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Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

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Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#11

The separation of “OS X” and “macOS” gives me pause about the reliability of the other figures, particularly Linux and Chrome OS.

The last release of OS X was 11 years ago but this site shows it having over twice as many users as macOS. It's totally implausible.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#13

Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not agree if you filter for "likely human", which results in 6%. If you include bots, it hits 9.3%. https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...

6%-14% (throughout the day, for some reason it's most popular late at night, Steam Box and other gamers, maybe?) is still the largest it's ever been, though, and it's presumably not getting smaller.

It's about the same as Firefox share, which is getting smaller.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#15
post #11

The separation of “OS X” and “macOS” gives me pause about the reliability of the other figures, particularly Linux and Chrome OS.

The last release of OS X was 11 years ago but this site shows it having over twice as many users as macOS. It's totally implausible.

I haven't done any investigation but some scraper and/or bot configuration uses OS X as its user agent.

I run an unpublished service used by 1s of people and was hit by an influx of supposed OS X user agents that didn't correspond to my actual user base.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#16
post #6
post #3

I imagine a big part of the puzzle is that many people do not even use laptops/desktops regularly anymore, just phones and tablets

Also, Chromebooks.

I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.

I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#17

Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not agree if you filter for "likely human", which results in 6%. If you include bots, it hits 9.3%. https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...

It’s still really strange that Linux is several times larger than ChromeOS. I would not have guessed this. And I daily drove Linux for years.

In what universe would I jump from a proprietary OS to another proprietary OS without a damn good reason?

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#18
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Chromebooks.

I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low. I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. Th…

I used one in the wild, but I was working for Google at the time.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#19
Depending on how this data is being collected, a factor could be the rise of search / fetch / scrape capabilities, added in lots of places. Agentic this, google killer that, and so on. The easiest way to parse web content nowadays is to load up a browser and drive that. And thats easier to do with linux / mac distros, both at scale (i.e. datacenter based solutions) and at home.

As a bit of a side note, this year I started noticing captchas / cf verify speed bumps while browsing from the same residential ISP with the same mac laptop. I never used to get them. Maybe has to do with all that "buy a mac mini" craze that happened a while ago.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#20

Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not agree if you filter for "likely human", which results in 6%. If you include bots, it hits 9.3%. https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...

6% is still significant. I'm used to seeing 3-5 in that slot. Hey, I'll take any increase, even a single percentage!
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