Hacker News Reader

Comment by MeinBlutIstBlau | Hacker News Reader

>I’m very curious if we’ll start seeing a move off of windows for gaming rigs with this

Not even in the slightest. Linux marketshare is still insignificant to even Chromebooks. This is just the echo chamber that is HN that thinks Linux is bigger than it is. Remove all CS majors in the world and I'd wager the amount of people who've touched Linux is less than .01%

Edit: I love how HN downvotes because someone gives them a reality check on their beloved Linux. I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.

View on HN

Unlike Android, Chrome OS is actually a full fledged desktop GNU/Linux distribution. It's Gentoo-based (used to be Ubuntu) and runs desktop Linux apps.

Though even outside of that you'd be surprised where people have unknowingly used Linux. ATMs, Point-Of-Sale, Infotainment (Planes/Cars), public transit, arcades, etc. I'd estimate that a majority of people have had some interaction with a Linux-based system.

> I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.

One of my grandparents runs Ubuntu and they're able to handle their email and documents just fine. Arguably better than the others who run macOS/Windows. You can find plenty of similar anecdotes online; if all you need is a browser and possibly basic word processing it's not all that different.

It's not Gentoo based. It just uses portage as a package manager in dev mode. ChromeOS has it's own rendering system separate from X and Wayland entirely.

> I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.

This is what I call the "Granma case". Considering the uses case is very well defined and the possibility of using exotic hardware and services and basically never needing to install any software; this is the situation where linux shines the brightest. My mom has being using linux having 0 idea what it was and needed 0 assistance to browse the web, access social networks, see photographs and videos and listen to music. That's all she does and any modern linux is much better than windows for this specific use case. No need to care about anti-virus, degrading performance, malware, advertisements... it is perfect for that.

I do the same with my parents in law, and it’s been like 8 years without call for maintenance, if not for the very rare Ubuntu upgrade.

Yeah honestly 99% of what most casual user do on a computer is in the browser, and Linux does that just fine. And it's way less noisy in terms of random notifications, upgrade spam etc. so it is not a bad choice for unsophisticated users.

Also things don't randomly move around so much between upgrades like they do on commercial OS's.

> Remove all CS majors in the world and I'd wager the amount of people who've touched Linux is less than .01%

Android. I'd say a huge percentage of computing device users have Linux in their pocket and quite literally touch linux on regular basis.

> I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.

I've done this, 10 years ago with my aging Mom and Dad and it worked well. Stock Kubuntu works closely enough to Windows, Chrome and Firefox are identical, the built in photo manager and video players just worked, and it put an end to malware and viruses. Please donate the $1000 to a local food bank, please. I do not what the check.

Two weeks ago, my son and I re-purposed a three year old cryptocoin mining desktop into a gaming machine. We loaded it up with Kubuntu and Steam and ... well, I thought I'd have to install Windows. No problems. Proton lived up to the hype.

> Remove all CS majors in the world and I'd wager the amount of people who've touched Linux is less than .01%

I'm not part of the group that downvoted you, but why would the only people touching Linux be CS majors? I'm not a CS major and I think most people I know that voluntarily use Linux on a daily basis isn't neither.

I'm saying this because most people who use or are aware of Linux happen to be CS majors. You pull any random business major and they barely understand Excel. You eliminate all college majors and the average person that uses Linux has already plummeted. Regular every day computer uses want cheap and easy. Linux is cheap but not very easy, especially if you have no clue what your doing. Sure you can go into a forum on what to do, but what person that knows nothing of computers and doesn't intend on going into the field will bother with learning this stuff? Even myself I find it tedious and I know what I'm doing or can at least learn it pretty easily.

“ most people who use or are aware of Linux happen to be CS majors”

As someone who taught in an accounting school where awareness of Linux was higher than you state, I can tell you this is false.

Give it up already, face the fact that Linux is more popular and well-known than you want it to be, for whichever reason.

> I'm saying this because most people who use or are aware of Linux happen to be CS majors.

Android is a Linux distribution it is the #1 phone OS (73% market share this year). ChromeOS is a Linux distribution and is the leading OS by market share in K-12 schools. Both are cheap and easy. In ChromeOS's case, they are easier for both administrators to manage and users. I'm also sure the students using Chromebooks have not completed their CS degrees yet, but one can hope.

And yet zero of Android and ChromeOS games come into GNU/Linux.

Linux community likes to pat themselves on the back thanks to Android and ChromeOS using the Linux kernel, yet they are oblivious to the fact that Linux syscalls aren't part of the official stable API, only certain ChromeOS models do run Linux (a yet another guest OS, WSL style), and then what GNU/Linux gets are Electron apps.

>You pull any random business major and they barely understand Excel.

I'm not sure you could pull any random Linux user and have them truly understand Excel either.

> I'm not sure you could pull any random Linux user and have them truly understand Excel either.

As a Linux user who did not major in business, I bet your odds with Linux users would be markedly worse than with business majors on this one, hahaha

Not to mention that Linux also has users who never went to college

I knew this comment would get brought up haha. God this site is filled with pretentious and anal people who nit pick everything.

i understand what you are trying to say.

people mentioning android have forgotten that android hides many parts of linux. and manufacturers make sure your device hardware works well with the operating system.

other have mentioned relatives who are using linux on desktop. that they are doing limited activities such as browsing and emails. that's fair but the story of how they discovered linux would be the most interesting one.

which brings me to op's cs majors point. so many things have changed that we should not dismiss the claim but think about it.

do happenstances of the past still present themselves to people today. i discovered linux through a pc magazine back in the late 90s. pc magazines back then offered young people like myself at the time a way to try new things on the computer. and i did try everything.

what is the equivalent of that nowadays?

What? My mom has been using linux for 5 years and I don't think she even knows what windows or linux is. She calls her computer "the memory" or "that box".

>I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.

My father is tech illiterate enough that he manually searches and navigates to the unemployment website each week rather than figure out bookmarks.

He's been on an Ubuntu laptop a friend gave him since late last year. I kept expecting to have to walk him through it, but it hasn't happened yet.

I used to work in a small computer shop and there were some (presumably) 60-70 year olds who I wouldn't consider to be computer literate in the least running Ubuntu and even other distros. There were at least a couple people who refused to use any other OS including Windows. One such customer always referred to their beloved Ubuntu as "Ukabuntu" for some reason.

I did do the same with my father-in-law, about ten years ago. I installed Ubuntu on his laptop and he used it for work (photo editing, writing articles, etc.) without any complaints until he got a new one from work a few years later.

I honestly don't think giving my parent who didn't know jack about computers Windows and telling them to figure it out would be a necessarily pleasant alternative either.

How about we show some compassion and take time to help people around things, especially when they are people we care about and things we care about as well?

every Android phone runs Linux...

Which isn't part of the public APIs,

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

I'm not really sure what your point is

the NT native kernel API is also undocumented

Exactly, that is why applications that don't want to break with each OS update don't touch those APIs, making them irrelevant for application developers.

Also, contrary to Windows, since Android 7, applications that link to undocumented APIs get terminated as security measure.

Ask the termux guys how much fun they are having by refusing to acknowledge the fact that they have to use JNI and not Linux syscalls for their stuff.

> Also, contrary to Windows, since Android 7, applications that link to undocumented APIs get terminated as security measure.

"undocumented" has nothing to do with it

there is a sandbox, syscalls are checked by seccomp and those not explicitly permitted will result in termination of the application

it doesn't care where the syscall comes from, be that libc, golang style, or calling svc #0 yourself

additionally: the kernel is open source... there are no "undocumented" syscalls

this also has nothing to do with the original point

Sure it has, because it doesn't matter if it is open source or not, if it is a stable API described on the NDK documentation it is not allowed.

Something that termux guys are having some issues to swallow, regarless of Linux being the kernel, it is not allowed to do what they want, wrapping Java APIs via JNI is the only allowed way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com