this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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If you look at the commercially successful variants of Linux (ChromeOS and Android), you'll see that taking away freedom/choice was the first thing they did.
And ultimately, if you are targeting the mass market, that's almost required.
ChromeOS isn't successful.
Successful compared to what? I don't have data, but I'd venture to say that it's the most popular desktop Linux distro.
It's a bit past its peak, but in 2023 it had 7% market share in the quite lucrative North American market. That's not nothing. In North America, all other Linux distros combined just overtook ChromeOS this year. World-wide it was last year.
There's also no other Linux distro that comes pre-installed on devices from different manufacturers (at least none that I know of).
Yes. By the porn stats, Linux already crushes ChromeOs. Let's not take any advice from it.
Well, all Linux distros combined are more than ChromeOS. If you split up by distro, ChromeOS is still the top Linux distro by far.
Interesting. I would have guessed that Mint gave ChromeOS a run for it's money, by now.
Really difficult to actually get good numbers here since there's a ton of sampling bias and user agent strings (which are used for most of these market share detectors) don't capture Linux distros apart from ChromeOS.
But we can combine sources to get somewhere.
The Steam Hardware and Software Survey doesn't include any data on ChromeOS, because there's no Steam on ChromeOS, but it says that there's a total market share for Linux of 3.2% with the most common Linux Distro being Arch with a market share of 0.32% (probably due to the Steam Deck), followed by Mint with 0.24%.
So double the maket share to get roughly to the 6.3% total Linux maket share from PH, and we get Arch with 0.64% and Mint with 0.48%, which is both much much lower than the 2.4% of ChromeOS on PH.
Nice! Thanks for sharing this analysis.
Standardization is a requirement. Whether that still gives the user the ability to color outside of the lines on what's considered "standard" will be the key factor.