Between the months of March and April 2020, Windows 7 saw a drop in user market share from 26.23 percent to 25.59 percent. That’s hardly surprising for a 10-year-old, unsupported OS as people finally upgrade to Windows 10. Right? Despite that conventional thinking, Microsoft’s Windows 10 actually experienced a rare drop in market share (down to 56.08 percent in April from its March 2020 share of 57.34 percent). Meanwhile, popular Linux distribution Ubuntu enjoyed an explosive increase.
How explosive? Ubuntu’s overall share of operating system usage ballooned from 0.27% in March to 1.89% in April. To put that in perspective, that’s an increase of 599 percent.
The lift for Canonical’s Ubuntu resulted in Linux usage climbing from 1.36 percent to 2.87 percent. And to frame that up against an interesting Apple data point, NetMarketShare measures macOS Catalina — which also gained user share in April — at 4.15 percent.
One key thing to note: Ubuntu isn’t seeing a 599 percent increase in additional users. That jump represents its increase in overall operating system market share from month to month. But it’s still an astonishing number.
NetMarketShare only measures active user sessions within its network of monitored websites, but those websites number in the 1000s so it’s a respectable sample size.
So why is Microsoft bleeding overall market share while Ubuntu is gaining so rapidly? One reason, as WindowsLatest points out, could be the COVID-19 pandemic and a significant decrease in company-owned PCs being used at the office.
And perhaps people are exploring alternatives at home.
I like to believe another contributing factor is that Ubuntu — and by extension Linux — is steadily gaining more coverage from mainstream and specialty tech press. Over the past two years, desktop Linux has enjoyed a renaissance when it comes to gaming, ease-of-use and its combination of seamless system updates and privacy-respecting features.
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