No, Linux desktop market share has not crossed 10% in North America, and Windows is not suddenly losing millions of users. 2026 is not the year of Linux, for those who care. If anything, it’s the year the internet died, because the entire spike appears to be driven by AI bots. Almost every month, we […]
Overall probably closer to the truth.
I wish people didn’t obsess over these large numbers as much. Like when Linux suddenly hit 5% on Steam when that was clearly just an outlier and was destined to fall right back down.
The only interesting thing about the numbers is that eventually, people outside the tech bubble will pick up on it and think about seeing what the fuss is about and if it’s a solution for them and then maybe also switching.
In that sense: I “heard” that the number is 20% actually. Windows is so over. It’s true. Pass it on.
How would that clearly be an outlier? Hindsight is 20/20, right?
Because these numbers experience wild fluctuations on a regular basis. Does it make sense to you that people are just joining and quitting Windows by the masses simultaneously?
Something strange with the March 2026 results was that it had two new distro entries, “0 64 bit” at 17.60% and “64 bit” at 8%. In April, one of those entries disappeared and the other’s share dropped significantly. In May, both were gone entirely and Linux was back to a more reasonable marketshare of 4%.
I’ll admit that weird and unexplained data is a hint to something going wrong. Shame on steam.
There was nothing that would have explained a more than doubling of Linux desktop market share.
It was not that difficult to come up with a more likely explanations and some people where quick to mention AI crawlers/agents, which did actually explode in numbers.
But why would those crawlers participate in the steam survey?
The latest results I saw from steam actually showed an increase in Windows 11 market share.
The 10% was based on browser user agents.