That’s a huge increase.
The most possible answer might be more boring though: this number is increasing because more people are installing Linux in old PCs and Laptops, either out of curiosity or because they want the machine to live more years.
Still, this might make people consider install Linux in their main machine too in the future (after they pass the learning curve).
I guess I’m not in the majority, but my reason for finally switching fully to linux after 20 years is that gaming finally Just Works (mostly) thanks to Wine and Valve. I’ve been gaming under Linux since Quake III, but always kept a windows install because lots of games ran poorly or not at all under linux.
Last year I finally switched to an AMD GPU, and all the games I’ve played since then worked either OOTB or required minimal effort to fix (I don’t play multiplayer games except for Overwatch, which also runs fine). I haven’t booted my windows install in like 6 months, soon I’ll wipe it to make some room for more linux games.
@loutr
This ! Wiped my windows install last month, so far so good. Still have some glitches in kde/steam/proton where the window blinks like crazy.
Also agree with previous post: in my early days of IT, my school laptop (thinkpad t42p) was starting to age, and debian gave it a seco d life, out of the box. I was “forced” to use it, but never regretted it, except when at thw time support for xls, doc wasnt so good, not to mention gaming
@tricoro
I also switched because gaming just started to work. Gave Linux a try every 6-12 months for like almost a century but both the desktop and gaming performance always were subpar.
Until 3 years ago when I once again tested Linux and both GNOME and KDE were super snappy to use, gaming worked mostly out of the box via Proton and all the applications I need for work, worked on Linux or had an even better alternative.
Stuck with dual booting for one more year because I couldn’t get VR to work properly. Now I’m 100% on Linux since 2 years.
The speed at which things have improved in those 3 years is amazing. Things went from “needs some tinkering” to “just install it”. Performance went from mediocre to blazing fast. Software support went from “need to compile from source” to “download the AppImage/Flatpak”.
i think its been bouncing around there 3% or so for a while though
No, it was close to reaching 3%. Went to 2.91, now it’s beyond that landmark and even gained .08% extra.
It’s excellent news because companies are less likely to ignore the market share of Linux.
Year of the Linux desktop, is it?
Usual question behind this kind of stats: what are the sources? I’m tired of having to believe stuff that appears on the net just by faith.
Not only that but looks to be via tracking code used on various sites. I suspect a larger percentage of Linux users will be using ad blockers that likely block that further reducing the numbers.
The stack overflow survey puts the various Linux distros at about 58.4%* with windows at 59.72% and MacOS at 32.57% for personal use. This both accounts for people using multiple OSs and gives a much more accurate number - at least among developers. Though I do suspect these numbers will be higher for developers than the general population but 3% to 58% is a huge discrepancy.
The steam hardware survey does put the number at 1.44%, though that is extremely biased towards windows for obvious reasons. And I don’t know of any more accurate ways of counting then these two. But they only show two wieldy different domains.
* wonder why they broke that out to different distros this year pushing it down the list by splitting it up 🤔 why not also report on the different versions of windows? 😒
And ChromeOS is even more popular.
