Desktop Linux just cracked 10% market share - and Windows 11 is mostly to blame

Windows 11 is mostly to blame">

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Believe it or not, according to StatCounter , a web analytics company that's been tracking end-user operating systems since 1999, desktop Linux has now reached an all-time high of 10.65% in the North American market . Take that, Microsoft!

But it's important to take StatCounter's numbers with a grain of salt. The firm's numbers are derived from just over a million websites . When someone visits one of its sites, StatCounter records every page view and collects such data as the visitor's browser, operating system, and whether it's from a PC, tablet, or smartphone. However, the company doesn't count traffic from such popular websites as Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia.

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Still, even with those caveats, Linux's market share growth has been impressive. The last time I looked at the numbers in 2025, Statcounter only showed a high of just over 5% . Linux doubling its market share in just over a year should get everyone's attention.

If you look closer, you'll also see Chrome OS, which is a Linux distro that uses Google's Chrome web browser for its interface, has a 2.07% share of its own. Add that in, and Linux owns 12.72%.

I decided to look beyond StatCounter's statistics to see what my preferred data source for operating system numbers, the US federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP) , had to say.

This site gives a running count of US government website visits and an analysis. On average, there are 1.6 billion sessions over the last 30 days, with millions of users per day. In short, DAP gives a detailed view of what people use without massaging the data.

DAP Linux desktop market share for the past 30 days (8 August, 2026).

DAP gets its raw data from a Google Analytics account. DAP has open-sourced the code that displays the data on the web , as well as its data-collection code . You can download its data in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format so you can analyze the raw numbers yourself.

When I last looked at DAP's numbers, the Linux desktop had a 5.8% market share. DAP showed a much more modest gain from 0.5% to 6.3%.

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On the other hand, Android, which is also a Linux-based OS, had a 12.1% share, while Chrome OS had a modest 0.6%. Add them together, and you get a 19% end-user Linux share.