for your enjoyment
source https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200910-202511
TIL there’s a new operating system that came out less than a year ago but already captured 5% of the market, passing ChromeOS and Linux
This stat is rubbish because they’re basing it on web views, and the millions of ai scraping bots are influencing it
Interesting. But since when is iOS a desktop operating system?
The Year of the Unknown Desktop
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t. By subtracting where it is from where it isn’t, or where it isn’t from where…
You get the idea
Hmm… What’s eating Windows’ lunch? Oh “Unknown” and “Other”. Cool.
If they’re basing this off browser user agents like a third of my traffic at least is random Chinese ips and requests with Chinese language in the headers.
All of them would be flagged as unknown by the major user agent parsing libraries.
None of the sure I work with have any Chinese content or content remotely useful for Chinese people, so it’s scrapers.
From the FAQ:
Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device.
So yeah, they’re basing of browser user agents.
That’s probably Linux too
Can it be fingerprint spoofers skewing the results? In that case the data is worthless.
Most people don’t fake agent strings but the bots sure do.
The actual thing obscured by this graph is the amount of users. Most people use mobile devices now and companies are incentivized to use apps there instead of actual desk top machines.
The unknown is actually a niche OS they put on all the smart dildo and sex toys they make now. True story. ✌️
There’s desktop iOS?
See yall in 60 years
Or 25 years, people habitually underestimate exponential growth
I’m colour blind so there’s basically only three colours on this graph but what I’m assuming is showing is that windows is decreasing in popularity and apparently so is OS X. I’m assuming the other colour is Linux or Chrome but no idea which is which.
For future reference, when making graphs make them in black and white first and if they are visually distinct then you can add whatever colours you want.
They’re in order in this highlighted column:
- Windows (at the top)
- OSX
- Unknown
- Linux
- Chrome
- IOS
- Other (dotted)
Here’s a table version of this graph:
Year-Month Windows, % OS X, % Unknown, % Linux, % Chrome OS, % iOS, % Android, % Playstation, % macOS, % Other, % 2010-01 93.76 5.16 0.2 0.7 0 0 0 0.15 0 0.02 2011-01 92.02 6.56 0.07 0.74 0 0.44 0.01 0.15 0 0.02 2012-01 89.62 7.33 0.07 0.82 0 1.71 0.24 0.14 0 0.07 2013-01 90.96 7.95 0.07 0.88 0.01 0 0.12 0 0 0 2014-01 88.87 8.35 0.05 1.13 0.14 0 1.45 0 0 0 2015-01 88.19 9.1 0.91 1.46 0.33 0 0 0 0 0.01 2016-01 85.18 9.03 3.8 1.47 0.51 0 0 0 0 0.01 2017-01 84.4 11.2 2.07 1.55 0.77 0 0 0 0 0.01 2018-01 82.68 12.8 2.17 1.43 0.9 0 0 0 0 0.01 2019-01 75.47 12.33 9.41 1.61 1.17 0 0 0 0 0.01 2020-01 77.7 17.04 1.83 1.9 1.52 0 0 0 0 0 2021-01 76.26 16.91 3 1.91 1.91 0 0 0 0 0.01 2022-01 75.5 15.85 3.86 2.19 2.6 0 0 0 0 0.01 2023-01 74.14 15.33 5.27 2.91 2.35 0 0 0 0 0.01 2024-01 73 16.11 5.33 3.77 1.78 0 0 0 0 0.01 2025-01 71.9 15.02 7.43 3.72 1.92 0 0 0 0 0.01 2025-11 69.37 8.26 13.14 3.07 1.3 0 0 0 4.85 0 Unfortunately I can’t paste the whole table here because of character limit so look at it here if you want to (in Markdown format).
Edited on 12/15/2025 12:05 UTC because the link suddenly died.
Let’s see what the Steam Machine will do for Linux on desktop. 2026 will be interesting.
Between that and windows 11 forcing people to choose between buying new hardware (at currently inflated RAM prices) , remain on win10 without updates oo switching to a different OS, it really could mean the fabled “year of the Linux desktop” has finally arrived.
