Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#11

Post by Alekhine »

bobowzki wrote: post #9

Is 2020 the year of the Linux desktop?

No, and it never will be until:

Open source creative and professional tools are on par with proprietary tools (MS Office, Adobe) in terms of function and UI,

GUI applications are written for every conceivable setting a non-technical user would need,

Gaming is easier (it's getting better)

And, Ubuntu, Mint and other popular distros streamline everything even more so that even an idiot (and lots of people are idiots when it comes to tech) can use it.

Once those things happen, there is a chance we'll carve out more of the market, and create a snowball effect. If 10% of the market starts using Linux because OEMs preinstalled it to cut costs, software devs will notice, and it will only get better from there as more popular programs are ported to Linux.

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#12

Post by mixmastamyk »

wincy wrote: post #8
akmittal wrote: post #6

Ubuntu is becoming more and more suitable for normal users. Most of the work is done in web browsers these days. I do ubuntu minimal installation and almost everything works out of box. More people would be using if laptop makers start giving ubuntu as default option.

You still get weird gotchas. My wife wanted to install Microsoft Teams to talk to our doctor. She got the the Linux download page then asked “should I download the .rpm or the .deb?”. Luckily I was there to tell her. Then she installed it like a champ and got it working, so that was nice. But there’s no way she’d have just “known” this, and it’s just another hurdle to non technical users. Why should you have to know…

Why on earth would someone talk to their doctor with such a product?

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#13

Post by ladyanita22 »

bobowzki wrote: post #9

Is 2020 the year of the Linux desktop?

The nearest linux has been from dominance is back in the glory days of Android when it was thought mobile would conquer everything. Now it's increasingly clear it is going to dominate only the mobile market, and even then the power uses of phones are extremely limited.

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#14

Post by nmstoker »

wincy wrote: post #8
akmittal wrote: post #6

Ubuntu is becoming more and more suitable for normal users. Most of the work is done in web browsers these days. I do ubuntu minimal installation and almost everything works out of box. More people would be using if laptop makers start giving ubuntu as default option.

You still get weird gotchas. My wife wanted to install Microsoft Teams to talk to our doctor. She got the the Linux download page then asked “should I download the .rpm or the .deb?”. Luckily I was there to tell her. Then she installed it like a champ and got it working, so that was nice. But there’s no way she’d have just “known” this, and it’s just another hurdle to non technical users. Why should you have to know…

I get your point that there's clearly further to go, but it's not that unusual to need to know something relevant like this if installing from a source that's not your OS app store. After all, we often expect Windows users to know their install option is "PC" (a historic piece of info that isn't "Windows") rather than than Mac.

It's also something that is answered effectively with the very first Google result for an obvious search: https://www.google.com/search?q=should+i+install+deb+or+rpm&...

There are a few ways round this but they would generally require action on the part of all the software suppliers who post packages via websites. In your example it wouldn't be hard for MS to figure out the Ubuntu users and send them just the right link and likewise several other Linux distros - I guess it's still not worth it.

Maybe this is an area where a JS library for websites would avoid each one rolling their own and thus make the experience better across the board?

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#15

Post by gamblor956 »

People can't go to work and log in, ergo, a noticeable drop in Windows 10 usage, because Windows is used by a lot of people at work.

But, since we are looking at relative market shares, that means every other OS' share goes up, even if the actual number of users remains almost the same. (And the article points this out at the end.)

This will be followed by each of those OSs seeing massive drops in relative market share once people go back to work and all the dormant Windows 10 computers start running again.

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#16

Post by pjmlp »

ladyanita22 wrote: post #13
bobowzki wrote: post #9

Is 2020 the year of the Linux desktop?

The nearest linux has been from dominance is back in the glory days of Android when it was thought mobile would conquer everything. Now it's increasingly clear it is going to dominate only the mobile market, and even then the power uses of phones are extremely limited.

Except Linux isn't exposed to user space, and its syscalls aren't part of NDK stable APIs, so Android Next can use BSD, Fuchsia, NT, NuttX or whatever Google comes up with and very few would notice.

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#17

Post by ladyanita22 »

pjmlp wrote: post #16
ladyanita22 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nearest linux has been from dominance is back in the glory days of Android when it was thought mobile would conquer everything. Now it's increasingly clear it is going to dominate only the mobile market, and even then the power uses of phones are extremely limited.

Except Linux isn't exposed to user space, and its syscalls aren't part of NDK stable APIs, so Android Next can use BSD, Fuchsia, NT, NuttX or whatever Google comes up with and very few would notice.

And except Android is architecturally a shitshow that would never be able to compete against a proper OS like Windows or macOS.

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#18

Post by bdcravens »

> Ubuntu’s overall share of operating system usage ballooned from 0.27% in March to 1.89% in April.

This is when a new version of Ubuntu was released. Since it's measured by web visits, this could be a bunch of people installing 20.04 in a VM and checking it out

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#19

Post by pjmlp »

ladyanita22 wrote: post #17
pjmlp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Linux isn't exposed to user space, and its syscalls aren't part of NDK stable APIs, so Android Next can use BSD, Fuchsia, NT, NuttX or whatever Google comes up with and very few would notice.

And except Android is architecturally a shitshow that would never be able to compete against a proper OS like Windows or macOS.

In that regard the only thing I appreciate is their approach to securing native code.

As for everything else, kind of agree.

10 years and still a broken NDK experience, Java stuck on a pseudo Java 8 subset, every IO the best practices get rebooted, Vulkan requires cloning github repos, already went through 3 animation frameworks, JetPack Composer still has no idea how to match existing GUI tooling, ....

Re: Windows 10 Bleeds Users While Ubuntu Linux Enjoys an Astonishing Increase

#20

Post by ladyanita22 »

pjmlp wrote: post #19
ladyanita22 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And except Android is architecturally a shitshow that would never be able to compete against a proper OS like Windows or macOS.

In that regard the only thing I appreciate is their approach to securing native code. As for everything else, kind of agree. 10 years and still a broken NDK experience, Java stuck on a pseudo Java 8 subset, every IO the best practices get rebooted, Vulkan requires cloning github repos, already went through 3 animation frameworks, JetPack Composer still has no idea how to match existing GUI tooling, ....

And don't even mention drivers. Lack of stable ABI is why Android gets 2 years of updates vs. how many in Apple and Windows?
Post reply on HN