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.
I wonder how many are Steam Deck users. It’s brought Linux to a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have tried it.
The stats come from webpages, something a Steam Deck is unlikely to ever see, or at least not very often, so I would say it has almost nothing to do with Steam Deck, other than maybe exposing more people to Linux.
I’ve seen several people use a Steam Deck + a dock as their desktop PC. It’s not much different from using a mini PC.
at least not very often
The people you’ve seen are likely enthusiasts. A small minority of the millions of users. The vast majority probably never leaves game mode.
Agreed, also wonder how many people it proves that Linux is now perfectly valid for a gaming pc
Linux is now perfectly valid for a gaming pc
And all it took was a corporation throwing millions of dollars and thousands of developer hours at it.
Well, on top of the tens of thousands of volunteer developer hours put in to stuff like wine that they built upon.
And one dude that really wanted to play Nier Automata on Linux.
You make it seem like Microsoft didn’t do everything they could to kill Linux and Mac.
Like literally investing in $150 million in Apple in 1997 and porting Office to MacOS to get in front of a possible antitrust trial ahead of Jobs’ return?
I’m not an MS fanboi, but at least get your facts right if you’re going to make such a claim.
Okay look at the history. Look at the Macworld introduction to Microsoft Office. The Apple community wasn’t happy about it. Microsoft made a lot of money and kept themselves from being a monopoly. You think they did that out of the kindness of their hearts?
I bet if we talk about Linux, you’re going to bring up that Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation and completely ignoring their anti competitive practices before that.
I’m merely pointing out that your thesis – “You make it seem like Microsoft didn’t do everything they could to kill Linux and Mac.” – is categorically false. Of course no sane business decision in the current economic climate is altruistic, but this is scarcely news.
The word “could” can refer to anytime in history.
Just because someone tried to murder someone and did everything they could do to make the murder happen, doesn’t mean they didn’t just because they got caught trying to do so, changed their mind so they wouldn’t get caught, and gave the person, that they tried to murder, money.
Just because Microsoft did everything they could to kill Linux and Mac, doesn’t mean they didn’t just because an antitrust case was building up, changed their business practices, and invested money in Apple.
Also it’s no thesis. In 2001, Microsoft settled with the DOJ and changed their business practices.
Give a Man Code, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Code, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime
Yup, there’s enough games supported that one could completely ignore windows.
Also wonder how much impact Windows 11 requirements factored in, since the TPU and processor requirements basically said a measurable fraction of functional systems were trash otherwise.
Do you mean the TPM? Any system made in the last 7-8 years should have a TPM 2.0 chip and I suspect people won’t want to run Windows 11 on anything older than that (since newer versions of Windows tend to be pretty slow on old systems)
Well, my first generation Ryzen didn’t make the cut, and it was doing just fine
That’s definitely been a catalyzing factor for me. I had fiddled around with Linux and had been pretty ‘meh’ about Windows for years, but I was just coasting along the path of least resistance. Them telling me that I could no longer use my perfectly functional computer for Windows was the ‘last straw’ that finally what made me begin to take action and get ready to say goodbye to Windows.
If you think about it, Microsoft’s timing for this is really perfect. Wait until Linux is very viable for desktop use including gaming then tell vast numbers of your customers that they need to ditch a fully working computer in order to keep using Windows. I expect that this figure will probably double by the end of the year. There’s another article by ZDNet now that says that the share is more like 6% and rapidly accelerating. I’ll post it on the main Linux community if hasn’t already been posted there.
As of two days ago we are official a Microsoft Windows free household (except when my wife is WFH).
The holdout was our gaming PC but I put Bazzite on it because who wants to use Windows 11?
I game on Debian stable.
I only play 1 game though, so maybe I’m an edge case.
I saw somewhere that Bazzite was good for purpose built gaming rigs. I have yet to try it out though. My gut have to change it if I don’t like how it runs.
I hear a lot of people using Nobara, but I hate RPM based distros.
Nobara at home, Ubuntu on the server that I may switch to Fedora if I some how stop being lazy, and the Steam Deck in the office for slow days.
I just can’t with Ubuntu. The Amazon ad thing just left a bad taste in my mouth.
It’s a factor, but I really just don’t like snaps and the feel of GNOME. I got more familiar with Fedora as Nobara is a spinoff, so I just need a weekend to burn.
Smashes.
Long may it continue!!
Good work Linux devs! May y’all be forever remembered and cherished!
I’m confused, did it SMASH or did it crawl?
It SLAMMED
this linux fucks
If I’m following the article right, it crawled from 2013 to 2021, and smashed at some point between February and June 2025.
What I want to know is, with Linux increasing in market share, does that mean we’ll need to start worrying about viruses on Linux now?
You should always be worried about viruses on all your devices. Assuming your OS won’t get a virus because it’s obscure is literally security by obscurity, which should never be your plan A.
does that mean we’ll need to start worrying about viruses on Linux now?
- Linux is still a very small marketshare on workstations.
- Pretty much every server runs Linux and is probably much more likely to be attacked than a workstation.
- Lots of very profitable companies that run these servers need high security, so they will invest as much as is strictly necessary.
- Everything is open source and auditable by anyone.
As much as I’m pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft and anti-Apple, I have to say that I don’t think comparing desktop use to server use is appropriate when it comes to security. I don’t think server use of any OS translates to desktop use in terms of security at all. If nothing else, the end user is a major difference between the two. End users download, install, run, and interact with all kinds of random software, websites, etc. without thinking and this is the main source of desktop malware. The same is not the case for servers.
It ate Bill Gate’s lunch!
It clawed too 💅
Removed by mod
