According to the research company Statcounter, Linux reached 4.03% of the global operating system market in February. Statcounter obtains desktop operating system (OS) usage statistics by tracking the code installed on more than 1.5 million websites that generate more than 5 billion page views each month.
The only adjustments that the company says it makes to this data are to remove bot activity and to adjust the preview settings in Google Chrome, reports ArsTechnica.
In February, Linux’s share of the desktop market was higher than ever. If we count ChromeOS as a Linux OS, the market share in February was 6.34%. Focusing on Linux numbers alone, the nearly 33-year-old OS has seen its market share grow by 31.3% since June 2023. Overall, there has been a big jump compared to five years ago. In February 2019, Linux was used on 1.58% of computers worldwide.
The dominance of Windows, on the other hand, mostly increased between June and February, when Microsoft’s operating system was installed on 72.17% of computers. Between June 2022 and June 2023, there was a drop (from 76.33% of the market share to 68.23%), but now the use of Windows seems to have returned to the level of early 2022.
Meanwhile, macOS’s share of the desktop market fell from 21.32% in June to 15.42% in February. However, the current market share of Apple OS is similar to that seen in January 2023 (15.33%) and February 2023 (16.26%).
