Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
71–80 of 81 posts
Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
> medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just f…
Linux Desktops are having a moment this year, but there are still all sorts of sharp edges that a user has to navigate.
Getting a laptop to properly hibernate such that the battery life is usable on the road is a whole roll-your-own-adventure.
WirePlumber apparently mis-classifies some headphones resulting in only input or output working in web meetings.
I've worked with Linux on the server side for over 20 years and these were just two Fedora issues that LLMs helped me sort out recently. If I had to spend a whole day debugging these items, I would likely be drifting back towards macOS or WSL2.
Getting Linux installed has always been the "easy" part. It's everything after that in daily operations that has been hard.
Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
#73Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
From one recycler to another, thanks for the work you do! Personally, I typically use gray market Windows keys. I have a hard time moving machines with Linux on them. But I think you are doing a really good thing!
I am curious what is considered a grey market license here? I would guess legal departments only see 2 colors for their licenses, so what makes it a middle-state?
There are websites which will sell you a license key which is real and valid but is not sold directly by Microsoft or an authorized OEM. These keys could be volume license keys that are being "misued" by reselling them, they could be keys from another country being used in the US (for example), or in rare cases they could be keys that were 'stolen' from someone else (e. g. copied and used).
That's a 'gray market' key. It's 'gray' because you don't know the provenance, and so in the worst case, you might end up with the key being deactivated, theoretically.
But I've sold computers with gray market keys on them for years and never once has a key been deactivated. I have had keys come up as not usable, in which case I typically ask for my money back.
Most of the time, from what I've seen, it's the first case - a volume key being resold.
Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?"
Hard disagree. Claude with full access to a system is an amazing forensic, digging through obscure dumps, configuring tracing and measuring results, fast. It's also an amazing interface, from setting up environments, tweaking hidden parameters and everyday operations. I don't have such a customized (and functional) system since I was a way more energized teenager with plenty of time to fiddle around. Now it's instant…
They do pretty well at this, and like I said they're better than what we had before. But I've spent hours with LLMs trying to figure out kernel errors and going down rabbit holes that lead nowhere. Fortunately I've gotten pretty good at recognizing when this is happening.
Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just f…
Conversely, my windows 11 has fundamental issues that neither google nor claude can find solutions to.
This reminds me of how my journey from Windows 11 to CachyOS on my gaming desktop happened because of something like this.
I started getting driver crashes in certain games with my AMD 9070XT graphics card. Everything I tried didn’t work: DDU, reinstall, settings changes, etc.
I don’t know if it was AMD or Microsoft’s fault, but I don’t really care, because everything is more stable on Linux and I’ve been able to run 100% of what I want to run.
Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
#77Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
stopped with gaming content for the most part, moved to japan and does the occasional vlog about his kid or family or whatever. retired, basically.
I keep hearing he's retired, yet his channel looks just like any channel by a full-time influencer. The few videos of him I've watched (all quite recent) must have required substantial effort. Like, he's showing off extensive Linux ricing, complex UI/orchestration tools for LLMs,... on top of refined video editing. Whoever actually made all of that, that must have required non-negligible resources. Probably a lot mor…
He is likely quite wealthy now, from his long career on YT.
I'm sure that many of the things you see as "work" are hired out. Video editing, thumbnails, etc. Even hiring multiple Linux developers to help him get through a tricky spot in the build would be reasonable for someone "retired" but with a lot of money.
Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep hearing he's retired, yet his channel looks just like any channel by a full-time influencer. The few videos of him I've watched (all quite recent) must have required substantial effort. Like, he's showing off extensive Linux ricing, complex UI/orchestration tools for LLMs,... on top of refined video editing. Whoever actually made all of that, that must have required non-negligible resources. Probably a lot mor…
He is likely quite wealthy now, from his long career on YT. I'm sure that many of the things you see as "work" are hired out. Video editing, thumbnails, etc. Even hiring multiple Linux developers to help him get through a tricky spot in the build would be reasonable for someone "retired" but with a lot of money.
Hiring people isn't retirement, if anything it means growing your business. You're outsourcing some of the menial tasks and inherit managerial tasks instead. The show and the ROI on all those expenses still ultimately depend on him.
That's a completely normal evolution for any succesful influencer. In what world is that retirement? The only thing I can see being retired is his old online persona, the new persona seems more mature, likely tailored to please his fanbase who presumably have grown out of their teenage instincts (and have more money to spend now).
Re: Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America
#80A big shift I've noticed in the past few years is how much Windows is increasingly a second-class citizen for developer focused things. Increasingly you'll see a new tool or library or language, and there'll be installation instructions for everything except windows. Or Windows will be "supported" but when you go to run the tests they just don't work. Development has often been more Linux friendly, but it was rarely…
Rightfully so, I think. I’m on a mixed team - Mac, Windows, Linux targeting web; the issues the Windows users have just getting the computer to work are astonishing. I don’t think it is the corporate spyware because my Mac also has corporate spyware. Windows is just a profoundly awful development environment. So bad they think “run everything in a Linux VM” is a good answer, despite all the performance footguns and c…
they are not thinking running linux in a VM is a good answer, but that it is the only option they have to keep windows relevant for developers, short of porting windows itself to run on top of linux. i am confident that day will come.