Gnu PureOS Wonderful
Who writes these articles though?
shows GNU/Linux reaching an all-time high of 5.03% in the U.S. and 7.74% globally when ChromeOS is included.
Is there anyone who considers ChromeOS as being GNU? I haven’t used ChromeOS but I understood it to be a dumbed down OS that only runs Chrome Browser. That seems not good.
modern GNU/Linux distros like Purism’s own PureOS, Fedora, and Ubuntu have become polished, user-friendly, and privacy-respecting alternatives to bloated, surveillance-heavy operating systems.
Before I used PureOS for a while I was using Ubuntu and it seems like some spyware. I think encouraging people to think ChromeOS, Ubuntu, and PureOS are all the same “good” thing while Windows is “bad” misses the mark a bit.
Obviously it’s nice if we all use a Linux kernel but there’s more to our digital lives than the kernel, as I’m sure the GNU project had in mind when it started.
I agree: ChromeOS and Android are a far cry from some of the privacy-respecting OSes mentioned.
In an ungenerous version of the truth, I recently heard on these forums that more than a few hints are taken from LLMs when writing these articles, and we can’t really blame AI for confusing the relative merits of Linux OSes 
Okay… but I can definitely blame Purism for using it and not cross checking it
That was before the person was moved out of marketing that was using AI a bit too much.
Anyway, I made a post less than a month ago, which gave sources to the much more relevant data. And these numbers will be updated in the next 1-3 days. Indeed I’m expecting 6% in some countries, 3% in gaming market share (1% more than Mac!) and world wide around 4%-4.5% (millions of PCs in India are Linux systems, but as unknown listed - so probably above 5% in reality). I only speak about desktop market share without ChromeOS or any other “definition of Linux”
Still, every kind of statistic of this kind has to be taken with salt → it’s very hard to collect trustworthy data and so it shows more about the tendency and less about the real amount, which hopefully is close to these numbers.
Your starting point would be Wikipedia. It seems at least reasonable to consider the possibility. (For example ChromeOS certainly isn’t Windows and certainly isn’t MacOS, and those two along with Linux would be considered the three traditional desktop operating systems.)
However
This.
Particularly when you have people like me whose UserAgent in Firefox identifies me as a Windows user (last time I checked, anyway).
Indeed. I would prefer that Purism makes that clearer i.e. I would prefer that some actual human being puts his/her name to each blog post. But regardless I’m still going to link the blog posts here for people to read if they want to.
And then we have issues like today: France has over 11% Linux market share. But that’s probably just a measurement issue. In general the data looks a bit weird this month for some countries. I guess we have to wait for next month to see what’s real and what’s a statistic issue.
Linux in general is known for changed UserAgents etc, but with more people switching over, this effect decreases.