Voice of the Masses: Why is the Linux market share growing?
According to netmarketshare.com, Linux has just jumped over the 3% mark. To non-Linux users that may sound like a teensy amount, but for those of us who’ve seen Linux hovering around the 2% mark for many years, this is significant news.
But what’s causing it? And will it continue? There are a million possible reasons – let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and we’ll read out the best in our podcast of sheer awesomeness.
Related Posts
About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
23 Comments
More games coming to Linux and many people not satisfied with the latest macbook and move to Linux, perhaps ;).
Have you seen how complicated the windows 10 start menu is ? It has more windows in its top level than my entire desktop. If you are presented with all that complication at once it does tend to discourage modifying it and extending it to suit your self. If you have your own computer for the first time, that’s just what you want to do.
As I was saying:-
My desktop is my handiwork, more configuration and installation than programming, but it is that way because I set it up like that. If I want to, tomorrow, I can say “shove it” and switch from KDE to xfce without the sky falling down, or whatever strange metaphor you want for a major disaster.
It is not the result of a “corporate senior world wide desktop designer” trying to second guess the market. OK, so senior blah blah has been tops at second guessing the market for a long time, but he( she ?)(it ?) is not best at guessing people in their own preferences, when they know that they can have them.
GNU/Linux is the result of a simple and technically elegant basis for design, that now allows thousands of companies a technical forum in which to both cooperate and compete in a way that was quite normal before Apple and Microsoft swallowed the world.
I wish I could be more optimistic but I suspect it’s two things unrelated to what we think of as linux:
1) The firm behind those findings does not seem to distinguish between ‘linux linux’ and Chrome OS (unless the latter is the 3.12% ‘Other; see: https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0). Chrome OS does seem to be growing in popularity.
2) Home users who would once have used a Windows desktop move to tablets and phones, shrinking the size of the Windows slice.
The optimistic view is that markets less Windows-dependent are growing faster than traditional Microsoft ones. Eastern Europe? India? Sadly netmarketshare keeps geo data behind a paywall.
It’d be great if the increase was mainly due to a growth in adoption of the Linux desktop, but I very much suspect that your reason No.2 is the answer.
Not sure if I agree, wasn’t Windows working on a phone OS, it hasn’t had quite the takeup, but really whatever phone a person buys these days just comes with whatever OS is on it. What I mean is that very (very!) few people actually go to the trouble of /changing/ the OS on their phones, so if it comes with Windows Phone OS, that’s what they use.
It would be different, I humbly suggest, if more people were made aware that they /can/ choose a different OS for their phone, notwithstanding it’s fiendishly difficult to actually do so – noone wants a ‘brick’ at the end of the day.
But, yeah, I guess you still have a point.
As someone who has been using Linux for more than twenty years, I really don’t understand why anyone would use anything else.
If I had to speculate, then maybe the evangelising about Linux is starting to break through. I know most normal people are not concerned about the software freedoms, but getting great software for little or no cost and extending the life of hardware are good practical points in Linux’s favour over other systems.
For developers it makes perfect sense to use Linux. Not only are all the tools readily available for developers, but more and more applications and services are moving to the cloud, where I believe Linux is dominant, so there’s no reason to use anything but Linux.
Also, Linux is just so cool.
A lot more people now know what Linux is due to the brilliant Raspberry Pi, others use android devices and have an inkling of where it comes from, and anyone using cloud computing will probably have used it. Linux is everywhere nowadays, in cars, set top boxes, routers, IOT etc.
I think this new awareness is leading to more people trying it and starting to use it.
The new school year just started, and schools are switching to ChromeOS en masse.
Me thinks there are several reasons related to android and raspberry pi, but mainly 1 Windows 10 is much worse than previous incarnations. 2 some desktop Linux distribution just work well and don’t require tinkering.
Developers, developers, developers, developers,… Loads of de software write software that runs on Linux servers and to do so they use modern Linux desktops.
Look at it anyway you want, there is no system as dev friendly as a modern Linux distro.
Win7 is usable win8 and win10 are awful. Don’t know about apple. Need a good os? Who you gonna call?
I’ve been using Linux for so long now, windows is just so in your way..uh I don’t know what it is, I just hate it! Perhaps others are seeing it as well. Here’s hoping away. …
I think attitudes towards operating systems change a lot more slowly than the average Linux enthusiast might want them to. When I first got into Linux with the early versions of Ubuntu, people were already saying it was just as easy to use as Windows.
It wasn’t. As of the last five years or so it actually is but the average computer user just doesn’t reassess this sort of thing very often.
Clearly it’s the year of the breakthrough of Linux on the desktop
Part of it might be owed to Ubuntus popularity, its ease of installation and ease of use.
This is the start of the hockeystick growth pattern, we have seen this in many tech industries. Mobiles bubbled along for quite a time as business perks, before getting mass adoption (when it became cool for school kids to have one and text each other), so I think we are on the start of total world domination. It will start with school kids and then become mainstream that everyone has.
I hope this is true….
Linux market share is growing because systemd is doing such a great job. 😛
Linux is more popular because Windows 10 is so bad, people are now looking for alternatives. Probably due to privacy issues or else due to Windows 10 being too different to what people were used to.
As has been mentioned, Windows 10, much like Windows 8 was a real bridge too far for WinXP and Win7 users, the interface became a stupid thing, since it required one to enter a desktop, then go back to a full screen “start” screen just to run an application.
Bad UI design ‘decision’ wrt users’ desktop experience. Add to that the UAE or whatever, people couldn’t install stuff easily, and now with the latest version of 10, you can’t install /anything/ Micros**t hasn’t “beatified” or “blessed” – so no Gimp, Krita, or any open source software.
No wonder people are seriously reconsidering making linux their “go-to” desktop/laptop OS of choice.
Now that needs consolidation, given that at some point Apple’s walled garden ran on top of Darwin, and still much of their so-called OS takes so much from the Unix/Linux hard work, and still occupies something under 12 per cent, it’s really there for Linux to gain even more.
Best regards as always, and much thanks for your work,
Mihaly
MR ROBOT MR ROBOT MR ROBOT
People wanna be cool like Eliot
Sadly being a cynical old coot sometimes means you’re right: http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-the-linux-desktop-hasnt-jumped-in-popularity/#ftag=RSSbaffb68
I am personnally responsible for a tiny bit of that percentage as I run a small business fixing computers. By advertising loccaly in Newsagents and Petrol Stations I get phone calls from people who have run into some problem or other, often related to the Windows Operating System. In many cases the fix involves removing Windows and replacing it with Linux Mint – the distro with the easiest learning curve. A small bit of tuition and free technical support into the future leaves me with many happy customers who would have otherwise been totally oblivious to the existence of Linux. I’m encouraging Linux enthusiasts all over the world to speed up the Linux revolution by doing exactly what I am doing. You can meet lots of people, make some money, learn a lot about Linux and forge many good relationships and business into the future.
Jonny (jogideas.com)
When windows override people’s preference and also when other OS gain market share, people will search more for OS alternatives and they hear more about Linux.
Also do not forget that this is age of the Internet and people are more educated than before.