Bonum Certa Men Certa

GNU/Linux Desktop Market Share

20 years old kernel finds itself everywhere

Tux in money



Summary: The usage of GNU/Linux on the desktop is not as tepid as the corporate press has some people believe

WHEN this site was a lot younger and well before it required a cache server to offload pressure, monthly "market share" statistics were occasionally posted to show that about 40% of the visitors of the site use GNU/Linux. We have a wiki page about this subject, still. Many actually used SUSE, perhaps because we covered SUSE quite routinely.



After the DDOS attacks of 2009 we needed to move to a server which was not shared. Whenever people attacked the site this impacted some other sites. It was then that we lost cPanel and AWStats. Later in the year we also added server-level cache for handling the load and for protection against attacks (common around December of that year). This was not CMS-level cache, which continued to be used. Varnish basically divided, based on some criteria, requests that could be served from a local file (static) and those that needed to be passed for processing the usual way by Apache and the underlying CMS (with or without the database, depending on cache). The outcome of this was that statistics ceased to be meaningful. The logs contained requests from Varnish rather than from the users who accessed pages. Having said that, it is reasonable to speculate that about 40% of the visitors are still GNU/Linux users, putting Android aside.

What might be worth noting here is that there is a population bias that affects how people perceive the "market share" (usage) of GNU/Linux. Users of this operating system are drawn into niche sites that have a strong privacy policy and would not give away logs for the sake of someone's business model. Moreover, there are uneven distributions of OS use, typically based on geographical and lingual factors. Those factors are rarely or never accounted for by quick 'facts' vendors that just use brute force to output some 'magic' numbers, never bothering to study the population in question.

The bottom line is, as far as a site like Techrights is concerned, GNU/Linux as a desktop operating system is massive. It keeps growing, too.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

New XBox Leaks Probably Serve to Confirm XBox's Collapse (Many More Layoffs)
It's very much consistent with what many other sites have reported lately
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Farewell to Jane Goodall, California Bans Algorithmic Price-Fixing
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Lost Wages and a Saga Of Continuing To Use Palm PDAs
Links for the day
Richard Stallman's Talk in Helsinki is Done. Tomorrow Göteborg.
There are scarce details in Finnish about Dr. Stallman's talk
The Slop Song
The train wreck marches on
LLM Slop/Advanced Plagiarism Flooding the Zone With Capital That Does Not Exist
Many publishers out there still participate in this bubble instead of calling it what it is
Links 09/10/2025: Sacked Microsoft Workers Make "Sackbird", IBM Taps CockroachDB for PostgreSQL
Links for the day
"Happy Hacking Day" Richard Stallman Talk This Afternoon (From 14:00 to 16:00) at Haaga-Helia University in Pasila
Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 08, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 08, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Impact of Microsoft Layoffs, More Data Breaches
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Autumn Blues and C IRC Bot
Links for the day
Slopwatch Appreciated by Real Authors of GNU/Linux Articles
We do try to keep on top of those things
Upgraded R.R.R.R.R.R. Today
The Web of 2025 is full of garbage, not limited to slopfarms
Freedom From Proprietary Prisons
Forking always an option
IBM's Watson Died in 1956, Now Watson Dies Again
IBM is becoming just a reseller of GAFAM and other stuff
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, and Google News
We've also just noticed more slop from UbuntuPIT
Microsoft Says That Constant Mass Layoffs Are Success, the Media Isn't Buying This Microsoft Narrative Anymore
If people in the media feel an obligation to repeat whatever lies Microsoft tells, what point will there be to the media?
Links 08/10/2025: "Mali Puts Free Speech on Trial" And Apple Enforces Dictatorship
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: ‘Death to Spotify’ and Law to Ban Loud Commercials on Streaming (Dis)Services
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: Real Innovation and Nina.chat is Dead
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: Y2K38 Bug is a Vulnerability, Chat Control in Europe a Threat
Links for the day
Microsoft Windows is No Longer an Operating System, It's Surveillance Project
Why is this even legal to preload on PCs outside the US?
How and Why Once-Legitimate Sites Turn Into Slopfarms
Many sites will go offline and many social control networks will shut down once they realise or even openly admit they spend money and time gardening a bunch of bots and slop
UbuntuPIT Became a Slopfarm and Gnoppix Tarnishes Its Own Brand With Slop
It fits all the characteristics of mildly-edited (if at all) slop
Slopwatch: Linux Journal and Other Slopfarms
GAFAM needs to go the way of the dodo
Gemini Links 08/10/2025: "Seek Seek Revolution" and Gradient Backgrounds
Links for the day
Qualcomm Arduino Takes Aim at Raspberry Pi
Qualcomm is a Microsoft partner
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 07, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 07, 2025
Stagnation of the Economy and What Free Software Can (or Could) Do For It
If your economic model is based on a pyramid of lies, it won't last very long
Social Control Media is Sinking
it would rightly seem like the era of centralised "social" sites (they're not social, they're about controlling the users) is ending, not overnight but gradually