Right… No one is sure why… I am sure that it has nothing to do with being force fed AI and being surveiled by your own computer.
I switched a year or so ago. There was only so much bullshit from MS that i could stomach.
I read on here a couple of days ago that 6% was human traffic and 4% was bots.
I believe what you read was from a Microsoft blog which was variously discounted as being (a) a biased source and (b) based on bad processes for generating counter data.
Yep its not definitive. The only real data from that article was from cloudflare which showed some differing numbers. But thats all. I personally think we will know more once we have all the other trackers out there pull independent numbers.
Articles coming out seem to be what people “feel” like it is. Which isnt real data haha. All we can definitively say is that Linux usage is up from multiple trackers (stat counter/Cloudflare/Steam/etc…) but time will tell how much.
It’s a big jump, for sure. There’s something going on, I just don’t trust any explanation MS gives for it.
On track for World Domination™
my ublock blocks that page
It’s AI. The source doesn’t track users but website traffic. It’s Linux-based servers trafficking AI usage.
Because everything else is enshittifying at an increasing rate. News at 10.
Nah, seriously, I remember a time when Macs were considered ultra-reliable (“it just works”), and now when I look at those of my team developing on Macs… jfc it’s a Soulslike level of hell.
I dunno. I have mixture of Windows, Linux and Mac, and the M chip macs are a fucking beast. Stable, stupid fast, silent, and cool (as in temperature).
I am transitioning all remaining Windows workstations to Proxmox VE based VDIs, but for the people that need a total solution on the road and offline, the mac is hard to beat. Win11 ARM as a VM on Apple silicone runs faster, with less power draw and with significantly less heat than the original installnon raw metal. I’m not sure what dev tools your shop is using for the Macs, but we have had no issues.
StatCounter itself has flagged the possibility that some of the new Linux activity could be bot-related, including traffic generated by AI agents and other automated workloads, which would make the jump appear much larger than a shift driven entirely by human users.
Oh, it’s because of AI alright. Because Windows users are tired of it being shoved down their f***ing throats.
(I’m just being sarcastic for the fun of it…)
Definitely a mix of both. I estimate bot pollution is likely growing much faster than natural Linux desktop adoption, though. Simply because LLM based bots are appearing everywhere. I wouldn‘t be surprised if Linux Desktop breaks the 25% mark soon just because of bots.
I do buy the argument that the majority of the shift is due to AI bots / agents. Just looking at the robots.txt I had to implement just to try to keep the majority of bots off my websites is insane (literally 160+ lines of user agents).
But there are some other factors, such as the seemingly steady migration of users from Windows to Linux. I don’t buy the Valve hardware argument as much since the majority of those will be used for gaming on Steam, and not likely to be seen by StatCounter or Cloudflare.
Those are just the bots kind enough to specify a real user agent too 🥲
no one? NOBODY could have seen this coming?
People have been claiming that the current year is the “year of the Linux desktop” because of some improvement to Linux usability or action Microsoft took to offend people for decades. The claim has not come true by any reasonable metric for just as long.
10.61% in June 2026, up from 3.56% in May
Tripling in ONE MONTH.
Yeah, I’m sorry everyone. As much as all of us love Linux and (rightfully) hate Microslop, that’s a jump that simply cannot be explained just by human users.
Data from Cloudflare Radar appears to support that explanation. Cloudflare reportedly recorded a similar rise in Linux traffic, but the spike largely disappeared when its data was filtered to include only traffic identified as human. The comparison is not a direct match for StatCounter’s methodology, but it provides a strong indication that bots and automated systems are responsible for much of the sudden increase.
Thing is, “Cloudflare identified this as a normal browser used by a human” doesn’t mean it actually is a normal browser with a human in the driver’s seat. There are going to be both false positives and false negatives (a browser puppeted by Selenium is still a human-usable browser, after all, and could even be taken over by a human in mid-session; by contrast, a browser whose settings have been chosen by a privacy advocate may make some expected indicators unavailable). So it’s hard to make any useful inferences.
Partially sarcastic, but I did convince 3 people to switch to Linux this year
“bUt nO oNe’S sUrE wHy”
Meanwhile at Microsoft:
“Stop using Windows 10. We lied and made Windows 11. It’s all AI bullshit that we will Cortana in 2 years. Please scan your face and taint to login.”
Microsoft FEELS and ACTS like they have a monopoly.
They do not have a monopoly.
People can use Linux. So they are using Linux. Now up to 10% from 5% at the end of last year.
If Microslop doesn’t start making business decisions based in actual reality, then Linux user share is going to hit 20-30% of NA by early next year at the current growth rate.
I think MS doesn’t care about home users anymore. Azure, Office, Enterprise setups etc. are more profitable. Server core licensing alone is ridiculous; you can license whole departments of personal machines with the price of a datacenter license.
Enterprise is ditching windows overseas and once enough of them do, windows is no longer the common ground buisness need to do anything. It’s an expensive outlier.
Either way, we will see after this month if this is a trend or something of a statistical anomaly.
Theres a lot of articles claiming this and that. The only thing we can definitively say is Linux usage seems up or at least browsers are reporting more Linux across the board. Be careful of people who are saying “its all AI” or “its all algorithms” etc…as its just one month.
It was bots.
It’s gotta be bots. 10% of desktop traffic?
https://www.planksip.org/10-of-the-population-a-snapshot-of-modern-life-and-experiences/
I’m willing to be most people know somebody that is in that list, and most people don’t know somebody who uses linux. That being said, I bet linux usage is not as outward expressing as a lot of those things. Like, you can tell people own cats because you see them on the porch or in the window, but you can’t glance at most linux users’ houses and know that somebody there uses linux.
Old PCs with Linux, Openclaw, and a handful of LLM models installed, configured by ChatGPT, can be up and running in less than an hour. Once running, people can have them do all sorts of tasks.
It just means bots are taking over and we can trust even less of the web.
