OS Battle: Linux Takes 1.7% Desktop Marketshare

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 28 August 2014 at 11:52 AM EDT. 56 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
We have another metric in showing a 1.7% Linux desktop market-share, which isn't far off from other figures we've seen in the past indicating Linux desktop usage at under 2%.

What is the web-site PornHub's press agency doing emailing Phoronix? No, they didn't think we were "Pornonix", but they carried out some operating system statistics on their web traffic and broke it down quite in-depth, including for their Linux desktop visitors. The numbers are quite interesting and meaningful given that their one of the top 100 trafficked web-sites in the world as measured by Alexa.


Pornhub published a (safe-for-work) blog post entitled "OS Traffic" where they break down the traffic by operating system and extract various bits by OS category. For desktop OS traffic, Linux was at 1.7%, OS X was at 10.9%, and Windows was at 85.5%.

Linux users were found to have a longer duration on the site than Windows visitors but less than OS X and their page views per visit was also in between Windows and OS X. As said by Pornhub, "The Linux search list is as multi-cultural as the user base of this open source operating system."

The leading Linux traffic sources for the site were the United States at 24.4% followed immediately by India at 23.1%. Coming in next at under 5% each were the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Canada, and Poland.

Those wishing to look deeper into these OS statistics for this top 100 web-site can visit OS Battle, which is a clean web-page if you're at work. There's also smartphone stats, etc.

Linux desktop usage coming in at about 1.7% is in line with expectations with many general-focus web-sites seeing less than 2% Linux traffic. With the monthly Steam Hardware/Software survey of gamers, Linux gaming usage is usually around 1.0~1.5%. (On Phoronix our latest stats are 47% Linux traffic, 33% from Windows, and 7% from OS X.)
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week