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Operating Systems Linux

Linux Desktop Use Surged To 22% On One Workday, Cloudflare Data Shows (zdnet.com) 58

Posted by BeauHD from the year-of-the-linux-desktop dept.
Cloudflare data suggests desktop Linux usage in North America has climbed to 6.4%, up from 4.1% a year earlier, with one post-holiday workday briefly spiking to 22%. ZDNet reports: [B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are not AI agents or bots, but real people. I set Cloudflare to count humans rather than bots. If you include people and bots, Linux has a 9.7% market share. That proportion is similar to StatCounter's score. By Cloudflare's count, bots alone come to 19%.

These numbers tell us that workers are leading the way to the Linux desktop. [...] However, past performance doesn't explain present trends. So, why are we now seeing such a bump in Linux desktop growth? Experts believe this trend is largely AI developers and Linux users running AI Agents. For example, as David Linthicum, former managing director and chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting and AI and cloud influencer, recently observed, while "Windows 11 can technically run local AI workloads, but as you begin using multiple tools, managing different projects, and installing various dependencies, the friction starts to build," it's a different story for Linux users.

Linthicum continued: "Linux delivered what I can only describe as a true 'AI desktop' experience. Setup was straightforward, mainstream AI instructions matched what you'd actually see in your environment, and GPU-accelerated apps simply worked -- consistently. I spent far less time troubleshooting and far more time actually executing on projects." As for agents, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin summed up their role succinctly: "Linux is the OS of choice for AI agents." Desktop Linux is also gaining momentum as frustration with Windows 11 and the end of Windows 10 support push users to alternatives, particularly on older PCs that can't officially upgrade. At the same time, Linux has become much easier to use, install software on, and game with, lowering many of the traditional barriers to switching.

Linux Desktop Use Surged To 22% On One Workday, Cloudflare Data Shows More | Reply

Linux Desktop Use Surged To 22% On One Workday, Cloudflare Data Shows

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  • Every windows pc is in an office, and their users were home with their families. This means that all of the traffic was from Safari on iPhone, Chrome on android, or via one of the tvOS interfaces.

    • Every windows pc is in an office, and their users were home with their families.

      I worked in an office for years and never had a Windows PC. Always Linux (after they took our Mac SEs away). As far as home, it's (almost) all Linux. Except for a Mac system I inherited.

      • Same here. All Linux, all the time. At home and work.
        So we'll establish this as the baseline and everyone else as the outlier. ;-)

      • I worked in an office for years and never had a Windows PC.

        I've had a mix on my desk for day-to-day use over the years: DOS / Windows PCs. BSDi / 386BSD PCs, Sun 3/4 Workstations, SGI Indigo Workstation, various Linux PCs. The last two places provided Windows PCs for Office and Outlook, with X11 software for Unix/Linux server connections.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          Windows PCs for Office and Outlook,

          Interesting. When I had a Linux desktop, the company provided Windows application access to engineers with HP-UX, AIX and Sun workstations from NT servers via a Citrix product that would export the NT display/keyboard via X11. So when manglement sent out their periodic PowerPoint missives and expected immediate action, I'd just fire up a Windows session on my Linux display and handle it. The interesting part of this was that my NT access was logged and I could use that number to establish the amount of time

          • I've worked for two companies developing Linux applications. Oddly, both issued Windows PCs and used VirtualBox.

            • Was it because the suits needed MS Office? That's really the last stranglehold Microsoft has in the business world. LibreOffice and such just aren't "there", yet.

          • Reminds me of Hummingbird Exceed on Windows, an X11 client that we got.

      • At work (all at one company) - work built 6502 based systems, Kaypros, UNOS with serial terminals, Xenix, SCO Openserver, Linux, and eventually Linux with Windows running as a virtual on rare occasions for me. Don't get me wrong, we're mostly Windows based, but as the licensing changes, there's a lot of regret there as well and we see many more attempts to move what can be moved off of Windows. I don't make use of any Windows software, so I'm fine with my Linux box. I can administer all of the Linux servers

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      It's probably AI stuff

  • Not. The bots are just getting better at looking like people.

  • What? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Uldis Segliņš ( 4468089 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @07:17PM (#66284684)
    Sounds like they have no clue what they looking at. Not believing. That is like saying that one day all road construction vehicles were electric. I think they just looked at partial or simply wrong data. Also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

    • Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @07:50PM (#66284738)

      Nah, it's just that a whole bunch of people simultaneously tried desktop Linux... then, right afterward, most of them immediately gave up.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Most likely explanation is that some bot switched to using a Linux user agent for HTTPS requests, and it took Cloudflare a day to notice and correctly categorize it as non-human.

      That said Microsoft is rightly concerned that the enshittification of Windows and AI making it easier for users to switch is helping Linux make gains on the desktop. Hopefully they react by deshittifying Windows now.

      • In order to de-shittify Windows you would have to first de-shittify Microsoft, and that is never going to happen by cause Microsoft didn't get shittified, it has always been a shit company.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gtall ( 79522 )

          "de-shittify Windows", doing the inner workings is easy, swap it out for Linux. Keeping apps functioning isn't easy. And there's nothing you can do to de-shittify the user interface. It is the definition of "shit". Job's said it best: MS has no class.

        • You gotta admit, the shit really got piled on when Nadella took over. Good luck though getting rid of this ass-hat. His cloud services makeover is making money, lots of money, so the big fuck you to Windows consumers is overlooked.

          • Oh his predecessor Mr. Big Bear Ballmer was an ass-jerk. He MBA-fied the company. He had nothing but contempt for developers, until he realized his company was in a free fall. Then he went around doing the "developer developer... " Gorilla dance routine, until he fell off the stage one day to never return.

            I am not supporting Nadella, I am just making him look better by comparing him to Ballmer.

      • Hopefully they react by deshittifying Windows now.

        No. That's a lost art at Microsoft.

  • Slashdot. That sucks. Not sure how often I will visit Slashdot in the future.

  • That's not "Linux desktop usage" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @07:41PM (#66284714)

    That's Internet usage of machines identifying themseleves as Linux. That's all Cloudfare (and StarCounter, and NetMarketShare) can measure.

    A bunch of AI agents in a Linux server (either on-prem or at the cloud) carrying out some work for someone in a company incentivized to run AI, will do tens, perhaps hundreds of calls to the web (say for research), even though the original request came from a Windows desktop where that person was running word, outlook and adobe, and reading /. on chrome.

    I have no beef with Linux, if anything, I am gratefull to it, I installed my first one in '96* @ Uni, and Linux made a huge positive impact in my professional career ever since (Sysadmin and OpenStack Trainer).
    I am not pro Windows, I run MacOS day to day since '09, I bootcamp to Windows for games only. I am not against Windows either.

    But deluding ourselves with misleading headlines like the one ZDnet concoted will not bring "the year of the linux desktop" any closer...

    JM2C YMMV

    * Learned Unix in '93 via Slowlaris, and first installed OpenBSD in '95

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      There are more ways than the user-agent header to detect your OS. nmap can detect dozens of OS from their IP fingerprints during a scan, without them even sending more data as most nmap modes do not fully open connections.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        And it's extremely unreliable, especially for devices which are behind a firewall or proxy.

        • So your theory is that the OS fingerprinting became significantly more unreliable for a short period of time, and then returned to the previous degree of unreliability? I'm going to go out on a limb and say you didn't think that line of reasoning through.

      • There are more ways than the user-agent header to detect your OS. nmap can detect dozens of OS from their IP fingerprints during a scan, without them even sending more data as most nmap modes do not fully open connections.

        I do not think Cloudflare is running nmap on organizations worldwide. or on every clients that connects trough it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by allo ( 1728082 )

          They are not running nmap, but they are fingerprinting your network packets. Even though one might get the impression that they make their money with annoying captchas, their core business is indeed DoS and bot detection, which for example involves comparing if your user-agent string matches the HTTP headers and the TCP fingerprint. They can tell if your Chrome is likely a curl with --user-agent option.

  • Hold up! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @07:44PM (#66284722)

    I'm not about to believe this until netcraft confirms it.

  • 22% doesn't pass the smell test (Score:3)

    by A nonymous Coward ( 7548 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @07:46PM (#66284726)

    If it can jump from 6% to 22% for one day, and then presumably back down to 6% the next day, either they've got an almighty small sample size, or they're lying.

    • If the reason for the temporary 22% user share is because all the Windows users are still home with their families for holiday break and all of the Linux using DevOps people and greybeard sysadmins are in the office working... that's not exactly a good selling point.

    • A large percentage from a smaller total can easily be a constant value. If you look at the Cloudflare DataExplorer, you can see that the normal diurnal usage increase for Windows is not in play on July 6.

      Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, if the diurnal peak for in-office Windows usage is 28% of the total, then the percentage increase for Linux from 6% to 22% is actually a constant absolute amout of Linux usage.

      The implication is that a lot of Windows users took a 4-day weekend.

      • That may explain the mechanism, but it still means they've got too small a sample size. There's no reason for Windows and Linux users to differ so extremely over four day weekends.

        • "There's no reason for Windows and Linux users to differ so extremely over four day weekends."

          Would you expect the proportion of Windows users to Linux users is the same for the group of people who could take July 6th off versus the group that worked on July 6?

          Also, consider the proportion of Linux users that are also Windows users because they have to communicate with Windows-only users. If the latter group takes the day off, that reduces the former group's Windows usage.

  • But I guess a day will do for now.

  • Linthicum continued: "Linux delivered what I can only describe as a true 'AI desktop' experience

    Please, just kill me now.

    I dearly want open computers, but not like this. Not like this.

    Fuck the world, stop the world, I want to get off.

  • I suspect that AI crawlers who have successfully gone undetected are responsible for a decent fraction of this increase.

  • You need to better understand the data (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    wow how to completely misread statistics and data and not understand what is being measured. What it tells you is many workers access websites through linux based systems not that they are running linux on the desktop which the majority are not.

  • Finally (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bu11etmagnet ( 1071376 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @01:44AM (#66284978)
    Could this be the year^H^H^H^H day of Linux on the desktop?

  • Linux is too hard to define (Score:4, Informative)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @02:32AM (#66285016)
    Linux isn't a monolithic "GNU/Linux" anymore. If you take what a you think a typical Linux distro would look like as a X11 or Wayland desktop environment distro with Firefox/Chromium then they still aren't as popular as you think, despite SteamOS and Gaming distros bringing in new people. Most Linux is in embedded, servers, IoT, containers, bots, AI agents and all sorts of weird places. Linux isn't even a single kernel, but split among different ecosystems like ChromeOS, Musl, Android and uClinux that have different use cases. Then there are people who use WSL, Homebrew, Cygwin, MingGW and others that give you Linux like experiences on other kernels.

    Linux is everywhere, but also niche, it's a paradox that I don't think people can truly understand.
  • when I read that, I was expecting the reason people were trying to ditch Windows was because it had AI shoved in every corner
    • So, what did you think when it turned out it was because Linux had even more corners into which AI can be shoved?

  • Let's hear the words of an AI/cloud influencer (Score:3)

    by fleeped ( 1945926 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @03:37AM (#66285054)

    I feel dumber after having read TFS. Some extraordinary claim, and some word diarrhea by some influencer, with AI mentioned 7 times in the story, all of it thinly veiled as some "Year of the Linux Desktop" story to bait the folks here. Wow.

  • I use Linux exclusively (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Teun ( 17872 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @03:49AM (#66285068)
    The Indian outfit I consult with is a Microsoft shop, everything is tied to Office 365.
    I use Kubuntu and using the Brave browser I can easily access their documents.
    Two days ago I spoke via Teams with an engineer working in the Quality and Regulatory dept. of a French company and he told me he is also using Linux.
    At first he tried to reach me from a Windows computer but the mandated anti virus software did not allow him to use the camera in Teams, switching to Linux solved the problem.
    • And the antivirus blocks the microphone too? You only need a microphone too use teams. Why would his company not want him to be able to do conference calls?
    • What AV software blocks the camera for Teams? What AV blocks cameras?

      Never heard of that, but I guess someone didn't configure it correctly if Teams was blocked.

  • Even AI is frustrated and disgusted by Micro$oft... maybe AI is more intelligent than we thought after all!

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