> Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic
> Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.
I think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?
I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.
I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.
I have seen several because family members have owned them. They are nondescript black rectangles that are owned by cheap people and kids. There is no reason for you to notice them in particular and it's useful to remember our perception isn't a representative sample of anything.
The problem is, we have no way of knowing if our personal experiences are actually representative of everyone else's experience. I have 2 Chromebooks but I'm a computer nerd so I know I'm not your average user, but going off 2025 shipment data, it's something like 223 million Windows laptops to 25 million Mac's and 22 million Chromebooks.
Depending on how this data is being collected, a factor could be the rise of search / fetch / scrape capabilities, added in lots of places. Agentic this, google killer that, and so on. The easiest way to parse web content nowadays is to load up a browser and drive that. And thats easier to do with linux / mac distros, both at scale (i.e. datacenter based solutions) and at home.
As a bit of a side note, this year I started noticing captchas / cf verify speed bumps while browsing from the same residential ISP with the same mac laptop. I never used to get them. Maybe has to do with all that "buy a mac mini" craze that happened a while ago.
Is my understanding of that graph right? if the periodic change is the weekends, that means the total share percentage of requests from Windows and macOS users drops, while Linux increases in share percentage. Linux traffic is stable regardless of weekday/weekend cycles compared to Windows and macOS? Otherwise if there was equal drop in Linux, then the share percentage would be a smoother line. Is that right?
You have to buy a Chromebook to run ChromeOS, right? You can install Linux on your PC as dual boot. The investment is far smaller. However you have to buy a Mac to run MacOS so maybe that means that a Chromebook is not a very compelling machine to buy, or has a limited use case.
I don't believe this for a moment. I have seen many more Chromebook users than desktop Linux users. Not individuals, but a lot of schools use Chromebooks where I am. They are probably not well-tallied in the results, because they are often used to do some work in Google Docs/Sheets, plus some education-specific sites and less browsing on the general web.
I guess my point is that it is nearly impossible to get reliable counts from user agent statistics, etc. (lots of crawlers, that identify as a regular desktop as well etc.). The best way would probably to do real-world surveys among random population samples. But that costs money/time.
If you increase the date range to 12 months you can see that ChromeOS is several times larger than Linux but recently there must have been an update so ChromeOS is now incorrectly detected as Linux.
If you increase the date range to 12 months, you see that (with "likely human"), linux usage jumped from 3-4% to 5%-6% in the last 1.5 months. Something changed.
ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?
6%-14% (throughout the day, for some reason it's most popular late at night, Steam Box and other gamers, maybe?) is still the largest it's ever been, though, and it's presumably not getting smaller.
It's about the same as Firefox share, which is getting smaller.
Yes, the dam has been broken. Major linux distibutions are getting polished for many decades already and they are totally ready for the mainstream adoption. No amount of marketing will be able to reverse this trend. Considering that Big Tech is spending all their earned money (and even more by borrowing from investors) on AI, nobody will be even trying.
It's obvious that Microsoft doesn't even want to be in the consumer desktop OS market anymore, they'd rather pivot to being pure B2B like IBM did. Likewise, it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification and infantilization of their OS until it will eventually be useless for anything except developing iOS apps. So neither major player will bother spending a marketing budget to reverse this trend; they'd rather not play the game at all. On the flipside, fewer and fewer people will have traditional desktops in the first place; owning only a phone and no PC at all is the new normal.
What have they iOSed about macOS? The latest versions haven’t lost any features as far as I’m aware. But Windows lost the ability to even pin the task bar to the side of the window in Windows 11… and the ability to stop auto updates.
If anything, iOS is getting more Mac-like, especially the iPad version. It has multi windowing and a window manager now.
Imagine first thinking that humans are using Linux on the Desktop after seeing this (without specifying which distro) and then realizing that it is bots which are the "desktop users" because they are using Chrome to scrape websites since forever.
OS X: 21.14%
macOS: 8.6%
Yeah, if you believe this kind of stats it's on yourself.
Also why are you posting a random reddit link? It doesn't even match up the latest stats provided on the official source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
It does match statcounter if you filter for North America.
Aren't macOS and OS X the same thing?
> Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic > Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.
I think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?
Even if you assume OS X is 1999-2016 and macOS is 2016- then the numbers are still odd.
The separation of “OS X” and “macOS” gives me pause about the reliability of the other figures, particularly Linux and Chrome OS.
The last release of OS X was 11 years ago but this site shows it having over twice as many users as macOS. It's totally implausible.
I haven't done any investigation but some scraper and/or bot configuration uses OS X as its user agent.
I run an unpublished service used by 1s of people and was hit by an influx of supposed OS X user agents that didn't correspond to my actual user base.
Did you run any advanced TCP fingerprinting techniques to dig a bit deeper?
Regardless, they're the same OS, so any serious (read: competent) person compiling stats like this would combine them into the same bucket.
I imagine a big part of the puzzle is that many people do not even use laptops/desktops regularly anymore, just phones and tablets
I guess almost all laptops/desktops are corporate, student, gaming or own business use.
I have never, ever, seen a corporate linux desktop outside of devs.
I have never, ever, seen a student using a linux desktop apart from CS students and a few physics/maths.
Linux is not for gaming.
See above answers for Linux in own business.
Also, Chromebooks.
I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.
I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.
Yea Chromebooks are wildly popular in American education. They've replaced the school desktop PC.
My wife has one. Been rock solid for years. I recommend them to relatives who just do email and browsing etc.
I have seen several because family members have owned them. They are nondescript black rectangles that are owned by cheap people and kids. There is no reason for you to notice them in particular and it's useful to remember our perception isn't a representative sample of anything.
The problem is, we have no way of knowing if our personal experiences are actually representative of everyone else's experience. I have 2 Chromebooks but I'm a computer nerd so I know I'm not your average user, but going off 2025 shipment data, it's something like 223 million Windows laptops to 25 million Mac's and 22 million Chromebooks.
I used one in the wild, but I was working for Google at the time.
It would be hell being forced to use these things for your job. What departments were? Because I can't imagine a software developer using one.
Depending on how this data is being collected, a factor could be the rise of search / fetch / scrape capabilities, added in lots of places. Agentic this, google killer that, and so on. The easiest way to parse web content nowadays is to load up a browser and drive that. And thats easier to do with linux / mac distros, both at scale (i.e. datacenter based solutions) and at home.
As a bit of a side note, this year I started noticing captchas / cf verify speed bumps while browsing from the same residential ISP with the same mac laptop. I never used to get them. Maybe has to do with all that "buy a mac mini" craze that happened a while ago.
Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not agree if you filter for "likely human", which results in 6%. If you include bots, it hits 9.3%.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
Is my understanding of that graph right? if the periodic change is the weekends, that means the total share percentage of requests from Windows and macOS users drops, while Linux increases in share percentage. Linux traffic is stable regardless of weekday/weekend cycles compared to Windows and macOS? Otherwise if there was equal drop in Linux, then the share percentage would be a smoother line. Is that right?
It’s still really strange that Linux is several times larger than ChromeOS. I would not have guessed this. And I daily drove Linux for years.
You have to buy a Chromebook to run ChromeOS, right? You can install Linux on your PC as dual boot. The investment is far smaller. However you have to buy a Mac to run MacOS so maybe that means that a Chromebook is not a very compelling machine to buy, or has a limited use case.
I don't believe this for a moment. I have seen many more Chromebook users than desktop Linux users. Not individuals, but a lot of schools use Chromebooks where I am. They are probably not well-tallied in the results, because they are often used to do some work in Google Docs/Sheets, plus some education-specific sites and less browsing on the general web.
I guess my point is that it is nearly impossible to get reliable counts from user agent statistics, etc. (lots of crawlers, that identify as a regular desktop as well etc.). The best way would probably to do real-world surveys among random population samples. But that costs money/time.
If you increase the date range to 12 months you can see that ChromeOS is several times larger than Linux but recently there must have been an update so ChromeOS is now incorrectly detected as Linux.
In what universe would I jump from a proprietary OS to another proprietary OS without a damn good reason?
One where you don't like the first OS, believe the second OS does what you want, and don't care whether it's proprietary?
If you increase the date range to 12 months, you see that (with "likely human"), linux usage jumped from 3-4% to 5%-6% in the last 1.5 months. Something changed.
ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?
6%-14% (throughout the day, for some reason it's most popular late at night, Steam Box and other gamers, maybe?) is still the largest it's ever been, though, and it's presumably not getting smaller.
It's about the same as Firefox share, which is getting smaller.
6% is still significant. I'm used to seeing 3-5 in that slot. Hey, I'll take any increase, even a single percentage!
Yes, the dam has been broken. Major linux distibutions are getting polished for many decades already and they are totally ready for the mainstream adoption. No amount of marketing will be able to reverse this trend. Considering that Big Tech is spending all their earned money (and even more by borrowing from investors) on AI, nobody will be even trying.
It's obvious that Microsoft doesn't even want to be in the consumer desktop OS market anymore, they'd rather pivot to being pure B2B like IBM did. Likewise, it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification and infantilization of their OS until it will eventually be useless for anything except developing iOS apps. So neither major player will bother spending a marketing budget to reverse this trend; they'd rather not play the game at all. On the flipside, fewer and fewer people will have traditional desktops in the first place; owning only a phone and no PC at all is the new normal.
What have they iOSed about macOS? The latest versions haven’t lost any features as far as I’m aware. But Windows lost the ability to even pin the task bar to the side of the window in Windows 11… and the ability to stop auto updates.
If anything, iOS is getting more Mac-like, especially the iPad version. It has multi windowing and a window manager now.
> What have they iOSed about macOS?
How about this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
> it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification
What’s an example of a specific iOS-indication in macOS that makes the OS worse?
Launchpad. It sucks on macOS. You can just not use it but it's there.
Fullscreen apps and Spaces. My Mac isn't an iPad, but their window manager wants me to use it like one.
Hidden scrollbars.
App sandboxing.
I don't know if the BSD folks would be happy to see it mentioned or unhappy that it's at 0%. At least you know that most of those users are human
Netcraft confirms it...
I do not believe this. Unless it’s some sort of tricksy word game or counting android or something.
There is 0% chance that 10% of desktops/laptops are running desktop Linux.
https://archive.is/kaef0
Imagine first thinking that humans are using Linux on the Desktop after seeing this (without specifying which distro) and then realizing that it is bots which are the "desktop users" because they are using Chrome to scrape websites since forever.
Source: vibes
I guess Steam OS counts as Linux?
That's because it is Linux, specifically Arch.
All Linux is Linux.
Except for Android and ChromeOS. Nix is kinda weird too. But other than that, yeah.