Linux Hits New High in Global Desktop Market Share
Linux is still dwarfed by operating systems such as Windows, but it’s making modest gains off the back of growing popularity in emerging markets.
Looking at the data more closely, one reason for the overall rise is a big jump in the use of Linux in India - up from 8% in February last year to 15% last month. Usage in the United States has also grown, albeit rather less dramatically from 2.5% a year ago to 3.85% last month.
Linux is free to install and can be a good way of reusing older hardware, and modern distributions are easier to work with than previously. These factors are perhaps fueling demand.
Measuring market share for operating systems is often a tricky business, and there are other sources that don’t show the same breakthrough. For example, gaming platform Steam reports that just 1.6% of the devices its customers are using are running Linux.
The Linux Foundation’s own research shows that the operating system is in fine health. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the companies it surveyed said they use it.
Developers are one of the main groups that are still using desktop Linux - Stack Overflow’s 2023 developer survey found that 27% of developers used Ubuntu for personal and professional use, 16% said they used Windows Subsystem For Linux, and 8% said they used Debian.
There was a time when open source enthusiasts believed that desktop Linux could be a rival to Windows. However, a hugely fragmented marketplace (there are a lot of different flavors of Linux) plus the steep learning curve needed by the average user who wanted to install it, meant that challenge rather fizzled out. That didn’t stop cries of ’this is the year of the Linux desktop’ that lasted for a few years. Linux is growing, but Windows can relax.
