this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Oh, it's because of AI alright. Because Windows users are tired of it being shoved down their f***ing throats.
(I'm just being sarcastic for the fun of it…)
Definitely a mix of both. I estimate bot pollution is likely growing much faster than natural Linux desktop adoption, though. Simply because LLM based bots are appearing everywhere. I wouldn‘t be surprised if Linux Desktop breaks the 25% mark soon just because of bots.
I do buy the argument that the majority of the shift is due to AI bots / agents. Just looking at the robots.txt I had to implement just to try to keep the majority of bots off my websites is insane (literally 160+ lines of user agents).
But there are some other factors, such as the seemingly steady migration of users from Windows to Linux. I don't buy the Valve hardware argument as much since the majority of those will be used for gaming on Steam, and not likely to be seen by StatCounter or Cloudflare.
Those are just the bots kind enough to specify a real user agent too 🥲