Linux desktop market share has hit another all time high above 3%, according to netmarketshare

Just having a look at the netmarketshare data myself. Amused that 90.70% Windows + 5.94% Mac + 3.37% Linux + 0.00% others = 100.01% total. Yes, I know, it's only rounding errors. Funny though.

While there, I was a bit bothered at the power of Google in the Search Engine space. Never happy to see one company completely dominate some technology.

One thing to say about the "big jump" this month (3.37%) compared to previous months (closer to 2.50%) is that they are sampling internet browsing traffic. They are using mechanisms like observing the User Agent string being sent by a person's browser to a selection of tracking websites. Sampling will never be a perfect way to get accurate values. One month 1 million Linux users might visit those websites (out of a total 10 million world-wide Linux users), another month 1.5 million Linux users might visit those websites (out of a total 9 million world-wide Linux users).

See what I did there - I showed a bigger sample being observed for a smaller population. Things like that do happen. It probably indicates flaws in their sampling mechanism.

I don't trust this sudden leap at all, but I'm sure happier to be not trusting a sudden major gain than I would be not trusting a sudden major loss.

I believe that most of this "new" Linux Users come from the Windows App Store. thanks to the linux subsystem. I believe i read that one can install the ubuntu gui on windows.

The Steam numbers unfortunately look completely different. -0.11% in August.

-> http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Than I gave up, restarted computer and log in to Linux where EVERYTHING is working perfectly and where nothing similar will ever happen. So, it's not strange that people are running away from Windows, but it's strange that Linux and MacOS users are complaining about such a good operating systems that they are using.

Welcome to Linux! I'm using it for over 20 years now. We are not complaining, we are discussing! Also even our good operating system has some flaws, which needs to be addressed :)

I believe that most of this "new" Linux Users come from the Windows App Store. thanks to the linux subsystem. I believe i read that one can install the ubuntu gui on windows.

Does the GUI work now? I thought it was console only? Sorry for stupid questions, but I have no "Windows App Store" available to give it try :D

Just having a look at the netmarketshare data myself. Amused that 90.70% Windows + 5.94% Mac + 3.37% Linux + 0.00% others = 100.01% total. Yes, I know, it's only rounding errors. Funny though.

That is just a rounding issue. I'm sure they calculating it with Excel xD

I believe that most of this "new" Linux Users come from the Windows App Store. thanks to the linux subsystem. I believe i read that one can install the ubuntu gui on windows.

Does the GUI work now? I thought it was console only? Sorry for stupid questions, but I have no "Windows App Store" available to give it try :D

It's been more than a year since I played with this, but right from the start, you could install an X-server for windows (I think I used something called x-ming), set $DISPLAY inside the console, and launch GUI applications that way. I can't remember if I tried launching an entire desktop environment, but it definitely ran openbox on an X root window, inside windows.

(By the way, I don't know what the professional use cases might be for the Linux subsystem, but trying to do stuff on an NTFS formatted disk which doesn't recognize unix file permissions sure is irritating.)

It's been more than a year since I played with this, but right from the start, you could install an X-server for windows (I think I used something called x-ming), set $DISPLAY inside the console, and launch GUI applications that way. I can't remember if I tried launching an entire desktop environment, but it definitely ran openbox on an X root window, inside windows.

(By the way, I don't know what the professional use cases might be for the Linux subsystem, but trying to do stuff on an NTFS formatted disk which doesn't recognize unix file permissions sure is irritating.)

Well I use Cygwin or MobaXterm if I need an X-Server on Windows :).

For the filesystem you might want to look into ACLs. They are more powerful then the "normal" unix file permissions and kinda a common ground if it comes to Windows and NTFS. They are also perfect to annoy your colleagues *hihi*


Last edited by Crazy Penguin on 4 Sep 2017 at 8:21 pm UTC

BTW: Where can I find the real numbers behind the "share"? Only they show if the we have grown in numbers or just in percentages.


Last edited by Crazy Penguin on 5 Sep 2017 at 7:23 am UTC

In 3 years using Steam (on Ubuntu) i got my very first survey 2 days ago. So if the numbers are from those surveys, i guess they're wrong and Linux share might be even higher than those statistics.

It's worth noting that all ways of tracking it come with their own flaws.

Flaw in here is , Chromebook's counts as Linux.

Chromebook is Linux, its problem is that it is not GNU. Still, better than the rest.

Yes, an increase of almost 1% in a month can only indicate some abnormality in the counting of the numbers. Chromebooks should be entering the Linux count, but since they are Linux, that's not entirely wrong, and it's very cool to see Linux passing 3%, maybe this call the market's attention to software and games support on Linux.

So very much this. Maybe once we reach a greater than 10% market share the GNU vs non-GNU toolchain issue should become a bigger deal and a reason to split the numbers (Chromebook isn't the first non-GNU Linux by any stretch after all, just the biggest to date) at which point also dividing them by core distro (Debian, Arch, etc) is maybe a worthwhile thing to do. At this point any growth in the Linux market share is a boon to every interested party.