Linux is quickly approaching a 4% share of the Desktop Operating System Market. Is there an explanation for the recent uptick in its use?

Six months ago we reported Linux Has Over 3% Desktop OS Share, marking a milestone in its uptake. The latest figures, again from web analytics service Statcounter shows that its share has continued to rise. Linux has stayed above 3% in every month apart from October and in the past two months its share has increased by 0.9%:

June - 3.07%
July - 3.12%August - 3.18%
September - 3.02%
October - 2.92%
November - 3.22%
December - 3.82%

This chart from Liam Dawe on his GamingOnLinux site, based on long-term Statcounter data, suggests that a Linux could quickly pass the 4% milestone: 

One might expect that the increase in Linux popularity is to do with the slow uptake of Windows 11 due to its hardware requirements. However, this isn't borne out by this Statcounter chart for Versions of Windows over the past 3 years which shows that Windows 11 uptake is now climbing steadily:

The latest Statcounter figures reveal that in December 2023 Windows had an almost 5% greater share than in June 2023, up from 68.15% then to 72.79%.

Windows increase was balanced by a fall of over 5% of OS X, down from 21.38% in June to 16.35% in December. The operating system that had seen the greatest change proportional to its size was Chrome OS, down from 4.15% to 2.42%. As Chrome OS is also Linux it could be argued that Linux overall share had in fact declined from 7.23% in June to 6.24% in December.

I prefer to think that we are seeing a real rise in the popularity of Linux for desktop computing and that it something to do with with the recent end to the shortage of Raspberry Pi chips and the fact that over 50 million Linux-based Raspberry Pis have shipped worldwide.

• Harry Fairhead is the author of Raspberry Pi IOT in C, 2nd Ed and Raspberry Pi IoT in C with Linux Drivers and co-author of Raspberry Pi IOT in Python with GPIO Zero and Raspberry Pi IoT In Python Using Linux Drivers.  

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