> Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic
> Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.
I think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?
It’s hard to trust StatCounter, or anyone presenting web traffic stats at this point, after they showed a large spike in Windows 7 users for a few months, before it suddenly disappeared. (Even better: the blogs reporting on it with a made-up conclusion that users were revolting against Windows 11.) Bots want to act like humans, they run client-side JS, and they use residential proxies.
My understanding is that apple officially changed from OS X to macOS in 2020 with the launch of macOS 11, even though the branding changed a few years earlier.
We should really be able to downvote submissions... This analysis is clearly factually inaccurate. I am curious to know why OS X and macOS are showing up separately though
The thing is, there is an ongoing linux boom (the percentage doubled which means linux user base has effectively doubled too). But god help us in this AI-slop phase.
I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.
I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.
I wasn't forced to use anything. This was in the mid-2010s when the first ARM Chromebook came out; I bought one out of curiosity. But I learned about it at work.
Independent of that: some of the modern higher end Chromebooks can be quite nice, and you can (A) run general Linux on them, and (B) VS Code dev tunnel in the browser runs on them just as well as on any other laptop.
yeah i forgot about their linux capabilities they got. In my mind they didn't seem a lot different than simple android tablets with a keyboard but indeed if the hardware isn't bad it could be valid option now I think about it.
I have seen several because family members have owned them. They are nondescript black rectangles that are owned by cheap people and kids. There is no reason for you to notice them in particular and it's useful to remember our perception isn't a representative sample of anything.
The problem is, we have no way of knowing if our personal experiences are actually representative of everyone else's experience. I have 2 Chromebooks but I'm a computer nerd so I know I'm not your average user, but going off 2025 shipment data, it's something like 223 million Windows laptops to 25 million Mac's and 22 million Chromebooks.
Yes, the dam has been broken. Major linux distibutions are getting polished for many decades already and they are totally ready for the mainstream adoption. No amount of marketing will be able to reverse this trend. Considering that Big Tech is spending all their earned money (and even more by borrowing from investors) on AI, nobody will be even trying.
It's obvious that Microsoft doesn't even want to be in the consumer desktop OS market anymore, they'd rather pivot to being pure B2B like IBM did. Likewise, it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification and infantilization of their OS until it will eventually be useless for anything except developing iOS apps. So neither major player will bother spending a marketing budget to reverse this trend; they'd rather not play the game at all. On the flipside, fewer and fewer people will have traditional desktops in the first place; owning only a phone and no PC at all is the new normal.
What have they iOSed about macOS? The latest versions haven’t lost any features as far as I’m aware. But Windows lost the ability to even pin the task bar to the side of the window in Windows 11… and the ability to stop auto updates.
If anything, iOS is getting more Mac-like, especially the iPad version. It has multi windowing and a window manager now.
Everything. The whole OS has been getting locked down more with each release. More harassment about Apple accounts, harder to run non signed apps, the OS gets less and less configurable. I mean when Launchpad was released, it was clearly and iOS style interface to find your apps. Maybe you aren't old enough to remember when you could literally do anything you wanted with the OS and make it work for you.
I think people don't know what OSX was like, when it was a glorious Unix system that did what you wanted. It let you install extensions and run unsigned code. Now its just a boring locked down iOS that has a windowing interface.
I'd pick major Linux Desktop Environments (KDE or GNOME for instance) over macOS and Windows any day of the week. I feel 3-4x more productive on Linux.
With LLMs, I've been creating little desktop apps to fill the odd gaps. For example, yesterday, I made a little offline dictation app for KDE.
Flagging since statcounter's data is just so unreliable that discussing it is like discussing last week's lottery numbers.
(Just a couple of weeks ago there was an equally implausible frontpage post showing the Firefox had more than doubled in use in the US, to 12%, but only in the US, not in any other country. My money is on scraper bots identifying as Linux-Firefox, run from US IPs to minimize the impact of geo-blocking. But when Statcounter doesn't explain their methodology and doesn't care about the quality of their data, we'll never know.)
Depending on how this data is being collected, a factor could be the rise of search / fetch / scrape capabilities, added in lots of places. Agentic this, google killer that, and so on. The easiest way to parse web content nowadays is to load up a browser and drive that. And thats easier to do with linux / mac distros, both at scale (i.e. datacenter based solutions) and at home.
As a bit of a side note, this year I started noticing captchas / cf verify speed bumps while browsing from the same residential ISP with the same mac laptop. I never used to get them. Maybe has to do with all that "buy a mac mini" craze that happened a while ago.
If you increase the date range to 12 months, you see that (with "likely human"), linux usage jumped from 3-4% to 5%-6% in the last 1.5 months. Something changed.
ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?
You have to buy a Chromebook to run ChromeOS, right? You can install Linux on your PC as dual boot. The investment is far smaller. However you have to buy a Mac to run MacOS so maybe that means that a Chromebook is not a very compelling machine to buy, or has a limited use case.
I don't believe this for a moment. I have seen many more Chromebook users than desktop Linux users. Not individuals, but a lot of schools use Chromebooks where I am. They are probably not well-tallied in the results, because they are often used to do some work in Google Docs/Sheets, plus some education-specific sites and less browsing on the general web.
I guess my point is that it is nearly impossible to get reliable counts from user agent statistics, etc. (lots of crawlers, that identify as a regular desktop as well etc.). The best way would probably to do real-world surveys among random population samples. But that costs money/time.
If you increase the date range to 12 months you can see that ChromeOS is several times larger than Linux but recently there must have been an update so ChromeOS is now incorrectly detected as Linux.
Is my understanding of that graph right? if the periodic change is the weekends, that means the total share percentage of requests from Windows and macOS users drops, while Linux increases in share percentage. Linux traffic is stable regardless of weekday/weekend cycles compared to Windows and macOS? Otherwise if there was equal drop in Linux, then the share percentage would be a smoother line. Is that right?
You can't tell from this graph alone the extent to which the change in share during weekends is due to decreased use of the more popular operating systems or due to increased use of Linux.
6%-14% (throughout the day, for some reason it's most popular late at night, Steam Box and other gamers, maybe?) is still the largest it's ever been, though, and it's presumably not getting smaller.
It's about the same as Firefox share, which is getting smaller.
I don't think these numbers are correct, but desktop Linux is no doubt having its year now. So many big YouTube content creators are covering Linux content and switching to Linux specifically, since the major obstacle to switching (gaming) has now been solved. Add to that the push effect from the constant enshittification of Windows.
Imagine first thinking that humans are using Linux on the Desktop after seeing this (without specifying which distro) and then realizing that it is bots which are the "desktop users" because they are using Chrome to scrape websites since forever.
Any reason to think that bots are linux and not windows/macos. If you look at crawling resellers, you can simulate mac/windows/ios/android. Why would crawlers prefer linux over those?
I think the main split between hardcore "GNU/Linux" guys and the general tech world is about principle vs pragmatism.
The hardcore crowd see free software as a right that needs to be fought for, whereas others see open source as nothing more than a way to modify or improve software without requiring explicit support from the publishers.
And there are many, many parts of Linux that make the software "freer" but worse.
For some reason the AI overview model likes to pick up stuff from Reddit a lot. I guess, once you get to more niche topics, it's easier to find some stuff on Reddit because Google has stopped properly indexing/ranking the small web.
Very often, AI overview states something as a fact (Consensus on Reddit would be a lot better, because it at least indicates that it is bullshitting using Reddit), but when you click on the sources, it's extracted from what a random Redditor says without any proof whatsoever.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
It's also showing Linux usage exploding in English speaking regions.
reply