After the Crowdstrike incident shone a light on Windows’ utter dominance across enterprise in late July 2024, users may be relieved to hear perennial up-and-comer Linux may be on course to hit 5% market share by 2025.
While new data from StatCounter, providing data for July 2024, shows that Windows is still the stalwart favourite with 72% market share, Linux was recorded as having reached 4.5% market share.
This could be welcome news for anyone not already in or looking to get out of the Apple ecosystem, or displeased with Microsoft’s interminable attempts to turn Windows into a service.
Linux and your small business
As our sister site Tom’s Hardware has addressed - Linux’s rise hasn’t been smooth sailing. Though it reached 4% in late February 2024, it then slipped back to a 3.9% share in April and May. This latest result, however, shows that progress is happening thick and fast, and if the alternative operating system’s current market share trajectory holds, it will hit 5% by February 2025.
Windows and MacOS are the ubiquitous household names in the OS space, and Crowdstrike has, in the case of the former, shown that many enterprises also reach for brand recognition and, more pertinently, interoperability with existing Windows client systems.
However, Linux does offer several advantages over either of these that are pertinent to a smaller business environment, should you be up to the task of convincing your sysadmin to acknowledge that it exists. The first and foremost one is price: an overwhelming majority of Linux distributions (popular ones including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Zorin OS) are free, or offer modestly priced versions bundled with additional productivity tools (Zorin OS Pro, for $47.99/£47.99, is one example).
Meanwhile, legal use of MacOS requires purchasing premium hardware well into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and Windows 11 Pro, before you even get into being pushed into buying into the subscription-based Microsoft 365 collaboration tools, is $199.
That will help drive adoption in the future, but for now, a key factor in Linux’s immediate rise is the popular distributions that are leaning heavily into features and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that are not only intuitive, but pointedly resemble the ‘big two’.
Ubuntu - the operating system this writer is running - combines a Windows-like taskbar with MacOS’ ‘Launchpad’ for apps, as well as an ‘app store’ serving cross-distro apps (‘flatpaks’) from popular app distribution platform Flathub. The average user or employee can get by without ever touching the command line, and that’s been the case for a handful of years now.
In truth, even 5% market share won’t shatter any records or expectations, but it’s no wonder that Linux is having its day, when its competitors seem committed to ‘walled garden’ philosophy. If you’re not convinced, consider Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, the increasing dependence on Microsoft accounts to set up Windows in the first place, and Apple since the beginning of recorded time, 2007 AD.
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