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Desktop Linux makes gains
Desktop Linux grows, open-source WordPress battles and open source vs AI
Steven Vaughan-Nichols
July 21, 2025
At long last, after years of waiting for the "Year of the Linux desktop," we're getting somewhere.
According to the US Federal Government Website and App Analytics, which I trust more than StatCounter, 6% of its visitors over the last month were using Linux operating systems.
This website keeps track of US government website visits and analyzes them. On average, there have been 1.6 billion sessions in the last 30 days, with millions of users participating daily.
If you add in Android (16.2%) and Chromebooks (0.8%), you're talking about 23% of visitors using Linux, which puts it above MacOS (11.7%), Windows 10 (15.7%), and Windows 11 (15.3%), which is downright impressive. Take that, Windows!
I’d been a happy WordPress user since I switched from the Vignette content management system (CMS) for WordPress in 2003. Many others quickly joined me. Today, 43.5% of all websites use WordPress. But, then in 2024, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, who founded and is the CEO of Automattic, WordPress’s parent company, declared that WordPress hosting power WP Engine was a “cancer to WordPress” and things got really ugly really fast.
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In the meantime, Automattic stopped contributing to the WordPress Core code and associated projects such as Gutenberg, the default WordPress editor. In late May, Automattic started contributing code again. Mullenweg has also restored some, but not all, of his critics’ WordPress accounts. However, the conflict, both inside and outside WordPress, has continued to leave developers and users worried about the program’s fate.
Thus, the Linux Foundation decided to get involved by launching the FAIR Package Manager. FAIR, which stands for Federated And Independent Repositories. It is led by WordPress developers, including some of its internal critics. It’s meant to address the problem that, practically speaking, WordPress is under Mullenweg’s control since he’s both CEO of the WordPress company and the “steward” of the WordPress non-profit organization.
Anyone who runs a website knows how annoying AI bots are these days.
F5, the application delivery network company, found that more than half of all web visits come not from people but from data scrapers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity AI bots.
People are sick and tired of wasting money on their sites only to have AI companies rip off everything of value. So, Xe Iaso, a technical educator and part-time bot fighter, wrote an open-source program, Anubis, to stop AI bots in their tracks.