Linux Continues To Be Above 4% On the Desktop (gamingonlinux.com) 149
According to StatCounter, Linux on the desktop has continued to rise and remain above 4%. GamingOnLinux reports: First hitting over 4% in February, their March data is now in showing not just staying above 4% but rising a little once again showing the trend is clear that Linux use is rising. Slow and steady wins the race as they say. [Last March, Linux on the desktop was at 2.85%.]
Technically, ChromeOS is also Linux, and while people like to debate that if you do include Linux and ChromeOS together it would actually be 6.32%. A number that is getting steadily harder for developers of all kinds to ignore. It terms of overall percentage, it's still relatively small but when you think about how many people that actually is, it's a lot. Since StatCounter gets its data from web traffic, it's unlikely the rise is due to the Steam Deck and its SteamOS. "I doubt all that many browse the web regularly on Deck," writes GameOnLinux's Liam Dawe. "However, indirectly? Possible, I've seen lots and lots of posts about people enjoying Linux thanks to the Desktop Mode on the Steam Deck."
Technically, ChromeOS is also Linux, and while people like to debate that if you do include Linux and ChromeOS together it would actually be 6.32%. A number that is getting steadily harder for developers of all kinds to ignore. It terms of overall percentage, it's still relatively small but when you think about how many people that actually is, it's a lot. Since StatCounter gets its data from web traffic, it's unlikely the rise is due to the Steam Deck and its SteamOS. "I doubt all that many browse the web regularly on Deck," writes GameOnLinux's Liam Dawe. "However, indirectly? Possible, I've seen lots and lots of posts about people enjoying Linux thanks to the Desktop Mode on the Steam Deck."
Better innate privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if part of this is that since most apps have moved to the Web, all one really needs is a web browser for most tasks. Moving to Linux provides a lot more privacy (the OS isn't sending telemetry data constantly, other than an optional hardware profile), and definitely a lot smaller attack profile than Windows. This doesn't say it is immune to intrusion, due to supply chain attacks, but it has done a good job holding its on the security front.
Linux has been becoming desktop-ready, slowly but surely. For many people, it is good enough. The only thing holding it back are games, but that is becoming less and less of an issue.
Re:Better innate privacy? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing holding it back are games, but that is becoming less and less of an issue.
Wine works really well for a lot of games. For old games/software, it often does better than Windows.
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Re:Better innate privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better innate privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
I want an open phone but it really isn't practical for my needs right now. Also, while my iPhone may be less "open" than an Android, I at least get some semblance of privacy protections. I don't think that makes me a horrible person.
For years I used nothing but Macs. I dabbled in Linux and would dual-boot, but that was just for playing around and learning about servers. Eventually Linux got to the point where I could use it everyday and when my Macs reached EOL, I just went from dual boot to only *nix.
I'll probably follow the same trajectory with cell phones. Once PostmarketOS becomes compatible with an old phone I have lying around I'll install it and toy around with it. Eventually I'll have an iPhone and an "open" phone. Once there's enough feature parity, I'll make the switch full time (for me, the ideal situation would be tight integration with NextCloud—if that becomes a thing I could convince my boss to switch the whole company over).
I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect everyone to use an "open" phone:
postmarketOS is for Linux enthusiasts. For hackers, tinkerers, technical people who are interested in pushing their mobile devices beyond what can be done with the stock operating system: more free software, mainline kernel, getting software updates until the hardware breaks, better privacy, less distracting features, etc.
The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for non-technical people too, but we are not there yet. Usability and most importantly stability issues need to be worked out first. If you are looking for an OS that is as usable as iOS or Android, this project is currently not for you. You will have the best experience with postmarketOS after taking time to familiarize yourself with how it works, making it your own and contributing to development and/or testing. If you want to help us move forward and continue working on these issues, we gladly accept donations.
– State of PostmarketOS [postmarketos.org]
(I know there are some Android forks out there, but that's like using a Chrome-based browser when I could be using Firefox)
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I at least get some semblance of privacy protections
How do you NOT get more privacy protection with an open phone? Where you can pick and choose the software and services that you use?
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while my iPhone may be less "open" than an Android, I at least get some semblance of privacy protections. I don't think that makes me a horrible person.
If you wanted privacy then you would run a degoogled Android, because Apple is part of PRISM and isn't offering you actual privacy either. There are still lots of Android phones with unlockable bootloaders, so you can install your own OS.
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User contributed reports at winehq.org suggest it last worked in 2013 and you just missed it.
Re: Better innate privacy? (Score:2)
If it worked then, the same version will work now with the same version of wine.
More likely someone made an overly positive report.
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According to the Wine App DB, iTunes 12 installs and kind of works, but there are many issues; refer to https://appdb.winehq.org/objec... [winehq.org]
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An iTunes substitute would fit the bill.
Depends on what you mean by substitute.
If you want an app that can buy music / movies / etc. You're better off using a web browser and what ever service that will let you get what you want. Pretty much any decent music service will allow you to download a unprotected MP3 that will work with just about anything. eBooks are available from some sites DRM free, and calibre can mostly convert the rest with the right plugins. (But depending on the site you might need additional hardware or some VM running andr
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There are a few options, War Thunder, Warframe, World of Tanks, and, surprisingly, Genshin Impact, all work. And War Thunder actually has a native client. But you may note that those are all freemium games. I'm not aware of any big multiplayer games that will run in Linux, via Wine or otherwise, that don't use the freemium
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Feel free to correct me on this, I'd love to play Helldivers 2
People are reporting that it works with Proton/Wine (although some Radeon video cards seem to have trouble with it).
Some older MMOs I guess... Now there's a dying genre. Whatever happened to those anyway?
Final Fantasy online is putting out some good content still.
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Re: Better innate privacy? (Score:2)
IME most software doesn't build on cygwin. And I've tried a lot. Simple, complex, most of it won't build.
Re: Better innate privacy? (Score:2)
I'm not new, kid.
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That is possible in a minority of cases, where the professional program isn't making use of specialized hardware for acceleration or accessing resources using custom protocols and such.
No, specialized hardware for acceleration is the minority of cases.
Open source is wonderful and a powerful set of ideas from an academic perspective, but like things such as communism what works in the lab doesn't always mesh well with reality.
Open source works in reality. You're using motivated reasoning, stop it.
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I had to look up "motivated thinking" as a logical fallacy as I'd never heard of that one before.
I believe it. You should read it again so you stop doing it. Motivated reasoning is bad. It's what lawyers do.
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I work in IT and I'd use it as my daily driver at home but my latest video card had some issues starting after install and I didn't want to debug it, but the live usb worked which was interesting. I'll take another dive on a day I have more time to muck around, but I'm tired of the way Microsoft is handling Windows and has for a long time, I'd rather run windows in a VM as needed, and it's okay if I have to give up a few games, I can do almost everything else without issue,.
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Usually this just means the live usb ships with the non-free drivers but for a regular install you have to know to install them explicitly afterwards.
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No, I did, and I could boot in recovery modes as well. It was a weird issue. So it's not that I couldn't boot at all per se, it's that I couldn't get the drivers to operate in normal mode for some reason for my 3080, and I didn't want to debug it at the time.
Re:Better innate privacy? (Score:5, Informative)
Steam on Linux is now truly amazingly good. I run Debian but have a separate Windows PC for games. I haven't booted it for months. Steam's proton implementation is a game changer (bad pun, intended) . I bought a new AMD graphics card. I did not install it in my dedicated Win 10 gaming PC. It went into my Debian PC where it actually gets used for all kinds of things and also is great for games.
Single Board Computers (Score:2)
I wonder if the upswing has to do with hobbyists purchasing single board computers (Raspberry Pi variants (4, 5, Zero), Orange Pi, Lichee Pi 4A, N100, etc) and experimenting with Linux distros for the first time. Download and copy to a microFlash card and see how they compare.
I wouldn't say this is the "year of the Linux desktop" but there are a not-unsubstantial number of folks purchasing sub-$100 SBCs to experiment with. In the past year I've purchased both a Rpi4 and Rpi5 and installed two or three di
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Not just Raspberry Pis, but China is cranking out RISC-V boards with a lot of nice stuff on them. Even with an outdated kernel and antediluvian drivers, the boards coming from there are getting faster and faster, and often out-do the ARM boards.
A SBC as a basic desktop sounds painful, but give it a couple years, and this may be something viable. On the x86 side, there are a lot of Chinese mini PCs coming out with decent GPU capability as well. They are not expandable, but they do work well for the price,
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A SBC as a basic desktop sounds painful, but give it a couple years, and this may be something viable.
It isn't painful. The latest raspberry Pi OS is a version of Debian and runs well even on 3Bs. On a 4 or 5 I would expect not to notice any difference between that and Debian on a standard motherboard setup.
Heck, I recently obtained a Pi Zero 2 W which is about twice the size of a pack of gum and that can also run a Pi OS desktop! For something that small that is impressive. (I won't be using it for that; but it doesn't take long to flash a SDHC chip and try things out.)
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I have a RPi 4 as a basic desktop, and to me it sort of works... but driving a 4k monitor, it definitely isn't something I'd enjoy using as a daily driver. However for the few things I use it for (a Spartan environment I use for writing), it works well enough.
I have a Pi Zero W which is doing failover NTP service, and I think that could run a desktop (or more like "walk" rather than run.) The Zero W works well for small tasks like NTP, or DNS caching.
On the RISC-V side, I'm starting to see SBCs with 32 gi
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Those BCM parts are still lightyears from the performance needed to run anything but the most spartan X WM you can find without it being obnoxious.
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Not just Raspberry Pis, but China is cranking out RISC-V boards with a lot of nice stuff on them. Even with an outdated kernel and antediluvian drivers, the boards coming from there are getting faster and faster, and often out-do the ARM boards.
It's true that RISC-V is becoming competitive with stock Cortex-A76s, which is great... But they're still under half of an A12 per GHz.
Stock A76s suck for desktops. Anyone who says otherwise has a really fucking low bar.
RISC-V needs to go a long way before it becomes a suitable desktop part. I for one hope it does. But I do wonder if it'll ever end up being any more than a stock Arm core competitor.
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I am noticing that Chinese companies are throwing a lot of R&D at RISC-V, mainly because it is a flexible architecture, and relatively unencumbered by patents. But, they are getting there. I've seen some RISC-V boards [theregister.com] have some interesting functionality.
Right now, ARM is still king, but there is competition.
The sad thing is that POWER and SPARC are not contenders anymore. Power10 is an incremental update, while SPARC is dead in the water after Oracle jettisoned all the engineers. It would be nice to
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Arm (iin the generic, see: stock Arm licensed and designed cores) just isn't very good.
Prior to recent Apple parts, Arm being compared with x86 was something worth of rolling your eyes at.
Apple isn't doing anything special here that other people can't do... but still, no one has.
Will corporations do what it takes to make RISC-V, and non-Apple Arms competitive with x86? I sure fucking hope so... but I'm losing hope.
Stock arms steadily lose ground.
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"and Linux as an installed option is only available from Dell"
Hmm, Lenovo offers ubuntu pre-installs for the thinkpad line. pretty sure there are others too
Re:Better innate privacy? (Score:5, Informative)
Linux as an installed option is only available from Dell, in their high end workstation configurations.
Wrong.
Dell. Lenovo. HP. System76, Tuxedo... plus various refurbers offering a choice of installed and tested distros.
100% of these ChromeOS devices are garbage tier hardware that actually suck to use.
Also wrong.
"garbage" sub $200 devices to premium $1000+ devices and everything in between are all freely available.
You're good at pulling stuff out your ignorant butt. Maybe do a few seconds' research first before spewing your wibble?
More developers? (Score:2)
My guess is few of these are non-devs.
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My guess is few of these are non-devs.
My wife is definitely not a developer. But I am, so that's why she is using Linux on her laptop. (While I don't because I develop software for Windows.)
I guess this scenario, that people get their computers installed and configured by somebody who likes Linix is becoming more common.
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My guess is few of these are non-devs.
My wife is definitely not a developer. But I am, so that's why she is using Linux on her laptop. (While I don't because I develop software for Windows.) I guess this scenario, that people get their computers installed and configured by somebody who likes Linix is becoming more common.
Same here. Wife's computer changed into a Kubuntu install when her Win7 computer died because I run Linux and am tired of Windows' shenanigans (starting with TPM 2.0 requirements for the HW, you're the data they want, etc). Almost all she does is based on some site in a browser and the rest is pretty generic (looking at PDFs, etc). She's been using Thunderbird for email for years, so no change there. Libre/Open-office is good enough for the few docs she has to work on it. I also like the change because it m
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Do Steam Deck users actually use Linux on the desktop?
Re:More developers? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've talked to several people who started using their Steam Deck as a Linux desktop, simply because it's already available as a feature, so that takes all the hassle of installation and configuration away, and they discovered that without those roadblocks it was very convenient and they liked it. I suspect the percentage of users doing that is higher than people think; all you need is a dock and it becomes a fairly capable general purpose computer.
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I've got 3 Steam Decks. I fucking love that thing.
but that 15W Zen2 is a shit CPU for desktop use.
Open up Discovery, and enjoy a solid 25 seconds of the machine being unresponsive.
I'm so tired of people selling shit fucking experiences.
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Well, it doesn't take 25 seconds to start for me, and it certainly doesn't render the rest of the machine unresponsive.
lol.
And that's how I know you A) don't have a Steam Deck, or B) Don't use your Steam Deck.
Its CPU performance is equivalent to a circa 2015 Intel part.
It's not designed to be a powerhouse- it's an ultra-low TDP part.
The gamble is that that is just fine for games- and it is.
Maybe your wifi sucks, or you're just a liar.
Ya, slow wifi notoriously causes pegged CPU cores.
I actually had a computer in 1996 and taking your statements at face value I'd have to assume you just don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
It was a colorful exaggeration, you dim-witted fuckstain.
I don't know what the fuck you're trying to sell, but it's sad as shit.
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ChromeOS uses the Linux Kernel... (Score:5, Interesting)
but in the begining it was not a Linux "Distro" (a distro is what most people associate with an OS). It was a bunch of google only stuff on top of the Linux Kernel.
Having said that, over the years, ChromeOS is getting closer and closer to Linux (you can run Linux Apps there, for example), so, while probably there will not be a hard before and after, at some point in the future, ChromeOS will be a Linux Distro with some google stuff bolted on
Good for Linux. Having been exposed to FreeBSD ('95) and Linux (in '96) in the university, I was a big defender of Linux on servers on servers in the early '00s, when defending Linux was "Risking your career". For desktop? I do not care one way or the other, I'll use whatever fits the bill. But again, good for Linux.
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I wonder how many people actually do run Linux apps on Chrome? I bet it's not many, aside from developers.
Including ChromeOS with Linux is daft. 99.9% of users only ever run ChromeOS apps, using the ChromeOS filesystem and APIs, downloaded from the ChromeOS app store. It deserves its own category.
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Chrome facilitates "Linux" apps via chroots and containers (depending on how you do it)
Windows 11 (Score:2)
Windows 11 makes Linux look really tempting. I haven't switched yet, but if Microsoft fucks with the UI too much with no workarounds (see the recent blacklisting of ExplorerPatcher), I may have to reconsider my choice of OS.
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Stardock sells Start11 and Open-Shell is still free and works with Windows 11
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I try to switch every year or so, but some multi-monitor thing, or the total lack of low vision tools, or the lack of decent software holds me back. Or there are bugs that annoy me too much...
Most of the time some installer bug gets me and after trying 3-4 distros, I give up. I even bought an AMD based graphics card recently just to help with Linux desktop bugs, but it's just too much.
I also have issues with Windows 11, so I'm currently stuck at 10, dreading EOS.
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I've tried it a few times, still buggy.
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Hit up a LUG friend for help installing?
Somehow I've been getting by without those problems since 2009.
I have a Windows VM to run tax software that I fire up once a year and an ancient win7 miniitx box to run firmware update tools on sdd's.
Some discernment is required. I got a 3D printer with a web interface based on Klipper that integrates perfectly with OrcaSlicer. It's possible to buy one with janky Windows-only software instead.
But that means I don't have phone-home backdoors stealing my data.
Tradeoffs.
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one of my old bosses said (Score:3)
But that could be it here. Any chat about if Linux looks good enough was put to bed a long time ago, so I think we're at the point you can just show Grandma the email program and the web browser, and you're done. She doesn't and won't know any difference.
Re:one of my old bosses said (Score:5, Interesting)
Well the OS is becoming more and more irrelevant.
Compared to just a few years ago the number of "Apps" I have installed on any OS is far lower. I'm constantly moving content into cloud or cloud like storage. My daily driver "machine" is quickly becoming my daily driver "account". ( But secretly My actually daily driver machine has been Linux for well over a decade. )
You are right once grandma is only using the web and email it really doesn't matter what OS is in use. For my father I'll be moving him to an arm device with a giant screen and keyboard in the next year. And he won't know the difference at all.
Noting one of the reasons for the move is he is becoming more and more susceptible to scammers. He's starting to respond to the calls and the popups. So I need to reduce the surface area where attacks to take hold.
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moving him to an arm device with a giant screen and keyboard
he is becoming more and more susceptible to scammers. He's starting to respond to the calls and the popups. So I need to reduce the surface area where attacks to take hold.
"I'm sorry Dad, but I'm afraid you've driven your last web browsing session already."
In all seriousness, that sounds like you need to reduce the physical surface area the computer takes up not increase it. That or at the very least kill the internet subscription. The world will thank you for it.
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Linux, or the OS at all, would become irrelevant once everything was an X11 app...
FTFY
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If every app became a web app, I think I'd quit computers entirely and go live in a cave.
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Sun tried to go the Networked Computing route and bankrupted themselves.
Internet connectivity is far too slow and far too unreliable for most tasks. Worse, most apps still use TCP and UDP, despite better transport protocols existing. And IPv4 is still mainstream, despite IPv6's benefits.
The Internet is also not secure, due to NSA demanding the IETF withdraw IPSec as a mandatory requirement for IPv6.
No, thin clients with overpowered central servers (the mainframe architecture) was abandoned for good reasons
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Worse, most apps still use TCP and UDP, despite better transport protocols existing.
Oh really? What's their IP protocol numbers? Asking for a friend.
IPv4 is still mainstream, despite IPv6's benefits.
IPv6 provides absolutely no benefit to the average consumer. The average consumer isn't directly exposed to the internet, (and hopefully never will be), so they gain very little for all of the extra complexity and cost. IPv6 also does not permanently solve the problem it was created to fix. (It just kicks the can down the road until we start getting grey goo levels of IP address assignments.) If it did solve that problem, consumers would hav
Those undecided should sample virtual machines (Score:5, Interesting)
Virtual machines are the most convenient way to sample a variety of Linux distros on your most performant PC. You can download free prebuilt VM from places like osboxes then if a distro interests you roll your own VM to get comfortable with installing then configuring your system for your use case.
I don't "switch" OS, I add them as it's free and easy to do. Converting old Windows installs to virtual machines is typically easy (and even if you don't use Linux a fine way to back up old Windows installs in an easily accessible manner, for example running Windows 7 or 10 on a W11 host).
No need to wait until a Windows version deeply annoys you when you can run any or many OS on your host OS of choice. Give it a go. It's FUN.
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How do you convert old installed Windows into VMs like VirtualBox's with the different hardwares?
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Only very old Windows makes this hard. Since Vista it has been pretty easy. Install chipset and storage drivers if necessary, take a disk image and boot it, the system will just come up and reconfigure itself.
No question it was easier to do this with older versions with vmware, which offered a little migration help. But with modern-ish Windows it's not a real problem.
I can feel it (Score:5, Funny)
This could be the year.
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Linux won't capture the desktop market unless Microsoft is broken up due to them repeating antitrust activity they have been repeatedly convicted of. But that won't happen because the US is too dependent on its supply of what's basically electronic heroin.
So what we all want to know is (Score:2)
when is the Year of the 5% Linux Desktop?
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If you include Chrome PCs, that's been and gone.
NOOOOOoooo! (Score:5, Funny)
If this keeps up then how are my fellow nerds and I going to smugly declare we "only use Linux" with an air of superiority? I know we spoke about how great Linux is, all the freedom it provides but you're not actually supposed to take that seriously!
Look, just go back to Windows and be abus^W treated like a welcome customer and you won't have to deal with uhh... compiling the Linux kernel. Yes, that's a thing you must do all the time and it's really hard and takes hours. Please, don't take our superiority away from us!
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You can still be smug:
"Linux? What, you just run a kernel? I run GNU/Linux."
"Your distro has systemd. You might as well be a Windows user."
"I use Arch. You've probably never heard of it."
"Linux has be corporatized. That's why I use *BSD."
"Slackware is the only true distro for nerds."
"Gentoo is the only true distro for nerds."
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"Debian, you peasant."
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We'll start identifying by which distro we run. And if one distro starts to dominate, we'll identify by which DE we run. The vast choices Linux provides offers a nearly-infinite number of ways to satisfy our urge for tribalism.
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I run BSD.
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FreeBSD? OpenBSD? NetBSD? DragonFly BSD? original recipe BSD 4.4? Inquiring minds want to know! :)
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Gentoo BSD ;)
Linux Migration Stories (Score:3)
I have absolutely no loyalty to any distro and I don't care what anyone else uses either, but I can't help but wonder how many people gave up without ever installing Ubuntu because their Linux-using friends told them not to bother with it. Most of the hate against Ubuntu seems to revolve around ideological issues that the average beginner couldn't care less about. Perhaps being pushed into using snaps, systemd, and other such behavior may eventually push them away from Ubuntu, but by then they will probably be comfortable enough with Linux to fix the issues they'd encounter in other distros.
Anyway, I guess my point is that when we recommend distros to beginners, I think it would be best to put our ideological differences aside and recommend the distro with the highest chance of success for new users. And at the moment, that still appears to be Ubuntu. You may now proceed to call me an idiot for saying something positive about Ubuntu.
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"You may now proceed to call me an idiot for saying something positive about Ubuntu."
It won't be me, I use Mint, Ubuntu in green. No driver problems, but an occasional problem with getting second hard drives mounted. Fstab is a bit picky, here you must use a space, there you must have commas.
The most annoying problem I've had is a multiple file copy to a Mac reliably fails, every other file gets truncated. This happens with Nemo and Thunar, but doesn't seem to happen with Caja. Yes, I've set up machines wit
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im not a linux user and i still dont get the drama behind systemd - I thought it had to be about DRM or something but it looks like a technical point theyre all disagreeing on? whats the actual controversy?
The short answer is that systemd is low quality software put in place of high quality software, and it doesn't do most of the things it says it does. e.g. they say it eliminates init scripts, but scripts can do things that unit files can't, so it doesn't. It only reduces their number and some wind up being called from unit files.
Systemd does nothing you couldn't do with shell scripts. It's modular but you need enough of the pieces that it might as well not be. Meanwhile it creates whole new classes of probl
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To fully understand the problems with systemd, you need to understand some basic tenets of modern software development:
* Single Responsibility principle: Each piece of software should do one thing well, rather than multiple things poorly.
* Keep It Simple principle: Each piece of software should be as simple as possible, though no simpler.
* Reuse: All functionality common to multiple pieces of software should be its own piece of software.
* Depende
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There are many reasons why I and many others do not like, trust, nor voluntarily use systemd. These are just some.
Unfortunately, we've been mostly outvoted. All major distributions use systemd.
But the freedom of choice inherent in the Linux ecosystem means there are usually other choices. My Gentoo Linux system has bits and pieces of systemd installed, as dependencies of other projects, but does not run systemd as PID 1 (first process, responsible for managing all others). And it will stay that way for
Re:Linux Migration Stories (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using Linux on all of my personal devices since the late 90s. I used Ubuntu for many years but switched to Mint not because of ideological reasons around systemd or snaps or what-have-you, but because they did the one thing that companies like Microsoft do to their customers that keeps me using Linux.
They changed the desktop, radically and dramatically in ways that completely fucked how I use my device.
And sure, it's Linux, so I could switch the DE ... but the entire reason I used Ubuntu was so that everything would "just work" on a fresh install and I wouldn't have to do that level of heavy customization.
I can't remember what the new desktop was ... was it Unity? All I know is that this is when Canonical was following Microsoft in thinking that "the future is touch-screens and mobile!"
I don't know what is driving the growing Linux use. But I do know that what really bothers me as a tech consumer is the constant trend-chasing and forced change that impacts the user experience in very major ways. All I want is stability, predictability and boring. If some new tech comes out that has the potential to improve my work flow or my life, I want to be able to evaluate that and make the change gradually on my own terms.
I don't want to be forced to use Cloud storage. I don't want to be "forced" to buy an "AI PC" (whatever the fuck that means) because it's all you can buy. I don't want to be "forced" to use web apps for things that can be desktop applications. I have a love/hate relationship with web apps. On the one hand they have enabled to use Linux at work the last few years because I can use Zoom, Slack, GMail and other work-required tools. But as an end user, I can't stand the fact that the company can push UX changes on me that I never opted in to or wanted.
I miss the days when companies would have to spend resources doing beta tests and focus group their new versions and then people could choose whether or not they wanted to "upgrade" by reading the reviews. These days, changes get push on you during weekly release cycles. Don't get me started on the infuriating Pendo pop-ups that tell you about new features that you couldn't give a shit about.
Canonical violated my trust by doing that very business trend chasing thing that drives me to Linux in the first place. So I switched to Mint and for the last 10 years or so have no reason to switch to any other distro because it gives me that stability and predictability that I depend on.
So it could be ... just maybe ... that people are fed up with companies pushing constant change on them and that for first time in tech history, Linux is the "stable" choice.
Next milestone: 4.1% (Score:2)
THEN we can hope for...4.2%!
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THEN we can hope for...4.2%!
Well, original BSD from Berkeley, became really good at 4.2, so....
Obligatory.... (Score:2)
So, the Year of the Linux Desktop?
Shrinkage? (Score:2)
What *I* want to know is (Score:2)
When will TuxRacer be available on Steam?
--
"I seen 40 of them one day--flying in formation [UFOs]. Then Venusians, they got no monetary system, go government, no wars..." -- George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) to Wyatt (Peter Fonda) in "Easy Rider" (1969)
Devil's advocate (Score:2)
Non iPhone post (Score:3)
Microsoft's Windows 11 debacle has made a lot of perfectly good and fast computers "obsolete". After years of conditioning people to "update or you will be pwned immediately", many or most people are religious about it. I mean, if microsoft does BOHICA updates on everything including Enterprise versions, it has to be critical, amirite?
So here people are with contemporary computers with no speed issues can be rammed up and SSD'd up to make them haul ass, and Microsoft tells them "No soup for you!", well, there you have a real candidate for Linux. Not an older computer that is slow and creaky and can be futzed about with.
So a lot of people are discovering that something like Mint can be installed easier than Windows, and that Linux has better driver support, and that updates do not do it BOHICA style, but wait until you determine when to apply them.
I have a number that have been converted to dual boot, and others that are now Linux only. Livin' their best life.
Corporate Sabbotage is Open Source's Worse Enemy (Score:2)
I have three laptops (Score:2)
Is the desktop becoming less popular? (Score:2)
I am seeing more people using their phones as their primary, if not only, computer device. If it's not a phone, it's probably a tablet, or maybe a laptop.
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This is an aside, but I found I could not walk into a local office supply store and buy a decent laptop bag.
Went to literally a dozen or so, only to end up with a crappy one without nearly enough pockets, compartments, etc. to truly replace the old one I had.
Brick and mortar retail is dying in large part because the online shopping experience is just better.
It's become pretty easy to build desktop PCs from parts that have been vetted in advance to verify Linux support.
The laptop story on the other h
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Chromebooks have never been contaminated with Windows. I've run a few distros on mine, and like Mint best.
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Troubleshooting Windows when it goes wrong is so esoteric to be near impossible.
What you will do, is browse 800,000 MS support forum posts filled with some mechanical turk saying they're sorry for your bad experience, with no actual resolution by the end of it, just links to 57 other tickets with a statistically described success probability for each maybe-fix.
Linux, when it explodes, is definitely complicated.
However, every single portion of it can be learned, because there's no black box.
Y
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As long as you consider Android/Linux instead of GNU/Linux.