It appears that during the Coronavirus lock-down, the Linux market share according to website NetMarketShare has seen quite a large bump.
While calculating the market share of a desktop operating system is never going to be exactly correct, sites like NetMarketShare are one of the best ways to look at it. According to their stats the Linux share has bumped between around 1.5% and 2% for some time. That changed when they recently put up April's stats, which shows the Linux market overall according to them at 2.87%.
The biggest winner appears to be Ubuntu when looking over what Linux versions they track. Ubuntu alone seemed to go from 0.27% in March up to 1.89% in April.
What would be the cause of such a bump? Well, entirely possible it's due to more people using Linux personally at home where they would perhaps be using Windows workstations in their job. Really we could speculate forever on this - so over to you, what do you think?
Nothing to go popping open the champagne over though, while it's a big jump it would only truly be worth celebrating if it sustains the higher position. At least when looking over the Steam numbers too (see our Steam Tracker), we're trending upwards there.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
So the whole gain is only Ubuntu (and other distros actually lost some share in Ubuntu’s favour).
Looks like some change of the method of classifying Ubuntu (1.5 % ‘stolen’ from what previously has been classified as Windows?) + some fluctuations between distributions (0.1 % of the whole gained by Ubuntu from other Linuxes).
Last edited by silmeth on 6 May 2020 at 12:28 pm UTC
math, math, math.
We win!
In the world of Linux market share, any good news is still good news, so while I'm not breaking out the champagne, I will be just over here tossing back a few pints if anybody's interested.
NetMarketShare's statistics don't support that though: Vista was flat, XP grew, Windows 7 lost 0.5%, Windows 8 lost 0.1%, Windows 8.1 lost 0.5% Windows 10 lost 1%.
SirLootALot May 6, 2020
QuoteWhat would be the cause of such a bump? Well, entirely possible it's due to more people using Linux personally at home where they would perhaps be using Windows workstations in their job.That's the situation with me. In the office I have to use Windows. At home I use Linux Mint. :)
(And sometimes a Commodore Amiga ... :D )
Last edited by KuJo on 7 May 2020 at 7:31 am UTC
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