Hmm... What's eating Windows' lunch? Oh "Unknown" and "Other". Cool.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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for your enjoyment
source https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200910-202511
If they're basing this off browser user agents like a third of my traffic at least is random Chinese ips and requests with Chinese language in the headers.
All of them would be flagged as unknown by the major user agent parsing libraries.
None of the sure I work with have any Chinese content or content remotely useful for Chinese people, so it's scrapers.
From the FAQ:
Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 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.
So yeah, they’re basing of browser user agents.
Can it be fingerprint spoofers skewing the results? In that case the data is worthless.
Most people don't fake agent strings but the bots sure do.
The actual thing obscured by this graph is the amount of users. Most people use mobile devices now and companies are incentivized to use apps there instead of actual desk top machines.
That's probably Linux too
I think it's pretty clear from this graph that the macOS is eating their lunch, and to a lesser extent, Linux.
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The Year of the Unknown Desktop
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where...
You get the idea
What do we know about
The unknown knowns
The things we don't know we know?
You know exactly how Greek fire was made. You just don't know that you know the exact recipe for the ultimate naval weapon. Yes, you in particular. Tell us.
Like instinctual stuff you haven't experienced yet, I guess.
You'll have to ask Donald Rumsfeld.
Seeing macOS go down, it seems to me, new macOS is masking
Everything going down or steady except "Unknown"
I don't care who wins, I care that Windows loses
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What the hell happened in Jan 2023
That’s what I want to know too! Did Windows blip out of existence in the UK for a month or something?
The unknown is actually a niche OS they put on all the smart dildo and sex toys they make now. True story. ✌️
Teledildonics has been a promising technology for several years.
And yes, you CAN run Doom on it. But turns out it's not a great idea
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Let's see what the Steam Machine will do for Linux on desktop. 2026 will be interesting.
Even if they sell like hot cakes relative to their intended audience of Steam users, it will not make much of a difference in overall market share. Steam might be relatively big with PC gamers, but overall they are rather tiny.
Tiny yes, but IMO getting the attention of computer gamers needs to be the next step if a Linux flavor is going to become a household name.
Even if it's "SteamOS" that becomes the household name instead of "Linux" that's still good overall. Maybe it'll turn into how people used to say they had "Droid" smartphones, not Android.
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Between that and windows 11 forcing people to choose between buying new hardware (at currently inflated RAM prices) , remain on win10 without updates ot switching to a different OS, it really could mean the fabled "year of the Linux desktop" has finally arrived.
I'm colour blind so there's basically only three colours on this graph but what I'm assuming is showing is that windows is decreasing in popularity and apparently so is OS X. I'm assuming the other colour is Linux or Chrome but no idea which is which.
For future reference, when making graphs make them in black and white first and if they are visually distinct then you can add whatever colours you want.
Here's a table version of this graph: |Year-Month| Windows, %| OS X, %| Unknown, %| Linux, %| Chrome OS, %| iOS, %| Android, %| Playstation, %| macOS, %| Other, %| |
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| |2010-01| 93.76| 5.16| 0.2| 0.7| 0| 0| 0| 0.15| 0| 0.02 |2011-01| 92.02| 6.56| 0.07| 0.74| 0| 0.44| 0.01| 0.15| 0| 0.02 |2012-01| 89.62| 7.33| 0.07| 0.82| 0| 1.71| 0.24| 0.14| 0| 0.07 |2013-01| 90.96| 7.95| 0.07| 0.88| 0.01| 0| 0.12| 0| 0| 0 |2014-01| 88.87| 8.35| 0.05| 1.13| 0.14| 0| 1.45| 0| 0| 0 |2015-01| 88.19| 9.1| 0.91| 1.46| 0.33| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2016-01| 85.18| 9.03| 3.8| 1.47| 0.51| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2017-01| 84.4| 11.2| 2.07| 1.55| 0.77| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2018-01| 82.68| 12.8| 2.17| 1.43| 0.9| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2019-01| 75.47| 12.33| 9.41| 1.61| 1.17| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2020-01| 77.7| 17.04| 1.83| 1.9| 1.52| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0 |2021-01| 76.26| 16.91| 3| 1.91| 1.91| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2022-01| 75.5| 15.85| 3.86| 2.19| 2.6| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2023-01| 74.14| 15.33| 5.27| 2.91| 2.35| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2024-01| 73| 16.11| 5.33| 3.77| 1.78| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2025-01| 71.9| 15.02| 7.43| 3.72| 1.92| 0| 0| 0| 0| 0.01 |2025-11| 69.37| 8.26| 13.14| 3.07| 1.3| 0| 0| 0| 4.85| 0
Unfortunately I can't paste the whole table here because of character limit so look at it here if you want to (in Markdown format).
Edited on 12/15/2025 12:05 UTC because the link suddenly died.
They're in order in this highlighted column:
- Windows (at the top)
- OSX
- Unknown
- Linux
- Chrome
- IOS
- Other (dotted)
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Unknown could be anything. It could even be windows!
Unknown could be anything.
Thats not a bad thing.
I'm a big fan of preventing marketers from gaining additional useful knowledge about me.
Sometimes that means anonymizing, sometimes it means actively polluting their data.
OS X
I don't use Apple devices and didn't realize that they didn't all use the same operating system (OS X vs IOS). Shame on me, I guess.
It's not even called OS X anymore, now it's called macOS.
iOS is actually based on macOS, although it's slimmed down a lot. iOS has been further split into iOS and iPadOS, although they're pretty much the same thing. It's just a marketing move.
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A couple of peaks of unknown seem to match very nicely with the windows graph, if you invert it. I think the two big windows crashes we see are measuring differences or re-categorization effects. ... or how about brand new or discontinued versions of windows, that were not counted as windows yet?
Interesting. But since when is iOS a desktop operating system?
Since they added free-form window management.
Probably since iPad gained a keyboard with mousepad?
It is barely on the graph at all, and really only in 2012 - I'm assuming they released some product around then that is enough like a desktop computer that it made the list but ultimately fizzled out.
At this rate it will only be relevant for another 15-20 years.
So I assume this is some kind of web traffic graph?
It is, yes
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