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nrdxp

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Over 70% use Windows. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

What happened to Linux these last 4 years?

It had stagnated at 1.5%-ish for a good decade.

But as of four years ago, it started to go up, higher than ever before, reaching 2% in 2021 and 4% this year.

Is the YoLD finally nigh?

And in some "niches" like PC gaming it's 97% (per latest Steam hardware survey).

And other "niches" like console gaming it is 0%.

Isn't the Xbox just running a modified version of windows?

Xbox has ads in the dashboard.

Which Linux (for Desktop) though? The fragmentation is still hurting Linux big time.

Mint / Mate works for me.

Arch Linux with Plasma 6.

Debian with kde or xfce

This unfortunately overwhelms 90% of users already. Ok, Debian. But what is KDE or Xface? Why do I have to choose? How do I choose? What's the difference? And so on.

And I would reply: "Gnome!" which proves op's point ;-)

> It's not the early 2000s, Linux is fine.

It's not the early 2000s; and you still can't just walk into a store and test-drive and buy a laptop with linux on it.

Its not fine, and similar statements make situation much worse, since some actually believe it and then get bad disappointment and never look back at the choice

Well, this depends on your point of view. GNU/Linux has been very fine for more than a decade now, but it obviously is not a MS Windows clone. Not because it is less capable -- quite to the contrary -- but because it is less opinionated how things should be.

Now I could go into a rant about tradeoffs and choices and how freedom is hard and so on, but I don't feel like it.

"Linux"? You mean the thousands of different operating systems, each with their own GUI, package manager and often incompatible software? Never running out of the box - because of some weird bug or lack of support for the specific hardware you happen to have? If you run some headless server it's fine but not for desktop computing.

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