Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
linuxiac.com
linuxiac.com
Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS. It is on virtually all servers on the Internet, the majority OS on phones, its in many TVs and STBs and streaming sticks, its one of the few OSes ever in space, its one of the few OSes ever on Mars, and it is also the OS behind ChromeOS (which that article mistakenly breaks out as its own numbers; so by their own admission, its at least 7%).
The largest desktop OS on that list? Windows.... made by a company who makes more money off Linux than anything else, is the largest corp contributor to Linux, and has far more Linux machines internally than Windows ones, and hires software developers who do not develop for Windows.
You're mostly right, but this is incorrect. MS was the largest kernel contributor for a few days 10 years ago, but overall companies like Intel, Google, Oracle and IBM contribute a lot more.
You can conquer the world, dominate every space and yet there's thus little voice inside saying "but you're not good enough. See over there, in that one space, you're a weakling. "
Welcome to the human condition.
They currently have around 20% market share (as Internet servers - much higher inside business LANs), which is a very nice chunk. And I'm sure encourages them to keep working on it.
Frankly the tooling for MS server keeps it in the hunt - they really understand the concept of making things easier to use.
Extremely big doubts about this. How would anyone even know? All the hyperscale datacenters built by FAANG must be 99.9% Linux, and those DCs alone would probably be enough to make 20% impossible to hit for windows.
(Scroll down to servers)
Incidentally this is public facing Internet servers. The % -inside- enterprises us much much higher.
Tools like Active Directory allow you to scale enterprise operations, which is important for companies that have hundreds-of-thousands of desktops etc.
In any event your estimate of 99.9% is unlikely. AWS offers Windows based EC2 instances, and one presumes they're not doing that for 0.01% of the market. Azure will likely have an even higher %.
From the data though, not just guessing, I'd say it's about 20% overall.
I can believe private enterprise usage is higher, but I imagine FAANG and similar companies also have quite a lot non public Linux servers. Not trying to rebut your overall point, but I'm not sure the total non public % is much different.
We know that all the top 25 websites are 100% Linux and represent a lot of servers each.
Also a whole lot of that cited report seems to be misidentified. The top Windows site other than Microsoft properties listed is nih.gov, which looks like Drupal on Linux behind Akamai GHost -- all Linux.
I do accept that Windows is probably about 20-25% of server instances and slowly contracting. But public facing webservers and the infrastructure that directly supports them? Nothing close to this.
What stings me a bit is that Microsoft is the dominant player on the desktop and then they are so little about making the making it a good and consistent experience. Windows 95 was never amazing, but they put the work in and gave us the impression that they at least tried. Now it's 2023 and my desktop has ads, tracking and UI elements that are 30 years old, because they could never be arsed to update them.
But lutris as it stands now breaks everything almost every time I use it. I had steam unlaunchable for over a week because of something lutris was doing implicitly. Now running steam directly off the CLI seems to be working for 90% of the games I play (which isn't a very long list).
Only thing I doubt I will be able to figure out is stuff like fortnite or anything that uses easy-anti-cheat (since their devs give a fuck about linux and effectively believe we are all hackers trying to ruin their game).
That's all I got, don't bother with Lutris unless you have an insane amount of time to debug which component is missing.
"Windowsification" is a admittedly vague concept, but tends to cover software that is gratuitously different, not a team player in the bazaar, prone to making land grabs through "embrace and extend", and reluctant to offer configuration options that conflict with its "opinionated" stances.
As an aside, I'm really sick of the systemd / "random pile of shell scripts" false dichotomy. It's trivial to turn a python script into a system service with runit, too. Simple, stable, and focused.
All the UX work is being done in the steam client itself and is not exclusive to the Steam Deck. In fact, the SteamOS ui is now available 1:1 in the good old PC Steam client, replacing the old Big Picture mode.
The only thing that doesn’t comes directly with Steam is Gamescope (but you can install it yourself easily).
Other than that, the SteamOS is just an Arch Linux with Steam installed, KDE and a Steam wallpaper.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussion...
I'm trying really hard to come up with a scenario where optimizing the desktop experience for the average user is a bad thing.
For example, what keeps me on Windows (and WSL2) at the moment is that the freesync/variable refresh rate technology doesn't always behave as you would expect it to be, resulting in games that stutter, frame dip and eat inputs. Gnome devs have a branch pending final tests for vrr for months. KDE on Wayland is the best for what I'm asking atm but even that has its problems during gameplay.
And let's not forget the pains Nvidia's drivers cause compared to AMD on Linux for desktop. I built my desktop using AMD GPU and CPU specifically for Linux to play nice, and yet it doesn't for the only 2 games I play during my downtime. It's just sad.
Again, maybe I'm a sore loser, but it definitely feels like a lot of software is becoming increasingly hostile to me, personally because it's being optimized for a presumed average user. I have no beef with this average user and it's globally a totally correct optimization to make stuff work for them as well as possible, but it means that software makes tradeoffs that are inconvenient for me personally.
The most common use case is streamlined by removing options that clutter up the settings menu or banishing the buttons I press a lot into some tertiary menu, or niche features I rely on become unsupported and then get removed (of course with forced auto-updates, because the average user experience is improved by them) to free up developer bandwidth for the core features. And then I end up using a different off-brand window manager with the serial numbers filed off that barely works in general, but works for my specific 'workflow" exactly like I want it.
Of course, at the same time I also benefit from general improvements targeting the average user. It's only about the tradeoffs.
It's a bad thing if you're not an average user, because software aimed at the "average user" tends to be a pain in the butt for the non-average user. I would point to Windows, the entire web browser space, etc., as examples of this.
And it's not just about the average user. It's also about the compromises needed to make a product suitable for mass production. I already see the effects of that on Linux, in the form of things like systemd, snaps, flatpack, etc.
No, not really.
You can't make things smooth and flexible at the same time, it takes too much effort. You can't support a ton of varied hardware and make everything work smoothly in every case; it again would take non-viable amounts of work.
You can have a pretty smooth desktop Linux experience if you pick a large mainstream distro, pick reliable, well-supported mainstream hardware, and pick a polished desktop environment such as KDE or that Gnome variant of Pop OS.
But if you want to tweak things, you've got to tweak things.
It feels a little bonkers that in 2023, Flatpak or something like it isn’t the default way software is installed. That calculator you just installed should not have access to your camera or microphone or file system. That weather app may need your location, but you should be able to grant access to sensitive resources always, never, or only after asking.
Or maybe Fuchsia, when it's ready for desktop.
This approach was widely ridiculed in the Vista days. Maybe I’m old but I still think it’s absurd security theatre that trades off a ton of usability for a tiny amount of imaginary security. It annoys me to no end that on macOS, for instance, opening a terminal emulator and trying to `ls` inside my home directory freezes on a security popup that wants me to allow my terminal emulator to access my home directory.
If you want a locked down appliance, there’s always Chromebooks. Which run a linux kernel btw.
What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more. If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it.
The only area I wish had a better story was the enterprise desktop space (like Windows domains or jamf on macOS) but currently I can’t justify allowing my team to run Linux because having its hard enough for small companies to manage a mixture of macOS and Windows fleets without adding a 3rd platform into the mix.
The danger that the history will repeat for browsers instead of OSs is real. The less market share for browsers other than Google Chrome or Chrome-based ones, the more likely it is, that we will be forced to use those because of incompatible web applications.
E.g. at work, using a Linux Computer, I switched to Chrome for Teams and Outlook, because of compatibility issues.
Source: https://techblog.willshouse.com/2012/01/03/most-common-user-...
What? This is very real and a key driver not to use Linux or Mac for millions of users. As soon as even a little performance is required webapps just can't compare. Look at anything graphics related especially 3d, CAD or video. You might be able to build shitty infographics for Instagram on Canva but real work still requires access to compute at the edge and most software providers in those spaces target Microsoft only.
I'd take every day a native app running locally over a web app. And I am a web developer.
Honestly, VSC is pretty decent due to all of the engineering MS put into it. Brackets and Atom both were way slower and had noticeable input lag, at least for me.
Other people have also looked into things like that: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
Personally, something like Notepad++ or Lazarus always felt the fastest to me.
Software like JetBrains IDEs, their Fleet editor, Visual Studio and even Visual Studio code all had noticeable hiccups but always seemed "fast enough". Even when the typing itself was okay, there'd be stuff like autocomplete delays/stuttering and refactoring slowdown, but nothing too annoying.
In contrast, Brackets, Atom, working through SSH, remote sessions through RDP/VNC or any device that lagged due to being underpowered always was annoying slow and disruptive.
Also, it runs on a $4 a month namecheap server.
Why is so fast? Because I came from the land of slow crms, and performance was my #1 goal. Instead of making it faster to develope, I made it faster for the end user.
Is that a worthwhile business goal? I don't know. But I know it's fast.
I propose that all the apps you use that you find good you assume are native, but possibly some of those are not.
You are still paying performance for using web apps, and even though your fingers don’t feel it as badly, your battery sure does.
This makes no sense. If webapps run without a loss in performance, then you don't need increased hardware performance in order to see the difference.
> [...] compared to native apps.
This simply isn't true. Run a well-designed webapp and a well-designed native app on the same platform. You'll see a difference in performance.
> you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look.
I'm still waiting to see even one example of this.
> Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower.
True. But it comes at a cost to quality.
That's a funny conclusion to make. In the business world that still exists and even my kids are forced into the Microsoft eco-system by their school because the software they insist you run (for which perfectly good web alternatives exist) only runs on windows.
Everything you want to install has to be approved by Microsoft
Enterprises are moving to Workspace from 365. I hope they drive each other's prices to the bottom. :)
While I agree, it has to start somewhere. As a customer of both, I appreciate the competition from 1-2% per year[0] growth.
[0]https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share...
We tried blowing Office 2013 away on everyone's machines after being told most users didn't think they needed it. Now, a few months later 90% of our users have asked for a 365 license.
What typically happens from what I can tell is that most businesses just end up having a mix of both 365 and Workspace.
Excel specifically seems to have the most attachment among our users.
I'm in that boat, but I don't especially mind. I run Windows because it allows me to run Fusion 360, but Windows Subsystem for Linux gives me a full Linux dev environment. A younger me would have got angry about it, but present me accepts that platform lock-in effects are very strong; fortunately for Linux, it dominates every new category of platform. I sincerely doubt that anyone will ever develop a new proprietary OS from scratch, because the business case for putting a pretty UI on Linux is overwhelming.
I'm not even necessarily blaming this on the performance difference, although that is a pertinent topic, but just the mental structure of something I'm using living in a browser tab rather than actually running on the computer.
For example WebGL 2.0 (2009 hardware), WebGPU (2015 hardware), any GPU capabilities after 2015? You ain't going to get them.
But the student has no choice
I don't think a win for Chromebooks counts as a win for Linux, except in maybe the most narrowly technical sense.
Its honestly quite interesting seeing new users from that perspective.
So in practice, no, it's not very useful. Most students are still forced to use a web browser and nothing more, else they run the risk of getting in trouble for hacking their Chromebook.
Tangent: That being said, it's hilarious how much worse the schools are at locking down Windows computers. As far as I can tell, they just bought a few commercial solutions, set them up on the Chromebooks, and paid no attention to the Windows computers. The BIOS isn't even locked. They're only restricted at the network level.
A loss for the school, but definitely a win for our education
I'm forced to use it at work. :(
One important reality, though, is that "forced" is a sticky word here. Anyone sufficiently anti-FAANG and tech-savvy enough will find a workaround, so the constraints are far less than most dominant forces across the lens of history.
But yes, I'm always surprised how many people buy things introduced to them in ads.
No they don't. There aren't any schools nearby that do not force Windows on the students and I can have my whole house on Linux it doesn't matter: if you want to participate in highschool around here then Windows it is. My personal views of MS, their crimes past and present are worth absolutely nothing. I would not be surprised if you dig deep enough that you'll find some level of corruption but even that doesn't help me, it would just lead to a long and drawn out court case the outcome of which will likely be resolved long after my kids are out of school.
So, I have no choice other than to take my kids out of school and that too - rightly so - isn't an option.
It's more than a little bit ridiculous too because there isn't anything in the highschool curriculum that per-se would require access to a windows computer. But they make it so that it just simply doesn't work otherwise, starting from windows native applications for the agenda and messaging system and ending with sending documents in proprietary formats.
But the lack of driver support still does. Linux on a modern laptop is just full of headaches. I mean, https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-7840u this is typical: GNOME doesn't work, graphical glitches... In my own experience, operating MFC devices over several years is a nightmare, Bluetooth is problematic as well, some proprietary VPNs do not have Linux clients which might not be Linux's fault but if I can't log in I can't work.
Life is too short for this, sorry. Windows + WSL is the way. The right tool for the right job, Windows for drivers, WSL for, well, everything else.
So, they took a cutting edge Windows PC, slapped Linux on it, and it didn't work well.
How well did OSX do when they tried it? Clearly, OSX isn't ready for the desktop! No wonder nobody runs it!
Modern computers are complex enough that they can work well with Windows, OSX, or Linux, but they don't work well with more than one of them (unless the designers work really hard). See, for example, how to reboot: https://mjg59.livejournal.com/137313.html
If you want to run Linux on a computer, buy it preinstalled, with support. Anything else is an exercise in chasing down small glitches, as you describe. (This happens for Windows too! The difference is that the laptop vendor has a team of people (the system integration team) to fix the issues, either by modifying drivers, modifying the firmware, or having the ODM change the hardware. If you slap Linux on some random bit of Windows kit, you get to be the system integration team, but with only one of three avenues open to you to fix the glitches. And that only halfway, since you cant get the OEM or ODM to give you the time of day. And that's assuming you're a proficient kernel hacker.)
Slapping Linux on a Windows box is a mug's game. The only way to win is not to play.
It's about the hardware's support of the OS (see the firmware discussion above).
It's also about your support experience as a customer (do you have to reinstall Windows before the OEM will give you the time of day, let alone fix the hardware glitch you're hitting)
Many printers, especially the MFC ones, support Linux. For instance, Brother has drivers: https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/52188/~...
WRT corporations, they can do what they like with their own hardware and software. And yes, a lot are short-sighted. Most won't be using Mac any time soon, because they've locked themselves in quite effectively.
it's possible of course, but invariably breaks, especially if you need to install any single third party thing.
i hate flatpak etc but it really makes u think about why people are putting effort into fat packages for desktop stuff
That was the case in 1999 too. The Linux on the Desktop dream wasn't about removing choice, but about MORE people making the choice to run Linux.
Also, market share translates to support, resources available, people and companies working there, drivers, and so on. Personal choice to use X doesn't magically offer those.
But I can't use the OS I like. I can't go in a store, pick a laptop I like, and get it with an OS I like. I can get it with an OS I don't like; and gamble that I can install on it an OS that I do like. It would have been very different if Linux market share on the desktop were in double digits.
That's a strange point to make. The whole point of this users changing their minds, and deciding that they prefer Linux.
> I can’t justify allowing my team to run Linux
So it's not about choice then?
And let's not even get started about work.
And high quality image editing is possible, though it's probably done differently from whatever you're used to. There are plenty of graphic artists making their work on Linux and bragging about it.
So "doesn't even remotely come close" is either a lie or a display of your ignorance.
I use Linux because it works for me and makes my life easier, is free/open and because I don't have to deal with Windows.
But in the most important ways - software availability and reliability - it is much worse.
Depending on how you define "desktop" i would argue that Linux has a very big presence on the desktop. Considering the "new desktop" is a smartphone, and Android is based on Linux, that alone would account for a very large desktop presence.
Unfortunately there is no real “transmission” between the two, pretty much only the kernel is shared, absolutely nothing in userspace. Hell, it is ridiculously difficult to even run/emulate android on a normal linux distro.
Which is a shame, because while android’s model is far from perfect, it is definitely eons ahead of the traditional linux userspace, especially on the security front.
Despite the lack of any exponential moonshots in marketshare, compatibility layers like Wine and Wine derivatives, as well as platform agnostic package management tools, have made Linux desktops much more pleasant to use compared to just 4-5 years ago. This has allowed me to almost completely de-Windows my computer usage without abandoning Windows-only applications.
I do try to shill Linux to friends from time to time as a casual tease. Haven't had much success in that regard but it's not a concrete goal of mine. Despite having all gone to the same STEM program that required Linux environments for most courses, I'm the only one using it as a daily driver outside of work among the 15-20 people I still regularly contact.
Not even a slight itch.
What do I care how many people use the thing I do? The only thing that matters to me is how good the toys I get to use are.
> See over there, in that one space, you're a weakling.
A lot more people eat fast food that gourmet food. I wonder if the people who can afford gourmet food feel like weaklings because of that. My guess is: No they don't.
Perception matters :)
There is a lot we can learn from a creature whose life purpose is eating shit all day, every day.
No. In fact, as a Linux user, I'm happy that Linux doesn't have a major share of the desktop. If it did, then I think it would have a terrible (to me) effect on the direction of Linux development, because it would be more tempting to aim for the most common denominator, and we already have good options for the most common denominator.
NOO IT DOESN'T!!
Love the can of worms you opened with that comment. It does sting, because the desktop market is optimized for proprietary software. Open source, even if superior, is always behind on a hill that is upwards both ways. Proprietary firmware, drivers, patents, vendor lock-in, etc., have become very high walls.
For the average person, they don't care what a window manager is or pulse/alsa/jack or whatever. They just want a singular consistent experience that "just works", whatever software they install, whatever hardware they plug in. And the Linux community is obsessed with the complete opposite of this.
Apparently a lot of the systemd pushback was because it was making everything "too similar and compatible with each other". Now isn't that just laughable; that's what most people want!
When explaining linux to skeptical non-techies, I tell them it's the OS running the nuclear submarines right now. Suddenly they're more confident it can handle their ecommerce dashboard.
For US nuclear subs: All of the core components and electronics use a custom RTOS; older ones built in Ada, newer ones built in C++. The "control computers" (the computers that humans interface with to tell core components what to do) aren't running anything like Ubuntu or Fedora, but instead run a heavily ruggedized and customized Linux system based on the Titanium suite from Star Lab.
For UK subs, they run a similar custom OS for the modules and electronics and (until 2017 or so, at least) run Windows XP for their control computers.
I have no idea what other nations use; but I would assume they are similarly setup.
That's not to disavow the fact that clearly the US govt trusts those Linux computers to be reliable, thus their investment in them. So it is an accomplishment, they just don't "run" anything.
That’s not to be minimized. Sounds like very much on the critical path, and definitely not some shitty infotainment sidecar. If that crashed, you couldn’t control core functions of the sub? Are there overrides?
Btw, thanks for sharing these details. I would never have learnt this. Love HN sometimes.
Sure, it's an important component of the entire system. Much as a steering wheel is an important component of a car, it still doesn't "run" the car. You need to interface, yes obviously; but if the machine crashes the sub operates merrily along like usual and any of the other control computers can continue to give it commands.
As to overrides, if you lost every single control computer and the direct interfaces (the analog control boards you see in crucial areas of naval vessels) then the overall system has a fallback procedure. It's not documented or public knowledge, but assumedly it would surface and activate an emergency beacon as the vessel is crippled (and likely damaged) at that point.
However, desktop Linux is where the product is 100% OSS. That’s the apples to apples comparison. And that’s where it can’t compete without vendors writing property code to put in front of it to make it actually work well.
Server side Linux gets a lot of support from professional programmers paid by big corps. They have improved it beyond hobbyist level, and it works pretty well. And of course cheap makes up for a lot.
Sour grapes.
> Linux is the go to choice when you could just as well be using something else that’s really cheap, like BSD.
You actually couldn't be just as well using BSD. Corporations would love to be able to take Linux and not contribute their changes back (and that's frequently what happens when they use it internally but don't distribute it). They don't use a BSD licensed kernel in many such places (e.g., Android) because Linux is more advanced.
More advanced in what sense? There are lots of devices using BSD, so that's entirely possible.
Taking one off the top of my head that was relevant around the time Android was being developed, dynamic ticks which is important for low power operation. Linux supported this in 2007 about 5 years before FreeBSD and I think NetBSD still doesn't support it. Could not field a phone OS without that, at least not back in those days.
Tell that to your BIOS or the firmware that runs on your WLAN or NVMe. Hell, tell that to the CPU itself[^1].
[^1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
Linux has the largest collection of various hardware drivers, and a rather wide community of kernel developers who know how to produce them.
Linux has a number of specialty filesystems, some pretty important for embedded development.
Linux kernel has real-time extensions, which is not entirely a commodity, AFAICT.
Also, stuff like io_uring, BPF VM inside the kernel, namespaces (see "containers"), etc.
No, I don't think you can easily replace Linux kernel with whatever BSD kernel, Darwin, VxWorks, Contiki, FreeRTOS, etc, or, well, Windows. Much of the larger embedded stuff is Linux-specific, and much of big server stuff is either Linux-only or has extensive specific support.
> Various versions of NT family operating systems have been released for a variety of processor architectures, initially IA-32, MIPS, and DEC Alpha, with PowerPC, Itanium, x86-64 and ARM supported in later releases.
> In order to prevent Intel x86-specific code from slipping into the operating system, due to developers being used to developing on x86 chips, Windows NT 3.1 was initially developed using non-x86 development systems and then ported to the x86 architecture. This work was initially based on the Intel i860-based Dazzle system and, later, the MIPS R4000-based Jazz platform. Both systems were designed internally at Microsoft.
Here's a report about server market share:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux
Here's one for total device market share (quite a bit out of date, since Gartner paywalls all new reports; still it shows the general trend):
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3050931/windows-comes-...
Etc. All of which agree with you. But, it turns out, most people don't care about what OS runs their toothbrush or thin client. Only their mobile device or desktop, which is why these reports are so much more popular.
Yeah. But it's not its OS. The true OS of most Android installations is some propietary firmware blob.
Huh? This is...totally wrong. Software devs at Microsoft are supplied with Windows machines by default, a lot of software is built on Microsoft-specific technologies like C#, and most of the server footprint is Windows Server.
My team only uses MacBooks at Microsoft. It’s true that I was forced to receive a PC, but it sits in a drawer collecting dust and only gets booted up when compliance throws a tantrum.
Culture has changed, nobody cares if you use a Mac. Hell I bet half the employees are taking Teams meetings on their iPhones.
For anyone who cares about these stats using Linux is the most important thing about computing.
You can't get an app designed for Android to run on Linux Mint with ease.
The kernel is not the operating system, even if it is a key component of it. Android phones do use the Linux kernel - well, not exactly; some kind of modified version of it - but they do not use the GNU/Linux operating system. The OS is different in many ways: Filesystem hierarchy, daemons/services, graphics stack, etc.
Depends on what and why Linux. Original dream/vision selling it was a libre OS developed in the Bazaar that will give user full control over their devices against the tyranny of the corporations. You can't with straight face claim that all the billions of phones and embedded devices represent that freedom.
As about kernel, it may be BSD, Linux or maybe even NT or Plan 9, it honestly doesn't matter.
Is there a source for that?
Yes, but that's kind of a moot point.
The decades old dream was "Linux on the Desktop" (not just as some 3% market share or "works for me" - it worked for people in 1999 too), but overtaking Windows as the desktop OS for the masses).
And of course all those billion of Android devices, hide everything about what people meant and wanted from the Linux experience. It's just the kernel and some basic userland stuff, on top of which everything else is totally foreign, closed down, and tied to proprietary services under Google's control (with Samsung and co's own touches).
Linux is so irrelevant to the visible part of Android's functionality, that Google could very well change the backend to Fuchsia when that's ready, and those billion devices would be un-Linuxed within a few years, as they get old, and their owners replace them by new Fuchsia running smartphones.
It's interesting to see how over the years the user experience of Linux Desktop ia getting better, bug are being fixed, we get better software, desktop environments are getting more features e.g.
Citation needed, I think. Microsoft barely makes or doesn't even make the top 20 kernel contributors for current releases: 6.4 (#20): https://lwn.net/Articles/936113/, 6.3: https://lwn.net/Articles/929582/, 6.2: https://lwn.net/Articles/923410/, 6.1 (#19): https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
> 20XX will be the year of Linux on the desktop
They've been saying it so long it's part of our psyche. It doesn't matter the other places Linux is running, it hasn't conquered that one place they've been trying to conquer since the start. You never get over the one who got away.
When they said it back in the 1920s it was sort of confusing, tbh.
Who is "they"?
There's are a heck of a lot of people happily building [software for] Linux systems that give precisely zero care to the success of Linux desktop.
Who is "they" here?
After so many years, they still don't have reliable "Every package even the ones not in the repos just works" status. It's mostly there, like, 99.9%, but stuff still breaks more than on Windows or Android. I suspect they never will, except for things like NixOS.
I used to think Linux was behind because of legacy reasons and game companies not being interested... but now I think Linux itself has something to do with it, and we should use that as motivation to improve.
Right now I think NixOS, or just accepting Snap packages, or waiting for Flatpak, might be the best/only chance, aside from moving to a batteries included OS like Android.
Seems like Nix really just needs GUI admin tools, everything else seems to be fairly polished.
Steam and Lutris (StarCraft 2!) work pretty well, Detroit Become Human just works. (Enable proton in Steam, and click install and play.)
(I removed snap, however, as it's just in the way, but I don't remember what was my exact problem with it.)
That's the whole point. Probably 99% of computer (anything that uses a processor I guess qualifies a computer these days) users in this world don't really care what's running underneath as long it gets the job done. If something can run linux underneath and can still pass as acceptable that's a huge win I think.
SteamDecks are indistinguishable from PCs, since they run more or less exactly the same software as a Linux desktop/laptop would.
At best it would be a general purpose mobile device, but even that is rather contrived. How many users do you imagine are using a steam deck as a substitute for a desktop or a different mobile device? I would guess something very close to 0.
Also, the Steam Deck's OS is by far the closest you can get to a traditional Linux distro since it's GNU+Linux under the hood. The built-in desktop mode is extremely close to a basic KDE Arch install, especially after you disable read-only mode. Android doesn't have as full-featured of a desktop experience unless we count Samsung DeX and even then display out is available on a vast minority of devices. iOS has no native display out and iPadOS doesn't even support normal 16:9 screens without black borders. The issue with all of the above devices is that their "desktop" modes are janky afterthoughts while on the Steam Deck it's a core feature.
Also, the deck does not replicate a subset of the desktop experience, it just contains a desktop experience. Unless the KDE desktop is not a desktop now. If that's the case - it runs windows.
But Steam Deck is just running a fork of Arch not some other operating system. From analytics perspective it's indistinguishable to any Linux PC. Also IIRC you can just connect it a display which would turn into a desktop PC.
Is it contrived? They've shown, in their official marketing videos, demonstrations of the steam deck being hooked up to an external monitor and being used to run KDE and Windows 10.
It’s an arbitrarily defined category of computer, and this statistics site doesn’t mention how they’ve specified that definition, but it seems they haven’t included any server, mobile/handheld, or gaming console devices at all, not just the steamdeck.
If laptops get to be included (which they usually are), then steamdeck gets to be included.
It doesn't replicate "some subset" of the desktop experience. It does everything a small tower can, plus things it can't do.
You won't use it as a daily driver in handheld mode. The virtual keyboard covers half of the screen, the touchscreen is unusable as a mouse and touchpads are inconvenient.
Ordinary laptops don't have these problems.
I've had mine for about a week now, and am using it more than I use my laptop. The "desktop" mode works more than well enough for web browsing and such.
The biggest thing that changed for me was learning that you can use both trackpads on the keyboard at the same time, and use the trigger buttons to "press" a key - or to press shift if you use the opposite trigger from the side your finger is moving.
Not sure about PS5.
That doesn't mean it's running BSD. For example, MacOS runs a non-BSD kernel with lots of BSD networking code added on-top. It is not a BSD-based Operating System but it does use BSD code to create it's environment. I would not for a single second believe that the PS4 runs an unmodified FreeBSD kernel. There is just no upstream code to support this claim.
The same can't be said of the PS; the PS isn't a desktop computer.
Any source for this?
OTOH windows is becoming adware/spyware and macos is becoming big brother lockdown-wear, so maybe it is time for linux to shine.
Personally windows (actually, almost anything microsoft) enrages me anytime I'm unfortunate enough to have to use it, and I'm getting increasingly annoyed at macos limitations and won't be buying apple again, so my next machine will run linux.
Just install something like Fedora, and you won't worry about it, it will just work.
I personally hate Ubuntu btw Canonical is just not for me. I have no idea how it's so popular. Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.
Could be. I should try NixOS or fedora again but seriously don't overstate it. Cannonical are not my fav company. Installing an LTS ubu works fine, it has annoyances (maybe nixos and fedora are better?) but it's still so incredibly far ahead of windows or macos it's not even close for me. Sure, I'm used to linux on my laptop (thinkpad t480s intel graphics) that anything else will be a massive hassle to maintain, with driver issues, os-level spyware and all that other headache. When I use my kids' macs they always feel janky, windows? Forget it, it's just so unpolished and ew.
Pretty different to RH7 in 2002 in quality and polish when I first tried linux.
Ubuntu got popular years ago because they made a distro that supported everything and was really easy to install and use. Fedora has always been a pain because it doesn't support a lot of stuff out of the box (i.e. codecs): a distro that can't even play MP3s was a non-starter for many people 10-15 years ago. NixOS isn't nearly as easy to install and get started with.
Ubuntu has been coasting on its inertia for a long time though, and many other distros have caught up with it or surpassed it, such as Mint, while Ubuntu has been shooting itself in the foot with things like Snaps.
The AUR.
Then why can't I change the spaces animation (turn it off)? Windows snapping without leaving a gap on the edge of the screen? Etc, etc.
And are they now doing scans for copyright-infringing media and so on - I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm an adult. It's my computer. Let me do what I want with it.
You can turn on "reduce motion" and it will replace it with a much simpler fade in.
You want the window to just vanish (which I get), because you have a model of computing that doesn’t need the genie animation. Most everyone on HN has a model of computers far in excess of the median computer user.
> Then why can't I change the spaces animation (turn it off)? Windows snapping without leaving a gap on the edge of the screen? Etc, etc.
Spaces is irritating, I just don't use it, Apple has a tendency to introduce new workspace and window management solutions and then abandon them. Yabai or Amethyst might be you closer to what you want (both open source).
> And are they now doing scans for copyright-infringing media and so on - I wouldn't be surprised.
This isn't true AFAIK.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-communication-safety-nude-...
Its title claims they are, but that appears to be clickbait.
In the body of the article, the author confuses the cancelled always on filter for illegal images that reports to authorities and an opt-in, on-device filter for unwanted adult images.
More to the point, the choice is a feature, and it comes with a bit of chaos. Would you rather live in an effectively single-party state like Singapore where everything is shiny but you get caned for spitting gum on the street (MacOS), Russia which is a third-world mafia state masquerading as a gas station masquerading as a world power (Windows), or a messy democracy like The Netherlands where everyone has a voice but sometimes the government collapses because they can't agree on everything (Linux)?
I live in The Netherlands and I've run Linux on the desktop for 30 years.
This sounds like a good place to live for me, because I don't spit gum on streets and wouldn't want to live around people who do. What kind of disgusting person would do such a thing? And who chews gum these days?
Personally, I think this is a terrible analogy.
As an outsider, the Netherlands seems a lot more stable than many other democracies, including Germany and the US.
However… there is a difference between meaningful choice and choice that is simply a byproduct of grumpy disagreements from 20 years ago.
Choice has compound costs. Primarily, it creates interop issues. The best is example is, of course, software distribution (hey what ppa do I need to install node). It also creates an explosion of configuration options and points of failure.
The desktop distro maintainers should, imo, put their disagreements aside and find common ground to the most pressing issues. Perhaps funded by some billionaire or their mega-corp.
Choice is fine as long as everything can integrate properly and work together.
Maybe the desktop could do with a little bit of Singapore's sort-of benevolent-ish dictatorship - that's how the kernel is developed after all.
Before that, whatever Linux it was it came on about half a dozen 1.44MB floppies. I remember it used a Linux 0.9 kernel, but not much else - except it was a Real Proper Unix System like I had at university, except *on my very own desktop PC*! With a compiler and everything! And SLIP!
On Windows and macOS, you don't have any choice, so people usually see that as good enough because they can't compare it against alternatives on the same platform.
Every Linux desktop user says "use what works best for you, we're all different," but I really don't buy that we're so different to warrant multiple competing DEs / window managers / whatever on top of the same OS.
If you went to buy a car, would you be fatally paralysed by indecision at seeing two different makes that looked ever so slightly different parked side-by-side?
Of course not. That would be idiotic.
99.999% of people don't need to go off road, and only need a bog standard desktop distro.
The car analogy is that you've got the boring Toyota (Windows), the boring but somewhat nicer Honda (Mac), the slightly more efficient CVT Mitsubishi (typical Linux) that needs some major component (X11 or w/e) replaced in 2 years and fewer people will know how to deal with it, or the same Mitsubishi except with stanced wheels and degen exhaust setup to be cooler (Arch Linux w/ XFCE or w/e).
(Other alternatives I enjoy include Cinnamon and Xfce. I cannot stand gnome-shell, it's like a tablet OS or something.)
Lots of popular distributions support KDE out of the box (Kubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora KDE, etc), and it'll install on pretty much anything else with minimal fuss. That's the most fun part about desktop environments on Linux: you don't have to pick just one. You can install a bunch side by side and switch between them when you log in. Once you know this, it becomes fun to experiment :)
If you want a full-fledged modern DE with active development, the choice is only between GNOME and KDE imo.
>GTK or Qt
I used to worry about whether to go full GTK or Qt, these days I don't really care. Both work in either environment and the theming is usually consistent as well unless you have a custom theme, so they don't even look out of place.
>X11 or Wayland
It seems like Wayland is going to be the future, so it's only really a matter of whether it works well enough for your uses yet or not. If it does, great, use Wayland, if not, stick with X11 for a bit longer.
It honestly doesn't seem like that much of a mess to me.
- My DJ software (which I pay for) is not supported at all on Linux (likewise true for most common music production software).
- The Affinity suite (which I paid for) is not supported on Linux.
- The best debugger I can find (remedybg, which I paid for) doesn't work there.
- and there are a few more niche ones.
I just can't give up on half of my productive tools and trade them off for much jankier alternatives. I sadly cannot contribute to get to 4%.
That's why you're still running the same OS you always have. [1] You accumulate software yes, but you also accumulate habits and knowledge. Changing OS means discarding all the accumulated knowledge, which 0% of "normal users" want to do.
Throw in the change in software, ending up with at least some proportion of worse software, and the desire to change is 0.
[1] where "you" applies to a rounding error away from 100%
The advertising seems to be local to the US because I've never seen it, but I expect users will ignore it just like they ignore it on TV, Google, Facebook, Twitter, on every roadside, at every mall and do on. Frankly advertising is everywhere, avoiding it doesn't seem to be a priority.
I think you summed it up. Computer Experts may want to switch to Linux, and likely already have. My mom, who is 40 years a novice, cares less about any of what you listed. Her skill set is small, and her interest in changing is miles below 0.
And there are 97% of the world like her and, 3% like you ;)
Microsoft has made sure users can't stop using cloud services, unless they spend a ton of effort every time a new update that re-enables them is released.
E.g. try to disable the web search in the Windows start menu.
>> And there are 97% of the world like her and, 3% like you ;)
If the 3% expert users switch away from Windows it will be the beginning of the end for Windows.
Microsoft is making a lot of changes that will annoy the expert users. Stuff like a Settings app that has a single screen - e.g. one makes changes to his network setup, decides to increase the brightness of the screen - the Settings app navigates from network to screen and the user progress with network is lost.
However, make the next Minecraft, Fortnite or Roblox work only (or considerably better) on Linux desktop[], and you will suddenly gain a lot more new users. Some of whom will stick around, since all their other apps work the same in the browser.
[] Whatever that term means, even the article makes a distinction between that and Chrome OS.
That said, I'm far from your typical desktop user. I'm vaguely Linux sysadmin adjacent, and I ran Linux as my primary OS for many years - until one day I noticed I was mostly booted into Windows for gaming and decided to reclaim that SSD space.
Gaming on Linux has come... leaps and bounds. It's actually extraordinary. Still many sharp edges, but the Steam Deck might in fact be the first spark of a revolution here. We'll see, I guess.
Jokes aside, totally right, and unfortunately, in my experience it's often a better experience to run the Windows port under Wine than it is to use the native version. e.g. the native version of Tyranny is just a black box for me, but the Wine version works pretty flawlessly.
I think userspace is just too unstable, and game companies probably don't want a forever-ongoing maintenance cost just to keep their old games running.
And lose lots of money in that process. :)
And what Linux OS should you target? Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Arch, Android? Target KDE or Gnome? Or maybe XFCE? X Windows or Wayland? Use ALSA, Pipewire or Pulse Audio? Bionic or glibc?
Linux is an OS.
It doesn't matter which distro you pick, because they're all the same.
For example DaVinci Resolve is packaged for (now quite old) CentOS but runs just fine installed on Ubuntu, with absolutely no problems at all. The only thing that might catch out the unwary is that CentOS packages a couple of libraries as default which Ubuntu doesn't but if you're savvy enough to edit video you're savvy enough to catch this.
You can also run Resolve in a Docker container so it "sees" a CentOS environment no matter what, and it's transparent across any other distro. There's no real need to do this, although it makes running more than one version easy.
And doing so, they'd likely just target the particular Linux system they happen to have or like---whether Arch, or Android, or even Alpine. It might well work on other Linux systems (or even non-Linux), or it might not.
Maybe I'm off base here, but that's what I see (even casual) gamers do, especially younger ones: go to great lengths to get the game they want, to run. If that system which runs the game also supports their other hobbies, school or work, then that's what they will use.
If you stick to windows xp or roll your own Linux distros maybe this is true, but I barely know how to use any windows box. Bunch of black registry magic and constantly changing UI nonsense, literally Google and sometimes msdn are how I survive there.
Ubuntu/Fedora all go through fits of hipness and constantly change how things are done. Config files one day, services and runtime the next. UIs are really non-standard and always breaking something or other.
OSX...first time I used it I was learning Unix systems. I went back to it and it was an unholy mess of gotchas.
Android is still hurtling through versions every year and I have no idea what "current" phone looks like, I probably hate it.
When I have been unfortunate enough to use iOS it was like being made Legos trying to build other Legos. It was a right pain.
There are some common design patterns and the like but that tends to be in spite of the OS, not because of it.
Changing from one OS to another is orders of magnitude more complex. As you point out above jumping between them is painful.
Your job may require you to do that, but you're a tiny sliver of the work-force, never mind everyone else. My book-keeper has never encountered the Windows Registry.
You're thinking of the OS as an actual bit of software you interact with. For 99.99% of users it's invisible. They just want printing to happen when they press the print button.
Huh?! That's bullshit. I had recently tried to fix something on family's PC that upgraded itself to Win11 and had absolutely no clue how to navigate all the new settings panels even though I use 10 near daily.
If you go a couple months often that's enough for some things to be drastically different in Windows land. In a year its a whole new OS.
This is simply not true - the OS can and does change with monthly patches. Windows and Linux are both worse than Android or iOS/OSX in this regards I find, but that's to due with vendor preference not an underlying guarantee.
More and more upgrading the OS means discarding a large amount of accumulated knowledge as well, which normal users don't want to do, but don't have much of a choice.
It just has to be much much better.
I only ever hear Linux users make this argument. Mac users are confident enough in MacOS UX that they know it’s not a significant barrier to transition. The same is not true of Linux. So many solutions to problems require opening the CLI, and that’s just an automatic fail for the vast majority of consumers.
Honestly, I would like Linux fans to just accept Linux for what it is: an amazing kernel with incredible GUIs built by and for developers. App developers just do not care about (or do not have the resources for) making simple and intuitive software. Valve is a welcome and notable exception with the Steam Deck. Linus Torvalds explains it perfectly: https://youtu.be/Pzl1B7nB9Kc
I bought my mother a Macbook during the Snow Leopard era and we sold it after 2 months because she could absolutely not get used to the UI, since she had been using Windows since basically forever.
So much for "intuitive UI".
There is no reason to make your mom (or my mom) switch.
And while MacOS may be intuitive, its less intuitive if you come from something else. I used one for a bit and found everything "backwards". One version of Mac to another or one version of Windows to another is trivial compared to changing from one to the other.
Obviously the Linux CLI is waaay beyond most average people. So it's a non starter anyway.
Maybe there was something about my configuration I could've tweaked to mitigate the lag, but I have zero interest in fiddling with Linux. That stuff's fun if your goal is to learn about the OS, but absolutely intolerable if you just wanna get work done.
- MoneyWell
- Omnigraffle
- Keynote (I like my glossy presentations)
I know I’m missing a few.
I love and monetarily support free software, but man… some of these apps get a lot of love and it’d be hard to leave.
I believe there was also a time period where it was given to users who activated a new Apple product, but for people still running older machines had to pay.
rr is great, I have used it a few times with great success, but always as a heavyweight, for solving really tricky bugs. Usually, printf is first, then gdb and/or valgrind, then rr.
On Visual Studio (which has a great debugger), the debugger is the first tool I reach. It is simply more convenient, more reliable on a day-to-day basis, plus, there is "edit and continue". Generally I prefer the Linux dev tools (rr is one of the good ones, I also love valgrind), but for interactive debugging, for me, Windows wins.
Releasing binaries is still a PITA for Linux. That's one of the main reason it has so little support from closed source consumer software. If you care, see my comment history on my company dropping Linux support for a pro-audio app, even though our software works on Linux.
But for development tools, it's you-win-some-you-lose-some. There are some development tools (the Valgrind suite, for example) that I still miss after mostly switching to macOS. Going from Linux to macOS also means losing great tools.
Is it really that bad? I mean, many small FOSS programs provide packages for multiple distributions. Are they busting their balls building that stuff?
That works for FOSS, but not for smaller closed-source consumer apps. And it's not just building, it's also testing and debugging. It's just not tractable for a small company to test on dozens of different distros / versions for such a small percentage of users.
Regarding audio, if you decide to target several audio stack yes indeed. I hope this get eliminated by Pipewire really soon. It's already the case as a end user (Pipewire replaces Pulseaudio, Jack and the userland part of Alsa) but I don't know if all use cases are covered yet. If I'm not mistaken Pipewire started from the need to be able sandbox multimedia streams in Flatpak , so I guess Flatpak might be indirectly helping here :)
Regarding hardware it's the same problem for any operating system though, testing with all hardware can be tricky for a small company.
It’s annoying that this isn’t true for modern Linux desktop software.
I'm not sure about your statistical claim. Of course my impression is purely anecdotal, but I'm thinking of examples like:
https://mkvtoolnix.download/downloads.html
or:
https://www.monetdb.org/easy-setup/ (and press the Linux button)
they seem to providing their own builds. And - if you wrote your build system reasonably (e.g. CMake, properly check for dependencies etc.) - then building on different distros would not be much of a headache. You may not provide 40 different binary packages, and they may only fit recent versions of the popular distributions, but - after you set this up once, I wonder if it isn't just running a script after you have your versioned source tarball release.
And I am sure that's how most open source packages on Linux are built. Again, I spent a lot of time in that world. (Former KDE core developer, former employee at SAP Linux Lab, friends working at all major distros, have a bunch of my stuff in every distro, talks at lots of Linux conferences, etc.)
Building really isn't the problem. It's testing and supporting. Building is relatively easy. But you can't just ship commercial packages without testing them. Pulling out a Debian 11 VM because someone's having problems with your software there under Wayland, but not X11, but it seems to work in Sid... Again for the 0.01% of your customers using that configuration, ... it's hard. And it rarely makes economic sense unless you've got a disproportionate number of users on Linux, or a ginormus user base. You can't assume because something works on Arch Linux that it also works on Mate. Or that something on Ubuntu works on Debian. Or Redhat on SUSE. And then your users may have any of 3-4 versions of those installed. By the time you get to a specific configuration you're dealing with often debugging things for a single-digit number of users.
Windows is about 66% of our customers, macOS about 33%, Linux about 1%. On Windows we currently only test on x64 for Windows 10 and Widows 11. On macOS we test 4 configurations. Each Windows configuration we test is 33% of our users. Each macOS configuration about 8%. Linux is starting at 1%, and previously we tested only one configuration, which was already 8x more costly than macOS. But there were a lot of complaints from people using other distros / versions, which resulted in anger, bad reviews, claims that we don't understand Linux...
To get reasonable coverage of the Linux desktop landscape, we'd need to test probably 20+ different configurations, meaning each of them would cover about 0.05% of our customers. The QA tests take multiple hours to run through. That makes supporting a Linux user a staggering 160x more expensive than supporting a macOS user, and 660x more expensive than supporting a Windows user.
Again, you need either a giant user base, or a disproportionate number on Linux (which is the opposite of true in pro-audio) to even hit break-even on Linux users.
Whatever Linux specific stuff I need to run (mostly for development), WSL2 and Docker takes care of that.
I want an OS that just runs and doesn't stay in my way.
YMMV. For me, Linux is the OS that just runs and doesn't stay in my way. For my work flows, the tools on Linux are far superior. I recognise that may not be the case for the tools you use.
And of those embedded/mobile devices, the rest will either be running iOS, vxworks, freertos or zephyr.
I think the joke has always been "this is the year of Linux", but in all honesty... it's the decade of Linux. It's probably one of the few areas where there is growth in computing capacity and by far most of the net new is running Linux.
There was a chance with mobile phones to use and signal Linux, but that didn't happen either.
Still, congratulations on hitting 3% desktop share.
What do you mean? Android is Linux!
So yes, android is 100% Linux.
It is not Gnu/Linux though. Which is what the desktop folk are celebrating.
This is one case where the distinction actually is important.
Or how despite having an endless choice of games, and applications, almost none of them are available in GNU/Linux.
Yes, which is why I said “and signal”, which is to say it isn’t marketed as such and so consumers don’t know that. To them, they’re running Android OS, for better or worse.
This is plain wrong. Sent from my GNU/Linux smartphone Librem 5.
Quite hilarious to see some HNers who cannot even read the title of the article and are compelled or have the urge to bring up other irrelevant statistics to hide the little to no desktop usage when compared to other desktop operating systems.
It is specifically talking about desktop market share.
Actually tbere are plenty of other options for embedded.
As for the server room, UNIX was already the winner there anyway, since the 1990's.
Unix was king in the 80s, maybe early 90s for anyone doing terminals, banks, government and universities were all ok the big iron train. But when nt3.1 and 3.5 came out, if you were a business not looking into it, you felt like you were behind the times. We had DEC and iris at our house, so weren't in a good position to switch, but it wasn't long before the change happened.
The only places where NT managed to succeed on server room have been Microsoft shops, or places where .NET was adopted as the main development stack.
Workstations is another matter.
In the 80's many banks were either on mainframes/micros, or using stuff like Novel Netware.
.NET came out well after NT was replaced with windows 2000 (unless you claim that 2000, and thus XP and later windows OSes were also NT)
> In the 80's many banks were either on mainframes/micros, or using stuff like Novel Netware.
In my experience in the late 90s NT crushed Netware. It rode the wave of computerisation of SMEs and gained massive amounts of users (with desktop often being 3.11 onwards rather than NT).
Until then it was all about ASP, Outlook, and SMB shares, nothing else.
All big stuff was on UNIX.
Again, when talking about the server room.
From 1999 to 2003, I was doing project delivery across Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT/2000, so I might have an idea of how our customer based actually had their server rooms configured.
Likewise the university campus was wired to DG/UX, Solaris, eventually Red-Hat came into the picture as DG/UX server died.
Computer labs desktops were a mixture Windows 9X, NT, Mac and some lucky professors had a couple of NeXT Cubes, which they eventually replaced by Red-Hat (before Apple's aquisition).
So to each their own 1990's anecdote.
How is toybox not good enough to replace the GNU coreutils for a phone? Or what GNU software are you talking about that someone would even want to run on a phone?
To be a proper replacement, anything in GNU/Linux must be available.
The Termux App [https://termux.dev/en/] provides a full linux terminal with zsh, emacs, and apt based package manager. I've been using it in lieu of creating full apks for personal projects -- much easier to spin up a database and local webserver via ssh on my phone than to build a proper app package.
I find it fits most of my linux on the go needs; for example I can pull up a node REPL and quickly test code on my phone, or curl a API endpoint
What do they do? Who uses them?
Yes! Especially if your application is legacy/old and requires Windows anyway. I used to think why people would do that when you can dockerize SQL Server and just use Debian or Fedora or whatever but I once tried that on a legacy application and things... were not quite right.
It was easier to install on Windows than to debug the issue so I just let it go. I think things would be different if the code was new or I was familiar with it enough to anticipate how it could break in different ways. If the code/framework is new enough, it might be worthwhile diving into that rabbithole.
It's fully supported by Microsoft on Linux, so if you run into technical problems you have a support line to call.
You can’t deploy SSIS packages, can’t edit user accounts and permissions, can’t manage linked servers, etc. Sure you might not do those every day, but if you have to jump through all these hoops to do something I wouldn’t call ADS a full replacement.
> What do they do? Who uses them?
I don't know about the percentages but there is at least one b2b e-commerce website application thing with the latest version built with ASP.NET MVC on dotnet 4.8 so it has to be on Windows.
It isn't "cloud" by any means but you can create an EC2 instance or an Azure VM or whatever and put Windows on it and run IIS and all those things.
That and I think on Azure, you can run things like Azure functions and Azure web apps on Windows. I also don't understand why people would pick Windows to run modern software where you have a choice.
I'm my family we have two desktop computers and a laptop. One desktop is running Linux, the other and the laptop are windows.
But we're also running Linux on all our phones, two tablets, two TVs, the vacuum cleaner, our router, and probably more devices I'm forgetting or not aware of.
Maybe 60% of embedded devices with an OS.
But yes, Linux (and BSD) are quite dominant outside of the desktop market segment.
Desktop Linux has reached perfection IMHO. People complain about too many distros, package formats, desktop environments, init managers, audio servers and so on. I just love it, I pick and choose whatever I like and I like pretty weird things. I have excellent support and QA from community disto packaging - my Arch install is over 10 years old and I never had to do anything to it besides tinkering for fun. My Debian private server requires 30 minutes every 2 years to switch to the new release. The documentation is heavenly. The commercial offerings (that run on Linux) that pay my bills aren't even in the same league. Neither is Windows or Mac.
I want Linux to remain an enthusiast OS. It's not good for my parents, my non-tech friends, and maybe it's not good for you either. That's not a bad thing and I do not want it to change.
Cloudflare making it easy to block entire countries, allow people to be lazy in protecting their websites and goes completely against the open web. Of course I could use a vpn but it's getting tiring that I have to do so more and more often.
What I can't understand is why people are willing to shut their websites from like half of the world. Especially Linux bloggers. Open source, "free as in freedom", right? These people should fight practices like that, not follow them.
Amazingly, the country I'm in right now is blacklisted on this website.
Isn't it ironic for a website promoting "free" and "libre" software?
I guess this is accurate for people who are in the web ads business, but otherwise obviously it's a bad proxy and seems likely it's undercounting a lot since Linux users tend to be savvy enough to block analytics and probably do less web browsing on StatCounter monitored sites.
Eg they show Firefox as having too small to see (< 2%) market share here: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share - other data sources show 7-ish %.
Technology adoption takes strange paths but the history of linux is one of remarkable resilience and capability which augurs well for the future.
My guess is that a key driver of growth will come from power users that will make best use of local AI and data science tools, preserving privacy and commercial secrecy.
While many many casual users will continue using thin clients, effectively outsourcing their digital lives to the "cloud", this is unlikely to continue being the 97%.
The opportunity is, e.g., for all the apps of the linux desktop to start making use of the python ML tools to empower users with unprecedented functionality. There is no reason that all of that new universe must be ceded to a small number of actors.
This opportunity was there for a long time now, ML is not new, but the broader FOSS community is quite reactive. Emulating proprietary / closed tools to a fault (eg the libreoffice suite) rather than exploring the unique opportunities of alternative paths has been the norm.
Luckily the AI hype will work as a kick in the butt. The future is for linux to lose.
Does it? It’s 3%. If it was 15% or 20% maybe you could say that.
It’s less than “unknown” and less than ChromeOS which is just over 4%. If it wasn’t a round number, I don’t think anyone would ever write this article because the number is just too small.
It’s nice that it seems to be growing. I just don’t think this is a big achievement.
It’s popular with schools etc.
It is not GNU, though. Perhaps we are actually trying to measure the prevalence of GNU on the desktop?
(my computers, by contrast, all run Linux, and have for the last 17 years...)
For years, during the desktop boom in the 2000s, most of the support for networking hardware, wired and wireless, was based on binary blobs coming from Windows OSs and "imported" into a Linux system. How could you dare to use Linux as a desktop?
As of today still most of the PC hardware comes with Windows preinstalled. It would be like offering people pink cars which they can paint in a different color, more or less.
Nope. I think 3% is a lot if you take into account the amount of efforts needed for people to contrastate the so-called "market push".
Linux world is "fragmented" by definition: each main tool and even desktop environment has a number of variants, developed by smallish (fragmented) teams in the name of freedom and choice. Windows, on the other side, has a basically monolithic environment in the name of ... dunno what. Normal (non-techie) people are scared by Linux. Because they have never tried the blue pill. They have never seen how deep the rabbit hole can be.
Consistency, stability?
To me it's more market grip on people that prefers chains to freedom, not thinking to thinking.
macOS does it, too. Android does it, too. Basically any os that cares about human interaction.
Such was the success, that my sister in law started using LibreOffice and quite likes it.
That's ignoring the "iot" vlan with god knows what on (printer, plugs, speakers, even a bulb), but most of that's linux.
I wish more devices ran "not-linux" really.
For most people, a desktop OS is just a platform to run a web browser on. Chrome's dominant state in that area concerns me more than the dominance of linux in computing.
But also: 3%!!
If we still had Windows 7, with no ads, no recurring charges, and no built-in cloud services, I'd still be using it.
I wonder if any of you tried to develop C/C++ on MacOS. It seems that it's impossible to find leaks and misbehavior, while on Linux there is this valgrind that does everything for you. MacOS have some `leaks` tool but it does not really do half of the things valgrind does. So probably I would say "Linux is in the first place". /Writing this on my company's mac/
I have a Mac provided by my company. None of my development tools are available there, profiling, debugging is a hassle.
The only way I can work on it is by booting up linux VM, or connecting to my servers to compile there.
Mac is just terrible for development. It's barely better than Windows.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india/#mo...
Why tho ?
> Email the site owner with the cloudflare ray id.
Okay, where do I get the email id ?
Love the false positives. Keep em coming.
And on the laptop and desktop market, we just haven't ever had any company making that kind of play. And don't get me wrong - it's not an easy play to make.
That said, I wouldn't dismiss it either. The whole "ubiquitous web browser" thing has made that kind of consumer play be more realistic, and I think that Google's Chrome push (Chromebox and Chromebooks) is clearly aiming towards that.
So I'm still hopeful. For me, Linux on the desktop is where I started, and Linux on the desktop is literally what I still use today primarily - although I obviously do have other Linux devices, including an Android phone - so I'd personally really love for it to take over in that market too.
"
When I installed Ubuntu on HP Pavillion dv4 laptop for one of the friend, who was casual user, said - what kind of OS is this, which is still working after 6 years. :)
Happy to contribute to that 3%.
Are people fleeing the Windows as Ad Space direction? Are they fed up with Mac OS oddities? Do they use their Steam deck more?
Or are they just enjoying the Linux experience....
I know that after years of Linux usage I can't stand Windows in-your-face Ads and "use our accounts". And I can't stand the locked down Apple ecosystem either. But what drives others? Are there any good sources on that question?
For programmer / power user, I guess linux desktop is now in good state, for programming I find very minimum difficulty on using Ubuntu. It is now a viable choice beside mac and windows.
Furthermore with steam proton and lutris we can play many games with linux which was impossible. The programming device and gaming device now can use single Linux os
I'm pretty certain that the 'unknown' is almost all Linux or *BSD users. From the source of the data itself (https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology)
> In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 5 billion page views per month, by people from all over the world onto our 1.5 million+ member sites.
The majority of Linux desktop users that I know off are especially privacy focused and potentially blocking attempts at fingerprinting.
Had M$ been broken up, maybe it would be different. Until things change, I am happy that at least I can run applications on UNIX based MacOS.
3% is just sarcasm
For example I tried Ubuntu Unity on a fresh install for a week or so recently and it was popping up with unknown errors randomly. It also lacks any hotkeys. Software centre seems to have improved but is still buggy. Also there are still occasional issues which make the machine not bootable and hard to sort without stack overflow and some reasonable Linux knowledge.
Ended up swapping back to i3 and just using my old confs.
Which I think is the main issue. There isn't really a good, reliable, simple, predictable desktop experience yet like you get on Windows or MacOS.
The biggest driver of adoption is simply more computers sold with Linux pre-installed. Very small fraction of users ever installs an OS.
It is possible, and that's great, but boy Dell et al do obfuscate the choice on their sites. You have to know the machine exists, need to know the generation, the year, etc.
It's almost as if they don't want people to buy these machines.
If other people like to run Linux on the desktop or Windows on the servers, I don't have anything against it. Everyone should run what it suits him best.
* The share of desktops themselves is shrinking towards mobile
* The other desktop OSes are steadily turning into shite, so there are fewer compelling reasons to stay on them
* Everything is in the browser anyway, so as long at it can run Chrome, no one bats an eyelash
How to do it when the devices are already locked-in by a monopoly? That would be ultra hardcore regulation (USA grade) with alternatives which would have to be financially backed by some means to keep those alternatives "out-of-the-economy", until it reaches economic equilibrium (if ever... since big tech has infinite money...).
That said, current elf/linux distros have a lot of nasty too (planned obsolescence is very strong).
It's thanks to redhat and corporate types using it so much that all sorts of controversial and divisive changes were introduced. The monetization aspect is also hard to resist when 100M+ people use your OS, takes a lot of character to resist becoming a billionaire by selling out your original users who heleped you succeed.
I am happy with it but yesterday morning the computer wouldn't boot so I had to do some hand waving to fix the problem. No idea what caused it.
I'd rather it be the next system that takes off. Hopefully a properly engineered system based on a microkernel (such as seL4) multiserver architecture, preferably with capabilities.
I do of course use Linux, as a stopgap until such a thing is here.
MacOS has so many annoying things which drive me nuts; like it doesn't show the full path in finder (and can't easily manipulate it), deleting files feels like a hassle. I hate that screenshots go to my Desktop and I can't quickly tell it where to go. The experience overall feels restrictive, obscures what's really going on and prioritizes the wrong things. I already tweaked my settings to fix some of these things but it's still not as good as Kubuntu... The main positive thing I have to say about MacOS is it's better than Windows.
And the desktop market amongst servers, cell phone, consumer electronics is?
Linux doesn't need to play this game because it has already won it - a long time ago.
ChromeOS is a Linux. Therefore its numbers should be included.
3.08 + 4.15 = 7.23%
Still not all that impressive, but better than twice as good as claimed, a solid 3rd place after macOS, and still climbing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
It's a Linux kernel and a Linux userland on top of `glibc`. It's not a weird libc, like Bionic in Android. You can run a Debian container and Debian apps; my own ChromeOS Flex machine runs Firefox and DOSemu.
It's a Linux. It's the most successful desktop Linux there is, and so of course all the advocates decry it as not being a True Linux, but then again the Fedora lot think Ubuntu is junk, and the Debian lot think everything is junk, and the Arch folk think they're more cutting-edge, and the NixOS folk think all the rest are still in the stone age somewhere...
Linux is two things: a kernel and an ecosystem of distributions. This website is clearly targeting users of distributions that brand themselves as "Linux distributions". In that way, ChromeOS is obviously not a Linux distribution to anyone that cares about Linux distributions.
This is exactly what I expect in this corner of the FOSS world, though.
Linux is like Christianity: somehow the Unix world encourages schisms and splinter sects who all deny that each other are legitimate. It's sort of a defining characteristic.
Ignoring all the commercial ones, as they are effectively all dead now, and just looking at the FOSS ones, there are at least a dozen or so rival sects: NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, Minix, HURD/L9 and its various splinter groups, Plan 9 (9front, HarveyOS, Jeanne, etc.), Inferno, and of course, Linux and its thousand distributions.
Precisely two (2) Linux-based OSes have enjoyed large-scale commercial success as user-facing GUI systems for non-technical users. One has billions of users, the other a large fraction of a billion. Both are from Google, and both share a defining attribute: the FOSS world rejects them.
ChromeOS comes in 2 flavours: there's ordinary ChromeOS, which you can only get by buying hardware built to run it (just like Apple's macOS), and there's ChromeOS Flex.
Flex used to be called Neverware Cloudready: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverware
Neverware grew from Hexxeh's remixed and rebuilt ChromiumOS for ordinary PCs. Hexxeh made ChromeOS Flow, and that is the direct grandparent of ChromeOS Flex: both are ChromeOS for generic PC hardware.
And that, for me, is the significant angle. It shows that this is just another Linux distro.
No, it doesn't say "Linux" in the branding. Neither did Ubuntu for the decade or so it took for it to grab some 75% of the desktop Linux market.
Even today, if you go to https://ubuntu.com/ you must scroll quite a long way down the page before the first mention of the word "Linux" and then it's a negative: that line says Ubuntu Pro (a subscription support service) is more than just Linux.
If someone said "Android is not a Linux" I could see that being defensible. You can't download it for free, you can't run it on your own generic off-the-shelf computer, you can't run ordinary Linux apps on it, and so on. It's a different sort of beast, even though, technically it is a Linux because it has a Linux kernel.
By default and unless cracked, it has nothing else Linux-like about it. No shell, no desktop, no X11 or Wayland, nothing.
But ChromeOS Flex is different. It is a Linux in every way that matters. It's free, it's Free, it's open source, there are remixes and rebuilds. It runs on generic kit. It has a desktop, albeit its own unique one. You can pop a shell. You can run containers on it and in them run any arbitrary Linux app.
It looks like a Linux, it acts like a Linux, and it runs like a Linux. It is based on a generic Linux kernel and userland from Gentoo, and it does Linuxy stuff with Linuxy binaries like any other desktop Linux.
It doesn't have systemd, but thank the great god Torvalds and his apostle St Cox, that is not yet a requirement for a Linux distro. It has `upstart`, which was one of the most widespread init systems before ~Lucifer~ Lennart spread his dark blessing across the land.
It is 100% on-brand for the Linux world that when one specific form of Linux-based OS went mainstream, and is now used by billions, the True Believers of the Linux world disowned it. Android is not Linux. OK, they kind of have a point.
But ChromeOS is a Linux. It's not a typical Linux, because typical Linuxes are nerd tools and that kind of OS will never, ever go mainstream unless someone forces people to use it. (As the government of the People's Republic of China are currently doing, but that is irrelevant right now.)
ChromeOS is a desktop Linux with the Linuxiness stripped out. No choice about partitioning. No weird dual-boot mechanisms. No choice of desktops or package managers: No package manager!
But in every way that matters, it is mainstream, it is commercially successful, it's a good polished end-user desktop OS, and it's a Linux.
So of course the Forces of FOSS hate it. Of course they do.
And how do they express that contempt? By saying it's not a True Linux.
Battery, WiFi chip, memory, and storage are all upgradeable; you'll just be signing up for a given chip generation. L
Of course you can manually install any desktop you want on either.
Basically the difference is that open source needs experts to maintain it, so it works really well for server side stuff and predefined environments. Not as much for desktop.
Honestly, I spend less time maintaining my Linux desktops than I do fixing the Windows boxes in my house. Had to reinstall Windows completely several times to fix issues with updates not applying and other things that just don't work properly. And don't get me started on the endlessly nested configuration UI in Windows, some bits are modern, some bits seem to date back to XP, nothing is in one place.
not that many people have a ps5 devkit either, it doesn’t make them less important.
Some selected models allow to run GNU/Linux, WSL style, in its own sandboxed environment.
> 3% [of the] desktop market share
How do you spell "90%() of the server market share"? And I don't dare talking about mobile and embedded devices
() my very own guesstimate