As an OpenBSD user I find it funny how they list OpenBSD as 0%. Like, they could've just omitted it.

Maybe some AI crawlers started to honestly report Linux instead of Windows as they possibly did before? Otherwise such a quick spike is hard to explain (unbelievable). Or did I miss any big news lately?

//I'm on Linux in the last 15 years and I don't even care that much about what unrelated to me people use, although I always do help fellow Linux-ers when I encounter them in the wild.

I remember whn Linux hit 4% as if it was yesterday.

Way back in 2010 I made a prediction to my best friend using Windows: In 10 years we will have reached 10% market share. The catch with this prediction is, it was purely a wish without ANY understanding of the market whatsoever. Obviously 10 years passed and in 2020 I was wrong. We got COVID instead... Buuuuuut... only 6 years later we have already reached 10%!

Besides all the efforts that are going in into the Linux operating systems and eco system, we got two major companies supporting Linux with a huge impact: Valve, with all their gaming related efforts and Microsoft, with their free advertisement through Windows 11. Thank you to both companies and all other parties involved making this possible!

With that said, I make a new prediction: 10 years later, we (Linux) reach 20% market share AND OS X+macOS together reach 42%! Yes I even make a prediction for Apple. Also why is even macOS and OS X not a single graph, while everything Linux related is and even all Windows versions are a single graph? That makes the Apple line smaller than it is.

Honestly, at this point I don't think Microsoft cares about Windows all that much. They make their money elsewhere, and even the control offered by owning the OS can't be counted on, as the Internet Explorer wars showed.

At the same time, think about the weird coincidence that Windows 11 requires so much extra hardware firepower at the same time as said hardware firepower has become stupid expensive thanks to the same AI the company is pushing.

They made it unaffordable to run Windows 11, and that's how we get the Year of Linux on the Desktop?

Honestly, this is too good of a news to be true. There has to be some kind of error somewhere. Not used to this.

People should stop posting StatCounter, it's so unreliable and noisy.

But I am surprised by the Cloudflare numbers, which are a lot more reliable, and still have Linux at ~5% worldwide, which is still higher than I thought! And even ~6.5% for the past two months, though I imagine that's a seasonality effect - maybe Linux users in the northern hemisphere are more likely to use their computers at home during summer? :P

What’s the difference between “OS X” and “macOS” on this chart?

Surely 20% of the market share isn’t Mac’s that are so old their OS is over 10 years old? I don’t know how else to interpret that…

Weird that Apple has renamed OS X to Mac OS, my first thought opening the link to statcounter was NO WAY 8+% use an OS that was discontinued 25 years ago.

WTF Apple?

Opening Wikipedia it says Mac OS was introduced in 2001!?!?!!??
WTF? That's the year it was discontinued!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS

macOS (previously OS X and originally Mac OS X

Mac OS X succeeded the classic Mac OS, the primary Macintosh operating system from 1984 to 2001.

For fucks sake! No it's not "classic Mac OS", it's Mac OS. It was never named classic. Just because Apple fucks up doesn't change the name of the original Mac OS.
And no OS X did not maintain the same version number for decades. It was introduced as OS X 1.0, 10 is not a version number, it's part of the name like with OS/2 where the number is also not a version number but is part of the name, and describes something completely different, namely that it was meant as the default OS for IBM PS/2 computers.

Sorry for the rant, but the stupidity of Apple removing the X from the name and not distinguishing properly between the original Mac OS and the new macOS is just such a piss poor decision IMO.
For instance Mac OS does not have multitasking! But macOS does.

Microsoft legit single-handedly bringing about the Year of Linux with how they’re turning W11 into categorical dogshit lmfao 🤣

I'm one of em. Finally listened to the linux evangelists on here and put mint on my laptop a few months ago. I'm not a very technical person but installation was a piece of piss, and setting everything up was easy too. Didn't have to use command line once. Feels like I've got my laptop back, was hardly using it before because windows 11 was such a fuckin pain in the arse.

This is truely the year of the Linux desktop.

whats the difference between osx and macos?

Really wish I had my own computer instead of just my work one so I could get running on a proper OS instead of Windows

putting osx and macos on separate lines was dumb af. the 'drop' of osx over the last ~ 18 months is entirely offset by the debut (and thus, an 'increase' from zero) of the name change to macos. it's a wash there.

linux gains are almost entirely windows' loss, but whether it's a legitimate trend or not will take time to determine.

I feel very happy seeing Linux attracting people, even if they get back again to Windows or Mac.

Im waiting to see how big corpos will ruin Linux.

Year of Luigi?

YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP BABY (im still stuck on windows 11 because of CAD)

Why did it spike so much in just the last few months? That is a huge change!