Is Linux market growth stagnated (at least)?

This is temporary and only reflects a change in user habits with the introduction of tablets to the general user base. Your methodology however in my mind demonstrates the Linux community’s inability to articulate a unified message to consumers. Why does the Linux community need to be so specific when purism only hurts what could be some of Linux’s success in the minds of consumers? Remember Apple really didn’t succeed until they gave up the RISC vs. CISC type arguments, so much so that they ended up on basically the exact same hardware as Windows.. They did that because consumers don’t understand those kinds of arguments and in the face of confusion they will go with what they think is easiest to understand. Red Hat didn’t try to change the way corporate customers think. They espoused instead, certifications and acronyms. These identifiers while needed and clearly demonstrate true degrees of sysop capability, when it comes to technology in the enterprise whether you’re talking about Windows, Red Hat or Solaris, its all just acronyms that managers use without actually understanding most of the time what they’re even talking about. The only division in any corporation that is tasked to understand the tech is IT, the other divisions just talk without a clue so who could change that and why try? Linux on the other hand is constantly trying.

Unix and unix inspired OSs like Linux are vastly successful. The way you sidelined Android’s numbers is the same way Apple acts as though OS X is somehow different. OS X correlates directly to KDE & Gnome. The rest is BSD like any other BSD or even Solaris. Apple nor Red Hat nor Ellison (Solaris & Unbreakable) are trying to make arguments about kernels, boot partitions, boot managers or anything else as byzantine and likely to confuse the public. Biggest picture terms, other than technological nuances (ZFS, jails, systemd), the biggest difference between most of the OSs is the licensing which again most people don’t read and free apparently isn’t as big a persuasion, when you look at Apple’s and Red Hat’s pricing models. The linux community has to meet general users where they are. Red Hat is baddass in the enterprise and Suse rules HPC, but you can’t sale that. Opensource doesn’t have to be a business but it does have to be business minded if it wants higher market share.

When the Linux community is able to accept that it has much more in common with the high priced ecosystems that Apple, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, and HP have built around Unix and unix like OSs than differences, It may have an easier time understanding what it needs to do to make its case to consumers. Besides commercial interest use opensource advancements all the time and despite having the marketing budgets to tell the world about it, they never do. Apple did get its OS Unix not UNIX certified, but that was before they realized the world doesn’t actually care. Just us.

Web stats are really not all that meaningful. You have two kinds of stats from the web; user-agent stats, and search term stats. User-agent stats are meaningless, because they’re skewed by many factors, such as false user-agents, and the type of user who visits particular sites generating the stats. Search terms WILL decline because Linux is offering a far far stronger “out of the box experience”. It used to be a struggle to set up a Linux box, try installing it and the installer doesn’t load, search for solution. Install it and most of the hardware doesn’t work, lots of searching to find the solutions for all that. Eventually muddle your way through to a usable system. A modern Linux distro, however, is basically a matter of sticking in the disk and following the prompts, the end result is a system that 90% of the time, works fully, 10% of the time requires *minor* tweaking.

The decline in the stats is probably due to the improvement in the Linux experience, as well as the decline in the desktop. Because you insist on counting Android separately from MS, you should know that Android devices are outselling MS and apple **COMBINED**. This really speaks of a fundamental shift in computing. Desktop computers (and laptops) may not actually be declining in numbers, but they most certainly are in PROPORTION.

Now to get a truly accurate count of Linux installations, unfortunately, requires that you have access to MS and apple OS registration and update checking statistics. MS more than apple, of course. I forget where I saw the reference, but there was some documentation from MS that actually placed Linux market and user share ABOVE that of apple. How do they know? Well every new computer that gets sold with an MS license but never checks in… they can calculate to 10 decimal places how many new computers get their MS wiped clean.