Linux

I have a better metric, Linus tech tips and other PC channels are all talking about linux this year, many even for gaming, the general PC nerd is hearing and learning about linux and considering it as a real choice, so many are absolutelly fed up with windows BS and are swaping to linux. The supposed big problems of linux about having to tinker it all the time, they are just as likely to happen on windows now, except that on linux is something technichal to fix, on windows its the new update fucking everything up, and you know it will keep happening, because they are continually pushing updates, and you did not choose any or use any of those updates. My PC has been crashing about once a day for the past year for some updates that gave me nothing except more settings to turn off every time. Every PC nerd that was not already on linux has been waiting for an alternative for a long time, maybe work requires windows, maybe gaming requiered windows, maybe other people sharing the PC, but all those things are going away, there is no real reason to keep windows, its becoming a walled garden like apple, except apple has better quality i guess(never had a mac, and hated the iphone), windows is a barbed wire garden, easier to get out but if you are used to it you dont want to touch the spikes. Now a part of the fence is broken and people see that the grass is just as green or greener outside.

What I read is a whole lot of vagueness and assumptions and so n so...

Anecdotal evidence doesn't count but Ima use this one today: I know a guy.

Not a super tech wizard in the slightest but works with pc's, recently told me he joined the linux camp with bazzite. I think we here on the fediverse all probably know someone who recently switched through proton/bazzite or mint/ubuntu ...

And those might not all stick around, but some will.

As long as MS keeps shooting themselves in the foot and showing their allegiance to drumpelstilskin and company I'd like to think people are going to take notice.

It's not gonna be that old lady next door but her grandson at some point probably will be coming across linux at some point.

Aww :(

So is it still 4%?

Sounds like they're in denial.

Why not try promoting the Linux desktop as a platform that makes it easy to use AI bots?

Just note how the guy starts with "only Microsoft numbers can be trusted" is biased bullshit. Pretending a company will give true numbers at all time, is a big lie. If anything they will inflate numbers and they'd try to hide the truth as much as they can because investors are watching.

While there will be truth in bots taking a part of the traffic, the whole article is Microsoft bootlicker talk.

Taking another random tool that seems to filter bot for results is just him trying to get a confirmation for his bias.

Yes a 10% stat at a given time by a given measurement tool, is not equal to a true 10% userbase. Yes there are bots. Yes there are Linux and Windows zombies alike.

Still, linux desktop is going up, with a fraction of the marketing power Windows and Apple have.

it's weird (perhaps convenient) that their explanation is "bots" but they don't mention bot metrics from StatCounter themselves: according to StatCounter numbers, bot traffic share increased 0.37% in July 2026, while Linux Desktop grew 1.92% in the same month.

Ignoring that the default browsers on many distros are seen as bot traffic, filtering the alleged bot traffic on Linux still results in around 7% of overall traffic, up from 4ish a year ago. It also doesn’t explain the giant leaps in downloads on many distros that correlate with the spike. It’s possible some organization set up a ton of computers with openclaw and a wide variety of distros on it I guess to influence opinion 🤷‍♀️

Also extremely biased source

Jokes on them. I'm running WSL.

Okay, so did they account for the bots that claim to be Windows PCs? (I'll bet there are still some running around that identify themselves as IE 6, although those may finally no longer be the majority of all bots.)

Copium

To address some of the author's points.

1. MacOS vs OSX: to my understanding, safari reports the OS as OSX still, likely for compatibility reasons. 3rd party browsers such as chrome changed their agent to macOS, which explains the split. macOS users are more likely to use Safari in general.
2. Bots: Does the author really believe these sites aren't capable of detecting bots? I'm sure some slip through, but if not traffic were included in general, then Linux would be at a 90% share or higher. They just consume way more page traffic than a human ever could.
3. Data corrections: Sure, the data may get corrected a bit to bring Linux numbers back down, but there is a clear trend that Linux numbers are rising. It also happens that Windows is where people are migrating from the most.
4. Official numbers from Microsoft: lol

Good. The less people there are on linux, the less work for devs, less attackers targeting linux, and less garbage in the forums.

Yes there are zero bots running windows and nothing would ever inflate those numbers pleased clap.

I'm on pro Linux side and still think that trend was pushed by AI scrappers.

No offence to the artist but the WSL Tux is ugly af

Overall probably closer to the truth.

I wish people didn't obsess over these large numbers as much. Like when Linux suddenly hit 5% on Steam when that was clearly just an outlier and was destined to fall right back down.

There are thousands of organizations that rely on Microsoft for their office suite, Outlook, Teams and these companies have thousands of PCs. They can mandate what update will get pushed, restrict admin access, running monitoring tools etc.. These are hard to replace.

guys don't tell them that this also means that windows is poop, since it's either too bad at scaling or at tech infrastructure to even attract ai developers to the platform 😂

Who cares, just fake it till you make it.

Humans are why we cannot have nice things. The internet was always going to get ridiculous, just like the usa was always going to prove back to the future right in the stupidest possible way.