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Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

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Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#511
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not anymore. Last gen phones have enough performance to run webapps without a single loss in performance, look and feel compared to native apps. Native apps will remain, but you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look. Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower. Although native knowledge is still required for Auth, billing, advertising and other required native stuff.

I still have to see a single webapp that is as performant and feels the same as a native one. We might get there, and lots of companies are happy to release a half-backed webapp today, but that is definitely not the experience today.

I could post a mini saas that I made in php and mysql, using jQuery on the front end, that outperforms just about any webapp and most modern local apps, but I don't want to attract too much attention because I'm sure technically it's easily breakable to pros and malicious people.

Also, it runs on a $4 a month namecheap server.

Why is so fast? Because I came from the land of slow crms, and performance was my #1 goal. Instead of making it faster to develope, I made it faster for the end user.

Is that a worthwhile business goal? I don't know. But I know it's fast.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, I could run Qt apps on my MATE desktop and Gtk+ apps on my KDE desktop. I prefer X11 because it's mature and works perfectly for me. I might try Wayland sometime, but it had better support all of the weird things I do with X11. More to the point, the choice is a feature, and it comes with a bit of chaos. Would you rather live in an effectively single-party state like Singapore where everything is…

>Would you rather live in an effectively single-party state like Singapore where everything is shiny but you get caned for spitting gum on the street (MacOS) This sounds like a good place to live for me, because I don't spit gum on streets and wouldn't want to live around people who do. What kind of disgusting person would do such a thing? And who chews gum these days? Personally, I think this is a terrible analogy.…

Also, Singapore doesn't cane people anymore. However, they still don't have true freedom of speech like in many Western countries.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#513

I 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.

Nah. I play games on Windows because its easy, program on Mac because its comfortable, and deploy on Linux because its powerful. Its all good!

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#514

I 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…

What os hasnt been to space? The laptops on the ISS run windows and they have ipads up there too.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#515

I 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…

Charitably: a wider userbase on desktop means there's more attention given to consumer hardware support, vendor/driver support, app support, desktop environment and distro work, etc etc, all of which makes the experience better for the people who already use it on desktop. So I think that's a good reason for them to be excited

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#516
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like macOS, that is, all locked down, with abilities to customize things revoked with every release, with most software paid, and only available on a narrow choice of pretty expensive (though powerful) hardware? No, not really. You can't make things smooth and flexible at the same time, it takes too much effort. You can't support a ton of varied hardware and make everything work smoothly in every case; it again would…

IMHO, desktop Linux could use a little bit of locking down and progress is slowly being made in that direction. It feels a little bonkers that in 2023, Flatpak or something like it isn’t the default way software is installed. That calculator you just installed should not have access to your camera or microphone or file system. That weather app may need your location, but you should be able to grant access to sensitiv…

If you look at your system like that, maybe QubesOS would be appealing to you.

Or maybe Fuchsia, when it's ready for desktop.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice. But I can't use the OS I like. I can't go in a store, pick a laptop I like, and get it with an OS I like. I can get it with an OS I don't like; and gamble that I can install on it an OS that I do like. It would have been very different if Linux market share on the desktop were in double digits.

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Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#518
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the lock in still exists. In many fields. You need a certain software to be competitive, so you have to use whatever os supports it. I know people who have switched from Mac os to windows because office is slightly janky on Mac os. Lock ins happen all the time.

There's also a thing where software supports Mac and Windows, but really needs a lot of memory and storage, so the absurd markups Apple went back to charging in the Apple silicon era make it unviable for all but the most profitable workloads. I looked into Apple when laptop shopping recently, but couldn't justify or afford the markup to get the storage and memory I can put in the laptop I went with for a fraction of…

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Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#519
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the time those packages, or the build files for them, are contributed by the distributions themselves I'm not sure about your statistical claim. Of course my impression is purely anecdotal, but I'm thinking of examples like: https://mkvtoolnix.download/downloads.html or: https://www.monetdb.org/easy-setup/ (and press the Linux button) they seem to providing their own builds. And - if you wrote your build sy…

Literally most of the packages on the page you link there explicitly say that they're maintained by other people. The author seems to maintain an RPM and a DEB setup, which is already more than most. And my point is absolutely not that some people don't go nuts there, but that's not where or how most Linux users get their software. It's mostly coming from stuff packaged by the distributions. And I am sure that's how…

To make this more numerical:

Windows is about 66% of our customers, macOS about 33%, Linux about 1%. On Windows we currently only test on x64 for Windows 10 and Widows 11. On macOS we test 4 configurations. Each Windows configuration we test is 33% of our users. Each macOS configuration about 8%. Linux is starting at 1%, and previously we tested only one configuration, which was already 8x more costly than macOS. But there were a lot of complaints from people using other distros / versions, which resulted in anger, bad reviews, claims that we don't understand Linux...

To get reasonable coverage of the Linux desktop landscape, we'd need to test probably 20+ different configurations, meaning each of them would cover about 0.05% of our customers. The QA tests take multiple hours to run through. That makes supporting a Linux user a staggering 160x more expensive than supporting a macOS user, and 660x more expensive than supporting a Windows user.

Again, you need either a giant user base, or a disproportionate number on Linux (which is the opposite of true in pro-audio) to even hit break-even on Linux users.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#520

I 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…

Because some people are trying to advance Linux as a desktop OS, which is a good idea.
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