Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America

linuxiac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 81 posts

Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America

#2

Post by Grombobulous »

As the article points out, we’re not sure about the validity of these numbers.

Anecdotally though, the idea of major creators like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee putting out Linux content was unheard of a few short years ago.

I have been seeing a wide trend among the Windows tech-savvy universe of frustrated users who have social media platforms suggesting strongly that people give it a try.

Plus, you’ve got Steam, which has made Linux an excellent game platform for the very large percentage of Windows desktop users who play games.

I also find that the availability of AI makes troubleshooting for newbies way easier. Dump your error message in or describe what’s not working and you’re on your way.

It is truly the year of the Linux desktop. I switched away from Windows thinking I’d still need a dual boot partition but so far I really don’t.

Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America

#3

Post by SoftTalker »

Grombobulous wrote: post #2

As the article points out, we’re not sure about the validity of these numbers. Anecdotally though, the idea of major creators like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee putting out Linux content was unheard of a few short years ago. I have been seeing a wide trend among the Windows tech-savvy universe of frustrated users who have social media platforms suggesting strongly that people give it a try. Plus, you’ve got St…

In my experience, LLMs are not great at resolving linux issues, but they are better than what we've had in the past. Trying to use forums and web searches was exhausting, and you'd often deal with people who were trying to show how smart they are and rather than answering your questions they demand to know "what are you really trying to do?"

Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America

#4

Post by Grombobulous »

SoftTalker wrote: post #3
Grombobulous wrote: post #2

As the article points out, we’re not sure about the validity of these numbers. Anecdotally though, the idea of major creators like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee putting out Linux content was unheard of a few short years ago. I have been seeing a wide trend among the Windows tech-savvy universe of frustrated users who have social media platforms suggesting strongly that people give it a try. Plus, you’ve got St…

In my experience, LLMs are not great at resolving linux issues, but they are better than what we've had in the past. Trying to use forums and web searches was exhausting, and you'd often deal with people who were trying to show how smart they are and rather than answering your questions they demand to know "what are you really trying to do?"

I totally disagree there. My medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude. As the resident IT person among my friend group this blew my mind.

I’ve noticed that it’s helped me as well, because it’s able to give me diagnostic commands that I can run and report back with the results. For example, I fixed/set up a virtual machine with libvertd and I just wouldn’t have gotten that far without it, especially for when I broke the setup later.

Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America

#5

Post by yomismoaqui »

Grombobulous wrote: post #2

As the article points out, we’re not sure about the validity of these numbers. Anecdotally though, the idea of major creators like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee putting out Linux content was unheard of a few short years ago. I have been seeing a wide trend among the Windows tech-savvy universe of frustrated users who have social media platforms suggesting strongly that people give it a try. Plus, you’ve got St…

Don't forget PewDiePie, the last person I expected to do a video about migrating to Linux.

Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America

#6

Post by basch »

SoftTalker wrote: post #3
Grombobulous wrote: post #2

As the article points out, we’re not sure about the validity of these numbers. Anecdotally though, the idea of major creators like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee putting out Linux content was unheard of a few short years ago. I have been seeing a wide trend among the Windows tech-savvy universe of frustrated users who have social media platforms suggesting strongly that people give it a try. Plus, you’ve got St…

In my experience, LLMs are not great at resolving linux issues, but they are better than what we've had in the past. Trying to use forums and web searches was exhausting, and you'd often deal with people who were trying to show how smart they are and rather than answering your questions they demand to know "what are you really trying to do?"

LLM's also came at a time of search decay. Getting google to surface good results was approaching impossible, (although the new ai categories somehow are even worse as they are adding strange terms or location data to create new unrelated searches.)

Hopefully there is a middle ground, where I can explain to my crawler which results look good, which dont, what it got wrong, and it adapts. A return to crawler/surfacer agents that work to find and retrieve would be a step in the right direction.

Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America

#9

Post by kittikitti »

I am very happy to hear this. Usually, when I tell people that my main operating system is Linux, they don't even process it and assume it's either Windows or Mac. Sometimes, they get confused and claim that no one uses Linux.

Now that there is data in terms that people can understand (capitalism), I think people will finally accept that Linux is an OS. The next thing is the false equivalence between Linux and Android.

Post reply on HN