According to both Statcounter and Cloudflare, Linux has hit a market share high of 10.65%.

You read that right.

Ten point sixty-five percent.

According to Statcounter, that high was reached in July 2026, which was nearly double what it was in June (5.52%).

To be fair, the 10.65% figure only applies to North America.

But how did this happen? "The most probable explanation is that a portion of previously unclassified traffic – disproportionately generated by Linux users running privacy-hardened browsers, VPNs, or non-standard configurations – was reclassified under the Linux category," said Tech-Times.

At the moment, even Cloudflare's Radar has Linux listed at 9.2% for North America, but if you change that to Worldwide, the figure drops to 6.2%. Even still, that's an increase. The distinction between Statcounter and Cloudflare is that Cloudflare counts HTTP requests at the network layer and processes over three billion page views per month. What this means is that these figures represent web activity and not an actual count of machines. That logic also applies to all other operating systems, including Windows.

One possible reason for this increase is the release of the Steam Machine, which runs Linux. Given that Valve reportedly was selling over 15,000 units per week, that could easily be the reason for the spike.

We'll see if this trend continues; if it does, the year of the Linux desktop could finally be nigh.