According to one source Linux hits over 6% desktop user share

By Liam Dawe - 21 Jul 2025 at 8:25 am UTC

Last updated: 21 Jul 2025 at 1:32 pm UTC

Depending on where you look, Linux on the desktop has somewhere between 4-6% user share on the desktop. Showing it's growing slowly but steadily overall.

A lot of people like to look at Statcounter, which we've covered here at GamingOnLinux quite a few times which currently showings Linux on the desktop at about 4.1% for June 2025 globally. However, there's another pretty big source of data we can use for checking on this – the US government.

Using the US government public data, we can see that over the last 30 days the Linux user share hit an all-time high there at 6.1%. Pretty healthy looking percentage there, and if we filter it to the current calendar year overall it's at 5.8%. That's a surprisingly high number, given their data mentions how they've had "1.48 billion sessions in the last 30 days" to pull the data from.

Going back to Statcounter and filtering to the US, it's also showing an all-time high for Linux at 5.1% too. And then there's our Steam Tracker, showing Linux for gaming has been steadily trending upwards too.

We've all seen the running joke of the "Year of the Linux desktop", and while most celebrations on it are rather premature, we've truly over the last year or two seen quite a seismic shift in how people have been looking at Linux. Not just from data points like these, but the wider consensus when you look at how even bigger influencers have been pouring more time into covering Linux too (and their videos doing well). Look at PewDiePie with 110M subscribers telling people to now install Linux, or how about JayzTwoCents too and various others.

Seems like there's never been a better time to try out Linux on the desktop.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Editorial, Misc

22 Likes

About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
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11 comments

Corben a day ago

I love JayzTwoCents reason, why he has never touched a Linux topic in his life:

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxia5tx5gdqh07gMJ5CcVTvaHMeApUj3BV

emoji

0 Likes

Liam Dawe a day ago

Admin

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He's not wrong, distro wars long plagued Linux communities in the past.

6 Likes

syylk a day ago

Distro wars and that certain je-ne-sais-quoi toxicity of many uber-nerd environments, where elitism and holier-than-thou reign supreme.

I'm glad that a certain degree of pragmatism (e.g. W10's October deadline) is finally being embraced in our beloved ecosystem.

5 Likes

hardpenguin a day ago

Supporter

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Maybe at 10% mainstream game publishers will finally stop ignoring us... 😩

1 Likes

pb a day ago

What is fascinating about the analytics.usa.gov data is that Linux is 6.1% out of all systems *including mobile*.
Windows 32.5%
iOS 32.4%
Android 16.5%
Macintosh 11.7%
Linux 6.1%
Chrome OS 0.8%
Other < 0.1%

And the devices are:
desktop 51.2%
mobile 47.2%
tablet 1.2%
Smart TV 0.3%

so basically on desktop Linux is 11,9% emoji

12 Likes

eggrole a day ago

Hot take: as linux is adopted and the mainstream crowd shows up, you won't see improvements as many people predict. My bet is that if/when the non-technical users outnumber the technical users linux will end up following the same enshitification path we've seen time and time again.

Further, the more popular linux becomes the more ripe for corpo takeover it also becomes. If you look at the corps already paying for linux development it is quite shocking.

It won't happen overnight, but I'd wager that in 10 years linux will be more adopted and shittier.

2 Likes

pb a day ago

@eggrole I don't get these concerns. We already have corporate-backed distros: Red Hat for enterprise, Ubuntu for consumers, SteamOS for gaming - and for everything else we have everything else. Linux is just a kernel and you can wrap it in whatever you want. In your vision, will Ubuntu become even more shitty, or will Arch become more like Ubuntu? With the first one I might agree, with the latter - not a chance.

That said, I have a completely different and yet eerily similar vision of the future - Windows will one day migrate to the Linux kernel and then we will finally "be there", for better or for worse.

8 Likes

Salvatos a day ago

My only real concern is with who controls the kernel. Beyond that, we can always fork away from corporate takeovers. (Technically we can fork the kernel too, but the pool of potential, skilled maintainers shrinks dramatically at that level.) Just look at Google's Android and how many other mobile OSes have emerged to provide alternatives true to libre values.

3 Likes

elmapul 23 hours ago

he is not wrong, many things can go wrong.
for example locked bootloaders like some android devices, proprietary only drivers for many devices, distros with some proprietary software to differentiate thenselves (steamOS main interface is the steam client not the desktop enviroment, i can see some proprietary DE emerging in the future as well from other vendors), and the worst part: so long its good enough for most people, they wont bother to try to have even more freedom.

linux fragmentation is already an issue, we have tons of distros and the easier way to make sure an game will work on all of then now and in the future is actually targeting windows and trying to run the game on wine, most distros care about ensuring wine work "flawless" on their distro because its a very important application (and even then flawless might not be so flawless, it may just mean we havent tested enough to find the issues)
now imagine with either 1 big distro (most likely android, google is killing chromeOS, merging it code to the desktop mode of android, android will be their desktop OS) or a few big ones with proprietary crap being the ones used by 90% of the users or more, we will have tons of apps that wont work on any free (libre) distro, and if we want to play anything recent or have a descente quality of life, we will have to use then.

0 Likes

Purple Library Guy 17 hours ago

There are key benefits if Linux goes mainstream. Hardware (and the software attached to hardware, so basically complete control over specialized complicated hardware), anti-cheat, and software. Only the last of those is very mixed as blessings go: On the up side, all the software that we're missing, like Adobe stuff, will run on Linux. On the down side, software like Adobe stuff will run on Linux, and be just as annoying and subscriptiony and all as they are on Windows . . .

I don't think it will make a huge difference to the desktop experience otherwise.

1 Likes

Shmerl 14 hours ago

May be Lenovo selling more laptops with Linux preinstalled is having an effect.

1 Likes

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