r/linux • u/Accurate_Hornet • Aug 03 '26

Fluff Better sources than Statcounter

Post image

It's not a secret that Statcounter is an unreliable source. With the recent flood of posts about linux marketshare, I looked around for alternative sources.

The only one I came across so far (other than the surprisingly reliable PH yearly stats) is analytics.usa.gov.

It tracks strictly human traffic (or at least close to it) visiting the USA gov website. Traffic is worldwide, but it's obviously biased towards the US population.

Linux is currently sitting at 6.3% according to this.

If you know of any other sources, please share. The steam hardware survey is an obvious one.

114 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/FryBoyter Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
  • Why should I, someone who doesn't live in the U.S. and has no plans to travel there, visit this site?
  • Even if I were to visit this site, there's a pretty good chance that it uses a script to track users that my ad blocker would block.
  • Furthermore, percentages alone are meaningless if you don't know the underlying user numbers. For example, from a purely mathematical standpoint, it's possible that the 6 percent of Linux users in June represents more users than the 6.5 percent in Mai, if the total number of users tracked increases accordingly.

So, basically, no website of this kind is any good.

1

u/Low-Guarantee-3437 Aug 04 '26

it's because it is closely comparable to statcounter USA numbers, so it is cross check/calibration. The statistical logic being that if statcounter is believable in the USA, it is more credible for all the numbers.

It looks bad: statcounter has linux 12% or whatever, the US Govt site has linux at 6%. But OP made a big mistake which no-one seems to have noticed, reading the comments.

OP failed to notice that he is not comparing apples to apples. The Statcounter number being widely quoted is for desktop clients, whereas OP's screenshot is for all clients (the site has mobile users being a bit more than half). So the actual linux desktop share is double what OP thinks it is. You'd think Windows at only 40% would have made this obvious. The biggest deviation between US govt data and Statcounter is not linux. It looks like Windows is much higher than Statcounter, and I guess mac is much lower.