36 Fascinating Linux Facts and Statistics in 2024

Last Updated on January 5, 2024 by James Wilson

Windows dominates the majority of the operating systems market, with 82.56%, however, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other operating systems to consider. Linux actually powers a lot of global technology, some of which you probably didn’t even realise.

Linux refers to a family of open-source operating systems. These use the Linux kernel and include Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, etc. Linus Torvalds, who created the original Linux code, was born in Finland. I bet you didn’t know he actually has an asteroid named after him!

Linux is incredibly powerful, though it only holds a 0.89% market share. It’s for this reason that I felt it was imperative to dig a little deeper under the covers to find out more about Linux.

General Linux Statistics

The Linux kernel has around 27.8 million lines of code in its Git repository
In 2019, 100% of the world’s supercomputers run on Linux
Android holds the highest OS market share with 38.9%
96.3% of the world’s top 1 million servers run on Linux
Of the top 25 websites in the entire world, only 2 websites aren’t running on Linux
Linux was launched on September 17, 1991

Linux Usage Statistics

85% of all smartphones are based on Linux
The Linux market share on desktop is 1.89%
Linux holds a 1.19% market share of operating systems in Europe
In the U.S., the operating system market share for Linux is 0.96%
In the U.K., the Linux market share drops to 0.62%
In 2018, the number of Linux games available on Steam reached 4,060
95% of the servers that run the world’s top 1 million domains are powered by Linux
In 2018, 25.3% of professional developers used Linux
In 2019, 54.1% of professional developers used Linux
83.1% of developers claim that they prefer to work on Linux as opposed to other operating systems

Linux Demographic Statistics

Of users using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, 22.3% are in the U.S.
59% of people using Ubuntu use the English language
98% use amd64 OS architecture
In 2016, 10.5% of the developer population were women
Of the Linux kernel git population, 9% are women
The countries that use Linux the most are India, Russia, and Cuba
Utah and Canada in the U.S. prefer Linux to other states

Linux Code Statistics

Systemd now has nearly 1.3 million lines of code
There were nearly 75,000 code commits to the kernel during 2019
The top contributors by email domain were Intel and Red Hat
The top contributing individuals were Linus Torvalds, with 3.19% of the commits
There were 4,189 different contributors overall in 2019
Systemd had 43,000 commits in 2019
The top contributor was Yu Watanabe with 26.94% of the commits

Interesting Linux Facts

90% of Hollywood’s special effects are made on Linux
90% of the public cloud workload runs on Linux
Every major space program uses Linux
96.3% of the world’s top 1 million servers run on Linux
Sony’s PS4 runs on Orbis OS, which is developed on a Linux-based kernel
In 2018, 75.16% of smartphones worldwide ran on Linux

36 Fascinating Linux Facts and Statistics in 2024

General Linux Statistics

Linux Usage Statistics

Linux Demographic Statistics

Linux Code Statistics

Interesting Linux Facts

References

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