Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
151–160 of 564 posts
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 swit…
I might be a NT fan, yet I am the first to acknowledge NT never had a big market share on the server room. The only places where NT managed to succeed on server room have been Microsoft shops, or places where .NET was adopted as the main development stack. Workstations is another matter. In the 80's many banks were either on mainframes/micros, or using stuff like Novel Netware.
> The only places where NT managed to succeed on server room have been Microsoft shops, or places where .NET was adopted as the main development stack.
.NET came out well after NT was replaced with windows 2000 (unless you claim that 2000, and thus XP and later windows OSes were also NT)
> In the 80's many banks were either on mainframes/micros, or using stuff like Novel Netware.
In my experience in the late 90s NT crushed Netware. It rode the wave of computerisation of SMEs and gained massive amounts of users (with desktop often being 3.11 onwards rather than NT).
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s still not a desktop PC. You’ll notice that iOS, Android and iPadOS aren’t included in the list either, even though the devices that run those operating systems can also replicate some subset of the desktop pc experience (and much more comprehensively than the steam deck can). At best it would be a general purpose mobile device, but even that is rather contrived. How many users do you imagine are using a steam de…
Anecdotal but I bring my steam deck with a dock and M&K with me when I visit family since I don't have a desktop computer there. Also, the Steam Deck's OS is by far the closest you can get to a traditional Linux distro since it's GNU+Linux under the hood. The built-in desktop mode is extremely close to a basic KDE Arch install, especially after you disable read-only mode. Android doesn't have as full-featured of a de…
Is a windows server a desktop PC. If not, why?
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
ok maybe i'm a sore loser, but looking at where the popular desktop OSes have been going going i think i'm fine with linux remaining an enthusiast thing
Exactly my thoughts. I think Linux is in a good sweet spot; popular enough so that applications advertise support for Linux, but not popular enough to be spoiled and optimized for the "casual" user.
There's nothing stopping different organizations from making very different distributions of Linux, with some optimized for casual users and others optimized for techies. We're already had this for ages, with Ubuntu being aimed at more casual users and Gentoo/Arch/etc. being aimed at more technical users for instance. If Microsoft dumped Windows and made a new version of Windows based on Linux internals (but of course lots of big changes to make it more like Windows, plus a bunch of telemetry and advertising crap), that wouldn't prevent other distros from continuing to do their own thing.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#155Every 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. -…
Re: debugger. It's the opposite for me. rr is the best debugger period, so I am miserable whenever I need to debug on Windows or macOS where rr doesn't work.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#156I 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 wh…
The kernel does not provide "generic" functionality; it provides very specific, often top-notch functionality which you can't easily find elsewhere, at least not as an easy replacement.
Linux has the largest collection of various hardware drivers, and a rather wide community of kernel developers who know how to produce them.
Linux has a number of specialty filesystems, some pretty important for embedded development.
Linux kernel has real-time extensions, which is not entirely a commodity, AFAICT.
Also, stuff like io_uring, BPF VM inside the kernel, namespaces (see "containers"), etc.
No, I don't think you can easily replace Linux kernel with whatever BSD kernel, Darwin, VxWorks, Contiki, FreeRTOS, etc, or, well, Windows. Much of the larger embedded stuff is Linux-specific, and much of big server stuff is either Linux-only or has extensive specific support.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice. What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more. If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it…
Adobe (and others) wants a word with you.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#158I 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…
> made by a company who makes more money off Linux than anything else, is the largest corp contributor to Linux, and has far more Linux machines internally than Windows ones, and hires software developers who do not develop for Windows.
Huh? This is...totally wrong. Software devs at Microsoft are supplied with Windows machines by default, a lot of software is built on Microsoft-specific technologies like C#, and most of the server footprint is Windows Server.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> its one of the few OSes ever on Mars When explaining linux to skeptical non-techies, I tell them it's the OS running the nuclear submarines right now. Suddenly they're more confident it can handle their ecommerce dashboard.
That's a bit of a mistatement/overstatement. That's like saying the Windows XP thin-client at Barnes and Noble runs the, mostly Linux/Unix, backend. For US nuclear subs: All of the core components and electronics use a custom RTOS; older ones built in Ada, newer ones built in C++. The "control computers" (the computers that humans interface with to tell core components what to do) aren't running anything like Ubuntu…
> (the computers that humans interface with to tell core components what to do) aren't running anything like Ubuntu or Fedora, but instead run a heavily ruggedized and customized Linux system based on the Titanium suite from Star Lab.
That’s not to be minimized. Sounds like very much on the critical path, and definitely not some shitty infotainment sidecar. If that crashed, you couldn’t control core functions of the sub? Are there overrides?
Btw, thanks for sharing these details. I would never have learnt this. Love HN sometimes.
Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure it stings Microsoft a lot more that Windows isn't the dominant server OS.
I'm sure it stings a lot! Windows Server is expensive, and a huge money earner for MS. They currently have around 20% market share (as Internet servers - much higher inside business LANs), which is a very nice chunk. And I'm sure encourages them to keep working on it. Frankly the tooling for MS server keeps it in the hunt - they really understand the concept of making things easier to use.
> They currently have around 20% market share (as Internet servers -
Extremely big doubts about this. How would anyone even know? All the hyperscale datacenters built by FAANG must be 99.9% Linux, and those DCs alone would probably be enough to make 20% impossible to hit for windows.