There May be Close to 100,000,000 Laptops and Desktops Running GNU/Linux Around the World in 2024
But it's incredibly hard to track the number of deployments, due to the decentralised nature of distribution among other factors, as I explained 17 years ago (still applicable)
THIS year it's time to revisit an old question.
Some people wonder how many desktops and laptops run GNU/Linux. Given that few buy GNU/Linux PCs (preinstalled), many are offline, and one can install a distro on many machines after just one download, let's extrapolate a little.
"In 2019," this page says, "there were over 2 billion computers in the world, including servers, desktops, and laptops."
So set aside tablets and phones running Android, which has Linux. Ignore those for now.
5 years have passed. More hardware exists now. Many people purchased laptops during the pandemic.
Most servers run GNU/Linux and that leaves us with close to 2 billion desktops and laptops at present (there aren't that many physical servers). Now that GNU/Linux is measured at over 4% based on several worldwide surveys, 1% would be about 20 million and 4% or more would be over 80 million. Add Chromebooks on top of that... how many Chromebooks are out there? Google probably knows because it "phones homes" ('telemetry').
GNU/Linux is widely used in the domain of science and technology, even on the client side. Film studios also use it extensively, but it is not a subject that today's media (what's left of it) typically explores. There's no company like Apple and Microsoft to "commission" so-called 'journalism' (marketing) about it. █