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Comment by CodeCompost | Hacker News Reader

> Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market.

I don't understand this headline, was it written by a bot?

The author used a deliberately confusing title to make the point that ChromeOS should be considered as a Linux OS rather than a distinct category. The actual stat is "Linux (excluding ChromeOS) has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market".

I feel that it could have been made clearer by writing "GNU/Linux has nearly half.. [etc..]", maybe?

But ChromeOS is also GNU/Linux

That's not a joke though and the whole point is made with the weird title

No, that would exclude Alpine and I don't know any purist claiming that Alpine isn't Linux.

It's The Register being pedantic and a bit argumentative.

There's a reasonable argument that Chrome OS is Linux--or at least more so than Android is. But it's not so much that it's "the wrong kind of Linux" according to purists as the article says but that it mostly addresses a different use case than installing Fedora or Ubuntu and therefore, IMO, it generally makes sense to treat them separately unless your point is that some form of Linux (and *nix generally) has a pretty large market share on both desktop and mobile.

I'm not sure it addresses a different use case than Fedora or Ubuntu. Fedora and Ubuntu on the desktop are likely mostly used for internet browsing and productivity applications. This is the same for ChromeOS.

The ChromeOS use case is a strict subset of the use case of a normal Linux laptop. There is nothing stopping you from treating an Ubuntu installation as if it's as limited as a Chromebook. It's every bit as lightweight and can be every bit as locked down.

> can be every bit as locked down

I've never seen the security stuff from ChromeOS be ported to live outside of ChromeOS. When I looked at it (trying to build the inside-container agents for acustom container image), the error messages for setting it up incorrectly were.. let's charitably say hard to understand. I doubt anyone outside of ChromeOS developers understands it, really.

It's pretty intricate, e.g. giving Wayland access to virtual machines in a safe way.

Pretty soon, SteamOS will be separated out. Then Linux will makeup an even smaller portion of the "desktop Linux market."

I guess, reading the linked article would explain this, it's what the article is about.

> We feel that a more accurate reckoning would be that Linux has now reached 7.23 per cent of Statcounter's usage figures, with ChromeOS at just over half: 57.4 per cent of the total.

I guess that's more Chromebooks (laptops) than true desktops.

I'm probably missing something subtle in this comment.

Linux laptops are as Linux as Linux desktops. I had a Linux desktop in the 90s but all my Linux boxes have been laptops since then.

I think they're quibbling with the term "desktop" in the article title.

You are probably right but for me the desktop in Year of the Linux Desktop has always been one of the several DEs inside the screen.

Read the article.

Usually title should be understandable without reading the article. The point of the title is to summarize the article.

If the title is confusing, the least someone could do before taking the time to write a comment with a basic question is to read the article. The point of the title is not always "to summarize the article".

And that is one recurring problem I see across HN in recent times, where people merely make comments/claims based on only reading the title and completely disregarding the contents of the article shared.

It might be that the title may be clickbait-y, but that is I guess to be expected in this day. Someone reading has the choice to just not interact if that title is too much bait.

It has nothing to do with "in recent times," people have been doing it here for well over a decade.

At slashdot it was assumed that no one read the article before commenting.

I have been on HN a lot more since ditching Reddit recently and somehow I think it's actually worse than Reddit with commenters not reading the article

At least on Reddit people make jokes. At one point the most-gilded comment ever was a (honestly, pretty funny) one-line joke reply to a paragraph long heartfelt comment about grief and loss.

Here it's a loose game of word association. For example, title says "GNU" in any context so we get 300 comments with unrelated anecdotes about Stallman. The comments section becomes stories about whatever random nonsense is in the top 2-3 comments. When it was being published, n-gate[0] was great at highlighting this.

[0] http://www.n-gate.com/hackernews/

On the other hand, my first thought was, “If the title is that confused, how much worse is the article gonna be?” so I browsed the comments first and discovered that the weird title was purposeful. Which made me more inclined to read the article than I was beforehand.

Unless the title is a joke which it is. The whole point of the article is that linux blowhards try to ignore ChromeOS as Linux.

The Economist print edition, for exxample, routinely uses puns and wordplay in their headlines (though the subtitle is generally more straightforward). But there is a subset of people who firmly believe that headlines should be "just the facts."

Sounds like a boring world to me!

Interestingly they are those people that don't read the article. Thus proving the worth of opaque curiosity piquing titles.

I run ChromeOS, and it is logical in some sense to exclude or at least separate it from Linux classification.

The Linux VM has limited availability. I believe it depends on your processor (I have an i5, some Chromebooks have ARM.) It needs to be enabled as a "developer option" and yes, it is labeled as a developer tool, which means it could break. It will not work if you're logged in with multiple users. (Neither will the Android subsystem.)

ChromeOS will not run graphical Linux applications out of the box. I haven't experimented enough with the VM, but it does not have X11, Gnome, KDE, or Wayland dependencies installed; it is a minimal package list.

The Linux CLI runs in a VM (and a container too, I believe.) So you're running Linux in the sense that WSL runs Linux. ChromeOS Linux has limited access to the rest of the system. You need to configure each shared folder, for example.

That's userland. There aren't any Linux drivers to install, uninstall, or corrupt. You can't look through /proc or do meaningful system monitoring that you would find on Linux. There's no crontab or any scheduled tasks, for that matter.

I'd say it's one notch up from your Android phone in the hierarchy of "what is Linux?"

it took some thinking, but i did manage to figure out that they must be talking about chrome OS even without reading the article, so i approve

The point of a title, just like the point of any other bit of writing or any other bit of creation of any kind, is whatever the author wanted.

The point of most publication titles is more to grab attention than merely a dry summary.

The point of this one was to grab attention by being funny and curious through being seemingly illogical.

The readers are expected to be humans not robots. Humans understand and enjoy this. They even have a term just for it. You may google the term "wordplay" for more information.

> Usually title should be understandable without reading the article.

I agree with you. It's just that this case is unusual.

> The point of the title is to summarize the article.

This title does just that.

At most publications, yes. But this is El Reg. They have their own way of doing things.

In straight reporting, the title, or "headline," is a story summary. But there are many kinds of writing where the title is a teaser, something to get the reader to turn their attention to it. The worst of the them are "clickbait," but this one is something different. It encourages the reader to click, but not by misleading. Instead it teases, begging the reader to look at the article to make sense of it.

No...

Sorry but this is rewarding bad behavior by giving the article a click instead of pointing out how this is a bad headline.

We should not be excusing headlines like this by simple saying that the article has the answer.

This comes up most times the register is posted. It's what they do. It's their style. It's humor.

My problem is less the article and more the response to just read the article.

While yes I have an issue with the article headline, the person I am responding to just saying "read the article" is just feeding into clickbait.

I really don't think we should be saying "it's their style" as a defense for bad clickbait headlines when we are actively spreading those headlines. Clickbait is a serious problem on the internet and here we are defending it? No... it deserves to be called out. I don't care how funny it is, they are not the onion.

There is nothing wrong with the title. It IS their style, and their publication, and their right to write in whatever style they choose, including ones that are perfectly understood and appreciated by some people, even if you are not among them.

Its a clickbait headline...

You're right, they can do whatever they want to do. That doesn't mean they are free from bring criticized for doing it.

I do not understand how we are defending a clickbait headline right now.

The headline was intentionally written in a way that it does not make sense to get someone to click it. By saying "read the article" we are rewarding that behavior.

Are you also going to defend the clickbait of Kotaku?

I understand why these companies do it, but I refuse to give them a free pass encouraging clicking a clickbait headline when talking about the fact that the headline does not make sense.

No it isn't clickbait. It's wordplay. It's fun. Some humans enjoy that.

Clickbait is different from intriguing. If you don't know how to articulate the difference, that is a consistent pattern with also being unqualified to judge writing quality.

This title, at least not with the cover image included, did not artificially and pointlessly withhold information. The title doesn't mention chromeos or any other linux-based systems, but the picture includes a chromebook, and from that I knew the article was going to be about chromeos, and the title was a joke about chromeos being arguably both a linux system and not a linux system.

If you didn't, assuming you don't happen to be blind and assuming the images alt tag doesn't happen to be specific enough, the deficiency is in you not the article.

Myself, I would not be so eager to advertize that I don't get simple things like this.

Wordplay in headlines has been a common feature of some British newspapers and magazines for decades.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/may/13/guardian-200-m...

My English teacher has this on the wall of his classroom: https://www.ambaile.org.uk/asset/49730/

And it's one of the things I love about them.

Then don't read it, jsut scroll over. And yes, you should read the Fing article before compaining about it. Thats basic stuff.

The point is that there is a semantic quibble about the word "Linux" in data gathering contexts.

The article is about whether ChromeOS counts as a "Linux desktop OS".

The whole article seems confusing, and as if it's written by a bot. Not really what I'd call quality journalism.

The headline is just a bit of British humor

It's a "we checked the Linux desktop share and you won't believe what we found out!" type of headline.

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