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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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It's almost certainly much higher than that
First of all, ChromeOS is Linux. It's a weird Linux, but it is Linux and can be made to run regular Linux software. It's based on Gentoo. It's not just "technically" Linux; it just straight up is. It's even more Linux than Android is.
That adds another 2.69% up to 7.69%
But also, the 4.77% Unknown is almost certainly made up of primarily Linux machines.
So really, it's a range of percentages anywhere from 7.69% to 12.46%. I would guess Linux users are at least 10% of the US market now
Source: The StatCounter pages the article is referring to for US: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america
World wide is also similar: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/
There we're potentially even higher: 5.33% to 14.5%. That's just shy of the worldwide Mac users! macOS + OS X is 15.35% worldwide.
idk i'm not here to be a downer but it seems like counting chromeos kind of dilutes the open-source surge part of the headline yk? like obviously it counts as a linux but i wouldn't call anything google-made libre at the very least.
Except that the Linux part of ChromeOS is still open-source and the growth of ChromeOS still would yield benefits to Linux users across the board.
like i guess but linux has such high enterprise usage already that idk what it brings to the table for the free software people. if they didn't have their own bespoke DE maybe that, but as far as i can tell the only thing chromeos brings that the enterprise guys don't is consumer hardware support