this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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I'm as happy about this news as the next tech enthusiast, but bluntly, it's not a big shift. Going from ... What? 5% to 6%? That's great and all but it's hardly moving the needle.
If we want a significant shift we need OEMs selling prebuilt PCs with some flavor of Linux pre-installed, that's as easy to use as the competition (Windows/mac) with compatibility that's both good enough and transparent enough that people don't need to think about it much.
Before we get Linux OEM PCs on store shelves, we need to figure out that last bit first.
That still hasn't happened yet. We can't even agree what window manager should be used, nevermind any of the dozen or so other critical services on the system...
The thing that makes Linux great is that anyone and everyone can, and does, make stuff for it. That's also the thing that's going to hold it back from being put on store shelves pre installed on prebuilt PCs.
If you look at the commercially successful variants of Linux (ChromeOS and Android), you'll see that taking away freedom/choice was the first thing they did.
And ultimately, if you are targeting the mass market, that's almost required.
ChromeOS isn't successful.
Yes. By the porn stats, Linux already crushes ChromeOs. Let's not take any advice from it.
Well, all Linux distros combined are more than ChromeOS. If you split up by distro, ChromeOS is still the top Linux distro by far.
Interesting. I would have guessed that Mint gave ChromeOS a run for it's money, by now.
Really difficult to actually get good numbers here since there's a ton of sampling bias and user agent strings (which are used for most of these market share detectors) don't capture Linux distros apart from ChromeOS.
But we can combine sources to get somewhere.
The Steam Hardware and Software Survey doesn't include any data on ChromeOS, because there's no Steam on ChromeOS, but it says that there's a total market share for Linux of 3.2% with the most common Linux Distro being Arch with a market share of 0.32% (probably due to the Steam Deck), followed by Mint with 0.24%.
So double the maket share to get roughly to the 6.3% total Linux maket share from PH, and we get Arch with 0.64% and Mint with 0.48%, which is both much much lower than the 2.4% of ChromeOS on PH.
Nice! Thanks for sharing this analysis.