First you have to define what is Linux (does ChromeOS count? How about Android? Alpine? What makes something “Linux”), and what is a desktop (do laptops count? How about portable handhelds/phones with a desktop mode?).
If Microsoft keeps shooting itself and its user base in the foot in new and inventive ways it’s possible. It’ll probably have to wreck its business clients more first though.
Who gives a shit what other people use, i switched to linux some years ago and i am never going back, why bother about market shares
More users typically translates to more and better software.
Also, that would translate to the end of windows, a nice extra. Once 20% of desktops are Linux, companies will take note, other users will take note. Why pay through the nose with subscriptions, deal with insecurity, ads, constant surveillance, if you can simply have an awesome looking Linux instead?
maybe it already does… https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/
I would not be suprised if that is biased by Android tablets which now default to desktop mode.
I think that with enough community effort, it could.
Some of what I think is missing is just community documentation (manuals, tutorials, troubleshooting pages) that are easy to find and recent. While yes, solutions from 5 to 10 years ago still work, they often don’t reflect the full recent reality, never mind the tendency for CLI solutions (which are great, but plenty of people are intimidated by the CLI).
The other thing that I think is missing is polish around things that are just off the beaten path… the kinds of things that not everyone will do, but that most will do at least one of.
I think it’s coming sooner than a lot of people think.
We may even hit it within a year or so if we count the Steam machine and how that launch goes
Less and less people even have a home desktop these days. It’s basically gamers, programmers/IT/etc. types, and old people who refuse to learn how to use a smartphone.
A decent amount of those techy types are either already using Linux, or at least have some familiarity with it from working on servers and such, and it’s only a matter of time before a lot of them switch out of frustration with Microsoft’s enshitification
Gamers are already moving in pretty great numbers, valve has made it so that most games can now run fine on Linux which kept a lot of people from switching previously, and the steam deck has made a lot of people curious about it. And there’s a lot of people who have perfectly serviceable rigs that they can’t “upgrade” to windows 11 now that they won’t be getting regular security updates for 10, and with the price of RAM now, they may not want to invest in hardware upgrades and may turn to Linux to at least squeeze a couple more years out of their system.
And as far as the old luddites go, most of them could probably use Linux just fine. They’re not doing anything besides browsing the web checking their email, and using basic office programs anyway.
I recently switched my parents over to Linux Mint because their computer was just too bogged down with windows 11 bullshit and everything was going at a crawl. They’ve been on it for about a month now and it’s been smooth-sailing.
And I think as more of us gamers and tech nerds get more familiar and comfortable with Linux, more people are going to do the same thing. For those of us who have made the switch ourselves and play tech support for our parents and grandparents, the next time they call you up to come take a look at their computer, bring a Linux flash drive and boot that up for them. Tell them to play around with it a bit to see if they can live with it (I left my flash drive plugged into their computer for about a week for them to play around with it before I installed it for them) show them that libre office is basically the same as Microsoft office, install whatever web browser they’re used to, make sure their printer is working, etc.
And eventually, maybe they’ll even tell their old people friends about it. I can definitely see one of my mom’s friends complaining about how slow their computer is, and my mom saying “well my son put this Linux stuff on our computer, and it sped everything right up” and then boom you got old people getting curious about it too.
And eventually, maybe they’ll even tell their old people friends about it. I can definitely see one of my mom’s friends complaining about how slow their computer is, and my mom saying “well my son put this Linux stuff on our computer, and it sped everything right up” and then boom you got old people getting curious about it too.
That’s a good point. If we’ve reached a point where the basic experience Just Works while solving real Windows issues (incl updates and performance), then it’s going to get word-of-mouth praise instead of complaints. And if regular people start hearing about Linux stuff improving their computer, it’s going to mean far more than my ideological rants about owning your own tools and community created software.
SOs HP laptop borked Win11pro OS, wouldn’t load or recover. Tried reinstalling clean but Win11 installer can’t see SSD. Driver loading during install results in install crashing error.
Linux, here we come.
My dads laptop did this, the ssd was overheating, not loading even with the windows installer. The installer would just hang, remove the drive installer was good to go.
Is the drive showing correctly in bios? Is it showing at all under any identifier?
If you haven’t destroyed the data yet, what I did to recover all my dads data from an m.2 was to remove the drive and put it in an external caddy but left the case open, put it in front of my open window when it was -20 out (can prolly put it in the freezer for similar effect) then used a working pc (linux in my case) to get the data off thru a file browser, had to pause several times to let the drive cool down as the transfer went from a normal speed to only a couple kb/s.
Best of luck with your drive issue, hope it is not what I had to deal with
I dont think the free linux desktop for everyone that we all dream about will ever come to fruition. Even if everyone moves away from windows some other corporation will find a way to attract everyone to there platform.
Going with a definite maybe 🤔
The fact that I’m having more and more discussions with non tech people about what even Linux is, that they heard of GrapheneOS or /e/OS, makes me thing that yes, it’s possible.
What also makes it potentially possible is that Microsoft is doing like NVIDIA alienating gamers. They are “just” gigantic corporations which only go where there is more money. There is no ideology except capturing whatever drives profit up for the next quarter. They currently see AI data center as they place to earn more so they are giving up on the rest.
Twenty years ago, we were speculating whether open source browsers would survive or catch on.
Now there aren’t any closed source browsers left.
Vendors will find other forms of lock in, anyway, of course.
But chrome, edge, and safari aren’t open source to my knowledge and they make up almost the entire market. Sure chromium is open source, but that’s not the entire browser. Not to mention, it’s basically Internet Explorer all over again, but with Google behind the reigns.
Looking at android, we get a glimpse of what Google is willing to do to “open source” to keep control.
Microslop is doing everything to promote Linux. So yes, I think 10% is possible.
I think it’s inevitable at this rate. The rate it’s growing, and the rate that people are being frustrated by Windows, means it’s only a matter of time. When people see others they know on Linux then it breeds curiosity, and there’s no turning back. It’ll only grow.
And when the people with the ability to reinstall an OS have all switched to Linux then the others will follow. I have already switched two laptops from Windows to Linux in my close family and they have had no complaints about it.
I think 10% is very achievable within 5 years, driven by a few converging factors:
- Steam Deck effect — it’s normalizing Linux gaming in a way nothing else has. People who game on Deck start wondering “why not on my desktop too?”
- Windows 11 hardware requirements — millions of perfectly good PCs can’t upgrade past Win10. When support ends, Linux is the obvious path for those machines
- Corporate cost pressure — companies paying per-seat Windows licensing are looking at alternatives seriously, especially with web-based workflows
The biggest remaining barrier isn’t technical — it’s the ecosystem lock-in (Adobe, MS Office dependencies). But even that’s eroding with web apps replacing native ones.
If you look at OS on steam its about 3%, but filtered for English, its 7% in that market.
Its kinda on its way there already in some markets.
It’s currently at 8.27% on the gamingonlinux tracker: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
In thw wikimedia stats, linux usage is around 5 to 6% and seems to be growing
Yes. It’s already grown from ~1% to ~6% within the last couple of years. There are several major external factors at play: Valve helping to push gaming on Linux, the continued and increasingly big enshittification of Windows, and the current deranged US regime (resulting in less trust and less users of US-company-produced proprietary operating systems). Remember that Linux or the open source BSD variants are the only (usable/practical) operating systems you can use if you want to achieve digital sovereignty. Plus, it’s also getting even better over time by itself of course (that’s the internal factor).
it’s already grown from ~1% to ~6% within the last couple of years
Source?
Just normalize by language to English to avoid the huge spikes of Chinese users skewing the data and you’ll see we’re around 8.54% for English speakers:
- English windows users: 0,2041×96,61 = 19.72
- English Linux users: 0,826×2,23= 1.84
- Filtered total: 21,56
- Filtered percentage of Linux users: 0,085 i.e. 8.5%
Surely we don’t count steam deck nor think gamers are a representative sample of computer users
Gamers are the majority of the desktop space, and only growing in percentage as nowadays the main reason someone has a PC is for gaming with phones replacing almost all other uses. Also gaming has been historically the main issue with Linux, so looking at gaming stats has always been the pessimistic way of looking at this.
Steam Deck might skew things a bit, but not by that much, as only 23% of Linux users are on SteamOS, so even subtracting all of those (which is not correct as some people might have a Deck and also play on other Linux, like myself) you still have a 6.5% pure Linux user base, which is what the message you’re replying mentioned. Also I would argue people using the Steam Deck are using Linux, whether their other devices are Linux or not is irrelevant to the point that they are Linux users.
The primary source being cited by most of the articles is U.S. Gov Analytics, (or the less reliable Statcounter, which I wouldn’t rely on.) U.S. Gov Analytics currently places it at around 4.7% over the last 30 days, 4.4% this calendar year, and 5.6% the last calendar year. It was about 6%-ish when most articles were written about the 6% number for the first time.
Steam, so basically just gamers and not regular desktop users, has it more around 2.3%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
EDIT: mobile being at 15.3% is all we need to see here
That US site’s data includes both mobile and desktop. With a bit of math, you get Linux’s desktop marketshare over 30 days as 7,1%.
Steam’s February data is heavily influenced by Chinese new year. If you only consider Linux Steam users who have set English as their Steam language, Linux’s marketshare is 8,28%.
Literally anywhere on Google. But it also makes sense when you think about ChromeOS & non-us aligned countries - what else are they gonna use?
