There has been an upsurge in the desktop Linux market share which has seen a rise to 3.37% in the latest statistics on Net Market Share for operating systems. Linux market share has witnessed a steady increase, especially in the last two summer months.
The stats show May 2017 with 1.99%, June with 2.36%, July had 2.53% and August showed Linux market share increasing to 3.37%.
Net Market Share is an analytical company that “collects data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of HitsLink Analytics and SharePost clients”. Their network includes over 40,000 websites across the globe.
Quite clearly this is not the real statistics on how many Linux desktops are in use and perhaps that is even not possible. But this is as close as we can get in collecting data on Linux market share.
Chromebooks help Linux Market Share?
The stats seem to take count Chrome OS as Linux since it is built on top of Linux kernel. Chromebooks, devices pre-installed with Chrome OS, have grown popular lately especially among college going students.
Chromebooks are usually lower end devices that have low prices and are lightweight. They come handy in carrying around and taking notes and saving them to cloud.
This might be a factor as students preparing to go to college may have boosted Chromebook sales.
However, this is my speculation and it may happen that more people are actually using desktop Linux. It is worthy to note that Linux distros dominate the market in servers and embedded devices. Not to forget that Linux simply rules super-computers with almost all of the top 500 supercomputers running on Linux.
Leave your comments below on what you think might have caused the increase in Linux market share for operating systems.
One thing adding to the rise of the Linux Desktop is the developer community.
As more cloud centric development models (using Docker and Kubernetes) continues to increase, the more developers that opt for Linux as their development OS.
Big problem for Linux adoption is not the OS per say, its what doesn’t run on the OS for many users. I would say most who install Linux and go back to Windows have nothing but positives to say about the install or adjusting to Linux. But its about not finding what they need in applications that forces them back to Windows.
The time is ripe for Linux to take a huge share with Windoze 10 being such a huge pile of spyware garbage. As for Linux market share keep in mind that many Linux systems are highly anonymous and do not freely transmit everything about you and your PC like Windoze does. i.e. they will not appear on the Web as Linux users.
I believe that Windows Update is a major driver of switching people to Linux. My part time job is providing support to Windows users, and Windows Update is breaking over and again, in new ways.