Linux reaches new high 3.82%

markus99@lemmy.worldbanned from sitebanned from site to Linux@lemmy.ml – 838 points –
gs.statcounter.com
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Okay, I guess I'll say it. Year of Linux Desktop!

Whew, I was getting worried we were one day into 2024 and nobody said this yet.

Next year is the year of IPv6!

I wish! I've got the hardware to support it, but neither of the two ISPs available at my house support IPv6.

Could be worse. My ISP has a broken implementation.

my isp supports ipv6 but disables it in openwrt config.
i found a way to get root access to it and re-enabled it, seems to work just fine. the configuration is kinda fucked up but kinda works (dhcpv6, no slaac)

1 more...

This is very good. The higher those numbers go, the more pressure there will be for better official support for both HW and SW.

FOSS is fantastic. But lack of options (FOSS or paid) for a few of my use cases keeps me stapled to Windows and WSL. Unfortunately. I'm hoping the momentum shifts.

If literally any Adobe competitor released a product for Linux they'd dominate that niche.

I tend to agree. And people need to realize that Adobe's secret sauce is not in their apps, it's in the multi-device interoperability. I love lightroom, but it's not the photo editing ability (darkroom has that), rather it's the fact that I can seamlessly work the same catalogue from any device (even if I don't use their cloud for anything but smart previews).

I think Adobe would cash in if they supported Linux - for want of a workable alternative, I'd even pay them.

Music device manufacturers need to support Linux too. NI Maschine (and others) is simply a non-starter...

It really depends, but some tools would really do that. DaVinci Resolve, for example, has a pretty bad Linux distribution support and format, all things considered, and it's still the go-to video editor for Linux users, despite all of the issues.

Kdenlive and shotcut are also great.

They really are, but still leagues behind the features (and online learning material) compared to Resolve. I love both of them, but still, when I need to get to work with video, I still prefer to deal with Resolve's limitations than to deal with Kdenlive or Shotcut.

Fair enough! My only work with video has been very lightweight stuff and I haven't needed much else. Shotcut definitely has quirks, though I know it a lot better than kdenlive. Have not played enough with Resolve to comment, though I have it on my list to try when the opportunity presents itself.

gimp noises

I say this as a foss proponent... gimp sucks ass.

Now, Inkscape is Goat, but Gimp is nigh unusable.

When was the last time you used it? The newer versions are better and with Gimp 3 there will be many improvements.

There are lots of individual applications that do pretty well in and of themselves (darktable, gimp, krita, etc.) they have varying degrees of niceness. But what Adobe can do has no analogue in Linux land (paid or not) - it's the multi-device interoperability. It makes for unparalleled workflow. I am not an advocate your Adobe - I really wish there was someone else that did it, and I believe it is something worth paying for. Figma maybe? (but it's all cloud and was nearly knocked out by Adobe...)

(FWIW, I've never found gimp to be pleasant to use, but that is only my own subjective experience. Others like it and that's a good thing.)

I appreciate GIMP but nah, it's objectively inferior to Photoshop by a long shot and development is really slow. I mean they've only just got to GTK 3.

It's comparatively difficult to use.

Plus they insist on sticking to that infantile name. I don't know how they're expecting to get industry support with a name like that.

Don't get me wrong I use it every once in a while but damn they're so far behind it's a joke. And the worst part is they seemingly don't want the project to advance.

FOSS or paid

I hope you know the difference between Free(Libre) and Free(gratis)

I suppose what I mean is that i am happy to select whatever software is best for the task at hand. I have no issue with paying for software if it serves my needs. In a few cases, that limits my options to running windows as commercial versions are unavailable on Linux, and it is my hope that more commercial orgs start making their wares available for Linux, especially in cases where there's no available alternative.

As for splitting hairs on the difference between gratis and libre, life's too short (so if I used incorrect terminology, c'est la vie...)

I guess you don't know its difference.

Free software means freedom and not the price. There are paid free software.

By defenition, free software is software that satisfy 4 essential freedoms

Freedom 0: Freedom to run the program any way you want on any of your devices

Freedom 1: To see and study how the program works and change it according to your needs. Source code of the entire program should be visible for this freedom

Freedom 2: Freedom to share copies of the original program(sharing is caring)

Freedom 3: Freedom to share copies of the modified version which you adapted to your needs such that whole community can benefit from your modifications

So yeah this is Free software, and when you say FOSS, its not about the price, but the freedom and control you get with the software. Why is this important? Because theese non-free softwares are taking away our freedom by even limiting "us" from using our "own" devices(DRM, locked bootloader, etc.), and it will be too late to realise how most proprietary softwares we use, and ones we are forced to use, captures our freedom.

I mean, it's no secret that the SteamDeck is a huge reason why. Praise Gaben, may we game on every platform equally.

I've seriously been writing down the pros and cons thinking about switching over to Linux on my main desktop at home. It covers all the games I play now. I was very surprised.

Without the games to hold me back, I don't see why I wouldn't.

Follow Up: I'm on Linux mint! And my two favorite Windows games work just fine with zero configuration with Steam.

Do it. I switched a couple of months ago. I hated it at first, then cought on to what's different. Long story short; I never want to go back to windows.

The more the number change in that direction, the more game devs will not choose to ignore non-Microsoft Windows options too moving the needle to native support. Imagine a future where a game only works after enabling WSL with command flag workarounds if you want to play on a proprietary OS 😂

Yeah its really awesome how many games work without a flaw on Linux now, was my main reason why I still hat a Windows Partition for a long time

Its just sad that some Multiplayer Games wont work on Linux because they want to install Spyware or something that wont work

My only extreme concern, is, I run a Nvidia system. And even if my current list works, I'd be concerned about future games.

Nvidia will probably be even better supported in the future and opensource drivers are getting close to proprietary feature sets.

Wayland support has also been improving in major ways so we can have fractional scaling, HDR and all those nice things soonish.

Then in general there will be an even bigger push for games to support Linux via DXVK, Wine etc to support Steam Deck.

I would recommend trying out dual boot setup for a while and then deleting Windows when you're ready.

I know some Linux users trash talk Nvidia on Linux like it just a piece of shit. But it's simply okay. Don't get me wrong it's not great. But it works.

But if you have a simple setup it will probably work. My SO PC has a rtx 2060 and one monitor and it works fine.

You can of course always dual boot. I still have windows for VR gaming and just in case. I do recommend a stable os with Nvidia (especially if you just starting out with Linux). Something like pop os. Don't go with arch just for the meme.

With dual booting you can try Linux and test if it's okay for you. If not just give the disk space back to windows. If not great keep using Linux.

I have used nVidia on OpenSUSE since 2017, it has been 100% fine, no issues. it may help that nVidia maintains their own OpenSUSE repo for leap and tumbleweed etc

Nvidia drivers are mostly bad for Wayland afaik. Games shouldn't be particularly problematic.

I'm also running NVIDIA (RTX 4070), and while I did have to try drivers from a few different sources, I eventually got it working pretty quickly.

But my mistake was choosing an OS that doesn't bundle non-free drivers (Fedora), from what I've heard some distros like Ubuntu come with NVIDIA support by default, so I guess that's also an option.

Nvidia hosts their own RPM packages for OpenSUSE and I believe Fedora. On new installs it is just adding the nvidia repo

True, but iirc there are several alternatives, from different repositories, and i was unlucky enough that j choose the wrong one for the first time.

I'm on an Ubuntu derivative called Mint, and on the first boot it gave me a pop up from the driver tool recommending that I change to the proprietary driver with an option for one click automatic download and install.

You are correct that this is detected and handled.

I literally did this two weeks ago, switched Win11 for Fedora and so far it has been an amazing experience. So far, I only had to dual boot to Win once, and that was because I wanted to play some SteamVR games, which is the only thing I didn't manage to get working (I know there's ALVR, but SteamVR refuses to launch for me unfortunately).

Just go for it, get a new SSD drive and dual boot your choice of distro. You can always go back, and unless you use bitlocker you can just access your windows files from the Linux, so there's not need to move stuff around that much. With dualboot, you have nothing to loose.

I don't have money for a new SSD right now but my current SSD is mostly empty, 2TB. I turned off BitLocker to facilitate easy copying of files and because I'm pretty sure secure boot would be a pain. I'm running Linux Mint and I hope to go back into the windows install as little as possible. Maybe one day I'll dump it entirely.

When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It's a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we're close!

Its happening Troy

3.82% is actually pretty damn good. And if Windows 12 pushes us into a subscription model I can see that gap rising.

Also, if/when DirectX gets native Linux support, or DXVK/VKD3D matches the API in performance, that'll be it.

Personally I'm thanking Valve for this.

I'm thanking yall for this. And also idk what so different in linux, but I just want apps on here. Like I can find an alternative, but I have to say it, most of the time it's just worse. Like how do you replace AMD Software or Logitech Ghub or Realtek audio (or whatever is the deafult for win, it's so seamless).

To add to this, I can install a standalone app for every feature that AMD Software has, but I don't want to. And Ghub got de-drm-ed for like two mice, but I own a different one. Video recording and Audio settings are basically non-existen. Good luck changing the quality of your audio.

To add even more, I'm more and more used to these alternatives, so idk if I'll still cry about it in a few years. Re-learning computers is such a pain. I hope I'll be able to give linux to my kids as a norm (basically to use without terminal mastery).

Like how do you replace

Most of the time there is no 1:1 replacement, it all depends on which features you use from these apps. Some suggestions:

AMD Software

CoreCtrl can do most of the important stuff from the AMD software like GPU overclocking, custom fan curves and per-game profiles.

Logitech Ghub

Piper has a lot of support for different mice and keyboards, maybe yours are supported there?

Realtek audio

I'm not sure what Realtek audio does nowadays, which features do you need?

Video recording

OBS is available and does pretty much does the same stuff as on Windows. If you need to capture gameplay you will have to install obs-vkcapture which is the Vulkan/OpenGL replacement for DirectX capturing included on the Windows version of OBS.

Audio settings

Which settings do you require? What do you mean with "Audio quality"?

Unfortunately most Pipewire/Wireplumber settings are hidden behind config files and I'm not aware of any applications to manage them. The KDE audio settings are quite decent but limited in scope. However, most of the Pipewire settings have a sensible default and probably shouldn't be changed unless you're doing audio production.

qpwgraph is quite powerful when you need to connect multiple devices together or have virtual audio devices.

Even on Windows obs is the best performing option, last I tried (which was a few years ago granted)

They say sex is good and all, but I bet they never received a reply like this before. I'm going to respond one by one.

I mostly used AMD Software for instant replay, I miss this loads. Tried replay-sorcery like 3 times, failed all 3 times. I gained more knowledge since, fixed discord's screenshare, so I might give it another shot, but I also heard that you can get instant replay with OBS somehow.

I'd like some alternative to fancontrol, I know I could set fanspeed in the bios, idk why I don't. But I had a nice lil software that managed fans, now I don't.

Piper also doesn't support my mouse. It does however support the one I just switched from a month ago...

Idk what Realtek does, but I never had any sound related problems on windows. AKA it just worked, I'd like it back pls. I now use pipewire-pulse. Made Virtual Surround sink, loving the customization, hating the documentation. I'd still like to fix the bandwidth (I read somewhere that it's limited by default) and mess around with EQs, my lead is AutoEq.

OBS just doesn't work. But I remember it barely working on windows as well. It's popular, I can probably fix it.

I already have qpwgraph, but I don't have a use for it, I just used it to visualize, and fix connections when they're wrong. Might do some soundboard fun later with it, or in-game mic trolling :p

Thanks for the links tho, I'll look into what I can utilize. But don't get me wrong I love linux, there is just so little support, paired with such a steep learning curve.

rant: I'm not using linux for long, and I have a bunch of stuff to get working. Password manager, find nice image and PDF viewers (web browsers feels cheap), fix recording (obs can't capture and barely can anything else), get (or make) a nice theme, try out tiling window managers, set-up WMs so I don't have to dual boot anymore. While don't even get me started on stuff I have no Idea how works on linux. Like grep's powerful, how does regex work, links?, everything in /etc, bash script. hopefully I can get these answered in 2024. I hear the memes that this is the "year of linux desktop"; well it's certainly for me.

Which distro do you use? I don't really have much sound issues here and I have a pretty exotic setup.

I mostly used AMD Software for instant replay, I miss this loads. Tried replay-sorcery like 3 times, failed all 3 times. I gained more knowledge since, fixed discord’s screenshare, so I might give it another shot, but I also heard that you can get instant replay with OBS somehow.

Yes, I use OBS for that. The feature is called "Replay Buffer" and I have it running with no issues with hardware encoding. I would recommend you use the OBS flatpak, depending on your distro you might also want to use Steam in a Flatpak to make things easier.

I’d like some alternative to fancontrol, I know I could set fanspeed in the bios, idk why I don’t. But I had a nice lil software that managed fans, now I don’t.

I'm not aware of a software that controls all fans but I didn't really look since I just let them do what they want. CoreCtrl can do the GPU fan but I also leave that alone.

Piper also doesn’t support my mouse. It does however support the one I just switched from a month ago…

You might have some luck requesting support for your mouse/keyboard on their git page, maybe support can be added.

Idk what Realtek does, but I never had any sound related problems on windows. AKA it just worked, I’d like it back pls.

What does not work?

I’d still like to fix the bandwidth (I read somewhere that it’s limited by default)

There's no bandwidth limit on Pipewire that I'm aware of. The default sampling rate is 48000 if you mean that but it's a sensible default and you probably don't want to change it.

and mess around with EQs, my lead is AutoEq.

AutoEq sounds good. EasyEffects definitely can do your EQ and much much more.

there is just so little support, paired with such a steep learning curve.

The learning curve can be steep but don't be afraid to ask, there's a lot of helpful people on here. Also most Github/Gitlab projects might look intimidating but they also gladly offer support for applications there.

PDF viewers

Okular is included with KDE and is pretty competent.

Like grep’s powerful, how does regex work, links?, everything in /etc, bash script. hopefully I can get these answered in 2024.

Those are not strictly needed in order to "use" Linux but if you want to learn about them you there's a lot of resources for them out there. ChatGPT is also pretty useful in helping with bash scripts/commands since they're sometimes hard to read.

Thank you. I'll look into this "Replay Buffer" and OBS in general, as it doesn't work atm. I'm on Arch, and when I plugged in my laptop to the TV via HDMI it didn't play any sound. With some brute force commands (can't remember, could maybe check history) I managed to play a static noise on the TV, but I couldn't get it recognized as an audio device. Gave up after a while as we just wanted to watch the movie, so we found another way instead of me holding up my family with debugging.

Password manager

Basically the same as in Windows: Keepass with manual sync between devices(using Syncthing for example) or Bitwarden (Vaultvarden if like you like to selfhost and don't have enterprise account).

image and PDF viewers

I'd use a desktop environment defaults, but https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications

grep's powerful

Awk and sed are great too. Sed will also turn 50 this year.

how does regex

It's magic. You can(and should) test your regex here https://regex101.com/

Okay update: Piper does support my mouse. Which is good, because I can now config the profiles without windows. But also sad, because I'm still having my scroll wheel problem. I'll say it briefly maybe you know something about it. My mouse send hight res and normal scroll ups and downs inconsistently. When I scroll wirelessly it sends 5 hi res events, which get's turned into a normal one, so it sends both. the 5 events is inconsistent, so sometimes I don't even scroll. What apps use is inconsistent, so sometimes i scroll 5 times instead of 1, or even worse when apps wait for the 5 hi res next to each other, meaning it doesn't even scroll sometimes. But all of this is gone when I plug in. When wired my mouse only sends "normal" scroll events and everything works perfectly. I got the leads: ([1], [2], [3], [4]) (I have to admit, I haven't read all of these, at one point they just turned into technical gibberish for me)

Can't say I ever had that problem, sorry. My Logitech PRO X scrolls normally over wireless and wired.

I wonder if native D3D would really help at all. Most OpenGL drivers in Mesa are really Gallium drivers. Gallium is a low level internal Mesa API uses to implement support for higher level APIs, including OpenGL and Direct3D 9. Vulkan support isn't implemented on top of Gallium, because Vulkan is apparently lower level than Gallium is. These drivers are still pretty damn fast, despite having to go through and intermediate API. If Gallium is fast enough for OpenGL drivers, I don't see why the lower level Vulkan can't be fast enough for Direct3D drivers. As far as I'm aware, the performance difference between DXVK/VKD3D and Direct3D drivers on Windows is already negligible.

I thought the performance hit was quite substantial, like 20% to 30% lower frame rates from using dxvk. Maybe things have improved?

Native Vulkan support is of course the holy grail but so few games support it. The only few I can think of are Valve games.

Not even World of Warcraft supports Vulkan, and they've supported OpenGL for so long.

It's definitely not 20%-30% behind. I'd say the difference is usually 10% or less. Sometimes DXVK is even a little ahead. Does depend on the game and drivers, tho.

Wowzer, ok, that's seriously impressive though, like in 2022 I feel we were stuck at 2-2.5% and in 2023 we passed 3% for the first time and now we're at almost 4????? That's like DOUBLING the market share in a year

I was thinking the same thing. We've actually surpassed Apple on desktop. I know we're gonna laughingly say "year of the Linux desktop," but we have to honestly look how far we've come in a relatively short time.

mac has over 16% though, we still aren't even close

You're actually 100% right. I don't know what figure I was thinking of, but you're just right.

My journey to Linux pretty much started with the reddit thing. I moved to Lemmy and started slowly eliminating corporations out of my life.

2024 YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

I'm replacing a couple of really old PCs at work with slightly less old PCs and I know they don't meet Windows 11 specs without workarounds. I'm thinking about taking the leap but I need printer support to work. Otherwise something like open office and a web browser will do what I need. What distro should I start with? I don't have time to find a perfect fit.

Open office is a dead project, avoid at all costs. LibreOffice or OnlyOffice are active.

Probably linux mint. Everything tends to work out of the box and function the way you'd expect. If you're used to windows then cinnamon will have a familiar feel to it. I like xfce myself, but I move things around to make it feel like windows 95.

I've found Mint seems to have the best default Workspace config so i use it far more on Cinnamon than I do any other DE

I’m thinking about taking the leap but I need printer support to work.

In my experience printer support in Linux is generally pretty good. Even when it doesn't "just work" you usually need only a simple profile file from the manufacturers website that you install.

In general drivers on Linux have been way less painful for me than on Windows; most importantly you don't need an always-running application for every crappy piece of hardware.

But you still might want to check your printer manufacturer's website and/or make one prototype Linux PC and try everything out.

With that being said be prepared for users complaining about some workflow changes (that will be bigger with a switch to something like LibreOffice from MSO) and blaming every issue of theirs on Linux and you.

Please, don’t use Open Office. Dev essentially halted on it years ago when it was forked o LibreOffice. Use LibreOffice instead. The Open Office project seems to still exist to trick people into using old software.

I'd say keep it basic with Ubuntu. It's not exciting, but it 'just works' out of the box and there's TONs of support if you can't figure something out.

Debian starting with Bookworm has all the advantages of Ubuntu with none of the drawbacks of being a Canonical product.

2nd. Ubuntu is the place to be if you want your best chances for immediate compatibility, and search results will favor your popular configuration if you have issues.

3rd, but I recommend getting the kde variety (used to be called kubuntu). This will give you the most windows like experience. Regular Ubuntu ships with gnome and has a different feel to it.

Also, gnome suxxxxxxxxxxx! There, I said it!

I love KDE, but Kubuntu is a buggy mess, at least it was a year ago when I last tried it.

Honestly, the best implementation I've seen is Manjaro's, with Nobara close behind.

I've been on slackware almost exclusively for 2 decades-ish. I'm team kde. I always liked it, but I had shitty hardware from like 2010 - 2020, so I was on xfce because it's a lot lighter. But I always had kde installed so I could use some of their native apps.

90% of ubuntu support will work with mint

It needs testing to ensure you get what you need, but I found printer support worked better on Linux for my obscure printer. If you setup a CUPS server then distros will automatically find the networked printers. SUSE/OpenSUSE also has a very good GUI printer admin with lots of automatic setup and auto driver downloads...makes it so easy.

I just have a single network printer I need to access from all of our computers. A Sharp mx-4071'if memory serves. I figured it out on Linux Mint in about 10 minutes so I'm pretty happy with that.

I'm loving KDE's Neon distro that's based off Ubuntu. I've not had to do much faffing around to get it the way I want it and anyone that has used Windows should be comfortable using it. KDE Plasma feels very polished and streamlined.

Debian is solid and will come ready with office and web apps. You might want to check out if drivers are available for your printers though. You can always try it out on a live USB.

Meanwhile in India: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india (14.51%)

indias growth is so important, it's such a dense country so growth will be rapidly exponential unlike 95℅ of other countries. it's the perfect mixing pot of technologically literate, dense, money conscious, and distrustful of western influence for linux to thrive in. once india is dominated by linux, it will expand outwards so fast.

Will the scammers finally stop telling me to go to the start menu to check if I have their virus?

Are you using gnome or kde madam? Are your programs show on the left or the bottom?

No no no, sudooo no sodooo madam

I hear this like I am saying this because I am Indian. Lmao

are you using i3, hyprland, sway, or dwm maam?

Seriously, I'm impressed on just how much influence Linux has in India, not only as an OS, but as a community. I'm in charge of some of the Fedora social media accounts and it really impressed me at first how India is consistently one the top 3 countries our followers are from in all of them.

It was me checking out all the distros

based autismo

I have spent 3 days trying to install 64bit Linux on a mini PC which has 32bit UEFI. The funny thing is that this device is so slow probably I will not use it, but I still want to make it work.

What brand is it? I'm waiting for my crowdfunded mini PC which will definitely be running Linux, so I'm curious as to other people's experiences.

It is a ViewSonic, but I don't know the model. I have it's PCB and power supply only. CPU is Intel Atom x5-Z8350. Btw I have already installed Linux on it, was a really good feeling, now it is collecting dust on the shelf :D

I switched my gaming PC to Linux two months ago and I'm loving it. I've only had to boot my Windows drive twice.

What did you have to boot Windows for?

If you're used to Excel or have some specific games that are not covered with Wine it could be a good reason.

VR specifically is kind of a nightmare with older headsets. Kinda hoping Valve will do something there too.

Most of my VR games don't seem to track my head movement ;(, but Half Life: Alyx somehow works perfectly fine.

There are still VR headsets that are supported on Linux and there is a community page with a list of games and headsets supported.

It's not great, but it's getting better.

oh, definitely, it‘s just not quite at the same level of windows. But I’m exited for the near future where it very well may be!

I just installed Linux on a six-year-old budget laptop this morning. My first time using Linux. What was a uselessly slow machine is now just humming along.

I'm doing my part!

Welcome to the linux world! We wish you software freedom and hardware longevity.

Nice. That is what started me into Linux. Wife's 2011 laptop became useless with W10 upgrade, now it runs linux and she has fast browsing, zoom calls etc, and it is peppy like a new computer.

I am not saying “This is the Year of the Linux Desktop”. That said, things languished below 2% for decades and now it has doubled in just over a year. With the state of Linux Gaming, I could see that happening again.

Also, if ChromeOS continues to converge, you could consider it a Linux distro at some point and it also has about 4% share.

Linux could exceed 10% share this year and be a clear second after Windows.

That leaves me wondering, what percentage do we have to hit before it really is “The Year of the Linux Desktop”. I have never had to wonder that before ( I mean, it obviously was not 3% ). Having to ask is a milestone in itself.

I've never been a Linux guy but recently I've switched to Pop!OS on my laptop and bought a Steam Deck. Other than a few teething issues with the laptop I've had a great experience and I wouldn't consider myself ridiculously tech savvy. I'd absolutely consider switching my gaming PC over but my worry is loss of performance and being unable to use my game pass games. I'd be super happy if I could switch my PC over in the next couple of years.

Game pass is the one problem with no great solution in sight... But not great doesn't mean none. If you have an Xbox you can play them on the pc streamed over your Lan, and you can also stream games directly from the web as well.

Again, not great solutions, but it is unlikely we will see Xbox game pass running on Linux. I think MS will do anything and everything to prevent that.

Then there's the not-solution of running a windows vm. You aren't ditching windows with that entirely and, at least from what I understand, you'll need a second graphics card to dedicate to the vm to get "bare metal" performance.

I wouldn't say ChromeOS can be clarified as Linux for the sake of this number. While it of course is bases on the kernel, it still is in the hands of one company and definitely not free software. While we may talk about ChromiumOS, I would differentiate here for the sake of control over your OS.

ChromeOS is as much Linux as anything else is. It's controlled by a greedy megacorp, but so is Red Hat (IBM) or, idk, Oracle Linux. Yes it's based on an unusual immutable design, but immutable distros are now cropping up out of lots of projects (Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, amongst many others, not to mention the Steam Deck). It avoids using the GNU tool chain, but the alternatives that it uses are already used by other Linux distros (like Alpine). It now uses the standard Wayland graphics stack, and is in the process of moving from upstart (a previously widely used Linux init system) to systemd.

It's hard to come up with a definition of "Linux distro" that excludes ChromeOS without excluding a bunch of unambiguously Linux distros too.

I think you raise an interesting point. I haven't considered Red Hat Linux, but according to my definition this shouldn't be Linux then... I still don't think I feel fully comfortable calling it Linux, because a lot of stuff is watered down. Years ago I used Cloudready, and even though it was based on ChromeOS it used Flathub. I think for me that made a huge difference, because then I could install Steam, LibreOffice, Zoom and Firefox on my ChromiumOS laptop, without having to go through a Linux emulator. I still want to knoe why Google didn't use this functionality in mainstream ChromeOS.

In the current version of ChromeOS, as far as I know, either you sideload Linux or Google completely controls all app stores. For me that is a fundamental conflict with the promise of freedom and user control that Linux gives - with a simple sudo you can be lord of the world. I think your comment made me realize that that ChromeOS cannot be called not Linux, because it clearly has similarities. But Red Hat doesn't control your way of getting new apps. For me that is a major difference. Ultimately one could raise a point that MacOS is also Linux, because it uses Darwin - and so I think we need to use different definitions than just a pure "we share same technical basis".

Ultimately one could raise a point that MacOS is also Linux, because it uses Darwin

There's no basis for calling MacOS Linux. There's a legitimate basis for calling it BSD, as Darwin was forked from FreeBSD, but BSD and Linux aren't directly related. Also, Darwin has diverged considerably from FreeBSD, and only a small amount of the stack outside of the kernel shares any code, so it's not necessarily meaningful to think of it as a "FreeBSD distro" in the same sense as you would ChromeOS a Linux distro (which uses, as I mentioned in my previous comment, a more-or-less standard Linux technology stack).

In the current version of ChromeOS, as far as I know, either you sideload Linux or Google completely controls all app stores

ChromeOS lets you install Linux native applications out of the box, although it does so in containers (Crostini, which I believe is based on LXD, another standard Linux technology stack). Once you enable Linux apps, it automatically hooks you up to the Debian repositories, and you can install using apt like you would on any other Debian install.

Whether you consider Crostini to be "sideloading Linux" is a matter of semantics, but fundamentally it's no different from installing containerised LXD/LXC apps on Ubuntu or whatever, which is a common use case for developers and production servers.

For me that is a fundamental conflict with the promise of freedom and user control that Linux gives - with a simple sudo you can be lord of the world.

I think you're making an argument for why it's a bad Linux distro (from a certain perfectly valid point of view), but not that it's not a Linux distro.

There are few if any other distros which are as locked down ChromeOS out of the box, but all Linux distros can be locked down, and if you've ever used a corporate provisioned machine in a workplace or education setting then odds are you won't have any admin freedoms regardless of the distro chosen. Sudoer privileges is something you might have on your own home machine, but not something that you can expect on every Linux machine. Even on devices you own, there are devices that you might buy (such as wifi routers, DVD players, smart TVs) which run standard Linux but which are as locked down (and more) than a Chromebook; it's just that most people don't expect to have unrestricted sudo privileges on their router in the same way as they do a laptop.

For the record, I am not a Chromebook fan. I owned one once for a few years, and thought it was a disappointing, artificially limited experience, and I don't intend to have one again. ChromeOS is not my idea of a good Linux distro. But I'll still argue firmly that it is a Linux distro in all ways that matter.

I think you have raised an excellent point, which also led me to reconsider my thoughts. Truly, when you argue with my definition, a Fedora workstation in an enterprise where an end user cannot install apps shouldn't be considered Linux, because the end user isn't able to install apps on it. A few of the points you raised (e.g. LXD) I haven't even known existed. But I e.g. use Fedora Silverblue, and with Toolbox you can emulate a Ubuntu distro. Should then Silverblue be not considered a Linux distro because it doesn't offer installing native packages by itself? That would be a risky argument to make. So in the end, I thank you for the points you raised. You have led me to reconsider the topic. I especially didn't knew that Crostini was based on a Linux stack, I always thought that it was a side-loaded emulator which "replaced" ChromeOS - which even isn't logical, as I now see. So thank you, I learned something new from today and will pay more attention to see ChromeOS not as something distinct from Linux, but just as a distro with a "Google-y touch" on it. Especially now with ChromeFlex, where you can install it on every PC with a processor => toaster, it has truly become a Linux distro.

year of the linux desktop is based on how many third party apps are there, not how many people use it imo. they correlate and impact one another but arent the same

The equation for YotLD is simple for me:

Adobe looks at Linux market share and thinks, "Hmm, we could make some money from this," and ports Photoshop, After Effects, and inDesign to Linux

Or:

Adobe looks at ChromeOS and thinks, "Hmm, we could make some money from this," and ports all their programs to the web except After Effects because that involves massively extending web protocols again to support all the codecs and improving performance.

ChromeOS can run native Linux apps, so realistically if Adobe wanted to support ChromeOS they'd probably go for a Linux port anyway. A lot less work than trying to reimplement every single UI from the ground up as a web interface.

So you'd think, but why else would Adobe bother developing a web version of Photoshop? Good to know, though.

Obviously it defeats piracy, but that argument doesn't make sense if Adobe is still shipping a native version of Photoshop.

India, Greenland, Greece and Turkey are the four countries with the fastest growth of Linux users. I've checked their neighbouring countries, and it looks like they are still in the 1-2% range.

Hi from Turkey, We have nore linux users than MacOS users and I tell everyone I know to switch like the foss evangelist I am

India is the eye opener .... an enormous market of 1.5 billion people and the majority of them are too poor to pay for any specialty OS ... it's going to turn into a futuristic dystopia down there ... people living in slums but scrounging up old neglected and forgotten hardware to bring them back online with Open Source Software.

Edit: I don't normally make big corrections or changes to my comments but after rereading this, I think I went a bit too far with my assumptions about another country and culture ... thanks @embed_me@programming.dev for putting it to my attention

Ok as an Indian allow me to interject. The reason people use linux is not because of poverty. Even the cheapest laptops come preloaded with activated windows.

We get introduced to Linux based OSs in schools. That plus people are heavily pushed into engineering and lately computer science and software engineering.

I was probably too hasty in my assumptions ... simplistic, stereotypical maybe even a bit racist

I just thought it made economic sense ... why build an entire economy or business using foreign owned software and basing it all on a foreign company, especially one with unknown loopholes that would put the company's and country at risk by a foreign power.

Thanks for the correction and insight ... I'll be more careful about my assumptions in the future.

Thanks for acknowledging it.

Also another thing you are wrong about: You may be surprised to know that the second hand market for computer electronics is non-existent. As far as I know, there are only a handful of cities in the whole country where there is a second hand local market. Cheap electronics don't last that much and in laptops there are only so many components you can buy separately and install. (Overwhelming majority of the computers are laptops, not the traditional CPU towers)

Also another thing I failed to mention is, the government tried to make a distro for govt use at one point but idk if anything came out of that. But I want to say there's definitely a growing presence of linux here

That sounds like a great education setup. Hope we mirror that in the west.

Are you from kerala?

No. What prompted such a random guess?

It was not so common to use linux in schools in other states and in kerala, all government schools use a Kite Ubuntu which is fork of lts ubuntu. Its like the law to use free software for education in kerala. Me also got introduced to linux from school so i expected you are from kerala too. And Free software is most popular in kerala afaik.

The intensity of free software user group in kerala shows it too https://fsug.in/

Oh. I studied under a Gujarat board school. We had mint in our computer labs and textbooks 8 years ago. Idk what they're now

Most people in software around me in Europe are moving to OSX for the convenience and better hardware. How does it look like in India?

Honestly I'm a little surprised it's so low relative to linux. It definitely has a strong presence. I'm thinking it won't be as popular because of the lower cost to value ratio

an enormous market of 1.5 billion people and the majority of them are too poor to pay for any specialty OS

piracy is still a thing, though

Indian here. The reason isn't Windows' price tag - pirated Windows is very cheap and common - but a government push to make us less dependent on foreign (i.e. US / Chinese) companies. Schools, government offices, hospitals etc. have shifted to, or are shifting to, Linux (mostly Ubuntu and Mint). This shift started over a decade ago, but the US sanctions on Russia have spooked the government into speeding things up now.

Steam Decks?

Would that show up in browser stats though?

Steam Deck is neat and all but I've never thought of it as anybody's main browsing device.

idk about others but I do use my Steam Deck for web browsing quite heavily. It's basically my laptop right now.

For me the turning point was when a failed Windows forced upgrade ended up deleting me important files. I had backups, but I lost days of work because Microsoft felt so insecure in the face of piracy that they had to upgrade my computer despite me constantly telling them not to do so.

That was around 10 years ago. I went through various KDE distros; in the end I settled for Kubuntu.

The recent developments in KDE plasma are excellent. I haven't had to open a command prompt in years. I hadn't had a tech problem until this year when my tmp folder got full.

I haven't had to open a command prompt in years

Awesome!

I'm from the other side, though. I'm a developer and systems administrator on Kubuntu and I live by the command line. I use yakuake, which is totally awesome, and have about 50 or so shells open pretty much permanently, all nicely tucked away in tabs and sub sections in a programmable drop down that automatically starts all those command line shells when my computer boots. It's pure awesomeness, Linus os pure awesomeness!

Damn, you know, I love automation and customization, and your description sounds awesome. I certainly will jump the gap at some point, but the thought of having to relearn an entire OS and suite of tools, and inevitably make mistakes that will cost me time and -probably- multiple reinstalls discourages me quite a bit. I remember using Fedora 20-something ten years ago on my laptop and the amount of things for which I needed a terminal was overwhelming. I also remember trying to learn file management by copying/backing up files from the terminal, and ending up batch-deleting entire folders worth of pictures. I never had a reliable "readme" for learning all this, that didn't already assume I knew all the lingo and was proficient in some programming language.

I started using powershell more because it comes with a lot of bash aliases out of the box. Besides a brief period of using ubuntu in like 2006 because my windows install got corrupted, its my first foray into linux. Ive been daily driving debian 12 and i love it. I feel like getting used to the lingo helped ease the transition.

But if you actually use powershell for more than simple tasks and take advantage of its object oriented nature, it might make the switch harder. If you plan to use the command line as little as possible i think the switch is trivial. Your biggest worry is going to be analysis paralysis with all the options, but i just installed debian with the defaults and trying out different desktop environments is really easy and i havent yet had a problem that wasnt simple to solve with a google search.

Try a live USB - you might be surprised how easy and intuitive it is to use now.

Well, I have opened commands prompts, but only because because they're fast at doing stuff with files and I like that.

But I haven't NEEDED to open them to fix or configure stuff.

Back in the early 00s that was pretty much par for three course.

I use Linux (Arch actually) as my daily driver - I'm the MD of a small IT business in the UK. I have at least one employee who is asking me to create a Linux standard deployment to replace Windows because they don't like it anymore - W11 is quite divisive.

For a corp laptop/desktop you might need Exchange email - so that might be Evolution with EWS. You'll want "drive letters" - Samba, Winbind and perhaps autofs. You'll need an office suite - Libre Office works fine. There's this too: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for more MS integration - if that's your bag.

I often see people getting whizzed up about whether LO can compete with MSO. I wrote a finite (yes, finite) capacity scheduler for a factory in MS Excel, back in 1995/6 - it involved a lot of VBA and a mass of checksums etc. I used to teach word processing and DTP (Quark, Word, Ventura and others). LO cuts it. It gets on my nerves when I'm told that LO isn't capable by someone who is incapable of fixing a widow or orphan or for whom leading and kerning are incomprehensible.

I remember back in 2017, I didn't really need any big desktop apps anymore. All I used was Salesforce, Netsuite, O365, Postman... I asked my company to just give me a Chromebook. Now I hate Chromebooks and I could very much do my job on a Linux distro mainly using web apps if needed.

My IT dept would never allow it because they can't install security software on it. Obviously I'd be pretty safe from malware, but they'd have to trust that I set up firewalls and password protection because they couldn't enforce a group policy, and their data loss prevention tools wouldn't work.

Not as "safe" as you think in that regard (I use arch btw), the reason they don't want it is because you lose control as the administrator. Once everyone is running some flavour of Linux and people report problems, guess who's gotta look at it? The IT department. It's a management nightmare compared to windows.

As arch users, we would never need the help of some low-level IT person though. That would be ridiculous.

Good point. The company would not only save money by not buying windows, but by not even having an IT department

Risk compliance forces the IT department to do certain things. Don't hate on the chill guys

Zorin Grid looks promising...whenever that will make it to market

I solved that by social engineering our IT to join my "Windows" computer into the domain, which was actually just a Windows VM. They didn't notice, and I'm free to Linux away.

This may be a controversial opinion but I would rather use the web version of Outlook than Evolution. I have been trying to use Evolution since the Ximian days but I was never really happy with it. I gave up on it in favour of web Outlook a couple of years ago.

2 more...

I suspect that it's not Linux that is on the rise, but overall PC market that is shrinking. It's been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.

The desktop/mobile ratio chart aligns with this

https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet

I remember looking at pc sales data, and they have been shrinking in the last decade, with the curve flattening until the pandemic, when sales grew substantially, almost to the 2000s level. Now it's shrinking back slowly. I'm not sure if people are abandoning desktops in favor of phones as much as we think. desktops are durable and we tend to have only one, while mobile devices are gaining different forms, and people are getting more of them. Perhaps the desktop market has not much more room to grow while mobile devices are still booming.

But that's just one possible explanation, I might be wrong. I was going to post the data, but statista requires login to see it.

I don't know if we know it's shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1'23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There's a way to read it as shrinking, but there's also a way to read it as stabilizing. There's just not enough samples to be certain.

What we have to remember is that we're finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a "value stall" that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.

I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.

And yet here I am looking to expanding my devices with a replacement server (linux) and a NUC (linux).

Finally ditched Windows on the desktop forever, about 7 months ago.

I agree with you on mobile. I my country many ppl ditched laptops and desktops for their phones.

Although I have a hard time understanding how they can actually get some work done on the phone, if they do any work from home that requires a computer. Well those ppl probably have an old laptop laying around.

I don't know what everyone else's case is, but my work provides a laptop. None of my home machines have Windows, but the work laptop does.

Yeah, many workplaces here do not offer a laptop, its more of "bring your own device" kinda thing.

But of course, some do.

I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.

In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3'20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.

It’s been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.

Can't do that if you play games.

Also that's half of the reason Windows hasn't lost the war on home desktop PCs yet. Another half is office applications.

Actually, these are thirds.

Another reason making me say so is that no major user-friendly distribution wants to be just that, they all have a particular madness with no good reason for it.

So I don't know what to recommend, there should be something off the top of my head, but that'd be "just install Debian, it's fine".

So, any single reason of these going away would accelerate Linux adoption notably. Any two would make it a trend visible to housewives. And all three would resemble the flight of ICQ users to Skype.

Can’t do that if you play games.

I recently been arguing with some dude about some PUBG mechanics. It took me quite some time to realize that he was playing PUBG mobile, never played the PC version or even knew that it even existed for that matter. For him, PUBG simply meant PUBG mobile. For those people, they don't even consider using PC for gaming. They might consider console, but PC to them is just more or less a typewriter for school/office tasks.

I've been thinking for some time what to answer and concluded that the normie world is a world of pain.

We - as in FOSS OS users and FOSS paradigm users - desperately need open hardware, so that the rest of the industry could eat all the rubber dicks they want without affecting us significantly.

And I mean not only hardware design, but fabs.

It may seem an impossible future, with semiconductor deficit etc, and Taiwan being that important.

And with starting a fab being so expensive.

Still, they only way a conclusive FOSS victory resulting in even balance happens is if there is a public fab producing general-purpose hardware with public design.

Because right now lots of resources are being wasted on catching up in inherently disadvantageous areas, like supporting proprietary hardware which is always harder for FOSS developers than for MS or Apple.

Without full-chain FOSS hardware production it'll always be bare survival.

What's Ubuntu's "particular madness"? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they've chilled out on that.

I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won't be enough because there aren't ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don't need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There's nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

It's not that linux can't win on games or office. It's that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00's, but I quickly realized that there will never be a "year of the linux desktop" regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.

And that's ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.

What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”?

I remember that it does too much, but without specifics. It's been 4+ years since I touched Ubuntu.

They used to be a little FOSS-only

I vaguely remember that "Amazon lens" for Unity, I don't think they ever were that much FOSS-only.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives.

It's fine. That'd still be goal fulfilled.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it.

How so?

There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

I recently had a problem with LO, while editing a document with lots of math formulae - from time to time while adding a formula about half of others (in the whole document) would just become empty.

Not sure something like that would happen under Apple suite's analog of Word, whatever it's called.

It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both.

With that I agree, somewhere in 2012 I somehow realized that it's already much better than the alternatives, and yes, for a housewife's desktop just as well, if one's honest and thinks of their own needs.

And if one's comparing it to advertising of the competing commercial products, then it's hopeless.

date '+%Y is the year of the Linux desktop'

Let’s go! It’s always great to see people wrestle control back from the corporations.

On my laptop, I've switched to Linux since, despite being built in 2017, doesn't meet Win 11's min requirements. This is horseshit, I don't care how MS explains it or justifies it, there's nothing wrong with it. I'm sure during development, they realized a 20 year old computer could run Win 11 and decided to make up requirements to force people into buying new PCs.

Anyway, I'm using KDE Neon and I'm loving its ease of use and simplicity. I have barely needed to dive into the terminal to fix anything and KDE Plasma feels very polished and user friendly. To me, it feels like the new "normie-friendly" Linux. And without the horseshit telemetry and Microsoft spying, it's like a brand new PC.

I'm a sysadmin and we are in the very early stages of rolling out windows 11 to our users. Windows is windows, but I just can't help but have observations that windows 11 looks like KDE did maybe 10 years ago? It's like a badly themed linux distro from 2015..

It is arbitrary: my HP Zbook initially offered W11 upgrade, but we use corporate stuff and our software wasn't certified on W11 yet so I held off. Months later we get a notice that the Zbook no longer meets requirements for W11 LOL

I wonder if that dip in Windows in April, going down to like 62%, and the correlated boost for "Uknown" operating systems to 13% might somehow simply be Windows not being recognized properly and categorized as unknown?

It seems a bit far-fetched to me that a bunch of Windows users would for 1 month suddenly all decide to use ReactOS, FreeDOS, BSD, Solaris, Illumos, Haiku, Redox, and Plan 9.

Yeah probably some chrome update which made statscounter to fail to determine the OS, probably

I just ditched my old Windows 10 PC for a raspberry pi 5, and am running KDE Plasma.

It's refreshing to have an operating system that doesn't suggestive sell to me.

That seems like a odd choice. Raspberry pis are limited and require the raspberry pi kernel and proprietary binaries.

Couldn't you have just install Linux mint on your PC and called it a day? It would likely have better performance.

It was a specific choice. My PC is a little long in the tooth, sucks power, and is overly loud for where it was situated.

The pi is doing fine for my relatively non-demanding usage. If I do set up the old PC again, I'll probably wind up installing Mint or something, rather than buy upgrades and crap to support Windows 11.

If adobe would be willing to port its creative suite to linux that number would increment faster

We have Gimp and kdenlive. What else could you possibly need.

Edit: Just to clarify this was only a half serious comment

Well, i got some feedback, most creative people don't find gimp good, they won't switch.

Well dunno if it's because gimp lacks good tool that ease up their workflow or because we teached them adobe suite.

During my art course it was : adobe suite and autocad with 3d max.

But i knew blender, gimp and scribus way before entering art school because i disagree with adobe's licensing system and found it very expensive.

Imho, the current best creative software on linux is Blender. There is also Darktable and Rawtepee for light, contrast.

For inkscape, krita, i can't compare, i never used adobe illustrator, nor corel drawer.

Scribus is good, almost perfect but it lacks a very important feature that i can't replicate. Adobe Indesign is far more easier because of the guideline that tell ya this item is correctly aligned and has the same size.

Kdenlive, well featured but i find adding video effect easier on adobe premiere pro. And kdenlive had a lot stability issue, i lost my work several time and that's how i learned to setup automated save.

Autocad easily outmatched freecad, there were a huge difference in functionnalities. I don't know if it has changed since 10 years. It probably improved a lot.

I apologize for my english grammar.

I know this is probably tongue-in-cheek, but if you wanted the serious answer:

GIMP:

  • Non-destructive Editing (it's coming real soon!)
  • Vector shapes, not bitmap
  • Smart objects
  • Full CMYK support
  • Full PSD support (for collaboration purposes), hahaha
  • KILL ALL FLOATING SELECTIONS

Kdenlive:

Well, I actually do use Kdenlive. I'm fine with Lightworks too, and Resolve on macOS. But it's lacking finer color grading controls, the interface is inefficient (being fixed in a future release), hardware-based decoding/encoding needs to either exist or be improved.

And the other big reason is collaboration with other Adobe users.

Personally I don't want people to switch to linux without caring about software freedom. I mean it might be nice to run adobe software in linux but I will not use it, and such softwares have same problems like "windows" which we are switching away from. They are proprietary programs from corporations which doesn't even satisfy freedom 0.

I didn't care about software freedom very much until after I switched to Linux, so I'll keep recommending Linux to anyone willing to listen.

Well yes. I agree reccomending linux to others. But if the only reason someone isn't switching linux is because some proprietary app doesnt support it, i don't see they will care about free software later on. Also not everyone are like you and me, and may use linux without caring about software freedom at all.(I have a friend who uses google chrome AND edge)

I guess part of software freedom, for me, is that I don't care what other people choose to do, I just use and recommend Linux and other open source software wherever I can.

Absolutely wild that you'd purity test people and recommend against them using Linux just because they wouldn't be using it for the reason you want them to...

I am not against people using linux for some other reason but I don't want to promote linux just for people to use proprietary software. They could, but i am not interested in them and does feel useless if its not for software freedom. (That doesnt mean i am against people using them)

Btw if you dont know, software freedom is not about using whatever software you need. Its about a software that gives you the four essential freedoms

Linux is useless except for software freedom.

Alright, I take it back. With a sales pitch this bad, it's maybe a good thing for you to hold back on the Linux evangelism.

I started caring about foss software only after i switched to linux

I mean If you have all thoose proprietary apps availiable in linux, you probably wouldnt be introduced to foss apps. You probably keep on using the proprietary software you used in windows

Very cool. I wonder how much the steam deck helped in this push

about three fiddy

What a great news.

it would be very interesting also the kids had some aknowledge on school about linux, besides windows. Would be open mind to get new apprentices. Besides that, for the normal human being/worker, who only uses PC for internet and office, linux can be taken into account, since it is open source.

I know linux is harder to learn than windows for an average joe, but I guess teaching kids with two OS (windows and linux) give to them more capacity too choose and give them more software/hardware skills

(Im not using linux rn just because imo windows is more stable to edit videos, but in the future, is probably to return to the pinguin)

(Sry about my bad english)

No need to apologize for your English ability.

I have been trying to start a community here where people can ask English questions.

!englishlearning@lemmy.com

I can see a few mistakes with your grammar and I would be happy to help or answer any questions you may have.

Thats class! Ty for the reply and your help. Sometimes I use translator apps/sites, but I know is not too accurate and I do some corrections (I guess?! Ahah) from these apps/sites. And yeah, other times i just write without any help.

My problem is with grammar plus I dont have too much vocabulary too understand certain things. But, one more time , ty for your help, appreciated a lot!

Nice, at this pace we'll reach 50% in less than 50 years!

I know it's a joke, but if linux keeps growing steadly, without saturating, it can reach a point in which it breaks the "I don't use it because no one else does/ I don't use it because my software isn't supported" barrier and start to grow exponentially.

https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology

Considering their methodology, I wonder how many of these are Steam Decks registering as "desktops" when they visit a website in the web broweser?

I would consider the steamdeck to be a linux desktop if someone is browsing the internet on it.

I agree, but it's definitely marketed as a gaming console of a sort, and not really marketed as a full-fledged PC.

So, imho, that technically skewers the numbers a bit, as it's not a "desktop" in the traditional sense.

I mean, I'm still not calling 2023 the "Year of the Linux Desktop." I'm calling it the "Year of the Portable Linux Gaming Console."

The growth in percentage in Linux in Steam metrics is almost entirely because the Steam Deck.

When you are using the steamdeck in handheld mode there is no web browser unless configured from desktop mode. The desktop on the steamdeck is no different to my computer therefore I don't think it's fair to wave it off as a console. It's far closer to a pc than a console.

It’s far closer to a pc than a console.

Ehhh, you have to spend money on a decent dock to be able to use it with any consistency as a desktop. Sure, software-wise, it's not a console, it plays PC games.

However, it's physical form factor is a console. It looks and functions out of the box far more like a Nintendo Switch than a IBM ThinkPad.

It's literally a gamepad with a screen and no keyboard or mouse. So despite being a PC platform, I would still consider this a "console," based on outward-facing form factor alone, personally.

That's a fair point. Since we are talking about linux os share, the software that's running on the device is more important to me than the form factor. What's running on my steamdeck is so close to what's running on my desktop pc that when I'm browsing the web on my steamdeck I'd consider myself browsing on linux rather than browsing on specifcally steam os.

You cant be sure, Valve pushing Steam Deck and Proton is what made me switch to Linux as lot of games now works but I haven't bought a Steam deck

Just made the switch at the end of December alongside making my new PC. Feels very refreshing to actually be in control of my own computer. I’ve barely run into any issues gaming either, which is a welcome surprise - Proton remains one of the best things Valve has ever done.

I'm one of the converts. Didn't like Windows 11 at all, decided to try Ubuntu/Zorin before going back to 10 and ended up staying. I've tried various distros many times over the past ~15 years but it never felt "ready" to me until now.

The last few years have had great improvements. For any average user (like a kid or adult that just browses web, streams video, zoom calls, etc) there is no reason a Linux desktop can't be their main system.

I've been really happy with fedora, specifically the KDE spin. Looks amazing and a lot of things just work.

This is the year I'm porting my family to Linux. Starting this summer!

Nice, lets keep the moment going. Another great year for Linux and open source.

Windows 11 has irked me on my main laptop. I still use it due to various applications (not just games) that require Windows, but the slowness of the OS and the tracking drive me away from it. I installed Linux on another drive on the laptop.

Additionally, I purchased a desktop from my friend, and completely wiped Windows from it to install Linux (KDE Neon). I realized there is nothing that I'd want from that desktop, possibly aside from a couple of games my more powerful laptop can run, that Linux cannot run.

Remember to include the android distro

I wouldn't call that "desktop" Linux.

Chrome OS 2.42%

This one good enough to include?

Is the chrome OS not full-fledged? I used it once ten years ago. Seemed fine.

It’s a linux distro that relies on a proprietary JavaScript/web user space

I would only count the ones that aren't locked down and you can get into the Linux kernel and root user.

That said the low specced laptops might as well be large size mobile phones.

I mean it's a locked down gento system that now allows you to install popular open source software, and it's linux-y enough to get businesses to be less linux-hostile in their software and webapps

I also noticed this and a bit surprised. Ah well, gotta see if it is a fluke though.

I'm really suspicious of those numbers, seeing the sudden drop in macOS and Chrome OS, but I'm hoping so much that those are accurate. Things are slowly but surely getting better.

So some people switched to phone only after Windows 8 security stopped...

Jokes aside, it's cool to see it move up no matter how small the move is.

I would switch in a heartbeat if MS office would be on Linux. I have tried all alternatives, including MS office online and I always encounter some kind of formatting fuck up. That's just not acceptable for my job.

MS knows this of course.

you could run it in a vm if you really have to, they have very low overheard on modern computers. mine isn't even modern, it's a thinkpad x230 laptop, it can run a win10 vm without slowdown. also hlps to have a vm sitting around in case oyu need it for anything else

Can I ask what you're using? I tried virt-manager with a win 10 installation and it barely works. Granted an i5 5200U is not beefy by any means but at 100% CPU usage everything just stutters.

Please Mr Biden weaponize Android and Windows. We need your wise actions to spur the development of free and open alternatives.

Android is practically Linux, it uses a Linux kernel and is also mostly open source though heavily controlled by Google

It uses the Linux kernel but the user space is so different that is has nothing in common with a regular Linux distribution.

Also it strongly depends on Google proprietary apps (and Play Store, Play Services...).

Yes you can have a de-Googled Android, but it's still very different from a typical Linux install.