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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

#241

Post by ryandv »

paulcole wrote: post #226
ryandv wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. > [...] (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets) Somewhat unrelated but something I never see discussed is how the form factor of the computing device changes our relationship to, and the types of, media that we produce and consume. One critical task not…

> One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media The key addition obviously being “for me.” For others tablets (and for some others, phones) are what they use for producing long-form textual media. I, for example, have no issue producing long-form textual media on my iPad w/ Magic Keyboard. I’m sure that you will feel as though I’m not producing Real Long-Form Textua…

[flagged]

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#242

Post by api »

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…

Tablets and phones have replaced PCs for casual use and content consumption. If you want to make anything beyond posts and videos you usually need a PC.

Mobile OSes are strictly designed for consumption and are too restricted for most other use cases. It’s an OS limit not a hardware issue.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#243

Post by dfxm12 »

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…

Yeah, are there any big box retailers selling machines with Linux installed as an option? Maybe the numbers are small enough for hobbyists to make a dent, but until you see Linux machines in best buy, etc., this is probably due more to people dumping their personal windows machine in favor of a using their work laptop or iPad almost exclusively.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#245

Post by [deleted] »

assbuttbuttass wrote: post #185
fsflover wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would still count it as the Linux kernel. This may be technically true, except it has no single meaningful implication, like no Linux software works there.

You can run Linux software on Android via termux, or the amazing UserLAnd app even lets you install an entire distro userland with several choices (Debian, Arch, etc)

[deleted]

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#246

Post by nobodyandproud »

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…

> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.

A Linux desktop is far better to run LLM experiments with.

My home, tinker workstation used to be Windows but there was no reason to keep it that way, when most of the build and support tooling prefer Linux.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#247

Post by oblio »

vkazanov wrote: post #204
fsflover wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's completely incompatible, so in practice it's a different OS. Doesn't mean it's not valuable.

In practice Linux is a family of different OSes. Sometimes POSIX-centric, sometimes not. What do you even count as "an OS"? Linux + gnu userland + Gnome? Or is it KDE? Embedded Linux? Does ChromeOS count? LG's WebOS?

Desktop Linux has a clear scope, and we all know. We can act like we don't, but we do.

Can I install LibreOffice on Android? Gnome, KDE, Xfce? Which percentage of packages in the Debian repos can I use on Android?

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#248

Post by rhabarba »

sneak wrote: post #140
kube-system wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different. Linux is a kernel.

A distinction without a difference. The point of this subthread is that the term Linux is overloaded to mean two things: a kernel and also an OS that has certain assumptions (usually glibc and some unix userspace stuff). The point being that “Linux Desktop” means something more than “runs the Linux kernel”.

There is not even one common "the Linux kernel".

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#249

Post by Gormo »

resource_waste wrote: post #130
lvl155 wrote: post #76

I think adoption has to do with the fact that desktop environment efforts are divided across so many distros.

I might be a bit contrarian on this. I think the biggest obstacle in the Linux world is people knee jerk recommending Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/outdated linux. If people rallied around the current SOTA, Fedora, we would've hit 5% a few years ago. The variety of distros cause people to get confused, and go with the most heavily marketed distros, Ubuntu flavors. Just because Ubuntu gave away free CDs 20 years ago, doesnt make…

Fundamentally, Linux is Linux. Differences between distros are vastly overstated, and they mostly amount to different default selections and configurations of the same underlying components.

Ultimately, anything that will run on one Linux distro will run on any other, with the only significant differences being on distros that run on unusual architectures or have made major changes to the kernel.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#250

Post by 827a »

zokier wrote: post #195
jsnell wrote: post #18

The statscounter data is not reliable, and it is just embarrassing how often these posts make it to the HN frontpage. You even have a demonstration in this very article, with the surge of classic Mac OS to 7% for several months . The data is obviously nonsense, and when it has errors nobody at the company cares about them. But when they have persistent "data reporting issues", why are we supposed to believe any of th…

Bingo. Cloudflare has also OS stats available and I'd imagine they are far more reliable. Some silver lining of them having such wide dragnet on the web. They report 4.4% Linux desktop marketshare in the US. Tbh I believe the summer vacation season probably influences the numbers here, but there is some real growth too. https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...

1. Radar is also reporting a Linux increase over the past month: 3.3% to 4.4%.

2. Both StatsCounter and Radar break out Linux and ChromeOS; if you combine them, StatsCounter hits 7.7%; Radar hits 6.3%.

3. That being said: Both StatsCounter and Radar experienced an anomalous drop in ChromeOS clients & rise in Linux clients over the past month. StatsCounter took ChromeOS from ~4.4% to 2.7%. Radar took it 2.6% -> 1.9%.

This kind of implies that something changed with a major ChromeOS device out that; some model/version maybe changed its UA and started reporting itself as a Linux device instead.

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