I'm not sure how accurate StatCounter is, given that most Linux users use adblockers. However, according to it, Linux has almost a 14% desktop share in India.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I find the concept of 'market share' applied to FOSS projects quite confusing.
What's confusing to you? If Linux has higher desktop use, wouldn't it bring more and better quality apps and games.
I would assume that “market share” is related to the relative number of units sold/number of active subscriptions/fraction of total sales in terms in revenue, or some similar metric. I run a variety of different distributions on servers (bare metal, VMs and containers) and desktop computers. Do they all count equally? Without giving it more thought, I wouldn’t even know how to determine the market share of Ubuntu in my own home in a sensible way.
With Windows, I can just count the number of active licenses. Oh wait, its zero.
For once, Redhat and Suse do have market share, because they are companies. Other distros not so much. Then the reliability of the numbers, since you can only guess it from downloads and useragents.
But that will also bring the problems that Linux is supposed to be safe from.
such as?
Security issues.
Edit: Before you reply, I know no OS is 100% secure but it is one of the advantages of linux nonetheless.