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End of 10 is a campaign to move people over to Linux with Windows 10 support ending
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this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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I know. I was going to post, "and how's that campaign going?" There was a bit of a spike months that was pretty clearly due to Steam and the Steam Deck, and TBH Linux is undercounted because Linux users are, as a group, less likely to share accurate telemetry and to masquerade as other OSes, but still. I'm not seeing a giant market share spike. I'd expect the refugee population to be less likely to masquerade and to show up clearly a Linux.
I'm going to assume you meant "more likely" on masquerading, but I do want to point out, Linux users also tend to be more proud of their choice and to want to contribute to the statistics, want to be represented. Maybe those numbers effectively cancel out, but I doubt they significantly lean towards underrepresentation for the reason you mentioned.
"Less likely to share accurate telemetry, and to masquerade"
I am sometimes overcautious about comma usage. In this case, it made my meaning ambiguous.
Much of the telemetry is gathered from web sites harvesting browser self-identification. I would guess that a larger percentage of Linux users are concerned about privacy, and use plugins and settings that obfuscate browser identification, which most do, because browser identification is one of the key analytics fingerprinting that trackers gather. You don't? Use blockers and privacy settings, I mean.
And, while Microsoft and Apple undoubtedly know about nearly every single installation that is online at any given time, Linux users of most distributions have to actively turn on telemetry. For many distributions, you have to go out of your way to seek out, install, and activate telemetry software. Additionally, unlike Microsoft and Apple, there is no one single source of truth for Linux installations, even for people who set up telemetry; which organization are these Linux distributions phoning home to?
A great many Linux users are also privacy advocates, and we steer well clear of tracking, telemetry, and analytics. A great many of us show up as Microsoft or Apple computers; I'd guess a far larger percent, and greater total number, than Apple or Windows users who show up as Linux. Steam is probably the biggest single contributor to accurate telemetry to impact Linux since advertisers popularized analytics.