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Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

Go to any Walmart or BestBuy here in the US and you'll see an entire row of Chromebooks for sale. They don't do this because these devices don't sell. Steamdeck has now sold tons of desktop-class devices running Linux.

I'd also note that Windows is ubiquitous, but hardly popular. People who know about computers tend to have not-so-great opinions of both MS and Windows while people who don't know about computers are only using Windows because it's what comes bundled with their machine. For the rest, MS has directly or indirectly paid to keep the software they need stuck in the Wintel duopoly (though that is also slowly changing).

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SteamDeck is not desktop device, it's pretty much single usecase machine. It is for gaming and that's how most use it. And there is no need to take bad samples and anecdotes on how widely used Linux is. There are multiple longstanding companies tracking the usage numbers of various operating systems. Linux on non-mobile devices is really rare exception.

You can dock the Deck and use it as a desktop with a monitor, mouse and keyboard. It runs a KDE desktop and many people have said they're using it as their daily driver now.

> Linux on non-mobile devices is really rare exception.

Linux is widespread on basically every single type platform out there, if not dominant in most of them. The only where it's currently lagging is laptops, and of course not as popular as other OSes on desktop. But on the rest of the platforms out in the world, Linux and various derivations is very popular.

Yeah, I know. 9 days ago in this forum I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34103132

EDIT: I think it is pretty obvious that we are not talking about servers and patient monitors here, but rather desktops and other enduser devices.

To me saying that ChromeBook is Linux is as disingenuous as saying that your Android phone is Linux.

Yeah maybe it's the UNIX kernel, but it's not the end-user Linux experience, which is what 99% of the people talk about when they say it's not the "year of Linux on the [insert platform here]".

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