Technology

If anyone is stuck on windows and not able to switch there's a program called wind hawk that will let you download customizations in windows 11 including moving the bar

idk how you stayed on windows so long, had I tried linux sooner I wouldve dumped it faster, no software support or piracy for said software if it does have support is rough tho like houdinifx is hard to pirate if not impossible, davinci is easy tho, adobe has no support (no idea if it works well with wine pirated)

It wasn't immediately clear, I think you need to change your username to IUseArchBtw so we all know off the bat.

Real men and women run Slack. Tarballs Yum!

To head off the zealots-- ./././

The stats are from StatCounter which has this in their FAQ:

What methodology is used to calculate Statcounter Global Stats? 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 it's the percentage if web traffic (to sites that use this analytics service)

My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting "OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!" to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.

What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it's a major, major victory for all the distros.

ChromeOS is going to the Google graveyard, to be replaced by android

(Maybe this is a good thing as Chromebooks have an expiration date averaging 3-5 years where they stop getting Chrome updates, when if it's android can get updates to the browser for a much longer time AND have Firefox as default)

Linux as an OS is generally meant as Desktop Linux, and it most definitely is in this context that is about desktop marketshare, Desktop Linux is mostly following freedesktop guidelines, which has traditionally helped standards on Linux a lot to streamline developments. So for instance XFCE/Gnome/KDE desktop apps can be run in all the different desktop environments. For instance also standardizing things like how tray icons work. Freedesktop is part of X.Org Foundation, and Chrome OS does not use X.org or Free Desktop standards at all. The newer Wayland to replace X is also an X.org standard.

So while Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel, it is NOT a Linux OS in the original sense, a term that became popular decades before Chrome OS or Android became a thing.

If you include Chrome OS you might as well include Android too. As it can run on for instance Raspberry Pi and other mini systems, and could be used as a desktop system.

Chrome OS is a Linux kernel based OS, and not much more than that.
It's somewhat confusing in some situations that Linux as a desktop OS doesn't have a unique name, but it wasn't a problem originally, as what some prefer to call GNU/Linux was made 100% for desktop use originally.

The Linux kernel is way way more widespread and successful than what we usually term Desktop Linux or GNU/Linux.

TLDR:
Linux OS, Desktop Linux, GNU/Linux are generally meant as the same thing.
Chrome OS and Android do not belong in that category. They are Linux based as in the Linux kernel only, but do not follow the standards of Desktop Linux.