Windows just had its worst month on record. StatCounter’s newly published numbers for June 2026 put worldwide desktop market share for Windows at 56.61%, the first time it has ever fallen below 60% in the history of the dataset. Linux closed the same month at 4.36%, its highest number in a year. The r/linux crowd found the chart within hours, and the thread that followed was half celebration, half cross examination.
Here’s what the data actually says, what it probably doesn’t say, and why the comments didn’t believe it for a second.
They’re both likely biased in different ways, different goals to a point. It sounds like statcounter is making some effort to verify unique devices for determining numbers potentially, but Cloudflare looks like it’s just raw requests which is going to bias you towards the noisiest devices. Still useful but I feel like that’s a harder sell if you’re trying to determine market share specifically. I’m not sure how you’d improve either one without drastically raising your overhead.