On August 9, 2026, Roy Schestowitz, who runs the Linux news aggregator Tux Machines, posted a short piece called “Data Points on GNU/Linux Growth”. Rather than quoting a market-share survey, he looked at his own server logs.
What the numbers say
Two days before the post, Tux Machines served 1,335,694 web requests. Its sister site served another 882,453 the same day, for more than 2.2 million requests in 24 hours. Schestowitz says it is “safe to assume most of them were bots”, meaning crawlers and AI scrapers. Even so, he believes real human traffic has more than doubled in recent years.
His reasoning is simple. Surveys show more people are using GNU/Linux, so more people should be searching for Linux information and reading Linux news sites. He reads the traffic as a sign that “many people nowadays explore, research or already use GNU/Linux.”
Why a traffic log is a weak but useful signal
Request counts from one site are not market share, and the post doesn’t claim they are. Here are the main caveats:
- Bots dominate raw counts. A request log mixes people, search crawlers, feed readers and AI scrapers. Unless you filter by user agent and behaviour, the total mostly measures how often you are crawled.
- One site is one audience. Growth at a single news aggregator can come from better search rankings or links from social media just as easily as from new Linux users.
- The direction still matters. When several independent sources point the same way, the trend is easier to believe. Those sources include web analytics surveys, CDN data like Cloudflare Radar, and the traffic of community sites.
Why it matters to sysadmins
If you run your own blog, documentation site or package mirror, you can do the same kind of check yourself. Pull a day of access logs, split out obvious bots by user agent, and compare the result with the same day a year earlier. With goaccess or a few lines of awk against your Apache or nginx logs, it takes a few minutes. It also shows you how much of your bandwidth goes to scrapers rather than readers. That is worth knowing before you decide whether to rate-limit or block them.
For the bigger picture, see our posts on Cloudflare’s desktop Linux numbers for North America and Linux usage trends in India and Africa.
Source
Original post: https://tuxmachines.org/n/2026/08/09/Data_Points_on_GNU_Linux_Growth.shtml by Roy Schestowitz, Tux Machines. Found via the Linux News app.
Related guides: Linux Desktop Use Surged to 22% on One Workday, Cloudflare Data Shows | India and Africa Phasing Windows Out? What the GNU/Linux Usage Numbers Show
2 Comments