No, Linux desktop market share has not crossed 10% in North America, and Windows is not suddenly losing millions of users. 2026 is not the year of Linux, for those who care. If anything, it’s the year the internet died, because the entire spike appears to be driven by AI bots. Almost every month, we […]
  • eremophila@lemmy.zip
    0·
    3 months ago

    Humans are why we cannot have nice things. The internet was always going to get ridiculous, just like the usa was always going to prove back to the future right in the stupidest possible way.

    • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Bots: Does the author really believe these sites aren’t capable of detecting bots? I’m sure some slip through, but if not traffic were included in general, then Linux would be at a 90% share or higher. They just consume way more page traffic than a human ever could.

      Only other possibility I can think of is llms made botting for small operators more accessible. Still leads to a lot more people running linux

  • Methio@jlai.lu
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    3 months ago

    Just note how the guy starts with “only Microsoft numbers can be trusted” is biased bullshit. Pretending a company will give true numbers at all time, is a big lie. If anything they will inflate numbers and they’d try to hide the truth as much as they can because investors are watching.

    While there will be truth in bots taking a part of the traffic, the whole article is Microsoft bootlicker talk.

    Taking another random tool that seems to filter bot for results is just him trying to get a confirmation for his bias.

    Yes a 10% stat at a given time by a given measurement tool, is not equal to a true 10% userbase. Yes there are bots. Yes there are Linux and Windows zombies alike.

    Still, linux desktop is going up, with a fraction of the marketing power Windows and Apple have.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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      3 months ago

      Just note how the guy starts with “only Microsoft numbers can be trusted” is biased bullshit.

      I would argue misquoting someone to fit your argument is more a egregious example of “biased bullshit”.

      Only Microsoft or OEM partners can tell you with the highest accuracy how many people use Windows now versus five years ago.

      This is literally true. They’re not saying they WILL tell you the accurate numbers, they’re saying only they have those numbers to tell.

      • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 months ago

        I own 6 Windows Professional licenses. I am presently using two. You really think Microsoft are the ones to trust?

        Having numbers others don’t doesn’t make those numbers useful or true in every context.

    • _Nemo_@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 months ago

      Still, linux desktop is going up, with a fraction of the marketing power Windows and Apple have.

      This isn’t entirely true. Linux is getting a lot of help from Microsoft. <wink wink>

    • the_weez@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      FWIW this website is always like this, every article I’ve read from latest feels like it came from the MS PR desk.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
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        3 months ago

        I wonder why that could be, rofl!

        Surely MSFT would always be clear, transparent, and forthright with the public, ahahahaha!

  • brokenwing@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    There are thousands of organizations that rely on Microsoft for their office suite, Outlook, Teams and these companies have thousands of PCs. They can mandate what update will get pushed, restrict admin access, running monitoring tools etc… These are hard to replace.

  • SitD@lemy.lol
    0·
    3 months ago

    guys don’t tell them that this also means that windows is poop, since it’s either too bad at scaling or at tech infrastructure to even attract ai developers to the platform 😂

    • ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I’m betting that the bots are running in something like ubuntu-node docker images which could’ve been built from any OS.

      I’m also willing to bet that the survey was only ever looking at the OS reported in the User-Agent which those scrapers will change frequently.

  • nyan@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    Okay, so did they account for the bots that claim to be Windows PCs? (I’ll bet there are still some running around that identify themselves as IE 6, although those may finally no longer be the majority of all bots.)

  • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Ignoring that the default browsers on many distros are seen as bot traffic, filtering the alleged bot traffic on Linux still results in around 7% of overall traffic, up from 4ish a year ago. It also doesn’t explain the giant leaps in downloads on many distros that correlate with the spike. It’s possible some organization set up a ton of computers with openclaw and a wide variety of distros on it I guess to influence opinion 🤷‍♀️

    Also extremely biased source

    • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Various governments in Europe are switching to Linux too. Libraries in Copenhagen now use Linux.

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    it’s weird (perhaps convenient) that their explanation is “bots” but they don’t mention bot metrics from StatCounter themselves: according to StatCounter numbers, bot traffic share increased 0.37% in July 2026, while Linux Desktop grew 1.92% in the same month.