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Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

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Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#211

Post by microtonal »

tuna74 wrote: post #190
palata wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly why people here talk about "Linux Desktop". Linux is a kernel, Linux Desktop is some flavour of a full OS made to run on a PC, as opposed to e.g. embedded Linux or a Linux server. Not sure what your point is?

Yeah, but ChromeOS is just as much "Desktop Linux" as Fedora Workstation.

I think that's pretty pedantic. When most people here say 'Linux Desktop', they mean the Linux kernel, GNU(-ish) userland, Wayland/X11, and some desktop like GNOME, KDE or Mate.

Though, I guess outside tech circles, people will just talk about Linux as the whole desktop OS. E.g. our municipality was promoting installing a Linux distribution to save Windows laptops after the Windows 10 apocalypse, and they just call it Linux.

Even Wikipedia says: Linux (/ˈlɪnʊks/ LIN-uuks[15]) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#212

Post by latexr »

delecti wrote: post #162
latexr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been wanting to do this for years on an old (and severely underpowered) MacBook Pro which I use with Windows exclusively for Games. Do you have any recommendation for an extremely lightweight Linus distro which installs and runs Steam fine? It would be used exclusively for that, so it shouldn’t run a ton of background stuff.

Check out Bazzite. It started as a way to approximate SteamOS for general hardware. Or if you have an AMD GPU, you could even try SteamOS itself, though it's intended for handhelds.

I thought about SteamOS but didn’t seem viable for that Mac.

Bazzite looks to be the next best thing. Probably what I’m looking for. Thank you.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#214

Post by dmd »

adamc wrote: post #202
nerdjon wrote: post #53

I have to wonder how much of this is people switching to Linux vs the larger trend of people not having traditional computers to begin with. Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the p…

Must be circles. I just visited relatives, and brought my laptop as well as my phone; I barely used the laptop. But my brother always uses his, and his kids used laptops, and even one of my great nieces used a laptop. Did they have phones? Yes. Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.

Nearly everyone in our family’s (public, Massachusetts) high school writes papers exclusively on their phone.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#215

Post by 9rx »

microtonal wrote: post #211
tuna74 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but ChromeOS is just as much "Desktop Linux" as Fedora Workstation.

I think that's pretty pedantic. When most people here say 'Linux Desktop', they mean the Linux kernel, GNU(-ish) userland, Wayland/X11, and some desktop like GNOME, KDE or Mate. Though, I guess outside tech circles, people will just talk about Linux as the whole desktop OS. E.g. our municipality was promoting installing a Linux distribution to save Windows laptops after the Windows 10 apocalypse, and they just call i…

But with respect to "Linux on the Desktop" in the context of marketshare, the interest is in seeing how far Linux has gone, not how far software running on Linux has gone.

The only reason "ChromeOS" isn't considered Linux in this dataset is because Chrome has a flag that removes Linux from the user-agent on certain systems. If we were talking about Linux on the desktop casually, or were compiling a dataset through some other means where the kernel is a known quantity, we'd most certainly include said systems.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#218

Post by virgildotcodes »

dmd wrote: post #214
adamc wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be circles. I just visited relatives, and brought my laptop as well as my phone; I barely used the laptop. But my brother always uses his, and his kids used laptops, and even one of my great nieces used a laptop. Did they have phones? Yes. Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.

Nearly everyone in our family’s (public, Massachusetts) high school writes papers exclusively on their phone.

This is incredible, wow.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#219

Post by paulcole »

palata wrote: post #91
nerdjon wrote: post #53

I have to wonder how much of this is people switching to Linux vs the larger trend of people not having traditional computers to begin with. Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the p…

I agree with your points, except this: > thanks to the Steam Deck [...] but I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux. The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different. SteamOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch. If you run your Steam Deck in "desktop mode", it is very much a Linux Desktop (with…

If your belief is that Steam Deck is Linux Desktop then you need to count Switch/PS5/Xbox as desktops as well and take those into account with the OS percentages.
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