Linux desktop market share climbs to 4.45%
ostechnix.com
ostechnix.com
> Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever dealt with. So, Nvidia: [angrily for moment, wags a middle finger to the camera] fuck you.
Debloated and no ads. You do have to do a little bit of troubleshooting, install extra components (e.g. to install the Microsoft store), etc., but it was significantly easier than debloating a regular Windows 11 install.
https://massgrave.dev/genuine-installation-media#verify-auth...
> instead of just using Linux (and possibly making it work better?)
I want a PC that can play games without hassle. I love Linux, computing, and complexity, but sometimes I want something that just works consistently.
Linux has gotten better over the years, especially as far as compatibility goes, but it's still _much_ harder to use than Windows.
I dispute that notion
I was a Windows user from 95 all the way to 10. Yearly formats with fresh installs were a constant through the whole time.
Ever since I switched to Linux things are surprisingly stable. My laptop is running as well as my fresh install from more than 2 years ago.
No it's not all in a browser. That's a shitty assumption and one that should not be forced upon anyone.
I always wonder how many people have been fucked over by a helpful relative giving them a Linux install with a browser and telling them to get on with it ...
But, if we're talking desktops, I suspect most desktop users want much more than just a browser. Either for gaming, office use, creative use, etc.
The keyboards are really bad for a developer, though. Otherwise, I might use them a bit more.
The rendering of the Office file formats by the LibreOffice is dogshit. Feature parity is a rounding error. LiberOffice UX is completely from last century. There is so many little UX things that MS added which are so out of the league (like live content update from Office 2007!) for LibreOffice and its outdated codebase.
The Office alone can maybe replaced partially in Linux-compatible environments. However the MS Office-integrated prosumer software ecosystem is the thing that keeps people on Windows. Unless Linux people redesign the whole ecosystem to be as accommodating to closed source app ecosystem and find a time machine to replace all the existing Windows ecosystem, nothing will change.
The reality is that even without talking about the UI and various stability/compatibility/performance (oh god) issues there are even some very basic missing functionalities that ones will encounter regularly when doing stuff that is not just low-level administrative filler work.
If one company would decide to invest in developing a decent competitive alternative it could be worthwhile but, in the meantime, most people are better served with browser-based stuff. Either the Google stuff, free Microsoft version or even the newer Proton offering are decent but there are some semi-commercial offerings that can be decent too.
On the surface LibreOffice is all right, but the hard reality is that it is way too much of a PITA to work with for most people to bother unless they really don't have a choice or are forced too for some reason.
The fanboys don't like that reality and would rather deny it instead of working on fixing the issue; which is precisely why it's a lost cause.
One of them was really sceptical, but after while said "I though linux is more for nerds and more different than Win." Well, she is just casual user of browser, few chat apps, Kodi and occasionally libre office, but still positive with change.
However while I use linux on server and laptop, I cannot use it on workstation beacuse of Adobe that I need for professional work.
Your experience with Linux will heavily depend on your experience with computers, distro, hardware (e.g. due to obscure driver issues), and workload.
Your experience with macOS/Windows will be fairly consistent. There are still driver issues with Windows, but they're less common than Linux.
- Your experience with macOS/Windows will be fairly consistent. I do not agree. Every system update scares me quite a bit.
- There are still driver issues with Windows, but they're less common than Linux. On Fedora, I never had to install drivers manually. All drivers was installed together with first upgrade after fresh install. Even on very old ThinkPad x201 from 2011. On Windows it's mix of searching on multiple HW manufacturer sites, manually installing them and trying if they are compatible.
The caveat is that I don't play games on my computers. For gaming, Windows is still the best choice.
The average person, though, still would prefer regular Windows 11 over your favorite Linux distro.
> The average person, though, still would prefer regular Windows 11 over your favorite Linux distro.
I don't know, I think it depends on their needs. Most users these days use their computers as "browser launcher" and for that Linux works just fine. I also don't think most people are enjoying those massive ads in Windows 11.
They all suck the same. In different ways.
I never hit that wall you speak of. Has been so amazing I donate 20 bucks every year to the project, just because I feel it has no right being at the same time free and that good.
That did not work for me. Once in the last 25 years of trying apart from a small bit between 2003-2004 when Fedora worked.
It works for a narrow group of vocal people who use it for specific tasks but generic and usable, it is not.
> the absolutely terrible inconsistent user experience
really? That would make sense as an argument for MacOS, but Windows is an absolute dumpster fire when it comes to consistent UX.
These days for 90% of users, the only "must have" application is a web browser anyways.
I'd still argue large swathes of things we take for granted on other platforms don't exist or don't work either.
I don't know where you'd start to see a performance difference compared to Excel for Win32.
If Microsoft and Apple weren't continually making their platforms worse I might switch back to one, but they have been continuously going in the wrong direction for many years now, while Linux keeps getting incrementally better.
I actually booted up an old Windows 7 PC the other day and had forgotten how clean and nice the UX was. An OS like that is not bad, but Windows 11?! Good lord, I want nothing to do with it and would much rather deal with some occasional rough edges in Linux.
Google, Facebook, Valve, Red Hat, the French Gendarmerie, the Munich city hall...
I contend that if they can do it, others can too.
We're already there: AMD has first class upstream Linux support!
I played steam games for ten hours on 6.11-rc3 last week with zero problems, on a very old userland (Debian bullseye). The amdgpu driver was built-in, not a module.
I thought we were already there, 19years ago
I'm not discounting your experiences at all, btw. My 11 year old has been using Ubuntu as his main gaming rig, and the NVidia drivers work incredibly well and Steam games just work. It's still mind boggling to me that it works so well.
And, I no longer have to troubleshoot removing Windows virii from his computer.
My understanding though, is that most of "steam games" are still windows binaries + wine + patches (proton, etc). It's well hidden behind a nice GUI, but the tech couldn't exist without the legacy of pure old wine.
Will we ever get UT2k2X?
Fortunately UT2k4 is still fun and plays well, even on an ancient PC, and looks decent enough.
I’ve heard there’s still some folks on some self-hosted servers playing it, maybe I’ll have to look into that.
Website is still up, but only partially functional. Check out the character design for Samael.
Yeah, I guess I was always holding out some futile hope that they may reboot it at some point.
Just a couple of months ago, yet another motherboard where UEFI and Linux distributions don't get along without some gimmicks.
When Win10 goes out of support I'll probably be using Linux as my daily driver for the foreseeable future, so I'm glad Valve put in the work.
And really Valve/Linux Community is more responsible for AMD's Opensource Radeon drivers and Gaming performance on Linux than AMD is!
Even Intel has better Blender 3D iGPU/dGPU Accelerated Cycles rendering support for Intel's ARC/Earlier iGPUs and dGPU hardware(Via OneAPI/Level-0) and iGPU/dGPU compute API support on Linux. And so really one must first consider what Linux Opensource applications need proper iGPU/dGPU compute API support so they do not have to use the slow and power hungry CPU rendering/whatever fallback instead.
And Blender 3D used to support OpenCL as the iGPU/dGPU compute API for AMD and Intel Graphics but even back then AMD's OpenCL component was not easy to get installed and working on Linux. And Linux/MESA had the old clover OpenCL implementation in the MESA drivers but that was not kept updated for OpenCL feature set support! And even with the newer Rusticl OpenCL Implementation in MESA that's just been created is that Rusticl/OpenCL implementation been fully enabled in any Ubuntu versions or Ubuntu derivatives currently?
Look at support for AMD's ROCm/HIP in Linux and for Consumer/Client iGPUs and dGPUs and that's rather limited and Polaris dGPUs have long since been dropped form the ROCm/HIP support matrix and Vega iGPU/dGPUs are on borrowed time for ROCm/HIP support.
So be careful there giving too much credit to AMD's iGPU/dGPU efforts on Linux as there's more to that story. And Look at Blender 3D where that works with Nvidia's CUDA and Works with Apple's Metal and iGPU compute API support there and dGPUs as well.
And I'm on Linux Mint and never going back to Windows but all my older AMD iGPU/dGPU hardware has never been properly supported for Blender 3D's iGPU/dGPU accelerated Cycles rendering. Intel's got better iGPU/dGPU compute API support on Linux but for ARM Based Processors Apple's the only choice there for proper Blender 3D iGPU support and no mention of Blender 3D iGPU accelerated Cycles rendering support for Qualcomm's Adreno X1 iGPUs on the Snapdragon X Elite SOC based laptops or Mini Desktop PC(Coming soon for consumers).
Imagine spending the money for a premium laptop and the hdmi port being just permanently busted because it has an AMD apu inside, lol.
Even worse… AMD has settled on rdna 3.5 as their forever architecture for APUs (like Vega before it) so this isn’t going away anytime soon even if it’s fixed in rdna4. Same problem with av1 encoding - the bugs are present in rdna3.5 and won’t be fixed until rdna4 at earliest, and AMD won’t put rdna4 in APUs because it’s got raytracing, so these bugs are just gonna stick around forever. It’ll be probably 3 years until they launch APUs with rdna4.5 or rdna5 or whatever the next forever architecture is.
So anyone who wants plex transcoding is best advised to stay away as well. And that’s the problem - with Radeon you’ve always had to start listing off all the people who shouldn’t buy the product, and if you don’t use any of those things it’s great. (well, decent… except for x y and z…)
Hardware transcoding is unnecessary, I don't care if it works and I never will.
That's not AMD's fault and there's nothing AMD can do here outside of releasing a proprietary driver. Which they used to do. It sucked and caused a lot of confusion and problems.
Actually,
(1) it’s their product so yes, it is their fault, and blindly assuming HDMI would be willing to open-source their product for AMD (after release!) was an incredibly stupid decision from the get-go. You get legal approvals beforehand like any other company does. You certainly don’t release a whole second generation (or further cards in the same generation) without it fixing it, and you don’t continue advertising it on products that don’t support it.
(2) literally everyone else has figured it out, including intel, who has an open driver. They do it by implementing a LPCON onboard, which is perfectly fine and gets the job done. AMD is the only one with broken HDMI support under Linux.
(3) AMD already has a proprietary driver, amdgpu-pro, so this clearly isn’t a problem or burden. In fact it was and is their primary focus of development, per their communication with geohotz.
I will never understand why the AMD fan base engages in this kind of apologism for clearly broken features etc. like oh gosh poor lil AMD had no idea that hdmi was unwilling to open-source their shit, despite every single other vendor realizing this and implementing workarounds. It’s not their fault, they had no choice but to ship a broken feature, advertising it on the box, and spend 5 years leading people on that it was going to happen!
Like they are literally still shipping broken products today! Not just standalone cards, but laptops etc where it will never ever be fixable.
That’s shitty anti-consumer behavior and you’re enabling it.
At the end of the day it's AMD's product, the buck stops with them. Nobody is making them continue falsely advertising the product, and in fact it really is their job to make sure it works properly before release, not begging HDMI to open-source their product after the fact. Imagine if literally any other company had gone ahead and released the product before they knew they were legally allowed to release the product - "oops" would not cut it.
Which is an extremely questionable business decision, probably driven by statistics like desktop market share.
But the resources need for driver development are negligible and Linux does run on most computers worldwide, so the behavior of many hardware manufacturers is quite puzzling from a business and technology standpoint.
It’s a matter of time.
I strongly believe that AMD's driver is superior because the open source process makes it better. NVIDIA does not participate in that process.
Aside from source availability and maybe the risk of version mismatch, I mean.
There are some subtle arguable advantages, for example on x86 static kernel text sits on 2MB hugepages while module text sits on 4K pages from vmalloc.
The kernel on my gaming machine is actually built without loadable module support at all. It's a static binary with only the exact necessary set of drivers turned on.
Naive question: Most of ML workload in a datacenter runs on Linux, for which I assume there's good driver support. Why do we say that Nvidia does not have enough driver support on linux?
Source: once worked as an student system admin in my university HPC center.
It's a long story.
Nvidia has provided pretty-good datacenter/CUDA support on Linux for a long time, now. The problem is desktop Linux. Nvidia wanted to focus on supporting the old x11 desktop server at a time when most distros were switching to Wayland as a replacement. Nvidia tried to fix the issue by giving Linux devs a proprietary render API to develop Wayland support on, but it was largely rejected since it required writing a lot of platform-specific code. For a few years, the only way to properly accelerate Wayland on Nvidia hardware was to use the reverse-engineered Nouveau drivers that broke most desktop software - a catch-22 for Nvidia users that wanted a more updated desktop experience.
Very recently, a few things started changing. For one, Nvidia started to shuffle around their proprietary GPU code to make their hardware more open and modular. For two, starting with 510-series drivers and continuing through 535 and 555, Nvidia has started to make Wayland support a priority. In the long-term this should resolve the issue of Nvidia GPUs requiring special workarounds to support modern desktops.
The good news is that those days are mostly behind us, with the more recent Nvidia drivers. Guess the crypto/AI boom helped them find the cash to hire better Linux devs.
I am aware that Valve has done some shady stuff in the past. Given time, I'm sure they will do more in the future. Today, though, they are such a breath of fresh air for the support they have shown.
Link: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BA...
Oh man, what did they do in the past? I have Valve on my very short list of "good companies". Go ahead and rip off that band-aid: what are you referring to?
But any day now.
In response, Valve seems to have had a tantrum and won't release things like the Steam Deck here. I guess they're afraid they might need to honour the warranty for those too. ;)
Steam still has Linux at only 2%, but agreed, I've been playing most Windows games fine through Proton
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/17h6kwt/do_we...
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
But to backyp steam doing something right, https://www.reddit.com/r/Lutris/comments/vcnaqe/very_poor_pe... so I can see winehq not being so useful when they just say game version x wine version, while steam's Proton may be better configured & kernel version / gpu etc matter. I'm on an AMD gpu
It’s unexpected even in the case of techies.
If you get past installation and initial setup, using Linux in a desktop role isn't really challenging if you've got access to support.
Funny how that changed.
New-ish laptops with intel tiger lake procesors use MIPI cameras with ipu6 and don't work out of the box or only on specific kernel/distro combos.
There are efforts to mainline the driver and it is better than 2 years ago but still a big step backwards[1]
This was a super shitty experience though. It really felt unplanned & chaotic. Hopefully some of the kernel architecture carved out for ipu6 is good & useful for running other video pipelines.
Most webcammers don't knowingly think heavily on color science, but ideally our devices can.
The lack of device drivers for iOS means that manufacturers had to start getting serious about ensuring their devices follow USB class specifications, because otherwise they will not work on an iPad.
Linux (which has USB class drivers) has only benefitted from this.
This is getting better/fixed with pipewire though.
That hasn't been the case for a long time now. I can't remember the last time I plugged something in that didn't work. My home setup is a minipc with wireless kb and mouse on a unified USB receiver, hdmi to a large monitor, bluetooth speaker, wireless printer, and USB webcam with mic.
I didn't have to do a single thing. It all just works. And it has for years, through various distro hopping.
[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1407494/screen-share-not-wor...
Assembled PCs tend to be more compatible (because of more standard components), but on the othe hand each individual component doesn't receive the coverage (testing) as laptops. There was no way for me to know that my mobo's sleep is broken on Linux, even if the previous mobos from the same producer had good compatibility.
I've never even heard of Ubuntu certification. I instead search for people who are using the product I wish to buy with Linux, and see what they say about its compatibility. This always works. So it is not pretty much impossible.
I'm not sure if you refer to friends or strangers on the internet.
In the former case, one is restricted to a very small pool of models to choose from.
In the latter case, "strangers on the internet" who say that their hardware "works perfectly", are typically completely unreliable; saying "my hardware works perfectly is treated as a badge of honor, so there's a perverse incentive.
One example, in a lot I've personally experience, is that I've read from multiple "strangers on the internet" that the wifi from the laptop I'm typing from, "works perfectly". In reality, the Linux drivers are half broken (on Linux, it has a poor signal).
Ok a bit flippant, but I've been running KDE on my NUC as a secondary desktop for years now. Most of the time it works fairly well, but then suddenly something breaks or needs tweaking. And when it does it's often not trivial for a non-geek to handle.
That said, if they can get Krdp working properly, I'll almost certainly switch to KDE as my main driver, and demote Windows to my secondary.
On Windows, on a clean install, I need to install the drivers from WU to get audio working, etc. And then I need to open Intel website to get the latest Bluetooth driver, go to Dell to get the latest wifi, as on Windows Update's these are not the latest.
And even after all of this, some of the drivers on Linux is better maintained, because the support for old Intel GPUs on Windows is very short. Meanwhile, on Linux, I get Vulkan support, and all recent drivers on my Broadwell. Video perf is way better on Linux here.
Found out afterwards that the version with windows preinstalled(that the friend bought, because of the cheap windows licence that maybe needed) comes with a special mipi camera from intel with ipu6 out-of-tree driver that only supports specific kernels and specific distros and while there are packages for ubuntu I couldn't get it to work.
Linux works if you don't buy the wrong hardware, windows works on any bought hardware.
I'm not against linux and I use it and most of the time it works out of the box, but this "most of the time" will bite you when you stop looking at specific reviews and driver support and just buy a laptop.
I've never once looked at reviews. The only time I've been bitten in the last 20 years was when given a MBP for work (the intel model with butterfly keys).
There's definitely edge cases out there. But these days they're exactly that: edge cases.
All lenovo yoga x1 models from the 8. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 2 years
All lenovo carbon x1 models from the 10. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 3 years
I'm pretty sure it also affects all newer hp and dell models since at least ~2023
It's great that your choice of laptops are never the ones that are broken, but then again, I never said linux never works.
Even if you set aside the webcam problem, the lenovo laptops who where always called out for their good linux support had problems:
The 2016 yoga x1 model couldn't get to sleep (s3i problem which many laptops had) and if it good back from sleep it need a special command to reconnect trackpad and trackpoint.
There where some special patches to make it work and after about a year it worked, still not a possibility for non technical people
The 2016 thinkpad x1 carbon gen. 6 model sometimes needs a special command to reconnect the trackpad and trackpoint, think that got fixed after ~3 years.
Neither of theses devices have a working fingerprint sensor, I can't even think of one that works with linux
Neither of these devices had a supported mobile (lte) modem, as the built in modem wasn't supported and you can't change it because the bios has only whitelisted the preinstalled model.
The new s3i sleep modus also made it impossible for linux laptops to sleep for about a year until it was fixed.
Did all of this get better over time?
Yes
Will every big new hardware thing still mean that some linux things are broken for some time?
Yes
Again, linux works for most of the hardware most of the time, but this will bite you when you expect certain things or devices to work.
Let’s take an extreme example of that same argument: If someone’s only experience of macOS was manually installing on hackintoshes then they’d say macOS was hard to use too.
And by that same token, I can tell you from experience that manually installing Windows on new hardware isn’t a piece of cake either. You have the same bullshit experience trying to locate drivers.
The common theme here is that nontechnical people wouldn’t be building their own OEM systems or wiping laptop drives and performing fresh installs. Regardless of whether that’s Linux or Windows.
For starters, Bluetooth has been broken on Linux until recent times (a couple of years, probably, maybe less), because of the piece of crap that Bluez is. In some Ubuntu distros, Bluetooth may still have some broken functionality (I remember examining the configfiles).
Ubuntu's hibernation was broken last time I've checked, because the setup was setting a 2 GiB swapfile, which is not enough for the RAM of modern machines. My last installation, last week, still set the same size.
So there you go.
The laptop I'm writing from needs my mobile phone as wifi bridge, because the Linux driver is poorly written, and it causes extremely poor signal quality. I also can't workaround tearing that plagues the whole desktop environment.
My other laptop has issues with the speakers that will never be fixed. And another one or two issues that I can't remember.
I wanted to buy a certain Lenovo laptop that is officially Ubuntu certified. Lenovo doesn't offer the OEM Ubuntu that they used for the certification though, and the vanilla version doesn't work (I've stopped checking after an year or so).
My desktop has a wake from suspend problem.
To be fair though, I have no doubt that if one chooses a certain machine (laptop) based on Linux compatibility, they will be happy - but it implies a certain sacrifice upfront.
The solution was to buy a $40 Intel Wifi card and swap it out. I haven't thought about Wifi since, it "just works".
Overall almost everything worked but not all things. And I'm used to working through technical hiccups and being patient. But ultimately there's no guarantee "Linux" will be fully functional on your unique hardware setup, and it's still challenging to choose distribution, windows manager, desktop environment, etc and there's no way to know which combo is best for your hardware without a lot of time consuming trial and error.
He uses linux, has done for years, he just wants something that works.
Same: I was already using Debian 1.1 (1.1, not 11) on the desktop or something like that.
But why not talk about it? I switched both my wife (she's very OK with tech) and my mother-in-law (she's not good with tech) to desktop Linux.
If my mother-in-law can use Linux, everybody can. Most people nowadays only need one app: a browser and Linux is totally for that use case, which is about 99% of all users' out there's usecase.
Pop OS works near-perfectly.
Looks like this https://imgur.com/xelfxZB
The drivers are definitely signed by Intel e.g. https://i.imgur.com/yMr1bD5.png
https://pcper.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a3d4-card-front...
"Hey so what laptop did you buy?"
"Well I went for the ACER MEATGRINDER Z980 JUGULAR MOSH RAZOR in the end. The keyboard is 100% sRGB!"
I write this as I look at an ROG Zephyrus G16 (2023) GU630HE (Last part is important, I think I had to check if it was the model with one of the RAM slots soldered)
…it simply booted and continued working as before. No driver reinstall, no reconfiguring things. I don't remember but I don't think I even had to muck with BIOS/UEFI boot settings or anything.
Downside: a year later the SSD died ;D (possibly age/use related, it was 5~6 years old at that point)
What's interesting to me is that VFX and game dev are kind of similar in terms of software and expertise, but game devs predominantly use Windows. I wonder why that is?
Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQI...
The deliverable of a VFX project is a video file or an artifact that goes into a video file (no complex dependency on Windows) whereas most games need to be able to run on Windows.
Most software used in the VFX industry does officially support Linux, and a lot of those tools are also used in game dev. Maybe Unity and Unreal's Linux support hasn't been great, and that's the only reason?
I guess it's easier to get into gamedev than VFX as an indie, and if you have little/no technical background then there's a good chance you're on Windows or Mac when you start looking up Unity/Unreal/etc tutorials, and then you just stick with what you know.
I'm not even sure you can deploy to an Xbox or Playstation from Linux/Mac officially but I haven't tried this gen.
With WSL and containers etc, getting something on Linux from a Windows machine is way easier than the other way around so there's really no driving force towards Linux.
But I'm also very confused by your link. Do you mean the visual effects industry or whoever uses this VFXPlatform project that added Windows and Mac support much later?
2) Visual Studio still offers a second-to-none developer experience. If you're targeting Windows exclusively (which you are in PC gamedev), Visual Studio is pretty much a must.
If Pixar was forced to use Windows on their render farm, they'd be looking at a roughly $24mio !!! licensing bill. That's a VERY strong incentive to use Linux as much as possible.
They also don't have any issues with FOSS religion, they will gladly use proprietary drivers and UNIX software on GNU/Linux.
In any case, ChromeOS is also Linux, so tack that on there as well, along with whatever portion of that 7% "unknown" that you think is reasonable (which could be a relatively large portion, depending on methodology).
(Also, the bar chart shown in the article is messed up because they're charting the value of each item averaged over the previous year.)
That's not to say that people aren't switching, I see no reason to get a new Mac next time I'm replacing my laptop. My work will be done more easily on Linux at this point.
I don't have data better than StatCounter, but if we're thinking of methodology and whether it could be accurate, this is a possibility to take into account
The optimist in me wants to not leave unmentioned that Linux is more accessible than ever and information easier to come by while Windows has never been shittier (which old Windows version shipped with tracking and ads?) and macOS is still priced and protected the way it always has been: much easier to dual or live boot Mint. Come for the freedom and stay for the ease of use. It's no coincidence that Microsoft made it very easy to use Linux software within Windows now (obviously without contributing the inverse mechanism, that'd be stupid): people want it. I really hope there's more truth to this than to the first paragraph
I’m not really a desktop power user - I don’t even bother changing the wallpaper usually.
I think it’s just so much easier now - almost every app is a web app. The stuff I run locally - development tools mainly - all have Linux versions.
I love being free of Microsoft and Windows (and Aople and Facebook for that matter, but they're beside the point). On the way to minimising Google as well.
But fairly regularly their stats are either so volatile or so absurd that it's obvious they have no relationship with reality. Like when they reporter Windows 8.1 climbing from 0.1% to 6% market share in the US in late 2023.
One could easily come up with half a dozen other explanations for this Linux desktop market share number that are as plausible as the hypothesis of significant growth in desktop Linux usage.
It's unclear what sites they, but I doubt it's a representative sample. Even if it is, like one person figuring out which site was tracked setting up a refresh script could be enough to meaningfully damage the data.
It's not possible to reliably determine the operating system from just the user-agent. You could try to enrich the UA data with other signals, but all of those avenues are either being closed off by the browsers as fingerprinting vectors or are going to have trouble distinguishing Linux and Android.
Likewise we know they do some filtering of bot traffic, but not the details of how or even the proportion of traffic they're filtering out (which would at least allow us to reason about the quality of that filtering).
For example browser makers do that. Safari on iPads claims in the UA to be OS X on Intel, not iOS on ARM.
Another common use is for bots that are trying to hide they are bots. That might be malicious scrapers, non-malicious scrapers probing for whether changing the UA also changes the page content, or benign bots like software running phishing checks against links sent in chats or emails. It's not enough for these bots to just hide who they are, they want to look like a real browser.
I don't think they do. 4.45% of hits from UA's set to desktop report Linux. There's no more processing done. That'd explain why some random countries end up reporting a huge number of Linux users or the seemingly random spikes and drops the data shows.
>Likewise we know they do some filtering of bot traffic,
Do we? Could it not be ignoring certain UA's that report as bots, like cURL or google crawler?
You seem to think they must be doing something to justify their data, but as we don't know what they're doing the results are trash.
I think they don't do anything to justify their trash data. I've seen no reason to give them any credit.
Fast forward and I've been on Linux for more than 6 months now and, while it's not all roses, my overall experience has been far better than Windows 11. I still remote into a Windows machine regularly for things that I have not yet migrated to Linux and, while it's a familiar space, it's no longer a space I want to be in.
TBH, I'm ready to go back to windows.
The way I put it, driving a car with a driver's seat that looks like 747 cockpit is pretty cool and definitely very powerful. And it has auto-pilot if you just want the basics.
But man, if you want to do more than the absolute basics, a regular Toyota corolla drivers seat is _way_ more accommodating and intuitive. You don't need to spend a year studying the machine to use it fluidly.
Linux is cool, the idea incredible, but man, searching for guides that tell you to turn cryptic knobs, flick unlabeled switches, and push seemingly random buttons just to get the window to roll down has become too taxing for me. Especially when half the time it doesn't even work.
I want a GUI, .exe's, and hover text on options. There is a reason every consumer grade linux/unix OS hides the terminal (android, iOS, macOS).
It just works
My mother switched to Linux several years ago and the amount of questions I receive are less than when she used Windows, mainly because if she encounters issues it's much easier for her to find a solution herself.
If all you do is check email and watch youtube, it works excellent. Its when you are someone in the middle that it becomes a huge PITA.
I use an AMD GPU. When I installed windows, windows kept insisting to downgrade my drivers. I looked it up and the official solution on Microsoft was a regedit to disable auto updates for GPU drivers.
This actually happens pretty often when I’m using windows as a power user.
On Linux, I’ve setup endeavourOS once (and by setup I mean installed it, and then installed Flatpak for the rest of my applications). I run yay every once in a while and everything works.
Otherwise, I fight with python on the command line, but you do that on Windows and Macos as well.
Of course you need to run dwarf therapist, a 3rd party program, alongside the game to manage your dwarves. Dwarf therapist hooks into dwarf fortress to load data about your game in real time.
Of course, as I have come to normally expect, it didn't work. It could not find the active game session, despite the game running.
So you get on the linux answer machine (google) and start looking for those cryptic codes to painfully ctrl+shift+v (note: cannot have ctrl+v like every other interface on earth) and offer up to the emotionless terminal god with the hope that things work after submitting those magic characters (no response or confirmation, you just try to do the thing you want to do again to see if it worked).
This time around it was "ptrace_scope" settings. What is that? I have no fucking idea, I just want to use dwarf therapist.
https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist/blob/mast...
So I follow those steps to make a permanent adjustment, including getting this thing called "libcap2-bin" (again, no idea what that is, could be installing a botnet for all i know). And as I have come to expect, it doesn't work.
So instead now I have to run a terminal command (i have it saved in a text file on my desktop) everytime i turn on the PC to disable ptrace so I can run dwarf therapist.
Compare this to windows:
Download dwarf therapist.
Run it.
Works first time.
It's just such a classic linux experience.
This (hopefully) doesn't hold in the general case, but for this very specific instance the classic Windows experience of it "works first time" seems intimately tied to the fact that it is a less secure OS.
If you get it via a package manager (like apt or dnf), it's almost guaranteed to not be malware unless some nation-actor is out to get you.
Funnily enough, this is something that Windows never solved (store is garbage and incomplete, winget is powerless and incomplete) and remains a prime vector for malware after all these years, despite a bunch of bandaids that are ultimately useless.
Packaging like linux has had for decades would seem like a huge uplift for windows if they could do it, especially if it could be done with modern approaches to isolation.
I mean, how well does it run on iOS? (It won't)
Anyway, I also have my linux bullshit story of the day. I've been playing Nintendo Switch games on the Yuzu emulator for over two years now but things took an unexpected turn when Nintendo sued the Yuzu devs and took over the project, being hostile to anyone trying to fork it or even host it anywhere. If you are a windows user you can just keep using your installation and whatever "setup.exe" to keep reinstalling it because it's a stable api/abi system (until maybe windows 12 comes and breaks stuff). On a "unstable" linux distro, your yuzu installation is now constantly bit rotting away due to libraries apis and abis changing over time as the system updates. So now occasionally when I try opening yuzu and I'm greeted with... absolutely nothing (why linux DEs have such a hard time showing generic error messages when an app crash or exits ungracefully? That would be great feedback to the user, anyway, I digress).
Obviously normal/noob linux user would already be helplessly stuck, but I carry on. Running yuzu on the terminal reveals the error message, A library is missing. Running ldd on it reveals even more libraries missing. The rotting is on. I now have to run some commands to find which library pertains to which package (it's not always obvious) and find a way to get an old package containing it. Hopefully, Arch based distros have this nifty tool "dowgnrade" that lets you downgrade or download old packages. Now I have to extract all relevant libraries and put them together on some directory. I then have to run yuzu with special env vars such as LIB_PATH= LIBS= to make it load such libraries. To my demise it's not over yet, some libraries are loaded as dependencies of other libraries, which were not previously present, so ldd couldn't possibly find them. I have to repeat all steps again until all dependencies are met.
Finally, I can play some fucking Zelda. But by now I'm too tired, and it's too late. Maybe I should just have remained a Windows user 18 years ago after all. But before those intrusive toughs can complete, I think about all the bullshit people have to put up when using Windows, honestly, Linux bullshit is worth it.
I don't even remember yuzu having non AppImage releases, if you used AUR you could have just rebuilt the package instead of complaining about manually trying to find the right libraries.
A "normal user" wouldn't be using Arch Linux , building their own packages. They would just use the AppImage or the Flatpak.
So it sits on my machine as "legacy software" and the point of my post was to show that linux isn't very friendly with legacy software, it wants the software you have to be on a "treadmill", always updated, sourced from a repo somewhere, where someone can take care of these problems for you, where as on Windows thats less rough and usually old software just keeps on working.
Are you using outdated Linux? (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint)
Or modern linux? (Fedora)
Too many people fell for Ubuntu's Free CD marketing 20 years ago and repeat a prayer that its 'sTaBlE'. Its not stable, Outdated linux is garbage.
Since switching to Fedora, I install RPM fusion + Nivida and never touch the terminal. I don't use app managers either, I just havent had a reason to use either app managers or the terminal in the last 1.5 years.
> Or modern linux? (Fedora)
Citation needed. As an application developer, I'm seeing interest and activity on Fedora and Ubuntu decrease, and Debian and Mint increase.
(I'll agree with Ubuntu being a "trap", though not really for any reason related to stability.)
My local machine basically looks/runs like Windows 10, but with the KDE Plasma logo in the corner instead of Microsoft Windows.
I have a similar setup using Cosmic on Pop_OS!
I'm ready to go back to Windows 7. But between Windows 11 (or 12 or whatever), ios ("macos"), and Linux, it's not so simple anymore. It's just bad options all around.
From my perspective, Linux only works for people if you give a fuck about Linux and make it part of your core being. Some of us give a fuck about solving the problem, not the tool.
There is nothing more frustrating when I'm told "have you used Linux on the desktop". I literally use it on the server, have done everything down to writing kernel modules, have brought up startups and piles of infrastructure on it for 25 years but fuck no, it isn't going to the desktop because it doesn't solve any problems there, only creating new ones.
I don't even know how to access the KDE Plasma help because it is just so easy to use.
I am writing this on a $500 ASUS Vivobook that came with Windows 11. The hardest thing was making the KDE thumb drive because Windows kept giving me a blue screen of death.
Once installed everything just works.
I know it's an impossible question, but nonetheless, what's the best distro to use for someone who just wants a useable desktop?
Linux Mint has a special place in my heart as it was the first distro I used back in my high school computer science class and it holds up exceptionally well today. It's also community driven compared to Pop!_OS which is developed by System76.
But over the last few years I haven't had significant problems.
Some distros like popOS intentially bundle drivers for newer graphics cards and the like, but that aside, if you don't have really hardcore requirements, picking decent hardware that's a few years old will probably smooth out your journey a lot, regardless of which distro you pick.
If you're coming from macOS you might be happy to pay a premium for a purpose built machine as well (I have a System 76 laptop which has served me really well for a good 5 years or so now with no sign of slowing down)
As an aside, Linux Mint, PopOS and Ubuntu (the three you mentioned) are all great choices for a reliable, stable desktop.
I really, really want to migrate from macOS to Fedora on my M1 MBA but Asahi isn't completely there yet.
We ended up installing popos on our work Linux (Ubuntu)dell because we had trouble installing the nvidia drivers for the card we got.
I had one hiccup 4 years ago where it wouldn’t upgrade to the next version because I did some out of band install. (It was a usb to hdmi adapter…) It was a little to get it sorted but I never ended up with a unbootable system..
I don’t like the PopOS name though..
You should be able to try either distro with a live usb which will give you an indication if anything will break immediately on your system.
Were you by any chance using Nvidia graphics hardware?
If you play games, you'll likely have the best overall experience with AMD graphics. (Assuming the GPU model isn't too new; it can take some months for the drivers to catch up to new models.) Most desktop distros will have everything you need; no need to go downloading drivers from vendors or turning to third party software repositories.
If you don't play games, either AMD or Intel graphics ought to be good.
Nvidia drivers can be made to work well with most games, and certain distros make the setup easy, but they come with baggage and hassles. They're huge, and they have a long history of integrating poorly with the OS overall. The problems they caused me outside of games were part of what drove me to stop buying their hardware.
Ubuntu is alright. But you trade off up to date software for stability. And the bi-annual upgrades to the latest LTS are a bit of a PITA and don't always go that smoothly. And you end up running older kernel and whatever else was current around the time they freeze their LTS version. So, for something that is supposed to be user friendly and stable, it actually ends up having a lot of issues and not being all that stable over time.
If you want to get the best possible experience with graphics, you basically need the latest kernels, drivers, fixes, etc. as soon as they get released. Ubuntu doesn't deliver that because you get stuck on either the yearly or LTS release.
These days I prefer rolling release style distributions. It's just less hassle in the end and not really less stable for me. The opposite actually in my experience. You could go with Debian testing, fedora, and a few other options. But I ended up using Manjaro which is based on arch linux. My reason is simple: the SteamDeck uses a distribution that is based on arch linux. I wanted to run steam on my laptop. So, I figured that using what Valve themselves seem to actively support and invest in makes a whole lot of sense. I've not been disappointed with this so far (three years and counting).
Installing games is easy. Getting things like Gnome, Steam, etc installed via pac is easy. And I can install whatever via snap, flatpak, or native arch packages. More importantly, everything stays up to date and fresh. After three years I have no need to reinstall my laptop because it's fine. Every once in a while I need to deal with some minor issues after some update for which the solution usually is a Google search away. But other than that, Manjaro has been rock solid for me. And besides, I've never used a Linux distribution in 30 years that didn't have that issue.
Windows has become incredibly anti-user. I built a new PC recently. No internet because the latest version of the Windows 11 installer didn't have a realtek Wifi driver on it. This driver was present in the Windows 10 installer.
If I didn't know the work around, I would not have been able to install the OS.
Ok, so I got the OS installed, and was greeted with an OS with 4 different UI styles glued together from W7 on up. Keep in mind, the OS in its entirety has UI elements dating back to Windows 3.1.
Still no WIFI drivers which I had to hunt down and wait because the OEM's website was spittling out corrupt data for a while.
WIFI up, Windows update missed a bunch of drivers. Installed them manually.
After about 45 minutes, finally got the OS ready to install apps. Basic apps. Office, dev stuff, photo stuff. This took over an hour, what with Windows updates, and all.
I also put the latest copy of Fedora on my laptop. No internet connection needed. Typed in username, passcode. Installed in about 10 minutes. WIFI working out of the box. One reboot later, I had a fully functioning OS that came with everything I needed. 20 minutes total, perhaps.
Microsoft has completely thrown away any notion of usability while Linux is accelerating towards it.
I still can't quite wrap my head around requiring internet to install the OS while also not providing a means to access the internet via WIFI.
And then of course there are all the other issues surrounding the OS that has been talked about at length here.
Finally, Windows 11 is a buggy, slow, unresponsive mess of an OS, and it makes using Windows 10 feel like a breath of fresh air due to its comparative responsiveness and lack of bugs. Keyword is comparative. Windows 10 is still a corpulent waddling pig of a sloppily glued together OS.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I've seen some technical documentation, such as readmes for source code, that assumes the user is on a Windows laptop running WSL. At this point in time if I see anything mentioning Ubuntu I just assume it's written with WSL/Azure in mind.
Even at my fortune 20 company I see: "DNC RATINGS COMPARED TO RNC" clickbait crap. I'm amazed my company lets that garbage through. Probably because we have legacy software + some corruption with purchasing. Sharepoint... really?
I don’t use or plan to use Windows outside of VMs. But I think WSL made a difference to a lot of developers.
The main reasons were mainly getting tired/frustrated at how hostile Apple has been to developers and users. Apple has been slowly turning macOS into iOS, from the UI to slowly trying to lock down the OS. There is also the Apple upgrade treadmill where they force you to upgrade your hardware through planned obsolescence.
I'm not even going to say Linux, because people confuse it with Ubuntu/Debian/Mint GARBAGE. Never use that later crap for desktop. Its so outdated and buggy. You are using the terminal on a daily basis to get basic features working, if your hardware works at all.
Fedora is so good, I feel offended I didn't know about it until now. I am bitter against M$ and bitter against Canonical.
But ultimately it is a moot point as major distro upgrades are barely different than the regular security upgrades. There are just more packages upgraded at once.
You get the idea
Yes, they are. It works fine. I'm using KDE fwiw. Icon scaling is one of the easily-configured features, especially on the taskbar. (The icons are all SVG, so why would you want to do anything other than native scaling?) Everything I use it for works fine. Maybe you should try it out.
If anyone is really bored, go try what this comment is suggesting. Run things at native resolution and change every system/application font setting to be 1.5x the default. Or instead just think about it for 30 seconds and just realize that a lot of UI is not text, and now you get 'normal' sized text with tiny images, icons, scroll bars, etc. and a lot of UI glitches such as text overflowing tiny buttons or clipping out of panels. The entire experience being suggested is hot garbage.
https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2594d9f12f00ecdfbc...
Nearly 6% [4.45 + 1.41], really. Only misreported due to a certain browser [Chrome/Chromium] not including 'Linux' in its user-agent string.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36Decent hardware that Linux is happy with is definitely much cheaper than a decent MacBook.
I've been using Linux since the 90s and I never really would recommend Linux to anyone unless there were very special circumstances.
But today I'd gladly recommend for example Fedora Atomic, I haven't tried other atomic Linux distros but the key feature is being able to revert back to a previous state in the boot manager.
No software will ever be perfect, but once an issue happens a non-technical user must be able to easily revert back to a functional state so they can proceed with their work and life. Otherwise the OS is worthless to them.
And sure you've been able to do this with BTRFS and snapshots but Fedora Atomic is the first time I've personally seen a distro come with this feature out of box, while also being very modern and easy to use.
Just the other day I did an ostree upgrade and after rebooting Firefox couldn't play videos, Steam wouldn't even start. I just wanted to get on with my day so I simply rebooted into the previous commit. An end-user is given time and breathing room to wait for the issue to be resolved and try another update.
But I'll take a look at Fedora Atomic. What you describe sounds promising.
I wonder whether that's real or a mirage caused by Linux servers masquerading as desktops.
For example, it wouldn't be that surprising if they got data from HN, or a similar site. What portion of Indian desktop hits to this site do you think report using Linux?
Since then, I have only used GNU/Linux, trying different distros. In the end I kinda settled down with Debian but open to others like Guix.
However, my recent laptop which I've had for 3 years now, came with Windows 10. About a year or so ago it just upgraded itself to Windows 11. I don't mind it but there are just ** on it I don't care for. If I want it, I will install it. Even when I remove it, it comes back on the taskbar, etc.
I am only on Windows due to my current job - but as I am close to resignation... it wont be long before I backup important data, wipe the hard drive, and install debian.
I honestly think GNU/Linux as a desktop is far superior that Windows 11. I guess it all depends what you use a PC/laptop for. If you are stuck in a world of Microsoft products, such as Office.. I get it. It can be hard to break away what you are familiar with and, in some ways, some Micrsoft products dont really have close alternatives.
For me as a programmer, I pretty much have everything I need and my wife who use her laptop as a general user, had no complaints, either.
Honestly, since the rise of Steam on Linux and complaints on Windows 11 -- I am not suprised the market share for linux is rising.
And for that, I prefer Windows. I have stopped caring about my distro, my window manager, my desktop environment, the package manager I use. Even my wallpaper is just the default Windows 11 one.
Windows had only one OK consumer mail app, the inbox Mail apps, and they killed and replaced with Outlook Web App basically.
File Explorer got super awful, unstable, slow...
A ton of native things getting replaced by web apps... And each web app using their own Webview2, instead of at least using a shared webview between the apps (that's how W8 and W10 worked).
The result for this is that to show a simple weather info on taskbar, it literally needs a webview. Yes, the temperature thing on taskbar uses webview. If you are low on resources, the system just can't handle all of that.
Meanwhile on Gnome here, although with some issues, none comes close to that, and the design has been very consistent as well.
I'll still use Linux VMs for various services while my host is Windows and I'll develop in WSL but it's sad that a creative niche like audio production has practically no players in the Linux scene, I'm talking Native Instruments, Spitfire, EastWest, Dorico, even MuseScore with its MuseHub do not run under NixOS for example. Quite a shame.
I feel like Linux people are cheering for a tiny number. They'll take whatever desktop market share they can. 10 years from now maybe it will be 6%. Well... big f*king hurray! Open the champagne bottles!
This is all silly.
Linux is the greatest FOSS of all time, and small bumps in an upward trajectory are welcomed news. What is silly is jumping into such threads just to shit on progress made against the mega corporations that aren’t working for your best interests.
Awful! Slow, bloated, my files by default were uploaded to Microsoft (and the setting is easily reversed with updates if turned off), lots of advertisement everywhere I click, edge is slow, …
Glad to be a Linux user! The quality of open source software is frankly very high. The only limitation is that some drivers or software are not made for Linux.
At least they've solved that you had to wait 2 minutes anymore when plugging your mouse into a different USB port before it finds the driver from Windows Update again
In any case, for power users the Linux desktop is already a formidable platform.
I do think that Apple will continue to piss off engineers enough that over time Ubuntu or another mainstream distribution on a high quality laptop will be a popular choice for a plurality of developers.
I don't think it makes sense to count "unknown" as being in third place…
2009: 0.69
2012: 0.85
2015: 1.5
2018: 1.69
2021: 2.38
2024: 4.54
On a serious note there seems to be an interesting lesson here about what sort of products just don’t seem to work in a non-commercial open source model. Specifically, simple user friendly UIs for non-power users seem to require financial incentives and competition.
It will be beating the 10% mark?
I'm the person with the unpopular opinion that I would take Windows 11 over 10 any day.
Windows 10 has too much in the UI that still feels like a bridge between old and new.
They both run the same apps, so to me all the nitpicks and philosophical problems people have don't really matter much to me. I haven't found anything in Windows 11 that "doesn't work" or is even mildly annoying and it has a bunch of new stuff that's genuinely useful.
Like, it finally has screen capture utilities that don't frustrate me to use when compared to macOS. A bunch of little basic UI stuff like that where I feel it's an improvement. The Windows Shell is a major improvement. The notifications/quick settings area makes a lot more sense now.
Windows 11 remembers where your windows were when you undock from a second monitor. Little stuff like that where it was just slightly more frustrating to use than my Mac.
Windows 10 is also more poorly aware/optimized of modern hardware than a lot of people realize. It is an old os now. Things like automatic HDR in games just isn't there. (Really, gaming is an area where Windows 11's new features are quite clearly worth the upgrade)
It makes much more sense to me that ChromeOS is becoming more common than that everyday users are switching to Linux.
It's not necessary for anyone to switch to Linux to see this behavior. These are shares. I'm actually not surprised by these numbers because I've noticed Windows users use their desktops less, instead doing more with other devices. I wouldn't be surprised to see the number rise to 20% or more in the next few years even if there's no pickup in folks moving to Linux on the desktop.
But if/when Linux reaches 10/15% that may change.
UX is a passion of mine and something I'm a little pedantic about and while Linux has made strides, it still has a long way to go in this department though it's _so close_ and constantly getting better.
Gnome and KDE all have their little inconsistencies and/or lack of functionality. Individually they are minor but together they make it feel unpolished or incomplete.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of things that I feel could be improved - don't get me wrong, I love Linux and use it constantly - nit picking is my way of finding areas to improve it so I can recommend it in earnest to friends looking for a bit of OS strange.
Some things that I think could be improved;
===
- Gnome; has an incomplete file manager, though generally no file manager available on MacOS or Linux beats the one on Windows 7 or 10.
- Gnome; Window snapping doesn't always work for Chrome and in general window snapping needs some love.
- Gnome,KDE; While Chrome has its own style on all platforms, it somehow feels less congruent to Linux desktops than it does to MacOS and Windows - plus you can't drag tabs off the window in Wayland Chrome.
- KDE; Password keychain stuff. Feels like this needs to be native to Linux and not the DE.
- KDE; (minor) If you have a high refresh screen, KDE will use 60hz for workspace transition animations but 144hz for everything else.
- Gnome; Window decorations on Gnome are overly padded which makes the interface feel unpolished and somewhat clumsy compared to the tight fonts and spacing you see on Windows and MacOS. I assume this is because Gnome aspire to make a play for a mobile OS one day in the future?
- Gnome; The Gnome/libadwaita guidelines prefer a application menu design that is obscured from view resulting in too many clicks - I think this is also related to their mobile play. I believe that Cosmic gets this right.
- Linux; Please fix application installations. Flatpak is kind of okay but I constantly have issues with it so I tend to avoid it. I really love MacOS's "Foo.app" "executable folder" concept. It feels similar to AppImage but I don't think that's going to win the packaging wars any time soon.
- Fedora 40 + AMD GPU; This is my configuration but it might affect other distros/hardware - Steam doesn't launch from the icon right now. You must install Steam then launch it from the terminal.
===
There are lots of areas for improvement but regardless - every new release of Gnome and KDE gets better and better.
Steam has helped put Linux gaming on the map, that combined with the poor experience of Windows 11 has encouraged IT savvy people & gamers to genuinely consider running a Linux desktop for the first time.
Also the Cosmic desktop is shaping up to be a real strong contender in the Linux DE space and I am excited to see what happens there.
It's an exciting time to be watching the desktop computing space and I am hopeful that the additional attention Linux is getting will continue to push investment into polishing the desktop experience.
Fair, but for how many years now has Windows continued to have a legacy and "modern" way of accessing the OS's settings?
That said, I'd argue that we shouldn't solely rely on the failure of Microsoft to drive Linux DE adoption, instead we should strive to capitalize on this opportunity by rapidly improving desktop Linux and advertising it as a "no compromise" refuge/alternative to Windows (I believe this is what is happening anyway).
While Linux is good enough for me, I am not the average user. In my view, Linux can't just be an equal alternative to Windows, it needs to be better.
I've been thinking the exactly same thing about Windows for several decades now.
Regarding the article...
> While Linux's growth is noteworthy, it's important to view it in the context of the overall desktop operating system market:
>
> Windows remains dominant with a 72.08% market share
> macOS holds steady at 14.92%
> Chrome OS trails at 1.41%
>
> Linux's 4.45% puts it firmly in fourth place, ahead of Chrome OS but still well behind the market leaders.
Uhm what? And some people claim LLMs are great at summarizing data...
I'd love to see Linux for mobile devices just because of that reason. Old school "what happens on device, stays on device"