Linux could be 3% of global desktops. What happened to Windows?

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[Just another Forum Poster]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/report-linux-desktops-hit-3-global-market-share-but-are-declining-in-us/

According to one measurement by one firm, Linux reached 3.07 percent market share of global desktop operating systems in June 2023. It’s a notable first for the more than 30-year-old operating system, though other numbers in Statcounter’s chart open it up to many more interpretations. It’s either the year of the Linux desktop or a notable asterisk—your call…

Windows drops from 76.33 percent to 68.23 percent one year later, recovering a bit from a heavy winter/spring slump that took it down to 62.06 percent. Is Microsoft’s suspension of sales in Russia, starting March 2022, a factor? What else would explain a more than 14 percent drop in one year?..

Also growing gradually, but confidently, was MacOS, which Statcounter sees as growing from 14.64 percent in June 2022 to 21.32 percent a year later…

• This topic was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Just another Forum Poster.

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People are realizing that Windows and MS is more spyware than OS now since release of Windows 10 and 11 and the unofficial leak Windows 12. This is why people are moving to linux or mac or keep using older Windows like (95,98, Xp, 7, 8 or 8.1)

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Average-Jane

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Budgets.  People don’t care about their privacy.  See tiktok and most phones.  But budgets ultimately drive decisions.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Average-Jane, wavy, bbearren

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Most people quite evidently do not care about privacy, but it does not mean that you can just conclude that “people don’t care about privacy.” Some people do. I’m among them, and I would guess (judging from the above post) that guest poster “l l” does also.

Lots of us here on this site are clearly concerned about privacy, as is evident by their posts. We may not be in the majority, but there are enough of us to fuel an increase in the use of non-Windows OSes… not to mention that such a move might indicate that the minority who do care about privacy enough to do something about it could be growing.

I am not suggesting that’s what actually happened with the stats here, though. It seems to me that as long as there is such a large “unknown” group, we’re just guessing. We’d have to know why they are “unknown.” I would guess that “unknown” would favor the more privacy-friendly OS options, since people who are privacy-conscious enough to change an OS for privacy reasons are also more likely to use script blockers, ad blockers, anti-tracking addons, anti-tracking browsers, or anti-tracking browser settings (like those Firefox now offers). The scripts that collect useragent data from visitors for Statcounter are not much different from those who collect other bits of user data for the likes of Facebook/Meta and Google, so it is likely that privacy-conscious people are being substantially underrepresented in the results.

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Average-Jane

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3.23% is not large. It’s nearly as small as Linux.

If there are many Linux users in that group, most of them have recently switched back to Windows.

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“That something else could be “Unknown,” which ramps up gradually, then jumps and stays at 13 percent, just as Windows sees its slump.”

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Ascaris wrote:

“That something else could be “Unknown,” which ramps up gradually, then jumps and stays at 13 percent, just as Windows sees its slump.”

13% was three months ago. The latest share for “unknown” OS is only 3.23%:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

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I went by the text of the article, not the graph, admittedly. They said that the unknown figure went to 13% and stayed there. Clearly, it didn’t.

Even so, the real purpose of my reply was to demur with Susan’s statement that people don’t care about privacy.  Quite evidently, most do not, sadly, or at least not sufficiently to do anything about it, but to say that “people don’t care” implies that no one does, and that isn’t correct. I do, for one, and so do a lot of others here, and there is the possibility, whenever a change in a trend line is seen, that people becoming privacy focused would be one of the factors.

Even with the smaller number of “unknown,” I would still guess that Linux users are disproportionately represented in that group for the reasons I mentioned (depending on whether the scripts can detect a page view where the useragent sniffer is blocked, and whether it counts that as an “unknown” or simply discards that event). I would hazard a guess that most Linux users (where Firefox is the browser supplied by most distros, and seems to be the most commonly used) are concerned with privacy, and also that they are more often technically savvy enough to know how to use browser extensions that would tend to mess with Statcounter’s scripts.

Whether this is actually the case would depend on what is making the “unknown” visitors “unknown,” and that is unknown too, to me at least, as it was when I wrote my first reply. I can guess, but it’s just that.

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Here’s what the desktop OS market share graph looked like a decade ago:

(source)

In the same month for which the Linux share is shown, Windows was at 90.34%. According to Statcounter, that was the last time Windows desktop share stood at 90 percent. It fell below 80 percent in 2018 and dipped below 70 percent in March 2023.

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Most people will remember the extremely olde joke headline, usally found in the technical press at the beginning of the year:

“20nn – the year of Linux on the Desktop!”

For the last 20 or so years, you simply replaced 20nn by the current year, chuckled, then waited another year to do it all again.

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Ascaris wrote:

since people who are privacy-conscious enough to change an OS for privacy reasons are also more likely to use script blockers, ad blockers, anti-tracking addons, anti-tracking browsers, or anti-tracking browser settings

This doesn’t help as every browser transmit Browser, OS, location, IP address….

When I was in charge of developing my bank’s real-time online banking web site we install the system on IBM AIX yet we showed outside the site as running on Microsoft’s IIS to deter hackers.

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Alex5723 wrote:

This doesn’t help as every browser transmit Browser, OS, location, IP address….

Of course it does. The thing you describe is the useragent string (containing browser and OS; the IP is simply the one from the requestor, and that can be subjected to reverse DNS to get an approximate location), which is sent along with the HTTP request to the web server. Statcounter’s analytics scripts are not being served in the namespaces of the sites themselves… in other words, if amazon.com has agreed to partner with Statcounter, the scripts that collect that data are not being served by amazon.com, and they certainly are not running server-side at Amazon. The Amazon server knows what the contents of the useragent string is for its own purposes, but Statcounter does not.

The way it works is the same way other analytics scripts (most of which are related to ads) are served. The Amazon page has embedded URLs that call the scripts directly from Statcounter’s servers. This does not mean that the Amazon server initiates the request to Statcounter, though… that request is issued when the client (your browser, or the browser of any other visitor) parses the amazon.com page and finds the reference to the script. It then makes the request over HTTP to Statcounter.

If you block the statcounter.com script from running, Statcounter never gets the information.

 

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Linux allow users to continue using a device on which a supported version of Windows won’t run.  That I the only reason I have machine running Linux.  My Vista era laptop remains highly functional running Linux Lite.  I also have a 10 year old HP Pavilion that does not have a TPM.  It may be running Linux too in a couple of years if MS insists on making this machine obsolete.

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Every so often I try a Linux distro again in the hope that things have got to a stage where I can use it more often and break out of the Microsoft sphere. That just hasn’t happened. Every time I use one, I eventually come to the conclusion that Linux is at it’s core a system designed for servers or software developers when I see simple things not working as expected or requiring a huge amount of work to get right. But I also get the impression that the gatekeepers you see online wouldn’t want it to “just work”.

Yesterday’s example was Zorin OS. It looks great and the font rendering is top notch. But I just could not get Firefox to decode video via the GPU. It was using software rendering and therefore increasing CPU usage and heat. I spent about two hours doing the various about:config and environment variable hacks to make it work and at the end of it all, it still didn’t work. My laptop has a hybrid Intel/Nvidia setup but I set the Intel video as primary, knowing that Nvidia is iffy under Linux.

Why is it that stuff like this needs to be configured in the first place? On Windows, DXVA just works (if your hardware supports the codec of course). I can’t speak for MacOS due to not having any Mac hardware but I’d imagine that it would just work too. I don’t care about philosophies such as “free software” or “doing things the UNIX way”. At the end of the day I want something that I can install and use without too much messing. As much as I don’t want to admit it, maybe a Mac is in my future if I find Windows 11 that unpalatable. But that opens up another can of worms – unserviceable, disposable hardware.

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Cybertooth

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