Linux Hits 4% on the Desktop | Hacker News Reader

Linux Hits 4% on the Desktop

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74 pointsthrowaway119444 comments

I can't imagine running another OS other than Linux on my personal machine. You get a sense of control and privacy you won't get from the main other OSes.

Linux 23 years and counting. UNIX for the 10 years before that.

I looked at Windows around 1993. Couldn't believe how primitive it was for a GUI.

I can. Any of the free BSDs (of which FreeBSD is one of them).

I find using anything other than a tiling window manager to be extremely painful.

I keep a Windows 11 partition on my primary for games. Otherwise I would be full-time Linux on my personal machines.

I used to dual boot too but I started playing more and more on Linux and I didn't touch my Windows for two years.

> "I used to dual boot too but I started playing more and more on Linux and I didn't touch my Windows for two years."

Pretty much exactly how I ended up on Linux full-time myself. Eventually the only thing left on my Windows partition was EverQuest, and then suddenly one day WINE started supporting that pretty much flawlessly and that was the end of my dual-boot.

Then along comes Humble Bundle and GOG and Steam all with a wide variety of Linux-native games, and later on well-emulated Windows games too, and I just never felt the need (or even want) to dual-boot ever again.

I step onto the Windows GUI occasionally for work and I always walk away missing Sway. There's those snap windows but despite that the whole UI just seems so busy and crowded.

This could just be because at some point everything I did was either in a terminal or browser (when did that happen?) and Windows always seems to be sitting around waiting for you to open some windowed app.

"There's dozens of us!"

I kid. I've been using Debian as my main OS since about 2012. Once Steve Jobs signed Flash's death warrant, Linux as a desktop became feasible.

Its bitter sweet though. Linux is feasible because everything is on the web, which is worse than what we had before.

> Its bitter sweet though. Linux is feasible because everything is on the web, which is worse than what we had before.

What do you mean?

Late 90s argument against linux sounded like “we need to run Office”. Today i don’t need spreadsheets that are not shared in real time with my colleagues. So you use web version of excel/googlesheets and it doesn’t matter what OS is running your webkit-based browser.

Also all the “free software” is in someone else’s server.

In the past there was a binary running on your machine working with data stored locally. You had defacto control of your data. You also had defacto control of the program running since you could look at the assembly, maybe even patch it.

Now the software, all runs on the cloud on other people’s computers and your data is stored in their systems and you may or may not be able to get it out easily.

The whole point of GNU is having control over the binaries run on your local machine.

Today our situation is far worse than that, our data is held and processed by third parties.

The advantage of the latter is so great that Big Tech no longer cares of you run some weirdo OS. They own you anyway.

I self-host almost my entire stack and infra.

Its so much work and Im not a techie. Its definitely beyond most people's reach.

(I self host everything except email and calendar -> Apple and Microsoft own me)

Sad to say but Electron helped a lot too.

I don't understand why people give any credence to this data.

May 2023, for example, screams unfiltered bots:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android/m...

They collect data using tracking scripts too, which most tech savvy users block, i.e. majority of those using Linux.

Their Firefox market share figures are refuted by Cloudflare Radar (which doesn't rely on tracking scripts), for example.

All the data is based on page views, and they seem to support non-javascript, which means they don't even have the possibility of detecting a lot of bots.

+1% on Linux marketshare worldwide in less than 8 months.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

1 percentage point but >30% increase!

It’s all just a bogus data. Over 10% drop in windows market share in few months, that recovered after few more months? How can anyone believe data like this?

Yeah, it's more likely they had a broken version of their tracking scripts on some OS/browser versions.

FWIW, this is from StatCounter, so it's just one data point from sites that use their free counter (less than 1% of websites).

StatCounter provides the most optimistic estimate available. Another data point is from Steam, which says 1.76%. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=combined

The Steam Hardware Survey is a survey on the population of a gaming storefront. Despite Valve’s own efforts, Linux is still very much a second-class citizen in the gaming world. StatCounter might not be the most accurate predictor ever but, as a web analytics tool, is going to be more representative of the population at large that gaming microcosm.

> …Linux is still very much a second-class citizen in the gaming world.

I understand, just citing it to put a pin in the lower end of the range. I'd bet on ~3% actual.

Steam survey might also additionaly be skewed away from GNU/Linux. In all those years I have never gottent the survey popup on any of my GNU/Linux machines (except Steam Deck), but have gotten it many time on Windows when still using it, and on the Windows machine at work which I have to use to test stuff it was also shown regularly. Not one single time on GNU/Linux machines. Is this widespread? If it is then I guess there should be even more of uss according to Steam survey.

Dupe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38853877

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252801

Linux mainly since the end 90s. Most of it with i3. There is simply nothing more productive for me. It feels handicapped using anything else; it feels actually clunky when I see other people using something else.

Does a steam deck count as a Linux desktop?

Indeed - when stats jump up so fast, one has to suspect a new commercial product that reports as Linux.

Also, web browser's in cars or some new phone browser.

I was wondering this as well. I guess it's really a game system, but it is running Linux (a Debian derivative, right?) on PC hardware. Of course one of the problems of Linux is that there's really no singular OS - I'd be curious to see the top 5/10 distros.

It's an Arch derivative now.

In the sense that it runs Linux as its primary operating system, yes.

In the sense that it's a "victory" over Windows, no, since it's entire purpose is to emulate Windows APIs well enough to run Windows software.

That's basically the same strategy Windows is using to keep you there with WSL.

Yet it is not completely the same. Windows has monopoly so by them doing this they just take away another reason to actually switch to GNU/Linux and support it. By Valve doing it on GNU/Linux which has minority, they are just giving an excuse to developers of games to not properly support GNU/Linux. Just look at what happened with OS/2 which had better Windows emulation than Windows itself was. Sure it was not the only things that killed OS/2 (mismanagement at IBM was big part of it too), but it helped all the software vendors ignoring it. I am afraid this is also what is happening with Proton and GNU/Linux. So yeah short term it might be a good thing for the OS, but in long term strategic game, I am afraid it is not so.

They're also effectively creating a market for linux gaming, which will encourage developers to actually officially support linux.

Note that I use "will" instead of "might" based on personal anecdotal evidence of seeing more and more games support linux natively (not on Proton) since the steamdeck launched. Granted, it's more indie games than AAA, but the latter will never care until the market becomes actually sizable.

Linux has already had decades of long-term "strategy" that did not in any way shape or form bring gaming to linux... except of course for the tireless effort of wine, which is the basis for proton. In other words, even if you're right, and you well might be, I feel that the point is moot since there's no linux gaming market otherwise, and valve can't kill what's already dead.

Unless you have alternative strategies in mind that have not been tried and failed already

I would say it does, r at least it can. After-all they do have a desktop mode you can switch to and it has a full proper KDE Plasma desktop there to use.

I wonder to what extent this is due to the general decline of the desktop market share.

Finally Year of the Linux Desktop?

Hmmm. 4% is still single digits and very close to zero on the desktop if we round it down.

Still a long way to go.

Please transfer me 9% of your savings then. That's still a single digit and very close to zero if we round it down.

Unfortunately for both of us, 9% of zero is zero :(

With the popularity of WSL2 amongst developers, the actual number of people using Linux as a daily development environment would push the statistic much higher than what is being recorded.

I mean, it's a running joke about the year of linux on the desktop, but it's been quite a while since that meant anything at all. Most casual users of computing devices have long switched to phones.

> "Most casual users of computing devices have long switched to phones."

... which almost exclusively tend to be some bastardized Unix or Linux variant. "Year of the Linux pocket device"? ;)

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