Rather interesting to see the growth of Linux, at least as far as North America is concerned. The decline of Windows is happening almost exponentially. And that’s a good thing, IMHO.
It looks like people might be experimenting with Linux during their summer break, perhaps hoping to suss out whether or not it will fit before returning to classes.
"five drivers for people switching from Windows to Linux. These were: Microsoft’s shift from Windows as a product to Microsoft 365 and cloud services; the increased viability of gaming via Steam and Proton; drastically improved ease of use in mainstream distros; broader hardware support; and rising concern about privacy and data control…
…Perhaps the most important reason, though, is one that Ed Bott, ZDNET resident Windows expert, has recently observed: “Windows has become increasingly annoying, not by accident but by design, with monetization as the end goal.”
let that last part sink in…
Good point!
I think people are slowly finding out that there is NO NEED to rely on Microsoft for anything. There are plenty of beginner-friendly Linux distros available to get one started on the journey into FOSS. Hopefully this trend continues.
Everything (well almost) is done in a browser, so it doesn’t matter which OS you use (as long as it isn’t trying to steal your soul).
Everyone I have converted to Linux was a bit reticent at first, but after a few hours…
As long as people can look at their Faceberk, browse the web the underlying software is irrelevant 
Nah. That is the stereotypical person who turns on the PC or laptop for JUST browsing, YouTube, and social media. Most people I know do many other things… video editing, image creation/editing, music creation, podcasting, LOTS of writing. Those people need to find alternatives to the “Windows” apps their used to. Those are the ones that matter in the grand scheme of things. At least IMHO.
I was talking of the “unwashed” masses 
not the power user.
I think there are far more people into video editing, image creation/editing, music creation, podcasting, and LOTS of writing than you think. Sure, the “unwashed” masses are part of the equation, but not as high as you might think.
People are just realizing what we already knew for years.
That really good news and hopefully they will stay. What would you guys think is the critical mass to start getting attention of corpos so they start investing in linux dev for the software and drivers ?
And you thought the AUR attacks were bad. 10% increase in the market is also in increase in bad actors.
Sadly, true. It never was that “Linux is immune to malware or viruses.” It was always because nobody was going to create malware/virus to infect an OS virtually nobody uses.
Windows (and Mac OS) had malware/virus issues because everyone uses/used them. The more the Linux market share rises, the more likely some knuckledragger is going to create something to infect Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, openSUSE, etc…
And as AI will make it easier for the wankers (oh I love being a Brit) to produce malware 
We are somewhat protected here by the fact that most software you might need are packaged in some way for the distros we used by either the maintainers of the distro or the developer. It’s kind of why the AUR way of shipping software isn’t always the best way to ship software to end users because yes, transparency is highly beneficial, but alongside other measures of quality insurance like having standardized rules for how to do things and standards that are enforced and individuals who volunteer or are paid in some way to triage garbage and delete or ban offending packages or simply just limiting who can upload and/or maintain packages.
i wouldnt be too confident that we are at +10% US marketshare.
Steam as far as i am aware still indicates ~4% GLOBAL marketshare, yes not everyone installs/uses steam but still.
I think these websites are not only counting human users, but also AI visiting websites for reference, and it counts it as linux because servers usually run linux
Agreed. There’s no way that in one year’s time, Linux users doubled.
Yeah, I agree with you. Such market share statistics aren’t impossible to fake and, as far as I know, are quite unreliable.
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