Something strange has been happening lately. Linux just saw its market share double. According to NetMarketShare, the operating system's share of desktops rose from about 2.5% in July to 5% in September.
I'm not saying it's a significant increase, since Linux is reportedly reaching the reach of MacOS, which has 6.29% of the market.
Before we look at the data, it's worth talking a little about NetMarketShare. It's one of the services that has several rivals, such as StatCounter, Clicky, and W3Counter, that are trying to make sense of the fragmented computing landscape.
Its methodology is quite simple. It examines visitor logs from literally tens of thousands of websites, recording hundreds of millions (if not billions) of page visits, in order to determine which operating system and browser users are using.
While I'm sure the data the service has is vast, I can't say for sure if the results are 100 percent accurate and reflect reality. As with any poll, it looks at a sample and extracts broader trends from it.
So let's keep this trend going and see what may have happened recently.
Here we will talk about the Chromebook. The operating system that runs on all Chromebooks is ChromeOS, which is based on Linux.
September is the month when schools start, and as we know, Google is promoting Chromebooks in education. They are very helpful for beginners, and a complete system costs around $200.
ChromeOS is also easy to manage from a technical perspective. It's locked down like Fort Knox, and thanks to its design, it removes many of the technical headaches that come with Windows. Techs don't have to worry about installing major updates across the entire school or about some teenager accidentally downloading ransomware.
Can we explain the increase in Linux users with a large increase in ChromeOS usage, coinciding with the start of the school year? It can.
But then again, it may or may not. Last year's statistics from the same period in 2015 and 2016 do not show a similar increase.
Moving forward, I would like to believe that Linux has doubled organically in the last month, but that doesn't seem to be all that realistic, since major Linux distributions targeting a Windows audience haven't achieved impressive results after so long.
Linux fans have fought a lot for the “year of the Linux desktop” but so far it seems to have become a very tired cliché. I would love for it to happen, but I can’t imagine it happening now, in 2017.
So ChromeOS users seem to be the most prevalent theory for the rise of Linux.
Of course there is always the theory of incorrect data from NetMarketShare. Who knows? What do you think?
