Linux marketshare measured by statcounter didn't sustain the >4% mark in January 2025
Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide | Statcounter Global Stats
Another interesting observation is that linux marketshare in India has been falling in the last months since the peak above 17% in last September no 8,79% in January. Does anyone know something about what happened in there?
that's disappointing, but i don't know how reliable that data is. how many websites are they collecting data from, what's the "unknown" os, and some browsers (librewolf for example) report as being windows to blend in.
Indeed, the data isn't transparent and probably not very reliable, but it's all we have, so I believe it's still worth mentioning. Also, the trends tend to be more reliable than the absolute values, if their methodology is consistent, so any change in usage may be somewhat relevant.
They run a script in the user browsers for collecting the data, so I believe any privacy-enhanced browser, like librewolf blocks it, but so do windows users using ublock or similar, and they all fall into the unknown category.
It's all government and schools. You can see the trend for Linux going down and the trend for Unknown going up. It's pretty much 1:1. Probably just changes in the custom distros they have that Statcounter is not aware of yet. Statcounter will update and things will go back to normal.
Well it's not much but 18 days ago i said id switch and it's been 2 weeks since i did!
Congrats! Some of us stuck with our word and said we’d start switching to Linux with the October 2025 end of life deadline for Windows 10.
And it’s been great for me so far, just over 47 days! I don’t plan on crawling back to Windows, considering how great my experience has been.
“Alright you nerds, I made the jump to Linux.” - https://lemmy.world/post/24365609
Edit: fixed my typos due to mobile ugh
Yeah that's precisely why i made the change too. Had actually been planning on it for some time but Microsoft gave that extra push with the deadline 😅I'm really liking it so far
Seems like the kind of numbers you would expect. Windows is the default OS for every corporate and normie desktop everywhere, followed by the graphic designers and musicians rolling MacOS, and then the rest. The ratio never really changes, and never will unless something devastating happens to MS Office. If they included every headless server and AWS EC2 instance it would be the reverse with Windows barely featuring. With the proliferation of Android devices, Linux has become a quiet revolution with mobile but the majority of users probably don't even know they run it.
MS office is on its death bed. It is mostly around for legacy reasons. These days people are just fine using things like Google Docs or Libreoffice.
Depressing, maybe we disappointed newcomers..
newcomers may bounce back and forth a few times before settling, I did too. I think one problem is that ubuntu is widely recommended and many people go for it, but it's not pleasant to use...then they go back to wintoes. the almost fullscreen app menu is too win8. two taskbars. not a lot of customization. last I tried it I couldn't get apps to launch or show up anywhere after installing.
Obsessing about this increasingly irrelevant figure is pointless. Most people do not even have desktop computers outside work, and the number is going to keep dropping and dropping. The world has moved to mobile.
As Linux nerds who care about the future of free personal computing, we need to reboot our minds and focus on how to get free software onto mobile devices and into mobile applications.
The FOSS Linux stack is going nowhere on mobile (I have speaking rights here: I once bought an Ubuntu phone). Our last best hope is web apps that use web standards. I say we transfer our obsession to that project instead, rather than worry about this distraction of a statistic.
You can pry my laptop and PC from my cold, dead hands. I've been seeing people lament the death of computers for years and I still see no change. Most of the people I know (not nerds or techy people at all) still have at least one PC or laptop at home.
The people you know are not representative of the world population, and becoming even less so every day.
That's exactly why statistics are needed, because our personal perception is flawed. People like to say sensationalist phrases like "the desktop platform is dying", but data from sites like statista shows the desktop marketshare around a bit more than 1/3, and that's a lot of devices, very far from being a dead or irrelevant platform. It's logical that smartphones, that are personal devices turned on all the time will have more traffic and marketshare, but that doesn't mean the desktop is dying. Actually, the pc sales keep growing, although at a slower rate (that can be due to several factors, like older pcs lasting longer), and that means that the mobile platform has grown in a faster rate, not necessarily that people are stopping using pcs, but that specific data we don't have available, unfortunately.
Another thing I keep seeing people say on the internet without any proof (that's one interesting thing abut those sensationalist statements: they never provide any proof, just a personal perception, but we need proof to counterargument) is that younger people are stopping using pcs and that desktops are becoming an "habit of older people". I don't know of any gobal research on that, but at least here in Brazil, we have an annual survey from cetic.br that shows that desktop usage doesn't have significant differences among age groups. I don't know if the same stands for the entire world, but I've seen a lot of people saying that phrase around here too. Also, that's not only a sensationalist thing people say, but seems to me to have some degree of ageism.
It's not like both worlds are antagonists. Free software is more of an ecosystem, and every part that grows helps each other. People who run foss on a device are more likely to run foss in others.
Linux on mobile struggles not because of a lack of interested developers, but because most phones are locked to prevent us from running modified oses, and the apps available for all the services needed require an android os.
Besides, to discredit the desktop platform as fi not important is an exaggeration.
Sorry, that was my son. He wanted to play Fortnite so I helped him install Windows on a spare SSD. His first impression upon booting Windows: "Ugh, why is this so ugly?" And according to my wife he was still ranting about Windows the other day. But he wanted to play Fortnite with his friends.
And of course he'd be counted twice in the statistics when he downloaded Firefox through Edge.
Since when? The anti cheat doesn't have Linux support enabled.