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Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

Linux Desktop isn't perfect, but it's in no way a dumpster fire. I'm much happier using Linux than any other viable alternative. Your experience clearly differs, but I personally have very few complaints at this point. Calling it a dumpster fire is extreme hyperbole.

I'm hoping they're incentivized to support Linux just based on the developer market share of Linux. The StackOverflow developer survey looks like it unfortunately allows people to choose multiple options which devalues the results and obscures the actual numbers, but at the top level 27% of developers are using Ubuntu desktop.

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> The StackOverflow developer survey looks like it unfortunately allows people to choose multiple options which devalues the results and obscures the actual numbers

But how would you capture the situation when people are using both linux and Mac ? I for example have a good mini PC which run Linux and a MBP. I use both depending on where I'm (I mostly work from home). I even have a windows machine dedicated to gaming (not that it matters here).

Yeah, this is why I said it devalued the usefulness of the stat.

It goes both ways though. There are people who checked that they use Ubuntu when they're on Mac or Windows the majority of the time, but there are also people that checked they're on Debian which isn't feeding into the Ubuntu top line number. I'm not sure which way this is going to bias it -- I could see the number being much higher or much lower. Debian was at 9.8% (iirc) for instance, and I don't imagine there are many people using both Ubuntu/Debian for desktop usage.

> but at the top level 27% of developers are using Ubuntu desktop.

That seems very unlikely. The sample is of course probably extremely unrepresentative. Also I wouldn't be surprised if selection bias might have a significant effect (a lot of Linux users can't help but try and publicize the fact even if nobody is asking, so imagine what they do when someone does ask... Windows is likely the opposite).

I'm sure stack overflow is a biased subset of users, and I imagine the people that fill out tech surveys are going to be more likely to use Linux. But it's the best data source on this that I know of. Regardless of the exact market share percent, I think it's a reasonable assumption that there are millions of developers using it as a desktop OS.

Along those lines too, I don't have evidence but I'd bet that the type of developer who uses Linux is more likely to integrate new tech like LLM's into their workflow than someone whose on Windows.

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