According to netmarketshare Linux hit 6.91% market share last month, higher than Mac

I do not think that what we see is due to an increased proportion of Chrome OS users. The Chrome OS user agent string will be "CrOS". Therefore, Chrome OS is more likely to be found in the "other" category than being grouped as Linux.

This has happened for a second month in a row, and while NetMarketShare did tweak down the number after release both times (actually also the first time on release the number was higher) they still kept a high number after QA review. There is no need to stay pessimistic of overly cautious, this is real. My bet is that it comes from governements agencies and companies in Russia and China that have all the reasons not to use Windows anymore, it just make sense, too bad we don't have acccess to market share by countries which would allow us to check that.

Also still a lot of computer on the world are running Windows XP, and recent vulnerabilies on that system showed to people running those system that they have to act, and choosing Linux over paying a fortune for Windows 10 which is probably not going to run on the old computers where XP was running does make a lot of sense.


Last edited by Nyamiou on 1 October 2017 at 10:59 pm UTC

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Uramekus"This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."

well , yeah, we have our response rn with this.

Hah, that wasn't there when I first looked at it. I'm guessing they've had to put that up, due to how different it is. I did say it was suspicious!

Edit: This is now clearly noted at the top of the article, to prevent confusion.

Hey Liam, just pointing out that the disclaimer has been there with data dating back to may. I would take all of these results since then with a giant grain of salt.

Quoting: Jmsnz

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Uramekus"This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."

well , yeah, we have our response rn with this.

Hah, that wasn't there when I first looked at it. I'm guessing they've had to put that up, due to how different it is. I did say it was suspicious!

Edit: This is now clearly noted at the top of the article, to prevent confusion.

Hey Liam, just pointing out that the disclaimer has been there with data dating back to may. I would take all of these results since then with a giant grain of salt.

As originally mentioned in the article, I did say people should take it with a large bag of suspicion :)

As for the disclaimer, it has not been there since May.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Xpander

Quoting: Guesti got my take on this but man this awesome news.and you know what i don't care if i waste a champagne bottle time to celebrate because something big is happening. View video on youtube.com

a bit overly optimistic video :) but one can always dream.

I think there has to be some sort of error in the data.. lets say that 3% as it was before was 20 million people (it was probably more though). Now it should be 20 million people more just out of nowhere... haven't heard any news that some governments switched to linux fulltime. Maybe some African countries got into internet the first time? i still doubt it would be that huge gain though.

it has been adjusted to 4.56% so obviously someone goofed on the website.

And now back up to 4.83% :P

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Jmsnz

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Uramekus"This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."

well , yeah, we have our response rn with this.

Hah, that wasn't there when I first looked at it. I'm guessing they've had to put that up, due to how different it is. I did say it was suspicious!

Edit: This is now clearly noted at the top of the article, to prevent confusion.

Hey Liam, just pointing out that the disclaimer has been there with data dating back to may. I would take all of these results since then with a giant grain of salt.

As originally mentioned in the article, I did say people should take it with a large bag of suspicion :)

As for the disclaimer, it has not been there since May.

You can look back through the previous months data. Give it a try. It shows up until you go back quite a few months.

china has been wanting to get rid of Microsoft for a number of years now, but of course their are pirated copies of windows going around everywhere there. but now with ChromeOS, Android and various distributions of Linux like Kylin and Deepin (and the untold variations within China, that we don't see open sourced). it's no surprise to see something start to happen with the marketshare.
But it's always good to see things in a positive direction. :)

Quoting: Jmsnz

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Uramekus"This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."

well , yeah, we have our response rn with this.

Hah, that wasn't there when I first looked at it. I'm guessing they've had to put that up, due to how different it is. I did say it was suspicious!

Edit: This is now clearly noted at the top of the article, to prevent confusion.

Hey Liam, just pointing out that the disclaimer has been there with data dating back to may. I would take all of these results since then with a giant grain of salt.

This disclaimer is just here at the beginning of the month, in a few day it will be gone. NetMarketShare is a professional company that sell this data to a lot of other companies, they already reviewed the results of last month which were already an exceptional increase for Linux and didn't found any issue with it.

Quoting: GuestA doubling in one month seems highly unlikely! Unless China suddenly made Linux mandatory, or something :p.

Maybe not China... but possibly USSR...

Recently, the US government told everyone not to use Kaspersky anti-virus because of Russian backdoors.

Maybe Russia is doing the same... after all rumors of Microsoft installing NSA backdoors in their products have been around since well before the turn of the century.

I would expect this to be happening even if there was no formal announcement. Pretty much anywhere that they do not trust the US. (which would even include US allies that want to keep secrets from the US/NSA.)

I would expect North Korea to do this, but it has been ongoing for years... they even have their own disto, Red Star OS.

While this could be happening, I still don't think that it would explain a huge spike... it takes a long time for large corporate and government agencies to roll out new software installations, and OS changes require the most time.

I know the Chinese at one point had their national Red Flag distribution, but then MS gave them chunks of source code to Windows so they'd go back to using it.