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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

#351

Post by dmix »

scarface_74 wrote: post #327
jabroni_salad wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(US minnesota) recently a 23 year old new hire advised me that he doesn't have a normal computer or laptop and he buys plane tickets, files his taxes, plans projects etc on a phone or ipad. Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .

I had my first personal computer in 1986. But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone. 90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically if your employer uses one of the major payment providers like ADP or worse case taking a picture of your W2, clicking “Next” a few times after answering a f…

Planning a trip is one of the best usecases for not being phone-only. If it was jut "open app and buy ticket" then it'd be fine, but most trips involve a lot of moving parts that need to be in sync.

Comparing multiple different websites, copying and pasting information to share, looking up locations, etc. All way easier with a mouse, keyboard, and large tabbed browser windows.

Even Airbnb is better on desktop, since it very easily resets your search queries on the mobile app, because state is managed differently vs browser you can leave 10 different spots or multiple queries open in different tabs, which is common issue in mobile apps. And tab switching on mobile browsers is very slow.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#352

Post by jorvi »

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…

You are being obtuse.

99% of Steam Deck users won't ever use the desktop mode except for maybe setting up emulation or Discord.

In general, that makes Steam Deck users no more Linux users than people that use Android.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#353

Post by samrus »

MostlyStable wrote: post #325
IsTom wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam Deck has (accessible in menu by default) desktop mode that is just KDE with desktop icons and everything.

I don't think his point was that it's not linux but rather that it's not a desktop, and if it counts as a desktop, then so do the rest of the gaming consoles runnining non-linux, which probably didn't get counted so the 5% would be lower.

This is wrong. A steamdeck in desktop mode is exactly a desktop. You can write and execute code on it the exact same way you do on your laptop

You cant do that on mobile devices or other handhelds

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#354

Post by weberer »

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…

You can also look at the Steam survey as another data point. Linux use among English speakers is just above 5%, but the data is biased toward power users/ gamers.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#355

Post by mousethatroared »

School-Cotton wrote: post #138
mousethatroared wrote: post #83

For me, Linux became a viable desktop OS when Steve Jobs killed flash and browsers could render any page independently of the OS. Then Office 365 came around and I could do quick work w/out a windows machine.

FWIW you could install Flash on Linux. It was sometimes a pain but it did work.

Massive PIA.

Since flash didnt work I didnt use Linix

Since I didnt use Linux I wasnt very good at it

Since I kept at noob level, I couldnt install Flash, which was pretty hard

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#356

Post by sirjaz »

Have people looked at the numbers? Chromeos and Linux have swapped, and if you include the unknown OS which are most likely Windows behind a corporate proxy it is back up to 70% of the market. In addition, the number of sites statcounter pulls from us dropped in half in the last three years if that matters.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#358

Post by komali2 »

tiborsaas wrote: post #43
ryandv wrote: post #22

Based on the history of the tech industry, Linux adoption should be kept at this level and advanced no further. This is already the sweet spot for the "year of the Linux desktop," which should be celebrated by experts, technical users, and the sufficiently motivated. Once the unwashed masses start coming in, the software and its interaction patterns pander to the lowest common denominator and the quality of the mediu…

"oh no, the peasants are using MY operating system, this can't be good"

It feels similar to people complaining about their favorite tabletop game becoming popular with normies and then normies come and don't treat the game with the reverence the og fans believe it should.

Same response: just do your own thing then and ignore the normies, it's not a big deal.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#359

Post by osigurdson »

PhilippGille wrote: post #256
osigurdson wrote: post #143

After installing Arch / Gnome on my laptop last week, I can see why. Everything works completely fine and feels 3X faster than Windows 11. I have Linux on my desktop machine but always hesitated for laptops due to past bad experiences with power management (i.e. something always eventually went wrong when closing the lid). So far, all of that is working perfectly.

There are still issues. Just going with your example, see the threads in the Framework forum around lid close issues (almost all from Linux users): https://community.frame.work/search?q=lid%20close Reports about high battery drain, suspend issues and similar exist as well. I'm running Fedora on a Framework laptop, but with the awareness that it can require some tinkering.

Current battery life is better than it was on Windows. I know Windows is very good from this standpoint but things always degrade over time. That is my expectation with arch as well - good now but let's see how it is 6 months from now. That is always the real test. Regardless, my laptop is too small to run Windows + WSL so will probably stick with just running Linux.

Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

#360

Post by zelphirkalt »

WJW wrote: post #28
whizzter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines? A new machine for an enterprise or gamer will probably retain windows because it's needed but people not using their computers for more than surfing will be happy enough. On that side-note I would also not be surprised if people are leaving "computers" altogether in favor of phones, it's a capable enough computer today for most la…

Anecdotal evidence, but Steams' Proton compatibility layer that lets you run Windows-only games on Linux works really really well. I haven't had to log into years and years by now.

I hear this all around and I am myself running GNU/Linux almost all the time, but running games on Steam on my default OS, which is a Debian with KDE currently, that is more miss than hit. I even know someone who has almost the same hardware, also runs a GNU/Linux system and for them almost all games work using Proton. For me however they don't. I already tried proprietary graphics card drivers instead of the ones that come with the OS for amdgpu, HWE kernel, another distro, using Steam installer downloaded from website ... nothing seems to fix the issue. When I click on the big green "Play" button in Steam, for many times it loads for a moment, and the button turns into a blue "stop" button, but then just turns back into a green "play" button, never starting the game. Mind, some games work, like Stardew Valley for example. But I think those are mostly already made to work cross platform.

I have no idea what I can still try, and it annoys me, that for most games I still have to reboot into Windows to play them. I seem to have had more luck following guides for using WINE for specific games in the past, when I made games like StarCraft 2 work better than on Windows, than I have had with Steam and Proton so far.

So anecdote. It is not smooth sailing for everyone yet, unfortunately, and I don't know what the issue is.

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