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.
Copying my comment from another thread
Idk why everyone is always looking at statcounter. I still feel like Cloudflare probably has better data.
Especially cause it feels like their “other” category is probably scrappers and bots.
Also noteworthy is that Cloudflare isn’t about Desktop operating systems only. I don’t know how StatCounter operates, but they probably ignore everything that is identified as mobile and Smart TV. Cloudflare is about ANY HTTP connection / request. So its natural that these numbers are quite different, as they are different in their scope anyway.
Liek said, all data is biased, and that’s why we sould rely on multiple sources. The absolute values are really hard to get a precise mapping of, but the trends seem to be consistent. There’s a recent dip in windows usage in that chart as well
I don’t think one data point is better than the other. They are all a small portion of the entire base. Its like looking at different game reviews from different people to get an idea how good it is (I know little odd comparison :D). In example Cloudflare data is only relevant to those communities and sites that can pay for it and don’t have a different solution. Cloudflare is also a “recent” phenomenon; not sure how relevant that info is though…
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.
Windows: 56.61% Unknown: 21.45% OS X: 11.89% | macOS : 4.48% | --- 21.94% Linux: 4.36% | Chrome OS: 1.21% |I wonder what “Unknown: 21.45%” consists of. That is almost as much as OSX, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS combined “11.89+4.48+4.36+1.21 = 21,94”. This is a huge chunk. Also why is macOS and OS X listed separately, as they are basically the same group of operating systems. I mean we group all Windows into one, and even all Linux into one.
‘Unknown’ is the secret OS all the cool kids are using. But we won’t tell you what it is!
It’s Arch.
Arch is the endgame.
FreeBSD
A few things can cause that:
- Browsers that now block operating system fingerprinting by default, a privacy feature several major browsers have quietly shipped in the last couple of years (Librewolf and Helium browser do that)
- Bot and AI scraper traffic that doesn’t identify itself the way a normal desktop browser would
- Locked down corporate or government machines with identifying headers stripped out
- Modified or anonymized versions of Windows that don’t report themselves correctly
it means 21% are using some tracking prevention. Probably a lot of Linux users in here. This is good. And then there’re Linux users like me who pop one time as Chromium on mac, Edge on windows, firefox on atari…
It doesn’t necessary mean Linux. Given than Windows is going rapidly down and people get fed up with Windows a lot, but can’t or don’t want to switch to Linux, it is also probable that a lot of people go into stealth mode. Lot of YouTubers and media talk about the issues now. Then off course you have those niches grouped together like BSD and other systems, Tor browser and so on. It’s just a curious thing, because that makes a huge chunk of the entire user base.
My curiosity is, consists Unknown a collection of many small groups or is there a huge group responsible?
2026 is the year of the TempleOS desktop.
How do you do that?
I use Chameleon Firefox extension to shuffle and spoof many things, incuding user agent
You see that “unknown” one? Yeah, that’s all Linux. A lot of Linux users hide their identities real well online
@ekZepp I’m glad to see the growth of non-windows operating systems, but I kind of wonder about a chart or the second highest category is unknown?
Why unknown?
perhaps something like AI scrapers not properly reporting their UA? It would make sense to me that it’s a strong second place.
