Who knows! If it’s a stepping stone, then actual growth would trail it.

Yeah exactly, we can only speculate, rather than claiming definitively that it’s one or the other.

(I do think that, if Linux was the more popular option, and folks would notice that most of the things they’re running under Wine, that would remove one reason for them not to switch to Windows. But yes, it will also be reason for others to stay on Linux.)

Growing on Windows 11 is not helping promote freedom from proprietary software

I mean, it might. It could very well be a stepping stone to full Linux.

Yeah I know, I’d much sooner trust those numbers - but those are pretty good numbers! Desktop only of course, but still!

People should stop posting StatCounter, it’s so unreliable and noisy.

But I am surprised by the Cloudflare numbers, which are a lot more reliable, and still have Linux at ~5% worldwide, which is still higher than I thought! And even ~6.5% for the past two months, though I imagine that’s a seasonality effect - maybe Linux users in the northern hemisphere are more likely to use their computers at home during summer? :P