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.
by the way i use arch linux
I installed Linux Mint a few weeks ago and have it as a dual boot with windows 7. I will not upgrade to win 10. I still will use win 7 for win apps that don’t have a Linux version, but will not go on line. Linux will be used for my online finances, shopping and other stuff I may find interesting and probably more and more over time. And it is FREE!!!! Only drawback is I don’t have full functionality for my Canon printer.
Linux is great and I use it daily, but…
Honestly, it have no chance to take its place as a popular home desktop Os as long as it is such a plague to find a driver for combos printer/scanner, and play a game simply without tinkering for hours, just has you do in Windows.
When you grand mother will be able to use linux (and her printer whatever it is) without your help, then linux would have a chance.
As the problem is not coming from the linux part, but mostly from the devices and software providers, it will not be solved too soon.
So do not erase your Windows dual boot partition right now.
Vincent, if you plan properly and purchase printer hardware that is linux/unix CUPPS supported, Linux will work perfectly. Of course if you have an inability to plan and try to run it on outdated hardware from 1989 that is not supported, of course you are going to have trouble. Vincent, it is the same thing as with a car, if you ignore the engineering maintenance specs and put the wrong fuel or oil in your car it will not run properly. Does this simple logic escape you?