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Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

169 pointsposted 13 hours ago

by dviola

(old.reddit.com)

77 Comments

raincole

10 hours ago

OS X: 21.14%

macOS: 8.6%

Yeah, if you believe this kind of stats it's on yourself.

Also why are you posting a random reddit link? It doesn't even match up the latest stats provided on the official source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

laserbeam

9 hours ago

It does match statcounter if you filter for North America.

prologic

10 hours ago

Aren't macOS and OS X the same thing?

> Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic > Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.

Sort of. Apple half-heartedly changed their version numbers after 10.15, but there were times where they wrote both the 10.X and N+1.x versions elsewhere, so I think it's just generally a confusing mess with them now.

iPadOS masks itself as macOS/OS X (depending on where you look), so that doesn't help either.

kelnos

10 hours ago

I think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?

eddythompson80

9 hours ago

Even if you assume OS X is 1999-2016 and macOS is 2016- then the numbers are still odd.

philistine

2 hours ago

I presume Chrome on Mac still reports OS X as its OS, even when running a newer version. It is such a ridiculous idea not to put that together.

prologic

3 hours ago

This is what Wikipedia has recorded.

kirb

8 hours ago

It’s hard to trust StatCounter, or anyone presenting web traffic stats at this point, after they showed a large spike in Windows 7 users for a few months, before it suddenly disappeared. (Even better: the blogs reporting on it with a made-up conclusion that users were revolting against Windows 11.) Bots want to act like humans, they run client-side JS, and they use residential proxies.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/02/no-windows-7-isnt-g...

ouchqt

8 hours ago

My understanding is that apple officially changed from OS X to macOS in 2020 with the launch of macOS 11, even though the branding changed a few years earlier.

relyks

9 hours ago

We should really be able to downvote submissions... This analysis is clearly factually inaccurate. I am curious to know why OS X and macOS are showing up separately though

csomar

8 hours ago

The thing is, there is an ongoing linux boom (the percentage doubled which means linux user base has effectively doubled too). But god help us in this AI-slop phase.

bigfatkitten

11 hours ago

The separation of “OS X” and “macOS” gives me pause about the reliability of the other figures, particularly Linux and Chrome OS.

wmf

11 hours ago

The last release of OS X was 11 years ago but this site shows it having over twice as many users as macOS. It's totally implausible.

Caligatio

10 hours ago

I haven't done any investigation but some scraper and/or bot configuration uses OS X as its user agent.

I run an unpublished service used by 1s of people and was hit by an influx of supposed OS X user agents that didn't correspond to my actual user base.

fragmede

9 hours ago

Did you run any advanced TCP fingerprinting techniques to dig a bit deeper?

kelnos

10 hours ago

Regardless, they're the same OS, so any serious (read: competent) person compiling stats like this would combine them into the same bucket.

frollogaston

8 hours ago

I saw reddit and turned around already

bawolff

11 hours ago

I imagine a big part of the puzzle is that many people do not even use laptops/desktops regularly anymore, just phones and tablets

sgt101

9 hours ago

I guess almost all laptops/desktops are corporate, student, gaming or own business use.

I have never, ever, seen a corporate linux desktop outside of devs.

I have never, ever, seen a student using a linux desktop apart from CS students and a few physics/maths.

Linux is not for gaming.

See above answers for Linux in own business.

bigyabai

an hour ago

Just my anecdata, I've seen dozens of CS students that own a Steam Deck in the past few years. It's a perfectly suitable alternative to owning a gaming laptop for many students.

2000UltraDeluxe

8 hours ago

That, and the endless stream of automated requests from various crawlers identifying themselves as browsers.

nwah1

11 hours ago

Also, Chromebooks.

Brian_K_White

10 hours ago

I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.

I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.

tapoxi

10 hours ago

Yea Chromebooks are wildly popular in American education. They've replaced the school desktop PC.

mattlondon

9 hours ago

My wife has one. Been rock solid for years. I recommend them to relatives who just do email and browsing etc.

eru

10 hours ago

I used one in the wild, but I was working for Google at the time.

alpaca9

9 hours ago

It would be hell being forced to use these things for your job. What departments were? Because I can't imagine a software developer using one.

eru

8 hours ago

I wasn't forced to use anything. This was in the mid-2010s when the first ARM Chromebook came out; I bought one out of curiosity. But I learned about it at work.

Independent of that: some of the modern higher end Chromebooks can be quite nice, and you can (A) run general Linux on them, and (B) VS Code dev tunnel in the browser runs on them just as well as on any other laptop.

alpaca9

5 hours ago

yeah i forgot about their linux capabilities they got. In my mind they didn't seem a lot different than simple android tablets with a keyboard but indeed if the hardware isn't bad it could be valid option now I think about it.

esseph

9 hours ago

Vscode can run in a browser, your code is often in git, and it normally is going through CI/CD (being compiled/packaged/deployed elsewhere).

All you need for that is a dumb terminal.

olyjohn

8 hours ago

Boy I hope VSCode runs better in the browser than all of Microsoft's other terrible web apps.

esseph

7 hours ago

https://vscode.dev/

michaelmrose

9 hours ago

I have seen several because family members have owned them. They are nondescript black rectangles that are owned by cheap people and kids. There is no reason for you to notice them in particular and it's useful to remember our perception isn't a representative sample of anything.

fragmede

9 hours ago

The problem is, we have no way of knowing if our personal experiences are actually representative of everyone else's experience. I have 2 Chromebooks but I'm a computer nerd so I know I'm not your average user, but going off 2025 shipment data, it's something like 223 million Windows laptops to 25 million Mac's and 22 million Chromebooks.

gr_norm

8 hours ago

factorialboy

8 hours ago

I'd pick major Linux Desktop Environments (KDE or GNOME for instance) over macOS and Windows any day of the week. I feel 3-4x more productive on Linux.

With LLMs, I've been creating little desktop apps to fill the odd gaps. For example, yesterday, I made a little offline dictation app for KDE.

toplinesoftsys

10 hours ago

Yes, the dam has been broken. Major linux distibutions are getting polished for many decades already and they are totally ready for the mainstream adoption. No amount of marketing will be able to reverse this trend. Considering that Big Tech is spending all their earned money (and even more by borrowing from investors) on AI, nobody will be even trying.

kibwen

10 hours ago

It's obvious that Microsoft doesn't even want to be in the consumer desktop OS market anymore, they'd rather pivot to being pure B2B like IBM did. Likewise, it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification and infantilization of their OS until it will eventually be useless for anything except developing iOS apps. So neither major player will bother spending a marketing budget to reverse this trend; they'd rather not play the game at all. On the flipside, fewer and fewer people will have traditional desktops in the first place; owning only a phone and no PC at all is the new normal.

lukevp

9 hours ago

What have they iOSed about macOS? The latest versions haven’t lost any features as far as I’m aware. But Windows lost the ability to even pin the task bar to the side of the window in Windows 11… and the ability to stop auto updates.

If anything, iOS is getting more Mac-like, especially the iPad version. It has multi windowing and a window manager now.

olyjohn

8 hours ago

Everything. The whole OS has been getting locked down more with each release. More harassment about Apple accounts, harder to run non signed apps, the OS gets less and less configurable. I mean when Launchpad was released, it was clearly and iOS style interface to find your apps. Maybe you aren't old enough to remember when you could literally do anything you wanted with the OS and make it work for you.

fsflover

9 hours ago

> What have they iOSed about macOS?

How about this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959

pbalau

8 hours ago

Meanwhile, here I am posting this using Google Chrome, with Lightroom Classic, InDesign, Sublime Text, Steam bla bla all opened in the background.

You posted a 6 years old link.

andsoitis

9 hours ago

> it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification

What’s an example of a specific iOS-indication in macOS that makes the OS worse?

fragmede

9 hours ago

Launchpad. It sucks on macOS. You can just not use it but it's there.

Fullscreen apps and Spaces. My Mac isn't an iPad, but their window manager wants me to use it like one.

Hidden scrollbars.

App sandboxing.

olyjohn

8 hours ago

I think people don't know what OSX was like, when it was a glorious Unix system that did what you wanted. It let you install extensions and run unsigned code. Now its just a boring locked down iOS that has a windowing interface.

Sammi

3 hours ago

Better quality data comes from Steam with the qualifier that it only applies to Steam users.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

It's also showing Linux usage exploding in English speaking regions.

jsnell

8 hours ago

Flagging since statcounter's data is just so unreliable that discussing it is like discussing last week's lottery numbers.

(Just a couple of weeks ago there was an equally implausible frontpage post showing the Firefox had more than doubled in use in the US, to 12%, but only in the US, not in any other country. My money is on scraper bots identifying as Linux-Firefox, run from US IPs to minimize the impact of geo-blocking. But when Statcounter doesn't explain their methodology and doesn't care about the quality of their data, we'll never know.)

NitpickLawyer

10 hours ago

Depending on how this data is being collected, a factor could be the rise of search / fetch / scrape capabilities, added in lots of places. Agentic this, google killer that, and so on. The easiest way to parse web content nowadays is to load up a browser and drive that. And thats easier to do with linux / mac distros, both at scale (i.e. datacenter based solutions) and at home.

As a bit of a side note, this year I started noticing captchas / cf verify speed bumps while browsing from the same residential ISP with the same mac laptop. I never used to get them. Maybe has to do with all that "buy a mac mini" craze that happened a while ago.

IAmGraydon

11 hours ago

Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not agree if you filter for "likely human", which results in 6%. If you include bots, it hits 9.3%.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...

abdullahkhalids

11 hours ago

If you increase the date range to 12 months, you see that (with "likely human"), linux usage jumped from 3-4% to 5%-6% in the last 1.5 months. Something changed.

ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?

ndiddy

8 minutes ago

> ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?

It's schools letting out for summer. Most Chrome OS users are schoolchildren using their school issued Chromebooks. We will see it jump back up from ~1.5% to ~5% when school starts in September. The same pattern happened to Chrome OS usage in summer 2025.

benjaminl

11 hours ago

It’s still really strange that Linux is several times larger than ChromeOS. I would not have guessed this. And I daily drove Linux for years.

pmontra

9 hours ago

You have to buy a Chromebook to run ChromeOS, right? You can install Linux on your PC as dual boot. The investment is far smaller. However you have to buy a Mac to run MacOS so maybe that means that a Chromebook is not a very compelling machine to buy, or has a limited use case.

microtonal

9 hours ago

I don't believe this for a moment. I have seen many more Chromebook users than desktop Linux users. Not individuals, but a lot of schools use Chromebooks where I am. They are probably not well-tallied in the results, because they are often used to do some work in Google Docs/Sheets, plus some education-specific sites and less browsing on the general web.

I guess my point is that it is nearly impossible to get reliable counts from user agent statistics, etc. (lots of crawlers, that identify as a regular desktop as well etc.). The best way would probably to do real-world surveys among random population samples. But that costs money/time.

IshKebab

9 hours ago

If you increase the date range to 12 months you can see that ChromeOS is several times larger than Linux but recently there must have been an update so ChromeOS is now incorrectly detected as Linux.

hparadiz

10 hours ago

In what universe would I jump from a proprietary OS to another proprietary OS without a damn good reason?

AndrewDucker

9 hours ago

One where you don't like the first OS, believe the second OS does what you want, and don't care whether it's proprietary?

eddythompson80

10 hours ago

Is my understanding of that graph right? if the periodic change is the weekends, that means the total share percentage of requests from Windows and macOS users drops, while Linux increases in share percentage. Linux traffic is stable regardless of weekday/weekend cycles compared to Windows and macOS? Otherwise if there was equal drop in Linux, then the share percentage would be a smoother line. Is that right?

boomlinde

8 hours ago

You can't tell from this graph alone the extent to which the change in share during weekends is due to decreased use of the more popular operating systems or due to increased use of Linux.

SwellJoe

11 hours ago

6%-14% (throughout the day, for some reason it's most popular late at night, Steam Box and other gamers, maybe?) is still the largest it's ever been, though, and it's presumably not getting smaller.

It's about the same as Firefox share, which is getting smaller.

cwnyth

10 hours ago

6% is still significant. I'm used to seeing 3-5 in that slot. Hey, I'll take any increase, even a single percentage!

ediamondscience

11 hours ago

I don't know if the BSD folks would be happy to see it mentioned or unhappy that it's at 0%. At least you know that most of those users are human

eurleif

10 hours ago

Netcraft confirms it...

Markoff

2 hours ago

Does anyone has list of North America countries according Statcounter? Can't find their definition of NA whether it includes Mexico or not.

hedgehog

11 hours ago

https://archive.is/kaef0

myaccountonhn

8 hours ago

I think Linux is getting a lot more popular, but not this popular.

padjo

8 hours ago

StatCounter is a joke.

andrewstuart

9 hours ago

I do not believe this. Unless it’s some sort of tricksy word game or counting android or something.

There is 0% chance that 10% of desktops/laptops are running desktop Linux.

simongray

8 hours ago

I don't think these numbers are correct, but desktop Linux is no doubt having its year now. So many big YouTube content creators are covering Linux content and switching to Linux specifically, since the major obstacle to switching (gaming) has now been solved. Add to that the push effect from the constant enshittification of Windows.

All Linux is Linux.

fragmede

9 hours ago

Except for Android and ChromeOS. Nix is kinda weird too. But other than that, yeah.