I have to wonder how much of this is people switching to Linux vs the larger trend of people not having traditional computers to begin with.
Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the people that would have already had Linux desktops continuing to have theirs since they would likely be the same people (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets) less likely to be making that switch.
Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Given these numbers are percents I would be very curious.
Now yes there is a clear uptick thanks to the Steam Deck (however with Microsoft pushing their optimized for gaming Windows it will be interesting to see if that continues or goes backwards). But I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
> thanks to the Steam Deck [...] but I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different. SteamOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch. If you run your Steam Deck in "desktop mode", it is very much a Linux Desktop (with a read-only system and A/B updates etc, but still).
Android systems don't even run the linux kernel in any real sense, pretty much every downstream kernel has millions of lines of patched code that will never make it upstream in their current form. Of course, that's no different from mostly any other "Linux" embedded device, but it's very different indeed from what's standard on desktop systems.
Whether your virtual container is lightweight, heavyweight or from the cloud doesn't really change anything from a regular user's perspective. You aren't installing software in the main environment you are looking at, running a desktop on, etc.
> This may be technically true, except it has no single meaningful implication, like no Linux software works there.
Termux is notable is because you in fact don't need a virtual machine at all, or even a proper container. Even the "chroot" aspect is basically just to create a facade to make software work with less effort; it's not literally needed. And you can indeed run typical graphical Linux software as long as you have a compatible display server; Termux offers an X server as an add-on.
This doesn't mean that Android is the same as desktop Linux, but that's not the point here. The point is that Android runs the Linux kernel, and not just in name only. You actually can make use of the Linux aspect of Android, which many of us do.
It's possible that Google will lock down Android further in the future and make the host Linux environment less usable for stock Linux apps, but today you can run quite a lot of typical CLI and even desktop Linux software directly in Android with minimal fuss. Even if it's a little cumbersome, it's quite useful in a pinch.
I'd argue whether you can readily install software to the Linux host environment is also neither here nor there. For an immutable abroot setup like SteamOS, you can't really install directly to the host environment, but in my mind that does not make it any less "desktop Linux" or Linux kernel based.
You are talking about the OS while the person you are discussing with is speaking about the kernel.
The Linux kernel has its own merits outside standard Linux userspace.
I agree, saying that the fact standard Linux distros and Android share the same kernel has no single meaningful implication really undervalues the Linux kernel.
I also agree that it's important to keep in mind the two OSes are mostly incompatible.
The two OSes sharing the kernel have practical implications, including (theoretically) seeing improvements coming from Android dev in the kernel that can benefit standard linux distros, and things like Termux or Waydroid.
Compiling the mainline Linux kernel myself really taught me that the kernel does way more than people give it credit for. Sure, it can be debated as to whether two distributions of Linux can really be considered the same OS, but acting like the kernel is a relatively minor detail comes off to me as ignorant.
You’re keeping a discussion on technical reasoning for why Android and Desktop Linux are separated in a list like that, but the reason is not technical. It’s wholly for convenience. We want to know the performance of Desktop Linux separate from Android. Whether or not they are a different OS or not is irrelevant.
So when somebody says "Linux reaches X market share", are they talking about the kernel? Why does it even matter how much the kernel is used? Would you count WSL?
This is exactly my question. You said the discussion's about the kernel. Why do you want to evaluate its usage? Which conclusions are you going to draw?
Because when talking about the OS, you can conclude that Windows and MacOS start falling behind the free software.
I never implied this. This subthread is about countering your affirmation that Android being based on the linux kernel has no single meaningful implication. It's not anymore about evaluating usage and counting stuff.
This all started with a commenter writing "Android systems don't even run the linux kernel in any real sense", which is wrong, or at least highly misleading and confusing (I do agree with this commenter about the fact that we are talking about forks that don't upstream their shit, which does have severe implications). You could say that Android systems usually don't run mainline Linux kernel.
> you can conclude that Windows and MacOS start falling behind the free software.
I wish :-) And I wouldn't generally include Android in the free software family, few people run Replicant or some Android flavor without the Google services, let alone without proprietary blobs. (I would count blob-free Android)
Linux is a kernel, that's it. There is an organisation maintaining it, and also the trademark.
There is also a major family of OSes building on the kernel + gnu userspace, which you probably call "desktop linux".
In my house there are dozens of devices running linux the kernel: routers, a tv set, washing machines, NAS, printers, etc. Some have the full gnu posix-like stack, others are very barebones.
Then, there's is a bunch of android devices running the kernel as well.
What's wrong with all of these? At what point should i draw a line?
To me, Desktop Linux is the Linux I run on my work computer: the one that has a screen, a keyboard and a mouse. It is based on Linux (obviously), the GNU userland to some extent, and then it has a graphical environment (usually based on Xorg or Wayland).
This is different from embedded Linux or Linux on a server. And this is different from Linux-the-kernel (which runs on Android).
What if I run linux + gnu + gnome over rdp on VM a server in a rack somewhere that has no screen keyboard and mouse on it? Am i using desktop linux or not?
What if that same VM also is running nginx and serving up web content?
What if I have a pc with a keyboard and monitor sitting literally on my desktop, and it's running linux + gnu but no graphical environment, and I use it for coding (it has music playing when I do this, and i sometime check email or github issues, etc via cli) - yes I've done this, even recently to reduce distractions... some days GUIs are bad for my adhd. Is that a desktop linux? If not, why? What's different about this than doing basically the same thing, but also having a browser open when it's surrounded by a GUI?
I feel like you're overthinking it. It's not that one can get a badge saying "powered by Desktop Linux". It's a rough categorisation based on the use case:
* Embedded Linux is what you expect to see on a "small" device that usually doesn't have a graphical environment (it may have a small screen showing a temperature).
* A Linux server is what you expect to see in racks, serving stuff over the Internet. A homeserver could be that, too.
* Linux on mobile is what you would put on your phone.
* Desktop Linux is what you would put on your working computer, the one you interact with "physically".
Of course, you can run a server on your personal laptop, and you could run a "Desktop" graphical environment on a mobile phone. But that's beside the point. And of course, you can work on a Linux without a graphical environment.
Well, you came up with a rather vague definition. Xorg OR wayland. Gtk or qt? Which set of tools do you expect to be available?
All of that is just too nebulous. Linux is something that runs the kernel, that's about it.
I mean, I've been using linux for all of my life, servers, at home, for work, embedded dev, corporate environment, as a manager and as a dev, etc.
What I see is that linux as already everywhere. Desktop space is the only OS market where non-linux OSes are in the majority, and maybe this is why people are so excited about these pointless numbers.
Desktop Linux is difficult to define exactly, but the idea has merits. Something that's not proprietary, and that's not incredibly closed / locked / controlled by a monopolist like Android or Chrome OS.
> maybe this is why people are so excited about these pointless numbers.
I'd be excited by numbers showing an increase free software use, including the OS, first and foremost.
For what I personally care, I'd be happy to drop the Linux kernel requirement and extend the scope to Desktop BSDs and other open source desktop OS as well. People being trapped in closed OSes that happen to be based on a Linux kernel is of limited comfort anyway, actually.
> Almost every Android version imposes new major restrictions when it comes to security requirements, and specifically the Android 10 version update was dramatic for Termux usage, as it disallowed executing downloaded files directly.
> The Termux app avoided that by using a targetSdkVersion of Android 9, declaring that it was not compatible with the Android 10 requirements.
For now it's not a huge barrier to Termux running. We can go run Android 2 stuff today, & maybe Android will forever be backwards compatible.
It does mean that Termux can't build a top or use any new Android features. Termux is glued to a truly ancient version of Android, because Android became inhospitable to basic Linux userland use cases. Seems its mostly about being unable to run downloaded code, which feels admittedly like very much "just a technicality", but boy oh boy has that technicality kept Android from expanding outside of its own bespoke userland.
Wait, no, Termux is not stuck at Gingerbread, it's stuck at Android 9 (Pie).
Agree with the rest though. Android is a sinking ship, not only the Termux issue, but the increasing number of basic apps and features that are proprietary and not part of AOSP. I hope we'll be able to be caught by Linux Mobile or something like this in time.
Apologies! I originally posted Android 9 Pie (2018), but had doubt & switched to the SDK version. My mistake!!
The AI age where the AI needs to be able to peak into all the apps will hopefully create a new API / MCP age, new machine-to-machine work. I'm not sure how much of what Google is doing today is proprietary, adding hooks into all their apps and creating some means for Gemini to access that all, and how much is paved road & available for others. Very curious to know more.
Right, Android target levels are so different in how they behave towards applications that they're practically best treated as distinct OS's to begin with. There's really no such thing as a unified Android or iOS, unlike Windows or desktop Linux where even a program from the mid-1990s will run unmodified in the latest version of the OS.
> Android target levels are so different in how they behave towards applications that they're practically best treated as distinct OS's to begin with
You can run applications running different target levels side by side though
> desktop Linux where even a program from the mid-1990s will run unmodified in the latest version of the OS
mhm... I wish but that's not so true for Linux. Your old program will likely be missing some dynamic library or be incompatible with your current libc. Desktop Linux userspace is awfully unstable, compatibility is broken left and right, basically no one cares except the Linux kernel itself. There's a reason people jokingly say that win32, through wine, is the most stable Linux API. If you still have the source code of your program (and the linux ecosystem is full of free software so that's likely), you can always recompile but you'll probably need to edit the code so it's compatible with the current versions of libraries).
>Termux is glued to a truly ancient version of Android, because Android became inhospitable to basic Linux userland use cases.
No, this only a problem with Termux's approach of trying to put all apps into a single app. One Linux app should correspond to one Android app. This also makes it so that permissions you grant to the app is not to all of termux, but to a specific app.
>it dynamically downloads the programs using apt-get.
And then runs them as the Termux app. I didn't mean to imply that it put all of the apps into itself at build time.
>Android app for each binary is difficult to work with.
You could group multiple binaries that belong to a single conceptual app into a single android app. What do you think would make it difficult to work with? I think most of it could be automated away.
The principled way of doing this (while coping with the new post-Pie restrictions) would be to build a new "updated" .apk on-device with a new /usr/bin/ equivalent, then have the user explicitly "install" it and relaunch Termux. It would work no different than any live-CD install, or for that matter any other kind of "immutable" OS.
But then, everything runs under the same Termux user app again, just with extra cumbersome steps. And I'm not sure it's possible to do this safely, you need the APK to be signed, and the only way to do this would be to share the private key. And likely to have a good chunk of the Android SDK bundled with Termux. A version that runs on Android anyway.
Not sure it would fly with Google's Play Store policies.
to your parent:
> And then runs them as the Termux app. I didn't mean to imply that it put all of the apps into itself at build time.
You probably could if Android weren't intentionally constrained by Google to prevent it. That's what fsflover is trying to point out: Android is more of a television firmware than an OS and counting it like a PC OS makes very little sense because you can't use it like one.
EDIT: I think you still don't understand. It doesn't matter what hardware Android runs on it's written to be appliance firmware. Even if you put it on a laptop it just turns the laptop into what is essentially a television.
So I was saying that Android runs the Linux kernel, period.
But now that you say it, Android is very much a full OS. It's not a Linux Desktop, but it is a full OS. And televisions running Android are called "smart TVs", precisely because they run a full OS instead of a minimal firmware like they used to.
Google is working on bringing Android to the Desktop, and Samsung already does it. As in: you plug your smartphone into a docking station and it is suddenly a Desktop computer.
PostmarketOS doesn't use downstream kernel trees because those are useless for anything that's not AOSP-based (unless you use terrible hacks like libhybris) and are often not upgradable to newer versions. They rely on "close-to-mainline" kernels that are much closer to real Linux.
You can run Linux software on Android via termux, or the amazing UserLAnd app even lets you install an entire distro userland with several choices (Debian, Arch, etc)
Article talks about GNU/Linux clearly. There is a point to the whole "I'd like to interject for a moment..." copypasta and Android's situation is the clearest illustration of it.
The article talks about browsers that use Linux in the user agent. This includes Alpine Linux - which is not GNU/Linux. It also splits out Chrome OS which is pretty much GNU/Linux.
Me neither! I was suggesting to use "Posix" instead of "Linux" because it properly separates GNU/Linux or other Linuxes from Android. Posix is what Android isn't but what MacOS is. What people erroneously try to call "Linux" because they don't have a better word.
There are Linux distributions that don't use the GNU userland. Should we start being pedantic about that? And say Busybox/Linux or MyCustomThingy/Linux etc?
And actually, were you talking about GNU/Linux/Xorg, or GNU/Linux/Wayland? Can I also ask people to mention which libc they use? Alpine is OpenRC/Busybox/musl/Linux, which is not systemd/GNU/glibc/Linux.
So yeah... Desktop Linux is not worse a way to describe an OS than GNU/Linux.
This has been repeated for so long that in the meantime enough of the changes have been upstreamed such that Android has been able to run with the upstream kernel since 6 years ago.
Which is exactly why people here talk about "Linux Desktop". Linux is a kernel, Linux Desktop is some flavour of a full OS made to run on a PC, as opposed to e.g. embedded Linux or a Linux server.
I think that's pretty pedantic. When most people here say 'Linux Desktop', they mean the Linux kernel, GNU(-ish) userland, Wayland/X11, and some desktop like GNOME, KDE or Mate.
Though, I guess outside tech circles, people will just talk about Linux as the whole desktop OS. E.g. our municipality was promoting installing a Linux distribution to save Windows laptops after the Windows 10 apocalypse, and they just call it Linux.
Even Wikipedia says: Linux (/ˈlɪnʊks/ LIN-uuks[15]) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds.
But with respect to "Linux on the Desktop" in the context of marketshare, the interest is in seeing how far Linux has gone, not how far software running on Linux has gone.
The only reason "ChromeOS" isn't considered Linux in this dataset is because Chrome has a flag that removes Linux from the user-agent on certain systems. If we were talking about Linux on the desktop casually, or were compiling a dataset through some other means where the kernel is a known quantity, we'd most certainly include said systems.
A distinction without a difference. The point of this subthread is that the term Linux is overloaded to mean two things: a kernel and also an OS that has certain assumptions (usually glibc and some unix userspace stuff).
The point being that “Linux Desktop” means something more than “runs the Linux kernel”.
The Steam Deck is absolutely a full blown Linux. But it's not a desktop. It's a handheld.
Well, unless you hook a screen and keyboard to it, I suppose. No idea how many people do that. But if you do that, phones and tablets also become desktops.
I attach screen + keyboard to it often. It has an official dock to facilitate this. In my mind, it's a device that can function as both desktop and hand-held.
I mean, a keyboard on iPad is way less powerful than a keyboard on steam deck. The steam deck can plug into a monitor and runs Plasma out of the box, which is a full blown desktop environment
Typing this from my Steam Deck, its the best Linux desktop I've ever had. It's awesome to have my PC also be a handheld when laying in bed. I hope the Deckard has M+KB support too.
Admittedly yeah SteamOS does walk that line, and I guess technically given that I think these numbers are based on browser data it would only be capturing the people that actually go into desktop mode (maybe?).
But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux (or even understand that it is Linux) vs would switch to a Windows version if it worked as well.
Even in the "normal mode", I would argue that it is still Linux Desktop. A Linux Desktop init system, with a Linux Desktop userspace, with a Linux Desktop libc, with the Linux Desktop security model, a Linux Desktop package manager, a Linux Desktop compositor (it uses something based on Wayland, right?), etc.
If you open a terminal (or SSH into it), you're on Linux. It's very, very different on Android.
> how many of the people using a Steam Deck [...] care that it is Linux
Probably most don't. But that's a goal. If corporate employees could use a Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it would mean that the corporation can move to Linux, and that would be big.
I think it might be good to stand back a bit and think through what we are actually excited for. Because:
1. if someone uses Linux Desktop without caring about that it is Linux, why is that different from them using Windows?
2. why do we say SteamOS count as Linux Desktop but Android doesn't? is it really because how much of it is "Linux"?
For me, I think what matters to me is who has control over it. SteamOS is based on Arch, so the community has a say over where it will go, and Valve will have to work with the community. Android/Windows are fully controlled Google/Microsoft, doesn't matter that Android is Open Source.
As a user, what usually matters to me is what software I'm able to run on it. So even if people don't actually care about the OS itself, they will care that X runs on it but Y doesn't, which, given enough users, may push X to support that OS.
I actually daily drive Linux (Arch) because Windows is a PITA I'm not willing to put up with. But there are things I use which still don't run on Linux (Photoshop and Lightroom), so I'm actually thinking of getting a Mac again instead of having a second PC / dual boot, even though I know that can also be irritating (though less so than Windows).
"Who controls the OS" isn't that important to me. What matters is that it gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do with as little friction as possible. I know Linux being free means I can go and hack on it however I like. But I also have to contend with reality: I can't reasonably think that I (personnally) am going to hack on the kernel or on some desktop environment in any meaningful measure, so I still have to put up with whatever other people figure is best.
But if there are enough people like me, including those who don't actually care about what OS they're running, maybe the apps I want to run will adopt Linux. But that only matters because, as it turns out, it's the OS which I find the less irritating to use. If tomorrow Windows 12 finally became sane, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I'm not married to Linux.
If someone runs Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it still means that they use software that runs on Linux. Say if governments move to some Linux distro, they will need an office suite, and they may pay for its development.
If someone runs SteamOS, it means that they play games on Linux. So it becomes interesting for game devs to test for Linux. And then if someone runs SteamOS, instead of a dual boot with Windows maybe they just go to the Desktop mode. Which means that instead of Microsoft Office, they use something that runs on Linux, etc.
This is good for the Linux ecosystem. And the reason I like the Linux ecosystem is because, as you say, it's not fully controlled by TooBigTech.
It is an interesting distinction, unlike Android I do admit that SteamOS is obviously contributing to Linux Desktop market share. I just think it is a complicated situation.
From my understanding Xbox is running a version of Windows on their consoles (not talking about the new handhelds) tailor made for Xbox. But I would not call that adding to the Windows marketshare.
iOS and iPadOS were started with versions of OSX and then modified (and clearly share some pieces) but we would not call either of those as contributing to Mac's marketshare.
Obviously yes neither of those let you go into the traditional Mac or Windows desktop unlike SteamOS. But how the users perceive it is still important.
> Probably most don't. But that's a goal. If corporate employees could use a Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it would mean that the corporation can move to Linux, and that would be big.
The problem is this works the other way also. If most users of the Steam Deck don't care or really know that it is Linux there is not much getting in the way of Microsoft coming in with their new handheld/OS and eating up that market if they can get the OS to perform as well.
Put another way, if Valve decided (not saying they would, just asking a hypothetical) to either write their own OS or switch the underlying OS to Windows but kept the look of SteamOS as it behaved now and performance was the same. Would most users of the Steam Deck know or care?
Personally I think for claims about the "linux desktop" to really matter, there has to be a conscious desire and care that it is Linux or it could disappear.
> I do admit that SteamOS is obviously contributing to Linux Desktop market share. I just think it is a complicated situation.
Agreed. And IMO, the thing is that you can benefit from the work made on SteamOS on any Linux Desktop. By making most games run on SteamOS, Valve contributed to make Gentoo a better platform for gaming.
> If most users of the Steam Deck don't care or really know that it is Linux there is not much getting in the way of Microsoft coming in with their new handheld/OS and eating up that market if they can get the OS to perform as well.
Sure. But what I see is really the other side: if SteamOS is relevant, then game devs will have an incentive to support SteamOS, which gives the opportunity for gamers to move to SteamOS. Now they are on Linux, so they can start using software that runs on Linux.
Linux Desktop routinely has multiple package managers (for the better or worse): be it flatpak, pip, npm, nix... but it's still Linux Desktop. Just like you don't need to have the same libc to be a Linux Desktop.
One way to think about it is what APIs application developers are using. If most of the code running on a Steam Deck is Windows code running under a compatibility layer, it probably doesn’t help the larger Linux community in the same way that, say, iOS popularity has helped ensure that many libraries have excellent macOS support.
> But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux
If Linux adoption is to increase significantly (and I guess I'm of the opinion that would be a positive thing), then at some point that can only be done by acquiring users who don't care particularly deeply or understand much about their OS. That is, the vast majority of people. And that's probably not going to happen by converting that demographic to true believers.
Some of those people might decide they want to dig deeper later, and that's great. Most won't and that's fine too.
It would be a bit asymmetrical to restrict the definition of "Linux user" to folk who really care what Linux is or know their way around coreutils.
Think about it from a brand perspective. If you were microsoft and some flavor of windows were running on people's phone and game station, would you claim this market share? I'm sure they would.
What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one? Many Android tablets (especially those with Samsung Dex) can certainly double up as desktops if its users were so willing, at least a lot more so than the Steam Deck.
Linux Desktop is something else. When Adobe considers if it's worth to port Photoshop to run on the Linux Desktop they don't include the market share of Android devices in that calculation. It's two completely different markets: desktop Linux apps and Android apps.
> What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one?
A desktop is a computer that sits on your desk, as opposed to being held in your hand. In concrete terms, you can install Android Firefox on ChromeOS, and it runs fine. But it is near unusable because it turns out how people interact with desktops is very different to how people interact with phones.
Also, desktop window managers tend to look like a protocol, rather than a library. That because every language can speak a protocol, but a library is written in one language and if you are lucky, someone many have provided bindings to that library to the language you are using.
Android's display is effectively a Java library. If you want to talk to it from C or Python, you have to FFI to Java, which sucks from a number of perspectives. It's not how you would implement a general purpose desktop environment, and I've never met anyone who considers it to be one.
That lack of flexibility shows up in a number of other ways. For example it's not difficult to implement an phone OS interface using XWindows or Wayland. Neither particularly care what window manager is running on top of them them. The reverse isn't true. You can't provide a the multi-window desktop environment on Android as it stands.
None of this is true for ChromeOS. It uses Wayland under the hood, and so you can install and run Debian GUI apps on it. In fact I do that, and it mostly works as you would expect. Thus I consider ChromeOS to be true Linux Desktop environment, and it should be counted as one. It isn't mind you - but I think should be.
Google seems to be in the process of replacing ChromeOS with Android, and as part of that process ChromeOS's ability to run Linux desktop apps is being ported to Android. If and when that happens, then I'd consider Android to be Linux desktop too.
Market share only matters to geeks and commercial software vendors when deciding the total addressable market. A “Linux desktop” that is connected to a TV used to play games is not part of the market they care about.
They aren't. Or not in the sense that it matters for traditional Linux desktop users, which is pretty much the only reason the metric gets brought up.
Following your logic, people using the old TiVo setop boxes were also Linux users.
Active Linux desktop adoption rates matter because it means companies will put money into ensuring their product works well on it. 1Password or Telegram is not going to meaningfully care about Steam Deck users. Or Android users vis a vis the Linux desktop client, because Android can't readily run Linux GUI applications :)
It's honestly kind of nuts no one here is getting that.
It really doesn't matter, you're again conflating the "kernel" and "desktop" distinction that's important here. It's like saying that XNU isn't being used by gamers - in practice you're correct, but the kernel is used to run millions of iPhone games. It doesn't matter for the adoption of macOS as a gaming platform, but the kernel is used for it.
What matters, to me as a Linux user on the desktop, is that Nintendo and Google simply follow the license. I don't want them contributing patches to GNOME or Firefox, I want them downstream testing the kernel and contributing patches back for me to benefit from. And I do! My Switch Pro controller has official Linux support because of Nintendo. My day-to-day life on the desktop is improved by both company's contributions.
The idea that Nintendo or Google are neglecting their duty because Photoshop doesn't run on Linux is a facetious argument. It might be a major issue for you, but clearly millions of Linux users are perfectly happy without those trappings.
> Or Android users vis a vis the Linux desktop client, because Android can't readily run Linux GUI applications :)
A travesty for Android's adoption metrics, one can only imagine. Thankfully for Linux users, the inverse is not so true: https://waydro.id/
You would be correct if steam deck users were in line with the average computer user, but they definitely skew more towards the tech savvy crowd - the crowd that would be interested in desktop/emulation.
Part of this is in order to use a steam deck, unless you want to be very limited, you kind of have to be a little more tech savvy. I love my deck, but it is definitely not plug and play/turn key like a switch is for instance. Hell until a year or so ago swapping between gaming and desktop mode resulted in a total crash like 30% of the time. It still doesn’t dock and undock seamlessly, you get all kinds of wild behavior with standard TVs still, and if you’re off your home network and it tries to update it can still lock you out. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still a distinct possibility.
I love it and frankly the machine is a marvel, especially at its price point. But I still struggle to recommend it to people.
If your belief is that Steam Deck is Linux Desktop then you need to count Switch/PS5/Xbox as desktops as well and take those into account with the OS percentages.
I don't think his point was that it's not linux but rather that it's not a desktop, and if it counts as a desktop, then so do the rest of the gaming consoles runnining non-linux, which probably didn't get counted so the 5% would be lower.
Yes, you can, and yes, among the group of people represented on HN, I have no doubt that a fair number do use it this way.....but how typical is that? How often does the average steam deck owner use it as a desktop? How often does the average user leave the steam launcher? How often does the average user think of it as anything other than a gaming console?
If all you care about is some very technical sense of "how many linux desktop environments are installed in the world", then none of these questions matter. But if the reason one is interested in the "Linux Desktop market share" is some level of interest in how people are using desktop computers, and when/if they are choosing them over competing OSs like Windows and MacOS, then these questions matter a lot. My guess is that 90% of SteamDeck owners don't think about the fact that it is Linux, barely every leave the steam launcher, and were they to be looking at getting a new desktop computer, their SteamDeck experience would not make them consider a linux distro vs. Windows or MacOS.
In case it matters, I think more people should be running Linux than do, I think people over-estimate the difficulty of switching. I want the steam deck and SteamOS to be a gateway for people to switch in more contexts....I'm just skeptical that it's actually doing that more than a trivial amount.
You need to switch to desktop mode to install non-steam software like emulators, so I assume some people use it at least intermittently. And I've seen some posts about people running a DAW (bitwig) on it. It's not going to be many people, but the deck is a legit linux PC if you've got a dock with peripherials attached. Can't say that about other consoles.
Yea except I cant use my PS5 as a actual desktop. As in my steamdeck has a DE. My actual desktop is 4000 km away. So I have a monitor and mouse + KB plugged into my steamdeck Dock and its no different.
The other consoles don't have the same capabilities. They don't have a desktop, so they're not a desktop. SteamOS has a desktop, and it's one of the most popular Linux desktops, KDE. So, it's a desktop operating system.
By picking a standard menu option I can go to a traditional desktop and use Libre Office and Firefox.
Can I so that with a Switch?
I can plug in a USB dock, with a monitor, mouse and keyboard and edit images with GIMP.
Can I do that with a PS5?
If I like the Steam Deck UI, I can install a package on my desktop and pick it on login, thus gaining basically all of this functionality. I in fact do have the SteamOS 3 UI installed on a gaming PC, and it works really well.
Can I install the PS5 UI and the ability to play PlayStation games on a BSD box?
But that's not the same operating system. I would need to install a different operating system. So the Switch does not have a Linux Operating System - you can just install one.
If that's the metric, then Linux desktop use must be close to 100%. Almost every platform can install some Linux distro.
> > By picking a standard menu option I can go to a traditional desktop and use Libre Office and Firefox.
> > Can I so that with a Switch?
> Yes. With a paperclip
A paperclip isn't a standard menu item. It's a hack to switch the operating systems. Once you've hacked it you can't play Switch games until you revert back. That's nothing like what the deck is offering.
> Some installations of linux require a USB drive.
We aren't talking about hacking, we are talking about whether the deck comes with desktop Linux, which it does. What you are talking about is nothing like what the Deck is offering.
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here
Interesting, could you tell me which part of US you are from?
---
My 2 cents, small country, mid-Europe, more or less in the middle of list of GDP / AIC per capita in EU.
Nearly everyone has some sort of PC or laptops for personal use.
Now it's changing, kids(~5-13yrs old) are using phones and tablets for school, Tiktok, Ytube, games. And only minority of kids is using PCs.
After they reach certain age, they've switched to PC games, at least in the past. Let's see what will happen now.
Gamers use primarily PC (Windows, because forced BS Anticheats), consoles are minority.
Probably because big tradition of piracy here, for long time it was legal to download anything. Even after forced change from EU, it's somewhat grey area and you can torrent anything, without VPN and nobody will care.
But regarding pirating games, it changed years ago, with Steam of course. Like everywhere else.
Still it's funny that we have same price or sometimes even higher than US and our median salary is ~5x lower than US. :-)
Here we call it "specific market", meaning "everybody buys it and everybody's stupid".
Only prosecuted cases I know, it was people uploading movies (usually local production) and they've made money from it.
In case of Germany and their automation of spamming letters from lawyers with ransom for €1k because someone on your internet torrented something.
That's totally ridiculous from our point of view and it would spawn huge public backlash.
I think that even lawyers torrents here :D
(US minnesota) recently a 23 year old new hire advised me that he doesn't have a normal computer or laptop and he buys plane tickets, files his taxes, plans projects etc on a phone or ipad. Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
> Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
Sad, but true. Recent batch of new hires where I work, same age range - mid-late 20's, none of them have computers at home except their work issued laptop. They are by far the biggest source of help desk tickets for us, and same story as you, using phone & iPad for everything at home.
Honestly concerns me for talent recruitment in the future, if AI isn't doing everything tech when that time comes - kids only tech experiences now are fully locked down walled gardens, takes away both the ability and incentive to tinker, explore, or even troubleshoot. Whole generation of new workers coming in without even the most basic of troubleshooting/problem solving skills. Have a few at my work where even just reading an error message on the screen seems overwhelming to them.
I had my first personal computer in 1986. But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.
90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically if your employer uses one of the major payment providers like ADP or worse case taking a picture of your W2, clicking “Next” a few times after answering a few questions and it’s done.
Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.
Plans? For my personal projects I use Trello. I have an M2 MacBook Air that I only bought when I was between jobs for around a month to do a side contract.
My wife wanted a new computer to replace her aging x86 MacBook Air and then her older iPad went out. We bought an iPad Air 13 inch and paid $70 for a regular old Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and that’s her “computer” now.
Planning a trip is one of the best usecases for not being phone-only. If it was jut "open app and buy ticket" then it'd be fine, but most trips involve a lot of moving parts that need to be in sync.
Comparing multiple different websites, copying and pasting information to share, looking up locations, etc. All way easier with a mouse, keyboard, and large tabbed browser windows.
Even Airbnb is better on desktop, since it very easily resets your search queries on the mobile app, because state is managed differently vs browser you can leave 10 different spots or multiple queries open in different tabs, which is common issue in mobile apps. And tab switching on mobile browsers is very slow.
I feel exactly the same: Context switching is awful on a mobile, but great on something with a mouse and keyboard. Even copy and paste on mobile still feels weird after 10 years of doing it.
We travel so much, we keep things as “simple” as possible - Hilton and Hyatt brand hotels 95% of the time, Delta for domestic flights and preferably Delta or SkyTeam (AirFrance, Virgin Airlines, etc) for international flights. We have status with Hilton, Hyatt and Delta (Platinum Medallion) and Delta lounge access. Of course we have TSA Precheck and Clear.
We found a couple that runs a few AirBnbs in Costa Rica for our winter stays there starting next year.
In october 2022, my wife and I got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in 4 suitcases, sold our cars, rented our home [1] out to our adult son (and two of his friends that we considered family) and flew one way trips to 15 different cities until landing in our then second home [2] in Florida. We did all of the planning via a shared Google Sheet on our phone, the Delta and American airline apps and Hilton and Hyatt hotel apps.
During the past 7 months, we’ve had trips to Vegas, Costa Rica, 4-5 flights back home to ATL, a few flights to see my parents in south GA, DC, London and Niagara Falls Canada, we still have a few trips back to Atlanta and to see my parents this year.
While we are doing all of this traveling together, my wife flies to conferences and I did travel semi frequently for business as a consultant but that has died down.
At the same time, I’m managing the best use of Delta Skymiles, when to transfer points from Amex to AirFrance to get cheap domestic flights on Delta (check out r/awardtravel), Hilton points, Hyatt points either directly or by transferring from Chase. These are all using the apps.
I have a Google sheet to keep track of various credit card perks (Delta stays credits, companion passes, etc)
I have a spreadsheet with tabs for the next couple of years plans - next year we are staying in Costa Rica for a 45 days in an Airbnb and 3-4 cities domestically during the summer and a couple of other random domestic flights during the year.
I am also keeping track of my budget, when is the best time to “nomad” based on potential rental income from my home [2].
While we have one account for hotels and a shared calendar, miles flying are based on “butts in seat”, whoever flies gets the miles. But you can book flights for others using your miles. We juggle those together too.
This is all from our phones usually at night.
We really have this down to science after 3+ years.
[1] we sold our primary home last year
[2] our current home is a unit in a condotel (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp) we own. When we leave for months at a time, we just pack everything we own in 4 suitcases and store what we can’t in our one car - like my “desk” which is just a card table.
We then put our unit in the rental pool and get income whenever someone stays in our unit. That covers our mortgage and all inclusive HOA fee. But that really only works in March - mid April (spring break), during the summer and the last two or three weeks of the year.
> But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.
Well no, the UI on a phone is severely dumbed down because it has to work with a smaller screen and touch input. You can do the same stuff, sometimes, but with more effort.
Like, I could program on my phone, if I wanted. But that would suck major ass. It has the same capabilities, but certainly nowhere near the convenience. Even just running two things at once. It's... possible... on an iPhone. But it's not a desktop with split screen. And, if it can do split screen, I really have to squint, right?
Programming on a phone is actually pretty amazing if you can run a good overlapping window manager and an OS that won't randomly kill background tasks. I had a phone running Linux for a while and it was great I wrote a ton of unit tests for my side projects on it while taking the train. One time I was out and ran into some UI issue and fixed it right there on the bus. There's nothing like that now and everything that's available is so bad no one even understands what they're missing.
I'm sure, because phone have multiple problems. One is the software, usually it's fisher-price levels of dumbed down. Buttons are huge because people have fat fingers.
So we can fix the software, but we still have hardware limitations. The hardware is small. The screen is small. There's no keyboard, only buttons on said screen. I can open a document on my phone, yes. But I see 1/10th the content I would on a computer screen - just because the screen is very small. I mean, we have these super high resolution displays... running at 400% scaling. Meanwhile, I have 1440p running at 100% on my computer.
That's, like, a lot more stuff that can be on the screen.
What do I need to see on my phone that I can’t when I am doing my taxes or even more so planning a trip - which I do a lot of?
I launch the Delta app as a Delta loyalist (Platinum Medallion) to book my flight. I then launch the Hilton app (I am Hilton Diamond) and compare prices/convenience with hotels with Hyatt (I am Hyatt Explorist).
The only exception was when we were looking for an AirBnb for an extended stay in Costa Rica next year.
>That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically
Whoa interesting, so everyone is using 3rd party company service, is it paid service or free, I've checked their website and cannot understand if it's free or not for this basic level you've mentioned.
In my country, if this was a thing, that you must pay some company to file your taxes, it would probably cause public meltdown and end of any current government :)
Here, basic level taxes are done by your employer for you, by law, for free.
Because actually they don't do taxes, but they only report amount of tax advances, social security, healthcare paid by your employer, to state, (all 3 is required by law to be paid and you or your employer have big legal problems if not). And also variables for tax deduction and then "something like IRS" will just send you tax return into your account.
And for any other cases(if you have more sources of income, eg.: salary + self-employed / rent) you must do taxes yourself, website for helping you to file taxes, is managed by state agency, for free.
Or you pay some money to "tax specialist" to file your taxes for you and liability to file it right goes after them (something like accountant, but hired only for this one task)
US tax forms and rules are insanely complex compared to other highly developed nations. Lots of people use a commercial product called Turbo Tax to help them.
If you just have a W2 and are taking the standard deduction (applicable to many, if not most taxpayers), then there is no insane complexity. Your tax document is one and a half pages and can be done with a pen and calculator.
If you have stock trades, IRA distributions, rental income, things like that, then yea, you probably need computer-based help.
Personally if I am going to spend more than $100 I am going to comparison shop and I like having multiple windows open to do it in.
Opening a specific airline's app and just getting whatever they have on offer is completely foreign to me. I would think I am getting cheated.
Also, federal taxes may be easy but the only way to free-file the state tax is to do it directly with the state and that means filling out a form myself.
We don’t comparison shop. Domestically flights on Delta, hotels are either Hyatt or Hilton brand hotels. Internationally? Most Delta partners (AirFrance, Virgin Airways) or Delta itself.
For Hilton, we get points directly and can transfer from Amex (rarely worth it). For Hyatt, points are more valuable and it’s easy to get points from Chase credit cards (r/churning) that can be transferred to Hyatt (saves us thousands a dollars a year sometimes).
On Delta, we have lounge access, 2 free checked bags, free regional (domestic, north and Central America) flight upgrades, priority check in, etc.
> 90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically
Why even pay TurboTax if you're just taking the standard deduction and have only W2 income? Might as well just paper file for free. Anything more complex than that, and having a desktop monitor and full size keyboard is very useful. I can imagine even filling out 5 stock trades in TurboTax on a phone would be quite painful.
> Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.
This one bit me recently as I did some traveling. None of the major airline apps even work on my phone anymore. Their developers all just up and decided to block use of their app on older phones with full-screen modals preventing the software from working. My only choice is to buy a new phone or do my flight booking on a desktop. Mobile apps are an absolute shit show unless you have a <= 5 year old phone.
Netherlands here. Most people I know (outside of gamers) tend to have a laptop only if they have one for work anyway, they use their phones for banking, tax, searching the correct spelling of words etc. That's in the age groups from like 30 all the way to 70.
I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.
For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
Latops and desktops, it's a mix here. Older people had mainly desktops in the past. That's my experience, at least.
Banking, yeah mainly phones because of ridiculous forced banking apps from corporate masters, like everywhere else? (certain bank even lost a lot of customers because of that)
Taxes, if you are just an employee, taxes are done by your employer for you, by law. (I presume it's a post-communism BS, so people doesn't pay attention how much taxes we pay.)
If you have other types of income, you do it yourself, you have app/website to click through it, easy. Not automatic though.
Self-employed IT pay less taxes than normal employees :D and overall lower-income people pay bigger taxes by percentage, what a great country :D
We call your country Holland, great country imho, If I would thinking about moving, that's top option for me.
Only thing that keeps me here are best gun laws in EU (I have Glock, AR15 clone, Bren3 ordered), you can conceal carry nearly everywhere, you can even use gun for self-defense, sadly very low criminality here :)
Hell, I can even legally carry katana, not kidding.
Linux is used only by IT people, friends cannot switch because they play MP games with invasive Anticheat running on kernel.
Personally, I'm only switching people to Linux if they cannot afford new PC because of Win11 upgrade. Zorin OS usually.
> Only thing that keeps me here are best gun laws in EU (I have Glock, AR15 clone, Bren3 ordered), you can conceal carry nearly everywhere, you can even use gun for self-defense, sadly very low criminality here :)
Must be circles. I just visited relatives, and brought my laptop as well as my phone; I barely used the laptop. But my brother always uses his, and his kids used laptops, and even one of my great nieces used a laptop. Did they have phones? Yes.
Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.
Wow, isn't that painful without a big screen and keyboard? [1] Most primary schools here (NL) use Chromebooks or Windows laptops. High schools sometimes have a BYOD, but you certainly have to bring a laptop.
[1] Of course, you can hook up most phones to a display, keyboard, mouse, but that blurring the lines a bit. A Samsung DeX device or future Pixel desktop mode device hooked up to peripherals is pretty much a desktop (Pixel will even support Linux apps in a VM).
To you or me, yes. And I would say “oh they just don’t know what they’re missing” but they all have laptops and chromebooks but prefer to use their phones.
I'm a millenial and I'm touch typing. The idea of writing long texts on a phone or tablet feels ridiculous to me. I already get annoyed when I have to write an e-mail on my phone. Also, I find the mobile UX for text formatting, cut/copy/paste extremely frustrating.
Interesting.
I'm also in MA, and my daughters (like all their classmates) mostly use the chromebooks issued by their public high school. They strongly prefer their macbooks tho. Granted, we live in an affluent town. But I thought the chromebooks were a statewide thing.
I'm in San Jose and it's school-issued Chromebooks here, too, though many students have their own [superior] laptop they are able to use. In the case of my household, my son has a Thinkpad X1 Carbon and my daughter has a Pixelbook Go, I use a MacBook Pro M1 and my wife uses an old Pixelbook or an old iPad with a Magic Keyboard. Everyone's pretty much chained to their phones but recognize a real keyboard and bigger screen are beneficial for certain tasks (like writing, or Khan Academy, or even consuming media).
These days might be gone, with the availability of LLMs now. You only need to prompt a bit, then it is all copy and paste. I have no idea if the students are learning a whole lot this way, though.
Interesting. My great nieces have Lenovos (Windows) that they use for school work and light gaming. They'd like better gaming laptops, but don't have them.
Have they ever tried to use a real computer for that? Can they afford a real computer? Would they prefer a bigger screen and a real keyboard over a tiny screen and an even smaller keyboard? Maybe they just don't have the experience of using a real computer to know how far superior it is to a tiny screen/keyboard?
Using a phone to write papers seems like an exercise in masochism, if better alternatives are available.
It's also possible that their peer group that does use laptops to write papers is doing far better in many ways.
Yes, this is a very affluent district. Everyone has a chromebook from school and most have a macbook from their parents. They prefer the phone.
(“Big computers are more of an old person millennial thing.”)
Why is this is a top comment? Market share is a relative measure. Even if there is a drop in the number of personal computers, still it's an achievement that the drop didn't affect Linux, while it affected other platforms.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
I disagree. Imagine that Linux became the OS used on 95% of personal computers. According to your reasoning there wouldn't be much to celebrate. Says who?
>everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets
And of the remaining desktop/laptop users, 90% of their work is being done in a browser. Which makes Linux distros like Ubuntu suitable for more people.
If you are doing all of your work in a browser anyway, you might as well use a less finicky iPad with longer battery life with a regular Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
1. iPadOS is kind of ass. Multi-tasking is lacking, cursor support is ehhh, and applications are still dumbed-down. This means more clicks, more actions, to do the same thing.
2. Bluetooth is ass, trust me I know. Thing will disconnect and you will need to manually reconnect them. I don't know why in the year 2025 bluetooth isn't completely seamless, but it isn't.
3. Rinky-dink keyboard and real keyboard is night and day. I've used those iPad keyboards. They suck.
We are talking about people who want to use the web for everything and real windowing, menus etc is coming to iPads this fall
2. Bluetooth works fine. I haven’t ever needed to re-pair my Bluetooth keyboard to my Mac or iPad
3. The iPad works with any random Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Bluetooth keyboard support has been available on the iPad since 2010. Bluetooth mouse support has been available for 7 years+.
If you have problems with Bluetooth keyboards, that says more about other operating systems. I’ve used them since my G4 Mac Mini in 2006.
I've used an iPhone. I know, for me, bluetooth does not work fine. It drops somewhat frequently.
As for keyboards and mice, sure, they work, but what's the point? If we have to attach a keyboard to an iPad and carry it around as it's own thing, then a laptop is more convenient. It has a keyboard, mouse, and screen all built in one thing. No bluetooth required, no charging required.
Are we talking about Bluetooth headsets now? I thought we were talking about keyboards and mice.
So what crappy Bluetooth headphones are you using? I haven’t had any issues with either my AirPods Pro or my cheap $60 Beats Flex.
And you can go months without recharging a keyboard or mouse. The advantage of the iPad is I don’t need a keyboard or mouse all of the time - well my wife doesn’t. It has built in cellular which is unlimited via T-mobile and when I go on an airplane, I can leave my keyboard and mouse in my bag.
And honestly, I hate working on just my laptop for any period of time and I still take my Roost laptop stand and a keyboard and mouse with me and I have an external USB powered/USB video external monitor I take with me and sometimes use my iPad as a third monitor for my laptop.
Greater control over what hardware and software you wish to run. e.g. you wouldn't have to follow Apple's decisions in making things obsolete and effectively keep old hardware running for a lot longer if you so wish. There's also a possible issue in having a U.S. based company in control of your O.S.
But most people could care less as long as they have the apps they need. They don’t want to muck around with their computers. I’ve been programming as a hobby since 1986 and professionally since 1996 and I don’t want to muck around with my computer.
But the comment is about most people only caring about the browser.
> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.
Interesting. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a personal computer at home. Mostly laptops. With the exceptions of nerds like myself, the signifier that someone is a gamer is that their home computer is a tower rather than a laptop.
I wonder how much regional variation there is around this sort of thing? It sounds like it might be quite a lot.
Both my parents run on Microsoft Excel. Neither of them care much for phones or tablets, but if there was an ExcelDeck running ExcelOS and it had a web browser and worked like the desktop version of Excel does, maybe they would go for it.
As it stands though, that's not the case, so I'll be stuck supporting a couple of Windows desktops permanently.
Before you suggest the app versions of Excel or Google Sheets, that's already a step too far. My mom told me she's "basically done learning new technology" and that's just how it's going to be.
What's important is that we have an alternative to keep Microsoft and Apple honest. If they overdo it with their crappy ideas - like showing ads in the start menu or recording the desktop - then people can easily switch, at least for personal computing.
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here.
> [...] (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets)
Somewhat unrelated but something I never see discussed is how the form factor of the computing device changes our relationship to, and the types of, media that we produce and consume.
One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media; hence the concomitant rise of picture and video and the smartphone camera, which is now the primary medium through which many, many people view the world. Editing anything longer than a Tweet is torturous on a phone or even a tablet, and I suspect that this lack of ergonomics is what leads to the proliferation of reductive, simplistic, short-form, and byte-sized thinking.
Computing "interface culture" was once hyper-literate; "in the beginning was the command line" [0], and people's primary way of seeing the internet was through words, keyboards, and terminals. Now we have the "colossal success of GUIs" and a Disney-fied [0], touchscreen interface to computing, where the control mechanisms used by adults are the exact same as the ones used by toddlers.
I'll chime in here; while I'm in one of those niches you described at the start of your comment (with multiple laptops, a gaming PC, and a homelab made up of what I'd call a reasonable number of physical computers of various descriptions), me and a few other friends of mine recently made the jump away from Windows and to various Linuxes on our gaming PCs.
I went for Ubuntu, while my friends mostly went to some type of "gaming-optimized" flavour of Arch.
I'm definitely an edge case as most computing goes, but it feels for the first time like the gaming-on-Linux train's gaining traction, and there's enough community support out there that making the jump feels like a palatable ideal.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Why? If Windows & OSX desktops are in decline, but Linux isn't, I'd still celebrate that - apparently Linux is serving the more "important" / long-lived use cases?
The article is specifically claiming a shift and growth. But if all that really changed was an increase in percentage due to less devices overall there really isnt much of a shift or growth.
I think there is likely an argument that the people that would have previously used Linux are likely using Linux for tasks that would not easily work on a phone or a tablet and are likely more technical users.
Where as many users who would have previously used Windows or Mac for general basic computing can easily accomplish those tasks on their phones or tablets. (Not all tasks obviously, but there are a lot of tasks that an iPad can do that you would have previously done on your traditional computer).
That is why to me just celebrating a percent change really is not telling us much of the story. And to be clear here, I am asking the question not to say that the number is not something to celebrate but to ask why the number is the way it is and celebrate accordingly.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
I've been saying this for a while, in the sense that the "year of the Linux desktop" isn't going to come from mass adoption of Linux on the desktop, but will come because overall "desktop" market share will decrease to the point where if you need a desktop, you are probably technical enough and more likely to be running Linux.
Desktop (and laptop) computing is becoming niche outside of work. Like you said, most folks just use their phones, and maybe an iPad. By having a non-day job computer at home, and having it be a core device, already puts you in a niche group of users.
Gamers, devs, media professionals and enthusiasts are the remaining desktop computing users. Linux is well suited to take over gamers and devs, media professionals will continue using Macs. So yeah, it might appear Linux usage is growing, but I think the more likely story is it's relatively stable and overall desktop usage is shrinking.
Yeah, are there any big box retailers selling machines with Linux installed as an option? Maybe the numbers are small enough for hobbyists to make a dent, but until you see Linux machines in best buy, etc., this is probably due more to people dumping their personal windows machine in favor of a using their work laptop or iPad almost exclusively.
I'm not sure but going on 3 years now after having mostly only used it full time at a previous job where everyone's workstation was a Linux one.
It helps that I can now do all of my gaming on Linux, so I'm not touching Windows again, outside of an employer paying for my work devices to use it on.
>Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here.
That's very anecdotal of you. Proves absolutely nothing.
Since we're posting anecdotes here, everyone I know has at least one computer that is not "their work computer" (which is confusing, is it employer-owned, or just personally owned for their own purposes?).
Many people do not like typing on tablet or phone keyboards, real keyboards are much nicer. Bigger screens are also much nicer than tiny phone screens and most tablet screens.
I suspect your anecdotal circle is probably very young and may just not be able to afford a real computer, or have never used one, so they are fine with their tiny devices, not knowing the benefits of having a more traditional laptop or desktop computer.
This is largely people who were previously Windows customers but who chose to go another way. Microsoft is doing a lot of shenanigans with their monopoly power, and anti-trust is largely toothless.
I know quite a lot of professionals, who for them the last straw was purchasing the professional edition, and then finding out later after an update that their company lock screens now have ad's posted; and worse, those ads frequently have malware that cause even more headaches for them in a unmanageable way.
The bean counters at MS pushed their biggest supporters over the knifes edge, and alot more people are getting serious about alternatives to MS now.
Tablets and phones have replaced PCs for casual use and content consumption. If you want to make anything beyond posts and videos you usually need a PC.
Mobile OSes are strictly designed for consumption and are too restricted for most other use cases. It’s an OS limit not a hardware issue.
People do all kinds of crazy stuff with steam decks. I don't own one, but at least I give to steam that they created a general computing device that people can use however they please instead of yet another walled garden console. It would not surprise me if people actually also use them to browse the web.
I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. Due to licensing costs and our certifications, we can't sell anything with Windows. My coworkers install Ubuntu, but I install Linux Mint. We don't have any clue if people keep using Linux or install Windows, but it's cool to think we're helping to move this needle.
I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines? A new machine for an enterprise or gamer will probably retain windows because it's needed but people not using their computers for more than surfing will be happy enough.
On that side-note I would also not be surprised if people are leaving "computers" altogether in favor of phones, it's a capable enough computer today for most lay-people, my ex and her parents don't have computers anymore and my daughter hardly uses her either.
Those that actually need computers such as developers are more prone to use Linux anyhow (especially when Microsoft is pushing annoying features such as forced reboots for those dropping their computers anyhow onto powerusers).
Anecdotal evidence, but Steams' Proton compatibility layer that lets you run Windows-only games on Linux works really really well. I haven't had to log into years and years by now.
I've been gaming on Linux for about a decade now full time, and somewhat before that too. I don't have a single Windows machine any more. My laptops are running Arch, my wife's personal Laptop runs Mint, her work machine is Windows because it has to, my work machine is Ubuntu, and my 5yo plays Minecraft on an Arch + Gnome laptop.
7-8 years ago it was pretty frustrating to spend £4k+ on a gaming rig to be unable to play a bunch of titles but I will not use Windows, I just accepted it.
Fast forward to today, and I'm playing Helldivers 2, with its anti-cheat and everything online with my nephew who's on Windows and getting far, far better performance (granted my PC is also more powerful). I can play the modern DOOM games with better performance than if I was running Windows on the same hardware.
My point is, Linux gaming is only getting better, I now also own a ROG Ally which I "flashed" (installed the same way you would any other Linux distro) with Bazzite straight out of the box without even booting Windows and I can play the single-player games I like to while travelling, or can have a quick game of Helldivers with my nephew if I'm not near my PC but have a stable connection. When I need/want to I can plug it into a monitor/kb/mouse with a single cable and have a full desktop with HDR, VRR etc.
I'm mostly a Mac user but I tested Windows 11 versus Bazzite in VMs in my Unraid server, and the Windows 11 install was a nightmare to then be left with a nightmare UI and a bundle of GPU driver issues, meanwhile Bazzite took two clicks and worked.
Obviously there are very cutting edge drivers you can't get on Linux, and Nvidia support is questionable, and some anti-cheat doesn't work, etc, but if you mostly play games released in [current year - a few] on hardware released [current year - a few] it's really a much more enjoyable experience.
I've never really used old hardware, and generally I've not had too many issues using the latest hardware with Linux. I don't tend to buy PC hardware on release day either, so within a few weeks/months of release when I'm buying, drivers are usually available. I've been through a half dozen generations of Intel laptop for work usually with Nvidia GPUs but my current one is the first with an Intel Arc GPU, for which there are no Ubuntu 24.04 drivers as far as I'm aware, and I'm not entirely sure whether it is/can run the dedicated GPU right now or if I'm using the iGPU; but my work doesn't require GPU accel beyond my desktop and my IDE and terminal (Alacritty).
The biggest issue I find is external devices that need firmware flashing require some crap piece of Windows software from the manufacturer in order to flash, so I'll spin up a Windows VM and USB passthrough to do the update then blow it away again.
I hate W11 to the point that I am still running W10 (IoT) on my machines (I also run Solus and Mint). That said, I have never experienced what you say in the first paragraph.
Windows has at least three screens in the install that are upsells on other Microsoft products, plus a screen where you have to disable multiple analytics trackers. The GPU driver issue might have been a VM issue but to get even basic support I needed to install the AMD drivers, and ended up in some endless loop of the installer telling me it could install drivers for my GPU, installing them, then saying it wasn't supported. I figured the issue out eventually, after watching the AMD installer (with ads!) run for the Nth time, but like I said I'm not trying anything cutting edge, so drivers baked into the OS that I don't have to think about are much nicer.
The case that this is true is only if you don't have an Nvidia GPU or don't play D3D12 games.
I tried it, discovered that Nvidia has a known regression that causes anywhere up to 25% lower performance compared to Windows in GPU limited games in D3D12, and immediately went back to Windows.
I'll never understand why people keep championing Linux for gaming when it has such a severe regression on the most common gaming GPU vendor. Steam says 75%. An Nvidia employee even stated that the fix is not trivial so they're not committing to a timeline for a fix. This is a year+ old issue. They're never fixing it because it doesn't affect CUDA.
Add it to the list of the death by a thousand cuts of Nvidia as a gaming powerhouse. I would have said that they would have fixed it eventually to be chosen by Valve for a Steam Deck, but they’re gorged on AI money at this point. I don’t think they’re the future of gaming GPUs at all. They’re very slowly abandoning the market through those cuts.
I hear this all around and I am myself running GNU/Linux almost all the time, but running games on Steam on my default OS, which is a Debian with KDE currently, that is more miss than hit. I even know someone who has almost the same hardware, also runs a GNU/Linux system and for them almost all games work using Proton. For me however they don't. I already tried proprietary graphics card drivers instead of the ones that come with the OS for amdgpu, HWE kernel, another distro, using Steam installer downloaded from website ... nothing seems to fix the issue. When I click on the big green "Play" button in Steam, for many times it loads for a moment, and the button turns into a blue "stop" button, but then just turns back into a green "play" button, never starting the game. Mind, some games work, like Stardew Valley for example. But I think those are mostly already made to work cross platform.
I have no idea what I can still try, and it annoys me, that for most games I still have to reboot into Windows to play them. I seem to have had more luck following guides for using WINE for specific games in the past, when I made games like StarCraft 2 work better than on Windows, than I have had with Steam and Proton so far.
So anecdote. It is not smooth sailing for everyone yet, unfortunately, and I don't know what the issue is.
Debian is just not going to have access to as much up to date software as it probably needs, even with testing back ports, to run well. I say this as a very long time Debian user that is really struggling in this day and age to find a place for Debian among my devices at this point.
Out of curiosity, what distribution have you been using lately instead of Debian?
Anecdotally, I've been using Fedora Workstation for a few years already, and my Steam + Proton Experimental experience has been fantastic with an AMD GPU using the drivers that come with the kernel.
Although I must admit, I miss having a Debian-based distribution sometimes, because in some situations I can't find rpm packages for more specific things I'm trying to do in my system. The problem is I just don't know any other distribution that's not Debian Testing that could work like Fedora Workstation but with .deb packages.
I add flathub.org and remove the fedora flatpak repo. The few other things I need are in copr/terra, but honestly they are very rare. I think I have maybe 1 piece of software per thing that doesn't release a native .rpm (ghostty is one)
Which steam do you use? I have heard that some people have issues with the Snap, Flatpack or Native versions. Also for proton there are different "versions" you can try, experimental or 9 is usually what I run.
$ dpkg --list | grep -i steam
ii steam-devices 1:1.0.0.75+ds-6 all Device support for Steam-related hardware
ii steam-installer 1:1.0.0.75+ds-6 amd64 Valve's Steam digital software delivery system
ii steam-libs:amd64 1:1.0.0.75+ds-6 amd64 Metapackage for Steam dependencies
ii steam-libs:i386 1:1.0.0.75+ds-6 i386 Metapackage for Steam dependencies
ii steam-libs-i386:i386 1:1.0.0.75+ds-6 i386 Metapackage for 32-bit Steam dependencies
I am not using Snap, or Flatpack. I either used apt or an installer from their website. I don't quite remember.
When a game doesn't work and the described symptoms happen, I usually try a few different Proton versions via the game's settings, but this has not helped me make a game run. If anything for some games it has reprocessed shaders or similar things that Steam games do before launching, maybe. But the result stays the same. Game is not starting, button changing back to "play" button.
I’ve been wanting to do this for years on an old (and severely underpowered) MacBook Pro which I use with Windows exclusively for Games.
Do you have any recommendation for an extremely lightweight Linus distro which installs and runs Steam fine? It would be used exclusively for that, so it shouldn’t run a ton of background stuff.
Basically, what I care is that as I’m running the game, the system is consuming as few resources as possible. It’s an outdated machine, so every bit matters.
I'm a big fan of Linux. My small business and personal life run on it. You can download XFCE/Ubuntu spin at https://xubuntu.org/download/. If you develop on your Apple system, it will be pretty similar except
- App Installation via repositories is more common than single program installs. No DMG files. There is a similar concept to DMG with "snap" installs. Steam should probably be installed via a snap. You trust the producer (Valve). But most software and security should come through repos (in CLI, sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade)
- Home directory is /home/<username>
Much of the rest is similar -- Apple's BSD and Linux share a common Unix design progenitor.
Linux is way open to rewipe, just pay attention that you don't lose files. My first day on Linux in the mid 2000s, I somehow overwrite the file system allocation table with the content of an MP3. It was recoverable!
For me Proton works sometimes, but I've had much more success with the third party Glorious Eggroll versions that include the Microsoft Codecs used by many games for in-game video.
> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?
I know that a large portion of our business is to other resellers and businesses. FWIW, long before I started working here, I replaced XP with Xubuntu on my parent's computer about 15 years ago. I told them that "it works like Windows[0]", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer and scanner worked great! I expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
[0] If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that most people don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. They care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs.
One thing I wonder about with people moving to linux is whether "it works like windows" can act as a safe and comfortable landing point, but then how many people explore and prefer the options that they then have access to.
One aspect MS has been criticized for over the past few versions of windows is that they are opinionated about how the base windows UI operates and looks for a very large number of users. One of the things I find interesting on the subreddits for some distros is a lot of posts is showing off how they've customized things, so you can nudge people towards the theming support or panel components you can swap out, or that you can have drastically different DEs with different operation models yet handle the same applications.
> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?
I got my hands on a Dell that was retired out of an office somewhere for $30+shipping. Add the cost of a couple HDDs, time spent removing a disc drive and installing Linux, I got myself a cheap backup server on my LAN.
They're great for machines you don't want to drop a lot on for basic utilities.
Would just like to add it’s not needed so much now. I’m a pretty avid gamer and I’ve been using Bazzite as my OS now for months without issue.
Proton has completely changed the game (pun not intended). All that’s really missing now is the big studios who won’t release their anticheat for Linux.
I've sold linux mint laptops on ebay and I always reach out after sale basically saying "just to be clear, this isn't running windows, it's linux. I'll be happy to cancel if this isn't what you expected"
and 100% of the time the person was like "yes! Linux is what I wanted"
Actually, as a long time Linux Desktop user, i have at least 4, refurbished bought Notebooks in my place yet. Beside the 4, another 3 new new bought Notebooks.
The reason why I buy refurbished is, that my use-cases don't need the newest hardware and for a long time, older hardware was more compatible with Linux and BSD for me. Also, you get for a small price, high quality hardware.
If you now ask yourself, why that many notebooks? Notebooks are like handbags. They have to match the occasion.
Agreed! Old laptops are more than powerful enough for Linux, and I like having purpose-oriented computers. The hobby programming computer doesn’t have games on it and is at any rate too weak to run them. The music laptop has every flac I ever ripped from a CD, and precious little disk space for anything else. And so on.
I am the same. I decided a few years ago that I really really like the thinkpad t450, and have gradually bought 5 of them online for a total cost of about 300 USD. I may never need to buy a laptop ever again.
Yes, over the past 15 years I bought at least a dozen used thinkpads of the X series (x201, x220, x230 and x1). Most of them are now with other family members and friends (they are now also Linux Desktop user). And I still use 3 of them. One daily, the other weekly, and the 3rd for conferences. Beside that, I am also a fan of the T and yet of the P series. And I have a small collection of thinkpads with the big blue logo from the A and R series, but that's mostly just for fun.
I worked selling refurb computers and this wasn't the case from Windows 95 - XP. The rise of TPMs and EFI is after that time so it's possible some newer system provides a way of tying licenses to computers, but it's not BIOS.
It’s not burned into the BIOS, instead Microsoft maintains a database mapping licenses to hardware identifiers. But transferable licenses still exist, and enterprise volume licenses are yet a different beast, so it all depends on what Windows license the PC was originally sold with, if any.
>It’s not burned into the BIOS, instead Microsoft maintains a database mapping licenses to hardware identifiers.
Wrong. IT IS 100% stored in the UEFI firmware, specifically ACPI tables, MSDM field. Only if that exists, it is then verified on-line for activation to make sure the license is genuine and matches the device ID you're referring to for witch the license was sold(typically for OEM) or if it's portable.[1]
On linux you should be retrieve the license via something like:
It’s in the ACPI tables, in ACPI Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM), not the BIOS. An home user might be able to active it, but the repair shop probably can’t legally.
If it's tied to the hardware, there is no valid reason why the repair shop wouldn't be able to activate it -- a repair shop will use the same public license servers as consumers will.
Btw ACPI is a specification, not a separate piece of hardware. ACPI tables are stored in BIOS nvram, there is no other place for it to go.
The biggest issue right now is really the upcoming EOL of Windows 10. Most of these machines will be old enough (pre Intel 8th gen or Zen 2) that they won't be officially supported by Windows 11.
On most machines we sell that's probably the case. I don't know of anything that stops me from linking people to the official Windows installation media on Microsoft's site, so I do that even on the listing.
In case of OEM, the license is never directly owned by the owner of the machine; the license is tied to the hardware, and you're selling it on with its license key attached. If you activate Windows using a bought license, that license does not get copied into the hardware.
Thanks! I've been going through my to-do stack, and there was quite a few there. They've been selling fast! I've got a stack of Toughbooks to go through, too... someday.
You can either configure unattended updates (e.g. cron-apt or unattended-upgrade), or you can give system administration privileges to other users so they can accept pending updates. I don't think the latter is granular enough to only allow package upgrades, it also allows installing/removing packages.
The statscounter data is not reliable, and it is just embarrassing how often these posts make it to the HN frontpage.
You even have a demonstration in this very article, with the surge of classic Mac OS to 7% for several months. The data is obviously nonsense, and when it has errors nobody at the company cares about them. But when they have persistent "data reporting issues", why are we supposed to believe any of these numbers?
Cloudflare has also OS stats available and I'd imagine they are far more reliable. Some silver lining of them having such wide dragnet on the web. They report 4.4% Linux desktop marketshare in the US. Tbh I believe the summer vacation season probably influences the numbers here, but there is some real growth too.
1. Radar is also reporting a Linux increase over the past month: 3.3% to 4.4%.
2. Both StatsCounter and Radar break out Linux and ChromeOS; if you combine them, StatsCounter hits 7.7%; Radar hits 6.3%.
3. That being said: Both StatsCounter and Radar experienced an anomalous drop in ChromeOS clients & rise in Linux clients over the past month. StatsCounter took ChromeOS from ~4.4% to 2.7%. Radar took it 2.6% -> 1.9%.
This kind of implies that something changed with a major ChromeOS device out that; some model/version maybe changed its UA and started reporting itself as a Linux device instead.
ChromeOS drop is pretty easily explained by it being predominantly used in education and schools being closed for summer. And that drop muddies all other numbers, because of course the percentages of others go up when one goes down. In summary, I'd wait until November (or at least October) before making any broad conclusions.
Yeah, schools being out explains the major drop in ChromeOS devices; check out Radar's 12 month view and how ChromeOS data looked August/September 2024.
But if it significantly explained the rise in other percentages, we'd see all the other shares go up. However, Windows and MacOS are flat; 64% and 30%, respectively, last and this month.
Only Linux went up; so its likely there's some genuine linux desktop adoption going on. But the rise in Linux marketshare is pretty steep; two months ago Radar measured it at 2.6%, now its 4.4%.
It could be legit. There's been a significant uptick in tech Youtubers pushing linux content (LTT and Jayz have both done recent videos on it), including the Lenovo Legion Linux vs Windows perf comparisons which found Linux to be faster, Lex Fridman just interviewed DHH and they spoke at length about linux setups (~1M viewers on that likely), and the pushback against Apple in the tech circles is reaching a fever pitch.
I find this compelling, alongside the fact ChromeBooks are well placed in retail shops and usually the cheapest things you can buy. They are also ubiquitous in elementary schools. This is more about ChromeBooks than linux.
Add the fact that all my kids hate their school chromebooks.... maybe this isn't such great news for Linux afterall.
Mentioned this in another comment [0], but analytics.usa.gov has the % of visitors on Linux operating systems at 5.7% in 2025, up from 4.5% in 2024. Of course "visitors to U.S. government websites" is not fully representative of all U.S. computer users, but it's worth noting.
Additionally, with the number of people who use ad blockers on Linux and given that statcounter mostly uses 3rd party JS tags, I highly doubt these numbers are correct.
There's a discussion in a peer thread about how people never notice its Linux and keep using their refurbished machines as-is. This too, is surprising to me, as my own experience as well as the ones I've heard in person from IT folks and IT-related forums online, people immediately notice that the UI looks different and panic as to how to achieve their current tasks. I'm skeptical of that entire thread too.
In general, I just wonder how much of any popular forum is just people LARPing. I do wish that it didn't occur here, though it's undoubtedly difficult to moderate.
> people immediately notice that the UI looks different and immediately panic as to how to achieve their current tasks
This was probably a bigger problem 10 years ago than it is now. Plenty of people never do anything at all with their computer besides opening a browser. No matter what OS you use, "click the Chrome logo" still applies.
I've watched my grandparents use a computer. I guarantee I could swap out Windows for KDE or Cinnamon and, as long as I make the wallpaper the same and I put the Chrome icon in the same place, they wouldn't notice anything had changed. I'm not actually going to do that, because then I become the only person in the family who can tame their computer if it starts acting out, but still.
Also, Microsoft's own UI isn't a steady target. Windows 11 is, dare I say it, more akin to Plasma 6 than it is to Windows 7.
Unless they're using JS for something specific, getting the user to load anything at all would give them the OS from the useragent string in almost all cases. I'd believe their URLs being included in default filter lists though.
Pretty sure OS X and macOS should be combined, not doing that feels like amateur hour, very puzzling. But even with that in mind, you see wild ups and downs as large as 3.5% a month from 10/24 to 11/24 to 12/24 to 01/25 and there’s no way in hell actual deployments are fluctuating like that. Error bars like that make a number of 5% pretty meaningless, however feel-good it is.
Also, for people unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem: the OS X => macOS rebranding happened back in 2016, IIRC the Safari user agent never ever included macOS (Safari on M4 Macs running latest macOS 15.5 reports itself as “Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7” in its UA), so absolutely no idea where they’re getting this new “macOS” category. Maybe they publish technical details of their methodology somewhere? I can’t bother to check.
Indeed, OS X goes down, and obviously none of us actually believe that. But not only does Statcounter report that clearly faulty number, but they have yet to fix the problem.
This happens all the time. When their numbers are clearly wrong, they don't care about the numbers enough to fix even the glaring problems, their sample is unsound, and their methodology is unpublished, why exactly are we supposed to give any of their numbers any credence?
What you've written is the first I've heard of a recent change to the Safari on OS X user-agent string, and I see no indication of it in my access logs. What's it supposed to be now? It seems a bit unlikely, and given Safari never ran on classic Mac OS, it seems like a company that's supposed to specialize in analytics should be able to handle it...
I don't understand why Statcounter reports them separately though. They're just two different versions of the same OS, and those are grouped for other OSes in this chart. Makes no sense.
It's "macOS" [1] if you really want to be pedantic. However, it's still "Intel Mac OS X" in Safari UA even on M1 MacBook, so why Statcounter data includes both OS X and macOS remains a mystery.
There is a port of Mbed TLS to Classic MacOS[1] which has TLS 1.2 enabled but per the README.md probably not the right cihper suites (it only has AES-CBC ciphers enabled by default) to connect to servers configured per the widely-used Mozilla "intermediate" recommendations[2] (which require AES-GCM or ChaCha20 ciphers).
I wonder what a more reliable measure would be. Maybe something like the "Crane Index" where we count the number of new software packages for Linux. Particularly, it makes sense to focus on paid software, because there's actually some bar to entry there (setting up an LLC, accepting payments, etc.) I haven't actually looked into this, but I think the initial data for this figure is zero, and we're projected to reach zero by next year.
You can also look at the Steam survey as another data point. Linux use among English speakers is just above 5%, but the data is biased toward power users/ gamers.
For another anecdata point, https://analytics.usa.gov tracks user device demographics to all visitors of U.S. government websites. Which of course might skew in ways different than the general U.S. population. But checking out the numbers right now for Linux users:
Last 30 days: 6%
2025 so far: 5.7%
2024: 4.5%
edit: analytics.usa.gov includes iOS and Android in its operating systems breakdown — e.g. Windows has a 32% share vs OP's 63%. Assuming most of Linux users are on desktop, it could be the case that Linux share in desktop users is a bit higher than 6%
I am in this category, but I'm growing increasingly frustrated with the state of the market for OS's:
I've used macOS for work for many years and Arch-based derivatives for personal desktop. The challenge with that has always been gaming: Gaming on Linux _mostly_ works, but third-party launchers (e.g., Battle.net, Origin, etc.) HATE it. I also don't love the Proton shuffle (i.e., "Which version of Proton do I need to use to get this to work?"), but it's tolerable for me. I'll tell you for whom it _isn't_ tolerable: my wife (who mostly uses a different system running Windows 10, but sometimes wants to use the more powerful gaming PC running Linux). And thus the only remaining choice for the home system has been Linux + Windows (in some capacity).
Now, I've not used Windows full-time since 7, but I recently installed Windows 11 (via QEMU using LookingGlass) and it is simply TERRIBLE. There are full-blown ads in the Start Menu, the built-in search ignores your default browser/search engine settings, and (critically) __you can no longer put the Start Menu bar at the top of the screen__ (It's less common, but I've done this my entire life).
I think it comes down to the following wishes:
A. I wish Windows 8/10/11 didn't suck so much.
B. I wish Linux was widely-supported by ALL game platforms.
The ever increasing number of GPUs of the world are making the cloud PC gaming services ridiculously cheap. I only pay $12 USD/month (boosteroid, gaming only).
If I bought a gaming PC with similar specs, it would take over 7 years to pay it off (no use for a PC besides gaming). That would be 7 years of fixed hardware, where the cloud hardware specs keep improving with time, and I can pause the subscription whenever I want.
You definitely pay with some extra input latency, but not enough to impact my casual play. Definitely worth trying, if you have nice internet.
You can easily buy a gaming PC for less than $1000 that provides a better experience than cloud gaming. You also need to remember that these companies are trying to create a market for their product and right now they're happy to sell their services really cheap. Once its adopted it will be raised.
I am still using Windows 10. I use Flow Launcher ( https://www.flowlauncher.com/ ) and have it bound to ctrl-alt-shift-g, but then use an AutoHotkey binding to rebind it to Caps lock. Point being I almost never use the Start Menu, I just use Flow Launcher. And Flow Launcher has half the latency to display with no ads. When I'm forced to update to Windows 11 I may be forced to investigate alternate taskbars.
Fundamentally the thing that keeps me on Windows is battery life. I need to be able to trust that my laptop won't lose more than 20% of its charge in a week when not in use and Linux just can't reliably do that.
A related thing is stuff like play/pause/mute not working when the screen is locked.
I have a script that puts my laptop from suspend to hibernate automatically within some sane amount of time (hours), and so either I pickup my laptop within hours, or it’s hibernated and reliably not wasting my battery away while sleeping.
Windows 11 only sucks if you get the Home version. If you get the Pro version you can disable all the annoyances. New things pop up here and there with each update every few years (recently asking to connect my phone so I can see notifications), but those can be disabled easily.
It does suck resources so using it on Laptops is not ideal, but for desktop its by far the best, mostly because of WSL2 integration, which is mature enough to not only run graphical linux apps, but also supports CUDA.
For Laptops, honestly, Linux Mint with I3wm is the way to go. Once you get used to I3, its hard to go back standard display managers with icons and menus.
I agree with this. Couple years ago I splurged on a nice Thinkpad X1 carbon, and decided to give windows a try after abstaining for many years. I really liked the WSL but overall it was a resource hog. It would blast the fan for seemingly no reason, the task manager would slow down, the laptop would overheat. And even playing basic games like freecell would randomly fail to launch, probably because it couldn't reach the ad server.
What really surprised me was how hard it is to switch back to Linux. After about a year using windows there was a ton of friction to get my mindset back in Linux. But I made the switch and I will never use windows willingly again.
1. The statistics only show Desktop usage relative to each other. But I could totally imagine that macOS "loses" users to iPadOS. Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general (I see more and more people who don't actually have a personal computer anymore).
2. Valve (and others, surely) is doing an incredible job with video games on Linux. 20 years ago, I needed a dual boot just to play games. I dropped Windows when I stopped playing, and I started playing again thanks to the Steam Deck. I am convinced that many people today "need" an OS on which they can play video games, except that today they have a choice (thanks to Valve and others).
3. Privacy. I think it's becoming a lot more important outside the US (it's actually now a national security concern there), but I'm convinced that people are slowly learning about that. TooBigTech pushing to train their AIs with everything the users do surely has an impact on that.
> Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general
But this is desktop only. If someone stop using windows completely, it won't show a decrease in windows usage. This will basically only show when people switch from desktop OS.
You sure about that math? If there are 2 linux users and 8 windows users, then that's 20% linux, 80% windows. If one windows user quits using computers, then that's 2 linux users (out of 9 total) and 7 windows users (out of 9 total), or 22% linux and 77% windows users.
I had a Teams meeting for an outside of work topic this morning. Since all my personal machines are Linux based I was kinda happy I had my work laptop available with Windows and Teams installed.
Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...
After rebooting twice and only five minutes before the meeting started I reverted to my Linux desktop, opened the email with the link to the Teams meeting and was a minute early using the web version of Teams.
Phew, saved by Linux.
Kudos to Microsoft for making Teams web version operating system and browser agnostic. But fuck what they've done with Windows updates. Numerous coworkers also saying their computers decided to reboot of their own volition the last couple of days in order to install updates.
Maybe it's a worthwhile trade off for security, but I'm glad I had an alternative option this morning.
I'm the five-odd years since switching to Linux exclusive at home, my decision is only ever reconfirmed as correct.
(I'm a reformed gamer from a long while ago, but the very few games I do play I have gotten to work on Linux).
Microsoft used to have a Teams for Linux application. It was identical to the Windows application because it's just an Electron app, but shockingly it was buggy on Linux (???) I don't even know how... I mean, Microsoft chose a cross-platform framework. They must've written some stupid ass code that isn't portable, at which point why not use one of the dozen Microsoft GUI frameworks available?
This is a very common workflow for me, except I was using Teams on a Mac. And thanks to some update there are now two non-working versions of Teams installed ("Teams" and "Teams new" or some equally tacky naming). Luckily I have a Linux laptop next to it that can run it in-browser.
I would love to know what Microsoft thinks the purpose of the standalone app is, when it is both slower and less reliable.
> Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...
I have that exact workflow with any computer I do not use on a regular basis. If I use the thing every day it is ok. But if I let something sit for like 6 months it is 'patch city'. I usually play that game on my game consoles because i do not use it much. My daily used computers 10-15 seconds tops until usable desktop.
After installing Arch / Gnome on my laptop last week, I can see why. Everything works completely fine and feels 3X faster than Windows 11. I have Linux on my desktop machine but always hesitated for laptops due to past bad experiences with power management (i.e. something always eventually went wrong when closing the lid). So far, all of that is working perfectly.
Windows 11 is exceptionally slow. I installed it on a ThinkPad Carbon X1, it was quite unusable. Unresponsive after starting up, copilot and O365 trying to run stuff and i had to wait for them to comolete. I was very surprised that they think this is acceptable. I spent about an hour going through processes and installed programs list, and uninstalling many things. At that point it was more tolerable.
There are still issues. Just going with your example, see the threads in the Framework forum around lid close issues (almost all from Linux users): https://community.frame.work/search?q=lid%20close
Reports about high battery drain, suspend issues and similar exist as well.
I'm running Fedora on a Framework laptop, but with the awareness that it can require some tinkering.
Current battery life is better than it was on Windows. I know Windows is very good from this standpoint but things always degrade over time. That is my expectation with arch as well - good now but let's see how it is 6 months from now. That is always the real test. Regardless, my laptop is too small to run Windows + WSL so will probably stick with just running Linux.
Arch Linux is an eternal OS, it can migrate through different hardware and there are people who never reinstall it (you don’t need to) for, say, a decade. Mine is half a decade at least, and went through three laptops. The last one was (Intel) MacBook Pro dying on me (the keys), and I just rsynced my system onto another MacBook (booted with Arch install) via ssh. Took me an hour or two in the background. I left my home and returned to a working laptop that needed a few tiny changes in configs here and there.
I have to ask - what OS do AI-training web scrapers tend to report? (A mixture? One with > 5% linux market share? Sorry, being a sceptic, otherwise I think this is fantastic news if accurately measured).
Good question. Most of these headlines about Linux market share ("mind share"?) are completely uninformative about how widespread the use of Linux is in reality.
12 years ago or so, a similar headline appeared, then someone explained that the Chinese government had recently cracked down on Windows pirating (to appease the Americans) with the result that some PC vendors had stopped including (pirated copies of) Windows with the computers they sell (shipping some Linux distro instead of course) but since pirated Windows install media was still widely available, there quickly grew a cultural practice in which the consumer installs Windows (or gets his more technically-inclined cousin to do it for him) as soon as he gets his new PC home. But the headline reported on a statistic that did not catch this cultural practice because it counted only the OSes on computers when they were sold (i.e., "OS shipments").
I tend to think that they mostly should be using their own user agent, and if not be desguised as the most common ones to avoid being detected too easily. Web scaping probably has been mostly running under Linux before the age of AI anyway. I'm not in the field, so if anyone more trustworthy info on that...
Yes they run Linux, but they either have their own user agent (not included in the stats) or are spoofing a real world web browser... In which case they might be spoofing Chrome on Windows even if they run on Linux.
Either way I don't think the 5% are impacted by scraping bots.
Any scraper out there that doesn't want to identify itself as such is very likely to spoof the most commonly used OS + browser combo (Chrome + Windows), regardless of what it's actually running on.
Yeah. A critical mass is needed and we seem to be there, but keeping it a system for "power users and up" (and for total laypeople but managed by others) is also desirable.
Based on the history of the tech industry, Linux adoption should be kept at this level and advanced no further. This is already the sweet spot for the "year of the Linux desktop," which should be celebrated by experts, technical users, and the sufficiently motivated.
Once the unwashed masses start coming in, the software and its interaction patterns pander to the lowest common denominator and the quality of the medium degrades.
I understand your point, and I genuinely hate when people try to put pressure on distros to essentially look more like Windows.
On the other hand, I think it's great when companies or government try to move to Linux (if you're not a US company or the US government, it makes total sense to try not to depend on US software so much).
But I want to believe that there is space for everybody. I wouldn't use Mint myself, but I convinced a couple friends to use it and it works really well! EU governments moving to european distros like Suse and the likes is great. And I will stay closer to "more advanced" distros like Gentoo or Alpine.
The beauty of Linux is that there is not one Linux; it's about freedom of choice. Because many people move from Windows to Mint doesn't have to mean that it's hurting Gentoo, I think? Hopefully.
How exactly is Linux becoming popular going to make my EXWM setup suck? To be fair, if it does get a large market share, some company is probably going to take MS's role and make a distro that sucks but many people use. But that shouldn't be an issue to existing users unless they take over something like a major DE and you insist on using that for some reason. For IT people, having the possibility of running a decent shell and sshd in most desktops would be terrific.
In some ways we are already seeing this. Have you ever opened a GitHub repository and the only installation/build instructions are for the AUR. I seem to run into this pretty frequently while looking at small projects.
What bothers me is when projects have a hard dependency on something like systemd or even Ubuntu, because most of the time it is not necessary and it means I can't use it.
But other than that, as long as I can compile the project from source (and if it's done properly I don't need instructions for that), I'm fine.
I would assume that a repo providing instructions for the AUR is already better than one assuming that "Linux == Ubuntu", because the developer knows at least one distro that is not Ubuntu :-).
not necessarily. There's room to have the mass market make breakthroughs in laymen software for linux if there's sufficient demand.
And having the mass market lowest common denominator doesnt remove the good stuff - they still exist and you could still choose to use them. This is esp. true for linux, where as you'd have fewer choice/customizability for windows as it's close sourced.
Linux based distributions solve this by not being a monoculture, no?
Pandering to the masses would be in the form of specific desktop environment, and maybe specific distribution integrating it well with all kinds of desktop software.
Nothing would change for the existing users of obscure software, hackishly stitched together.
Not at all. All Linux distributions essentially run the same software with different packages and configuration files. There are a few either/or choices they make, but it’s mostly overlap with very little disro specific software.
If Linux software starts widely adapting more dark patterns it will probably impact users across all distributions.
I share that concern, but again: if more people move to Linux, maybe (?) more people will become advanced Linux user and maybe (?) it will bring more activity into advanced distros.
Not that I believe it will necessarily be good, but I'm not sure it will necessarily be bad. Could go both ways, IMO.
I think it's more "they will give less control in order to please the peasants, and as a result I will lose control".
And I agree with that concern, though my hope is that we can make it easier for the peasants without sacrificing control for the nerds (trying to find a word that would work with "peasant" in this context :D).
I disagree with the concern, because obviously making Free Software easier for non-technically inclined people to use does not make the software harder for technically inclined people to use. This is strictly an issue for proprietary software.
> This is strictly an issue for proprietary software.
it really isn't, as Google Chrome and Chromium shows there's no clear dividing line in the real world. Linux isn't developed by Bob the free software enthusiast, take a look at the code contributions to the kernel.
Overall I'm also in favour of driving linux adoption because it's still a better world but the idea that this has no spill over effect on anyone else is wrong. It's a fiction to think that Linux, just like a browser is anything but a collective project with most development driven by very few organizations who also have commercial or proprietary interests.
there's not any genuine forks. They're all dependent on Google, see Vivaldi last year announcing they'll drop manifest v2 support. They're all pretty much cosmetic reskins. Whoever puts up the money for development makes the choices, regardless what license you slap on it.
And if there was a drastic mainstream adoption of linux, whatever implications that has for development focus, it would affect everyone because nobody is going to run a sincere kernel fork.
My point being that it's okay for some projects to sacrifice control, as long as others don't. I can't tell Ubuntu how they should make their distro; what I can do is choose Gentoo (or anything in between).
I know you are making it seem like this is a very cringe position, but its in fact a very valid one.
The problem in most any technology sector is that its impossible for one person in reasonable amount of time to put together systems for use. Maybe in the future when LLMs are advanced enough to where I can have it code a full OS for me to my liking this will change, but right now, I have to depend on other people doing work.
Linux happens to be in a sweet spot where the collaborative development is guided by technical decisions instead of market forces, but Linux is just an OS. It needs open hardware to run. It just so happens that laptop manfuacturers who target Windows just don't see Linux as a big enough threat to start locking things down.
But historically, along came Apple, made the iPhone, realized most people want jewelry more than functionality, realized they could monetize this, and now their Macbooks are locked down to MacOS pretty hardcore.
If Linux went the same route, you could very well see a distinct lack of hardware being made that can run open source Linux. Which then limits you to smaller manufacturers that don't have capital or bandwidth to compete with bigger ones.
It feels similar to people complaining about their favorite tabletop game becoming popular with normies and then normies come and don't treat the game with the reverence the og fans believe it should.
Same response: just do your own thing then and ignore the normies, it's not a big deal.
The problem when the masses come in is then we lose the whimsy. They will be offended by commands like "kill" and "fsck" and there will be stupid campaigns to change things.
It happened with git a few years ago, when people were up in arms over its use of the word "master". Stupid, pointless changes will be made to appease these people.
kinda like when people write to eachother, just open up your whatsapp, and type in a magic spell to let your friends know they are invited to dinner tonight..
You're probably talking about enshittification [0], which typically affects centralized for-profit entities, not community-based free software projects.
Windows 11 not working on otherwise perfectly good PCs I imagine is at least a small part of it. I've got an 8-core Ryzen system I think from 2016 that's still very powerful and more than good enough for my needs, but Microsoft is insisting I "throw it away and buy a new one", in this economy no less!
I also think a number of influencers like PewDiePie moving to Linux has to have moved the needle at least a little as well.
For me it was Windows 11 not supporting hardware. I moved to Fedora in the beginning of this year for work (while using it at home for quite a while).
After seeing SharePoint.exe using 1GB and 100% of the CPU today for over 12 hours I’m seriously considering removing my VM (that I only boot for MS Office). Edge even greeted me with a message that I have access to Copilot Vision that can now see everything I browse when I right clicked the process and clicked on search!
Earlier reporting on Windows MAU noted "400 million Windows PCs vanished in 3 years" (https://www.zdnet.com/article/400-million-windows-pcs-vanish... ). As Windows 11 wrecks havoc on older PCs, many may just sit unused or get discarded, thereby increasing the relative share of the surviving PCs (including Linux PCs).
Microsoft <3 Linux so much, they ruined Windows so people would switch to Linux. Thank you Microsoft!
Seriously though, I switched to Linux late last year and haven't looked back. It has everything I need for a computer and a lot of the "problems" people say is holding them back from switching full-time are greatly exaggerated. Like if you're not willing to make some small compromises so you can have a computer that respects you as a human and not a metric then I don't know what to tell you.
This has been my take. They even made Windows 11 look like a linux desktop so they can do a switcheroo later on.
Microsoft could kill off Windows as a desktop operating system and it wouldn't dent their financials in a major way. You'll know they're truly serious, though, when they start making contributions to Wine and also makes bash the default command line interpreter in windows.
A year ago I decided to upgrade my 10 year old motherboard and get something faster. I was hoping my existing Windows 7 SSD would boot up, but alas it would get to the coalescing window display and crash. I never figured out why.
My choices were to spend $200 on a new version of Windows that was worse than the one I lost, or switch to Linux. Guess which I did?
I hope we get to a point where enough "professionals" are using it to force companies like Acrobat to offer Linux versions of their software (cough Fusion 360). It is the only thing keeping me from completely ditching my windows VM. Using CAD in a virtulabox VM is torture. FreeCAD is sadly not a viable replacement (maybe in the future but a lot of work is needed). I was able to switch to other tools for other things like KiCAD for PCB work, Blender and DaVinci Resolve also work great.
Oh hey another "I'd fully be on Linux if it wasn't for Fusion 360" person. Although in my case I'm too lazy to maintain VMs, so I just use windows as my base OS. Microsoft may force the issue next year when my perfectly good desktop stops getting Windows 10 updates and can't install Windows 11.
I play all my video games on linux - heros of the storm, sc2, warcraft 2, counter strike... very stable much nicer then what i remember from windoze...
Anecdotally, I have two gaming desktops for my kids in the same place, side by side. They don't know much about computers, but they greatly prefer to use the Linux one and only use the Windows one when forced to, like because Microsoft bought Minecraft and only puts out Education Edition for Windows. They seem to navigate Ubuntu much easier than Windows, and that machine gives them less trouble and is snappier.
Comment generator: "Concerns about privacy invasions, adware, and forced updates in Windows are pushing users away. Many users are fed up with Microsoft "urging users to train their AI for free"."
1) Windows chatting behind your back causes distrust. And for good reason.
2) Yes, forced updates, but the consumers don't understand that they're just crofters in MSFT's world with all MSFT's products. MSFT will update as much as fits their needs to protect their property, not yours.
3) Re: adware. Part of your relationship with MSFT is that you are the commodity. It's a general internet business revenue model.
Linux will be stuck in the 5% range as long as people who love Linux are the ones making Linux.
You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal. No faster way to scare off users than give them a CLI heavy OS and have the trip over the very first copy+paste command they try to run (once they figure out the circa ~1982 cursor)
I really cannot say enough about the total fumble of Linux distros in an age when people are more desperate than ever to leave Windows.
>I really cannot say enough about the total fumble of Linux distros in an age when people are more desperate than ever to leave Windows
How is it a fumble? Linux is doing very well to scope up users from people looking to leave windows. Its not a monolithic company. There is no marketing budget only users to spread the word.
The reason Linux won't take off is because Windows users have unrealistic expectations. They define "intuitive" as "works like Windows".
But Windows is not intuitive - it's, possibly, the least intuitive operating system to ever exist. It's just familiar.
But it's a Catch 22. If Linux is like Windows, then there's zero reason to use it. Just use Windows. But if Linux is not like Windows, then it's not familiar.
The solution is to reframe your expectations. If you expect Linux to work like Windows, you will be disappointed - and rightfully so. Nobody expects MacOS to work like Windows, no, you adapt.
I disagree fundamentally. You're describing locked-down UNIX in name only operating systems, controlled by a single corporate entity with an iron fist.
If Linux was like that, it would have no value. Why not? Because these operating systems already exist.
Linux distros are open-source. That means it is fragmented by nature. This is unsolvable - because that is what open-source means. I can fork something, and that's that. If we say "no forking", then it's no longer open-source. This is the Catch-22.
If we want a defragmented Linux, we already have plenty of those. If we want to defragment Linux, it loses literally all of it's value.
The UX on Linux is, IMO, much more intuitive than Windows, and it's not even close. The problem is that it's not like Windows. That's why I use it. That's why everyone who uses Linux uses it. If we wanted an operating system like Windows, I would use Windows.
Downloading software straight from an app store is easier than downloading an exe online. The file browser is easier to use. Updates are easier to do, they're done system-wide. KDE is much, MUCH more cohesive than than Windows GUI. The installers are much more modern. Users are much more intuitive. Permissions are more intuitive. The file system actually makes sense. I mean, really C: drive? Back slashes? Come on now. dbus is better than COM or COM+. Editing a config file is more intuitive than regedit. The search functionality is more intuitive. And on and on.
I mean, picture a typical usecase: install a browser. On Windows, I boot up. First I see if it's already installed. I search, and I get web popups. Okay, not what I want - I don't want to read about Chrome on wikipedia. Okay, I finally get to the Chrome website. I click "Download". Edge tells me not to do this. The computer tells me it's dangerous. Edge tells me it's faster than Chrome. I ignore. I click through the installer. It's installed. Now, I might have to reboot for some reason. Edge then prevents me from making it my default browser. I do it anyway. Finally, I have Google Chrome.
On Linux. I search for Chrome in the search box. It's not installed, but there's a link to the app store. I click it, and I click install. There is no installer, it just installs it. Chrome is now installed.
Linux distros are really good, if and only if you go into them acknowledging they are their own thing, with their own methods.
The more poignant issues might be that there's inconsistencies around UI here. Some terminals allow that directly (Kitty), others require Ctrl+shift+v (Gnome shell, iirc Powershell and Konsole).
To be fair, the best non-windows OS likely is MacOS. It has software support for a lot of commercial prosumer stuff, e. G., Adobe, and has a convenient and stable 3rd Party offering for Windows VMs (Parallels).
As a Linux user it seems like there is a lot to learn in regard to UI consistency from both though (maybe less from Windows). Gnome and KDE are probably moving in the right direction here but it is still a bit off sometimes.
> Linux will be stuck in the 5% range as long as people who love Linux are the ones making Linux.
Why is 5% a magic number? Why not 4% or 6% or 10%?
> You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal.
Try Shift+Ins. CLI and GUI conventions have always been different, and the sort of users who work in the terminal are the ones who know the difference. Overloading Ctrl+V, and breaking applications that run in the terminal, just to make two completely different paradigms use the same hotkeys seems a bit ridiculous to me.
BTW, this applies across OSes, and isn't specific to Linux.
The version of Linux that actually moves the needle towards widespread adoption will almost certainly be hated by Linux enthusiasts. It will be annoying and clunky with a lot of prying necessary to make it feel "right".
It’s not a “fumble”, because “Linux” is not a company trying to sell as many units as possible.
As you said, it works for the people who make it. Why does it need to do anything else? Linux desktop conquering the world is just an old Slashdot trope, it’s not something anyone is actually working to achieve in real life.
Coming from decades of using a Mac, I swap left alt and left ctrl. I remap the Terminal using AutoKey so that ctrl+c and ctrl+v are copy and paste, and alt+c effectively sends a ctrl+c to terminate a program.
I think it is very unfortunate that Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V works for some programs in Linux. This makes the environment inconsistent. These programs should be adapted to the environment they are in and only support selecting using left mouse button highlight followed by middle mouse button press.
I imagine you have only used Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/outdated linux.
Fedora is a different level completely. With Fedora, I remember installing nvidia drivers via terminal, and that was essentially it.
Sometimes I open up ports for my kid doing minecraft, but that was it. Its not like when you use Ubuntu or Mint and you need to manually update something just to get Netflix to work on Chromium.
Fedora is so good, I won't call it linux. Linux has the Debian/Ubuntu baggage. Fedora stands alone. Its easier to use than Windows, I don't think I'm exaggerating. Windows 11 has ads, unresponsive search, UI/theme issues that make it impossible to read text, it has fake paths to files. Fedora just works.
When we say outdated, we mean the version of the kernel and other software. Not the first time it came out.
When referring to the terminal, these are 1 time events every 12 months. Its not really a huge deal on Fedora because you basically don't need the terminal. On Ubuntu, its a much bigger deal given how many things are broken and need to be repaired.
I’be had some machines with issues on fedora and no issues on Ubuntu, and vice versa. It really just depends on your hardware and on what you’re trying to do.
Recently moved to Arch Linux after 25+ years on Windows. It was a LOT of work (my whole career is on the computer and I have a lot of custom scripts and tools), but I'm so happy with the result.
No more hundreds of background processes sapping my battery life and performance.
No more blatantly manipulative ads every time Windows updates, about how I won't be "safe" unless I sign up for OneDrive, switch to Edge, and subscribe to Office Live Dynamics Pro Limited 365, because now word processing and spreadsheets are a subscription for some fucking reason.
No more 3 different generations of UI styles sloppily bolted together (though Linux desktop styling can be plenty sloppy).
No more news feeds in my start menu and task bar filled with the outrage and statistically improbable evil human acts of the day, no doubt with MS ads, alongside prods to install Candy Crush and other crap.
No more whack-a-mole MS telemetry I have to read obscure guides to find out how to turn off.
No more needing to sign in to a FUCKING CLOUD ACCOUNT to use my own computer.
No more stupid crap like copilot, sucking screenshots and forwarding them to MS and OpenAI, and other sparkly AI icons on every damn thing.
Haven't booted Windows in a month or two. So happy to have switched - my computer belongs to me again, for the first time in a long while
> No more whack-a-mole MS telemetry I have to read obscure guides to find out how to turn off.
My routine at some point after moving to W10 was to create/update system partition image, turn off all bypasses/tweaks that kept update components tamed. Then do the update, reboot and quickly run through all setting that in the past tend to reset "itself", apply tweaks again and reboot to see if these still work, and finally - look up if some processes or services were added.
I was dualbooting, using VM's for years and pandemic gave me something to do so I finally escaped from Microsoft grip.
Tho, it wasn't issues-free ride. Mint and Manjaro would randomly soft-hang for no reason; some Manjaro updates would made me few times reinstall the system (that would be still faster than manually correcting everything). I had to freeze GPU drivers for older card because newer ones would crash games. Keeping unified look across all types of applications is indeed a sloppy task - especially with all Gnome shenanigans regarding theming but atm is still doable. But overall, I'm happy and I see how much changed and improved since Mandrake 8 times when I tried Linux for the first time.
For majority of people, for doing basic tasks plus playing some games Linux should be fine.
So refreshing isn’t it? It’s like having an OS that’s actually designed for you, not them. Imagine!
Occasionally I will boot into a Windows partition because I have to do something windows-only. I’m so out of the Windows world these days that I mentally have to prepare myself not to get too fired up with it all, just calm down do the thing and get out. :)
Agree that it’s a lot of effort to switch though, so good for you on making the switch!
2 years ago i replaced my last win10 installation with linux mint and i literally never think about going back. i am a pretty technical person and i still run into issues sometimes that take a few sessions to resolve though. i wish it was an easier sell to my friends. i began to feel extremely creeped out by my computer running windows which was was ultimately motivated me, but i not only avoided the evils of microsoft, i feel much more in-control and capable of doing more on linux.
it's crazy to me when my friends will say shit about configuration and i'm like, what's the tradeoff? configuring windows to just work like a normal computer is MUCH more work. the only way to put in no work is to be farmed for data and treated like a child by your own computer.
My perspective is that the Steam Deck significantly contributes to this increase.
Additionally, a smaller factor could be the growing trend of Dev and Op professionals moving from Macs to Linux. And the trend before, to move from Windows to Mac's because they are cheaper to administrate. This shift is supported by manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo, who are providing more devices with Linux pre-installed, aligning well with the supply chain requirements of IT departments.
Also, at least for me, it's hard to envision vendors specialising in Linux desktop hardware, such as Tuxedo, Framework, and System76, experiencing a surge in their market shares. I am very curious to see their numbers and the kind of people and companies that buy this products.
I wanted a gaming PC forever but I just couldn’t stomach Windows. I had a great experience with the Steam Deck in the past 2 years so I built a Bazzite desktop. I am having a lot of fun.
My step dad doesn't know how to share links over messenger (constantly sends me screenshots of pages), but he runs Thinkpad Manjaro for last 3 years without issues. At first, I was afraid that I will have to do some sort of support regularly or answer questions, but besides "Which music player should I install?" it was crickets for the last 3 years.
Impressive because nobody has ever successfully made a Linux desktop computer targeted at consumers the way Apple has. I wouldn't count Chromebooks or Android devices. I mean a system you would use as a workstation or a power user's computer. And I don't mean a Windows PC that you have the option of pre-installing Linux on like from Dell or HP. I mean a computer designed and built around Linux.
Regarding Steam: Some people used to avoid Linux because of gaming, but that’s changed quite a bit. With Proton and native support for many titles, the barrier to switching is much lower now.
Great news anyway :)
3. Millions of abandoned laptops that had been made 4-5+ years ago.
Basically electronic and ecological waste: machines from 10 years ago work perfectly fine if you change thermal paste and don't hit them too much. Even if you don't care about the planet, you might care about your wallet though.
For video games as of today, SteamOS presents double digit performance gains on average over Windows, running Windows games on Steam Deck and similar platforms.
I've used all three OS's for many years and I really just.. don't care which one I'm on anymore. They all do the same thing. Currently on windows 11 after ~5 years of debian gnome and its fine. Enjoyable even, especially with WSL. GUI software support is much better here
Windows 11 and Steam OS are starting to make impact. I am sticking to Windows 10 until is stops working but I think Linux might be finally in my future.
I feel like this is more about Linux remaining reliable and the other platforms getting worse, rather than Linux getting substantially better.
I no longer have a windows machine. If I can't get a game to run on Linux then I don't bother with it. I played Clair Obscur start, to finish, in Mint on a 3090 with zero issues. I just forced it to load in steam since linux isn't officially supported.
> Linux remaining reliable and the other platforms getting worse, rather than Linux getting substantially better.
But that's a very key point of advantage in by-design open-ness and non-commercialisation.
It's taken 30(-odd?) years and the coining of the word enshittification, but the advantages of this ideology is now having the last of the clay and sand brushed off it, baring its beauty to a growing audience.
And Linux has, in fact, gotten steadily better over that time too, but it's been a slow consistent grind, so it doesn't appear as grand as a sudden red-curtain-unveiling-worthy improvement, but it is, in fact, that grand.
(What Valve / Steam / Proton has done may be the closest to a rapid increase of usability / marketability, but even that has been relatively subtly under the radar unless you're paying attention).
The posts on this thread arguing that Android is not a real Linux should take a look at the increasingly blurred lines between MacOS and iPadOS. Android tablets are on a similar trajectory. ChromeOS Flex pretty much is a desktop Linux distro with an Android runtime.
Some people will find the idea of elements of a mobile OS on their desktop attractive. Other people will find it less unattractive than buying a new PC to run Windows 11.
I've been using Android tablets for a long time. They're way behind iPads in terms of apps available for them, and for them to be usable as main computers for anyone half technical they'd basically needs access to all the Linux desktop software, which they don't have access to.
Have people looked at the numbers? Chromeos and Linux have swapped, and if you include the unknown OS which are most likely Windows behind a corporate proxy it is back up to 70% of the market. In addition, the number of sites statcounter pulls from us dropped in half in the last three years if that matters.
It’s surprising to me it’s not higher. Gaming is excellent on Linux and Windows 11 is simply not good. Just a relative easier distro like Ubuntu is outstanding and learning curve is lower than ever.
I think it's going to keep increasing. I know people who resisted linux for decades and after playing with a Steam Deck are now considering building a linux gaming PC. This is in large part because they are investing into the Steam ecosystem for the first time ever and seeing how great it is. Mad props to Valve for all their work on Proton and Steam.
That's twice the number Valve reports for Steam users which includes a lot of Steam Decks that come with Linux installed, so it seems high, I would have guessed somewhere in the 1 to 2 percent range. In some countries you have mass Linux deployments to schools or government IT systems that could give you a number like this but I'm not sure what could be driving it in the US.
I assume the problems still are that (1) no Desktop Linux is at the level of macOS or Windows, and (2) the only one close is still RedHat, but most want Debian-based or something else.
MacOS is the best model for a successful desktop Linux to use. Trim down the kernel/drivers to just what runs on that spec hardware, only support that spec hardware, focus effort on the OS and ecosystem, keep it stable, make upgrades trivial, and give it freedom to run other software, terminal apps, etc. And most of all- focus resources on these efforts and charge a lot of money for it!
That was long true by that time. On supported hardware, and if you don’t need applications that are not on Linux, it was fine in the first Ubuntu releases at least.
(in comparison with the state of Windows at the time, of course)
in 2003 it was WAY easier to install linux than windows. You had to mess with floppys for sata drivers and shit to install windows.
and KDE was always ATLEAST as easy as windows, arguably more. At this time lots of older crappy hardware people had also only had win98 drivers, giving people immense problems. It mostly worked better on linux. This still goes today.
Macos window/desktop management is also stuck in 2001 with "magic gestures" tacked on. For someone who hates using these gestures especially when connected to an actually good kb/m, the base desktop experience is horrible. The dock is completely useless, the various cmd+tab or cmd+` shortcuts are unwieldy, Spotlight is growing increasingly worse year after year.
Rectangle/tiling window managers on top is the only way to make it workable.
Apart from wm, the existence of application notarization is a downright insult (though Windows is also guilty of this with smartscreen but to a much lesser extent).
Apple's "pay us 100 bucks a year or we'll tell your users that your program is malware" is just another step in the inevitable game of locking down macos and turning it into a mobile-like hellscape
What gestures are you talking about? I think you can turn those off, and I’d be surprised if there isn’t a way to turn off the rest with a 3rd party or custom tool.
Application notarization isn’t a problem anymore- you just have a single accept dialog. That problem that made you do a trick to get past it was only a problem years ago, due to whomever the moron was that thought that was a good idea. The current way is acceptable.
I install homebrew and random apps with no problems.
I installed Ubuntu on my laptop 5 years ago and haven't looked back. Windows at this point just feels like crappy spyware. Not a single thing I miss about Windows.
Also gaming on Linux works great for the most part with Proton. Thanks Steam!
I remember when it was absolutely crucial for your desktop/laptop to be able to do everything and Linux was a no go for people. Today you can live off your phone and be OK, so Linux actually makes much more sense. Camera/audio doesn't work well? No worries, just call via phone.
Yeah, the only thing I'd love to see is "open with gdocs" to be somehow integrated similar to desktop experience. Having to drag and drop every time, creating new file, is really stupid.
My suspicion is that many folks are converting their old MacBooks etc which no longer have support to keep running Linux. I have about 4 such machines of different brands lying about the house, some over 10 years old and they run just fine despite their antiquated hardware.
What do you mean by that? DEs development is separate from distros. Distros often select a particular DE to be their default, but "desktop environment efforts" aren't really something the distros do.
I think the biggest obstacle in the Linux world is people knee jerk recommending Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/outdated linux.
If people rallied around the current SOTA, Fedora, we would've hit 5% a few years ago.
The variety of distros cause people to get confused, and go with the most heavily marketed distros, Ubuntu flavors. Just because Ubuntu gave away free CDs 20 years ago, doesnt make them good. It makes them good at marketing.
People confuse Fedora with Arch, which is terrible. People confuse Ubuntu with 'stable like a table', instead of 'outdated stable'.
We almost need a reduction in favored distros. Out with the complexity: Fedora for desktop. It has all the DEs too.
Fundamentally, Linux is Linux. Differences between distros are vastly overstated, and they mostly amount to different default selections and configurations of the same underlying components.
Ultimately, anything that will run on one Linux distro will run on any other, with the only significant differences being on distros that run on unusual architectures or have made major changes to the kernel.
What do you find "idealistic" about it? My intention was to explain reality as I see it.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "outdated distros". It should be implicit that I'm referring to the currently maintained versions of available distros, not deprecated versions.
And the "time in terminal" metric might not generally make sense, given the preference that many Linux users have for CLI/TUI tools over GUI ones, given the efficiency and consistency advantages of the former -- many people prefer to work in the terminal even where GUI tools for equivalent functionality are readily available.
I think the year of Linux on the desktop will actually be the year of Chromium on Linux on the desktop (instead of Chrome on Windows), ie. is it really the Linux on the desktop if the only application you run is the browser for SaaS anyway?
I have a great computer, but it isn't compatible with Windows 11, so now I'm using Ubuntu on it. It's not ideal, but at least it's not a brick. I hate the requirements for Windows 11.
I think the Unknown category could be custom standalone devices like Playstation, FireTV, webOS, and Switch which have browsers to make those stats but could be BSD based.
And, I wouldn't exclude ChromeOS also, I thought it's built off of Gentoo Linux.
So here's the thing. Chrome OS is absolutely a Linux distribution. It's even a GNU/Linux distribution (based on Gentoo), unlike say Android/Linux, which is doing its own thing. But... When people say "desktop Linux", they mean one of the user-controlled distros, not the locked down appliance that is ChromeOS. It's like how nobody who says they want a Linux phone mean Android. Technically correct, but not what people mean.
Are people just running headless / full chrome on *nix from data centers to scrape webpages for AI and data mining? Did the article mention anything about checking IP address?
Of course, there are always alternatives, but as a professional software engineer there are times I need to use genuine Visual Studio for one reason or another.
Why use Photoshop when Gimp is available? Fusion360 when there is FreeCAD? etc.
I have to admit it's been a bit but when I first made the transition after a couple years using JetBrains, everything I actually used in Visual Studio was in VsCode. I should also admit that a big part of Microsoft strategy from as far back as 2003 was to make things "easy" in a non-translatable way which kept people locked into Visual Studio. Having traversed this divide, I see it now as something akin to different languages for the same concepts. Not unlike learning further programming languages after your first.
And it could get into double digits, now Win 10 is phased out. Let's face it, if you are just a regular user of a Personal Computer, you don't need Windows anymore
This is not surprising, and further growth is inevitable. I am heavily involved in a local Linux users group, and the number of people switching away from Windows increases every year. Anecdotal, of course, but Microsoft's enshittification of Windows makes the argument in favor of a free OS easier every year too.
Interesting milestone, 5% might not sound huge but for desktop Linux in the US it signals a real shift. Part of this comes from more polished distros lowering the barrier for non-technical users, and part is probably a pushback against aggressive telemetry and forced updates in mainstream OSes.
Also worth noting: if you count Chrome OS under the Linux kernel umbrella, the footprint is even bigger. It shows that open-source roots can quietly gain ground, even if the branding isn’t “Linux” front and center.
Because computers are cool. Its easier to point to a general operating system than to all the cool software that runs on them. When people say Linux is cool its not because of just the kernel, its everything from the culture to the software stack and ethos
I genuinely wonder why it is considered "huge". Does it really matter how many % desktop usage one of the several dozens desktop operating systems has?
Pretty sure it's because Windows has gotten worse. I ditched windows recently because it was flagging bit torrent software as malware and deleting it (utorrent, qbittorrent, deluge, all directly from official sources), and when I tried to turn the setting off in the control panel it wouldn't allow me to. A few minutes later it popped up an advertising notification for a F2P windows store game.
Linux hasn't necessarily gotten better, sadly. My install was unusable due to video issues, I had to boot a recover console to fix it. I also had to fix some issues with X desktop effects glitching after waking from suspend, making the desktop environment nearly unusable. Otherwise, Linux performs a lot better on my system than Windows.
> I ditched windows recently because it was flagging bit torrent software as malware and deleting it
W10 once removed CCleaner from my system because it was an older version. I kept it that way because it was the last version at the time that didn't come with telemetry.
Obviously everyone has their own experience but any Arch(-based) distro I've used has just worked out of the box following a simple Calamares install.
I've had nothing but bad experiences with Debian installs and I'm curious if this is where a lot of issues are coming from when people switch to Mint or Ubuntu when they hear it's the "beginner distro"
Linux now has a bigger desktop marketshare than firefox. I never would have imagined history would turn out like this. Firefox had the easy job and desktop Linux had the hard one.
This will lead to a virtuous circle for Linux unless someone does something; privacy issues are leading people to the OSes where you get to freely choose your level of privacy. Anybody have any more weird old unix patents to throw at them and slow it down?
edit: maybe the way to stop Linux is heat up the war against all general purpose computing. Linux could be used to run unauthorized AI.
I came to say this as well. The market share of Linux in the US is 5.03%, while the same for Firefox is 4.23%! [1]
It's not an apples to apples comparison. But the userbase is largely the same, and it's easier to switch a browser than it's to switch an OS. So it does have a significance.
Personally I'm taking another kick at Linux desktop in advance of Win11, I installed Mint with Cinnamon... and I gotta say, I'm kinda disappointed how many pain points there still are. Type in your admin password every 5 seconds just to install routine updates, ugly-ass GRUB screens, confusing UI, and SDL2 games being half-broken with resolution-switching and audio. Installing software still involves bouncing around figuring out if I want the Flatpak or to add a new Apt source or what.
So I'm assuming these "5% desktop market share" aren't using that kind of distro.
You installed a distro that aims to preserve suckage for future generations, and even developed an entire DE out of pure aversion to change. It’s often recommended by change-averse Linux users…
Successful Linux-based OSes have unattended atomic updates and user-friendly app installation. That includes ChromeOs and Android, as well as modern atomic desktop distributions. Fedora Silverblue, Bluefin, Bazzite.
edit: however, market share is probably coming from legacy distributions. That’s largely a sign of how bad Windows gets, and how desktops/laptops become more niche.
Ah, I had no idea Mint Cinnamon was about "preserving suckage". I remember when Mint launched it was all about "Ubuntu but easier, like non-free stuff included" and my understanding was Cinnamon was their own DE built to follow familiar UI patterns and customizability instead of Gnome's opinionated stuff.
Didn't realize that it was also for grumps who wanted bug-compatibility in their workflow.
Mint, afaik, offers a choice between Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. These are all DEs built and maintained to preserve a particular workflow based around hierarchical “start” menus, menu bars in applications, and desktop icons — the Win’95 style. This particular selection is very indicative of a preference for a particular era.
Which is fine if that’s your preference, too. However, you shouldn’t expect your experience to be significantly different from what it was when that desktop experience was fresh when you choose a product made by people with such strong preferences.
Again, Bluefin and the like update (atomically, with a rollback option) when you turn your computer off, with no interruptions or sudoing; app installs are through Gnome Software (for GUI stuff; through brew otherwise), without a need to enter passwords. You pay for that with some customizability, but it’s rock solid if it works on your hardware.
I don't get the anti-Linux hate that some people have. I get apathy, it's normal not to care. But I don't understand why anyone would actively root against a free and open alternative.
This is great news btw, and consistent with what is coming out of the Steam survey.
I will say though, I teach in Computer Science at university, and every semester in a class of 100, there's only ever at max just 1 student who has a Linux distro of any flavor on their laptop. Usually it's 0. It's pretty sad if you ask me.
This is anecdata, but with my own very limited (by choice) website analytics, I see a strong correlation between Linux users and headless browsers. So while my Linux user base seems higher than ever before so is my headless traffic. When I remove headless traffic, my Linux user base is in that 2-3.x% region.
Makes sense, I now do the majority of my personal workflows, except for photography, on Arch Linux on a Framework 13 laptop. I still have a M1 MBP for personal use that I primarily use for photography and not much else. There's a very minimal set of "normal" use cases that cannot be served on Linux at this point, and Linux desktops are more stable in the ways that matter to users now than the alternatives.
Microsoft is killing it's platform. One egregious example is their efficiency mode that literally cripples your computer in the name of some misguided "green initiatives".
I primarily went back to Linux Mint because of this problem. Thankfully Steam allows me to game my library just like on Windows. I have no reason to return.
These stats are bogus: OS X market share drops by 50% in a few months, macOS market share at zero for most of last twelve months. Windows market share goes up 8% in a few months? Total garbage.
I’ve said for over a decade that Linux can win a huge chunk of the desktop if it just stays as good as it is and waits. Meanwhile Microsoft keeps making Windows suck more.
Apple could do the same to some extent if they cut their prices some.
I have literally never seen a Linux desktop in the wild. Speaking as a "normal" person who occasionally builds PCs for friends, fixes family computers, etc.
I have an old ThinkPad with Linux, but agreed, no way this can be true.
I installed Ubuntu on my parents' PC back in 2014. Never had to reinstall, only had to upgrade to LTS every few years. The only problems I encountered were with nvidia drivers on update that had to be dealt with but nothing too insane. It's been used almost daily, only migrated to SSD at one point to speed it up. 18~ years old machine.
I'm not particularly surprised anymore to see Linux on people's laptops in public, usually while travelling (you don't usually see people using laptops in public much otherwise). That is mostly in Germany where I live. Linux is, of course, also very common in universities.
The article is on the US statistic though. If it was a global statistic it wouldn't surprise me at all.
When it comes to laptops, we have a lot of MacBooks out there, and an endless Sea of $400 low quality Lenovos and HPs eternally marching to the garbage bins.
Ultimately my observation is just anecdotal, but I have built a lot of computers for people worked on a lot of family PCS, etc, and have never once worked with a Linux system in that context in 25 years of doing that stuff. I'm not interacting with a tech oriented crowd though (obviously those people would be chatting about tech instead and I would never be touching their system). Perhaps the tech oriented crowd is big enough to hit 5%, or perhaps Linux gaming is moving the needle, but I can't imagine 1 in 20 system is Linux in the US. I just can't.
20 years ago my kids were getting hand-me-down work laptops with Linux installed on them. Apart from their peers thinking that they must be in some kind of cult, it did the job of keeping them much safer from malware.
Linux has been very usable for a long time. Windows 11, being deliberately unusable on older hardware that works perfectly well is enough incentive for more people to try an alternative. That's not going to move the needle in corporate IT but it's enough for a couple percentage points of the installed base.
> Windows 11, being deliberately unusable on older hardware that works perfectly well is enough incentive for more people to try an alternative
The extreme majority of users doesn't care about that, they'll stay on Windows 10, they don't give a single fuck about the fact that it'll stop receiving security updates.
The people who manage your work PC of course won't migrate away from Windows just because of Windows 11. But home users faced with a few hundred dollars of hardware replacement will probably consider a less expensive alternative. That might be just letting it rot. But it also might be ubuntu, mint, or Chrome OS
> Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every page view referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every page view referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data to get our Global Stats information.
I think the general conclusion is that they don't know it reliably; notice the other comments in this thread pointing out that the numbers jump up and down more or less every time they're measured.
>According to the latest StatCounter Global Stats for June 2025, Linux now holds 5.03% of the desktop operating system market share in the United United States of America. This is fantastic news!
Then is this really an increase in Linux "desktop" market share? I'm aware that it's Arch based and can surely run as a desktop but I see it's contribution no different than if they included ChromeOS or Android with the 5% of Linux. A targeted platform more intended for the purpose of gaming.
Desktop Linux's biggest obstacles have always been hardware/software compatibility, and user friendliness for average users. If they're going to list "Windows Woes", then how much of this increase is actually happening on the REAL forefront of Desktop Linux: Ubuntu, Mint and so forth?
I have to wonder how much of this is people switching to Linux vs the larger trend of people not having traditional computers to begin with.
Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the people that would have already had Linux desktops continuing to have theirs since they would likely be the same people (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets) less likely to be making that switch.
Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Given these numbers are percents I would be very curious.
Now yes there is a clear uptick thanks to the Steam Deck (however with Microsoft pushing their optimized for gaming Windows it will be interesting to see if that continues or goes backwards). But I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
I agree with your points, except this:
> thanks to the Steam Deck [...] but I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different. SteamOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch. If you run your Steam Deck in "desktop mode", it is very much a Linux Desktop (with a read-only system and A/B updates etc, but still).
Android systems don't even run the linux kernel in any real sense, pretty much every downstream kernel has millions of lines of patched code that will never make it upstream in their current form. Of course, that's no different from mostly any other "Linux" embedded device, but it's very different indeed from what's standard on desktop systems.
I would still count it as the Linux kernel. They don't change the syscall API, it's really mostly at the BSP level, right?
Said differently: if manufacturers cared to mainstream their changes, they could. And we would all be better for it.
> I would still count it as the Linux kernel.
This may be technically true, except it has no single meaningful implication, like no Linux software works there.
That's not even true. You can use typical Linux software inside of a chroot, like with Termux.
Yep, and in the reverse, you don't need a separate kernel to run Android software on Linux: https://waydro.id
Waydroid is garbage. It's so bad. Better use redroid: https://github.com/remote-android/redroid-doc
You failed to provide any reason why waydroid is "so bad".
Waydroid actually allows me to run Android software on my GNU/Linux phone.
Whether your virtual container is lightweight, heavyweight or from the cloud doesn't really change anything from a regular user's perspective. You aren't installing software in the main environment you are looking at, running a desktop on, etc.
Recall the post above mine:
> > I would still count it as the Linux kernel.
> This may be technically true, except it has no single meaningful implication, like no Linux software works there.
Termux is notable is because you in fact don't need a virtual machine at all, or even a proper container. Even the "chroot" aspect is basically just to create a facade to make software work with less effort; it's not literally needed. And you can indeed run typical graphical Linux software as long as you have a compatible display server; Termux offers an X server as an add-on.
This doesn't mean that Android is the same as desktop Linux, but that's not the point here. The point is that Android runs the Linux kernel, and not just in name only. You actually can make use of the Linux aspect of Android, which many of us do.
It's possible that Google will lock down Android further in the future and make the host Linux environment less usable for stock Linux apps, but today you can run quite a lot of typical CLI and even desktop Linux software directly in Android with minimal fuss. Even if it's a little cumbersome, it's quite useful in a pinch.
I'd argue whether you can readily install software to the Linux host environment is also neither here nor there. For an immutable abroot setup like SteamOS, you can't really install directly to the host environment, but in my mind that does not make it any less "desktop Linux" or Linux kernel based.
I think this really undervalues what Linux provides. The Android software is Linux software.
It's completely incompatible, so in practice it's a different OS. Doesn't mean it's not valuable.
You are talking about the OS while the person you are discussing with is speaking about the kernel.
The Linux kernel has its own merits outside standard Linux userspace.
I agree, saying that the fact standard Linux distros and Android share the same kernel has no single meaningful implication really undervalues the Linux kernel.
I also agree that it's important to keep in mind the two OSes are mostly incompatible.
The two OSes sharing the kernel have practical implications, including (theoretically) seeing improvements coming from Android dev in the kernel that can benefit standard linux distros, and things like Termux or Waydroid.
Compiling the mainline Linux kernel myself really taught me that the kernel does way more than people give it credit for. Sure, it can be debated as to whether two distributions of Linux can really be considered the same OS, but acting like the kernel is a relatively minor detail comes off to me as ignorant.
You’re keeping a discussion on technical reasoning for why Android and Desktop Linux are separated in a list like that, but the reason is not technical. It’s wholly for convenience. We want to know the performance of Desktop Linux separate from Android. Whether or not they are a different OS or not is irrelevant.
So when somebody says "Linux reaches X market share", are they talking about the kernel? Why does it even matter how much the kernel is used? Would you count WSL?
I'm not sure why you are asking me all this, this is beside my points.
> So
I reject the link here.
> when somebody says "Linux reaches X market share", are they talking about the kernel?
Likely not.
> Why does it even matter how much the kernel is used?
Why not? Depends what's your concern.
> Would you count WSL?
Depends what you want to evaluate.
> Depends what you want to evaluate.
This is exactly my question. You said the discussion's about the kernel. Why do you want to evaluate its usage? Which conclusions are you going to draw?
Because when talking about the OS, you can conclude that Windows and MacOS start falling behind the free software.
> Why do you want to evaluate its usage?
I never implied this. This subthread is about countering your affirmation that Android being based on the linux kernel has no single meaningful implication. It's not anymore about evaluating usage and counting stuff.
This all started with a commenter writing "Android systems don't even run the linux kernel in any real sense", which is wrong, or at least highly misleading and confusing (I do agree with this commenter about the fact that we are talking about forks that don't upstream their shit, which does have severe implications). You could say that Android systems usually don't run mainline Linux kernel.
> you can conclude that Windows and MacOS start falling behind the free software.
I wish :-) And I wouldn't generally include Android in the free software family, few people run Replicant or some Android flavor without the Google services, let alone without proprietary blobs. (I would count blob-free Android)
In practice Linux is a family of different OSes. Sometimes POSIX-centric, sometimes not.
What do you even count as "an OS"? Linux + gnu userland + Gnome? Or is it KDE? Embedded Linux? Does ChromeOS count? LG's WebOS?
Desktop Linux has a clear scope, and we all know. We can act like we don't, but we do.
Can I install LibreOffice on Android? Gnome, KDE, Xfce? Which percentage of packages in the Debian repos can I use on Android?
Linux is a kernel, that's it. There is an organisation maintaining it, and also the trademark.
There is also a major family of OSes building on the kernel + gnu userspace, which you probably call "desktop linux".
In my house there are dozens of devices running linux the kernel: routers, a tv set, washing machines, NAS, printers, etc. Some have the full gnu posix-like stack, others are very barebones.
Then, there's is a bunch of android devices running the kernel as well.
What's wrong with all of these? At what point should i draw a line?
To me, Desktop Linux is the Linux I run on my work computer: the one that has a screen, a keyboard and a mouse. It is based on Linux (obviously), the GNU userland to some extent, and then it has a graphical environment (usually based on Xorg or Wayland).
This is different from embedded Linux or Linux on a server. And this is different from Linux-the-kernel (which runs on Android).
What if I run linux + gnu + gnome over rdp on VM a server in a rack somewhere that has no screen keyboard and mouse on it? Am i using desktop linux or not?
What if that same VM also is running nginx and serving up web content?
What if I have a pc with a keyboard and monitor sitting literally on my desktop, and it's running linux + gnu but no graphical environment, and I use it for coding (it has music playing when I do this, and i sometime check email or github issues, etc via cli) - yes I've done this, even recently to reduce distractions... some days GUIs are bad for my adhd. Is that a desktop linux? If not, why? What's different about this than doing basically the same thing, but also having a browser open when it's surrounded by a GUI?
I feel like you're overthinking it. It's not that one can get a badge saying "powered by Desktop Linux". It's a rough categorisation based on the use case:
* Embedded Linux is what you expect to see on a "small" device that usually doesn't have a graphical environment (it may have a small screen showing a temperature).
* A Linux server is what you expect to see in racks, serving stuff over the Internet. A homeserver could be that, too.
* Linux on mobile is what you would put on your phone.
* Desktop Linux is what you would put on your working computer, the one you interact with "physically".
Of course, you can run a server on your personal laptop, and you could run a "Desktop" graphical environment on a mobile phone. But that's beside the point. And of course, you can work on a Linux without a graphical environment.
Well, you came up with a rather vague definition. Xorg OR wayland. Gtk or qt? Which set of tools do you expect to be available?
All of that is just too nebulous. Linux is something that runs the kernel, that's about it.
I mean, I've been using linux for all of my life, servers, at home, for work, embedded dev, corporate environment, as a manager and as a dev, etc.
What I see is that linux as already everywhere. Desktop space is the only OS market where non-linux OSes are in the majority, and maybe this is why people are so excited about these pointless numbers.
Desktop Linux is difficult to define exactly, but the idea has merits. Something that's not proprietary, and that's not incredibly closed / locked / controlled by a monopolist like Android or Chrome OS.
> maybe this is why people are so excited about these pointless numbers.
I'd be excited by numbers showing an increase free software use, including the OS, first and foremost.
For what I personally care, I'd be happy to drop the Linux kernel requirement and extend the scope to Desktop BSDs and other open source desktop OS as well. People being trapped in closed OSes that happen to be based on a Linux kernel is of limited comfort anyway, actually.
Try Termux and you'll be surprised how much 'Linux' software runs fine on Android, this includes things made to run under X11 etc.
Termux turns my Android phone into a programmable pocket computer.
https://termux.dev/en/
Please give it a try and if you find it useful, donate.
https://github.com/termux-play-store/
What's your point? This mess is caused by Google policies, not technical considerations. You can still install Termux from F-Droid.
We can argue about Android being a horrible OS for all sorts of reasons but that's a separate discussion.
> Almost every Android version imposes new major restrictions when it comes to security requirements, and specifically the Android 10 version update was dramatic for Termux usage, as it disallowed executing downloaded files directly.
> The Termux app avoided that by using a targetSdkVersion of Android 9, declaring that it was not compatible with the Android 10 requirements.
Android level 9 is from Android 2 Gingerbread (2010!!). https://apilevels.com/
For now it's not a huge barrier to Termux running. We can go run Android 2 stuff today, & maybe Android will forever be backwards compatible.
It does mean that Termux can't build a top or use any new Android features. Termux is glued to a truly ancient version of Android, because Android became inhospitable to basic Linux userland use cases. Seems its mostly about being unable to run downloaded code, which feels admittedly like very much "just a technicality", but boy oh boy has that technicality kept Android from expanding outside of its own bespoke userland.
> > The Termux app avoided that by using a targetSdkVersion of Android 9, declaring that it was not compatible with the Android 10 requirements.
> Android level 9 is from Android 2 Gingerbread (2010!!). https://apilevels.com/
Wait, no, Termux is not stuck at Gingerbread, it's stuck at Android 9 (Pie).
Agree with the rest though. Android is a sinking ship, not only the Termux issue, but the increasing number of basic apps and features that are proprietary and not part of AOSP. I hope we'll be able to be caught by Linux Mobile or something like this in time.
Apologies! I originally posted Android 9 Pie (2018), but had doubt & switched to the SDK version. My mistake!!
The AI age where the AI needs to be able to peak into all the apps will hopefully create a new API / MCP age, new machine-to-machine work. I'm not sure how much of what Google is doing today is proprietary, adding hooks into all their apps and creating some means for Gemini to access that all, and how much is paved road & available for others. Very curious to know more.
Right, Android target levels are so different in how they behave towards applications that they're practically best treated as distinct OS's to begin with. There's really no such thing as a unified Android or iOS, unlike Windows or desktop Linux where even a program from the mid-1990s will run unmodified in the latest version of the OS.
> Android target levels are so different in how they behave towards applications that they're practically best treated as distinct OS's to begin with
You can run applications running different target levels side by side though
> desktop Linux where even a program from the mid-1990s will run unmodified in the latest version of the OS
mhm... I wish but that's not so true for Linux. Your old program will likely be missing some dynamic library or be incompatible with your current libc. Desktop Linux userspace is awfully unstable, compatibility is broken left and right, basically no one cares except the Linux kernel itself. There's a reason people jokingly say that win32, through wine, is the most stable Linux API. If you still have the source code of your program (and the linux ecosystem is full of free software so that's likely), you can always recompile but you'll probably need to edit the code so it's compatible with the current versions of libraries).
I've heard macOS is not great at this neither.
>Termux is glued to a truly ancient version of Android, because Android became inhospitable to basic Linux userland use cases.
No, this only a problem with Termux's approach of trying to put all apps into a single app. One Linux app should correspond to one Android app. This also makes it so that permissions you grant to the app is not to all of termux, but to a specific app.
> trying to put all apps into a single app
That's not exactly what it does, it dynamically downloads the programs using apt-get.
I get the security benefits of preventing the execution of data stuff, but building one Android app for each binary is difficult to work with.
>it dynamically downloads the programs using apt-get.
And then runs them as the Termux app. I didn't mean to imply that it put all of the apps into itself at build time.
>Android app for each binary is difficult to work with.
You could group multiple binaries that belong to a single conceptual app into a single android app. What do you think would make it difficult to work with? I think most of it could be automated away.
The principled way of doing this (while coping with the new post-Pie restrictions) would be to build a new "updated" .apk on-device with a new /usr/bin/ equivalent, then have the user explicitly "install" it and relaunch Termux. It would work no different than any live-CD install, or for that matter any other kind of "immutable" OS.
But then, everything runs under the same Termux user app again, just with extra cumbersome steps. And I'm not sure it's possible to do this safely, you need the APK to be signed, and the only way to do this would be to share the private key. And likely to have a good chunk of the Android SDK bundled with Termux. A version that runs on Android anyway.
Not sure it would fly with Google's Play Store policies.
to your parent:
> And then runs them as the Termux app. I didn't mean to imply that it put all of the apps into itself at build time.
ok, got you
Yes but you could just have a custom private key that's generated by a separate "apk builder" app and stored on-device.
Touché.
No software compiled for arm will run on x86. No software depending on Qt will run without Qt, even if you have GTK.
Doesn't mean they don't run the same kernel, does it?
You can recompile software for a different architecture relatively easily. You can't easily rewrite GNU/Linux software to run on Android.
And you can't easily rewrite Qt software to use GTK. Still they both run on Linux.
You probably could if Android weren't intentionally constrained by Google to prevent it. That's what fsflover is trying to point out: Android is more of a television firmware than an OS and counting it like a PC OS makes very little sense because you can't use it like one.
EDIT: I think you still don't understand. It doesn't matter what hardware Android runs on it's written to be appliance firmware. Even if you put it on a laptop it just turns the laptop into what is essentially a television.
So I was saying that Android runs the Linux kernel, period.
But now that you say it, Android is very much a full OS. It's not a Linux Desktop, but it is a full OS. And televisions running Android are called "smart TVs", precisely because they run a full OS instead of a minimal firmware like they used to.
Google is working on bringing Android to the Desktop, and Samsung already does it. As in: you plug your smartphone into a docking station and it is suddenly a Desktop computer.
Checkout https://postmarketos.org Those vendor provided kernel trees let you run a real Linux distribution on your phone.
PostmarketOS doesn't use downstream kernel trees because those are useless for anything that's not AOSP-based (unless you use terrible hacks like libhybris) and are often not upgradable to newer versions. They rely on "close-to-mainline" kernels that are much closer to real Linux.
This is the reason I hate the recent surge in linux desktop users. People jumping in without allocating enough time to get familiar with the ecosystem
You can run Linux software on Android via termux, or the amazing UserLAnd app even lets you install an entire distro userland with several choices (Debian, Arch, etc)
Android is Linux
Android is not GNU/Linux.
Article talks about GNU/Linux clearly. There is a point to the whole "I'd like to interject for a moment..." copypasta and Android's situation is the clearest illustration of it.
The article talks about browsers that use Linux in the user agent. This includes Alpine Linux - which is not GNU/Linux. It also splits out Chrome OS which is pretty much GNU/Linux.
Alpine and GNU/Linux are Posix, while Android is not.
I don't think Posix is very relevant to what is or isn't linux.
macOS is more posix than NixOS, but everyone knows NixOS is a real linux distro, and macOS is not one.
Me neither! I was suggesting to use "Posix" instead of "Linux" because it properly separates GNU/Linux or other Linuxes from Android. Posix is what Android isn't but what MacOS is. What people erroneously try to call "Linux" because they don't have a better word.
> Article talks about GNU/Linux clearly.
There are Linux distributions that don't use the GNU userland. Should we start being pedantic about that? And say Busybox/Linux or MyCustomThingy/Linux etc?
And actually, were you talking about GNU/Linux/Xorg, or GNU/Linux/Wayland? Can I also ask people to mention which libc they use? Alpine is OpenRC/Busybox/musl/Linux, which is not systemd/GNU/glibc/Linux.
So yeah... Desktop Linux is not worse a way to describe an OS than GNU/Linux.
> There is a point to the whole "I'd like to interject for a moment..." copypasta and Android's situation is the clearest illustration of it.
Well… :-)
With you in spirit, but to add to the mess, one could argue Alpine (and Postmarket OS) is a standard Linux distro, but non GNU.
"GNU/" cannot be used for clarifying things anymore.
This has been repeated for so long that in the meantime enough of the changes have been upstreamed such that Android has been able to run with the upstream kernel since 6 years ago.
> The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different.
Linux is a kernel.
Seeing how the Linux name is used in practice, it's useful to clarify.
"IT'S GNU/LINUX!" ~ rms
So anyone saying "the Windows operating system" is doing wrong?
Which is exactly why people here talk about "Linux Desktop". Linux is a kernel, Linux Desktop is some flavour of a full OS made to run on a PC, as opposed to e.g. embedded Linux or a Linux server.
Not sure what your point is?
There are no 'Linux desktops'.
Yeah, but ChromeOS is just as much "Desktop Linux" as Fedora Workstation.
I think that's pretty pedantic. When most people here say 'Linux Desktop', they mean the Linux kernel, GNU(-ish) userland, Wayland/X11, and some desktop like GNOME, KDE or Mate.
Though, I guess outside tech circles, people will just talk about Linux as the whole desktop OS. E.g. our municipality was promoting installing a Linux distribution to save Windows laptops after the Windows 10 apocalypse, and they just call it Linux.
Even Wikipedia says: Linux (/ˈlɪnʊks/ LIN-uuks[15]) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds.
But with respect to "Linux on the Desktop" in the context of marketshare, the interest is in seeing how far Linux has gone, not how far software running on Linux has gone.
The only reason "ChromeOS" isn't considered Linux in this dataset is because Chrome has a flag that removes Linux from the user-agent on certain systems. If we were talking about Linux on the desktop casually, or were compiling a dataset through some other means where the kernel is a known quantity, we'd most certainly include said systems.
> When most people here say 'Linux Desktop', they mean the Linux kernel, GNU(-ish) userland, Wayland/X11, and some desktop like GNOME, KDE or Mate.
This. It actually surprises me that it's apparently not entirely clear for everybody.
A distinction without a difference. The point of this subthread is that the term Linux is overloaded to mean two things: a kernel and also an OS that has certain assumptions (usually glibc and some unix userspace stuff).
The point being that “Linux Desktop” means something more than “runs the Linux kernel”.
There is not even one common "the Linux kernel".
The Steam Deck is absolutely a full blown Linux. But it's not a desktop. It's a handheld.
Well, unless you hook a screen and keyboard to it, I suppose. No idea how many people do that. But if you do that, phones and tablets also become desktops.
I attach screen + keyboard to it often. It has an official dock to facilitate this. In my mind, it's a device that can function as both desktop and hand-held.
I mean, a keyboard on iPad is way less powerful than a keyboard on steam deck. The steam deck can plug into a monitor and runs Plasma out of the box, which is a full blown desktop environment
Typing this from my Steam Deck, its the best Linux desktop I've ever had. It's awesome to have my PC also be a handheld when laying in bed. I hope the Deckard has M+KB support too.
Admittedly yeah SteamOS does walk that line, and I guess technically given that I think these numbers are based on browser data it would only be capturing the people that actually go into desktop mode (maybe?).
But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux (or even understand that it is Linux) vs would switch to a Windows version if it worked as well.
Even in the "normal mode", I would argue that it is still Linux Desktop. A Linux Desktop init system, with a Linux Desktop userspace, with a Linux Desktop libc, with the Linux Desktop security model, a Linux Desktop package manager, a Linux Desktop compositor (it uses something based on Wayland, right?), etc.
If you open a terminal (or SSH into it), you're on Linux. It's very, very different on Android.
> how many of the people using a Steam Deck [...] care that it is Linux
Probably most don't. But that's a goal. If corporate employees could use a Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it would mean that the corporation can move to Linux, and that would be big.
I think it might be good to stand back a bit and think through what we are actually excited for. Because:
1. if someone uses Linux Desktop without caring about that it is Linux, why is that different from them using Windows? 2. why do we say SteamOS count as Linux Desktop but Android doesn't? is it really because how much of it is "Linux"?
For me, I think what matters to me is who has control over it. SteamOS is based on Arch, so the community has a say over where it will go, and Valve will have to work with the community. Android/Windows are fully controlled Google/Microsoft, doesn't matter that Android is Open Source.
As a user, what usually matters to me is what software I'm able to run on it. So even if people don't actually care about the OS itself, they will care that X runs on it but Y doesn't, which, given enough users, may push X to support that OS.
I actually daily drive Linux (Arch) because Windows is a PITA I'm not willing to put up with. But there are things I use which still don't run on Linux (Photoshop and Lightroom), so I'm actually thinking of getting a Mac again instead of having a second PC / dual boot, even though I know that can also be irritating (though less so than Windows).
"Who controls the OS" isn't that important to me. What matters is that it gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do with as little friction as possible. I know Linux being free means I can go and hack on it however I like. But I also have to contend with reality: I can't reasonably think that I (personnally) am going to hack on the kernel or on some desktop environment in any meaningful measure, so I still have to put up with whatever other people figure is best.
But if there are enough people like me, including those who don't actually care about what OS they're running, maybe the apps I want to run will adopt Linux. But that only matters because, as it turns out, it's the OS which I find the less irritating to use. If tomorrow Windows 12 finally became sane, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I'm not married to Linux.
If someone runs Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it still means that they use software that runs on Linux. Say if governments move to some Linux distro, they will need an office suite, and they may pay for its development.
If someone runs SteamOS, it means that they play games on Linux. So it becomes interesting for game devs to test for Linux. And then if someone runs SteamOS, instead of a dual boot with Windows maybe they just go to the Desktop mode. Which means that instead of Microsoft Office, they use something that runs on Linux, etc.
This is good for the Linux ecosystem. And the reason I like the Linux ecosystem is because, as you say, it's not fully controlled by TooBigTech.
The alternative to Microsoft Word isn't LibreOffice Writer, it's Google Docs, which is very much controlled by a big tech company.
If a government chooses to move away from Microsoft, I hope it's not to get closer to Google.
And there are alternatives other than LibreOffice and Google Docs.
I'd start that conversation from another perspective. If someone uses linux, not caring that it's not windows, then that's a milestone.
It is an interesting distinction, unlike Android I do admit that SteamOS is obviously contributing to Linux Desktop market share. I just think it is a complicated situation.
From my understanding Xbox is running a version of Windows on their consoles (not talking about the new handhelds) tailor made for Xbox. But I would not call that adding to the Windows marketshare.
iOS and iPadOS were started with versions of OSX and then modified (and clearly share some pieces) but we would not call either of those as contributing to Mac's marketshare.
Obviously yes neither of those let you go into the traditional Mac or Windows desktop unlike SteamOS. But how the users perceive it is still important.
> Probably most don't. But that's a goal. If corporate employees could use a Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it would mean that the corporation can move to Linux, and that would be big.
The problem is this works the other way also. If most users of the Steam Deck don't care or really know that it is Linux there is not much getting in the way of Microsoft coming in with their new handheld/OS and eating up that market if they can get the OS to perform as well.
Put another way, if Valve decided (not saying they would, just asking a hypothetical) to either write their own OS or switch the underlying OS to Windows but kept the look of SteamOS as it behaved now and performance was the same. Would most users of the Steam Deck know or care?
Personally I think for claims about the "linux desktop" to really matter, there has to be a conscious desire and care that it is Linux or it could disappear.
> I do admit that SteamOS is obviously contributing to Linux Desktop market share. I just think it is a complicated situation.
Agreed. And IMO, the thing is that you can benefit from the work made on SteamOS on any Linux Desktop. By making most games run on SteamOS, Valve contributed to make Gentoo a better platform for gaming.
> If most users of the Steam Deck don't care or really know that it is Linux there is not much getting in the way of Microsoft coming in with their new handheld/OS and eating up that market if they can get the OS to perform as well.
Sure. But what I see is really the other side: if SteamOS is relevant, then game devs will have an incentive to support SteamOS, which gives the opportunity for gamers to move to SteamOS. Now they are on Linux, so they can start using software that runs on Linux.
I would agree on most points regarding SteamOS except for package manager: there are really two on the system — base one and Steam itself.
Users generally only care about the latter.
Linux Desktop routinely has multiple package managers (for the better or worse): be it flatpak, pip, npm, nix... but it's still Linux Desktop. Just like you don't need to have the same libc to be a Linux Desktop.
At least some of the dedicated ones also want to run epic games or others through heroic, but that's only a little more Linux on top of steam yeah
I think it is fixed now, but for a while you couldn't even use the touchpads on the desktop without steam running.
There is no "Desktop Linux init system" etc. There are init systems built for/on Linux.
> how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux
How many Windows users care that it is Windows? They just want to click on the Internet icon.
One way to think about it is what APIs application developers are using. If most of the code running on a Steam Deck is Windows code running under a compatibility layer, it probably doesn’t help the larger Linux community in the same way that, say, iOS popularity has helped ensure that many libraries have excellent macOS support.
> But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux
If Linux adoption is to increase significantly (and I guess I'm of the opinion that would be a positive thing), then at some point that can only be done by acquiring users who don't care particularly deeply or understand much about their OS. That is, the vast majority of people. And that's probably not going to happen by converting that demographic to true believers.
Some of those people might decide they want to dig deeper later, and that's great. Most won't and that's fine too.
It would be a bit asymmetrical to restrict the definition of "Linux user" to folk who really care what Linux is or know their way around coreutils.
Think about it from a brand perspective. If you were microsoft and some flavor of windows were running on people's phone and game station, would you claim this market share? I'm sure they would.
Totally agree. It's what finally got me to commit to a linux machine for my recent desktop build!
What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one? Many Android tablets (especially those with Samsung Dex) can certainly double up as desktops if its users were so willing, at least a lot more so than the Steam Deck.
Linux Desktop is something else. When Adobe considers if it's worth to port Photoshop to run on the Linux Desktop they don't include the market share of Android devices in that calculation. It's two completely different markets: desktop Linux apps and Android apps.
> What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one?
A desktop is a computer that sits on your desk, as opposed to being held in your hand. In concrete terms, you can install Android Firefox on ChromeOS, and it runs fine. But it is near unusable because it turns out how people interact with desktops is very different to how people interact with phones.
Also, desktop window managers tend to look like a protocol, rather than a library. That because every language can speak a protocol, but a library is written in one language and if you are lucky, someone many have provided bindings to that library to the language you are using.
Android's display is effectively a Java library. If you want to talk to it from C or Python, you have to FFI to Java, which sucks from a number of perspectives. It's not how you would implement a general purpose desktop environment, and I've never met anyone who considers it to be one.
That lack of flexibility shows up in a number of other ways. For example it's not difficult to implement an phone OS interface using XWindows or Wayland. Neither particularly care what window manager is running on top of them them. The reverse isn't true. You can't provide a the multi-window desktop environment on Android as it stands.
None of this is true for ChromeOS. It uses Wayland under the hood, and so you can install and run Debian GUI apps on it. In fact I do that, and it mostly works as you would expect. Thus I consider ChromeOS to be true Linux Desktop environment, and it should be counted as one. It isn't mind you - but I think should be.
Google seems to be in the process of replacing ChromeOS with Android, and as part of that process ChromeOS's ability to run Linux desktop apps is being ported to Android. If and when that happens, then I'd consider Android to be Linux desktop too.
Market share only matters to geeks and commercial software vendors when deciding the total addressable market. A “Linux desktop” that is connected to a TV used to play games is not part of the market they care about.
You are being obtuse.
99% of Steam Deck users won't ever use the desktop mode except for maybe setting up emulation or Discord.
In general, that makes Steam Deck users no more Linux users than people that use Android.
Android users are Linux users. So are Nintendo Switch users, the whole "can Linux game/be used for mobile" question is already answered.
They aren't. Or not in the sense that it matters for traditional Linux desktop users, which is pretty much the only reason the metric gets brought up.
Following your logic, people using the old TiVo setop boxes were also Linux users.
Active Linux desktop adoption rates matter because it means companies will put money into ensuring their product works well on it. 1Password or Telegram is not going to meaningfully care about Steam Deck users. Or Android users vis a vis the Linux desktop client, because Android can't readily run Linux GUI applications :)
It's honestly kind of nuts no one here is getting that.
It really doesn't matter, you're again conflating the "kernel" and "desktop" distinction that's important here. It's like saying that XNU isn't being used by gamers - in practice you're correct, but the kernel is used to run millions of iPhone games. It doesn't matter for the adoption of macOS as a gaming platform, but the kernel is used for it.
What matters, to me as a Linux user on the desktop, is that Nintendo and Google simply follow the license. I don't want them contributing patches to GNOME or Firefox, I want them downstream testing the kernel and contributing patches back for me to benefit from. And I do! My Switch Pro controller has official Linux support because of Nintendo. My day-to-day life on the desktop is improved by both company's contributions.
The idea that Nintendo or Google are neglecting their duty because Photoshop doesn't run on Linux is a facetious argument. It might be a major issue for you, but clearly millions of Linux users are perfectly happy without those trappings.
> Or Android users vis a vis the Linux desktop client, because Android can't readily run Linux GUI applications :)
A travesty for Android's adoption metrics, one can only imagine. Thankfully for Linux users, the inverse is not so true: https://waydro.id/
Errr, isn’t the Switch BSD based? Or am I confusing it with the PS5?
Switch’s network stack and some drivers are FreeBSD based, but that’s about it
You would be correct if steam deck users were in line with the average computer user, but they definitely skew more towards the tech savvy crowd - the crowd that would be interested in desktop/emulation.
Part of this is in order to use a steam deck, unless you want to be very limited, you kind of have to be a little more tech savvy. I love my deck, but it is definitely not plug and play/turn key like a switch is for instance. Hell until a year or so ago swapping between gaming and desktop mode resulted in a total crash like 30% of the time. It still doesn’t dock and undock seamlessly, you get all kinds of wild behavior with standard TVs still, and if you’re off your home network and it tries to update it can still lock you out. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still a distinct possibility.
I love it and frankly the machine is a marvel, especially at its price point. But I still struggle to recommend it to people.
If your belief is that Steam Deck is Linux Desktop then you need to count Switch/PS5/Xbox as desktops as well and take those into account with the OS percentages.
Steam Deck has (accessible in menu by default) desktop mode that is just KDE with desktop icons and everything.
I don't think his point was that it's not linux but rather that it's not a desktop, and if it counts as a desktop, then so do the rest of the gaming consoles runnining non-linux, which probably didn't get counted so the 5% would be lower.
This is wrong. A steamdeck in desktop mode is exactly a desktop. You can write and execute code on it the exact same way you do on your laptop
You cant do that on mobile devices or other handhelds
Yes, you can, and yes, among the group of people represented on HN, I have no doubt that a fair number do use it this way.....but how typical is that? How often does the average steam deck owner use it as a desktop? How often does the average user leave the steam launcher? How often does the average user think of it as anything other than a gaming console?
If all you care about is some very technical sense of "how many linux desktop environments are installed in the world", then none of these questions matter. But if the reason one is interested in the "Linux Desktop market share" is some level of interest in how people are using desktop computers, and when/if they are choosing them over competing OSs like Windows and MacOS, then these questions matter a lot. My guess is that 90% of SteamDeck owners don't think about the fact that it is Linux, barely every leave the steam launcher, and were they to be looking at getting a new desktop computer, their SteamDeck experience would not make them consider a linux distro vs. Windows or MacOS.
In case it matters, I think more people should be running Linux than do, I think people over-estimate the difficulty of switching. I want the steam deck and SteamOS to be a gateway for people to switch in more contexts....I'm just skeptical that it's actually doing that more than a trivial amount.
You need to switch to desktop mode to install non-steam software like emulators, so I assume some people use it at least intermittently. And I've seen some posts about people running a DAW (bitwig) on it. It's not going to be many people, but the deck is a legit linux PC if you've got a dock with peripherials attached. Can't say that about other consoles.
Great point actually.
And it got me thinking, i already hook up the deck to my tv and use bluetooth peripherals with it. Maybw ill try using it as my daily driver at home
Yea except I cant use my PS5 as a actual desktop. As in my steamdeck has a DE. My actual desktop is 4000 km away. So I have a monitor and mouse + KB plugged into my steamdeck Dock and its no different.
The other consoles don't have the same capabilities. They don't have a desktop, so they're not a desktop. SteamOS has a desktop, and it's one of the most popular Linux desktops, KDE. So, it's a desktop operating system.
Wow, I did not know this. Does anyone know the history behind why they chose KDE over GNOME? I promise: I am not picking a fight over those two.
My guess is the same reason as with SteamOS: not relying on a single party.
By picking a standard menu option I can go to a traditional desktop and use Libre Office and Firefox.
Can I so that with a Switch?
I can plug in a USB dock, with a monitor, mouse and keyboard and edit images with GIMP.
Can I do that with a PS5?
If I like the Steam Deck UI, I can install a package on my desktop and pick it on login, thus gaining basically all of this functionality. I in fact do have the SteamOS 3 UI installed on a gaming PC, and it works really well.
Can I install the PS5 UI and the ability to play PlayStation games on a BSD box?
> Can I do that with a Switch?
You can install Ubuntu on a Nintendo switch by using a paperclip so yes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SwitchHacks/comments/8f0ugz/hardwar...
But that's not the same operating system. I would need to install a different operating system. So the Switch does not have a Linux Operating System - you can just install one.
If that's the metric, then Linux desktop use must be close to 100%. Almost every platform can install some Linux distro.
But SteamOS IS a Linux distro.
> by using a paperclip
So, no?
Yes, you can. With a paper clip.
Some installations of linux require a USB drive.
This one requires a paper clip.
> > By picking a standard menu option I can go to a traditional desktop and use Libre Office and Firefox.
> > Can I so that with a Switch?
> Yes. With a paperclip
A paperclip isn't a standard menu item. It's a hack to switch the operating systems. Once you've hacked it you can't play Switch games until you revert back. That's nothing like what the deck is offering.
> Some installations of linux require a USB drive.
We aren't talking about hacking, we are talking about whether the deck comes with desktop Linux, which it does. What you are talking about is nothing like what the Deck is offering.
> you can't play Switch games until you revert back
You literally just have to reboot into the normal switch OS, it’s not different than dual booting.
The Deck doesn't need to "dual boot".
Hit the power button and instead on sleep or shutdown pick desktop and it switches interfaces.
When in the desktop mode it still has Steam and you can still play Steam games.
You're really reaching with the Switch is a desktop OS.
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here
Interesting, could you tell me which part of US you are from?
---
My 2 cents, small country, mid-Europe, more or less in the middle of list of GDP / AIC per capita in EU.
Nearly everyone has some sort of PC or laptops for personal use.
Now it's changing, kids(~5-13yrs old) are using phones and tablets for school, Tiktok, Ytube, games. And only minority of kids is using PCs.
After they reach certain age, they've switched to PC games, at least in the past. Let's see what will happen now.
Gamers use primarily PC (Windows, because forced BS Anticheats), consoles are minority.
Probably because big tradition of piracy here, for long time it was legal to download anything. Even after forced change from EU, it's somewhat grey area and you can torrent anything, without VPN and nobody will care. But regarding pirating games, it changed years ago, with Steam of course. Like everywhere else.
Still it's funny that we have same price or sometimes even higher than US and our median salary is ~5x lower than US. :-) Here we call it "specific market", meaning "everybody buys it and everybody's stupid".
Only prosecuted cases I know, it was people uploading movies (usually local production) and they've made money from it.
In case of Germany and their automation of spamming letters from lawyers with ransom for €1k because someone on your internet torrented something. That's totally ridiculous from our point of view and it would spawn huge public backlash. I think that even lawyers torrents here :D
(US minnesota) recently a 23 year old new hire advised me that he doesn't have a normal computer or laptop and he buys plane tickets, files his taxes, plans projects etc on a phone or ipad. Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
> Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
Sad, but true. Recent batch of new hires where I work, same age range - mid-late 20's, none of them have computers at home except their work issued laptop. They are by far the biggest source of help desk tickets for us, and same story as you, using phone & iPad for everything at home.
Honestly concerns me for talent recruitment in the future, if AI isn't doing everything tech when that time comes - kids only tech experiences now are fully locked down walled gardens, takes away both the ability and incentive to tinker, explore, or even troubleshoot. Whole generation of new workers coming in without even the most basic of troubleshooting/problem solving skills. Have a few at my work where even just reading an error message on the screen seems overwhelming to them.
I had my first personal computer in 1986. But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.
90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically if your employer uses one of the major payment providers like ADP or worse case taking a picture of your W2, clicking “Next” a few times after answering a few questions and it’s done.
Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.
Plans? For my personal projects I use Trello. I have an M2 MacBook Air that I only bought when I was between jobs for around a month to do a side contract.
My wife wanted a new computer to replace her aging x86 MacBook Air and then her older iPad went out. We bought an iPad Air 13 inch and paid $70 for a regular old Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and that’s her “computer” now.
Planning a trip is one of the best usecases for not being phone-only. If it was jut "open app and buy ticket" then it'd be fine, but most trips involve a lot of moving parts that need to be in sync.
Comparing multiple different websites, copying and pasting information to share, looking up locations, etc. All way easier with a mouse, keyboard, and large tabbed browser windows.
Even Airbnb is better on desktop, since it very easily resets your search queries on the mobile app, because state is managed differently vs browser you can leave 10 different spots or multiple queries open in different tabs, which is common issue in mobile apps. And tab switching on mobile browsers is very slow.
I feel exactly the same: Context switching is awful on a mobile, but great on something with a mouse and keyboard. Even copy and paste on mobile still feels weird after 10 years of doing it.
[Context: this isn’t bragging my wife and I got rid of everything we physically owned and downsized so we could do this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159562]
We travel so much, we keep things as “simple” as possible - Hilton and Hyatt brand hotels 95% of the time, Delta for domestic flights and preferably Delta or SkyTeam (AirFrance, Virgin Airlines, etc) for international flights. We have status with Hilton, Hyatt and Delta (Platinum Medallion) and Delta lounge access. Of course we have TSA Precheck and Clear.
We found a couple that runs a few AirBnbs in Costa Rica for our winter stays there starting next year.
In october 2022, my wife and I got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in 4 suitcases, sold our cars, rented our home [1] out to our adult son (and two of his friends that we considered family) and flew one way trips to 15 different cities until landing in our then second home [2] in Florida. We did all of the planning via a shared Google Sheet on our phone, the Delta and American airline apps and Hilton and Hyatt hotel apps.
During the past 7 months, we’ve had trips to Vegas, Costa Rica, 4-5 flights back home to ATL, a few flights to see my parents in south GA, DC, London and Niagara Falls Canada, we still have a few trips back to Atlanta and to see my parents this year.
While we are doing all of this traveling together, my wife flies to conferences and I did travel semi frequently for business as a consultant but that has died down.
At the same time, I’m managing the best use of Delta Skymiles, when to transfer points from Amex to AirFrance to get cheap domestic flights on Delta (check out r/awardtravel), Hilton points, Hyatt points either directly or by transferring from Chase. These are all using the apps.
I have a Google sheet to keep track of various credit card perks (Delta stays credits, companion passes, etc)
I have a spreadsheet with tabs for the next couple of years plans - next year we are staying in Costa Rica for a 45 days in an Airbnb and 3-4 cities domestically during the summer and a couple of other random domestic flights during the year.
I am also keeping track of my budget, when is the best time to “nomad” based on potential rental income from my home [2].
While we have one account for hotels and a shared calendar, miles flying are based on “butts in seat”, whoever flies gets the miles. But you can book flights for others using your miles. We juggle those together too.
This is all from our phones usually at night.
We really have this down to science after 3+ years.
[1] we sold our primary home last year
[2] our current home is a unit in a condotel (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp) we own. When we leave for months at a time, we just pack everything we own in 4 suitcases and store what we can’t in our one car - like my “desk” which is just a card table.
We then put our unit in the rental pool and get income whenever someone stays in our unit. That covers our mortgage and all inclusive HOA fee. But that really only works in March - mid April (spring break), during the summer and the last two or three weeks of the year.
> But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.
Well no, the UI on a phone is severely dumbed down because it has to work with a smaller screen and touch input. You can do the same stuff, sometimes, but with more effort.
Like, I could program on my phone, if I wanted. But that would suck major ass. It has the same capabilities, but certainly nowhere near the convenience. Even just running two things at once. It's... possible... on an iPhone. But it's not a desktop with split screen. And, if it can do split screen, I really have to squint, right?
Programming on a phone is actually pretty amazing if you can run a good overlapping window manager and an OS that won't randomly kill background tasks. I had a phone running Linux for a while and it was great I wrote a ton of unit tests for my side projects on it while taking the train. One time I was out and ran into some UI issue and fixed it right there on the bus. There's nothing like that now and everything that's available is so bad no one even understands what they're missing.
I'm sure, because phone have multiple problems. One is the software, usually it's fisher-price levels of dumbed down. Buttons are huge because people have fat fingers.
So we can fix the software, but we still have hardware limitations. The hardware is small. The screen is small. There's no keyboard, only buttons on said screen. I can open a document on my phone, yes. But I see 1/10th the content I would on a computer screen - just because the screen is very small. I mean, we have these super high resolution displays... running at 400% scaling. Meanwhile, I have 1440p running at 100% on my computer.
That's, like, a lot more stuff that can be on the screen.
Modern phone hardware is incredible. Often the most powerful computer people own these days is their smartphone because it's so good.
And I ran my phone with unit scaling. You don't need everything blown up to 400% especially with keyboard driven UIs.
I'll have to try Plasma Mobile sometime. I've been using KDE for 10 years now, and I love it. Very excited to see how Linux on smartphones progresses.
What do I need to see on my phone that I can’t when I am doing my taxes or even more so planning a trip - which I do a lot of?
I launch the Delta app as a Delta loyalist (Platinum Medallion) to book my flight. I then launch the Hilton app (I am Hilton Diamond) and compare prices/convenience with hotels with Hyatt (I am Hyatt Explorist).
The only exception was when we were looking for an AirBnb for an extended stay in Costa Rica next year.
>That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically
Whoa interesting, so everyone is using 3rd party company service, is it paid service or free, I've checked their website and cannot understand if it's free or not for this basic level you've mentioned.
In my country, if this was a thing, that you must pay some company to file your taxes, it would probably cause public meltdown and end of any current government :)
Here, basic level taxes are done by your employer for you, by law, for free. Because actually they don't do taxes, but they only report amount of tax advances, social security, healthcare paid by your employer, to state, (all 3 is required by law to be paid and you or your employer have big legal problems if not). And also variables for tax deduction and then "something like IRS" will just send you tax return into your account.
And for any other cases(if you have more sources of income, eg.: salary + self-employed / rent) you must do taxes yourself, website for helping you to file taxes, is managed by state agency, for free.
Or you pay some money to "tax specialist" to file your taxes for you and liability to file it right goes after them (something like accountant, but hired only for this one task)
US tax forms and rules are insanely complex compared to other highly developed nations. Lots of people use a commercial product called Turbo Tax to help them.
If you just have a W2 and are taking the standard deduction (applicable to many, if not most taxpayers), then there is no insane complexity. Your tax document is one and a half pages and can be done with a pen and calculator.
If you have stock trades, IRA distributions, rental income, things like that, then yea, you probably need computer-based help.
Personally if I am going to spend more than $100 I am going to comparison shop and I like having multiple windows open to do it in.
Opening a specific airline's app and just getting whatever they have on offer is completely foreign to me. I would think I am getting cheated.
Also, federal taxes may be easy but the only way to free-file the state tax is to do it directly with the state and that means filling out a form myself.
I just mentioned in another comment, we travel a lot
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583545
We don’t comparison shop. Domestically flights on Delta, hotels are either Hyatt or Hilton brand hotels. Internationally? Most Delta partners (AirFrance, Virgin Airways) or Delta itself.
For Hilton, we get points directly and can transfer from Amex (rarely worth it). For Hyatt, points are more valuable and it’s easy to get points from Chase credit cards (r/churning) that can be transferred to Hyatt (saves us thousands a dollars a year sometimes).
On Delta, we have lounge access, 2 free checked bags, free regional (domestic, north and Central America) flight upgrades, priority check in, etc.
> 90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically
Why even pay TurboTax if you're just taking the standard deduction and have only W2 income? Might as well just paper file for free. Anything more complex than that, and having a desktop monitor and full size keyboard is very useful. I can imagine even filling out 5 stock trades in TurboTax on a phone would be quite painful.
> Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.
This one bit me recently as I did some traveling. None of the major airline apps even work on my phone anymore. Their developers all just up and decided to block use of their app on older phones with full-screen modals preventing the software from working. My only choice is to buy a new phone or do my flight booking on a desktop. Mobile apps are an absolute shit show unless you have a <= 5 year old phone.
Spending $30 bucks to save time once per year is well worth it to me. I live in a state without state taxes so I don’t have to pay for state filing.
Netherlands here. Most people I know (outside of gamers) tend to have a laptop only if they have one for work anyway, they use their phones for banking, tax, searching the correct spelling of words etc. That's in the age groups from like 30 all the way to 70.
I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.
For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
Yes, top of the list, it shows :)
Latops and desktops, it's a mix here. Older people had mainly desktops in the past. That's my experience, at least.
Banking, yeah mainly phones because of ridiculous forced banking apps from corporate masters, like everywhere else? (certain bank even lost a lot of customers because of that)
Taxes, if you are just an employee, taxes are done by your employer for you, by law. (I presume it's a post-communism BS, so people doesn't pay attention how much taxes we pay.)
If you have other types of income, you do it yourself, you have app/website to click through it, easy. Not automatic though. Self-employed IT pay less taxes than normal employees :D and overall lower-income people pay bigger taxes by percentage, what a great country :D
We call your country Holland, great country imho, If I would thinking about moving, that's top option for me.
Only thing that keeps me here are best gun laws in EU (I have Glock, AR15 clone, Bren3 ordered), you can conceal carry nearly everywhere, you can even use gun for self-defense, sadly very low criminality here :)
Hell, I can even legally carry katana, not kidding.
Linux is used only by IT people, friends cannot switch because they play MP games with invasive Anticheat running on kernel.
Personally, I'm only switching people to Linux if they cannot afford new PC because of Win11 upgrade. Zorin OS usually.
College students will have laptops or a laptop-like device.
Must be circles. I just visited relatives, and brought my laptop as well as my phone; I barely used the laptop. But my brother always uses his, and his kids used laptops, and even one of my great nieces used a laptop. Did they have phones? Yes.
Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.
Nearly everyone in our family’s (public, Massachusetts) high school writes papers exclusively on their phone.
Wow, isn't that painful without a big screen and keyboard? [1] Most primary schools here (NL) use Chromebooks or Windows laptops. High schools sometimes have a BYOD, but you certainly have to bring a laptop.
[1] Of course, you can hook up most phones to a display, keyboard, mouse, but that blurring the lines a bit. A Samsung DeX device or future Pixel desktop mode device hooked up to peripherals is pretty much a desktop (Pixel will even support Linux apps in a VM).
To you or me, yes. And I would say “oh they just don’t know what they’re missing” but they all have laptops and chromebooks but prefer to use their phones.
I'm a millenial and I'm touch typing. The idea of writing long texts on a phone or tablet feels ridiculous to me. I already get annoyed when I have to write an e-mail on my phone. Also, I find the mobile UX for text formatting, cut/copy/paste extremely frustrating.
Interesting. I'm also in MA, and my daughters (like all their classmates) mostly use the chromebooks issued by their public high school. They strongly prefer their macbooks tho. Granted, we live in an affluent town. But I thought the chromebooks were a statewide thing.
I'm in San Jose and it's school-issued Chromebooks here, too, though many students have their own [superior] laptop they are able to use. In the case of my household, my son has a Thinkpad X1 Carbon and my daughter has a Pixelbook Go, I use a MacBook Pro M1 and my wife uses an old Pixelbook or an old iPad with a Magic Keyboard. Everyone's pretty much chained to their phones but recognize a real keyboard and bigger screen are beneficial for certain tasks (like writing, or Khan Academy, or even consuming media).
We’re also in a quite affluent town, and yes everyone does have chromebooks. But they’re considered uncool to use.
In highschool classes forever ago we had to write 20+ page papers. I can't imagine trying to do that on a phone!
These days might be gone, with the availability of LLMs now. You only need to prompt a bit, then it is all copy and paste. I have no idea if the students are learning a whole lot this way, though.
Interesting. My great nieces have Lenovos (Windows) that they use for school work and light gaming. They'd like better gaming laptops, but don't have them.
This is incredible, wow.
Have they ever tried to use a real computer for that? Can they afford a real computer? Would they prefer a bigger screen and a real keyboard over a tiny screen and an even smaller keyboard? Maybe they just don't have the experience of using a real computer to know how far superior it is to a tiny screen/keyboard?
Using a phone to write papers seems like an exercise in masochism, if better alternatives are available.
It's also possible that their peer group that does use laptops to write papers is doing far better in many ways.
Yes, this is a very affluent district. Everyone has a chromebook from school and most have a macbook from their parents. They prefer the phone. (“Big computers are more of an old person millennial thing.”)
They sound young and dumb, to the point that their opinion on this matter is irrelevant. They will figure it out eventually.
How do you write long school papers on the phone's tiny screen and keyboard?
ChatGPT?
Good point. You don't even need to use the screen and keyboard for that, just voice prompts. Kids are already living in the future.
With your thumbs
Right, slowly and painfully, with a lot of mistakes. Mouse and keyboard is still, by far, the most efficient input method into a computer.
Why is this is a top comment? Market share is a relative measure. Even if there is a drop in the number of personal computers, still it's an achievement that the drop didn't affect Linux, while it affected other platforms.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
I disagree. Imagine that Linux became the OS used on 95% of personal computers. According to your reasoning there wouldn't be much to celebrate. Says who?
>everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets
And of the remaining desktop/laptop users, 90% of their work is being done in a browser. Which makes Linux distros like Ubuntu suitable for more people.
If you are doing all of your work in a browser anyway, you might as well use a less finicky iPad with longer battery life with a regular Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Why would I recommend a Linux system?
A few reasons:
1. iPadOS is kind of ass. Multi-tasking is lacking, cursor support is ehhh, and applications are still dumbed-down. This means more clicks, more actions, to do the same thing.
2. Bluetooth is ass, trust me I know. Thing will disconnect and you will need to manually reconnect them. I don't know why in the year 2025 bluetooth isn't completely seamless, but it isn't.
3. Rinky-dink keyboard and real keyboard is night and day. I've used those iPad keyboards. They suck.
We are talking about people who want to use the web for everything and real windowing, menus etc is coming to iPads this fall
2. Bluetooth works fine. I haven’t ever needed to re-pair my Bluetooth keyboard to my Mac or iPad
3. The iPad works with any random Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Bluetooth keyboard support has been available on the iPad since 2010. Bluetooth mouse support has been available for 7 years+.
If you have problems with Bluetooth keyboards, that says more about other operating systems. I’ve used them since my G4 Mac Mini in 2006.
I've used an iPhone. I know, for me, bluetooth does not work fine. It drops somewhat frequently.
As for keyboards and mice, sure, they work, but what's the point? If we have to attach a keyboard to an iPad and carry it around as it's own thing, then a laptop is more convenient. It has a keyboard, mouse, and screen all built in one thing. No bluetooth required, no charging required.
Are we talking about Bluetooth headsets now? I thought we were talking about keyboards and mice.
So what crappy Bluetooth headphones are you using? I haven’t had any issues with either my AirPods Pro or my cheap $60 Beats Flex.
And you can go months without recharging a keyboard or mouse. The advantage of the iPad is I don’t need a keyboard or mouse all of the time - well my wife doesn’t. It has built in cellular which is unlimited via T-mobile and when I go on an airplane, I can leave my keyboard and mouse in my bag.
And honestly, I hate working on just my laptop for any period of time and I still take my Roost laptop stand and a keyboard and mouse with me and I have an external USB powered/USB video external monitor I take with me and sometimes use my iPad as a third monitor for my laptop.
> Why would I recommend a Linux system?
Greater control over what hardware and software you wish to run. e.g. you wouldn't have to follow Apple's decisions in making things obsolete and effectively keep old hardware running for a lot longer if you so wish. There's also a possible issue in having a U.S. based company in control of your O.S.
But most people could care less as long as they have the apps they need. They don’t want to muck around with their computers. I’ve been programming as a hobby since 1986 and professionally since 1996 and I don’t want to muck around with my computer.
But the comment is about most people only caring about the browser.
> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.
Interesting. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a personal computer at home. Mostly laptops. With the exceptions of nerds like myself, the signifier that someone is a gamer is that their home computer is a tower rather than a laptop.
I wonder how much regional variation there is around this sort of thing? It sounds like it might be quite a lot.
FWIW, this is my experience too. I'm 50yo, live in the Boston area.
Both my parents run on Microsoft Excel. Neither of them care much for phones or tablets, but if there was an ExcelDeck running ExcelOS and it had a web browser and worked like the desktop version of Excel does, maybe they would go for it.
As it stands though, that's not the case, so I'll be stuck supporting a couple of Windows desktops permanently.
Before you suggest the app versions of Excel or Google Sheets, that's already a step too far. My mom told me she's "basically done learning new technology" and that's just how it's going to be.
The truth is, it doesn't really matter.
What's important is that we have an alternative to keep Microsoft and Apple honest. If they overdo it with their crappy ideas - like showing ads in the start menu or recording the desktop - then people can easily switch, at least for personal computing.
But those "features" exist, and people did not switch (at least not in great numbers).
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here.
> [...] (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets)
Somewhat unrelated but something I never see discussed is how the form factor of the computing device changes our relationship to, and the types of, media that we produce and consume.
One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media; hence the concomitant rise of picture and video and the smartphone camera, which is now the primary medium through which many, many people view the world. Editing anything longer than a Tweet is torturous on a phone or even a tablet, and I suspect that this lack of ergonomics is what leads to the proliferation of reductive, simplistic, short-form, and byte-sized thinking.
Computing "interface culture" was once hyper-literate; "in the beginning was the command line" [0], and people's primary way of seeing the internet was through words, keyboards, and terminals. Now we have the "colossal success of GUIs" and a Disney-fied [0], touchscreen interface to computing, where the control mechanisms used by adults are the exact same as the ones used by toddlers.
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
> One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media
The key addition obviously being “for me.”
For others tablets (and for some others, phones) are what they use for producing long-form textual media.
I, for example, have no issue producing long-form textual media on my iPad w/ Magic Keyboard.
I’m sure that you will feel as though I’m not producing Real Long-Form Textual Media.
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I'll chime in here; while I'm in one of those niches you described at the start of your comment (with multiple laptops, a gaming PC, and a homelab made up of what I'd call a reasonable number of physical computers of various descriptions), me and a few other friends of mine recently made the jump away from Windows and to various Linuxes on our gaming PCs.
I went for Ubuntu, while my friends mostly went to some type of "gaming-optimized" flavour of Arch.
I'm definitely an edge case as most computing goes, but it feels for the first time like the gaming-on-Linux train's gaining traction, and there's enough community support out there that making the jump feels like a palatable ideal.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Why? If Windows & OSX desktops are in decline, but Linux isn't, I'd still celebrate that - apparently Linux is serving the more "important" / long-lived use cases?
The article is specifically claiming a shift and growth. But if all that really changed was an increase in percentage due to less devices overall there really isnt much of a shift or growth.
I think there is likely an argument that the people that would have previously used Linux are likely using Linux for tasks that would not easily work on a phone or a tablet and are likely more technical users.
Where as many users who would have previously used Windows or Mac for general basic computing can easily accomplish those tasks on their phones or tablets. (Not all tasks obviously, but there are a lot of tasks that an iPad can do that you would have previously done on your traditional computer).
That is why to me just celebrating a percent change really is not telling us much of the story. And to be clear here, I am asking the question not to say that the number is not something to celebrate but to ask why the number is the way it is and celebrate accordingly.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
I've been saying this for a while, in the sense that the "year of the Linux desktop" isn't going to come from mass adoption of Linux on the desktop, but will come because overall "desktop" market share will decrease to the point where if you need a desktop, you are probably technical enough and more likely to be running Linux.
Desktop (and laptop) computing is becoming niche outside of work. Like you said, most folks just use their phones, and maybe an iPad. By having a non-day job computer at home, and having it be a core device, already puts you in a niche group of users.
Gamers, devs, media professionals and enthusiasts are the remaining desktop computing users. Linux is well suited to take over gamers and devs, media professionals will continue using Macs. So yeah, it might appear Linux usage is growing, but I think the more likely story is it's relatively stable and overall desktop usage is shrinking.
Yeah, are there any big box retailers selling machines with Linux installed as an option? Maybe the numbers are small enough for hobbyists to make a dent, but until you see Linux machines in best buy, etc., this is probably due more to people dumping their personal windows machine in favor of a using their work laptop or iPad almost exclusively.
Dell
I'm not sure but going on 3 years now after having mostly only used it full time at a previous job where everyone's workstation was a Linux one.
It helps that I can now do all of my gaming on Linux, so I'm not touching Windows again, outside of an employer paying for my work devices to use it on.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
So, the true meaning of the "Year of the Linux Desktop" was that in the end there would only be a single unit left?
> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.
A Linux desktop is far better to run LLM experiments with.
My home, tinker workstation used to be Windows but there was no reason to keep it that way, when most of the build and support tooling prefer Linux.
That's a tiny minority of PC users, though.
It’s not 50% territory; but it’s enough to push it up from 1-2% to 5%.
There’s interest in LLM and GenAI beyond regular tinkerers; local NSFW image generator models are apparently a thing.
I think this is probably it. That plus the SteamDeck and maybe other random linux running devices.
>Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here.
That's very anecdotal of you. Proves absolutely nothing.
Since we're posting anecdotes here, everyone I know has at least one computer that is not "their work computer" (which is confusing, is it employer-owned, or just personally owned for their own purposes?).
Many people do not like typing on tablet or phone keyboards, real keyboards are much nicer. Bigger screens are also much nicer than tiny phone screens and most tablet screens.
I suspect your anecdotal circle is probably very young and may just not be able to afford a real computer, or have never used one, so they are fine with their tiny devices, not knowing the benefits of having a more traditional laptop or desktop computer.
This is largely people who were previously Windows customers but who chose to go another way. Microsoft is doing a lot of shenanigans with their monopoly power, and anti-trust is largely toothless.
I know quite a lot of professionals, who for them the last straw was purchasing the professional edition, and then finding out later after an update that their company lock screens now have ad's posted; and worse, those ads frequently have malware that cause even more headaches for them in a unmanageable way.
The bean counters at MS pushed their biggest supporters over the knifes edge, and alot more people are getting serious about alternatives to MS now.
Tablets and phones have replaced PCs for casual use and content consumption. If you want to make anything beyond posts and videos you usually need a PC.
Mobile OSes are strictly designed for consumption and are too restricted for most other use cases. It’s an OS limit not a hardware issue.
How many of the Linux desktops counted here are Steam Decks?
The stats come from website trackers - do people browse the web on Steam Decks?
People do all kinds of crazy stuff with steam decks. I don't own one, but at least I give to steam that they created a general computing device that people can use however they please instead of yet another walled garden console. It would not surprise me if people actually also use them to browse the web.
I do. It's a device that is often hooked up to my TV so it becomes the shared device for watching things like Youtube.
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I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. Due to licensing costs and our certifications, we can't sell anything with Windows. My coworkers install Ubuntu, but I install Linux Mint. We don't have any clue if people keep using Linux or install Windows, but it's cool to think we're helping to move this needle.
Edit: might as well link to the merch: https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling
I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines? A new machine for an enterprise or gamer will probably retain windows because it's needed but people not using their computers for more than surfing will be happy enough.
On that side-note I would also not be surprised if people are leaving "computers" altogether in favor of phones, it's a capable enough computer today for most lay-people, my ex and her parents don't have computers anymore and my daughter hardly uses her either.
Those that actually need computers such as developers are more prone to use Linux anyhow (especially when Microsoft is pushing annoying features such as forced reboots for those dropping their computers anyhow onto powerusers).
Anecdotal evidence, but Steams' Proton compatibility layer that lets you run Windows-only games on Linux works really really well. I haven't had to log into years and years by now.
I've been gaming on Linux for about a decade now full time, and somewhat before that too. I don't have a single Windows machine any more. My laptops are running Arch, my wife's personal Laptop runs Mint, her work machine is Windows because it has to, my work machine is Ubuntu, and my 5yo plays Minecraft on an Arch + Gnome laptop.
7-8 years ago it was pretty frustrating to spend £4k+ on a gaming rig to be unable to play a bunch of titles but I will not use Windows, I just accepted it.
Fast forward to today, and I'm playing Helldivers 2, with its anti-cheat and everything online with my nephew who's on Windows and getting far, far better performance (granted my PC is also more powerful). I can play the modern DOOM games with better performance than if I was running Windows on the same hardware.
My point is, Linux gaming is only getting better, I now also own a ROG Ally which I "flashed" (installed the same way you would any other Linux distro) with Bazzite straight out of the box without even booting Windows and I can play the single-player games I like to while travelling, or can have a quick game of Helldivers with my nephew if I'm not near my PC but have a stable connection. When I need/want to I can plug it into a monitor/kb/mouse with a single cable and have a full desktop with HDR, VRR etc.
I'm mostly a Mac user but I tested Windows 11 versus Bazzite in VMs in my Unraid server, and the Windows 11 install was a nightmare to then be left with a nightmare UI and a bundle of GPU driver issues, meanwhile Bazzite took two clicks and worked.
Obviously there are very cutting edge drivers you can't get on Linux, and Nvidia support is questionable, and some anti-cheat doesn't work, etc, but if you mostly play games released in [current year - a few] on hardware released [current year - a few] it's really a much more enjoyable experience.
I've never really used old hardware, and generally I've not had too many issues using the latest hardware with Linux. I don't tend to buy PC hardware on release day either, so within a few weeks/months of release when I'm buying, drivers are usually available. I've been through a half dozen generations of Intel laptop for work usually with Nvidia GPUs but my current one is the first with an Intel Arc GPU, for which there are no Ubuntu 24.04 drivers as far as I'm aware, and I'm not entirely sure whether it is/can run the dedicated GPU right now or if I'm using the iGPU; but my work doesn't require GPU accel beyond my desktop and my IDE and terminal (Alacritty).
The biggest issue I find is external devices that need firmware flashing require some crap piece of Windows software from the manufacturer in order to flash, so I'll spin up a Windows VM and USB passthrough to do the update then blow it away again.
I hate W11 to the point that I am still running W10 (IoT) on my machines (I also run Solus and Mint). That said, I have never experienced what you say in the first paragraph.
Windows has at least three screens in the install that are upsells on other Microsoft products, plus a screen where you have to disable multiple analytics trackers. The GPU driver issue might have been a VM issue but to get even basic support I needed to install the AMD drivers, and ended up in some endless loop of the installer telling me it could install drivers for my GPU, installing them, then saying it wasn't supported. I figured the issue out eventually, after watching the AMD installer (with ads!) run for the Nth time, but like I said I'm not trying anything cutting edge, so drivers baked into the OS that I don't have to think about are much nicer.
The case that this is true is only if you don't have an Nvidia GPU or don't play D3D12 games.
I tried it, discovered that Nvidia has a known regression that causes anywhere up to 25% lower performance compared to Windows in GPU limited games in D3D12, and immediately went back to Windows.
I'll never understand why people keep championing Linux for gaming when it has such a severe regression on the most common gaming GPU vendor. Steam says 75%. An Nvidia employee even stated that the fix is not trivial so they're not committing to a timeline for a fix. This is a year+ old issue. They're never fixing it because it doesn't affect CUDA.
https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/164#issuecommen...
Add it to the list of the death by a thousand cuts of Nvidia as a gaming powerhouse. I would have said that they would have fixed it eventually to be chosen by Valve for a Steam Deck, but they’re gorged on AI money at this point. I don’t think they’re the future of gaming GPUs at all. They’re very slowly abandoning the market through those cuts.
I hear this all around and I am myself running GNU/Linux almost all the time, but running games on Steam on my default OS, which is a Debian with KDE currently, that is more miss than hit. I even know someone who has almost the same hardware, also runs a GNU/Linux system and for them almost all games work using Proton. For me however they don't. I already tried proprietary graphics card drivers instead of the ones that come with the OS for amdgpu, HWE kernel, another distro, using Steam installer downloaded from website ... nothing seems to fix the issue. When I click on the big green "Play" button in Steam, for many times it loads for a moment, and the button turns into a blue "stop" button, but then just turns back into a green "play" button, never starting the game. Mind, some games work, like Stardew Valley for example. But I think those are mostly already made to work cross platform.
I have no idea what I can still try, and it annoys me, that for most games I still have to reboot into Windows to play them. I seem to have had more luck following guides for using WINE for specific games in the past, when I made games like StarCraft 2 work better than on Windows, than I have had with Steam and Proton so far.
So anecdote. It is not smooth sailing for everyone yet, unfortunately, and I don't know what the issue is.
Debian is just not going to have access to as much up to date software as it probably needs, even with testing back ports, to run well. I say this as a very long time Debian user that is really struggling in this day and age to find a place for Debian among my devices at this point.
Out of curiosity, what distribution have you been using lately instead of Debian?
Anecdotally, I've been using Fedora Workstation for a few years already, and my Steam + Proton Experimental experience has been fantastic with an AMD GPU using the drivers that come with the kernel.
Although I must admit, I miss having a Debian-based distribution sometimes, because in some situations I can't find rpm packages for more specific things I'm trying to do in my system. The problem is I just don't know any other distribution that's not Debian Testing that could work like Fedora Workstation but with .deb packages.
Fedora Workstation (42)
I add flathub.org and remove the fedora flatpak repo. The few other things I need are in copr/terra, but honestly they are very rare. I think I have maybe 1 piece of software per thing that doesn't release a native .rpm (ghostty is one)
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/ https://terra.fyralabs.com/
When it comes to Steam, I go to steam -> settings -> compatibility -> Enable Steam Play for all titles
I have used Nvidia GPUs and more recently switched to an AMD 6700. No issues with either.
Which steam do you use? I have heard that some people have issues with the Snap, Flatpack or Native versions. Also for proton there are different "versions" you can try, experimental or 9 is usually what I run.
When a game doesn't work and the described symptoms happen, I usually try a few different Proton versions via the game's settings, but this has not helped me make a game run. If anything for some games it has reprocessed shaders or similar things that Steam games do before launching, maybe. But the result stays the same. Game is not starting, button changing back to "play" button.
Hang in there for Trixie. Some things should be better there, especially around WINE performance, cause of the upgraded kernel
Same. Finally no reason to boot Windows on any machine.
I’ve been wanting to do this for years on an old (and severely underpowered) MacBook Pro which I use with Windows exclusively for Games.
Do you have any recommendation for an extremely lightweight Linus distro which installs and runs Steam fine? It would be used exclusively for that, so it shouldn’t run a ton of background stuff.
You can login directly to steam big picture mode using gamescope if you have no need for a traditional desktop: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam#Big_Picture_Mode_from...
Depends on your view of lightweight, but probably XFCE Ubuntu (Xubuntu) will serve you great. Full featured without a ton of bloat, historically.
> Depends on your view of lightweight
Basically, what I care is that as I’m running the game, the system is consuming as few resources as possible. It’s an outdated machine, so every bit matters.
> probably XFCE Ubuntu (Xubuntu)
Thank you. Will check it out.
I'm a big fan of Linux. My small business and personal life run on it. You can download XFCE/Ubuntu spin at https://xubuntu.org/download/. If you develop on your Apple system, it will be pretty similar except
- App Installation via repositories is more common than single program installs. No DMG files. There is a similar concept to DMG with "snap" installs. Steam should probably be installed via a snap. You trust the producer (Valve). But most software and security should come through repos (in CLI, sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade)
- Home directory is /home/<username>
Much of the rest is similar -- Apple's BSD and Linux share a common Unix design progenitor.
Linux is way open to rewipe, just pay attention that you don't lose files. My first day on Linux in the mid 2000s, I somehow overwrite the file system allocation table with the content of an MP3. It was recoverable!
Good luck, and have fun!
Check out Bazzite. It started as a way to approximate SteamOS for general hardware.
Or if you have an AMD GPU, you could even try SteamOS itself, though it's intended for handhelds.
I thought about SteamOS but didn’t seem viable for that Mac.
Bazzite looks to be the next best thing. Probably what I’m looking for. Thank you.
For me Proton works sometimes, but I've had much more success with the third party Glorious Eggroll versions that include the Microsoft Codecs used by many games for in-game video.
> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?
I know that a large portion of our business is to other resellers and businesses. FWIW, long before I started working here, I replaced XP with Xubuntu on my parent's computer about 15 years ago. I told them that "it works like Windows[0]", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer and scanner worked great! I expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
[0] If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that most people don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. They care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs.
One thing I wonder about with people moving to linux is whether "it works like windows" can act as a safe and comfortable landing point, but then how many people explore and prefer the options that they then have access to.
One aspect MS has been criticized for over the past few versions of windows is that they are opinionated about how the base windows UI operates and looks for a very large number of users. One of the things I find interesting on the subreddits for some distros is a lot of posts is showing off how they've customized things, so you can nudge people towards the theming support or panel components you can swap out, or that you can have drastically different DEs with different operation models yet handle the same applications.
> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?
I got my hands on a Dell that was retired out of an office somewhere for $30+shipping. Add the cost of a couple HDDs, time spent removing a disc drive and installing Linux, I got myself a cheap backup server on my LAN.
They're great for machines you don't want to drop a lot on for basic utilities.
Would just like to add it’s not needed so much now. I’m a pretty avid gamer and I’ve been using Bazzite as my OS now for months without issue.
Proton has completely changed the game (pun not intended). All that’s really missing now is the big studios who won’t release their anticheat for Linux.
My intuition is that most people, unless they have specific needs, just keep it.
Most people likely don't have an opinion besides being able to browse the web and will not even be aware that they are not using Windows.
So this is great work! Keep it up!
I've sold linux mint laptops on ebay and I always reach out after sale basically saying "just to be clear, this isn't running windows, it's linux. I'll be happy to cancel if this isn't what you expected"
and 100% of the time the person was like "yes! Linux is what I wanted"
Well alright then, there you go...
Actually, as a long time Linux Desktop user, i have at least 4, refurbished bought Notebooks in my place yet. Beside the 4, another 3 new new bought Notebooks.
The reason why I buy refurbished is, that my use-cases don't need the newest hardware and for a long time, older hardware was more compatible with Linux and BSD for me. Also, you get for a small price, high quality hardware.
If you now ask yourself, why that many notebooks? Notebooks are like handbags. They have to match the occasion.
Agreed! Old laptops are more than powerful enough for Linux, and I like having purpose-oriented computers. The hobby programming computer doesn’t have games on it and is at any rate too weak to run them. The music laptop has every flac I ever ripped from a CD, and precious little disk space for anything else. And so on.
I am the same. I decided a few years ago that I really really like the thinkpad t450, and have gradually bought 5 of them online for a total cost of about 300 USD. I may never need to buy a laptop ever again.
Yes, over the past 15 years I bought at least a dozen used thinkpads of the X series (x201, x220, x230 and x1). Most of them are now with other family members and friends (they are now also Linux Desktop user). And I still use 3 of them. One daily, the other weekly, and the 3rd for conferences. Beside that, I am also a fan of the T and yet of the P series. And I have a small collection of thinkpads with the big blue logo from the A and R series, but that's mostly just for fun.
I thought the Windows license was burned into the BIOS, so a reinstall would pick it up automatically?
I worked selling refurb computers and this wasn't the case from Windows 95 - XP. The rise of TPMs and EFI is after that time so it's possible some newer system provides a way of tying licenses to computers, but it's not BIOS.
Well, it's been 2 decades so things do have changed.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/activate-windows...
https://superuser.com/questions/1575650/how-does-a-windows-d...
https://superuser.com/questions/1108151/windows-license-stor...
Windows XP has been launched 23 years ago. Things may have changed inbetween.
It’s not burned into the BIOS, instead Microsoft maintains a database mapping licenses to hardware identifiers. But transferable licenses still exist, and enterprise volume licenses are yet a different beast, so it all depends on what Windows license the PC was originally sold with, if any.
>It’s not burned into the BIOS, instead Microsoft maintains a database mapping licenses to hardware identifiers.
Wrong. IT IS 100% stored in the UEFI firmware, specifically ACPI tables, MSDM field. Only if that exists, it is then verified on-line for activation to make sure the license is genuine and matches the device ID you're referring to for witch the license was sold(typically for OEM) or if it's portable.[1]
On linux you should be retrieve the license via something like:
OR [1] https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-find-windows-10-oem-prod...It’s in the ACPI tables, in ACPI Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM), not the BIOS. An home user might be able to active it, but the repair shop probably can’t legally.
If it's tied to the hardware, there is no valid reason why the repair shop wouldn't be able to activate it -- a repair shop will use the same public license servers as consumers will.
Btw ACPI is a specification, not a separate piece of hardware. ACPI tables are stored in BIOS nvram, there is no other place for it to go.
The biggest issue right now is really the upcoming EOL of Windows 10. Most of these machines will be old enough (pre Intel 8th gen or Zen 2) that they won't be officially supported by Windows 11.
I make a note of both in listings where that is applicable.
On most machines we sell that's probably the case. I don't know of anything that stops me from linking people to the official Windows installation media on Microsoft's site, so I do that even on the listing.
That might be even worse then, you'd be reselling a machine which was licensed under the previous owner's Windows key
How is that worse when the key is bound to the hardware and non-transferable anyway?
why would it be non-transferable?
OEM licenses are legally (and practically) tied to the machine. There’s no way to transfer it.
Sorry, I thought it was a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44581124
In case of OEM, the license is never directly owned by the owner of the machine; the license is tied to the hardware, and you're selling it on with its license key attached. If you activate Windows using a bought license, that license does not get copied into the hardware.
The link is appreciated! I like the selection of ruggedized laptops.
Thanks! I've been going through my to-do stack, and there was quite a few there. They've been selling fast! I've got a stack of Toughbooks to go through, too... someday.
Hey, that seems like a cool gig
It is! If my supervisor didn't kick everyone out at 5 and lock the place, I'd probably work all night everynight nerding out over everything in there.
How do you keep them auto-updated? I've just started on Mint and I'm disappointed how the software installer/updater still needs the admin password.
You can either configure unattended updates (e.g. cron-apt or unattended-upgrade), or you can give system administration privileges to other users so they can accept pending updates. I don't think the latter is granular enough to only allow package upgrades, it also allows installing/removing packages.
The statscounter data is not reliable, and it is just embarrassing how often these posts make it to the HN frontpage.
You even have a demonstration in this very article, with the surge of classic Mac OS to 7% for several months. The data is obviously nonsense, and when it has errors nobody at the company cares about them. But when they have persistent "data reporting issues", why are we supposed to believe any of these numbers?
Bingo.
Cloudflare has also OS stats available and I'd imagine they are far more reliable. Some silver lining of them having such wide dragnet on the web. They report 4.4% Linux desktop marketshare in the US. Tbh I believe the summer vacation season probably influences the numbers here, but there is some real growth too.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
1. Radar is also reporting a Linux increase over the past month: 3.3% to 4.4%.
2. Both StatsCounter and Radar break out Linux and ChromeOS; if you combine them, StatsCounter hits 7.7%; Radar hits 6.3%.
3. That being said: Both StatsCounter and Radar experienced an anomalous drop in ChromeOS clients & rise in Linux clients over the past month. StatsCounter took ChromeOS from ~4.4% to 2.7%. Radar took it 2.6% -> 1.9%.
This kind of implies that something changed with a major ChromeOS device out that; some model/version maybe changed its UA and started reporting itself as a Linux device instead.
ChromeOS drop is pretty easily explained by it being predominantly used in education and schools being closed for summer. And that drop muddies all other numbers, because of course the percentages of others go up when one goes down. In summary, I'd wait until November (or at least October) before making any broad conclusions.
Yeah, schools being out explains the major drop in ChromeOS devices; check out Radar's 12 month view and how ChromeOS data looked August/September 2024.
But if it significantly explained the rise in other percentages, we'd see all the other shares go up. However, Windows and MacOS are flat; 64% and 30%, respectively, last and this month.
Only Linux went up; so its likely there's some genuine linux desktop adoption going on. But the rise in Linux marketshare is pretty steep; two months ago Radar measured it at 2.6%, now its 4.4%.
It could be legit. There's been a significant uptick in tech Youtubers pushing linux content (LTT and Jayz have both done recent videos on it), including the Lenovo Legion Linux vs Windows perf comparisons which found Linux to be faster, Lex Fridman just interviewed DHH and they spoke at length about linux setups (~1M viewers on that likely), and the pushback against Apple in the tech circles is reaching a fever pitch.
I find this compelling, alongside the fact ChromeBooks are well placed in retail shops and usually the cheapest things you can buy. They are also ubiquitous in elementary schools. This is more about ChromeBooks than linux.
Add the fact that all my kids hate their school chromebooks.... maybe this isn't such great news for Linux afterall.
School Chromebooks are usually locked down (i.e. full of spyware) and poorly maintained. It's no wonder that children dislike them.
Mentioned this in another comment [0], but analytics.usa.gov has the % of visitors on Linux operating systems at 5.7% in 2025, up from 4.5% in 2024. Of course "visitors to U.S. government websites" is not fully representative of all U.S. computer users, but it's worth noting.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44582058
Additionally, with the number of people who use ad blockers on Linux and given that statcounter mostly uses 3rd party JS tags, I highly doubt these numbers are correct.
There's a discussion in a peer thread about how people never notice its Linux and keep using their refurbished machines as-is. This too, is surprising to me, as my own experience as well as the ones I've heard in person from IT folks and IT-related forums online, people immediately notice that the UI looks different and panic as to how to achieve their current tasks. I'm skeptical of that entire thread too.
In general, I just wonder how much of any popular forum is just people LARPing. I do wish that it didn't occur here, though it's undoubtedly difficult to moderate.
> people immediately notice that the UI looks different and immediately panic as to how to achieve their current tasks
This was probably a bigger problem 10 years ago than it is now. Plenty of people never do anything at all with their computer besides opening a browser. No matter what OS you use, "click the Chrome logo" still applies.
I've watched my grandparents use a computer. I guarantee I could swap out Windows for KDE or Cinnamon and, as long as I make the wallpaper the same and I put the Chrome icon in the same place, they wouldn't notice anything had changed. I'm not actually going to do that, because then I become the only person in the family who can tame their computer if it starts acting out, but still.
Also, Microsoft's own UI isn't a steady target. Windows 11 is, dare I say it, more akin to Plasma 6 than it is to Windows 7.
Unless they're using JS for something specific, getting the user to load anything at all would give them the OS from the useragent string in almost all cases. I'd believe their URLs being included in default filter lists though.
Pretty sure OS X and macOS should be combined, not doing that feels like amateur hour, very puzzling. But even with that in mind, you see wild ups and downs as large as 3.5% a month from 10/24 to 11/24 to 12/24 to 01/25 and there’s no way in hell actual deployments are fluctuating like that. Error bars like that make a number of 5% pretty meaningless, however feel-good it is.
Also, for people unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem: the OS X => macOS rebranding happened back in 2016, IIRC the Safari user agent never ever included macOS (Safari on M4 Macs running latest macOS 15.5 reports itself as “Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7” in its UA), so absolutely no idea where they’re getting this new “macOS” category. Maybe they publish technical details of their methodology somewhere? I can’t bother to check.
Don't confuse percentage points with percents.
25%+-3.5% means it's 5%+-0.7% for proportional error bars. They don't have to be linear, true, but they are certainly not 5% +- 3.5% either.
Note that OS X goes down for the same period. I believe Apple is calling it MacOS now.
So that looks like it might be some change in how Apple computers are reporting their OS.
Indeed, OS X goes down, and obviously none of us actually believe that. But not only does Statcounter report that clearly faulty number, but they have yet to fix the problem.
This happens all the time. When their numbers are clearly wrong, they don't care about the numbers enough to fix even the glaring problems, their sample is unsound, and their methodology is unpublished, why exactly are we supposed to give any of their numbers any credence?
What you've written is the first I've heard of a recent change to the Safari on OS X user-agent string, and I see no indication of it in my access logs. What's it supposed to be now? It seems a bit unlikely, and given Safari never ran on classic Mac OS, it seems like a company that's supposed to specialize in analytics should be able to handle it...
I don't understand why Statcounter reports them separately though. They're just two different versions of the same OS, and those are grouped for other OSes in this chart. Makes no sense.
"mac OS" not "MacOS". MacOS is for the older pre-OS X versions.
It's "macOS" [1] if you really want to be pedantic. However, it's still "Intel Mac OS X" in Safari UA even on M1 MacBook, so why Statcounter data includes both OS X and macOS remains a mystery.
[1] https://www.apple.com/macos/macos-sequoia/
"macOS" not "mac OS", to align with "iOS", "iPadOS", "watchOS" and "tvOS".
> the surge of classic Mac OS to 7% for several months
I'm not sure what's up with listing both "OS X" and "macOS", but I'm quite confident it's not classic Mac OS.
This could be related to the re-versioning of macOS from 10.x to the year of the release.
Can you even have a successful TLS handshake with Mac OS 9 ?
There is a port of Mbed TLS to Classic MacOS[1] which has TLS 1.2 enabled but per the README.md probably not the right cihper suites (it only has AES-CBC ciphers enabled by default) to connect to servers configured per the widely-used Mozilla "intermediate" recommendations[2] (which require AES-GCM or ChaCha20 ciphers).
[1] https://github.com/bbenchoff/MacSSL [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS
I wonder what a more reliable measure would be. Maybe something like the "Crane Index" where we count the number of new software packages for Linux. Particularly, it makes sense to focus on paid software, because there's actually some bar to entry there (setting up an LLC, accepting payments, etc.) I haven't actually looked into this, but I think the initial data for this figure is zero, and we're projected to reach zero by next year.
You can also look at the Steam survey as another data point. Linux use among English speakers is just above 5%, but the data is biased toward power users/ gamers.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
The article claims this is due to Apple rebranding OS X back to MacOS with newer releases.
Are you disputing that? Or did you miss that in the article?
That’s not classic macOS… that’s modern macOS, as in post OS X dude
For another anecdata point, https://analytics.usa.gov tracks user device demographics to all visitors of U.S. government websites. Which of course might skew in ways different than the general U.S. population. But checking out the numbers right now for Linux users:
Last 30 days: 6%
2025 so far: 5.7%
2024: 4.5%
edit: analytics.usa.gov includes iOS and Android in its operating systems breakdown — e.g. Windows has a 32% share vs OP's 63%. Assuming most of Linux users are on desktop, it could be the case that Linux share in desktop users is a bit higher than 6%
I am in this category, but I'm growing increasingly frustrated with the state of the market for OS's:
I've used macOS for work for many years and Arch-based derivatives for personal desktop. The challenge with that has always been gaming: Gaming on Linux _mostly_ works, but third-party launchers (e.g., Battle.net, Origin, etc.) HATE it. I also don't love the Proton shuffle (i.e., "Which version of Proton do I need to use to get this to work?"), but it's tolerable for me. I'll tell you for whom it _isn't_ tolerable: my wife (who mostly uses a different system running Windows 10, but sometimes wants to use the more powerful gaming PC running Linux). And thus the only remaining choice for the home system has been Linux + Windows (in some capacity).
Now, I've not used Windows full-time since 7, but I recently installed Windows 11 (via QEMU using LookingGlass) and it is simply TERRIBLE. There are full-blown ads in the Start Menu, the built-in search ignores your default browser/search engine settings, and (critically) __you can no longer put the Start Menu bar at the top of the screen__ (It's less common, but I've done this my entire life).
I think it comes down to the following wishes:
A. I wish Windows 8/10/11 didn't suck so much.
B. I wish Linux was widely-supported by ALL game platforms.
C. I wish macOS gaming wasn't so expensive.
> I wish macOS gaming wasn't so expensive.
The ever increasing number of GPUs of the world are making the cloud PC gaming services ridiculously cheap. I only pay $12 USD/month (boosteroid, gaming only).
If I bought a gaming PC with similar specs, it would take over 7 years to pay it off (no use for a PC besides gaming). That would be 7 years of fixed hardware, where the cloud hardware specs keep improving with time, and I can pause the subscription whenever I want.
You definitely pay with some extra input latency, but not enough to impact my casual play. Definitely worth trying, if you have nice internet.
You can easily buy a gaming PC for less than $1000 that provides a better experience than cloud gaming. You also need to remember that these companies are trying to create a market for their product and right now they're happy to sell their services really cheap. Once its adopted it will be raised.
I am still using Windows 10. I use Flow Launcher ( https://www.flowlauncher.com/ ) and have it bound to ctrl-alt-shift-g, but then use an AutoHotkey binding to rebind it to Caps lock. Point being I almost never use the Start Menu, I just use Flow Launcher. And Flow Launcher has half the latency to display with no ads. When I'm forced to update to Windows 11 I may be forced to investigate alternate taskbars.
Fundamentally the thing that keeps me on Windows is battery life. I need to be able to trust that my laptop won't lose more than 20% of its charge in a week when not in use and Linux just can't reliably do that.
A related thing is stuff like play/pause/mute not working when the screen is locked.
I have a script that puts my laptop from suspend to hibernate automatically within some sane amount of time (hours), and so either I pickup my laptop within hours, or it’s hibernated and reliably not wasting my battery away while sleeping.
Windows 11 only sucks if you get the Home version. If you get the Pro version you can disable all the annoyances. New things pop up here and there with each update every few years (recently asking to connect my phone so I can see notifications), but those can be disabled easily.
It does suck resources so using it on Laptops is not ideal, but for desktop its by far the best, mostly because of WSL2 integration, which is mature enough to not only run graphical linux apps, but also supports CUDA.
For Laptops, honestly, Linux Mint with I3wm is the way to go. Once you get used to I3, its hard to go back standard display managers with icons and menus.
>New things pop up here and there with each update every few years
In my experience this is every few weeks.
Then you haven't disabled advertisements or product recommendations. You can do that in the Pro version.
I agree with this. Couple years ago I splurged on a nice Thinkpad X1 carbon, and decided to give windows a try after abstaining for many years. I really liked the WSL but overall it was a resource hog. It would blast the fan for seemingly no reason, the task manager would slow down, the laptop would overheat. And even playing basic games like freecell would randomly fail to launch, probably because it couldn't reach the ad server.
What really surprised me was how hard it is to switch back to Linux. After about a year using windows there was a ton of friction to get my mindset back in Linux. But I made the switch and I will never use windows willingly again.
I think that there are multiple things at play:
1. The statistics only show Desktop usage relative to each other. But I could totally imagine that macOS "loses" users to iPadOS. Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general (I see more and more people who don't actually have a personal computer anymore).
2. Valve (and others, surely) is doing an incredible job with video games on Linux. 20 years ago, I needed a dual boot just to play games. I dropped Windows when I stopped playing, and I started playing again thanks to the Steam Deck. I am convinced that many people today "need" an OS on which they can play video games, except that today they have a choice (thanks to Valve and others).
3. Privacy. I think it's becoming a lot more important outside the US (it's actually now a national security concern there), but I'm convinced that people are slowly learning about that. TooBigTech pushing to train their AIs with everything the users do surely has an impact on that.
> Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general
But this is desktop only. If someone stop using windows completely, it won't show a decrease in windows usage. This will basically only show when people switch from desktop OS.
You sure about that math? If there are 2 linux users and 8 windows users, then that's 20% linux, 80% windows. If one windows user quits using computers, then that's 2 linux users (out of 9 total) and 7 windows users (out of 9 total), or 22% linux and 77% windows users.
I had a Teams meeting for an outside of work topic this morning. Since all my personal machines are Linux based I was kinda happy I had my work laptop available with Windows and Teams installed.
Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...
After rebooting twice and only five minutes before the meeting started I reverted to my Linux desktop, opened the email with the link to the Teams meeting and was a minute early using the web version of Teams.
Phew, saved by Linux.
Kudos to Microsoft for making Teams web version operating system and browser agnostic. But fuck what they've done with Windows updates. Numerous coworkers also saying their computers decided to reboot of their own volition the last couple of days in order to install updates.
Maybe it's a worthwhile trade off for security, but I'm glad I had an alternative option this morning.
I'm the five-odd years since switching to Linux exclusive at home, my decision is only ever reconfirmed as correct.
(I'm a reformed gamer from a long while ago, but the very few games I do play I have gotten to work on Linux).
Microsoft used to have a Teams for Linux application. It was identical to the Windows application because it's just an Electron app, but shockingly it was buggy on Linux (???) I don't even know how... I mean, Microsoft chose a cross-platform framework. They must've written some stupid ass code that isn't portable, at which point why not use one of the dozen Microsoft GUI frameworks available?
This is a very common workflow for me, except I was using Teams on a Mac. And thanks to some update there are now two non-working versions of Teams installed ("Teams" and "Teams new" or some equally tacky naming). Luckily I have a Linux laptop next to it that can run it in-browser.
I would love to know what Microsoft thinks the purpose of the standalone app is, when it is both slower and less reliable.
The "great" part about the Office desktop apps is that they're written in electron, so it's already essentially a web app but somehow worse.
When did they transition from native to electron?
They didn't.
To clarify, only Teams is in electron.
> Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...
I have that exact workflow with any computer I do not use on a regular basis. If I use the thing every day it is ok. But if I let something sit for like 6 months it is 'patch city'. I usually play that game on my game consoles because i do not use it much. My daily used computers 10-15 seconds tops until usable desktop.
Do you use your Windows laptop daily?
Normally, yes. Due to current circumstances I hadn't used it the day before (Tuesday) although I did use it Monday.
After installing Arch / Gnome on my laptop last week, I can see why. Everything works completely fine and feels 3X faster than Windows 11. I have Linux on my desktop machine but always hesitated for laptops due to past bad experiences with power management (i.e. something always eventually went wrong when closing the lid). So far, all of that is working perfectly.
Windows 11 is exceptionally slow. I installed it on a ThinkPad Carbon X1, it was quite unusable. Unresponsive after starting up, copilot and O365 trying to run stuff and i had to wait for them to comolete. I was very surprised that they think this is acceptable. I spent about an hour going through processes and installed programs list, and uninstalling many things. At that point it was more tolerable.
You pretty much need Windhawk to fix and remove all of Windows 11's poor design and architecture.
There are still issues. Just going with your example, see the threads in the Framework forum around lid close issues (almost all from Linux users): https://community.frame.work/search?q=lid%20close
Reports about high battery drain, suspend issues and similar exist as well.
I'm running Fedora on a Framework laptop, but with the awareness that it can require some tinkering.
Current battery life is better than it was on Windows. I know Windows is very good from this standpoint but things always degrade over time. That is my expectation with arch as well - good now but let's see how it is 6 months from now. That is always the real test. Regardless, my laptop is too small to run Windows + WSL so will probably stick with just running Linux.
Arch Linux is an eternal OS, it can migrate through different hardware and there are people who never reinstall it (you don’t need to) for, say, a decade. Mine is half a decade at least, and went through three laptops. The last one was (Intel) MacBook Pro dying on me (the keys), and I just rsynced my system onto another MacBook (booted with Arch install) via ssh. Took me an hour or two in the background. I left my home and returned to a working laptop that needed a few tiny changes in configs here and there.
I have to ask - what OS do AI-training web scrapers tend to report? (A mixture? One with > 5% linux market share? Sorry, being a sceptic, otherwise I think this is fantastic news if accurately measured).
Most of these types of surveys do their best to filter out robots.
With over 50% of Internet traffic being robots, the results really don't make any sense at all if you don't.
Good question. Most of these headlines about Linux market share ("mind share"?) are completely uninformative about how widespread the use of Linux is in reality.
12 years ago or so, a similar headline appeared, then someone explained that the Chinese government had recently cracked down on Windows pirating (to appease the Americans) with the result that some PC vendors had stopped including (pirated copies of) Windows with the computers they sell (shipping some Linux distro instead of course) but since pirated Windows install media was still widely available, there quickly grew a cultural practice in which the consumer installs Windows (or gets his more technically-inclined cousin to do it for him) as soon as he gets his new PC home. But the headline reported on a statistic that did not catch this cultural practice because it counted only the OSes on computers when they were sold (i.e., "OS shipments").
I wonder if they used firefox to download internet explorer?
What's "windows pirating" when Microsoft offers public ISO downloads and you can activate them with MAS?
The details of how the Chinese PC buyer gets Windows on his new PC is irrelevant to my point (as is whether it deserves the name "pirating").
I tend to think that they mostly should be using their own user agent, and if not be desguised as the most common ones to avoid being detected too easily. Web scaping probably has been mostly running under Linux before the age of AI anyway. I'm not in the field, so if anyone more trustworthy info on that...
Yes they run Linux, but they either have their own user agent (not included in the stats) or are spoofing a real world web browser... In which case they might be spoofing Chrome on Windows even if they run on Linux.
Either way I don't think the 5% are impacted by scraping bots.
None https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots There's no reason for those bots to report any specific OS
Anything that's automated today is linux. So, I'll assume almost 99.99%, or may be BSD in some cases.
Any scraper out there that doesn't want to identify itself as such is very likely to spoof the most commonly used OS + browser combo (Chrome + Windows), regardless of what it's actually running on.
So basically the 5% number is pulled out of thin air.
If you zoom out to say the last 10 years you can see that those graphs go up and down like crazy. The error bars on these numbers must be huge.
Yeah. A critical mass is needed and we seem to be there, but keeping it a system for "power users and up" (and for total laypeople but managed by others) is also desirable.
Based on the history of the tech industry, Linux adoption should be kept at this level and advanced no further. This is already the sweet spot for the "year of the Linux desktop," which should be celebrated by experts, technical users, and the sufficiently motivated.
Once the unwashed masses start coming in, the software and its interaction patterns pander to the lowest common denominator and the quality of the medium degrades.
I understand your point, and I genuinely hate when people try to put pressure on distros to essentially look more like Windows.
On the other hand, I think it's great when companies or government try to move to Linux (if you're not a US company or the US government, it makes total sense to try not to depend on US software so much).
But I want to believe that there is space for everybody. I wouldn't use Mint myself, but I convinced a couple friends to use it and it works really well! EU governments moving to european distros like Suse and the likes is great. And I will stay closer to "more advanced" distros like Gentoo or Alpine.
The beauty of Linux is that there is not one Linux; it's about freedom of choice. Because many people move from Windows to Mint doesn't have to mean that it's hurting Gentoo, I think? Hopefully.
I wish Windows 11 looked more like Windows.
How exactly is Linux becoming popular going to make my EXWM setup suck? To be fair, if it does get a large market share, some company is probably going to take MS's role and make a distro that sucks but many people use. But that shouldn't be an issue to existing users unless they take over something like a major DE and you insist on using that for some reason. For IT people, having the possibility of running a decent shell and sshd in most desktops would be terrific.
> some company is probably going to take MS's role and make a distro that sucks but many people use
You mean other than Ubuntu and the likes?
In some ways we are already seeing this. Have you ever opened a GitHub repository and the only installation/build instructions are for the AUR. I seem to run into this pretty frequently while looking at small projects.
What bothers me is when projects have a hard dependency on something like systemd or even Ubuntu, because most of the time it is not necessary and it means I can't use it.
But other than that, as long as I can compile the project from source (and if it's done properly I don't need instructions for that), I'm fine.
I would assume that a repo providing instructions for the AUR is already better than one assuming that "Linux == Ubuntu", because the developer knows at least one distro that is not Ubuntu :-).
> the quality of the medium degrades.
not necessarily. There's room to have the mass market make breakthroughs in laymen software for linux if there's sufficient demand.
And having the mass market lowest common denominator doesnt remove the good stuff - they still exist and you could still choose to use them. This is esp. true for linux, where as you'd have fewer choice/customizability for windows as it's close sourced.
Linux based distributions solve this by not being a monoculture, no?
Pandering to the masses would be in the form of specific desktop environment, and maybe specific distribution integrating it well with all kinds of desktop software.
Nothing would change for the existing users of obscure software, hackishly stitched together.
Not at all. All Linux distributions essentially run the same software with different packages and configuration files. There are a few either/or choices they make, but it’s mostly overlap with very little disro specific software.
If Linux software starts widely adapting more dark patterns it will probably impact users across all distributions.
I share that concern, but again: if more people move to Linux, maybe (?) more people will become advanced Linux user and maybe (?) it will bring more activity into advanced distros.
Not that I believe it will necessarily be good, but I'm not sure it will necessarily be bad. Could go both ways, IMO.
> If Linux software starts widely adapting more dark patterns it will probably impact users across all distributions
What is preventing people from just creating a fork?
"oh no, the peasants are using MY operating system, this can't be good"
I think it's more "they will give less control in order to please the peasants, and as a result I will lose control".
And I agree with that concern, though my hope is that we can make it easier for the peasants without sacrificing control for the nerds (trying to find a word that would work with "peasant" in this context :D).
I disagree with the concern, because obviously making Free Software easier for non-technically inclined people to use does not make the software harder for technically inclined people to use. This is strictly an issue for proprietary software.
If they take out options, then you might have to maintain a fork or write a plugin to keep them.
And thus, nothing was lost except the superiority complex :)
And the time and effort it takes to maintian a project.
The vast majority of people can just benefit from the time and effort that someone felt was worth spending to scratch their own itch.
Yeah, I think I agree with you after all. As long as it's open source, it's okay.
> This is strictly an issue for proprietary software.
it really isn't, as Google Chrome and Chromium shows there's no clear dividing line in the real world. Linux isn't developed by Bob the free software enthusiast, take a look at the code contributions to the kernel.
Overall I'm also in favour of driving linux adoption because it's still a better world but the idea that this has no spill over effect on anyone else is wrong. It's a fiction to think that Linux, just like a browser is anything but a collective project with most development driven by very few organizations who also have commercial or proprietary interests.
> Google Chrome and Chromium shows there's no clear dividing line in the real world.
There are lots of Chromium forks. I don't really see how this contradicts my point.
there's not any genuine forks. They're all dependent on Google, see Vivaldi last year announcing they'll drop manifest v2 support. They're all pretty much cosmetic reskins. Whoever puts up the money for development makes the choices, regardless what license you slap on it.
And if there was a drastic mainstream adoption of linux, whatever implications that has for development focus, it would affect everyone because nobody is going to run a sincere kernel fork.
[1]https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/112633927397201824
Gnome has sacrificed a lot of control.
i3wm and sway haven't :-).
My point being that it's okay for some projects to sacrifice control, as long as others don't. I can't tell Ubuntu how they should make their distro; what I can do is choose Gentoo (or anything in between).
Gnome can do whatever they like with their own project, but fragmentation is the biggest problem with Linux.
I know you are making it seem like this is a very cringe position, but its in fact a very valid one.
The problem in most any technology sector is that its impossible for one person in reasonable amount of time to put together systems for use. Maybe in the future when LLMs are advanced enough to where I can have it code a full OS for me to my liking this will change, but right now, I have to depend on other people doing work.
Linux happens to be in a sweet spot where the collaborative development is guided by technical decisions instead of market forces, but Linux is just an OS. It needs open hardware to run. It just so happens that laptop manfuacturers who target Windows just don't see Linux as a big enough threat to start locking things down.
But historically, along came Apple, made the iPhone, realized most people want jewelry more than functionality, realized they could monetize this, and now their Macbooks are locked down to MacOS pretty hardcore.
If Linux went the same route, you could very well see a distinct lack of hardware being made that can run open source Linux. Which then limits you to smaller manufacturers that don't have capital or bandwidth to compete with bigger ones.
The users arent the problem. The predatory corporations who will try to take advantage of them are the problem.
If you see alot of sheep coming into your glade, the jackels are close behind
Just switch to Qubes OS, and you're special again. (Worked for me.)
It feels similar to people complaining about their favorite tabletop game becoming popular with normies and then normies come and don't treat the game with the reverence the og fans believe it should.
Same response: just do your own thing then and ignore the normies, it's not a big deal.
The problem when the masses come in is then we lose the whimsy. They will be offended by commands like "kill" and "fsck" and there will be stupid campaigns to change things.
It happened with git a few years ago, when people were up in arms over its use of the word "master". Stupid, pointless changes will be made to appease these people.
The default branch name is still master, this hasn’t changed.
So is this the reasoning to keep Linux as hard to use as possible?
* just open the terminal and type this magic spell to make x work *
I'd imagine they would say: "if you find that difficult, then yes"
kinda like when people write to eachother, just open up your whatsapp, and type in a magic spell to let your friends know they are invited to dinner tonight..
With the difference that if you get a single character wrong you will get an error that might as well be written in Greek.
Or if you get a single character writing you brick the system (happened to me, in bazzite no less!)
You're probably talking about enshittification [0], which typically affects centralized for-profit entities, not community-based free software projects.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484
Mozilla says hello.
Firefox is for-profit and centralized.
Windows 11 not working on otherwise perfectly good PCs I imagine is at least a small part of it. I've got an 8-core Ryzen system I think from 2016 that's still very powerful and more than good enough for my needs, but Microsoft is insisting I "throw it away and buy a new one", in this economy no less!
I also think a number of influencers like PewDiePie moving to Linux has to have moved the needle at least a little as well.
For me it was Windows 11 not supporting hardware. I moved to Fedora in the beginning of this year for work (while using it at home for quite a while).
After seeing SharePoint.exe using 1GB and 100% of the CPU today for over 12 hours I’m seriously considering removing my VM (that I only boot for MS Office). Edge even greeted me with a message that I have access to Copilot Vision that can now see everything I browse when I right clicked the process and clicked on search!
It's conceivably part of the reason.
Earlier reporting on Windows MAU noted "400 million Windows PCs vanished in 3 years" (https://www.zdnet.com/article/400-million-windows-pcs-vanish... ). As Windows 11 wrecks havoc on older PCs, many may just sit unused or get discarded, thereby increasing the relative share of the surviving PCs (including Linux PCs).
Microsoft <3 Linux so much, they ruined Windows so people would switch to Linux. Thank you Microsoft!
Seriously though, I switched to Linux late last year and haven't looked back. It has everything I need for a computer and a lot of the "problems" people say is holding them back from switching full-time are greatly exaggerated. Like if you're not willing to make some small compromises so you can have a computer that respects you as a human and not a metric then I don't know what to tell you.
This has been my take. They even made Windows 11 look like a linux desktop so they can do a switcheroo later on.
Microsoft could kill off Windows as a desktop operating system and it wouldn't dent their financials in a major way. You'll know they're truly serious, though, when they start making contributions to Wine and also makes bash the default command line interpreter in windows.
A year ago I decided to upgrade my 10 year old motherboard and get something faster. I was hoping my existing Windows 7 SSD would boot up, but alas it would get to the coalescing window display and crash. I never figured out why.
My choices were to spend $200 on a new version of Windows that was worse than the one I lost, or switch to Linux. Guess which I did?
I hope we get to a point where enough "professionals" are using it to force companies like Acrobat to offer Linux versions of their software (cough Fusion 360). It is the only thing keeping me from completely ditching my windows VM. Using CAD in a virtulabox VM is torture. FreeCAD is sadly not a viable replacement (maybe in the future but a lot of work is needed). I was able to switch to other tools for other things like KiCAD for PCB work, Blender and DaVinci Resolve also work great.
Oh hey another "I'd fully be on Linux if it wasn't for Fusion 360" person. Although in my case I'm too lazy to maintain VMs, so I just use windows as my base OS. Microsoft may force the issue next year when my perfectly good desktop stops getting Windows 10 updates and can't install Windows 11.
What's torturous about using Fusion 360 in a VM?
I play all my video games on linux - heros of the storm, sc2, warcraft 2, counter strike... very stable much nicer then what i remember from windoze...
For me, Linux became a viable desktop OS when Steve Jobs killed flash and browsers could render any page independently of the OS.
Then Office 365 came around and I could do quick work w/out a windows machine.
FWIW you could install Flash on Linux. It was sometimes a pain but it did work.
Massive PIA.
Since flash didnt work I didnt use Linix
Since I didnt use Linux I wasnt very good at it
Since I kept at noob level, I couldnt install Flash, which was pretty hard
Anecdotally, I have two gaming desktops for my kids in the same place, side by side. They don't know much about computers, but they greatly prefer to use the Linux one and only use the Windows one when forced to, like because Microsoft bought Minecraft and only puts out Education Edition for Windows. They seem to navigate Ubuntu much easier than Windows, and that machine gives them less trouble and is snappier.
Comment generator: "Concerns about privacy invasions, adware, and forced updates in Windows are pushing users away. Many users are fed up with Microsoft "urging users to train their AI for free"."
1) Windows chatting behind your back causes distrust. And for good reason. 2) Yes, forced updates, but the consumers don't understand that they're just crofters in MSFT's world with all MSFT's products. MSFT will update as much as fits their needs to protect their property, not yours. 3) Re: adware. Part of your relationship with MSFT is that you are the commodity. It's a general internet business revenue model.
Linux will be stuck in the 5% range as long as people who love Linux are the ones making Linux.
You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal. No faster way to scare off users than give them a CLI heavy OS and have the trip over the very first copy+paste command they try to run (once they figure out the circa ~1982 cursor)
I really cannot say enough about the total fumble of Linux distros in an age when people are more desperate than ever to leave Windows.
>I really cannot say enough about the total fumble of Linux distros in an age when people are more desperate than ever to leave Windows
How is it a fumble? Linux is doing very well to scope up users from people looking to leave windows. Its not a monolithic company. There is no marketing budget only users to spread the word.
The reason Linux won't take off is because Windows users have unrealistic expectations. They define "intuitive" as "works like Windows".
But Windows is not intuitive - it's, possibly, the least intuitive operating system to ever exist. It's just familiar.
But it's a Catch 22. If Linux is like Windows, then there's zero reason to use it. Just use Windows. But if Linux is not like Windows, then it's not familiar.
The solution is to reframe your expectations. If you expect Linux to work like Windows, you will be disappointed - and rightfully so. Nobody expects MacOS to work like Windows, no, you adapt.
MacOS, iOS, and Android are all unix like OS's that had the wherewithal to hand UX to product people and not engineers.
You end up with very popular operating systems.
Again, the thing perpetually holding desktop Linux back is that it is made by people who like Linux.
I disagree fundamentally. You're describing locked-down UNIX in name only operating systems, controlled by a single corporate entity with an iron fist.
If Linux was like that, it would have no value. Why not? Because these operating systems already exist.
Linux distros are open-source. That means it is fragmented by nature. This is unsolvable - because that is what open-source means. I can fork something, and that's that. If we say "no forking", then it's no longer open-source. This is the Catch-22.
If we want a defragmented Linux, we already have plenty of those. If we want to defragment Linux, it loses literally all of it's value.
The UX on Linux is, IMO, much more intuitive than Windows, and it's not even close. The problem is that it's not like Windows. That's why I use it. That's why everyone who uses Linux uses it. If we wanted an operating system like Windows, I would use Windows.
Downloading software straight from an app store is easier than downloading an exe online. The file browser is easier to use. Updates are easier to do, they're done system-wide. KDE is much, MUCH more cohesive than than Windows GUI. The installers are much more modern. Users are much more intuitive. Permissions are more intuitive. The file system actually makes sense. I mean, really C: drive? Back slashes? Come on now. dbus is better than COM or COM+. Editing a config file is more intuitive than regedit. The search functionality is more intuitive. And on and on.
I mean, picture a typical usecase: install a browser. On Windows, I boot up. First I see if it's already installed. I search, and I get web popups. Okay, not what I want - I don't want to read about Chrome on wikipedia. Okay, I finally get to the Chrome website. I click "Download". Edge tells me not to do this. The computer tells me it's dangerous. Edge tells me it's faster than Chrome. I ignore. I click through the installer. It's installed. Now, I might have to reboot for some reason. Edge then prevents me from making it my default browser. I do it anyway. Finally, I have Google Chrome.
On Linux. I search for Chrome in the search box. It's not installed, but there's a link to the app store. I click it, and I click install. There is no installer, it just installs it. Chrome is now installed.
Linux distros are really good, if and only if you go into them acknowledging they are their own thing, with their own methods.
> You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal
The more poignant issues might be that there's inconsistencies around UI here. Some terminals allow that directly (Kitty), others require Ctrl+shift+v (Gnome shell, iirc Powershell and Konsole).
To be fair, the best non-windows OS likely is MacOS. It has software support for a lot of commercial prosumer stuff, e. G., Adobe, and has a convenient and stable 3rd Party offering for Windows VMs (Parallels).
As a Linux user it seems like there is a lot to learn in regard to UI consistency from both though (maybe less from Windows). Gnome and KDE are probably moving in the right direction here but it is still a bit off sometimes.
> Linux will be stuck in the 5% range as long as people who love Linux are the ones making Linux.
Why is 5% a magic number? Why not 4% or 6% or 10%?
> You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal.
Try Shift+Ins. CLI and GUI conventions have always been different, and the sort of users who work in the terminal are the ones who know the difference. Overloading Ctrl+V, and breaking applications that run in the terminal, just to make two completely different paradigms use the same hotkeys seems a bit ridiculous to me.
BTW, this applies across OSes, and isn't specific to Linux.
The version of Linux that actually moves the needle towards widespread adoption will almost certainly be hated by Linux enthusiasts. It will be annoying and clunky with a lot of prying necessary to make it feel "right".
It’s not a “fumble”, because “Linux” is not a company trying to sell as many units as possible.
As you said, it works for the people who make it. Why does it need to do anything else? Linux desktop conquering the world is just an old Slashdot trope, it’s not something anyone is actually working to achieve in real life.
You can't do ctrl-c and ctrl-v in MacOS too, that's doesn't break their marketshare.
> Linux will be stuck in the 5% range as long as people who love Linux are the ones making Linux.
This makes no sense. There are so many different ways to use Linux, there is not a single profile of "people who love Linux".
Coming from decades of using a Mac, I swap left alt and left ctrl. I remap the Terminal using AutoKey so that ctrl+c and ctrl+v are copy and paste, and alt+c effectively sends a ctrl+c to terminate a program.
I think it is very unfortunate that Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V works for some programs in Linux. This makes the environment inconsistent. These programs should be adapted to the environment they are in and only support selecting using left mouse button highlight followed by middle mouse button press.
Ctrl-C means something different in the terminal. Always has been. And if it doesn't make sense to use Ctrl-C, there is no sense in Ctrl-V either.
Windows lets you Ctrl-V while still mapping Ctrl-C to break.
I imagine you have only used Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/outdated linux.
Fedora is a different level completely. With Fedora, I remember installing nvidia drivers via terminal, and that was essentially it.
Sometimes I open up ports for my kid doing minecraft, but that was it. Its not like when you use Ubuntu or Mint and you need to manually update something just to get Netflix to work on Chromium.
Fedora is so good, I won't call it linux. Linux has the Debian/Ubuntu baggage. Fedora stands alone. Its easier to use than Windows, I don't think I'm exaggerating. Windows 11 has ads, unresponsive search, UI/theme issues that make it impossible to read text, it has fake paths to files. Fedora just works.
Fedora is actually older than Ubuntu. And FWIW you still can’t paste with C-v in the terminal.
When we say outdated, we mean the version of the kernel and other software. Not the first time it came out.
When referring to the terminal, these are 1 time events every 12 months. Its not really a huge deal on Fedora because you basically don't need the terminal. On Ubuntu, its a much bigger deal given how many things are broken and need to be repaired.
I’be had some machines with issues on fedora and no issues on Ubuntu, and vice versa. It really just depends on your hardware and on what you’re trying to do.
I really liked the recent picture of Linus Torvalds and Bill gets, hard to believe that after all these years of “competition,” they had never actually met before. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lh34ox/linus_torval...
This is really cool. I had no idea this had happened.
Thirty years ago Bill was writing angry memos about the rise of Linux and how Microsoft had to stop free software.
Recently moved to Arch Linux after 25+ years on Windows. It was a LOT of work (my whole career is on the computer and I have a lot of custom scripts and tools), but I'm so happy with the result.
No more hundreds of background processes sapping my battery life and performance.
No more blatantly manipulative ads every time Windows updates, about how I won't be "safe" unless I sign up for OneDrive, switch to Edge, and subscribe to Office Live Dynamics Pro Limited 365, because now word processing and spreadsheets are a subscription for some fucking reason.
No more 3 different generations of UI styles sloppily bolted together (though Linux desktop styling can be plenty sloppy).
No more news feeds in my start menu and task bar filled with the outrage and statistically improbable evil human acts of the day, no doubt with MS ads, alongside prods to install Candy Crush and other crap.
No more whack-a-mole MS telemetry I have to read obscure guides to find out how to turn off.
No more needing to sign in to a FUCKING CLOUD ACCOUNT to use my own computer.
No more stupid crap like copilot, sucking screenshots and forwarding them to MS and OpenAI, and other sparkly AI icons on every damn thing.
Haven't booted Windows in a month or two. So happy to have switched - my computer belongs to me again, for the first time in a long while
> No more whack-a-mole MS telemetry I have to read obscure guides to find out how to turn off.
My routine at some point after moving to W10 was to create/update system partition image, turn off all bypasses/tweaks that kept update components tamed. Then do the update, reboot and quickly run through all setting that in the past tend to reset "itself", apply tweaks again and reboot to see if these still work, and finally - look up if some processes or services were added.
I was dualbooting, using VM's for years and pandemic gave me something to do so I finally escaped from Microsoft grip.
Tho, it wasn't issues-free ride. Mint and Manjaro would randomly soft-hang for no reason; some Manjaro updates would made me few times reinstall the system (that would be still faster than manually correcting everything). I had to freeze GPU drivers for older card because newer ones would crash games. Keeping unified look across all types of applications is indeed a sloppy task - especially with all Gnome shenanigans regarding theming but atm is still doable. But overall, I'm happy and I see how much changed and improved since Mandrake 8 times when I tried Linux for the first time.
For majority of people, for doing basic tasks plus playing some games Linux should be fine.
So refreshing isn’t it? It’s like having an OS that’s actually designed for you, not them. Imagine!
Occasionally I will boot into a Windows partition because I have to do something windows-only. I’m so out of the Windows world these days that I mentally have to prepare myself not to get too fired up with it all, just calm down do the thing and get out. :)
Agree that it’s a lot of effort to switch though, so good for you on making the switch!
2 years ago i replaced my last win10 installation with linux mint and i literally never think about going back. i am a pretty technical person and i still run into issues sometimes that take a few sessions to resolve though. i wish it was an easier sell to my friends. i began to feel extremely creeped out by my computer running windows which was was ultimately motivated me, but i not only avoided the evils of microsoft, i feel much more in-control and capable of doing more on linux.
it's crazy to me when my friends will say shit about configuration and i'm like, what's the tradeoff? configuring windows to just work like a normal computer is MUCH more work. the only way to put in no work is to be farmed for data and treated like a child by your own computer.
My perspective is that the Steam Deck significantly contributes to this increase.
Additionally, a smaller factor could be the growing trend of Dev and Op professionals moving from Macs to Linux. And the trend before, to move from Windows to Mac's because they are cheaper to administrate. This shift is supported by manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo, who are providing more devices with Linux pre-installed, aligning well with the supply chain requirements of IT departments.
Also, at least for me, it's hard to envision vendors specialising in Linux desktop hardware, such as Tuxedo, Framework, and System76, experiencing a surge in their market shares. I am very curious to see their numbers and the kind of people and companies that buy this products.
I am doing my part.
I wanted a gaming PC forever but I just couldn’t stomach Windows. I had a great experience with the Steam Deck in the past 2 years so I built a Bazzite desktop. I am having a lot of fun.
The web browser app paradigm changed everything. The Windows API isn't nearly as important as it once was.
Then again, using Linux has no obvious advantage anymore, as you don't "own" most software you're running anyway.
My step dad doesn't know how to share links over messenger (constantly sends me screenshots of pages), but he runs Thinkpad Manjaro for last 3 years without issues. At first, I was afraid that I will have to do some sort of support regularly or answer questions, but besides "Which music player should I install?" it was crickets for the last 3 years.
2025: The Year of the Linux Desktop! [0]
0: https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/my-winter-of-99-the-year-of-...
Impressive because nobody has ever successfully made a Linux desktop computer targeted at consumers the way Apple has. I wouldn't count Chromebooks or Android devices. I mean a system you would use as a workstation or a power user's computer. And I don't mean a Windows PC that you have the option of pre-installing Linux on like from Dell or HP. I mean a computer designed and built around Linux.
Very cool! If you extrapolate the current trend by 2073 Linux will dominate the desktop market.
And the desktop market will have 4 users in total.
Regarding Steam: Some people used to avoid Linux because of gaming, but that’s changed quite a bit. With Proton and native support for many titles, the barrier to switching is much lower now. Great news anyway :)
Is SteamOS included? I am not really surprised. Linux is quite often only usable option, now when Win 10 is not really supported.
Why not use Win 11?
Because it's actively user hostile? Microsoft shoving their spyware and unwelcome AI into it regardless of consent
1. Ads
2. Built-in cloud AI spyware / Copilot
3. Millions of abandoned laptops that had been made 4-5+ years ago. Basically electronic and ecological waste: machines from 10 years ago work perfectly fine if you change thermal paste and don't hit them too much. Even if you don't care about the planet, you might care about your wallet though.
3 is especially ironic with that green leaf and energy recommendations slapped in settings
For video games as of today, SteamOS presents double digit performance gains on average over Windows, running Windows games on Steam Deck and similar platforms.
Because there's lots of good hardware out there that's unsupported by Windows 11, but supported just fine by Linux distros.
I wonder how much of this is driven by Linux gaming performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44560913
I've used all three OS's for many years and I really just.. don't care which one I'm on anymore. They all do the same thing. Currently on windows 11 after ~5 years of debian gnome and its fine. Enjoyable even, especially with WSL. GUI software support is much better here
Windows 11 and Steam OS are starting to make impact. I am sticking to Windows 10 until is stops working but I think Linux might be finally in my future.
I would not be too surprised to find out that significant portion of Linux on Desktop here is actually headless Chrome web scraping.
I feel like this is more about Linux remaining reliable and the other platforms getting worse, rather than Linux getting substantially better.
I no longer have a windows machine. If I can't get a game to run on Linux then I don't bother with it. I played Clair Obscur start, to finish, in Mint on a 3090 with zero issues. I just forced it to load in steam since linux isn't officially supported.
> Linux remaining reliable and the other platforms getting worse, rather than Linux getting substantially better.
But that's a very key point of advantage in by-design open-ness and non-commercialisation.
It's taken 30(-odd?) years and the coining of the word enshittification, but the advantages of this ideology is now having the last of the clay and sand brushed off it, baring its beauty to a growing audience.
And Linux has, in fact, gotten steadily better over that time too, but it's been a slow consistent grind, so it doesn't appear as grand as a sudden red-curtain-unveiling-worthy improvement, but it is, in fact, that grand.
(What Valve / Steam / Proton has done may be the closest to a rapid increase of usability / marketability, but even that has been relatively subtly under the radar unless you're paying attention).
The posts on this thread arguing that Android is not a real Linux should take a look at the increasingly blurred lines between MacOS and iPadOS. Android tablets are on a similar trajectory. ChromeOS Flex pretty much is a desktop Linux distro with an Android runtime.
Some people will find the idea of elements of a mobile OS on their desktop attractive. Other people will find it less unattractive than buying a new PC to run Windows 11.
I've been using Android tablets for a long time. They're way behind iPads in terms of apps available for them, and for them to be usable as main computers for anyone half technical they'd basically needs access to all the Linux desktop software, which they don't have access to.
The simple example would be LibreOffice.
Have people looked at the numbers? Chromeos and Linux have swapped, and if you include the unknown OS which are most likely Windows behind a corporate proxy it is back up to 70% of the market. In addition, the number of sites statcounter pulls from us dropped in half in the last three years if that matters.
It’s surprising to me it’s not higher. Gaming is excellent on Linux and Windows 11 is simply not good. Just a relative easier distro like Ubuntu is outstanding and learning curve is lower than ever.
I think it's going to keep increasing. I know people who resisted linux for decades and after playing with a Steam Deck are now considering building a linux gaming PC. This is in large part because they are investing into the Steam ecosystem for the first time ever and seeing how great it is. Mad props to Valve for all their work on Proton and Steam.
That's twice the number Valve reports for Steam users which includes a lot of Steam Decks that come with Linux installed, so it seems high, I would have guessed somewhere in the 1 to 2 percent range. In some countries you have mass Linux deployments to schools or government IT systems that could give you a number like this but I'm not sure what could be driving it in the US.
I assume the problems still are that (1) no Desktop Linux is at the level of macOS or Windows, and (2) the only one close is still RedHat, but most want Debian-based or something else.
MacOS is the best model for a successful desktop Linux to use. Trim down the kernel/drivers to just what runs on that spec hardware, only support that spec hardware, focus effort on the OS and ecosystem, keep it stable, make upgrades trivial, and give it freedom to run other software, terminal apps, etc. And most of all- focus resources on these efforts and charge a lot of money for it!
I’d argue desktop Linux passed “the level of windows” sometime around Windows 8 or KDE5.
I have way more stability issues and complicated upgrades on Windows.
That was long true by that time. On supported hardware, and if you don’t need applications that are not on Linux, it was fine in the first Ubuntu releases at least.
(in comparison with the state of Windows at the time, of course)
in 2003 it was WAY easier to install linux than windows. You had to mess with floppys for sata drivers and shit to install windows.
and KDE was always ATLEAST as easy as windows, arguably more. At this time lots of older crappy hardware people had also only had win98 drivers, giving people immense problems. It mostly worked better on linux. This still goes today.
Macos window/desktop management is also stuck in 2001 with "magic gestures" tacked on. For someone who hates using these gestures especially when connected to an actually good kb/m, the base desktop experience is horrible. The dock is completely useless, the various cmd+tab or cmd+` shortcuts are unwieldy, Spotlight is growing increasingly worse year after year.
Rectangle/tiling window managers on top is the only way to make it workable.
Apart from wm, the existence of application notarization is a downright insult (though Windows is also guilty of this with smartscreen but to a much lesser extent).
Apple's "pay us 100 bucks a year or we'll tell your users that your program is malware" is just another step in the inevitable game of locking down macos and turning it into a mobile-like hellscape
What gestures are you talking about? I think you can turn those off, and I’d be surprised if there isn’t a way to turn off the rest with a 3rd party or custom tool.
Application notarization isn’t a problem anymore- you just have a single accept dialog. That problem that made you do a trick to get past it was only a problem years ago, due to whomever the moron was that thought that was a good idea. The current way is acceptable.
I install homebrew and random apps with no problems.
I installed Ubuntu on my laptop 5 years ago and haven't looked back. Windows at this point just feels like crappy spyware. Not a single thing I miss about Windows.
Also gaming on Linux works great for the most part with Proton. Thanks Steam!
I remember when it was absolutely crucial for your desktop/laptop to be able to do everything and Linux was a no go for people. Today you can live off your phone and be OK, so Linux actually makes much more sense. Camera/audio doesn't work well? No worries, just call via phone.
Also, 99% of all day to day apps now run in the browser, so having MS Word on your machine is not so important.
Yeah, the only thing I'd love to see is "open with gdocs" to be somehow integrated similar to desktop experience. Having to drag and drop every time, creating new file, is really stupid.
My suspicion is that many folks are converting their old MacBooks etc which no longer have support to keep running Linux. I have about 4 such machines of different brands lying about the house, some over 10 years old and they run just fine despite their antiquated hardware.
I think adoption has to do with the fact that desktop environment efforts are divided across so many distros.
What do you mean by that? DEs development is separate from distros. Distros often select a particular DE to be their default, but "desktop environment efforts" aren't really something the distros do.
I might be a bit contrarian on this.
I think the biggest obstacle in the Linux world is people knee jerk recommending Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/outdated linux.
If people rallied around the current SOTA, Fedora, we would've hit 5% a few years ago.
The variety of distros cause people to get confused, and go with the most heavily marketed distros, Ubuntu flavors. Just because Ubuntu gave away free CDs 20 years ago, doesnt make them good. It makes them good at marketing.
People confuse Fedora with Arch, which is terrible. People confuse Ubuntu with 'stable like a table', instead of 'outdated stable'.
We almost need a reduction in favored distros. Out with the complexity: Fedora for desktop. It has all the DEs too.
Fundamentally, Linux is Linux. Differences between distros are vastly overstated, and they mostly amount to different default selections and configurations of the same underlying components.
Ultimately, anything that will run on one Linux distro will run on any other, with the only significant differences being on distros that run on unusual architectures or have made major changes to the kernel.
This is idealistic not realistic.
With enough effort, this is true... but out of the box, you are going to have significantly more bugs and conflicts using outdated distros.
I'd love to see a 'time in terminal' by distro. I imagine Fedora would be in the mere minutes per year, and Ubuntu in the hours per year.
What do you find "idealistic" about it? My intention was to explain reality as I see it.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "outdated distros". It should be implicit that I'm referring to the currently maintained versions of available distros, not deprecated versions.
And the "time in terminal" metric might not generally make sense, given the preference that many Linux users have for CLI/TUI tools over GUI ones, given the efficiency and consistency advantages of the former -- many people prefer to work in the terminal even where GUI tools for equivalent functionality are readily available.
This begs the question: At what threshold would we consider it 'the year of Linux on the desktop'?
5% seems too low. Would it be 30%? Or 51%?
Answering that question in the public sphere may quell many of the "Is ___ going to the year of the Linux desktop?" posts we get each year.
I think the year of Linux on the desktop will actually be the year of Chromium on Linux on the desktop (instead of Chrome on Windows), ie. is it really the Linux on the desktop if the only application you run is the browser for SaaS anyway?
I have a great computer, but it isn't compatible with Windows 11, so now I'm using Ubuntu on it. It's not ideal, but at least it's not a brick. I hate the requirements for Windows 11.
Microsoft is the biggest contributor to the Linux desktop market share.
I can't think of any logical reason to exclude ChromeOS and count it separately,and a good portion of the "Unknown" category may as well be Linux.
The "real" number shouldn't be far from 10%, if not already exceeding it.
I think the Unknown category could be custom standalone devices like Playstation, FireTV, webOS, and Switch which have browsers to make those stats but could be BSD based. And, I wouldn't exclude ChromeOS also, I thought it's built off of Gentoo Linux.
> I can't think of any logical reason to exclude ChromeOS and count it separately
Because virtually nobody who says "desktop Linux" means ChromeOS.
And that's (almost) as wrong as saying BSD is not Unix
So here's the thing. Chrome OS is absolutely a Linux distribution. It's even a GNU/Linux distribution (based on Gentoo), unlike say Android/Linux, which is doing its own thing. But... When people say "desktop Linux", they mean one of the user-controlled distros, not the locked down appliance that is ChromeOS. It's like how nobody who says they want a Linux phone mean Android. Technically correct, but not what people mean.
I think Fedora should be taken out too. Fedora stands alone and shouldn't be lumped in with the rest of the LinuxOS.
Fedora going up is a sign of progress. Regular Linux going up is just a sign that Windows sucks.
Are people just running headless / full chrome on *nix from data centers to scrape webpages for AI and data mining? Did the article mention anything about checking IP address?
How much of this is AI tools pretending to be users? If they use a real browser instead of identifying as a crawler then it's going to skew the stats.
Someone pinch me when VisualStudio runs under Wine/Proton with at least a silver rating. It is quite literally the only app keeping me on Windows.
Out of interest, what do you need visual studio for that you cant get on linux?
Of course, there are always alternatives, but as a professional software engineer there are times I need to use genuine Visual Studio for one reason or another.
Why use Photoshop when Gimp is available? Fusion360 when there is FreeCAD? etc.
VsCode works fine on Linux
VS Code and Visual Studio have about as much in common as JavaScript and Java.
I have to admit it's been a bit but when I first made the transition after a couple years using JetBrains, everything I actually used in Visual Studio was in VsCode. I should also admit that a big part of Microsoft strategy from as far back as 2003 was to make things "easy" in a non-translatable way which kept people locked into Visual Studio. Having traversed this divide, I see it now as something akin to different languages for the same concepts. Not unlike learning further programming languages after your first.
And it could get into double digits, now Win 10 is phased out. Let's face it, if you are just a regular user of a Personal Computer, you don't need Windows anymore
Pretty sure most of the recent gains are coming from gamers
It’s becoming a more viable option - assuming you don’t need multiplayer with anticheat
Perhaps people don't want copilot and other enhancements but just an OS. Also Windows forcing certain CPUs for Win 11 could play a role.
This is not surprising, and further growth is inevitable. I am heavily involved in a local Linux users group, and the number of people switching away from Windows increases every year. Anecdotal, of course, but Microsoft's enshittification of Windows makes the argument in favor of a free OS easier every year too.
Interesting milestone, 5% might not sound huge but for desktop Linux in the US it signals a real shift. Part of this comes from more polished distros lowering the barrier for non-technical users, and part is probably a pushback against aggressive telemetry and forced updates in mainstream OSes.
Also worth noting: if you count Chrome OS under the Linux kernel umbrella, the footprint is even bigger. It shows that open-source roots can quietly gain ground, even if the branding isn’t “Linux” front and center.
Very cool. My take on the growth...Chat bots make it very easy to find commands and troubleshoot issues.
Yay PewDiePie
Role models for computer use in my generation: RMS, Bjarne Stroustrup, Doug McIlroy.
Role models for computer use today: “PewDiePie”.
This is why we can't have nice things.
PewDiePie is awesome. His linux video has over 6M views. We need to make linux cool again for the general audience.
I don't know whether operating systems need to be "cool". Is Windows, the market leader, "cool"?
Or rather, I don't know whether those who think PewDiePie is "cool" have the same understanding of "cool" as computer nerds do.
Because computers are cool. Its easier to point to a general operating system than to all the cool software that runs on them. When people say Linux is cool its not because of just the kernel, its everything from the culture to the software stack and ethos
This is huge =)
I remember the days when we were under 1%.
Congratulations to all involved on making this true.
I genuinely wonder why it is considered "huge". Does it really matter how many % desktop usage one of the several dozens desktop operating systems has?
Is this because Linux became so good or because Windows 11 is so terrible?
I guess a bit of both.
Pretty sure it's because Windows has gotten worse. I ditched windows recently because it was flagging bit torrent software as malware and deleting it (utorrent, qbittorrent, deluge, all directly from official sources), and when I tried to turn the setting off in the control panel it wouldn't allow me to. A few minutes later it popped up an advertising notification for a F2P windows store game.
Linux hasn't necessarily gotten better, sadly. My install was unusable due to video issues, I had to boot a recover console to fix it. I also had to fix some issues with X desktop effects glitching after waking from suspend, making the desktop environment nearly unusable. Otherwise, Linux performs a lot better on my system than Windows.
> I ditched windows recently because it was flagging bit torrent software as malware and deleting it
W10 once removed CCleaner from my system because it was an older version. I kept it that way because it was the last version at the time that didn't come with telemetry.
Obviously everyone has their own experience but any Arch(-based) distro I've used has just worked out of the box following a simple Calamares install.
I've had nothing but bad experiences with Debian installs and I'm curious if this is where a lot of issues are coming from when people switch to Mint or Ubuntu when they hear it's the "beginner distro"
Windows 11 is great if you install the IoT LTSC version. Better than Windows 10.
Except all those perfectly working devices which aren't supported for no reason, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977038
9 years of updates it not at all out of line with Mac, iOS, Android etc:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/some-macs-are-gettin...
Maybe a few more years would have been good but I can't really blame Microsoft for requiring modern hardware support eventually.
They don't allow to install their next OS on capable hardware. This is not fine.
Thanks to Linux I’m still rocking a surface pro 3. Will never look back
Linux now has a bigger desktop marketshare than firefox. I never would have imagined history would turn out like this. Firefox had the easy job and desktop Linux had the hard one.
This will lead to a virtuous circle for Linux unless someone does something; privacy issues are leading people to the OSes where you get to freely choose your level of privacy. Anybody have any more weird old unix patents to throw at them and slow it down?
edit: maybe the way to stop Linux is heat up the war against all general purpose computing. Linux could be used to run unauthorized AI.
I came to say this as well. The market share of Linux in the US is 5.03%, while the same for Firefox is 4.23%! [1]
It's not an apples to apples comparison. But the userbase is largely the same, and it's easier to switch a browser than it's to switch an OS. So it does have a significance.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/united-s...
> Linux now has a bigger desktop marketshare than firefox.
This means many Linux users install an alternative browser, not to use Firefox. That's funny, but so true.
Browser selection is a heated topic in linux land just like text editors and window managers.
That's enough that we could form a 3rd political party.
That political party would fracture into 30 competing ones before the next election.
WSL+windows replaced the Linux desktop for me.
And at this rate, 6% by 2035, come onnnnn!
is this the year of the linux desktop?
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Wasnt this what Mac looked 15y ago?
Personally I'm taking another kick at Linux desktop in advance of Win11, I installed Mint with Cinnamon... and I gotta say, I'm kinda disappointed how many pain points there still are. Type in your admin password every 5 seconds just to install routine updates, ugly-ass GRUB screens, confusing UI, and SDL2 games being half-broken with resolution-switching and audio. Installing software still involves bouncing around figuring out if I want the Flatpak or to add a new Apt source or what.
So I'm assuming these "5% desktop market share" aren't using that kind of distro.
You installed a distro that aims to preserve suckage for future generations, and even developed an entire DE out of pure aversion to change. It’s often recommended by change-averse Linux users…
Successful Linux-based OSes have unattended atomic updates and user-friendly app installation. That includes ChromeOs and Android, as well as modern atomic desktop distributions. Fedora Silverblue, Bluefin, Bazzite.
edit: however, market share is probably coming from legacy distributions. That’s largely a sign of how bad Windows gets, and how desktops/laptops become more niche.
Ah, I had no idea Mint Cinnamon was about "preserving suckage". I remember when Mint launched it was all about "Ubuntu but easier, like non-free stuff included" and my understanding was Cinnamon was their own DE built to follow familiar UI patterns and customizability instead of Gnome's opinionated stuff.
Didn't realize that it was also for grumps who wanted bug-compatibility in their workflow.
Mint, afaik, offers a choice between Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. These are all DEs built and maintained to preserve a particular workflow based around hierarchical “start” menus, menu bars in applications, and desktop icons — the Win’95 style. This particular selection is very indicative of a preference for a particular era.
Which is fine if that’s your preference, too. However, you shouldn’t expect your experience to be significantly different from what it was when that desktop experience was fresh when you choose a product made by people with such strong preferences.
Again, Bluefin and the like update (atomically, with a rollback option) when you turn your computer off, with no interruptions or sudoing; app installs are through Gnome Software (for GUI stuff; through brew otherwise), without a need to enter passwords. You pay for that with some customizability, but it’s rock solid if it works on your hardware.
I don't get the anti-Linux hate that some people have. I get apathy, it's normal not to care. But I don't understand why anyone would actively root against a free and open alternative.
This is great news btw, and consistent with what is coming out of the Steam survey.
I will say though, I teach in Computer Science at university, and every semester in a class of 100, there's only ever at max just 1 student who has a Linux distro of any flavor on their laptop. Usually it's 0. It's pretty sad if you ask me.
Been there since 0.5% :)
Some related earlier discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41312883
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600172
Wow! That's a day growth actually. What happened? Is it Steam OS?
*great. Can't edit this comment, strange.
There has been noticeable momentum this year with the Windows 10 end of support date looming near and the continued enshittification of Windows 11.
This is anecdata, but with my own very limited (by choice) website analytics, I see a strong correlation between Linux users and headless browsers. So while my Linux user base seems higher than ever before so is my headless traffic. When I remove headless traffic, my Linux user base is in that 2-3.x% region.
Makes sense, I now do the majority of my personal workflows, except for photography, on Arch Linux on a Framework 13 laptop. I still have a M1 MBP for personal use that I primarily use for photography and not much else. There's a very minimal set of "normal" use cases that cannot be served on Linux at this point, and Linux desktops are more stable in the ways that matter to users now than the alternatives.
Finally! It is the year of the Linux Desktop! :D
Microsoft is killing it's platform. One egregious example is their efficiency mode that literally cripples your computer in the name of some misguided "green initiatives".
I primarily went back to Linux Mint because of this problem. Thankfully Steam allows me to game my library just like on Windows. I have no reason to return.
These stats are bogus: OS X market share drops by 50% in a few months, macOS market share at zero for most of last twelve months. Windows market share goes up 8% in a few months? Total garbage.
Is this the year of Linux on the desktop?
There’s no reliable way to collect this data. Linux “desktops” could just be bots.
I’ve said for over a decade that Linux can win a huge chunk of the desktop if it just stays as good as it is and waits. Meanwhile Microsoft keeps making Windows suck more.
Apple could do the same to some extent if they cut their prices some.
Still looking forward to the year of the Plan 9 desktop. I'm helping!
I do self hosting at home. Some of my friends are too. I own several SBCs. I wonder if the number of computers per tech makes a difference.
I don't believe this number for even a second.
I have literally never seen a Linux desktop in the wild. Speaking as a "normal" person who occasionally builds PCs for friends, fixes family computers, etc.
I have an old ThinkPad with Linux, but agreed, no way this can be true.
I installed Ubuntu on my parents' PC back in 2014. Never had to reinstall, only had to upgrade to LTS every few years. The only problems I encountered were with nvidia drivers on update that had to be dealt with but nothing too insane. It's been used almost daily, only migrated to SSD at one point to speed it up. 18~ years old machine.
I'm not particularly surprised anymore to see Linux on people's laptops in public, usually while travelling (you don't usually see people using laptops in public much otherwise). That is mostly in Germany where I live. Linux is, of course, also very common in universities.
The article is on the US statistic though. If it was a global statistic it wouldn't surprise me at all.
When it comes to laptops, we have a lot of MacBooks out there, and an endless Sea of $400 low quality Lenovos and HPs eternally marching to the garbage bins.
Ultimately my observation is just anecdotal, but I have built a lot of computers for people worked on a lot of family PCS, etc, and have never once worked with a Linux system in that context in 25 years of doing that stuff. I'm not interacting with a tech oriented crowd though (obviously those people would be chatting about tech instead and I would never be touching their system). Perhaps the tech oriented crowd is big enough to hit 5%, or perhaps Linux gaming is moving the needle, but I can't imagine 1 in 20 system is Linux in the US. I just can't.
FWIW, statcounter is showing 5.49% for Germany - which seems more plausible to me than 5% for the US, but whatever.
20 years ago my kids were getting hand-me-down work laptops with Linux installed on them. Apart from their peers thinking that they must be in some kind of cult, it did the job of keeping them much safer from malware.
Linux has been very usable for a long time. Windows 11, being deliberately unusable on older hardware that works perfectly well is enough incentive for more people to try an alternative. That's not going to move the needle in corporate IT but it's enough for a couple percentage points of the installed base.
> Windows 11, being deliberately unusable on older hardware that works perfectly well is enough incentive for more people to try an alternative
The extreme majority of users doesn't care about that, they'll stay on Windows 10, they don't give a single fuck about the fact that it'll stop receiving security updates.
The people who manage your work PC of course won't migrate away from Windows just because of Windows 11. But home users faced with a few hundred dollars of hardware replacement will probably consider a less expensive alternative. That might be just letting it rot. But it also might be ubuntu, mint, or Chrome OS
That's literally my point. Home users don't give a crap about the fact that their OS isn't supported anymore.
I installed Linux for my non-technial relatives and they happily browse the web and use LibreOffice.
My wife works at a Dutch company where they all run Ubuntu (mostly because they’re frugal)
I still wonder how they can know that reliably.
elf/linux distros are hardly pre-installed on PCs and forced upon users.
Looks like they track site traffic. [1]
> Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every page view referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every page view referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data to get our Global Stats information.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology
> I still wonder how they can know that reliably.
I think the general conclusion is that they don't know it reliably; notice the other comments in this thread pointing out that the numbers jump up and down more or less every time they're measured.
FTA
>According to the latest StatCounter Global Stats for June 2025, Linux now holds 5.03% of the desktop operating system market share in the United United States of America. This is fantastic news!
That...does not answer his query.
There are dozens of us. Dozens I say!
this is the year of Linux
> install linux
> 1 week later PC stops booting
> The Steam Deck has been a game-changer
Then is this really an increase in Linux "desktop" market share? I'm aware that it's Arch based and can surely run as a desktop but I see it's contribution no different than if they included ChromeOS or Android with the 5% of Linux. A targeted platform more intended for the purpose of gaming.
Desktop Linux's biggest obstacles have always been hardware/software compatibility, and user friendliness for average users. If they're going to list "Windows Woes", then how much of this increase is actually happening on the REAL forefront of Desktop Linux: Ubuntu, Mint and so forth?
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