this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Linux just cracked 10% desktop usage in North America, but no one's sure why (www.techspot.com)
submitted 3 hours ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] chrash0@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 1 points 18 minutes ago

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.