Here is the graph showing Linux market share over the last two years according to five different sources (the Steam Hardware & Software Survey, the US Gov website, w3counter, statcounter, and Cloudflare):
Please note that CloudFlare and StatCounter data are updated daily, whereas all other sources are updated monthly. Though each data source uses very different methodologies, this graph should be able to tell us about general trends over a medium length of time.
You can find more data and a description of the handling of each source on this page. Please note that part of it is reserved for paying subscribers as aggregating the data takes some time, and donations help me work on more features (such as by-country graphs and longer history) and, more generally, to run the website.
CouldFlare data uses the number of HTTP requests broken down by Operating System. You can explore the data for yourself here.
I have decided to set "Device type" to "Desktop" as I'm only interested in desktop marketshare, and I have kept "Bot class" empty as "Likely human" lowers the Linux marketshare significantly, and I'm worried that Linux users are considered more likely bots.
The data is continuously updated, which is great; however, it's provided as a percentage of HTTP requests each day, and to get the monthly value, I average them. I have found this to be rather accurate, but it does not account for which days have more traffic. Therefore, the number you see might differ from CloudFlare's own tally.
If necessary, we could filter the requests by country and have some more detailed geographical data, but I have not worked on that yet.
Statcounter publishes its methodology here and here, and you can see the data for yourself here. Again, I'm only interested in desktop market share, so I filter by that type of device.
I believe this to be the second-largest source of data after CloudFlare, as they claim to have had a sample of 5.3 billion page views in 2022. Of course, that might not be representative of the larger population.
Statcounter also offers to filter by country, which - again - could lead to some interesting geographical experiments. Let me know if that would interest you.
There are a few interesting things worth investigating. Firstly, StatCounter reports an unexpectedly high amount of unknown OSs, and I have not yet found a good explanation for why that is.
Secondly, they report weird numbers for MacOS vs OSX: the latter has a higher market share, but it's nine years old, so that's unlikely. Anyhow, I decided to aggregate the two together.
I hate this data source; please do not rely on it.
I have collected the data from here. However, it only reports the top 10 platforms, and does not allow filtering out by type of device.
Because of that, I have decided to filter out all non-desktop Operating Systems, so that we are comparing Linux market share only against Windows and macOS. However, there's a ~10% of non-top-10 platforms missing from our data; in order to set a lower bound for Linux, I decided to assume all platforms not listed in the top-10 as desktop-only
Therefore, the Linux market share as reported by W3Counter is likely slightly higher. Even with these adjustments, the data feels unreliable: it is giving a weird 10% spike around Sept '24, which is unrealistic. Nonetheless, it's a data point that's not worth excluding.
By the way, this is also why "Other" is so high: it simply includes all OSs (probably Windows and macOS) that are not displayed in the top-10.
You can also see some data points where Linux is set as 0; this is because it was not in the top-10 platforms, and I therefore do not have any data about that timeframe. I can only give an upper bound for its market share, but I do not believe that is particularly useful.
There is no filtering available for this source; it's as good as it gets.
The data comes from the API of this webpage. If I understood this correctly, it's the data from the AdSense account of the US government, and only tracks data from views of any website within .usa.gov.
According to the data itself, 61% of the views are from the US; unsurprisingly, this dataset is going to be heavily skewed towards this country. And, sadly, there's no way (that I have found) to filter OS information based on country of origin.
That said, it's still an interesting data source that gets sometimes quoted in articles, so I think it's worth including.
There's not much to say here: it's obviously a dataset that's heavily skewed towards gaming. Still, it's interesting to see how Linux market share changes within that niche, and it also often gets referenced around.
Sadly, getting good historical data here is a challenge. Steam does not publish it, but luckily, there's a good fella keeping track of it on a GitHub page. However, as they mention themselves:
Numbers are reconstructed from the platform specific data and might diverge slightly form official numbers on the main SHS page.
I have not found the numbers to diverge significantly. An alternative would be to use the Internet Archive; however, given how close this database gets me, I don't think that's necessary.
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