India, the country with the largest population, has a 15% desktop Linux marketshare.

Additionally, these surveys are highly inaccurate. They are at best a “conservatively low balled figure”. Linux installations don’t send a ping to a server anywhere to count the install, and there’s no other facility to gauge or count through the Linux ecosystem itself. Most computers used for Linux are also sold with Windows pre-installed, which means there’s no clean way to use sales figures either.

All that leaves is the browser user agent when visiting select websites that track and share the number of unique visitors that identify as Linux.

I did the math a few months ago in a different discussion (not on Lemmy) and my math at the time came up to about 50 million desktop Linux users, and that was using the “official” reported numbers of 3.x% at the time.

That also ignores that the Stack Overflow developer survey puts desktop Linux at over 50% for personal use, and (IIRC) about 47% for professional use.

But let’s be honest

You can’t be honest if you look at a single boiled down percentage of a very large, very diverse and technical landscape with more variations and caveats than the English language.

Also, in case anyone is wondering, the Stack Overflow numbers didn’t include WSL. If you do include that then desktop Linux usage was over 70% for personal use.