Linux market share at 2.87%

[mellowtigger]

It's difficult to estimate the use of different operating systems around the world. The question is always: are you measuring a representative sample?

The Steam game client is a great way to measure for a limited audience. They do not directly publish what operating system their client is using. Doing so would be a violation of privacy for Steam users. They do, however, publish results from a voluntary and randomized questionnaire that they send to their active users. Steam's current stats show Linux at about 1/4 of the MacOS percentage.

This number is equivalent to the relative share reported this month by NetMarketShare. NetMarketShare is a trusted source of information about web browsers to sites all over the internet. The two recent numbers differ significantly in total percentage (Steam says 0.87% Linux, while NetMarketShare says 2.87% Linux), but Linux and Mac are trending the same way together in both measures.

News media is trying to figure out why there's such a large jump in April. Is it because of the many unused Windows computers in corporate business environments? Is it because people are trying to conserve money and moving to free operating systems and software? Nobody really knows at this point.

Why are so many people using Linux, when it is still unsupported by many smaller companies? If you doubt that big companies will ever take Linux seriously with such small market percentage, then consider these points:

• Microsoft is adding Linux Filesystem to Windows (so you can read a Linux hard drive from a Windows computer).
• IBM bought RedHat (a major distributor and tech support company for Linux).
• Microsoft bought GitHub, a popular site for distributing opensource projects (frequently used on Linux).
• Microsoft open-sourced its massive DotNet library and is developing simultaneously for Windows and Linux.
• Steam pays CodeWeavers to develop Proton for playing Windows games on Linux.

Now is the best time ever to switch to Linux. I recommend Linux Mint for people who are accustomed to Windows. It's the most similar.

Comments

[foeclan]

Microsoft also now lets you run a Linux distribution within Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux, so you can get Ubuntu and others directly from the Microsoft Store in Windows 10. Virtualization and containers have made the underlying OS less relevant.

[mellowtigger]

I spend a lot of time in Windows for work, and it increasingly behaves like a marketing platform instead of an operating system. I recommend the reverse. Use Linux as a base so you can operate efficiently, then add compatibility layers for whatever fringe Windows program you need.