this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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I've been a regular user of Debian and Ubuntu for the last 20 years and even though I love the idea of Linux taking market share from Windows the article doesn't in any way analyze the reliability of the statistics.
Statcounter says it gets its desktop operating system (OS) usage stats from tracking code installed on over 1.5 million global websites generating over 5 billion monthly page views.
So... How reliable is this actually? There are a millions reasons for me to fake which is and web browser in using. Some sites actively sabotage the user experience and usability if the OS is not identified as Windows or the web browser is not Chrome/Edge.
I've been working IT since the 90's and there's not a 4% market share of Linux when I look at my friends and colleagues that works IT. The ones I know that doesn't work IT definitively don't use Linux. Att least not in other things than Steam Deck and Android (Linux as in "modified kernel") and maybe some premade img for RPi
Shouldn't this effect cause Linux use to be under reported? That is, the real percentage would be higher than 4%?
I would pretty strongly expect significant correlation between people who spoof their user agent and Linux users.
Idk, I'm a woman approaching my senior years who had to have someone else install it. My whole household is on Linux. None of us are in IT.
That's the point. As long as you can't buy a laptop with Linux on it at your local computer store, the average user will stick with Windows. And MS will do everything they can to keep it that way.
Down here in Brazil desktops/laptops with Linux are a thing on most mainstream electronics stores. Have been for at least two decades b/cs I remember seeing those as a kid in the 2000s. Because poverty so the stores always have the cheaper options and the ones with Linux are cheaper than windows. Sometimes you can find the exact same configuration but the Linux version is like 200-400 BRL cheaper.
But what most people would do here is buy the Linux desktop to then install pirated versions of windows.
Damn! You really gave me hope there and then smashed it with your last sentence.
My grandparents had someone else to install Linux too. It was me btw.
A lot of software developers use Linux on their work computers. That's a lot of page views done during work days.
But also many Linux users at home may have to use windows at work so it balances out I guess?
Is it?
Among my friends it's more like 30%
Never heard of this and highly doubt it, but if it were true that's 100% not a website I want to use, so they'd be doing me a favor.
You're free to whatever opinion you might have but it's not a secret that Google used to change their search page to a more limited one if you were using Firefox.
Hence people created add-ons to change the User Agent to mimic Chrome when accessing Google.
Edit: I just reread your comment and noticed that you only quoted the part about Windows.
I'll just let my comment remain but it's okay that you're having an opinion that spoofing OS when accessing websites is not needed.
I'm well aware of that. Browser and OS aren't the same thing. Weird.
I had to check if I was alone on this...I wasn't. First hit on a quick Google:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/z5sidv/me_every_time_a_web_page_doesnt_work_because/
So yeah, not alone... this is the hill I'm dying on😁
I've been daily driving Linux for over 3 years and don't remember ever seeing it. And as a web developer I know the only way that would happen is if a shitty business decision mandated it.
...and shitty business decisions there are plenty of.
Gonna second you in this one. My Manjaro box is what I run to as a gold standard if one of my families windows machines using Chrome fails to load something. It's consistent, reliable and fast. What I think is missing from this conversation is: wired or wifi. One of the reasons the Linux machine is the yardstick is that it's not using wifi; never had a first page load fail.
Slack on Linux however... Eesh. Never had an app so reluctant to launch.
Are you also a relatively new Linux user as the guy you are agreeing with has said he is? Because this absolutely happened and was a continuous annoyance in the 2000s.
No, I have been using some form of Linux at home and at work since then too. I distro hopped for many years until one of my coworkers showed me Arch. Oldest story in the book right? I eventually ended up on Manjaro after a drive failure and the need to get something arch-based up fast.
To the substance of your point: no question that the internet was rougher around the edges too though in the early aughts right? Does you want an ActiveX or an ObjectEmbed? Let me load my 2000+ line navigator.appName giant if-then config for my site. Or how about when it was all tables and shim.gif and img tags with width and height. Good times.
There were plenty of these problems between browsers on just one OS. Or even versions of IE. I still see the rows of testing machines in my dreams sometimes, each with a slightly different version of XP and IE. 5.1, 5.5, 6. Ugh. Or how about the early days of flexbox when it was 7s turn.
Chrome wasn't even a thing until 2008 iirc, but that was also post safari-shaking-things-up too. And safari was from WebKit, and WebKit was from who? KHTML baby. (The K is for KDE.)
TLDR you're right, but I don't feel like it is, or ever was just Linux based OS's being targeted so much as bifurcation of standards, or just lack of all the relevant parties (like the W3C and browser makers) sitting down and establishing those standards. It's also a chicken and egg thing with tech too.
None of that is to say it never happened though, I'm just skeptical it was ever at any meaningful scale.
So you are calling everyone out on this because you started using Linux too recently to witness it, therefore it didn't happen.
A quick google search will probably turn up lots of discussion forum results where Linux users were talking about the best way to change their user agent and complaining about sites that forced them to during ~ late 90s -> 2015 (give or take - prob was pretty rare by then).
In most cases it wasn't anti-linux, it was the site being programmed to go "the user agent has to match these things or tell the user it's not compatible with their browser" - but in MANY cases if Windows (or presumably MacOS) wasn't one of the matched things, you received that message. Off the top of my head I specifically remember having to change it to pay my cable bill and get to my bank website.
There were also some more subtle cases where the site would load but some shit would not work (most famously the web interface for Office365 when it was newish).
So you can doubt, but this is what it was like to run Linux in the 2000s.
More recently (for sure post 2016) I recall having to change it to get the Netflix website to let me play content or fix some other bit of functionality on their site. As of today I haven't run netflix in a browser window in years, but I assume that's been resolved by now.