Just at the time when Apple announces the release of new Macs, a rather curious fact comes from Statcounter: Linux reaches for the first time (at least in recent years) 4% of global market share, and mainly to the detriment of macOS. For the open-source system devised by Linus Torvalds, this is not an isolated case, but rather a steady growth trend – last summer it reached 3% for the first time, for example. That’s a growth of 31% in about 9 months. Also for reference, it can be kept in mind that five years ago, in February 2019, Linux’s shares were just 1.58% globally.
Statcounter is one of the most well-known platforms for collecting this type of data: it is based on a tracking plugin that is installed on over 1.5 million websites globally that collectively generate over 5 billion visits per month. The data collected in this way is skimmed from bot activity and Chrome pre-rendering activity. If we want to look at the issue in a purely technical way, in reality Linux’s shares are even higher, since Google’s Chrome OS is always based on it. In this case, the all-time record would be 6.31% share in February 2024.
macOS, on the other hand, has lost a lot: its global share was 21.32% at the beginning of last summer, and now it has fallen to 15.42%. At the moment there is no convincing explanation of why, and the possibility of an error or a somewhat flawed dataset cannot be ruled out. As you can see, there’s an unknown operating system (yellow line, labeled “Unknown”) that grows just as macOS drops, and it’s long been suspected that these are at least partially very old or very recent versions of Apple’s system that for some reason aren’t detected correctly.
