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https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america/#monthly-200901-202607
Cloudflare stats also seem to support peaks of 15% usage but around 9-10% on average.
The trendline suggests this is just the start.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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There's no way that's accurate, right?
Quite likely. Many Linux distros aren't visible because they hide their telemetry, and would be marked as 'unknown' - or they spoof Windows or Mac for compatibility reasons. It'd be impossible to get an accurate read on how many computers run Linux, but it'll be higher than the number that report it.
AFAIK they get their data through crowd-sourced browser header data. And I really doubt any significant number of people are manipulating that.
"Looking at browser headers" usually means they're parsing the User-Agent string, which all kind of people (and bots) spoof for all kinds of reasons. There even used to (and might still) be a Firefox extension that would generate random ones.