According to netmarketshare Linux hit 6.91% market share last month, higher than Mac

I do not think that what we see is due to an increased proportion of Chrome OS users. The Chrome OS user agent string will be "CrOS". Therefore, Chrome OS is more likely to be found in the "other" category than being grouped as Linux.

This has happened for a second month in a row, and while NetMarketShare did tweak down the number after release both times (actually also the first time on release the number was higher) they still kept a high number after QA review. There is no need to stay pessimistic of overly cautious, this is real. My bet is that it comes from governements agencies and companies in Russia and China that have all the reasons not to use Windows anymore, it just make sense, too bad we don't have acccess to market share by countries which would allow us to check that.

Also still a lot of computer on the world are running Windows XP, and recent vulnerabilies on that system showed to people running those system that they have to act, and choosing Linux over paying a fortune for Windows 10 which is probably not going to run on the old computers where XP was running does make a lot of sense.


Last edited by Nyamiou on 1 October 2017 at 10:59 pm UTC

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Uramekus"This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."

well , yeah, we have our response rn with this.

Hah, that wasn't there when I first looked at it. I'm guessing they've had to put that up, due to how different it is. I did say it was suspicious!

Edit: This is now clearly noted at the top of the article, to prevent confusion.

Hey Liam, just pointing out that the disclaimer has been there with data dating back to may. I would take all of these results since then with a giant grain of salt.

Quoting: Jmsnz

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Uramekus"This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."

well , yeah, we have our response rn with this.

Hah, that wasn't there when I first looked at it. I'm guessing they've had to put that up, due to how different it is. I did say it was suspicious!

Edit: This is now clearly noted at the top of the article, to prevent confusion.

Hey Liam, just pointing out that the disclaimer has been there with data dating back to may. I would take all of these results since then with a giant grain of salt.

As originally mentioned in the article, I did say people should take it with a large bag of suspicion :)

As for the disclaimer, it has not been there since May.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Xpander

Quoting: Guesti got my take on this but man this awesome news.and you know what i don't care if i waste a champagne bottle time to celebrate because something big is happening. View video on youtube.com

a bit overly optimistic video :) but one can always dream.

I think there has to be some sort of error in the data.. lets say that 3% as it was before was 20 million people (it was probably more though). Now it should be 20 million people more just out of nowhere... haven't heard any news that some governments switched to linux fulltime. Maybe some African countries got into internet the first time? i still doubt it would be that huge gain though.

it has been adjusted to 4.56% so obviously someone goofed on the website.

And now back up to 4.83% :P

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Jmsnz

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Uramekus"This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."

well , yeah, we have our response rn with this.

Hah, that wasn't there when I first looked at it. I'm guessing they've had to put that up, due to how different it is. I did say it was suspicious!

Edit: This is now clearly noted at the top of the article, to prevent confusion.

Hey Liam, just pointing out that the disclaimer has been there with data dating back to may. I would take all of these results since then with a giant grain of salt.

As originally mentioned in the article, I did say people should take it with a large bag of suspicion :)

As for the disclaimer, it has not been there since May.

You can look back through the previous months data. Give it a try. It shows up until you go back quite a few months.

china has been wanting to get rid of Microsoft for a number of years now, but of course their are pirated copies of windows going around everywhere there. but now with ChromeOS, Android and various distributions of Linux like Kylin and Deepin (and the untold variations within China, that we don't see open sourced). it's no surprise to see something start to happen with the marketshare.
But it's always good to see things in a positive direction. :)

Quoting: Jmsnz

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Uramekus"This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."

well , yeah, we have our response rn with this.

Hah, that wasn't there when I first looked at it. I'm guessing they've had to put that up, due to how different it is. I did say it was suspicious!

Edit: This is now clearly noted at the top of the article, to prevent confusion.

Hey Liam, just pointing out that the disclaimer has been there with data dating back to may. I would take all of these results since then with a giant grain of salt.

This disclaimer is just here at the beginning of the month, in a few day it will be gone. NetMarketShare is a professional company that sell this data to a lot of other companies, they already reviewed the results of last month which were already an exceptional increase for Linux and didn't found any issue with it.

Quoting: GuestA doubling in one month seems highly unlikely! Unless China suddenly made Linux mandatory, or something :p.

Maybe not China... but possibly USSR...

Recently, the US government told everyone not to use Kaspersky anti-virus because of Russian backdoors.

Maybe Russia is doing the same... after all rumors of Microsoft installing NSA backdoors in their products have been around since well before the turn of the century.

I would expect this to be happening even if there was no formal announcement. Pretty much anywhere that they do not trust the US. (which would even include US allies that want to keep secrets from the US/NSA.)

I would expect North Korea to do this, but it has been ongoing for years... they even have their own disto, Red Star OS.

While this could be happening, I still don't think that it would explain a huge spike... it takes a long time for large corporate and government agencies to roll out new software installations, and OS changes require the most time.

I know the Chinese at one point had their national Red Flag distribution, but then MS gave them chunks of source code to Windows so they'd go back to using it.

Quoting: GrazenHere's a worthwhile mental check (though admittedly anecdotal). Go to a local coffee shop. Look around. How many people are on Windows? How many on OSX or iOS? How many on Linux? Now, ChromeOS might bump it up a bit if it's counted as a Linux distro, but if Linux has surpassed OSX, the evidence would be all around us.

That's exactly it. This is a reality check a few of the commenters in this group needs to take.

The evidence is all around us if we bother to look. It's only in very specific communities where the Linux share is relatively high. Even in tech savvy groups, like my work in the IT industry, there's just a handful Linux desktops around.

... But it's rising! So much so that the employers are to a much higher extent than before making sure to use platform independent technologies. This has happened only over the last decade!

It says 4.83% now. Still all time high. Still not final.

The data is in all likelood not the right Linux market share, but also a real sample from lots of real websites. And... it's not just a single number that is off, there is a clear trend visible. Therefore we should consider this highly relevant, something very important is happening for Linux. Part of it migth be ChromeOS, but looking at sites that count both separately, traditional Linux is still bigger than ChromeOS. Might be some countries kicking out American products. Maybe we should try to contact Netmarketshare for an explanation.

Personally I encounter Linux desktops much more often than Mac desktops.

The slope of the graphs is even more interesting I think. Over a 2 month period GNU/Linux has a much larger growth than any other and windows has had negative growth for about half a year now (it's loss almost correlates with Linux's growth)

GNU/Linux: 1.150%
MacOS: 0.135%
Windows: -1.285%

It's not just the slopes either, they've also been accelerating in these directions. Linux has been accelerating upward (windows is accelerating downward) so I don't think the growth is going to die down, at least not for a few more months and who knows maybe it'll take off even more.

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: GrazenHere's a worthwhile mental check (though admittedly anecdotal). Go to a local coffee shop. Look around. How many people are on Windows? How many on OSX or iOS? How many on Linux? Now, ChromeOS might bump it up a bit if it's counted as a Linux distro, but if Linux has surpassed OSX, the evidence would be all around us.

That's exactly it. This is a reality check a few of the commenters in this group needs to take.

Here is your reality check: your local community probably represent less than 0.000001% of the overall world population, the US is one of the ~250 countries on the planet, your local coffee shop is irrevelant.

Even if lower than originally stated, remaining in the 5% ballpark is still a big deal, it puts us on the same scale as Mac anyway.

Maybe it has always been higher then reported previous months and the difference is that for September they revised the way they identify the platforms because they analysed their data more closely and saw that Linux wasn't being correctly identified in some cases but the revised identification created a lot of false positives for Linux which is why the number went down later when they corrected again. This could also explain why FreeBSD suddenly showed up. They simply haven't been identifying it correctly previously.

Meanwhile, on Steam Linux continues its journey down…

We will have to wait and see what the next month says.

There have been good news for the linux community, from the Atari box announcement, the new Ubuntu, I would add the Librem5 phone running linux, Skype and a consistent dedication from the linux community.
I am for one NOT double booting with windows anymore. I m mainly buying linux compatible games and software.

I am sure I am not the only one.

Plus, many people have been disappointed with windows and Apple iosx and considering linux to say the least.

Let's wait and see next month. If the trend still gives hope to linux in terms of numbers, well then we can fully be happy for this true achievement

Maybe Chine start pushing deepin linux usage in state computers. How ever we divide ubuntu debian redhat suse from linux they all is linux. So both chrome os and steam os and all linux derivatives is just linux with community or corporation's bundled softwares. All count as linux in my opinion. And linux attracting peoples and that is something good for all.


Last edited by Kuduzkehpan on 2 October 2017 at 10:38 am UTC