Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Together, Linux + ChromeOS (much closer to standard GNU+Linux than Android) have something between 6% and 7% of the desktop. I don't remember people saying the same about MacOS when it was around that mark.

Of course, we must be realistic. Linux around 6% is very different from MacOS at 6%. In that case, they already had support from items people complain to this day about Linux not having; main examĺes are msoffice and photoshop.

Nevertheless, Linux on the desktop has never been so good. Flatpak (or even AppImages and snaps) allow me to have a "stable core" with recently updated software. Support for most hardware is much better now (looks like most vendors make sure the hardware supports Linux, even though they themselves don't announce it). Pipewire and Wayland matured to the point where you can finally stream your desktop on Wayland using Pipewire. GNOME is snappier today then it was and cleaner and more elegant; of course we still need some consistency but windows suffers from that too; and, look, it even has thumbnails on the file picker! The kernel evolved to a point where desktop is just another well supported system: MGLRU and other improvements made latency on the desktop even under memory pressure just ideal.

The environment around it also evolved a lot. Many FLOSS software are on a quality level today that mostly only professional on almost niche areas can't use Linux on the desktop. Consider Blender, Godot, Audacity, Inkscape, Firefox, OBS... these things are refined, stable, elegant and don't try to steal your attention, require periodic payments or throw ads on your face. Actually a Linux desktop user feels very sorry when they see a "standard" windows user. And I'm not even talking about proton or areas where Linux leads or is well established.

So yes, it improved. Nevertheless, I'd love to, but I don't think I'll see Linux on the desktop beat windows or MacOS. But, know one thing: I don't care. Linux on the desktop has been good enough for me for a very long time and it will only get better. I just hope someday its market share will be big enough for it to no longer be ignored by so many vendors. Watching current growth, I don't think that is too far anymore now.

I use kubuntu as my daily driver for work for a little over 2 years now. I still run into daily issues that just make me not want to use it for my personal desktop os.

I fret Everytime I update, yet I must update due to work. but I have to schedule and plan those updates so that when the whole thing takes a shit, I can spend 2 or 3 hours fixing it. Just using the built in update utility, or apt upgrade, or really anything runs about a 10-20% chance of shit breaking. (I didn't do the math)

audio experience is terrible all around, and Bluetooth and wifi use out the box, is meh at best for range and stability.

I've tried a dozen distros to see if the grass is greener somewhere else, it isn't, and I have to work, I don't have an hour every day to fiddle, I have to bill clients.

good support is almost non existent, IF you get help, it's from some greater than thou righteous asshole who suggests you just rewrite the drivers yourself and create a pull request.

while I agree it is close, there is a still a LOT of 'polish' that needs to come where I will feel confident that hitting update doesn't ruin my day, and that when I'm done with a stress filled day of work, I'll be able to boot up and play my games without having to troubleshoot for an hour first.

Your overall point is valid and I don't want to minimize your struggles, but I do have a few questions.

> I fret Everytime I update, yet I must update due to work. but I have to schedule and plan those updates so that when the whole thing takes a shit, I can spend 2 or 3 hours fixing it. Just using the built in update utility, or apt upgrade, or really anything runs about a 10-20% chance of shit breaking. (I didn't do the math)

What... are you doing? Do you have some strange use-case that might be causing this? Since 2014 I've daily driven debians, Arch, and now NixOS and updates that break my system have been exceedingly rare. I don't remember a single time Arch pacman -Syu broke my system, nor apt, and, well, NixOS doesn't count ;)

> good support is almost non existent, IF you get help, it's from some greater than thou righteous asshole who suggests you just rewrite the drivers yourself and create a pull request.

Where do you ask for help? How do you ask it? I've never received such a dickish response when I go on IRC and ask questions, no matter how stupid. I'm consistently impressed at how dedicated some community members are to helping newbies out. What you're saying is completely opposite to my experience.

It's got to be the hardware. Most people don't have two or three hours fixing their desktop after an update. I use Debian Testing, and I can't remember the last time an update went bad; it's been years.

If you use bleeding-edge hardware with an OS that vendors aren't specifically targeting, expect problems. I gave up trying to put Linux on random new laptops, so I've researched compatibility ahead of every purchase I've made in the last 10 years. Also, if you buy from a vendor that specializes in Linux, there will be a markup, but you will also get assurances and support.

We can pretend like that's a failure on the part of Linux, but Apple only gives you like five choices of machine, while Linux runs at least somewhat on every random computer-like object.

Feel like I'm on a different planet to a lot of these desktop Linux users.

I've used desktop Linux since the late 90s - Redhat 6 was the first disto I used.

I have had uncountable complete system failures since then. As the parent says doing a dist-upgrade has a very non-0 chance of completely bricking the system. I've even had apt brick itself multiple times through normal upgrades.

Linux on the desktop for me over the past 25 years has been hilariously unreliable, by far the most buggy software I have used over my career.

Linux on the server is flawless and I use it all the time, but the amount of software installed compared to desktop usage is tiny, and I don't do dist upgrades on servers (would rebuilt it onto another machine).

For me after 25 years of various attempts the most reliable desktop "Linux" is actually Windows with WSL2. All hardware works great, sleep works, Bluetooth works, display scaling works, WiFi6E works etc. And I have a great Linux machine thru WSL2.

What really sounds like something with the setup is not right to me is that Beached seems to say they have to cross their fingers every time they run just a plain update, not a release upgrade.

I remember often having to fix something when dist-upgrading Ubuntu when I used it on personal desktops between ~2005 and ~2014. I can't remember what kinds of issues there were, and apparently none of them entirely bricked the systems beyond repair since the same install survived throughout those years, but I remember it wasn't flawless.

But random breakage from standard updates within release is not something I remember happening on Debian, Ubuntu or modern Fedora with any frequency. (Except when I ran Debian unstable before Ubuntu, but that's a different story.) Double digit percentages, or even integer ones, do indeed sound like they are from a different planet.

I switched away from Ubuntu on the desktop over some dissatisfactions nearly a decade ago (and I never really ran Kubuntu) so I don't have much experience with that from recent years. But I've now had the same install of Fedora since 2014 that's gone through more release upgrades than I care to count, and while release upgrades still have a non-zero chance of breaking something, standard updates have been pretty much flawless.

I suspect there's something rather different about the setups of people who report no issues and that of someone who says standard updates frequently break in mainstream distros. Either there's a hardware difference or a difference in some kinds of 5% needs for the setup -- such as some specific software, specific peripherals, or specific needs. E.g. someone doing sound production might be much more likely to run into sound issues than someone whose sound needs are Netflix on USB headphones.

My last couple of personal devices have been ThinkPads that I picked in part specifically for the compatibility. The previous one with almost everything Intel worked pretty much 100% issue-free for years. I can imagine that if I instead had a random-brand consumer laptop or desktop, a wifi card with some kind of flaky half-support, proprietary NVidia drivers, some slightly niche peripherals, and the need to run some kind of a proprietary application dynamically linking with shared libraries from 2017, the story might be quite different.

Of course it might also be that some of us are just so used to dealing with fixing small issues or skirting around them that they just don't register for us any more. I think that's something that might also happen for some people -- tinkering is so natural that it doesn't feel like tinkering so tinkering doesn't exist -- and I wonder if that's part of the difference in the reported experiences.

But if someone reports a double-digit percentage of stuff breaking on a standard update, there's something else going on as well.

Yes, I think if you pick hardware specifically for Linux you'll have far less problems and this may explain the difference.

Having said that, my RaPi has got in a bad apt state twice now which should be fairly 'mainstream' as hardware goes (as in a lot of people running the exact same configuration).

I think you may be right with what you consider bricking too. I would consider the system bricked if a dist-upgrade succeeded (system boots ok) but apt is in a bad state after, as it can take hours to resolve that.

I think also I have a lot less tolerance for this after running Mac and Windows for so long (I've only recently started using Windows again once WSL became stable, before that it was basically just Mac). I have never had a bricked upgrade from that.

I agree apt or dpkg ending up in a bad state would probably mean bricking for lots of people. It's something I remember also having to do in some cases after dist-upgrades.

I remember having occasionally dealt with having to manually run dpkg reconfigure to install packages that had somehow ended up in a semi-installed state during an upgrade, or some other similar bad state. To someone who's not familiar with the distro's internals, and probably to some who are, that would just appear as a mysteriously broken system that no longer operates.

I guess for me bricking would be if I can't get the system working again using some kinds of relatively well-documented or known repair steps (that is, known to me or sort of generally). I'm more bothered by something not quite working right and not understanding it than I'm by a complete but repairable bricking that I understand or know how to fix.

That's almost certainly not how most people would perceive it, though.

And even though I'm probably not that averse to fixing things, I also originally moved from Debian unstable to the newly founded Ubuntu because I didn't want to deal with routinely playing sysadmin on my personal box any more.

With that said, I don't know if it's because of stricter checks being made by dnf before package operations or what, but I've never got dnf/rpm into a non-working state on modern Fedora. Despite my old affection for Debian-based distros, I admit that apt/dpkg has seemed more flakey to me after this.

After nine years, I wouldn't even know how to try doing something similar to manually running dpkg reconfigure on Fedora. If that even exists.

(edit: sentence)

I’ve been using Linux as my daily driver, and primary OS, for going on four years now I think. I’ve only ever had things break once, and it was because I installed competing versions of NVidia drivers. Even then, it was painless (for me) to fix as booting the machine to a terminal allowed me to “apt remove” that shit in less than a minute.

I had some issues with Pulseaudio but overall they were minor, and now Pulseaudio has been swapped for something else and I don’t even know what it is… because it works well enough.

I’m not trying to say you didn’t experience problems, but your experience is the opposite of mine. I had more problems with Windows than I’ve had Linux. Windows absolutely ruined installs and disks on bad updates I more times than I can count. And the networking stack isn’t dog shit like modern MacOS (I still use Macs for work), plus unlike MacOS I can use a performant GPU to play games or do research.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

This has it at 5.1%. But ChromeOS has a lot of corporate mojo making it work. It’s only partially open source. A lot of the good bits are closed. So that puts Linux at 2.91%. A rounding error. For 30 years.

3% is probably twice as many as 10 years ago. Pretty good for people who aren't selling you anything and aren't asking you to use Linux.

Your data, as of this writing, is from January 23. Consider this: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide... which fully agrees with your data and shows the combination Linux+ChromeOS above 7% in June 23.

Thanks for pointing how fast Linux on the desktop has been growing lately.

And Krita. Great software.

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