Interestingly the highest market share is in supercomputing with 100% of the top 500 since 2017. This is followed by the server market. "Big Iron" Linus said and the biggest iron it was.
I don't understand why they even split ChromeOS out. Especially with their VM system, a good number are probably reporting as 'proper Linux.'
I can't speak for worldwide usage, but I've lived in 4 school districts in the last 5 years and all required Chromebooks. I imagine actual usage is higher than reported.
In practical terms, ChromeOS is radically different from every other Linux (desktop) distro. The usecase is very different, and the day to day handling of the system is also very different.
It makes sense to track ChromeOS in it's own category.
It's not so different than a modern immutable distro with Wayland and Flatpak apps, like Fedora Silverblue.
Sure, some of the daemons are different, like upstart instead of systemd. And out of the box it supports Android apps and doesn't allow shell access outside a container.
It's managed and owned by Google. That's what makes it different. I don't agree, but there's a clear us/them divide happening with Chrome OS right now that's also generational.
The vast, vast majority of ChromeOS users are children/students and teachers. ChromeOS exists so that Google has more avenues of data collection, so that they can sell schools on their ecosystem, and so that kids grow up on Google products (Drive, Docs, Sheets, etc) instead of Windows and Office. ChromeOS is a very legitimate threat to Windows/Office. Traditional desktop Linux isn't.
Howso? I use Brave. If I install Brave in their Linux system, it appears like a native app. It runs and reports as Linux. It doesn't even know it's on ChromeOS. I imagine Firefox is the same.
What i meant is that ChromeOS is primarily an OS for (young) students/kids. The primary usecase is in an education environment, and that is the angle from with which they compete against Windows and MacOS. Furthermore, ChromeOS is arguably much more of a threat to Windows/Office than traditional desktop Linux is. Hence why it makes sense to track it seperately.
The kernel running within Android is meaningless. It's not the GUI or the runtime. It performs commodity functions. It's like saying that PEX has 50% of all indoor plumbing share. It doesn't provide any distinguishing, features and the user doesn't care about it. It's cheap, that's its value.
I would agree that the average consumer does not really need to concern themselves with what kernel their operating system. For developers though it does mean that you know your code is written for linux then you know it will work on any operating system using the linux kernel. You can even take your compiled library and reuse it between the operating systems. For people who care about the success of the Linux kernel then keeping track of its market share is nice to know.
EDIT: Depending on how you count, its more around 50% according to Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...
Interestingly the highest market share is in supercomputing with 100% of the top 500 since 2017. This is followed by the server market. "Big Iron" Linus said and the biggest iron it was.