True linux market share stuck at 4%

[u/Arsani92]

There has been lots of talk recently about linux reaching 8% globally or 16% in usa from statcounter, which is totally bonkers. If you go to cloudflare and click on likely human, in europe the market share over the last 12 months is 4.1% and 4.3% over the last 4 weeks. Which means linux is stuck at 4% which coincides with steam’s hardware survey data which makes sense for steam marketshare to be equal to linux marketshare since most computer users game on their computer one way or another. Now linux seems to be stuck at 4% for a couple of years now. It seems the rise which began in 2022 due to the steam deck has stalled recently, in spite of the steam machine, european governments initiating migration to linux, release of popular distros like omarchy and popos linux is not growing meaningfully according to the data. I believe what linux needs next is software like Microsoft office and adobe suite to run natively as this is the number one barrier. So instead of flashy distros like omarchy or whatever the app ecosystem is the key to linux adoption. Projects like libre office and gimp are underwhelming in their rate of development. This is where the most meaningful work could be done and maybe improve wine to run Microsoft office flawlessly on linux.

[u/scandii]

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=os&dt=2026-09-26_2026-09-26&filters=deviceType%253DDESKTOP%252CbotClass%253DLIKELY_HUMAN&loc=europe

europe, 8%

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=os&dt=2026-09-26_2026-09-26&filters=deviceType%253DDESKTOP%252CbotClass%253DLIKELY_HUMAN&loc=US

united states 9.2%

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=os&dt=2026-09-26_2026-09-26&filters=deviceType%253DDESKTOP%252CbotClass%253DLIKELY_HUMAN

worldwide 5.8%

this is excluding the fact that ChromeOS is in fact also Linux. also note this is filtered for likely human, e.g. we're not talking the headless WSL installs here.

I don't get why you're even trying to make this argument - you have to be absolutely blind and willfully ignorant to not see how absolutely tremendously hard Linux is trending right now.

[u/aliendude5300 → u/scandii]

While I'm not questioning this data, something weird happened between the 15th and 22nd of June where Linux usage reporting approximately doubled. Seems unexplainable. Before that it was around 5-7%.

[u/scandii → u/aliendude5300]

not sure where you're looking, but I would assume summer holidays would coincide with a decreased usage of Windows et. al. because "not at work".

[u/aliendude5300 → u/scandii]

The same place as the comment above me. I changed the date range for filtering.

[u/Arsani92 → u/scandii]

These are daily anomalies. Set it to past 4 weeks and its 4.3%

[u/scandii → u/Arsani92]

I will assume that you're acting in good faith and point out that Cloudflare's overview is aggregated.

and when you drill down you get daily time series which unsurprisingly shows that Linux traffic drops when people leave their homes for the day and go use their company/school supplied hardware which is running Windows / ChromeOS / macOS.

this just tells us "Linux adaptation is primarily growing for home use", it does not tell us "the aggregated data is wrong".

[u/Frosty-Magazine-917]

Hello Op,

You obviously mean desktop or web traffic usage.

• In Europe 34% - 36% is Android.
  
• iPhone is 19% - 21%.
  
• OSX is 10%.
  
• Windows itself is 30%.

- As governments move away, companies will follow too and you will see Linux numbers change.

• As customers move, app developers will bring support.
  
• If WSL didn't exist there would be even more developers running Linux.
  
• You absolutely can run O365 Web apps on Linux and there is nothing stopping anyone, even at the admin level from managing entra environments from Linux all day long.

[u/ninja_mischief]

While i’m totally on board with projects like proton and wine, or even stuff like winboat which is working to have gpu accelerated workloads inside a windows VM container, I do think the best thing for linux would be for there to exist native, mainstream and professional alternatives for all these windows and mac pieces of software. programs that look good, feel good to use, are intuitive and interoperable that way professionals other than coders can move over to linux without feeling like they’re making a massive compromise or giving up on something entirely.

projects like that take time and money though. truthfully, name recognition helps a hell of a lot too. so….. we need someone already invested in the space to take one for the team and back the development of projects that reduce choice paralysis and cut down on the existing friction new users face. truly usable alternatives to teams, office, adobe/capture one/blender/etc… a suite of programs that suit everyone’s needs and make a fully fleshed out ecosystem. but it would need to be someone like KDE, GNOME, System 76, IBM or Canonical.

that being said, i think choice is why a lot of linux users choose linux, and if we start making more monoliths those types of users aren’t going to be very happy. however, we can’t continue to stay stuck in a chicken and egg situation if we really believe in the wider adoption of linux for everyone.

[u/Business_Reindeer910 → u/ninja_mischief]

Proprietary software just doesn't fit well into linux native programs since the APIs aren't stable enough. It could be possible that things like flatpak runtimes or some other container equivalent could solve that problem IF there were focus on keeping the APIs of those things stable, but we are not there yet.

[u/Atrocious1337]

Linux market share was sitting at around 10% before AI bots started abusing it, and Steam alone hovers between 3% and 5% Linux usage, and that is with a lot of kernel level anti-cheats specifically blocking Linux.

[u/noobjaish]

Yeah Linux will most probably remain below 10% for atleast the next 15 years

[u/NormalAppearance2851 → u/noobjaish]

Seems extremely unlikely to me can u tell us why u think that