2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop

Posted on December 20, 2022  •  1 minutes  • 185 words

Thanks to the 2022 StackOverflow developer survey we can finally say 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop!

Linux as a primary operating system had been steadily climbing for the past 5 years. 2018 through 2021 saw steady growth with 23.2% , 25.6% , 26.6% , 25.3% , and finally in 2022 the usage was 40.23%. Linux usage was more than macOS in 2021, but only by a small margin. 2022 it is now 9% more than macOS.

There is a slight difference between all respondents and professional developers, but that doesn’t take into account the 15% of WSL users on Windows or the 63% respondents that use Docker which uses a Linux VM on macOS and Windows. I’d be very interested to hear about adoption numbers for cloud development environments (e.g. GitHub Workspaces) which are all Linux based. It’s safe to say more people use Linux as part of their development workflow than any other operating system.

2022 also saw more than a million people gaming on Linux via the Steam deck. It has been quite a year of Linux desktop usage.