Linux market share passes 4% for first time; macOS dominance declines | Hacker News Reader

Linux market share passes 4% for first time; macOS dominance declines

arstechnica.com

43 pointsMISTERJerk2U25 comments

I wonder if this could be related to M1/2/3 Macs being worse for x86 system software development than the old Intel Macs. I work on ROS[1] which runs on x86 Linux platforms, but usually develop on a Mac. I may have to move to a Linux laptop soon because there's not an easy path (that I'm aware of) to running x86 ROS code on an M3: compiling the entire system for arm would be a huge headache while running x86 code in a Linux VM under Rosetta has a lot of unknowns.

Obviously my case is a bit of an outlier, but once you add up enough outliers you might see a real impact.

[1] https://www.ros.org

Edit: I'm really going to miss the Mac. As much as I love the Linux CLI, Linux GUIs are a huge mess. A simple example: on MacOS you can use Emacs style keyboard shortcuts (^A, ^E, ^K, etc) to manipulate text in just about any text field in any app. AFAIK no such thing exist in Linux, which generally uses Windows style shortcuts (Home, End) that a much more limited. Another example is the ever-present "Help" menu in Mac apps that can be used to find/run other menu items.

What problems are you running into with ROS on ARM? I've used it both on Raspberry Pis and ARM Macs with Docker (both natively and with translation) needing no modifications.

I bought a used Mac Mini for personal projects _only_ for those keyboard shortcuts. They're too ingrained in my mind from using a Mac for my day job.

> AFAIK no such thing exist in Linux, which generally uses Windows style shortcuts (Home, End) that a much more limited.

GTK used to have functionality for using Emacs shortcuts in text fields, but they removed it in GTK 4: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/1669

One issue was that because there's no separate command key, you'd end up with other functionality overriding the shortcuts (i.e. Ctrl+P would bring up the print dialog).

I think it has more to do with Linux becoming more viable on the desktop for the average user thanks to web apps and Electron. Developers can drive some trends, with them typically being the one in their group people go to for advice, but if developers alone haven’t tipped the needle by now, I don’t see that changing, especially when so much development these days isn’t being compiled.

Last time I setup a Linux box I was pleasantly surprised I could get a lot of the stuff I was used to, thanks to Electron. While I prefer native apps, having an official app that has feature parity to Windows and macOS will always win out, and I don’t think the average user even knows the difference.

The biggest weakness of Linux on the desktop going mainstream always seemed to be the lack of commercial software. That’s where OS X shined with developers. It was a Unix system that could also run Photoshop and Office, without hoping Wine worked, or relying on converting file types to maintain compatibility with the rest of the world… and hoping that worked.

The more native apps don’t matter, the better I see Linux doing.

I think his has also helped Windows. I remember several years ago trying Windows again for the first time in a long time. It felt mostly the same has 15 years prior. Looking around for app recommendations, and it was the same stuff from 15 years ago with the same UIs for the most part. No one was adopting the changes MS was trying to push. Electron comes along and now developers are putting their app everywhere, when for a while it seemed like it was mainly phone, macOS, and web. Windows and Linux users were seemingly expected to just use the web apps. While Electron may technical be the same under the hood, having something local for often used and mission critical apps is very nice.

For cloud programming, I find ChromeOs linux performance to be perfectly acceptable. The price penalty on Apple products is too high.

I also HATED the fact that I has to give Apple my credit card to get it to work. Apple treats your laptop like it owns it. I was unable to delete Itunes and had to sign Terms of Service that I didn't want.

Like ChromeOS? While not your typical distribution it is Linux

always ON monitoring from Google is the price penalty for a chromeOS.. personal profiling held without public access.. history says this never goes well..

> has to give Apple my credit card to get it to work

Get what to work?

There are always so many questions I have when I see numbers like these. One that is always in the forefront is how are people getting Linux on their computers?

4% is pretty impressive if the vast majority of users are actually installing Linux themselves (USB ISO, UEFI/BIOS). It might indicate that we're (possibly) reaching the upper limits of power (tech-savvy) users.

If the vast majority are from computers with Linux already pre-installed, that would be more amazing to me. It tells me that the entire Linux ecosystem is becoming more robust and self-supporting.

[dupe]

More discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39576200

And yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600172

Several variations on this theme recurring regularly:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38853877 63 days ago, 345 comments Linux hits nearly 4% desktop user share on Statcounter (gamingonlinux.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252801 30 days ago, 79 comments Linux has reached 4% for the partial Feburary 2024 data on StatCounter (github.com/openstatslab)

Your post above from yesterday has 179 comments.

This is a typo right: "macOS dominance declines”? Or clickbait maybe? It doesn’t seem like macOS from its lowest figure mentioned in the article (~15%) to its highest (~21%) dominates. It seems like the room for growth for both Linux & macOS is huge, I like both of these underdogs and wouldn’t bet against either. But why that headline?

I'm surprised Google doesn't come out with something akin to Chrome but that is a full Linux with the abiliy to load full applications on it... and something that can be installed from an ISO on old (or new) machines. What would be the downside of this?

People who want that can get any number of Linuxes - and ChromeOS exists on new devices for cheap as almost free.

There's really no market there.

See also: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/ (Today I learned that ChromeOS is somewhat dependent on Portage from Gentoo)

I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but it seems to me that ChromeOS Flex ticks all your boxes.

I use it regularly, on two Fujitsu and Lenovo laptops, neither being Chromebooks (hence your last requirement - the rest are available also in ChromeOS "proper").

Sounds interesting, but I'm curious what you think the upside would be for Google.

There are such things: https://mrchromebox.tech/#alt_os

Crostini gives you Linux container inside ChromeOS. If you want pure Linux experience you can install whatever distro you want as well.

ChromeOS is a full Linux, it just runs Linux apps in a Debian VM. If you install anything in there it looks native, shows up in the application menu, draws it's Wayland/X11 UI just fine. Even Steam works.

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en

You can also get ChromeOS as an ISO, but they mostly advertise it to enterprises to reuse old hardware, and not to end users. https://chromeenterprise.google/intl/en_uk/os/chromeosflex/

Is anyone working on getting MacOS and iOS apps working under Linux?

Because most effort seems to be in the other direction.

Darling is the only project that I'm aware of: https://www.darlinghq.org/

Yes, but it doesn't look very active.

That is probably because there are no products on MacOs needed on Linux.

A quick google shows me a program called darling, which is a "macos equivalent of wine".

Apart from Darling there is, of course, the venerable GNUstep development environment that allows porting MacOSX apps natively to Linux and related systems. See https://gnustep.github.io for details.

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