For as long as I can remember it’s always hovered around 4-5%. Even 5% seemed like a magical number to cross. To see it hit double digits in a span of a few months is crazy. I wonder how they’re gathering the stats for this? What gave Linux a boost. Surely it wasn’t the Steam Machines by themselves that caused this boost.
- Linux runs games well now.
- New computers are expensive, and Windows runs like poop on old computers.
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Did you know Proton is 8 years old? Steam launched on Linux in 2013. Gaming on Linux is a 10+ year old endeavor at this point. I remember the days of Steam barely running through Wine and before Lutris and Bottles and Heroic.
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The part about old Windows PCs running like shit has been true going back to like Windows 95 when I first started using computers. Building PCs as opposed to buying a pre-built has always been a $1000+ venture for me.
There’s something else happening here. If I had to guess, everything being mentioned plays a factor into it but the zeitgeist surrounding Linux has finally shifted far enough away from being for nerds and terminal only mode to being “user friendly” enough for large swaths of people to switch. More than that though is the privacy issues with AI and Age verification. That seems more pertinent amongst Windows switchers than ‘gaming is good.’ Nobody want’s to be bombarded by Copilot all the time.
i know someone who rage-installed linux after windows did an update in the middle of them playing a competitive game
That’s so funny lmao
Yup. Linux has only gotten better as Windows has only gotten worse. It makes sense that at some point Linux would seem a better option to a growing number of people.
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8 years ago, compatibility and ease of use weren’t quite there. This has changed a lot in the last 3 or 4 years, I would say (having followed linux gaming for around 30 years).
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That is true, but there’s a difference now; for the first time in history Moore’s Law has reversed: instead of doubling compute power at the same cost every X months (depending on the part), we’re now having less compute power at the same cost than the previous Y months (we as in we consumers, not the hyperscalers, of course).
Windows has always been resource intensive, but it’s the first time that new computers, at the same price, have less resources to run than new computers the year before. Of course Linux is affected too, but as it runs well on pretty much everything with some tweaking, it’s a much better choice now for every 12 year old kid that likes to play games and does the technical support in the family.
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What gave Linux a boost.
My guess is summer. Perhaps people waited until they have more time to switch from Windows to Linux. And holiday means less work computers – which are all Windows machines – being used.
Cloudflare Radar also shows a sudden jump from 3.5% to 5.5% from June 15 to June 29. It has since come down to 3.9%, which is still about 0.6 percent points higher than previous average.
Im guessing it was Microsoft shooting itself on the balls over and over
They’ve been doing that for years, why now?
Ran out of balls.
They know what they have to do. Bring Ballmer out of retirement!
This was the case for me last summer. Waited until the start of break so if anything went wrong it wouldn’t be too much of a nightmare. Wouldn’t be too shocked if others took similar opportunity. Depends a bit how many people have any sort of proper summer holiday these days though.
I think it’s due to how easy it is to set up now if you have a decent AI model to chat with. Instead of having to scour forums that may or may not have your answer, now you have an IT guy in a box who can take care of pretty much everything for you.
You don’t need an LLM to setup Linux, it is as easy, possibly even easier than setting up Windows 11. While LLMs can provide some help in troubleshooting, they can be just as wrong. If you think they can’t be, quite frequently actually, you are living a dangerous life.
I was gonna say what do you need an AI to use a 3 button graphical user interface for? Almost every distro besides Arch has figured out the ux for os install.
It’s handy when your video card drivers update in the background and then stop working. Then you get to learn fun commands like nvidia-smi to try and figure out what the hell is going on.
Linux is good, but there is still a pretty heavy need to get around on the command line. While I’m no fan of Windows anymore, at least you can point and click your way through a fair amount of stuff natively. Having a built-in Device Manager clone would be handy.
Also, setting up a multi-function printer/copier/scanner can be pretty ugly. Yeah only old people print, but they are still around. Tinkering with brsaneconfig4 to set up a scanner is a handful.
For most laptop users who don’t do much with peripherals and hardware, you’re pretty good. If you connect anything kinda odd, you’re going to have to work for it.
I use an online platform to connect to my car for diagnostics and the USB to OBDII cable requires specific drivers. I am thankful that the manufacturer did supply them, but I’ve had a few devices like that where it was just a dead end.
Use man pages. Why use questionable LLM results when the manual is literally built in
As an old DOS guy I really like the use of the command line. And you young whipper snappers should get to know it.
I finally made the move. It’s been great so far. Might accidentally convert 3 old computers into my home computer lab. Seems to be a slippery slope.
Hehe me too! I made the switch in January and convinced two of my friends to switch over completely too and they’ve stuck with it
You have old computers that are friends?
You happy?/jokingly
I edited my post to not have that relic of an adhd subject change mid writing a sentence. I can literally spend an hour thinking everything is wrong, or I get on with my life. I seriously felt bad about this one, which is why I did change it.
Btw upvote for calling out the poorly written sentence. No calling me the more stupider-est dumbdumb.
I wasn’t expecting this. Wow, 10.65% is awesome growth!
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america
Worldwide: 7.61%
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Nice! Let’s keep it up!
Outside of North America, and I just switched an old laptop (backup school device for kids) and my secondary computer that couldn’t be upgraded to windows 11 (so no longer receiving security updates) to Linux Mint in the past week. I’m a normie, and the process was simple even for me. Over the weekend we’ve tested a couple games on the secondary computer and while they didn’t run as well, they ran. Doing some more gaming this morning under the guide of “testing” haha
So far everything has been easier than Windows, I was very impressed as last time I tried (I think 2015ish I tried Ubuntu?) it was not nearly this easy. Everything just worked: third party controllers, USB devices, etc all connected immediately. The only issue I ran into was the sound in one game cutting out randomly from time to time? Not sure why, didn’t take time to diagnose.
One tip I can give you is never skip shader compilation. If you do, then Vulkan compiles shaders on-the-fly which causes lag spikes and stuttering. If you let it compile then it pulls from a shader cache or RAM.
I appreciate this tip - thank you!
Won´t be too long before EU governments and corporations stop handing their information over to Trump’s surveillance state as a matter of routine; several governments and privacy-focused businesses (hospitals especially) are planning to transition off of Microsoft to Linux.
I love how everyone here(kinda including me too) is eating up bs willingly cause we hate windows so much. Its obviously not at 10%
Why is that obvious?
Hey, friend, why the hate? Can’t someone love Linux without hating other operating systems?
Also, if you feel there’s a better source for capturing statistics on desktop OS usage in North America, please don’t be shy to share it with the rest of us!
I believe the source for what the OP shared is the following:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america
Have a great one!
This graphic just flexing on BSD at 0% for no reason
Yeah, there are presumably also 0% running BeOS, 0% on Microsoft DOS, 0% on OS/2…
Those are no longer being developed. OpenBSD is.
OS X (obsolete & unsupported since 2018) has more users than macOS?!
Also, where did you get those stats? https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/north-america has different numbers to yours.Link to stats: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america
I will never stop calling it osx.
A young 'un! Macintosh, surely.
Os9!
I just dont get why they changed it from osx to whatever it is now. 10.4, 10.5, 15.7…
I think it’s 26 now. You know, the number that comes after 15.
Ah yes
This post concerns Desktop marketshare, and I believe the OP got it from the following link:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america
Wait, they renamed it? And back to the previous name? The previous name of the pre-Unix version of the OS was MacOS.
I thought these stats meant there were still significant numbers of people on 25 year old computers.
ChromeOS uses a Linux kernel, so one could say desktop Linux usage is >12%.
Would like to get some confirmation from other sources before I start huffing the hopium. I’m afraid they could just be AI scrapers
AI scrapers use their own user agent and for sure don’t use a browser to scrap
I wonder what the division between win10 and win11 is
≈70% are on win 11. The rest are on other windows versions according to statscounter. When I look other places, it’s about the same.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide
They stopped reporting “unknown”? I want to know the absolute number also. It was 20% unknown for June.
As long as it never becomes mainstream we’re good.
