Why are macOS and OS X listed separately? Is it to delineate pre-2016 Macs from post-2016 Macs, when the rename to macOS happened? But in that case, I have a hard time believing that there are way more pre-2016 Macs floating around out there than post-2016 ones, as the chart shows. I have a hard time believing that anyone is running pre-2016 OS X versions at all, outside of a very small group of hobbyists; I thought Apple’s data showed that generally Mac users were pretty aggressive about being on relatively current macOS versions.
Also why separate out OS X and macOS at all when it appears that all Windows versions are lumped together and all Linux versions and distros are lumped together?
Anecdata: Every time over the years that my parents (now in their 70s) have purchased a new mac, software updates only ever happen if I run them.
I don't visit all the time. They run outdated versions of everything until I hear "we need to buy a new mac because we can't use this website for some administrative thing", which is caused by not updating the os and the browser becoming unsupported over time.
Also account for i.e musicians (I hear there's a few of them in Apple-land) who seem to keep getting bitten by Apple somehow breaking compatibility with a bunch of audio software/equipment even with developer release, time and time again.
StatCounter uses browser tracking as its data source, and it seems like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all froze the OS version they report in their user agent at Mac OS X 10.15 in order to avoid breaking sites that have poorly written parsing code by bumping the major OS version. I imagine that browsers that expose enough information to identify the actual OS version get shown as "macOS" and browsers that don't get shown as "OS X". See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216593 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1680516
Windows 11 removing support for older hardware, skyrocketing prices for new Hardware along with bad decisions to make even more money and Apple making ahead of its time tech now forces more and more users to give Linux a try or just buy a Mac. Linux gaming is also nice. Often a pad or phone is enough, I know many non-tech people not owning a single PC any more.
In my case it's Windows 7. I have to override the useragent in Firefox nowadays; Hacker News now rejects any attempts to login or browse the site if I don't fake the browser useragent.
Looking at the FAQ for the data source [0], specifically this part
> What methodology is used to calculate Statcounter Global Stats?
> Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device.
I assume they infer the OS and stuff from the User Agent and other stuff in the headers of requests. And I assume scrapers collecting data for AI systems don't include the standard User Agent stuff Statcounter classified when they made their data collection tooling. So my guess would be non-browser-automation style scrapers that are getting around defenses and have header data Statcounter doesn't know how to classify to an OS.
it's a bit skewed, I suspect 25% are bots and the like that don't present an identifiable user-agent. Also, a lot of bots probably identify themselves as windows to "blend-in".
Would love to see this decrease compared to mobile rates, before and after the decrease. People are using phones and tables like computers, more and more. Take a game like Habbo Hotel, it was originally browser based, had no mobile presence forever. Now most people playing it are on their phone. I wouldn't be surprised if RuneScape has similar numbers. Roblox definitely might, I've seen kids out in public, playing Roblox, off a phone.
The cope in this article is strong ... the year of desktop linux indeed.
> Of course, StatCounter’s numbers should be read for what they are: web usage statistics, not a direct count of installed operating systems.
I am unclear how one writes that paragraph after saying the numbers are "global desktop OS usage" over and over again. Not to mention the android share of web usage is 0%.
I was a daily windows user for ~20+ years and haven't turned on my windows 10 desktop in months because the only thing I have it for now is anti-cheat games that are too time consuming to play...
Anecdotal for sure, but microsoft's blunders and erosion of trust are starting to hurt it.
Yeah, but you're also on Hacker News. You are an outlier. I recently wiped Windows off of my gaming PC and installed CachyOS and, honestly, Linux just isn't ready yet. I'm also an outlier because I'm an SRE whose first distro was Slackware and I'm returning to the fold because Linux gaming has gotten much, much better... but it is still pretty inferior to playing games on Windows.
It depends on the game (which is one way in which it isn't ready yet, granted), but I've been amazed at how many games I can play without any issues. Maybe I'm just lucky that my taste aligns with what's playable but I've been fully on Linux for years now.
I'm glad you continue to try it, I encourage anyone looking to have not-Windows options to try it. You can check compatibility of various titles with protondb if you're curious.
It's not huge showstoppers. It's just a lot of little annoying things and last mile configurations. For example, I have to launch KCD2 with a Steam Deck related launch option for it to pick up my controller. It took a bunch of googling to figure that out.
I have an Audeze Maxwell headset whose dongle was left in Xbox mode (which Windows was happy with) and so I spent 30 minutes debugging why it wasn't working in Linux until I flipped it to PC mode - which crashed PulseAudio so I had to restart it.
Dota2 has a native Linux client... but it suffers from microstuttering and that's just killing me. FPS is high as I have a 4080 but, man, the stutters are killing me.
Battlebit initially launched in a resolution so low that I had to guess through game menus to get it to my monitors native resolutions. It's just... small and annoying things.
I don't really mind, personally. I grew up using Linux. I don't mind doing these configurations and it's worth it to have a dev environment on my desktop computer. It's just that Linux isn't really "Microsoft competitor" ready when it comes to gaming. Valve has put in a bunch of hard work though. Huge kudos to Valve for getting Linux as far as its come. I hope the Steam Machine takes off and we see more hardware and game developer support.
My last desktop before Linux was SunOs4 on a Sun Pizza box. Before that I used Macs. I had to use Win3.1 as road warrior kit until I got a laptop that would run Linux. So I've been using a Linux desktop for at least 30 years both at work & at home. I still use Windows (not 11!) sometimes where I can't avoid it but that's in a VM under Linux.
My mistake I misread the "OS X at 11.89% and macOS at 4.48%" and thought one was iOS rather than 2 versions of the desktop os, and we were lumping in all the web users not just desktop.
Yes, it is still tough to compete on the desktop with Microsoft and Apple, but things are moving in a positive direction.
The basics haven't changed. There is still little concern for compatibility with Linux. What exists is an ugly band-aid that covers the problem instead of addressing it.
This "feature" alone just keeps on giving to the less technically inclined.
I've seen that a lot more often lately because of AI botnets. Supposedly the bots come (or appear to) from some countries more than others, and sometimes websites are just banning a whole country because the load from bots is so bad they it outweighs a small number of real human visits.
Could also be an "instead of implementing legally mandated ID verification, we will simply block all traffic from any country that requires it" thing.
Why are macOS and OS X listed separately? Is it to delineate pre-2016 Macs from post-2016 Macs, when the rename to macOS happened? But in that case, I have a hard time believing that there are way more pre-2016 Macs floating around out there than post-2016 ones, as the chart shows. I have a hard time believing that anyone is running pre-2016 OS X versions at all, outside of a very small group of hobbyists; I thought Apple’s data showed that generally Mac users were pretty aggressive about being on relatively current macOS versions.
Also why separate out OS X and macOS at all when it appears that all Windows versions are lumped together and all Linux versions and distros are lumped together?
All of this seems very suspect.
Anecdata: Every time over the years that my parents (now in their 70s) have purchased a new mac, software updates only ever happen if I run them. I don't visit all the time. They run outdated versions of everything until I hear "we need to buy a new mac because we can't use this website for some administrative thing", which is caused by not updating the os and the browser becoming unsupported over time.
Also account for i.e musicians (I hear there's a few of them in Apple-land) who seem to keep getting bitten by Apple somehow breaking compatibility with a bunch of audio software/equipment even with developer release, time and time again.
Multiply by real world amounts of people.
Would be a good explanation...
That would explain a small number of true OS X users, but the graph reports 2x OS X as macOS, which is ridiculous.
StatCounter uses browser tracking as its data source, and it seems like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all froze the OS version they report in their user agent at Mac OS X 10.15 in order to avoid breaking sites that have poorly written parsing code by bumping the major OS version. I imagine that browsers that expose enough information to identify the actual OS version get shown as "macOS" and browsers that don't get shown as "OS X". See https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216593 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1680516
I think the events line up...
Windows 11 removing support for older hardware, skyrocketing prices for new Hardware along with bad decisions to make even more money and Apple making ahead of its time tech now forces more and more users to give Linux a try or just buy a Mac. Linux gaming is also nice. Often a pad or phone is enough, I know many non-tech people not owning a single PC any more.
2026: the year of Unknown on the desktop
Won't be for long given all the id restrictions coming for the internet.
I wonder what the "unknown" 25% are.
In my case it's Windows 7. I have to override the useragent in Firefox nowadays; Hacker News now rejects any attempts to login or browse the site if I don't fake the browser useragent.
Looking at the FAQ for the data source [0], specifically this part
> What methodology is used to calculate Statcounter Global Stats? > Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device.
I assume they infer the OS and stuff from the User Agent and other stuff in the headers of requests. And I assume scrapers collecting data for AI systems don't include the standard User Agent stuff Statcounter classified when they made their data collection tooling. So my guess would be non-browser-automation style scrapers that are getting around defenses and have header data Statcounter doesn't know how to classify to an OS.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology
Maybe windows users who weren’t smart enough to correctly answer the survey question?
Nevermind. These stats are computed by website visits:
https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology
So I guess web browsers that obfuscate?
it's a bit skewed, I suspect 25% are bots and the like that don't present an identifiable user-agent. Also, a lot of bots probably identify themselves as windows to "blend-in".
Would love to see this decrease compared to mobile rates, before and after the decrease. People are using phones and tables like computers, more and more. Take a game like Habbo Hotel, it was originally browser based, had no mobile presence forever. Now most people playing it are on their phone. I wouldn't be surprised if RuneScape has similar numbers. Roblox definitely might, I've seen kids out in public, playing Roblox, off a phone.
The cope in this article is strong ... the year of desktop linux indeed.
> Of course, StatCounter’s numbers should be read for what they are: web usage statistics, not a direct count of installed operating systems.
I am unclear how one writes that paragraph after saying the numbers are "global desktop OS usage" over and over again. Not to mention the android share of web usage is 0%.
I was a daily windows user for ~20+ years and haven't turned on my windows 10 desktop in months because the only thing I have it for now is anti-cheat games that are too time consuming to play...
Anecdotal for sure, but microsoft's blunders and erosion of trust are starting to hurt it.
Yeah, but you're also on Hacker News. You are an outlier. I recently wiped Windows off of my gaming PC and installed CachyOS and, honestly, Linux just isn't ready yet. I'm also an outlier because I'm an SRE whose first distro was Slackware and I'm returning to the fold because Linux gaming has gotten much, much better... but it is still pretty inferior to playing games on Windows.
It depends on the game (which is one way in which it isn't ready yet, granted), but I've been amazed at how many games I can play without any issues. Maybe I'm just lucky that my taste aligns with what's playable but I've been fully on Linux for years now.
I'm glad you continue to try it, I encourage anyone looking to have not-Windows options to try it. You can check compatibility of various titles with protondb if you're curious.
It's not huge showstoppers. It's just a lot of little annoying things and last mile configurations. For example, I have to launch KCD2 with a Steam Deck related launch option for it to pick up my controller. It took a bunch of googling to figure that out.
I have an Audeze Maxwell headset whose dongle was left in Xbox mode (which Windows was happy with) and so I spent 30 minutes debugging why it wasn't working in Linux until I flipped it to PC mode - which crashed PulseAudio so I had to restart it.
Dota2 has a native Linux client... but it suffers from microstuttering and that's just killing me. FPS is high as I have a 4080 but, man, the stutters are killing me.
Battlebit initially launched in a resolution so low that I had to guess through game menus to get it to my monitors native resolutions. It's just... small and annoying things.
I don't really mind, personally. I grew up using Linux. I don't mind doing these configurations and it's worth it to have a dev environment on my desktop computer. It's just that Linux isn't really "Microsoft competitor" ready when it comes to gaming. Valve has put in a bunch of hard work though. Huge kudos to Valve for getting Linux as far as its come. I hope the Steam Machine takes off and we see more hardware and game developer support.
My last desktop before Linux was SunOs4 on a Sun Pizza box. Before that I used Macs. I had to use Win3.1 as road warrior kit until I got a laptop that would run Linux. So I've been using a Linux desktop for at least 30 years both at work & at home. I still use Windows (not 11!) sometimes where I can't avoid it but that's in a VM under Linux.
How many desktop Android users are there?
My mistake I misread the "OS X at 11.89% and macOS at 4.48%" and thought one was iOS rather than 2 versions of the desktop os, and we were lumping in all the web users not just desktop.
I would be willing to count those Android HTPC devices you plug into a TV. Those come with a web browser, so it would be greater than zero.
I don’t think they should count as desktop.
Nobody is using PC or laptop in home anymore. People don't know what is a file or a folder.
Yes, it is still tough to compete on the desktop with Microsoft and Apple, but things are moving in a positive direction.
The basics haven't changed. There is still little concern for compatibility with Linux. What exists is an ugly band-aid that covers the problem instead of addressing it.
This "feature" alone just keeps on giving to the less technically inclined.
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are you serious?
I've seen that a lot more often lately because of AI botnets. Supposedly the bots come (or appear to) from some countries more than others, and sometimes websites are just banning a whole country because the load from bots is so bad they it outweighs a small number of real human visits.
Could also be an "instead of implementing legally mandated ID verification, we will simply block all traffic from any country that requires it" thing.