Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
linuxiac.com
linuxiac.com
Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS. It is on virtually all servers on the Internet, the majority OS on phones, its in many TVs and STBs and streaming sticks, its one of the few OSes ever in space, its one of the few OSes ever on Mars, and it is also the OS behind ChromeOS (which that article mistakenly breaks out as its own numbers; so by their own admission, its at least 7%).
The largest desktop OS on that list? Windows.... made by a company who makes more money off Linux than anything else, is the largest corp contributor to Linux, and has far more Linux machines internally than Windows ones, and hires software developers who do not develop for Windows.
You can conquer the world, dominate every space and yet there's thus little voice inside saying "but you're not good enough. See over there, in that one space, you're a weakling. "
Welcome to the human condition.
What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more. If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it.
The only area I wish had a better story was the enterprise desktop space (like Windows domains or jamf on macOS) but currently I can’t justify allowing my team to run Linux because having its hard enough for small companies to manage a mixture of macOS and Windows fleets without adding a 3rd platform into the mix.
That's a funny conclusion to make. In the business world that still exists and even my kids are forced into the Microsoft eco-system by their school because the software they insist you run (for which perfectly good web alternatives exist) only runs on windows.
The danger that the history will repeat for browsers instead of OSs is real. The less market share for browsers other than Google Chrome or Chrome-based ones, the more likely it is, that we will be forced to use those because of incompatible web applications.
E.g. at work, using a Linux Computer, I switched to Chrome for Teams and Outlook, because of compatibility issues.
I'd take every day a native app running locally over a web app. And I am a web developer.
But the lack of driver support still does. Linux on a modern laptop is just full of headaches. I mean, https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-7840u this is typical: GNOME doesn't work, graphical glitches... In my own experience, operating MFC devices over several years is a nightmare, Bluetooth is problematic as well, some proprietary VPNs do not have Linux clients which might not be Linux's fault but if I can't log in I can't work.
Life is too short for this, sorry. Windows + WSL is the way. The right tool for the right job, Windows for drivers, WSL for, well, everything else.
What? This is very real and a key driver not to use Linux or Mac for millions of users. As soon as even a little performance is required webapps just can't compare. Look at anything graphics related especially 3d, CAD or video. You might be able to build shitty infographics for Instagram on Canva but real work still requires access to compute at the edge and most software providers in those spaces target Microsoft only.
That was the case in 1999 too. The Linux on the Desktop dream wasn't about removing choice, but about MORE people making the choice to run Linux.
Also, market share translates to support, resources available, people and companies working there, drivers, and so on. Personal choice to use X doesn't magically offer those.
That's a strange point to make. The whole point of this users changing their minds, and deciding that they prefer Linux.
> I can’t justify allowing my team to run Linux
So it's not about choice then?
But I can't use the OS I like. I can't go in a store, pick a laptop I like, and get it with an OS I like. I can get it with an OS I don't like; and gamble that I can install on it an OS that I do like. It would have been very different if Linux market share on the desktop were in double digits.
And let's not even get started about work.
I use Linux because it works for me and makes my life easier, is free/open and because I don't have to deal with Windows.
Not even a slight itch.
What do I care how many people use the thing I do? The only thing that matters to me is how good the toys I get to use are.
> See over there, in that one space, you're a weakling.
A lot more people eat fast food that gourmet food. I wonder if the people who can afford gourmet food feel like weaklings because of that. My guess is: No they don't.
For the average person, they don't care what a window manager is or pulse/alsa/jack or whatever. They just want a singular consistent experience that "just works", whatever software they install, whatever hardware they plug in. And the Linux community is obsessed with the complete opposite of this.
Apparently a lot of the systemd pushback was because it was making everything "too similar and compatible with each other". Now isn't that just laughable; that's what most people want!
Despite the lack of any exponential moonshots in marketshare, compatibility layers like Wine and Wine derivatives, as well as platform agnostic package management tools, have made Linux desktops much more pleasant to use compared to just 4-5 years ago. This has allowed me to almost completely de-Windows my computer usage without abandoning Windows-only applications.
I do try to shill Linux to friends from time to time as a casual tease. Haven't had much success in that regard but it's not a concrete goal of mine. Despite having all gone to the same STEM program that required Linux environments for most courses, I'm the only one using it as a daily driver outside of work among the 15-20 people I still regularly contact.
What stings me a bit is that Microsoft is the dominant player on the desktop and then they are so little about making the making it a good and consistent experience. Windows 95 was never amazing, but they put the work in and gave us the impression that they at least tried. Now it's 2023 and my desktop has ads, tracking and UI elements that are 30 years old, because they could never be arsed to update them.
They currently have around 20% market share (as Internet servers - much higher inside business LANs), which is a very nice chunk. And I'm sure encourages them to keep working on it.
Frankly the tooling for MS server keeps it in the hunt - they really understand the concept of making things easier to use.
No, not really.
You can't make things smooth and flexible at the same time, it takes too much effort. You can't support a ton of varied hardware and make everything work smoothly in every case; it again would take non-viable amounts of work.
You can have a pretty smooth desktop Linux experience if you pick a large mainstream distro, pick reliable, well-supported mainstream hardware, and pick a polished desktop environment such as KDE or that Gnome variant of Pop OS.
But if you want to tweak things, you've got to tweak things.
No. In fact, as a Linux user, I'm happy that Linux doesn't have a major share of the desktop. If it did, then I think it would have a terrible (to me) effect on the direction of Linux development, because it would be more tempting to aim for the most common denominator, and we already have good options for the most common denominator.
NOO IT DOESN'T!!
Love the can of worms you opened with that comment. It does sting, because the desktop market is optimized for proprietary software. Open source, even if superior, is always behind on a hill that is upwards both ways. Proprietary firmware, drivers, patents, vendor lock-in, etc., have become very high walls.
Perception matters :)
There is a lot we can learn from a creature whose life purpose is eating shit all day, every day.
Depending on how you define "desktop" i would argue that Linux has a very big presence on the desktop. Considering the "new desktop" is a smartphone, and Android is based on Linux, that alone would account for a very large desktop presence.
Unfortunately there is no real “transmission” between the two, pretty much only the kernel is shared, absolutely nothing in userspace. Hell, it is ridiculously difficult to even run/emulate android on a normal linux distro.
Which is a shame, because while android’s model is far from perfect, it is definitely eons ahead of the traditional linux userspace, especially on the security front.
However, desktop Linux is where the product is 100% OSS. That’s the apples to apples comparison. And that’s where it can’t compete without vendors writing property code to put in front of it to make it actually work well.
Server side Linux gets a lot of support from professional programmers paid by big corps. They have improved it beyond hobbyist level, and it works pretty well. And of course cheap makes up for a lot.
Linux has the largest collection of various hardware drivers, and a rather wide community of kernel developers who know how to produce them.
Linux has a number of specialty filesystems, some pretty important for embedded development.
Linux kernel has real-time extensions, which is not entirely a commodity, AFAICT.
Also, stuff like io_uring, BPF VM inside the kernel, namespaces (see "containers"), etc.
No, I don't think you can easily replace Linux kernel with whatever BSD kernel, Darwin, VxWorks, Contiki, FreeRTOS, etc, or, well, Windows. Much of the larger embedded stuff is Linux-specific, and much of big server stuff is either Linux-only or has extensive specific support.
Tell that to your BIOS or the firmware that runs on your WLAN or NVMe. Hell, tell that to the CPU itself[^1].
[^1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
Sour grapes.
> Linux is the go to choice when you could just as well be using something else that’s really cheap, like BSD.
You actually couldn't be just as well using BSD. Corporations would love to be able to take Linux and not contribute their changes back (and that's frequently what happens when they use it internally but don't distribute it). They don't use a BSD licensed kernel in many such places (e.g., Android) because Linux is more advanced.
More advanced in what sense? There are lots of devices using BSD, so that's entirely possible.
> 20XX will be the year of Linux on the desktop
They've been saying it so long it's part of our psyche. It doesn't matter the other places Linux is running, it hasn't conquered that one place they've been trying to conquer since the start. You never get over the one who got away.
When they said it back in the 1920s it was sort of confusing, tbh.
Who is "they"?
There's are a heck of a lot of people happily building [software for] Linux systems that give precisely zero care to the success of Linux desktop.
Who is "they" here?
When explaining linux to skeptical non-techies, I tell them it's the OS running the nuclear submarines right now. Suddenly they're more confident it can handle their ecommerce dashboard.
For US nuclear subs: All of the core components and electronics use a custom RTOS; older ones built in Ada, newer ones built in C++. The "control computers" (the computers that humans interface with to tell core components what to do) aren't running anything like Ubuntu or Fedora, but instead run a heavily ruggedized and customized Linux system based on the Titanium suite from Star Lab.
For UK subs, they run a similar custom OS for the modules and electronics and (until 2017 or so, at least) run Windows XP for their control computers.
I have no idea what other nations use; but I would assume they are similarly setup.
That's not to disavow the fact that clearly the US govt trusts those Linux computers to be reliable, thus their investment in them. So it is an accomplishment, they just don't "run" anything.
That’s not to be minimized. Sounds like very much on the critical path, and definitely not some shitty infotainment sidecar. If that crashed, you couldn’t control core functions of the sub? Are there overrides?
Btw, thanks for sharing these details. I would never have learnt this. Love HN sometimes.
You're mostly right, but this is incorrect. MS was the largest kernel contributor for a few days 10 years ago, but overall companies like Intel, Google, Oracle and IBM contribute a lot more.
Yes, but that's kind of a moot point.
The decades old dream was "Linux on the Desktop" (not just as some 3% market share or "works for me" - it worked for people in 1999 too), but overtaking Windows as the desktop OS for the masses).
And of course all those billion of Android devices, hide everything about what people meant and wanted from the Linux experience. It's just the kernel and some basic userland stuff, on top of which everything else is totally foreign, closed down, and tied to proprietary services under Google's control (with Samsung and co's own touches).
Linux is so irrelevant to the visible part of Android's functionality, that Google could very well change the backend to Fuchsia when that's ready, and those billion devices would be un-Linuxed within a few years, as they get old, and their owners replace them by new Fuchsia running smartphones.
Huh? This is...totally wrong. Software devs at Microsoft are supplied with Windows machines by default, a lot of software is built on Microsoft-specific technologies like C#, and most of the server footprint is Windows Server.
My team only uses MacBooks at Microsoft. It’s true that I was forced to receive a PC, but it sits in a drawer collecting dust and only gets booted up when compliance throws a tantrum.
Depends on what and why Linux. Original dream/vision selling it was a libre OS developed in the Bazaar that will give user full control over their devices against the tyranny of the corporations. You can't with straight face claim that all the billions of phones and embedded devices represent that freedom.
As about kernel, it may be BSD, Linux or maybe even NT or Plan 9, it honestly doesn't matter.
Citation needed, I think. Microsoft barely makes or doesn't even make the top 20 kernel contributors for current releases: 6.4 (#20): https://lwn.net/Articles/936113/, 6.3: https://lwn.net/Articles/929582/, 6.2: https://lwn.net/Articles/923410/, 6.1 (#19): https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
After so many years, they still don't have reliable "Every package even the ones not in the repos just works" status. It's mostly there, like, 99.9%, but stuff still breaks more than on Windows or Android. I suspect they never will, except for things like NixOS.
I used to think Linux was behind because of legacy reasons and game companies not being interested... but now I think Linux itself has something to do with it, and we should use that as motivation to improve.
Right now I think NixOS, or just accepting Snap packages, or waiting for Flatpak, might be the best/only chance, aside from moving to a batteries included OS like Android.
Seems like Nix really just needs GUI admin tools, everything else seems to be fairly polished.
Steam and Lutris (StarCraft 2!) work pretty well, Detroit Become Human just works. (Enable proton in Steam, and click install and play.)
(I removed snap, however, as it's just in the way, but I don't remember what was my exact problem with it.)
The kernel is not the operating system, even if it is a key component of it. Android phones do use the Linux kernel - well, not exactly; some kind of modified version of it - but they do not use the GNU/Linux operating system. The OS is different in many ways: Filesystem hierarchy, daemons/services, graphics stack, etc.
You can't get an app designed for Android to run on Linux Mint with ease.
It's interesting to see how over the years the user experience of Linux Desktop ia getting better, bug are being fixed, we get better software, desktop environments are getting more features e.g.
Here's a report about server market share:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux
Here's one for total device market share (quite a bit out of date, since Gartner paywalls all new reports; still it shows the general trend):
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3050931/windows-comes-...
Etc. All of which agree with you. But, it turns out, most people don't care about what OS runs their toothbrush or thin client. Only their mobile device or desktop, which is why these reports are so much more popular.
For anyone who cares about these stats using Linux is the most important thing about computing.
Is there a source for that?
Yeah. But it's not its OS. The true OS of most Android installations is some propietary firmware blob.
The same can't be said of the PS; the PS isn't a desktop computer.
Not sure about PS5.
That's the whole point. Probably 99% of computer (anything that uses a processor I guess qualifies a computer these days) users in this world don't really care what's running underneath as long it gets the job done. If something can run linux underneath and can still pass as acceptable that's a huge win I think.
SteamDecks are indistinguishable from PCs, since they run more or less exactly the same software as a Linux desktop/laptop would.
At best it would be a general purpose mobile device, but even that is rather contrived. How many users do you imagine are using a steam deck as a substitute for a desktop or a different mobile device? I would guess something very close to 0.
It’s an arbitrarily defined category of computer, and this statistics site doesn’t mention how they’ve specified that definition, but it seems they haven’t included any server, mobile/handheld, or gaming console devices at all, not just the steamdeck.
Any source for this?
OTOH windows is becoming adware/spyware and macos is becoming big brother lockdown-wear, so maybe it is time for linux to shine.
Personally windows (actually, almost anything microsoft) enrages me anytime I'm unfortunate enough to have to use it, and I'm getting increasingly annoyed at macos limitations and won't be buying apple again, so my next machine will run linux.
More to the point, the choice is a feature, and it comes with a bit of chaos. Would you rather live in an effectively single-party state like Singapore where everything is shiny but you get caned for spitting gum on the street (MacOS), Russia which is a third-world mafia state masquerading as a gas station masquerading as a world power (Windows), or a messy democracy like The Netherlands where everyone has a voice but sometimes the government collapses because they can't agree on everything (Linux)?
I live in The Netherlands and I've run Linux on the desktop for 30 years.
Choice is fine as long as everything can integrate properly and work together.
Maybe the desktop could do with a little bit of Singapore's sort-of benevolent-ish dictatorship - that's how the kernel is developed after all.
However… there is a difference between meaningful choice and choice that is simply a byproduct of grumpy disagreements from 20 years ago.
Choice has compound costs. Primarily, it creates interop issues. The best is example is, of course, software distribution (hey what ppa do I need to install node). It also creates an explosion of configuration options and points of failure.
The desktop distro maintainers should, imo, put their disagreements aside and find common ground to the most pressing issues. Perhaps funded by some billionaire or their mega-corp.
This sounds like a good place to live for me, because I don't spit gum on streets and wouldn't want to live around people who do. What kind of disgusting person would do such a thing? And who chews gum these days?
Personally, I think this is a terrible analogy.
As an outsider, the Netherlands seems a lot more stable than many other democracies, including Germany and the US.
(Other alternatives I enjoy include Cinnamon and Xfce. I cannot stand gnome-shell, it's like a tablet OS or something.)
Lots of popular distributions support KDE out of the box (Kubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora KDE, etc), and it'll install on pretty much anything else with minimal fuss. That's the most fun part about desktop environments on Linux: you don't have to pick just one. You can install a bunch side by side and switch between them when you log in. Once you know this, it becomes fun to experiment :)
If you want a full-fledged modern DE with active development, the choice is only between GNOME and KDE imo.
>GTK or Qt
I used to worry about whether to go full GTK or Qt, these days I don't really care. Both work in either environment and the theming is usually consistent as well unless you have a custom theme, so they don't even look out of place.
>X11 or Wayland
It seems like Wayland is going to be the future, so it's only really a matter of whether it works well enough for your uses yet or not. If it does, great, use Wayland, if not, stick with X11 for a bit longer.
It honestly doesn't seem like that much of a mess to me.
On Windows and macOS, you don't have any choice, so people usually see that as good enough because they can't compare it against alternatives on the same platform.
Every Linux desktop user says "use what works best for you, we're all different," but I really don't buy that we're so different to warrant multiple competing DEs / window managers / whatever on top of the same OS.
Just install something like Fedora, and you won't worry about it, it will just work.
I personally hate Ubuntu btw Canonical is just not for me. I have no idea how it's so popular. Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.
Ubuntu got popular years ago because they made a distro that supported everything and was really easy to install and use. Fedora has always been a pain because it doesn't support a lot of stuff out of the box (i.e. codecs): a distro that can't even play MP3s was a non-starter for many people 10-15 years ago. NixOS isn't nearly as easy to install and get started with.
Ubuntu has been coasting on its inertia for a long time though, and many other distros have caught up with it or surpassed it, such as Mint, while Ubuntu has been shooting itself in the foot with things like Snaps.
Could be. I should try NixOS or fedora again but seriously don't overstate it. Cannonical are not my fav company. Installing an LTS ubu works fine, it has annoyances (maybe nixos and fedora are better?) but it's still so incredibly far ahead of windows or macos it's not even close for me. Sure, I'm used to linux on my laptop (thinkpad t480s intel graphics) that anything else will be a massive hassle to maintain, with driver issues, os-level spyware and all that other headache. When I use my kids' macs they always feel janky, windows? Forget it, it's just so unpolished and ew.
Pretty different to RH7 in 2002 in quality and polish when I first tried linux.
The AUR.
Then why can't I change the spaces animation (turn it off)? Windows snapping without leaving a gap on the edge of the screen? Etc, etc.
And are they now doing scans for copyright-infringing media and so on - I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm an adult. It's my computer. Let me do what I want with it.
If you went to buy a car, would you be fatally paralysed by indecision at seeing two different makes that looked ever so slightly different parked side-by-side?
Of course not. That would be idiotic.
- My DJ software (which I pay for) is not supported at all on Linux (likewise true for most common music production software).
- The Affinity suite (which I paid for) is not supported on Linux.
- The best debugger I can find (remedybg, which I paid for) doesn't work there.
- and there are a few more niche ones.
I just can't give up on half of my productive tools and trade them off for much jankier alternatives. I sadly cannot contribute to get to 4%.
Releasing binaries is still a PITA for Linux. That's one of the main reason it has so little support from closed source consumer software. If you care, see my comment history on my company dropping Linux support for a pro-audio app, even though our software works on Linux.
But for development tools, it's you-win-some-you-lose-some. There are some development tools (the Valgrind suite, for example) that I still miss after mostly switching to macOS. Going from Linux to macOS also means losing great tools.
Is it really that bad? I mean, many small FOSS programs provide packages for multiple distributions. Are they busting their balls building that stuff?
That works for FOSS, but not for smaller closed-source consumer apps. And it's not just building, it's also testing and debugging. It's just not tractable for a small company to test on dozens of different distros / versions for such a small percentage of users.
That's why you're still running the same OS you always have. [1] You accumulate software yes, but you also accumulate habits and knowledge. Changing OS means discarding all the accumulated knowledge, which 0% of "normal users" want to do.
Throw in the change in software, ending up with at least some proportion of worse software, and the desire to change is 0.
[1] where "you" applies to a rounding error away from 100%
If you stick to windows xp or roll your own Linux distros maybe this is true, but I barely know how to use any windows box. Bunch of black registry magic and constantly changing UI nonsense, literally Google and sometimes msdn are how I survive there.
Ubuntu/Fedora all go through fits of hipness and constantly change how things are done. Config files one day, services and runtime the next. UIs are really non-standard and always breaking something or other.
OSX...first time I used it I was learning Unix systems. I went back to it and it was an unholy mess of gotchas.
Android is still hurtling through versions every year and I have no idea what "current" phone looks like, I probably hate it.
When I have been unfortunate enough to use iOS it was like being made Legos trying to build other Legos. It was a right pain.
There are some common design patterns and the like but that tends to be in spite of the OS, not because of it.
Changing from one OS to another is orders of magnitude more complex. As you point out above jumping between them is painful.
Your job may require you to do that, but you're a tiny sliver of the work-force, never mind everyone else. My book-keeper has never encountered the Windows Registry.
You're thinking of the OS as an actual bit of software you interact with. For 99.99% of users it's invisible. They just want printing to happen when they press the print button.
More and more upgrading the OS means discarding a large amount of accumulated knowledge as well, which normal users don't want to do, but don't have much of a choice.
I only ever hear Linux users make this argument. Mac users are confident enough in MacOS UX that they know it’s not a significant barrier to transition. The same is not true of Linux. So many solutions to problems require opening the CLI, and that’s just an automatic fail for the vast majority of consumers.
Honestly, I would like Linux fans to just accept Linux for what it is: an amazing kernel with incredible GUIs built by and for developers. App developers just do not care about (or do not have the resources for) making simple and intuitive software. Valve is a welcome and notable exception with the Steam Deck. Linus Torvalds explains it perfectly: https://youtu.be/Pzl1B7nB9Kc
It just has to be much much better.
Maybe there was something about my configuration I could've tweaked to mitigate the lag, but I have zero interest in fiddling with Linux. That stuff's fun if your goal is to learn about the OS, but absolutely intolerable if you just wanna get work done.
rr is great, I have used it a few times with great success, but always as a heavyweight, for solving really tricky bugs. Usually, printf is first, then gdb and/or valgrind, then rr.
On Visual Studio (which has a great debugger), the debugger is the first tool I reach. It is simply more convenient, more reliable on a day-to-day basis, plus, there is "edit and continue". Generally I prefer the Linux dev tools (rr is one of the good ones, I also love valgrind), but for interactive debugging, for me, Windows wins.
Whatever Linux specific stuff I need to run (mostly for development), WSL2 and Docker takes care of that.
I want an OS that just runs and doesn't stay in my way.
YMMV. For me, Linux is the OS that just runs and doesn't stay in my way. For my work flows, the tools on Linux are far superior. I recognise that may not be the case for the tools you use.
- MoneyWell
- Omnigraffle
- Keynote (I like my glossy presentations)
I know I’m missing a few.
I love and monetarily support free software, but man… some of these apps get a lot of love and it’d be hard to leave.
And of those embedded/mobile devices, the rest will either be running iOS, vxworks, freertos or zephyr.
I think the joke has always been "this is the year of Linux", but in all honesty... it's the decade of Linux. It's probably one of the few areas where there is growth in computing capacity and by far most of the net new is running Linux.
Actually tbere are plenty of other options for embedded.
As for the server room, UNIX was already the winner there anyway, since the 1990's.
Unix was king in the 80s, maybe early 90s for anyone doing terminals, banks, government and universities were all ok the big iron train. But when nt3.1 and 3.5 came out, if you were a business not looking into it, you felt like you were behind the times. We had DEC and iris at our house, so weren't in a good position to switch, but it wasn't long before the change happened.
The Termux App [https://termux.dev/en/] provides a full linux terminal with zsh, emacs, and apt based package manager. I've been using it in lieu of creating full apks for personal projects -- much easier to spin up a database and local webserver via ssh on my phone than to build a proper app package.
I find it fits most of my linux on the go needs; for example I can pull up a node REPL and quickly test code on my phone, or curl a API endpoint
How is toybox not good enough to replace the GNU coreutils for a phone? Or what GNU software are you talking about that someone would even want to run on a phone?
Maybe 60% of embedded devices with an OS.
But yes, Linux (and BSD) are quite dominant outside of the desktop market segment.
I'm my family we have two desktop computers and a laptop. One desktop is running Linux, the other and the laptop are windows.
But we're also running Linux on all our phones, two tablets, two TVs, the vacuum cleaner, our router, and probably more devices I'm forgetting or not aware of.
What do they do? Who uses them?
> What do they do? Who uses them?
I don't know about the percentages but there is at least one b2b e-commerce website application thing with the latest version built with ASP.NET MVC on dotnet 4.8 so it has to be on Windows.
It isn't "cloud" by any means but you can create an EC2 instance or an Azure VM or whatever and put Windows on it and run IIS and all those things.
That and I think on Azure, you can run things like Azure functions and Azure web apps on Windows. I also don't understand why people would pick Windows to run modern software where you have a choice.
There was a chance with mobile phones to use and signal Linux, but that didn't happen either.
Still, congratulations on hitting 3% desktop share.
What do you mean? Android is Linux!
This is plain wrong. Sent from my GNU/Linux smartphone Librem 5.
Desktop Linux has reached perfection IMHO. People complain about too many distros, package formats, desktop environments, init managers, audio servers and so on. I just love it, I pick and choose whatever I like and I like pretty weird things. I have excellent support and QA from community disto packaging - my Arch install is over 10 years old and I never had to do anything to it besides tinkering for fun. My Debian private server requires 30 minutes every 2 years to switch to the new release. The documentation is heavenly. The commercial offerings (that run on Linux) that pay my bills aren't even in the same league. Neither is Windows or Mac.
I want Linux to remain an enthusiast OS. It's not good for my parents, my non-tech friends, and maybe it's not good for you either. That's not a bad thing and I do not want it to change.
Cloudflare making it easy to block entire countries, allow people to be lazy in protecting their websites and goes completely against the open web. Of course I could use a vpn but it's getting tiring that I have to do so more and more often.
What I can't understand is why people are willing to shut their websites from like half of the world. Especially Linux bloggers. Open source, "free as in freedom", right? These people should fight practices like that, not follow them.
Amazingly, the country I'm in right now is blacklisted on this website.
Isn't it ironic for a website promoting "free" and "libre" software?
I guess this is accurate for people who are in the web ads business, but otherwise obviously it's a bad proxy and seems likely it's undercounting a lot since Linux users tend to be savvy enough to block analytics and probably do less web browsing on StatCounter monitored sites.
Eg they show Firefox as having too small to see (< 2%) market share here: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share - other data sources show 7-ish %.
Technology adoption takes strange paths but the history of linux is one of remarkable resilience and capability which augurs well for the future.
My guess is that a key driver of growth will come from power users that will make best use of local AI and data science tools, preserving privacy and commercial secrecy.
While many many casual users will continue using thin clients, effectively outsourcing their digital lives to the "cloud", this is unlikely to continue being the 97%.
The opportunity is, e.g., for all the apps of the linux desktop to start making use of the python ML tools to empower users with unprecedented functionality. There is no reason that all of that new universe must be ceded to a small number of actors.
This opportunity was there for a long time now, ML is not new, but the broader FOSS community is quite reactive. Emulating proprietary / closed tools to a fault (eg the libreoffice suite) rather than exploring the unique opportunities of alternative paths has been the norm.
Luckily the AI hype will work as a kick in the butt. The future is for linux to lose.
Does it? It’s 3%. If it was 15% or 20% maybe you could say that.
It’s less than “unknown” and less than ChromeOS which is just over 4%. If it wasn’t a round number, I don’t think anyone would ever write this article because the number is just too small.
It’s nice that it seems to be growing. I just don’t think this is a big achievement.
For years, during the desktop boom in the 2000s, most of the support for networking hardware, wired and wireless, was based on binary blobs coming from Windows OSs and "imported" into a Linux system. How could you dare to use Linux as a desktop?
As of today still most of the PC hardware comes with Windows preinstalled. It would be like offering people pink cars which they can paint in a different color, more or less.
Nope. I think 3% is a lot if you take into account the amount of efforts needed for people to contrastate the so-called "market push".
Linux world is "fragmented" by definition: each main tool and even desktop environment has a number of variants, developed by smallish (fragmented) teams in the name of freedom and choice. Windows, on the other side, has a basically monolithic environment in the name of ... dunno what. Normal (non-techie) people are scared by Linux. Because they have never tried the blue pill. They have never seen how deep the rabbit hole can be.
macOS does it, too. Android does it, too. Basically any os that cares about human interaction.
Consistency, stability?
Such was the success, that my sister in law started using LibreOffice and quite likes it.
That's ignoring the "iot" vlan with god knows what on (printer, plugs, speakers, even a bulb), but most of that's linux.
I wish more devices ran "not-linux" really.
For most people, a desktop OS is just a platform to run a web browser on. Chrome's dominant state in that area concerns me more than the dominance of linux in computing.
I wonder if any of you tried to develop C/C++ on MacOS. It seems that it's impossible to find leaks and misbehavior, while on Linux there is this valgrind that does everything for you. MacOS have some `leaks` tool but it does not really do half of the things valgrind does. So probably I would say "Linux is in the first place". /Writing this on my company's mac/
I have a Mac provided by my company. None of my development tools are available there, profiling, debugging is a hassle.
The only way I can work on it is by booting up linux VM, or connecting to my servers to compile there.
Mac is just terrible for development. It's barely better than Windows.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india/#mo...
Why tho ?
> Email the site owner with the cloudflare ray id.
Okay, where do I get the email id ?
Love the false positives. Keep em coming.
And on the laptop and desktop market, we just haven't ever had any company making that kind of play. And don't get me wrong - it's not an easy play to make.
That said, I wouldn't dismiss it either. The whole "ubiquitous web browser" thing has made that kind of consumer play be more realistic, and I think that Google's Chrome push (Chromebox and Chromebooks) is clearly aiming towards that.
So I'm still hopeful. For me, Linux on the desktop is where I started, and Linux on the desktop is literally what I still use today primarily - although I obviously do have other Linux devices, including an Android phone - so I'd personally really love for it to take over in that market too.
"
When I installed Ubuntu on HP Pavillion dv4 laptop for one of the friend, who was casual user, said - what kind of OS is this, which is still working after 6 years. :)
Happy to contribute to that 3%.
Are people fleeing the Windows as Ad Space direction? Are they fed up with Mac OS oddities? Do they use their Steam deck more?
Or are they just enjoying the Linux experience....
I know that after years of Linux usage I can't stand Windows in-your-face Ads and "use our accounts". And I can't stand the locked down Apple ecosystem either. But what drives others? Are there any good sources on that question?
For programmer / power user, I guess linux desktop is now in good state, for programming I find very minimum difficulty on using Ubuntu. It is now a viable choice beside mac and windows.
Furthermore with steam proton and lutris we can play many games with linux which was impossible. The programming device and gaming device now can use single Linux os
I'm pretty certain that the 'unknown' is almost all Linux or *BSD users. From the source of the data itself (https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology)
> In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 5 billion page views per month, by people from all over the world onto our 1.5 million+ member sites.
The majority of Linux desktop users that I know off are especially privacy focused and potentially blocking attempts at fingerprinting.
Had M$ been broken up, maybe it would be different. Until things change, I am happy that at least I can run applications on UNIX based MacOS.
3% is just sarcasm
For example I tried Ubuntu Unity on a fresh install for a week or so recently and it was popping up with unknown errors randomly. It also lacks any hotkeys. Software centre seems to have improved but is still buggy. Also there are still occasional issues which make the machine not bootable and hard to sort without stack overflow and some reasonable Linux knowledge.
Ended up swapping back to i3 and just using my old confs.
Which I think is the main issue. There isn't really a good, reliable, simple, predictable desktop experience yet like you get on Windows or MacOS.
If other people like to run Linux on the desktop or Windows on the servers, I don't have anything against it. Everyone should run what it suits him best.
* The share of desktops themselves is shrinking towards mobile
* The other desktop OSes are steadily turning into shite, so there are fewer compelling reasons to stay on them
* Everything is in the browser anyway, so as long at it can run Chrome, no one bats an eyelash
How to do it when the devices are already locked-in by a monopoly? That would be ultra hardcore regulation (USA grade) with alternatives which would have to be financially backed by some means to keep those alternatives "out-of-the-economy", until it reaches economic equilibrium (if ever... since big tech has infinite money...).
That said, current elf/linux distros have a lot of nasty too (planned obsolescence is very strong).
It's thanks to redhat and corporate types using it so much that all sorts of controversial and divisive changes were introduced. The monetization aspect is also hard to resist when 100M+ people use your OS, takes a lot of character to resist becoming a billionaire by selling out your original users who heleped you succeed.
I am happy with it but yesterday morning the computer wouldn't boot so I had to do some hand waving to fix the problem. No idea what caused it.
I'd rather it be the next system that takes off. Hopefully a properly engineered system based on a microkernel (such as seL4) multiserver architecture, preferably with capabilities.
I do of course use Linux, as a stopgap until such a thing is here.
MacOS has so many annoying things which drive me nuts; like it doesn't show the full path in finder (and can't easily manipulate it), deleting files feels like a hassle. I hate that screenshots go to my Desktop and I can't quickly tell it where to go. The experience overall feels restrictive, obscures what's really going on and prioritizes the wrong things. I already tweaked my settings to fix some of these things but it's still not as good as Kubuntu... The main positive thing I have to say about MacOS is it's better than Windows.
And the desktop market amongst servers, cell phone, consumer electronics is?
Linux doesn't need to play this game because it has already won it - a long time ago.
ChromeOS is a Linux. Therefore its numbers should be included.
3.08 + 4.15 = 7.23%
Still not all that impressive, but better than twice as good as claimed, a solid 3rd place after macOS, and still climbing.
Battery, WiFi chip, memory, and storage are all upgradeable; you'll just be signing up for a given chip generation. L
Of course you can manually install any desktop you want on either.
Basically the difference is that open source needs experts to maintain it, so it works really well for server side stuff and predefined environments. Not as much for desktop.
Honestly, I spend less time maintaining my Linux desktops than I do fixing the Windows boxes in my house. Had to reinstall Windows completely several times to fix issues with updates not applying and other things that just don't work properly. And don't get me started on the endlessly nested configuration UI in Windows, some bits are modern, some bits seem to date back to XP, nothing is in one place.
not that many people have a ps5 devkit either, it doesn’t make them less important.
Some selected models allow to run GNU/Linux, WSL style, in its own sandboxed environment.
> 3% [of the] desktop market share
How do you spell "90%() of the server market share"? And I don't dare talking about mobile and embedded devices
() my very own guesstimate