2025 Won't Be the Year of the Linux Desktop Either. So What?
2024 wasn’t the fabled Year of the Linux desktop and, spoiler alert, neither will 2025. Globally, Linux only just breaks the four percent mark of desktop operating systems.
Linux will never threaten Windows’ dominance of the desktops. Even with the roll-out of Windows 11 rendering a lot of hardware Windows-obsolete, there hasn’t been a tidal wave of users abandoning Windows and moving to Linux, even though their hardware would run Linux just fine. A few will have migrated to Linux, for sure, but they’re already included in the four-point-something adoption figure. And that's Linux’s highest percentage of desktop share to date.
The notion of Linux taking a significant chunk of Microsoft’s desktop share is a pipe dream, and the idea that it could ever catch, overtake, or usurp Windows is nothing more than a flight of fancy.
But trying to measure Linux’s success by looking at desktop adoption is missing the point, and by a country mile.