No, Linux desktop market share has not crossed 10% in North America, and Windows is not suddenly losing millions of users. 2026 is not the year of Linux, for those who care. If anything, it’s the year the internet died, because the entire spike appears to be driven by AI bots. Almost every month, we […]
Ironically, I’m not sure it matters.
people running bots are still a large section of an OS’s market share. Microsoft wouldn’t hesitate to include bots and such like because it inflates the appearance that “everyone just uses it”. which does in fact drive up usage.
People running bots are still people using computers and such.
if I would to run bots I would only ever use windows or mac osx user agents. I would never use linux
I’m pretty sure that they’re talking about people deploying hundreds of VMs in a single go… In which case, licensing fees start racking up; and certain kinds of linux are very good at that kind of deployment.
once you start walking away from end-user computing; as an example, MS holds only 8% of all web-facing servers, where Unix (including linux,) is 90%. Linux distros specifically, are something like 61%. Nobody has even mentions apple’s macOS server options. Roughly half of professional devs use windows as the daily driver; but that largely has to do with organizations and integration with other MS products (like office.)
IMO, more telling in this conversation is the supercomputers… which are entirely some form of linux. And also, MS’s own Azure, clients mostly use linux. And for good reason kubernettes and docker were designed for linux, and it’s just easier. Also, there’s no per-instance license fees for your VM’s if you’re using linux. there is for microslop.