Linux Desktop Market Share Crosses 3% (netmarketshare.com)

Data for the month of August 2017 from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications is here, and it suggests that Linux has finally surpassed the three percent mark, quite possibly for the first time in recent years. According to Net Applications, the desktop market share of Linux jumped from 2.53 percent in July to 3.37 percent in August. There's no explanation for what accounted for this growth.

Comments

YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[Spy Handler]

has arrived!

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[Skewray]

Linux Desktop will achieve 100% at exactly that moment when there are no more desktops.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Desktop is over. Now its all about smartphones.

And well. The year of Linux on smartphones was a couple of years ago.

Linux has already won. Poeple don't really know it yet.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I felt too. Logically it is like this, Linux users are techie types and in order to make their systems more secure from attacks, it would spoof its system to report as a Windows OS and hence it skewed the results from market analytics.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[shaitand]

Not in business. The desktop (or usually laptop now) is still very real and really the only reason windows persists. There is less push on this front because in any organization with separate windows and *nix resources the *nix resources don't have to deal with nonsense related to individual users and most like it that way.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[MBGMorden]

Desktop isn't really over - it's just changed.

Personal users still use smartphones heavily. As a matter of fact I know quite a number of people who no longer own a computer and do all their personal tasks ONLY on a smartphone.

That said, business users are just as much into the desktop as ever, and that isn't likely to change any time soon. Smartphones make for decent media consumption devices, but they're not great and working with lots of plain old data.

Between the business sector and power users, the desktop will likely be around for just as long as mobile devices are - it just will be relegated to a niche product.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[KingMotley]

I would have to say your analysis is wrong.

Smartphones will replace desktops in more and more situations in the business world (this is already happening). I know of a few companies, mostly startups, but there are a few big names as well that issue employees tablets where traditionally it would have been a laptop.

Next phase is dockable (via a physical connector or wireless/bluetooth) phones/tablets with real keyboard, mice, monitor, and network connections. Once phones get software that support this and can instantly switch to a more desktop like environment you will see desktops/laptops disappear from a large portion of businesses. There is very little reason why phones can't present a desktop-like environment and allow the user to compose emails, write documents, update spreadsheets, do powerpoint presentations, or even light photoshopping. Pick the phone up and walk away when you are done.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[MBGMorden]

You're looking at things a bit oddly.

For one, startups often focus on unique business sectors - some fail, some succeed, but they're not representative of "normal business". Not all business workers travel or need to be mobile. Heck some CAN'T be mobile - what we call "counter users" who sit at a counter and are there to interface with the public as needed. They're going to be in a chair in front of a workstation all day. Think of the people over at the DMV for example.

So many people have this glorious image of the office road warrior in their heads that they forget that for a ton of people office work is just boring routine crap where you don't need to go anywhere.

As to the dockable component - that's simply semantics. If you dock your phone and then start using an external keyboard, mouse and monitor, then you're USING A DESKTOP. It doesn't matter that the phone is doing the processing work - the platform is still desktop based.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[michelcolman]

You're the one who's not a math guy, apparently.

100% of 0 is 0. Nothing wrong with that. Just because there are no more desktops doesn't mean that the term "desktop" has become undefined.

100% of all naturally flying pink elephants are capable of telepathy. That's a perfectly correct statement.

(With "naturally flying pink elephants", I mean excluding those painted pink and launched by catapult, obviously. Although those might somehow gain telepathic skills, you never know, it's worth a shot, but I digress)

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[Chryana]

I'm sorry to say that I completely disagree.

Most jobs don't require mobility. Thus, using their cellphone to do their work is not a particularly compelling use case. The operating systems running on cell phones are poorly suited to multitasking, and thus do not offer a particularly productive environment to work in when they are connected to a screen with a mouse and keyboard. Android has actually been moving away from larger screens, changing the UI to work better on cellphone screen sizes at the expense of tablet sized screens. In any case, it's already possible to get a desktop-like environment with a cell or tablet through the use of remote desktop, and I've yet to hear of a company that did the switch.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[Chryana]

The people who can accomplish their work with a cell phone indeed do not need multitasking, and have probably already switched over. A lot of jobs, however, require being able to see your email and interacting with some other application at the same (often the browser running some web app, I guess). Nearly all the staff in the company I work for is in that situation. If this is not multi tasking, I don't know what is.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[jwhyche]

And it only took 26 years!

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[jwhyche]

Good point! We could put the same UI on phones, tablets and desktops - it'll be a huge success!

Wait! Wait! I know this. $200 for the win. Is it .... windows 8?

I read your post and just can't help but think of the Northrop M2-F2 lifting body crash in 1967.

Re:YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

[jwhyche]

Yeah, except that statistic is broken. The real Linux desktop market share is about double.

I think its broken too. I think its more a long the lines of half that, if that much. I have yet to see a linux desktop in the wild that wasn't installed by a local penguin head for his own use.

Desktop System?

[Archangel Michael]

You mean "traditional desktop computers". My Smart Phone (Android, but iPhones count too) is as powerful as any desktop was 10 years ago, and runs Linux (kernel). I would suggest that WebBrowser is the real "new" OS. Best example is Chromebooks, Linux kernel with enough specs to get you to a web browser.

The Desktop has moved to my pocket.

Re:Desktop System?

[FrankHaynes]

It feels like every participant in that ecosystem is phoning it in.

ICWYDT.

Re:Desktop System?

[stooo]

>> You just have to make sure you press and hold F5 .... so that it doesn't reinstall ChromeOS.

Or get a real laptop which doesn't destroy your data on boot.
Perhaps an application of that would be if you ever enter the US with a laptop. A data destroying laptop is then useful.

It was me

[rtkluttz]

I reinstalled 3715 times trying to get a thermal issue solved with the 4.10 kernel.

Reliable market analytics firm Net Applications

[93 Escort Wagon]

I don't know this company - on what basis is the qualifier "reliable" added? Are they somehow better than any other analytics firm?

First thing I thought of when I read that was how Trump will add stuff like this when he's about to make something up - like how his "friend Jim, who is a very, very substantial person" stopped going to Paris.

Re:Looking at the trend

[93 Escort Wagon]

It seems clear that the losses in MacOS have appeared over in Linux.

July 2017
Mac: 6.02%
Linux: 2.53%

August 2017
Mac: 5.94%
Linux: 3.37%

Unless it takes 10 Linux desktops to replace each Mac, the math doesn't seem to work...

"reliable"

[JohnFen]

from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications

I have no reason to doubt the stats, but when someone feels the need to insert the qualifier "reliable" like this for their own source, it immediately makes me question the reliability of the source.

I guess it's a variation of the rule of thumb that you should never trust anyone who says "trust me".

I would like to apologize.

[Gravis Zero]

I was getting my fortune read by a old gypsy woman and she said, "2017 can be the year of the Linux desktop... but there's a price." I accepted but honestly, I didn't think she could actually make people vote for Trump! ;)

Chromebooks?

[MBGMorden]

I wonder if this includes Chromebooks? If it does, that's likely the uptick. They've saw decent adoption rates. My niece in third grade was actually just given one for the school year to take home.

Android is not really a "Linux" smartphone OS.

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't get why people consider Android to be Linux.

Is the Linux kernel present? Yeah, but it's buried so deeply that most Android developers, and pretty much all Android users, have absolutely no idea that it's there.

When you develop Android apps you have pretty much no direct interaction with the Linux kernel. You aren't writing POSIX-style applications that could be ported to the BSDs or macOS or Solaris or HP-UX with ease. You aren't using the GUI toolkits commonly used with other Linux systems. You're actually writing apps for what's effectively a proprietary Java-based environment.

When you use Android, you really aren't using the GNU utilities, systemd, X, Wayland, or any of the desktop environments typically found on a Linux system. You're using other software that is quite specific to Android.

Android is "Linux" in the most minimal sense. It clearly doesn't resemble other traditional Linux distributions. In fact, that's probably why it has been successful: a lot of the userland software that makes Linux a rather hostile environment for users has been totally discarded and replaced with far more effective, albeit essentially proprietary, replacements!

Google could probably silently switch the Linux kernel to the NetBSD kernel or some other kernel, and nobody else would have any idea it happened. That's how irrelevant and hidden the Linux kernel is to Android developers and users.

Perhaps that's what will eventually happen with something like the Fuchsia project.

We shouldn't consider Android to be an example of Linux being popular. I think it's the opposite: we should see it as Android (that is: what's essentially the proprietary software and environment running on top of the Linux kernel) being popular, and the Linux kernel just happens to be along for the ride.

Re: Android is not really a "Linux" smartphone OS.

[MBGMorden]

Meh - at least on the desktop, few users directly use the GNU crap either - it's just as buried as the kernel.

GNU/x.org/Gnome/Firefox/Linux just doesn't roll off the tongue too well, so the desktop system that we're all familar with is just "Linux". The smartphone OS, despite running the Linux kernel, is "Android".

The kernel might not be the whole system, but for one the whole system got colloquially named after the kernel - on the other it didn't.

Re:Looking at the trend

[drnb]

It seems clear that the losses in MacOS have appeared over in Linux.

No. Both growing but at different rates results in the same sort of numbers.

Oh, this is easy.

[sootman]

> According to Net Applications, the desktop market share of
> Linux jumped from 2.53 percent in July to 3.37 percent in August.
> There's no explanation for what amounted for this growth.

A 30% jump in one month, after two decades of "YYYY will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" ?

The explanation is obvious: bad data.

Easy to explain

[DontBeAMoran]

1. Microsoft Windows 10 which removes user control and adds spying/telemetry/etc.

2. Tim Cook as the CEO of Apple believes iPad Pro can replace computers, macOS is receiving mostly visual updates that do nothing and even removes useful features for pro users and Mac updates are a joke, they remove things users need, add features no one asked for and the machines are more overpriced than ever.

No explanation?

[ilsaloving]

I seriously doubt that there's no explanation. IMO, it's a desperately needed correction that has been a very long time coming.

Windows 10 is the most user-hostile operating system Microsoft has ever released in their history.

Apple continues to jack up their prices on increasingly stupid hardware and are generally doing everything they can to take the piss out of their consumer base.

Chromebooks are providing an inexpensive, viable linux-based option that is is taking advantage of the not just the general frustration of the above, but also it's finding a sweet spot for people that do very little localhost work that can't just as, or more easily be, done through cloud services.

Re:Believe it or not Microsoft's been gaining

[shaitand]

"on the server. They've fixed most of the major issues. You still have to reboot them for no good reason, but with load balancing that's not really an issue."

The biggest issue is that it's a less capable platform with more overhead and no upside except where it supports windows desktops. Nobody uses SQL server, IIS, or SharePoint because they are the best answer to their problems, they use them because of interaction with other products in the windows ecosystem (including things produced by windows focused developers). Without the windows desktop there won't be new generations of developers and admins who took the easy path of developing and learning on the windows platform their desktop runs on. Also without the windows desktop, you have no AD servers, without AD servers the rest of it becomes a major headache and platform doesn't make sense.

Yah I ditched my Desktop for a phone

[future assassin]

and now I'm so happy processing my photos, internet browsing, playing games and just about everything with a 5" screen held in my hands a few inches from my face, yet again experiencing Nintendo thumb from the early 90's

Re:Just how bad

[jwhyche]

Windows is crap, period. People only think it works better because they don't know any better, or are resistant to learning a new way of working with something, because they know windows and that's the only way anything will ever work for them.

Well that is a pretty dumbass thing to say. In virtually every desktop situation windows does as well and most of the time better than a linux desktop. For a gaming rig it does everything better than linux. Nothing touch windows for gaming.

For office work, again windows does everything better. If linux could touch windows on the desktop then it would be much higher than a mere 3%, if that much.

An there are plenty of us that work in both windows and linux. An yes, we do know better. Apparently, much better than you do.

Re:Just how bad

[jwhyche]

No arguments with you here on this. A few weeks ago I used sed to search and replace some words in almost one million files. It took about 40 minutes to do a search and replace on that many files. I don't even know of a windows tool off hand that would let me do that.

Windows server has a new gui-less mode but I don't know any one that uses it. If you are going create only server I have yet to see anything that beats linux or unix. An for straight up batch processing text and data, nothing does.

Just as windows has it strengths, linux has its. I know you can run webservers on windows but apache really excels on linux. Right tool for the right job.