For the first time ever, Linux has clawed its way past the five per cent desktop market share barrier in the United States so maybe 2025 is finally the much predicted year of Linux on the desktop.

StatCounter’s latest figures for June 2025 show Linux holding 5.03 per cent of the US desktop market. That might sound modest, but it is a massive milestone for the open-source faithful who have been banging on for decades that Linux would one day break through. Even more satisfying, Linux has now overtaken the “Unknown” category in the stats, a small but symbolic victory that shows the growth is no longer being ignored or misattributed.

It took a grinding eight years for Linux to crawl from one to two per cent by April 2021. Another 2.2 years were needed to hit three per cent in June 2023. From there it snowballed, taking only 0.7 years to cross four per cent in February 2024 and just four months later Linux is through five per cent.

Analysts say AI workloads, the backlash against surveillance-heavy proprietary platforms, and the never-ending trainwrecks of Apple have made Linux a more attractive option for ordinary users. Microsoft’s increasingly locked-down Windows 11, with its forced online accounts and hardware restrictions, has not helped either.

I guess Apple and MS are finally finding out.