posted in Technology
Linux just cracked 10% desktop usage in North America, but no one's sure why
www.techspot.com/news/113326-linux-cracked-10-desktop-usage-north-america-but.html
TechSpotLinux just cracked 10% desktop usage in North America, but no one's sure whyThe shift stands out because the change was not gradual but abrupt. Linux's rise came largely at Windows' expense, while macOS saw only limited movement over the...
Replying to @sanitation@lemmy.today
the AI explanation and reasoning is weak. what does “largely disappears” mean without numbers? Cloudflare doesn’t do vibes; give me numbers. in any case “desktop” surely means that the user-agent reflects a desktop browser and not a CLI tool, right? otherwise this number would be closer to 90% than 10%. unless the agents are intentionally spoofing browser user-agents i don’t buy it.
no mention of Steam’s and Framework’s hardware offering that come with Linux? no mention of the clear mass migrations?
here’s an AI explanation: LLMs are helping people who otherwise would struggle move to Linux
Replying to @chrash0@lemmy.world
Crawlers—even the honest ones—have been spoofing browser User-Agent strings (partially or completely) since the beginning of the commercial Internet. Why would they do this? To dodge bad browser-sniffing scripts, which I still run into from time to time.
Replying to @nyan@lemmy.cafe
sure, but is that implying that 5% of this traffic is bad faith or rogue agents? the tools built into Claude Code and Codex surely have their own user-agent settings.
and why would they spoof Linux instead of Windows?
Replying to @chrash0@lemmy.world
sure, but is that implying that 5% of this traffic is bad faith or rogue agents?
Given the volume of requests that have been semi-DDOS’ing a lot of servers? 5% is probably an underestimate.
the tools built into Claude Code and Codex surely have their own user-agent settings.
“Surely” is like “assume”—it says more about the speaker than the entity being discussed. They almost certainly don’t use completely distinct strings (no one does—they all start with “Mozilla/5.0”); at most they might have tacked an additional bit on at the tail. And that’s if they’re being aboveboard.
and why would they spoof Linux instead of Windows?
Why not? But actually, this may be due to an incorrect assumption on the part of the stats collectors. Typical strings for bots that admit to being bots don’t specify an OS: “Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot” as opposed to, say “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.0” or “Mozilla/5.0 (Android 15; Mobile; SM-G556B/DS; rv:130.0) Gecko/130.0 Firefox/130.0”. If they’re dumping anything without OS markers into the “Linux” bucket, that might do it.
Replying to @nyan@lemmy.cafe
what i mean is that Claude Code wouldn’t report as a Linux desktop browser without some nefarious behavior. what i mean by “surely” is that it would be shitty of Anthropic or OpenAI to do that for no benefit on their part. curl, wget, httpie, xh, whatever client use a specific user-agent that would be a reasonable default to use for any agent without fucking around pretending just to skew metrics.
those header report that they’re bots.