The latest data released by the market research organization NetMarketShare shows that among all desktop operating systems counted as of April 2020, the usage rate of the Linux operating system has reached 2.87%, which is much higher than the 1.36% in March this year.

There is such an obvious change suddenly. Which distribution is driving this growth? Some people think it is Ubuntu. omgubuntu mentioned that when NetMarketShare's data is broken down into Linux versions, it can be found that the usage rate of Ubuntu alone has increased from 0.27% in March. It jumped to 1.89% in April. For a distribution to achieve almost 7 times growth in one month is no small miracle.

Many (and relatively reasonable) reasons have been proposed to explain the sudden influx of Linux users, among which "people are not at work and do not need to be forced to use Windows software" is the most reasonable and widely agreed reason.

Judging from what was happening a few years ago, this surge may be due to errors in the data. But I prefer to believe that this is caused by differences in statistical paths. Some companies count Android as part of Linux; some companies count ChromeOS and Linux together as Linux operating systems; some companies only count a single distribution. So to some extent, these data can be interpreted.

Wikipedia conducted a similar survey, and at the time they believed that Linux-based desktop operating systems were more popular among the general public than generally believed. Of course, if enterprise and commercial use is indeed diluting Linux's share, and adoption of the free system on personal and home devices is more widespread than thought, you might also think there's something wrong with NetMarketShare's numbers.