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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they keep making these articles.

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.

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And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it :).

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.

Honestly, it feels like mentioning the concept of "desktop" seems a little weak, like someone from 2010. Chances are you have linux running in a VM, or container, or phone, or other device right beside you.

Indeed, if we are speaking about the Linux kernel, which isn't what most of these articles are about.

Except that Linux is the kernel. Anything beyond that is "UserSpace"/"distro".

For careless usage, "Linux" means Linux distro.

In a world where literally can also mean figuratively, Linux can also mean the distro.

I'm sure it stings Microsoft a lot more that Windows isn't the dominant server OS.

I'm sure it stings a lot! Windows Server is expensive, and a huge money earner for MS.

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.

> They currently have around 20% market share (as Internet servers -

Extremely big doubts about this. How would anyone even know? All the hyperscale datacenters built by FAANG must be 99.9% Linux, and those DCs alone would probably be enough to make 20% impossible to hit for windows.

Nit: many edge servers by N is FreeBSD at least.

It might be that a load of Azure sites run IIS to do some auth work or something, and that's counted as Windows for each of those sites?

And Active Director and Exchange, they have to count for a ton of installations as well.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...

(Scroll down to servers)

Incidentally this is public facing Internet servers. The % -inside- enterprises us much much higher.

Tools like Active Directory allow you to scale enterprise operations, which is important for companies that have hundreds-of-thousands of desktops etc.

In any event your estimate of 99.9% is unlikely. AWS offers Windows based EC2 instances, and one presumes they're not doing that for 0.01% of the market. Azure will likely have an even higher %.

From the data though, not just guessing, I'd say it's about 20% overall.

> Incidentally this is public facing Internet servers. The % -inside- enterprises us much much higher.

I can believe private enterprise usage is higher, but I imagine FAANG and similar companies also have quite a lot non public Linux servers. Not trying to rebut your overall point, but I'm not sure the total non public % is much different.

Ironically, despite macOS, Android and ChromeOS at Mountain View, it was Windows that got WebGPU first when Chrome went stable with it.

Of course, we might not believe that all of those internet facing servers are of equal size and represent an equal number of servers, right?

We know that all the top 25 websites are 100% Linux and represent a lot of servers each.

Also a whole lot of that cited report seems to be misidentified. The top Windows site other than Microsoft properties listed is nih.gov, which looks like Drupal on Linux behind Akamai GHost -- all Linux.

I do accept that Windows is probably about 20-25% of server instances and slowly contracting. But public facing webservers and the infrastructure that directly supports them? Nothing close to this.

Wouldn’t that survey count e.g. Google as just a single public facing server? I don’t know in what way that survey would be representative.

It might be expensive but I wouldn't at all be surprised if MS already makes more money annually on Linux instances on Azure and I'm almost certain that Windows instances on Azure makes more than the regular enterprise installations.

It surely does, yet they have a better OS to sell on the server room, Azure.

Most customers I work with use mostly Linux on Azure. Lots of Kubernetes and container stuff going on there.

They still have the dominant desktop OS and they barely care about that. Microsoft in it's current form wants to sell you subscriptions and in that context the operating system is less relevant.

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.

ok maybe i'm a sore loser, but looking at where the popular desktop OSes have been going going i think i'm fine with linux remaining an enthusiast thing

Exactly my thoughts. I think Linux is in a good sweet spot; popular enough so that applications advertise support for Linux, but not popular enough to be spoiled and optimized for the "casual" user.

It also helps that there have been very few important (big, complicated) applications in the past decade or two. Firefox is there? My development environment is there? I'm probably good.

All work and no game ...

Steam is there, with Proton, and Lutris. It's almost a better experience than the twelve different launchers situation I left behind (though they're annoying in very different ways!)

I was recently surprised to find installing battle.net with Steam Proton is not only possible, but dead simple, and actually worked. I had been trying for days using the lutris installer, but just shit keeps breaking endlessly. At some point I compiled lutris into a venv just to try and solve all the dependency shit that was lurking in there.

But lutris as it stands now breaks everything almost every time I use it. I had steam unlaunchable for over a week because of something lutris was doing implicitly. Now running steam directly off the CLI seems to be working for 90% of the games I play (which isn't a very long list).

Only thing I doubt I will be able to figure out is stuff like fortnite or anything that uses easy-anti-cheat (since their devs give a fuck about linux and effectively believe we are all hackers trying to ruin their game).

That's all I got, don't bother with Lutris unless you have an insane amount of time to debug which component is missing.

Yeah I admit at this point in my life, much like I used to start up the SNES to play Zelda back in my parents' living room, I start up my Windows system to play Monster Hunter or whatever, while trying really hard to ignore the whole desktop thing on that system.

There's nothing stopping different organizations from making very different distributions of Linux, with some optimized for casual users and others optimized for techies. We're already had this for ages, with Ubuntu being aimed at more casual users and Gentoo/Arch/etc. being aimed at more technical users for instance. If Microsoft dumped Windows and made a new version of Windows based on Linux internals (but of course lots of big changes to make it more like Windows, plus a bunch of telemetry and advertising crap), that wouldn't prevent other distros from continuing to do their own thing.

Valve is already doing this. Their long-term goal is to be independent from Microsoft and Apple.

I think we're past the sweet spot, things are starting to go "casual user", you only need to check what Ubuntu and Fedora are pushing,in a way the "windows ification" of Linux: gnome 3/4,systemd+,snapd,telemetry etc.

Yeah, systemd is definitely there to lure in the casual users..

It's not so much that systemd is designed to lure in casual users, it's that it (like other software on the list) reflects an attitude that separates "developers" who decide how a system should work, from "users" who have to take what's given to them. This stands in opposition to the traditional unixy world order, where the two groups are one and the same "hackers".

How exactly does the completely customizable systemd does any of that?

I'm using ubuntu among other distros, and it never tried to push gnome to me. Using i3 is literally one "apt install" away. As of systemd I'm old enough to remember when initialization was managed by a pile of unreadable shell scripts and I never wanted it back.

It's odd that you included systemd in the list. It's something that a casual user isn't going to notice, but that has made life easier for system administrators and desktop tinkerers. With systemd, I can write a few lines of config to turn a simple Python script into a daemon with syslog integration, process monitoring, and resource limits. I understand the concerns about scope creep, but I'd take systemd any day over the maze of distro-specific shell scripts that was there before it.

Systemd definitely belongs in the list, even if some admins like it.

"Windowsification" is a admittedly vague concept, but tends to cover software that is gratuitously different, not a team player in the bazaar, prone to making land grabs through "embrace and extend", and reluctant to offer configuration options that conflict with its "opinionated" stances.

As an aside, I'm really sick of the systemd / "random pile of shell scripts" false dichotomy. It's trivial to turn a python script into a system service with runit, too. Simple, stable, and focused.

Systemd was widely adopted because it makes life easier for the distros. It is directly resulting from the increased popularity of Linux putting an increased demand on them.

I don't see what ubuntu takes away from arch, alpine, or gentoo. There are many options

SteamOS is being optimised for the "casual" user. SteamDeck is the best handheld console at the moment.

To be fair, SteamOS is just a barely customized Arch Linux.

All the UX work is being done in the steam client itself and is not exclusive to the Steam Deck. In fact, the SteamOS ui is now available 1:1 in the good old PC Steam client, replacing the old Big Picture mode.

The only thing that doesn’t comes directly with Steam is Gamescope (but you can install it yourself easily).

Other than that, the SteamOS is just an Arch Linux with Steam installed, KDE and a Steam wallpaper.

And the SteamOS UI doesn't have the same game controller configuration options as the old Big Picture mode had. That is a good example of "dumbification" of the UI in order to make things cheaper.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussion...

>but not popular enough to be spoiled and optimized for the "casual" user

I'm trying really hard to come up with a scenario where optimizing the desktop experience for the average user is a bad thing.

For example, what keeps me on Windows (and WSL2) at the moment is that the freesync/variable refresh rate technology doesn't always behave as you would expect it to be, resulting in games that stutter, frame dip and eat inputs. Gnome devs have a branch pending final tests for vrr for months. KDE on Wayland is the best for what I'm asking atm but even that has its problems during gameplay.

And let's not forget the pains Nvidia's drivers cause compared to AMD on Linux for desktop. I built my desktop using AMD GPU and CPU specifically for Linux to play nice, and yet it doesn't for the only 2 games I play during my downtime. It's just sad.

> I'm trying really hard to come up with a scenario where optimizing the desktop experience for the average user is a bad thing.

Again, maybe I'm a sore loser, but it definitely feels like a lot of software is becoming increasingly hostile to me, personally because it's being optimized for a presumed average user. I have no beef with this average user and it's globally a totally correct optimization to make stuff work for them as well as possible, but it means that software makes tradeoffs that are inconvenient for me personally.

The most common use case is streamlined by removing options that clutter up the settings menu or banishing the buttons I press a lot into some tertiary menu, or niche features I rely on become unsupported and then get removed (of course with forced auto-updates, because the average user experience is improved by them) to free up developer bandwidth for the core features. And then I end up using a different off-brand window manager with the serial numbers filed off that barely works in general, but works for my specific 'workflow" exactly like I want it.

Of course, at the same time I also benefit from general improvements targeting the average user. It's only about the tradeoffs.

> I'm trying really hard to come up with a scenario where optimizing the desktop experience for the average user is a bad thing.

It's a bad thing if you're not an average user, because software aimed at the "average user" tends to be a pain in the butt for the non-average user. I would point to Windows, the entire web browser space, etc., as examples of this.

And it's not just about the average user. It's also about the compromises needed to make a product suitable for mass production. I already see the effects of that on Linux, in the form of things like systemd, snaps, flatpack, etc.

You can use Gnome if you want that.

I dunno, does it? I don't imagine Linus and friends would celebrate this any other way than saying "ah, neat"

Let’s not pretend it wouldn’t be good if I could run Linux on the desktop the way we run MacOS. It would be great to only have to learn one OS and it worked really smoothly.

Like macOS, that is, all locked down, with abilities to customize things revoked with every release, with most software paid, and only available on a narrow choice of pretty expensive (though powerful) hardware?

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.

IMHO, desktop Linux could use a little bit of locking down and progress is slowly being made in that direction.

It feels a little bonkers that in 2023, Flatpak or something like it isn’t the default way software is installed. That calculator you just installed should not have access to your camera or microphone or file system. That weather app may need your location, but you should be able to grant access to sensitive resources always, never, or only after asking.

If you look at your system like that, maybe QubesOS would be appealing to you.

Or maybe Fuchsia, when it's ready for desktop.

> It feels a little bonkers that in 2023, Flatpak or something like it isn’t the default way software is installed. That calculator you just installed should not have access to your camera or microphone or file system. That weather app may need your location, but you should be able to grant access to sensitive resources always, never, or only after asking.

This approach was widely ridiculed in the Vista days. Maybe I’m old but I still think it’s absurd security theatre that trades off a ton of usability for a tiny amount of imaginary security. It annoys me to no end that on macOS, for instance, opening a terminal emulator and trying to `ls` inside my home directory freezes on a security popup that wants me to allow my terminal emulator to access my home directory.

If you want a locked down appliance, there’s always Chromebooks. Which run a linux kernel btw.

Pretty much how the USA feels, and also its oligarch billionaire class LOL

No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice.

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.

I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS I tell them to use. It's called "my choice".

Adobe (and others) wants a word with you.

> 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 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.

Did you try setting your User Agent to Chrome? I have to use Teams for work. Under Firefox it has problems and missing features, setting my user agent to Chrome solves all of it. Highly uncompetitive if you ask me.

Thank you. That tip might lessen my need to use Brave for sites only working in Chrome.

Also, pro tip: copying the most popular user-agent string gives you a bit of extra protection against fingerprinting. As of the time of writing, the most populated user-agent string is this: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Source: https://techblog.willshouse.com/2012/01/03/most-common-user-...

To me that sounds more like bad software dev/test procedures at MS than anything intentionally uncompetitive. For example, maybe they don’t keep their Firefox support up to date because not enough Teams users use Firefox to warrant the effort, but maybe Firefox is increasingly Chrome-compatible. Firefox is not popular enough for MS to intentionally cripple.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

I'd take every day a native app running locally over a web app. And I am a web developer.

I have a native app (VS) and a web app (VSC) running side by side on my computer, its like an adult vs 7y old.

> I have a native app (VS) and a web app (VSC) running side by side on my computer, its like an adult vs 7y old.

Honestly, VSC is pretty decent due to all of the engineering MS put into it. Brackets and Atom both were way slower and had noticeable input lag, at least for me.

Other people have also looked into things like that: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

Personally, something like Notepad++ or Lazarus always felt the fastest to me.

Software like JetBrains IDEs, their Fleet editor, Visual Studio and even Visual Studio code all had noticeable hiccups but always seemed "fast enough". Even when the typing itself was okay, there'd be stuff like autocomplete delays/stuttering and refactoring slowdown, but nothing too annoying.

In contrast, Brackets, Atom, working through SSH, remote sessions through RDP/VNC or any device that lagged due to being underpowered always was annoying slow and disruptive.

Not anymore. Last gen phones have enough performance to run webapps without a single loss in performance, look and feel compared to native apps. Native apps will remain, but you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look. Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower. Although native knowledge is still required for Auth, billing, advertising and other required native stuff.

It's not just loss in performance, it's also loss of your data and control over that data.

This is not inherent to web apps though, is it? Free software web apps without vendor lock-in exist.

They do, but they are the exception, not the rule. The bulk of the free software that I use I use locally, in fact I don't think I use even a single package that is a free software web app that is operated by some third party and if it were then I probably would try to find an alternative.

I still have to see a single webapp that is as performant and feels the same as a native one. We might get there, and lots of companies are happy to release a half-backed webapp today, but that is definitely not the experience today.

Render speed of browser engines is really good these days on mobile phones. Getting fluid animations is maybe even easier and faster with css than with the Android sdk or ios. Plenty of frameworks out there to create nice SPAs. Some parts still have to be native like Auth, billing etc. But majority of the app can be web.

I could post a mini saas that I made in php and mysql, using jQuery on the front end, that outperforms just about any webapp and most modern local apps, but I don't want to attract too much attention because I'm sure technically it's easily breakable to pros and malicious people.

Also, it runs on a $4 a month namecheap server.

Why is so fast? Because I came from the land of slow crms, and performance was my #1 goal. Instead of making it faster to develope, I made it faster for the end user.

Is that a worthwhile business goal? I don't know. But I know it's fast.

But how do you know if an app is "native"? What does native even mean? Can I use html/js for layout in my native app?

I propose that all the apps you use that you find good you assume are native, but possibly some of those are not.

Feeling similar due to phone just being faster is not the same as a loss of performance.

You are still paying performance for using web apps, and even though your fingers don’t feel it as badly, your battery sure does.

> Last gen phones have enough performance to run webapps without a single loss in performance [...]

This makes no sense. If webapps run without a loss in performance, then you don't need increased hardware performance in order to see the difference.

> [...] compared to native apps.

This simply isn't true. Run a well-designed webapp and a well-designed native app on the same platform. You'll see a difference in performance.

> you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look.

I'm still waiting to see even one example of this.

> Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower.

True. But it comes at a cost to quality.

Why would the browser render engine slower than the Java Android UI render engine? I am almost certain that the browser css engine is better optimized than the Android native render. IOS is a different story since their render engine is heavily optimized against their own hardware. But still I know that webapps can have the same performance as native apps. And the end of mobile native UI kits will finally arrive. Webapps/spas will take over.

Same here, have done a mix of native and Web for 30+ years, and when it comes to chose, if there is a native app available, I'll take that.

Only if said OS exists. It does require a critical mass of users otherwise drivers wouldn't exist for desktop hardware and distros wouldn't exist. We're just lucky that the critical mass is actually quite low.

> 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.

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.

True, but increasingly marginal. Many schools have adopted Chromebooks (Linux in disguise) and even the MS Office suite has largely moved online.

MS is on a mission to go after schools that have adopted Chromebooks. If your school is using Chromebooks you can expect all kinds of stick-and-carrot tricks to try to get you to switch (back).

They invented the hilarious Surface SE, so bad it can't even run all Metro/Store apps. Worse than a Chromebook in every way.

Everything you want to install has to be approved by Microsoft

I agree. Google Classroom exploded during the pandemic in my local school systems.

Enterprises are moving to Workspace from 365. I hope they drive each other's prices to the bottom. :)

"Enterprises are moving to Workspace from 365" not in any meaningful numbers.

> not in any meaningful numbers.

While I agree, it has to start somewhere. As a customer of both, I appreciate the competition from 1-2% per year[0] growth.

[0]https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share...

Nah... We've had Workspace for a long time and there are still users that adamantly refuse to use Google Apps over MS. They actually have good reasons as well. Since Google just has web apps only there's always extra steps uploading all the office docs they get from other businesses.

We tried blowing Office 2013 away on everyone's machines after being told most users didn't think they needed it. Now, a few months later 90% of our users have asked for a 365 license.

What typically happens from what I can tell is that most businesses just end up having a mix of both 365 and Workspace.

Great feedback!

Excel specifically seems to have the most attachment among our users.

Excel has programming capabilities (VBA) that are used a lot, and I don't think they're available in the online version (are they?)

A lot of people are stuck on Windows or MacOS because of one killer app - Photoshop, a CAD/CAM package, a video or audio editor, or some proprietary bit of business software. Many of these applications have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dev time invested in them and it just isn't realistic to expect an open source alternative to compete.

I'm in that boat, but I don't especially mind. I run Windows because it allows me to run Fusion 360, but Windows Subsystem for Linux gives me a full Linux dev environment. A younger me would have got angry about it, but present me accepts that platform lock-in effects are very strong; fortunately for Linux, it dominates every new category of platform. I sincerely doubt that anyone will ever develop a new proprietary OS from scratch, because the business case for putting a pretty UI on Linux is overwhelming.

Sure but we were talking about students at schools here, where this is usually not a problem.

I hope that Photopea (browser-based Photoshop) can gain traction to break that dependency.

I know the evidence is that plenty of people are totally happy with applications running in a browser -- Office Online, Google Sheets, etc. are compelling evidence -- but I strongly prefer dedicated and native applications for something I'll be spending a lot of time using.

I'm not even necessarily blaming this on the performance difference, although that is a pertinent topic, but just the mental structure of something I'm using living in a browser tab rather than actually running on the computer.

Installable web apps would give you a workaround for that wouldn’t it?

They are still bound by the constraints of the Web.

For example WebGL 2.0 (2009 hardware), WebGPU (2015 hardware), any GPU capabilities after 2015? You ain't going to get them.

If the parents are talking about choice, then forced Chromebooks are not choice. The students must use them, and schools like them because they are very locked down and centrally observable.

But the student has no choice

> Chromebooks (Linux in disguise)

I don't think a win for Chromebooks counts as a win for Linux, except in maybe the most narrowly technical sense.

Go on the Chromeos subreddit and you'll see a lot of first time Linux users breaking open the dev tools to run Linux apps to get more functionality.

Its honestly quite interesting seeing new users from that perspective.

Yes, but many schools lock down their Chromebooks so that you can't run Linux on them. I somehow managed to unenroll mine last year, but I have no idea how I did, and to make it worse I had to switch out my Chromebook after it stopped working.

So in practice, no, it's not very useful. Most students are still forced to use a web browser and nothing more, else they run the risk of getting in trouble for hacking their Chromebook.

Tangent: That being said, it's hilarious how much worse the schools are at locking down Windows computers. As far as I can tell, they just bought a few commercial solutions, set them up on the Chromebooks, and paid no attention to the Windows computers. The BIOS isn't even locked. They're only restricted at the network level.

My middle school's computers (desktop pcs with windows at the time) fidn't have passwords on the bios We would bring linux "live users to boot on and play minecraft

A loss for the school, but definitely a win for our education

People aren't forced, they choose it. They are clueless about technology and don't trust anything that may look like a dark horse. They want reassurance. It's not just the "enterprise" or corporate world. Home users have that mentality. Mac computers cost an arm and a leg and people still pay for it because the advertising machine has hammered it into the heads that "it just works." Most people only trust big brands. The bigger the better.

> People aren't forced, they choose it.

I'm forced to use it at work. :(

I share that sentiment.

One important reality, though, is that "forced" is a sticky word here. Anyone sufficiently anti-FAANG and tech-savvy enough will find a workaround, so the constraints are far less than most dominant forces across the lens of history.

If a school requires Windows, students are forced to use it. Not changing schools isn't "choosing" Windows.

But yes, I'm always surprised how many people buy things introduced to them in ads.

> People aren't forced, they choose it.

No they don't. There aren't any schools nearby that do not force Windows on the students and I can have my whole house on Linux it doesn't matter: if you want to participate in highschool around here then Windows it is. My personal views of MS, their crimes past and present are worth absolutely nothing. I would not be surprised if you dig deep enough that you'll find some level of corruption but even that doesn't help me, it would just lead to a long and drawn out court case the outcome of which will likely be resolved long after my kids are out of school.

So, I have no choice other than to take my kids out of school and that too - rightly so - isn't an option.

It's more than a little bit ridiculous too because there isn't anything in the highschool curriculum that per-se would require access to a windows computer. But they make it so that it just simply doesn't work otherwise, starting from windows native applications for the agenda and messaging system and ending with sending documents in proprietary formats.

Well clearly the choice is to move to an area where your kids are able to run Linux.

I hope that was sarcastic. FWIW I think that government institutions, educational institutions, banks, insurance companies, health care service providers etc should use only open standards. No proprietary stuff at all. So no banking apps, no voting apps, calendar apps, no healthcare claim apps and definitely no client side software (Mac or Windows). Just the web and properly managed infrastructure.

> That doesn’t really exist any more.

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.

> I mean, https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-7840u

So, they took a cutting edge Windows PC, slapped Linux on it, and it didn't work well.

How well did OSX do when they tried it? Clearly, OSX isn't ready for the desktop! No wonder nobody runs it!

Modern computers are complex enough that they can work well with Windows, OSX, or Linux, but they don't work well with more than one of them (unless the designers work really hard). See, for example, how to reboot: https://mjg59.livejournal.com/137313.html

If you want to run Linux on a computer, buy it preinstalled, with support. Anything else is an exercise in chasing down small glitches, as you describe. (This happens for Windows too! The difference is that the laptop vendor has a team of people (the system integration team) to fix the issues, either by modifying drivers, modifying the firmware, or having the ODM change the hardware. If you slap Linux on some random bit of Windows kit, you get to be the system integration team, but with only one of three avenues open to you to fix the glitches. And that only halfway, since you cant get the OEM or ODM to give you the time of day. And that's assuming you're a proficient kernel hacker.)

Slapping Linux on a Windows box is a mug's game. The only way to win is not to play.

So true. If you get a System76 laptop you can get some really amazing hardware and make sure to never pay the Windows license fee.

It's not about the fee (generally it's small for you (though for the OEM it's critical, and one of the ways MSFT gets OEMs to do their bidding (a small example is how they all "recommend Windows" on their sites; it's a discount on the fees they pay MSFT)). The fee also is why you get so much crapware on new Windows boxes.

It's about the hardware's support of the OS (see the firmware discussion above).

It's also about your support experience as a customer (do you have to reinstall Windows before the OEM will give you the time of day, let alone fix the hardware glitch you're hitting)

)

System76 won't make MFC drivers for every MFC there is or make Linux clients for wacky corporate VPNs and Wifi appear.

Sure, because they (or whoever) don't make it.

Many printers, especially the MFC ones, support Linux. For instance, Brother has drivers: https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/52188/~...

WRT corporations, they can do what they like with their own hardware and software. And yes, a lot are short-sighted. Most won't be using Mac any time soon, because they've locked themselves in quite effectively.

i dunno. i work on completely cross platform things and use a system76 laptop and the experience is still pretty garbage. the real problem is the linux userspace. its a huge arbitrary mess that is made worse by the insane number of packages that have to work together for a remotely usable desktop experience.

it's possible of course, but invariably breaks, especially if you need to install any single third party thing.

i hate flatpak etc but it really makes u think about why people are putting effort into fat packages for desktop stuff

Sounds like the problems you describe would be fixed by Guix or Nix. You should give one of those a try, or even use them on your existing distro!

Oh, the lock in still exists. In many fields. You need a certain software to be competitive, so you have to use whatever os supports it. I know people who have switched from Mac os to windows because office is slightly janky on Mac os. Lock ins happen all the time.

There's also a thing where software supports Mac and Windows, but really needs a lot of memory and storage, so the absurd markups Apple went back to charging in the Apple silicon era make it unviable for all but the most profitable workloads. I looked into Apple when laptop shopping recently, but couldn't justify or afford the markup to get the storage and memory I can put in the laptop I went with for a fraction of the cost.

>No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice

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.

> No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice.

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.

This is a wholly valid point when it comes to Linux desktop penetration. However as an aside, it seems to me that the computers for sale in actual stores are usually of terrible quality. They’re the last the computers I would choose, and this isn’t really a Windows or ChromeOS thing. (I’d just wipe them and install Linux in any case) This doesn’t detract from your point at all, but it just seems like the most-available computers are the ones companies _want_ to sell rather than the computers that savvy consumers _want_ to buy.

I agree, and am sad to observe that it is very different with Apple, where laptops available on display in a physical Apple store are often the ones a savvy customer would want to buy.

> I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice.

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?

I'm sure as hell locked in. Linux Desktop doesn't even remotely come close to offer the things I ask out of a PC (high quality music production and image editing). On the other hand, both Windows and macOS do.

And let's not even get started about work.

Both these things are very well possible on Linux. Maybe you are more concerned about specific applications which have not been ported by their developers?

I have run high quality music production software on Linux. It was Windows software, that runs thanks to Wine. It works and it's even better than native applications because native applications expire when a distro version is discontinued and the application is not packaged for the current version. Windows applications installed in Wine never expire. Wine is Linux, Linux does the job.

And high quality image editing is possible, though it's probably done differently from whatever you're used to. There are plenty of graphic artists making their work on Linux and bragging about it.

So "doesn't even remotely come close" is either a lie or a display of your ignorance.

Can you use iLok on Linux/wine?

I know quite a few graphic artists and musical engineers who use Linux professionally. I think the difference, really, is which tools you're used to using. There aren't really any Linux tools for these sorts of things that work the same as the tools for Windows, so if you're expert with one, you still have a rather large learning curve if you want to use the other. That can be prohibitive.

What a joke. Web standards move under our feet -- and browsers break -- all the time. I personally work for a company that forces me to work online and only pretends to support Linux. They say I have to use the latest version of Chrome (so I can't choose a browser that won't spy on me), I use it and it still breaks occasionally. I know they count on everybody using Windows and don't want to bother with Linux. So much for cross-platform. That pipe dream was proven false years ago.

Who cares? I don't use Linux because it is or isn't popular. Who actually has an emotional bond to the market share of their software?

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.

Market share/popularity correlates directly to amount of available software, and their support. So it is completely rational to care about these metrics.

I care about other people having to suffer a shitty computing experience.

It is a little funny that I can't tell if this comment is pro or against desktop Linux.

Could be both tbh. There are definitely ways in which Linux is better - no ads (cough Microsoft) or artificial restrictions (e.g. recording desktop audio cough Apple).

But in the most important ways - software availability and reliability - it is much worse.

Reliability for sure, though it has gotten better. You could argue that availability is better because it's all free, but I see what you are saying. Often enough I can't use a program natively on Linux.

I'm not worried about whether Linux is "good enough". I want Microsoft to stop having a monopoly.

Windows is the modern VT100. It's simply a category error to compare its market share to Linux these days.

Wow, what's with that tone?

> And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it :).

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.

Feel free to read the title as GNU/Linux.

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.

It has full presence on my desktop, which is all that matters.

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.

It is a little worse that that for Linux - you have conquered the whole world except for the place where you were born - where you are still a nobody. You can't just forget about that place either because you wake up there every day to rule the rest of the world from.

> stings a bit doesn't it :).

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.

By kilogram, there's more ants than humans on the world yet no one says ants dominate the world.

Perception matters :)

Flies are clearly the master species.

There is a lot we can learn from a creature whose life purpose is eating shit all day, every day.

Agreed, it stings. I see it as a measure of how brainwashed/psychologically coerced the masses are. Why would a sentient, rational agent expend resources for an inferior product while a superior alternative exists which costs nothing.

Because you can’t play games simply and easily for one.

It doesn’t sting at all because my personal worth isn’t tied to what OS is used where. But this comment explains a lot about the mentality I see where people argue it’s a failing of Linux that it’s not intuitive for non-technical grandmothers.

Well, people also argue that it's a virtue of Linux that it's easier for non-technical grandmothers to use than Windows. I'm not making that up, either.

> And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it

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.

> And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it :).

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.

Linux's culture abhors everything required to be a great desktop OS and I don't think that will change any time soon.

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!

Nah. I play games on Windows because its easy, program on Mac because its comfortable, and deploy on Linux because its powerful. Its all good!

Sure, Linux is on many, many devices which have proprietary UIs. And there it does pretty well, because the kernel just provides generic functionality cheaply. It’s a commodity backend that could be swapped with another commodity backend without any users knowing or caring. Hooray. Linux is the go to choice when you could just as well be using something else that’s really cheap, like BSD.

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.

> Sure, Linux is on many, many devices which have proprietary UIs. And there it does pretty well, because the kernel just provides generic functionality cheaply. It’s a commodity backend that could be swapped with another commodify backend without any users knowing or caring. Hooray.

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.

>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.

More advanced in terms of supported features and hardware.

Taking one off the top of my head that was relevant around the time Android was being developed, dynamic ticks which is important for low power operation. Linux supported this in 2007 about 5 years before FreeBSD and I think NetBSD still doesn't support it. Could not field a phone OS without that, at least not back in those days.

> 100% OSS

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

The parent is talking about the operating system, not all software running on the machine.

The "operating system" is not really operating the system anymore. They're just an app sandboxed away from the real hardware by the real operating systems hidden away in the machine.

https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo

Nobody said it wasn't important. It's just a different kind of problem. I personally run disabled and neutralized Intel ME to be a bit safer.

The kernel does not provide "generic" functionality; it provides very specific, often top-notch functionality which you can't easily find elsewhere, at least not as an easy replacement.

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.

Let's remember that until fairly recently the Windows kernel supported only one architecture, lol.

It was designed for portability from the beginning and was ported to x86:

> Various versions of NT family operating systems have been released for a variety of processor architectures, initially IA-32, MIPS, and DEC Alpha, with PowerPC, Itanium, x86-64 and ARM supported in later releases.

> In order to prevent Intel x86-specific code from slipping into the operating system, due to developers being used to developing on x86 chips, Windows NT 3.1 was initially developed using non-x86 development systems and then ported to the x86 architecture. This work was initially based on the Intel i860-based Dazzle system and, later, the MIPS R4000-based Jazz platform. Both systems were designed internally at Microsoft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

We're talking about "devices which have proprietary UIs" so in that case, the company creating the proprietary UI is free to choose the hardware. At that point, all of the benefits of Linux over BSD cease to exist, because the vendor can simply choose hardware that supports BSD (or pay someone to develop drivers). So yes, in those specific cases (again, "devices which have proprietary UIs"), you could easily replace Linux with BSD.

They keep making these articles because your points are irrelevant to the discussion here. People want Linux desktop market share, because they know what the more market share Linux gains, the better the experience will be (more testing, more apps ported, etc.) Nobody who is cheering on the 3% number is going to be satisfied by obscure facts like "Android is Linux" (it isn't to the users of locked-down phones) and "Servers run Linux" (does that matter in the slightest to the person loading the webpage?)

> 19XX will be the year of Linux on the desktop

> 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.

> 19XX will be the year of Linux on the desktop

When they said it back in the 1920s it was sort of confusing, tbh.

Time Travelers, man.

> it hasn't conquered that one place they've been trying to conquer since the start

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.

> it hasn't conquered that one place they've been trying to conquer since the start.

Who is "they" here?

> its one of the few OSes ever on Mars

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.

That's a bit of a mistatement/overstatement. That's like saying the Windows XP thin-client at Barnes and Noble runs the, mostly Linux/Unix, backend.

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.

> (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.

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.

> 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?

Sure, it's an important component of the entire system. Much as a steering wheel is an important component of a car, it still doesn't "run" the car. You need to interface, yes obviously; but if the machine crashes the sub operates merrily along like usual and any of the other control computers can continue to give it commands.

As to overrides, if you lost every single control computer and the direct interfaces (the analog control boards you see in crucial areas of naval vessels) then the overall system has a fallback procedure. It's not documented or public knowledge, but assumedly it would surface and activate an emergency beacon as the vessel is crippled (and likely damaged) at that point.

If the goal of such parallel is to show how Linux is more reliable than Windows, then being the steering wheel is sufficient, compared to Windows not being a part of the car at all.

Well, a desktop OS like Windows is not meant to run industrial processes. It's better to not try to hammer nails with the torque wrench.

> 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.

Didn't the uk have a warship stuck at sea due to a windows update many years ago?

That's like trying to advertise tractors to people that want a sport car.

Are you comparing Mac OS or Windows 11 to sport cars?

>> is the largest corp contributor to Linux

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.

Some stats about that for Linux 6.4:

https://lwn.net/Articles/936113/

>Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS.

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.

> 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.

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.

You might be surprised.

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.

Can you elaborate on this? I have always been curious when a group works on an inferior (in terms of popularity!) product such as Ask Jeeves how they themselves work day to day in the workplace. So you worked for Microsoft and didn't use their flagship product?

What do you think the flagship product is? It’s not Windows, if we are ranking by revenue, it’s barely hanging in third place. I don’t think it’s too shocking when you consider that most of the Office products need to developed and compiled for other operating systems, and obviously Azure is not Windows dependent.

Culture has changed, nobody cares if you use a Mac. Hell I bet half the employees are taking Teams meetings on their iPhones.

> Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS

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.

> 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

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/

The desktop is a great test of whether an OS is actually great, or it's just free and happens to work really well because servers have professional IT staff and powerful machines.

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.

Meh. I switched (back) to Ubuntu this January after a few years of Windows, because my AMD CPU+GPU setup kept BSODing on Windows, it kept failing to wake up from sleep (and because I got fed up with a lot of other nits), and ... surprisingly most of the things just work. Brother printer? Next-next-finish. As it was many years ago on Windows. (The same printer takes an intensive 30 minutes of cursing and downloading some godforsaken software.)

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 majority OS on phones

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.

The article is about desktop market share (the headline is a bit misleading).

Yet, there's no such thing as Linux operating system. What runs on those machines are thousands of Linux distros, each being an operating system.

You can't get an app designed for Android to run on Linux Mint with ease.

Charitably: a wider userbase on desktop means there's more attention given to consumer hardware support, vendor/driver support, app support, desktop environment and distro work, etc etc, all of which makes the experience better for the people who already use it on desktop. So I think that's a good reason for them to be excited

Everyone knows Linux is the number one for servers and embeded devices but the desktop market share is special.

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.

Servers yes, embedded devices not really.

So literally everything other than normal users having a polished out PC OS.

That's a lot of words to ignore that this is very clearly talking about desktop market share.

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.

I guess it is more that if you dont know that you are using Linux then you aren't.

For anyone who cares about these stats using Linux is the most important thing about computing.

It’s interesting to me that your top comment today when I made this same statement years ago and got downvoted. yet nothing has changed. oh well.

Also routers (at least one in each internet-connected home), NAS devices, e-book Readers, car entertainment consoles, and many more.

> Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS.

Is there a source for that?

What os hasnt been to space? The laptops on the ISS run windows and they have ipads up there too.

2024 will be the year of Linux on the bathroom shelves if all electric toothbrushes will run it. :)

Because some people are trying to advance Linux as a desktop OS, which is a good idea.

> Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS.

Yeah. But it's not its OS. The true OS of most Android installations is some propietary firmware blob.

That's cope.

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