StatCounter’s June 2026 report shows Linux at one of its strongest recent positions, while Windows falls to 56.55%.
Okay, but StatCounter’s graph (edit: here) clearly shows that “unknown” is what’s cannibalizing most of that – and this is specifically measuring web traffic.
“Lemmy celebrates the rise of bots polluting web traffic stats because they didn’t bother to read the article beyond a misleading headline that reaffirms their biases.”
Looking at the included chart (below), I don’t think the growth in “unknown” is the primary factor of Window’s decline in market share. The chart does show, over the last two data points, that Mac OS and Linux have increased at the same time that Windows has decreased.
This is all but one data point anyway, so it’s not fair to draw a long-term conclusion based on that regardless.
Those “last two data points” are two months. For OS X, there’s some upward movement the last two months (about 3%, which isn’t a lot given it spiked late last year from 8.3% to 14.07% to 8.2% in a span of three points), while Linux is practically flatlined with a very light upward incline just the last month.
To the extent StatCounter is useful to begin with, the Linux point is functionally meaningless while the OS X increase of a few percentage points may or may not be significant; trying to divine a trend from twitches in those two points is reading noise. Look at the “unknown” line, meanwhile, and see how it begins mirroring Windows’ decline around mid–late 2025. It rose from 11.3% in September 2025 to 21.5% in June 2026. That represents actual, meaningful, lasting change.
How many Linux users use anti-fingerprinting extensions that prevent sites from seeing their OS? Wouldn’t that place them in the “unknown” category?
Hell yeah! bots polluting web traffic in a way that reaffirms my biases! 🥳
Most bots pretend to be Windows/Chrome or iOS/Safari… just sayin’.
The increase is likely bots that don’t even want to pretend to be Windows anymore.
More likely new bots are all being vibecoded and aren’t pretending to be anything because everything is stupid now.
This graph compares the desktop OS market share split between Microsoft (Windows), Apple (OS X, iOS, macOS), Google (Chrome OS, Android), and what’s being reported as “Linux”. Notably, it removes the “Other”, “Playstation”, and “Unknown” values, and re-normalises the rest to 100 (percent). Made by downloading the data from StatCounter
Windows only share of the above.
Apple, Google, Linux shares of the above.If you guys want to check the numbers and my maths here’s the spreadsheet.
Idk why everyone is always looking at statcounter. I still feel like Cloudflare probably has better data.
Whats up with android and iOS? They are counted, since they have their own colors, but shouldnt they be quite visible? I have a hard time believing there is more linux/macOS than android/iOS out there
Device type of Desktop answers that I think…
Whoopsiedoodles, my bad
It feels like macOS is somehow over represented there. Specially for a global statistic. In many countries macs are completely residual, where I live I almost know more people using linux than mac.
MacOS at 20% globally does seem to be extremely high. I would have expected something like 15 at most.
Anecdotally, I’m seeing a lot of bot traffic masquerading with a macOS user agent
Makes sense, no commercial site wants to block rich people
These are http requests, so it could be inflated from the larger proportion of software engineers using macOS, who also make significantly more requests than average, including in their usage of ai…
Maybe countries where macs are more popular throw it off. But I’d be surprised if even the US was over 20% for Mac (but not iOS).
Incoming rename to Copilot OS.
Aren’t they making a CopilotOS?
I hope they never recover.
I’m not surprised. Between privacy concerns, forced features, and Linux becoming easier to use, the barrier to switching is lower than it used to be.
I just Minted my old laptop that I last used like… 2-3 years ago to try out Ubuntu (which didn’t go well.) The progress is huge and I’m really very confused on how well things work now, even all my games on Steam?? When did this all happen?? Gonna make the switch on my main PC in few weeks.
Proton has been a huge game changer tho
Even if the numbers are a little off, that’s a wonderful sight. Those of us using Linux for decades it feels like the early days of the internet when AOL users came flooding in.
Well I can’t speak for the whole world but by my Windows usage dropped 100% from 2025 to 2026.
Quick add more dogshit unwanted features and spyware to extract the maximum value out of customers over the short term!
Oh no… anyways.
Now I run windows on my surfing machine and my gaming machine. Otherwise I have no use for it, and what a boondoggle 11 was
Browsers and most games run on linux. Why keep using an OS with a profit motive behind it that’s often against your best interests as a user?
StatCounter lists OS X at 11.89% and macOS at 4.48% for June 2026
What?
Os x is the older name for it and likely un upgraded devices. Macos is the current name for it and newer, upgraded os’s.
That was what I couldn’t believe that 3/4 of all Macs today are running a 10 years old version of Apples Operating system.
Some people just never update
