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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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https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america/#monthly-200901-202607
Cloudflare stats also seem to support peaks of 15% usage but around 9-10% on average. In the United States alone, the market share for Linux is nearly 12% now for the whole month and Cloudflare stats suggest peaks of up to 25% (!) Linux desktop usage on certain days and times.
The trendline suggests this is just the start. When will companies realize they cannot ignore Linux anymore?
Honestly, this is too good of a news to be true. There has to be some kind of error somewhere. Not used to this.
Yeah how much is ai bots or other scrapers
This was my thought, too, especially with how stable Linux traffic is relative to other OSes.
It might just mean that more people are web scraping, and that web scraping is easier/cheaper on Linux.
The Steam numbers are more interesting to me, as a measure of consumer usage, since they should mostly represent people actually using their computer.
PornHUB puts out annual usage stats, too, but idk if they include OS. (When I used Reddit, their stats would come up on dataisbeautiful frequently enough to come to mind years later—they had some interesting stats, like average visit duration and that the most Republican states were the most likely to search for gay and incest porn, but I digress.). Would bots make up a high volume of traffic for them? I imagine not, since there's little economic value in scraping it (to train LLMs, in particular — I think it would poison the training data rather dramatically!)
I suspect the data is tainted by scrapers claiming to be a Linux desktop because that doesn't have the same fingerprinting systems.
That's one of the industries Mozilla announced a while ago they'd go into.
Mozilla is getting into fingerprinting? Do you have a source or something more for me to search with?
Into providing web browsing to LLM agents as a service.