I'd of thought steam and proton would of been a large contributing factor

The insane requirements of Win11 (and the added Ai features) are definitely factors for me to switch to Linux

I'm doing my part!

Proton is what allowed me to make the switch. I do dual boot but almost never use my windows partition.

The Linux ecosystem has matured to the point where it can work well for the majority of people. Even the worst of Linux like Nvidia is still usable.

I'd guess every day someone gets fed up with some MS bullshit and goes looking for something else, for me it was the forced updates/restart and the following waiting to finish updates then 100% disk usage for a few minutes, then removing whatever bullshit that got reinstalled.

I added 2 to that count this week!

I resurrected my Asus T100TA tablet/laptop that got killed by Windows10 and installed Linux Mint. I can now stream the seas in the comfort of my TV.

Then updated my Lenovo Flex from Win11 to Kubuntu. I used to play Android games via LD Player and it was so slow in Win11. But with Kubuntu+Waydroid, I was able to play my mmorpg game at the highest setting without lag!

One of the biggest contributors to the growth of Linux is likely the stringent hardware requirements of Windows 11.

Keep it up, Microsoft! You'll make life better for us all yet. Windows 12 should be only for the elite few.

The huge push from communities to get back to normal communication and marginalising toxicity is something that doesn't get often mentioned, but the culture has definitely improved over the years to where the usual "elitist gatekeeper" accusation from other OS's bad actors falls flat and more people are not put off before even downloading an iso.

I used windows all my life up until May 2023 when I decided to try Debian and then never went back. Now that Debian 12 is easy to install I hope more people will join.

Last year's December marked my one-year birthday of daily-driving Linux as my primary OS consecutively, while this January marked one year of me using a single distro reliably without running into weird issues that'd lead me into a distrohopping frenzy. I am still proud that I managed to pull this off! I guess third time really is the charm.

I had previously tried using Linux two other times before - the first time was around March 2021 when I had to finally upgrade my computer and switch out of Windows 7, and since I didn't like Win10, I wanted to try out Linux. Sadly, I didn't know much about it at the time and made a bad first-distro choice in Manjaro, whose installer broke so horribly that it somehow nuked my entire SSD. Lesson learned: Don't use Manjaro.

Second time was in November (also in 2021), where I mustered the courage to try again after many frustrations with Windows 10, but with a different distro (initially Pop!_OS, but I had a terrible experience with its community and switched to Linux Mint the next day). My days on Mint were pretty great and I still remember them fondly, but there were many things that I needed but couldn't use as Mint's repositories were ancient and lacked them (and I didn't know about Flatpak at the time), so I tried switching to other distros with newer repositories... and kept running into all sort of bizarre, nonsensical issues nobody else had (such as atrocious gaming performance, archives not working, and other things I don't remember), and my requests for help were often either ignored or responded harshly, so I ended up giving up and returning to Windows...

...Uh, that didn't last more than 6 months because for some reason Windows 10 hates me and started giving me even worse issues. I managed to find a nicer and more forgiving community of Linux users who could help, so I mustered the courage to try again. And thankfully, with my prior experience, I managed to make it stick this time by finally resolving some of the bizarre issues I had - it got to the point that I sometimes forget I'm using Linux, lol. I'm very glad I could contribute to the 4%.

As always, such statistics should be treated with caution.

What methodology is used to calculate Statcounter Global Stats?

Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally.

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology

It is assumed that there are more than one billion websites worldwide. It is therefore not exactly unlikely that a Linux user will not access any of these 1.5 million websites.

Furthermore, it is quite common for Linux users to use tools such as Pi-Hole that simply block such statistics scripts. This means that these users would not be counted even if they accessed one of these 1.5 million websites. For my part, I also use computers with Linux that I don't use to access websites. Some of these computers don't even have access to the Internet. They are therefore not counted either.

Finally, let's come to the most important point. Percentage values say not much if you don't know the actual number of users behind them. Let's assume, for example, that 3.5 per cent Linux users were detected in December and only 3 per cent in January. However, if the total number of users was higher in January, it is therefore possible that more users were detected in January.

Source

Fucking based.