Only the "Unknown" category has decreased in market share, which leads me to believe that the linux market share has not increased at all. Just that the data is more complete.
Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
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Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#72I wonder why they keep making these articles. Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS. It is on virtually all servers on the Internet, the majority OS on phones, its in many TVs and STBs and streaming sticks, its one of the few OSes ever in space, its one of the few OSes ever on Mars, and it is also the OS behind ChromeOS (which that article mistakenly b…
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Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#73I think that is an important milestone.
An OS whose hardware support is largely closed source on one side and painfully reverse-engineered on the other. Thisnk about the graphics hardware.
For years, during the desktop boom in the 2000s, most of the support for networking hardware, wired and wireless, was based on binary blobs coming from Windows OSs and "imported" into a Linux system. How could you dare to use Linux as a desktop?
As of today still most of the PC hardware comes with Windows preinstalled. It would be like offering people pink cars which they can paint in a different color, more or less.
Nope. I think 3% is a lot if you take into account the amount of efforts needed for people to contrastate the so-called "market push".
Linux world is "fragmented" by definition: each main tool and even desktop environment has a number of variants, developed by smallish (fragmented) teams in the name of freedom and choice. Windows, on the other side, has a basically monolithic environment in the name of ... dunno what. Normal (non-techie) people are scared by Linux. Because they have never tried the blue pill. They have never seen how deep the rabbit hole can be.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#74That's far better market share per year than my personal projects do.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#75I wonder why they keep making these articles. Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS. It is on virtually all servers on the Internet, the majority OS on phones, its in many TVs and STBs and streaming sticks, its one of the few OSes ever in space, its one of the few OSes ever on Mars, and it is also the OS behind ChromeOS (which that article mistakenly b…
Sure, Linux is on many, many devices which have proprietary UIs. And there it does pretty well, because the kernel just provides generic functionality cheaply. It’s a commodity backend that could be swapped with another commodity backend without any users knowing or caring. Hooray. Linux is the go to choice when you could just as well be using something else that’s really cheap, like BSD.
However, desktop Linux is where the product is 100% OSS. That’s the apples to apples comparison. And that’s where it can’t compete without vendors writing property code to put in front of it to make it actually work well.
Server side Linux gets a lot of support from professional programmers paid by big corps. They have improved it beyond hobbyist level, and it works pretty well. And of course cheap makes up for a lot.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#76Probably 70 or 80% of cloud workloads are Linux, and like 60% of embedded devices, of which there are billions. And of those embedded/mobile devices, the rest will either be running iOS, vxworks, freertos or zephyr. I think the joke has always been "this is the year of Linux", but in all honesty... it's the decade of Linux. It's probably one of the few areas where there is growth in computing capacity and by far most…
Good luck trying to run a proper GNU/Linux on those Android devices. Actually tbere are plenty of other options for embedded. As for the server room, UNIX was already the winner there anyway, since the 1990's.
AOSP with the more modern kernels and less vendor garbage in giant forks will help with that.
Unix was king in the 80s, maybe early 90s for anyone doing terminals, banks, government and universities were all ok the big iron train. But when nt3.1 and 3.5 came out, if you were a business not looking into it, you felt like you were behind the times. We had DEC and iris at our house, so weren't in a good position to switch, but it wasn't long before the change happened.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#77Every once in a while I'm tempted to switch back to Linux (I used to have that as my desktop between 10 and 15 years ago), but then I remember: - My DJ software (which I pay for) is not supported at all on Linux (likewise true for most common music production software). - The Affinity suite (which I paid for) is not supported on Linux. - The best debugger I can find (remedybg, which I paid for) doesn't work there. -…
Operating systems have a really high degree of lock-in. Such that while you -can- change OS, there's simply no incentive to do so. That's why you're still running the same OS you always have. [1] You accumulate software yes, but you also accumulate habits and knowledge. Changing OS means discarding all the accumulated knowledge, which 0% of "normal users" want to do. Throw in the change in software, ending up with at…
A lot of people are locked-in Windows, but as Microsoft more and more ruins the OS by pushing advertisement, telemetry, slow cloud services, new versions of apps optimized for those who don't know how to use a computer, rather than experts - there will be plenty of users switching to Linux.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#78The problem is the desktop situation is such a mess. Do you go with a gtk or qt desktop and which one? And then X11 which is ancient and creaky, or wayland which is fatally nerfed in design (if not it's entire development philosophy) even when it does do what you need which is far from always? OTOH windows is becoming adware/spyware and macos is becoming big brother lockdown-wear, so maybe it is time for linux to shi…
Been using for 15 years, I've never sat there and worried about gtk or qt, Maybe wayland or X11, but I've just naturally moved to wayland? Just install something like Fedora, and you won't worry about it, it will just work. I personally hate Ubuntu btw Canonical is just not for me. I have no idea how it's so popular. Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.
>Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.
Could be. I should try NixOS or fedora again but seriously don't overstate it. Cannonical are not my fav company. Installing an LTS ubu works fine, it has annoyances (maybe nixos and fedora are better?) but it's still so incredibly far ahead of windows or macos it's not even close for me. Sure, I'm used to linux on my laptop (thinkpad t480s intel graphics) that anything else will be a massive hassle to maintain, with driver issues, os-level spyware and all that other headache. When I use my kids' macs they always feel janky, windows? Forget it, it's just so unpolished and ew.
Pretty different to RH7 in 2002 in quality and polish when I first tried linux.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#79I wonder why they keep making these articles. Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS. It is on virtually all servers on the Internet, the majority OS on phones, its in many TVs and STBs and streaming sticks, its one of the few OSes ever in space, its one of the few OSes ever on Mars, and it is also the OS behind ChromeOS (which that article mistakenly b…
And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it :). You can conquer the world, dominate every space and yet there's thus little voice inside saying "but you're not good enough. See over there, in that one space, you're a weakling. " Welcome to the human condition.
Honestly, it feels like mentioning the concept of "desktop" seems a little weak, like someone from 2010. Chances are you have linux running in a VM, or container, or phone, or other device right beside you.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#80I wonder why they keep making these articles. Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS. It is on virtually all servers on the Internet, the majority OS on phones, its in many TVs and STBs and streaming sticks, its one of the few OSes ever in space, its one of the few OSes ever on Mars, and it is also the OS behind ChromeOS (which that article mistakenly b…
That's a lot of words to ignore that this is very clearly talking about desktop market share.
Here's a report about server market share:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux
Here's one for total device market share (quite a bit out of date, since Gartner paywalls all new reports; still it shows the general trend):
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3050931/windows-comes-...
Etc. All of which agree with you. But, it turns out, most people don't care about what OS runs their toothbrush or thin client. Only their mobile device or desktop, which is why these reports are so much more popular.