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Recently, the NetMarketShare website and the Steam Hardware Survey showed the Linux share was rising but it appears both have now calmed down.

For NetMarketShare, something pretty big happened over the last few months. Back in March the Linux share they recorded was only 1.36%, and then it quickly rocketed upwards to 3.61% in June after multiple months of rising. The kind of rise you can't easily just write-off since it continued happening. No one really knows what caused it, possibly a ton more people working from home and not attached to their corporate Windows workstation. Now though, it seems to be levelling out as July's figure now shows it as 3.57%. Considering more people are being told to go back to work, perhaps it was as a result of COVID19. Across this whole time though, it's worth noting StatCounter which also tracks it has hardly moved much during it. So you may want to press X to doubt on it.

It's a tough thing to truly measure though, considering they all tend to rely on visitors browsing a specific set of included websites. They capture things like your browser string which can often be faked, but they're still about the best we have for an overall picture of any possible trends. One thing is for certain though: not a lot has changed overall.

As for the Steam Hardware Survey, it rose from 0.83% back in February up to 0.91% in May but it also has been slowly trickling down with it now sitting at 0.86% as of July's numbers. At least when looking over the past ~2 years, it's still trending upwards slightly overall. We're tracking it on our dedicated Steam Tracker page here, in case you haven't seen that before. We also recently added the ability to filter to specific year/months on our Steam Tracker, to allow for fine-tuning and adding more historic data.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Editorial, Misc
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Eike Aug 3, 2020
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Quite a healthy number!
3zekiel Aug 3, 2020
It's very strange, when I looked at netmarketshare on saturday, it was well above 4.5% and MacOS had a big drop, was there some kind of bug they fixed manually?
lordgault Aug 3, 2020
China wants to stop using Windows and they are working on a Deepin-based GNU/Linux system.The company created for this purpose is UNIONTECH and the operating system has been named UOS (based on Deepin). In addition, this company is working on the necessary software to replace the Windows software. Can you imagine what will happen when China leaves Windows and adopts UOS?
Liam Dawe Aug 3, 2020
Quoting: 3zekielIt's very strange, when I looked at netmarketshare on saturday, it was well above 4.5% and MacOS had a big drop, was there some kind of bug they fixed manually?
Not sure but the Steam Survey sometimes does it too, I assume some sort of background processing still going on and it eventually sorts itself out.
3zekiel Aug 3, 2020
Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: 3zekielIt's very strange, when I looked at netmarketshare on saturday, it was well above 4.5% and MacOS had a big drop, was there some kind of bug they fixed manually?
Not sure but the Steam Survey sometimes does it too, I assume some sort of background processing still going on and it eventually sorts itself out.

Gave me false hope next time I'll wait a few days before looking at the stats.

That being said, I did see quite a bit of momentum around me. Most of my colleagues not only finished switching to Linux for work, but also began to experience on their home machines.
At least here in France, quite a few of the mainstream tech medias are now regularly talking about proton/lutris & co (link just yesterday this one). There's clearly something happening since the last few months on that side.
Liam Dawe Aug 3, 2020
Quoting: 3zekielquite a few of the mainstream tech medias are now regularly talking about proton/lutris & co
Well, hopefully a few of their readers will continue to point out GOL is here and covers Linux all the time ;)
WorMzy Aug 3, 2020
Quoting: lordgaultChina wants to stop using Windows and they are working on a Deepin-based GNU/Linux system.The company created for this purpose is UNIONTECH and the operating system has been named UOS (based on Deepin). In addition, this company is working on the necessary software to replace the Windows software. Can you imagine what will happen when China leaves Windows and adopts UOS?

Don't forget there's likely to be a change in regime (and therefore policy) in one of the world's biggest bully states in the next few months, so I wouldn't be surprised if selling things to one of the world's biggest economies becomes the "in thing" again. I can see the latter getting a sweetheart deal to keep MS' market share up, although it'll be interesting to see if the damage has been done and this drive to nationally produced products stays strong.
3zekiel Aug 3, 2020
Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: 3zekielquite a few of the mainstream tech medias are now regularly talking about proton/lutris & co
Well, hopefully a few of their readers will continue to point out GOL is here and covers Linux all the time ;)

Haha yes, although not sure how many of their readers can read English, French people tend to not be so good at learning languages (Or more likely at teaching them). Has to do with thinking our country is the only one in the world I guess. If you want to really conquer that market guess you'll have to translate :p
Dunc Aug 3, 2020
Quoting: WorMzyDon't forget there's likely to be a change in regime (and therefore policy) in one of the world's biggest bully states in the next few months, so I wouldn't be surprised if selling things to one of the world's biggest economies becomes the "in thing" again. I can see the latter getting a sweetheart deal to keep MS' market share up, although it'll be interesting to see if the damage has been done and this drive to nationally produced products stays strong.
I would be very surprised if it does, regardless of US policy. “Made in China” has become a toxic brand, and not just because of the virus.

https://bitterwinter.org/
https://hongkongfp.com/
Alm888 Aug 3, 2020
X

Seriously though, this hardly matters. So far we did not see many core underlying shifts in OS distribution channels, with only one company (I forgot which one, Dell or Lenovo) starting to optionally provide pre-installed Linux on some notebooks. The rest are just "recommending" (yeah, we know of the deal they made to get certification/cheap licenses) "Windows™ 10™". ;)
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