Technology

The thing with FOSS is, that market share matters to an extend, only. It's about support und continued development and financing that (or helping otherwise).

The strain on the FOSS developers isn't closely related to the market share. Ok, bigger market share, might help to better the financing.

But Linux does well with the current share. (Doesn't mean its devs do too.) Server wise Linux is already here to stay. Desktop wise... It's much better than years ago, I must say.

KDE, Pipewire and all the USB and bluetooth device integration is already pretty good. There are bugs and flaws, but nothing serious. Hardware support - I can't think of any hardware in my possession, that isn't supported.

All the office apps, browsers, development environments don't need Windows anymore.

Gaming? Steam will continue to nudge developers to release native Linux versions. Or proper wine configs. They have a steam hardware to sell after all.
Yes, the anti-tamper ring0 and virtualization stuff can't be easily emulated or virtualized, I heard. Or has that changed?

Anything else that needs Windows running natively?

Specialized software still needs native Windows? What about Adobe and the like? Tools without a fully featured replacement and no native Linux version. These might offer Linux support if the share increases.

The numbers kind of add up:

• Statcounter gives you 10%
• Cloudflare gives you 5.7% "Likely human" and 8.9% total
• Steam Hardware Survey shows 4% Linux

So even if it is not 10%, it looks like a solid 5% might be possible.

Personally I made the jump a month or two ago. I don't think it is 100% AI traffic this increase.

Even if that's true it doesn't invalidate the 10% market share, I doubt that all 57% of Windows machines are actual users.

This is where I stopped reading. We’re looking at OS X, which was replaced by macOS in 2016, at 21.14%, while macOS itself sits at 8.6%.

Statcounter says on their market share page for macOS that they can't really reliably show usage stats for anything past 10.15, due to a bug in Apple WebKit. The actual market share of macOS is very likely higher.

Granted, Windows 11 is not a perfect OS

You don't say...

So the microsoft toady who wrote the article is saying that linux does ai better than windows 11?

That's rookie numbers let's get it to 30% to get massive amounts of new Linux hardware, devices, accessories made. Also, to make unlockable bootloader the standard for phones, tablets, cars, etc

My family had 3 windows machines a few years ago. Now we have 3 Linux machines.

I know we're not representative of the public at large, but my siblings are interested in transitioning... My friends are having more and more gripes with windows lately... Seems like a revolution is on the horizon. Never seen this sort of willingness, so who knows

Here at home two computers change from windows to linux in the past couple months. Windows isn't coming back 🤗

I thought those numbers looked fishy, now we know why. Actually, the numbers themselves aren't fishy, the fishy part is misinterpreting them.

Is there a reliable site that does report user installations of OS's?

Nice try, Windows

Basically, the article says "Windows is doing fine. Microsoft even told us. Also, no one uses AI bots on Windows."

This propaganda was brought to you by Microslop. Seriously though, as there is with all propaganda there is likely some truth to it, but I think the majority are real users. The winds are changing, and Microsoft is afraid.

I demand heckin' sources for that claim.

Home had 4 windows machines a year ago. Now 1 windows machine, a raspberry pi, and 4 linux machines... reckon theres still a real move under the data. Ai may be part but its not all or most.

While this sounds like cope, I'm leaning towards believing it. Firefox also just saw a 50% increase in users... Or the data got messed up in some way that nobody else (including Mozilla themselves) is able to detect and report.

Organic Linux usage jumping a full 100% seems even less likely.

I think this is still good to see. People on the edge of switching operating systems might see 10% market share on linux and finally give it a chance. It would be pure herd mentality but anything to get people off of Microslop.

I'd be willing to bet enough Linux users use anti-fingerprinting tools to make the statistics super inaccurate anyway.

Only windows device in the house is my work computer, which is mandated to have it for specific company demands.

Everything in the house otherwise is some nature of Unix.

The bot argument is valid but the OS X thing could just be because most browsers on macOS report “Mac OS X” in the User-Agent string for compatibility (and 10.15 as the version regardless of the actual OS version, for privacy reasons).