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.
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
Yup, there’s enough games supported that one could completely ignore windows.
And all it took was a corporation throwing millions of dollars and thousands of developer hours at it.
Give a Man Code, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Code, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime
And one dude that really wanted to play Nier Automata on Linux.
Well, on top of the tens of thousands of volunteer developer hours put in to stuff like wine that they built upon.
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.
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.
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.