Recently, the NetMarketShare website and the Steam Hardware Survey showed the Linux share was rising but it appears both have now calmed down.
For NetMarketShare, something pretty big happened over the last few months. Back in March the Linux share they recorded was only 1.36%, and then it quickly rocketed upwards to 3.61% in June after multiple months of rising. The kind of rise you can't easily just write-off since it continued happening. No one really knows what caused it, possibly a ton more people working from home and not attached to their corporate Windows workstation. Now though, it seems to be levelling out as July's figure now shows it as 3.57%. Considering more people are being told to go back to work, perhaps it was as a result of COVID19. Across this whole time though, it's worth noting StatCounter which also tracks it has hardly moved much during it. So you may want to press X to doubt on it.
It's a tough thing to truly measure though, considering they all tend to rely on visitors browsing a specific set of included websites. They capture things like your browser string which can often be faked, but they're still about the best we have for an overall picture of any possible trends. One thing is for certain though: not a lot has changed overall.
As for the Steam Hardware Survey, it rose from 0.83% back in February up to 0.91% in May but it also has been slowly trickling down with it now sitting at 0.86% as of July's numbers. At least when looking over the past ~2 years, it's still trending upwards slightly overall. We're tracking it on our dedicated Steam Tracker page here, in case you haven't seen that before. We also recently added the ability to filter to specific year/months on our Steam Tracker, to allow for fine-tuning and adding more historic data.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The comments are interesting. We all see what we want to believe. Every year has been the Year of the Linux Desktop since 2004 when I got my intro to Linux Land.
Quoting: Alm888Seriously though, this hardly matters. So far we did not see many core underlying shifts in OS distribution channels, with only one company (I forgot which one, Dell or Lenovo) starting to optionally provide pre-installed Linux on some notebooks. The rest are just "recommending" (yeah, we know of the deal they made to get certification/cheap licenses) "Windows™ 10™". ;)
Actually, it's both of them. Dell have been doing so in earnest for quite a while with Project Sputnik, and Lenovo have started doing it recently. Both of them are upstreaming any changes they need to make.
That's showing good prospects for the professional market segment. Boutique and build-your-own has generally been fine, and still seems to be doing well.
Chromebooks have got the cheap-and-nasty segment (the old low-margin netbook segment of things that people will buy on a whim) covered, which will help lower expectations that all computers must come with Windows. Those customers have zero interest in Operating Systems in any form.
The last segment is the "gamer" pre-built segment, and that will take longer. It's reliant on AMD getting more penetration - since Optimus has always been a disaster - and more recognition of Linux as a gaming platform, and manufacturers actually giving a damn. Given that the market is simply a higher-priced version of the cheap-and-nasty segment, and manufacturers can't currently be bothered to even make their blinkenlights work, that's still quite an uphill task.
Quoting: EikeQuite a healthy number!Indeed. The 3-5% marketshare reports I think are just bogus.
Quoting: WorMzyDon't forget there's likely to be a change in regimeYes
Quoting: WorMzy(and therefore policy)Don't hold your breath. Sure, the details will shift, but a Democrat-run US administration is still going to have "contain China" as its number-one-by-far foreign policy objective. And since China's economy by some measures is already bigger than the US economy and likely to continue pulling away, US attempts to suppress them are going to start looking increasingly desperate.
Quoting: lordgaultChina wants to stop using Windows
They've been through that exercise at least once before, haven't they? Red Flag Linux didn't seem to get much traction, although it was around for many years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux
I'm not sure why you think we "can't read english"?
Perhaps because most of us who can participate in forums and threads are doing so in a way that makes it hard for you to tell the difference between a native english speaker and us?
Most of my friends, if not all, do speak, read and write English almost fluently.
When you say
Quoting: 3zekielFrench people tend to not be so good at learning languages, I'd argue it's a fallacy.
However, you are proving that French do have a bad habit of bad mouthing their own country, unfortunately. :/
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