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Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

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Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#501

Post by mlyle »

bruce511 wrote: post #201
vasco wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They currently have around 20% market share (as Internet servers - Extremely big doubts about this. How would anyone even know? All the hyperscale datacenters built by FAANG must be 99.9% Linux, and those DCs alone would probably be enough to make 20% impossible to hit for windows.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys... (Scroll down to servers) Incidentally this is public facing Internet servers. The % -inside- enterprises us much much higher. Tools like Active Directory allow you to scale enterprise operations, which is important for companies that have hundreds-of-thousands of desktops etc. In any event your estimate of 99.9% is unlikely. AWS offers Windows based…

Of course, we might not believe that all of those internet facing servers are of equal size and represent an equal number of servers, right?

We know that all the top 25 websites are 100% Linux and represent a lot of servers each.

Also a whole lot of that cited report seems to be misidentified. The top Windows site other than Microsoft properties listed is nih.gov, which looks like Drupal on Linux behind Akamai GHost -- all Linux.

I do accept that Windows is probably about 20-25% of server instances and slowly contracting. But public facing webservers and the infrastructure that directly supports them? Nothing close to this.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#503

Post by CryptoBanker »

electricduck wrote: post #10

I'm kinda surprised this entirely forgot to mention the SteamDeck. I'd love to know how much of an impact that had, considering apparently 3 million units have been sold (according to Valve). Alas, how many of those users know they are running Linux is another question.

I wouldn’t count the SteamDeck as a desktop

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#504

Post by creatonez »

CryptoBanker wrote: post #503
electricduck wrote: post #10

I'm kinda surprised this entirely forgot to mention the SteamDeck. I'd love to know how much of an impact that had, considering apparently 3 million units have been sold (according to Valve). Alas, how many of those users know they are running Linux is another question.

I wouldn’t count the SteamDeck as a desktop

I would. It's designed to be used as a desktop by plugging in a DisplayPort cable, hooking up a keyboard and mouse, and switching it to KDE desktop mode or installing Windows. This is a documented and officially supported feature, and has been shown in Valve's marketing material.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#505

Post by holoduke »

JohnFen wrote: post #460
holoduke wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not anymore. Last gen phones have enough performance to run webapps without a single loss in performance, look and feel compared to native apps. Native apps will remain, but you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look. Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower. Although native knowledge is still required for Auth, billing, advertising and other required native stuff.

> Last gen phones have enough performance to run webapps without a single loss in performance [...] This makes no sense. If webapps run without a loss in performance, then you don't need increased hardware performance in order to see the difference. > [...] compared to native apps. This simply isn't true. Run a well-designed webapp and a well-designed native app on the same platform. You'll see a difference in perfor…

Why would the browser render engine slower than the Java Android UI render engine? I am almost certain that the browser css engine is better optimized than the Android native render. IOS is a different story since their render engine is heavily optimized against their own hardware. But still I know that webapps can have the same performance as native apps. And the end of mobile native UI kits will finally arrive. Webapps/spas will take over.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#506

Post by creatonez »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #94
qwytw wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more to an 'OS' than the kernel. SteamDecks are indistinguishable from PCs, since they run more or less exactly the same software as a Linux desktop/laptop would.

It’s still not a desktop PC. You’ll notice that iOS, Android and iPadOS aren’t included in the list either, even though the devices that run those operating systems can also replicate some subset of the desktop pc experience (and much more comprehensively than the steam deck can). At best it would be a general purpose mobile device, but even that is rather contrived. How many users do you imagine are using a steam de…

> At best it would be a general purpose mobile device, but even that is rather contrived. How many users do you imagine are using a steam deck as a substitute for a desktop or a different mobile device?

Is it contrived? They've shown, in their official marketing videos, demonstrations of the steam deck being hooked up to an external monitor and being used to run KDE and Windows 10.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#507

Post by bruce511 »

jorvi wrote: post #349
Gareth321 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You accumulate software yes, but you also accumulate habits and knowledge. Changing OS means discarding all the accumulated knowledge, which 0% of "normal users" want to do. I only ever hear Linux users make this argument. Mac users are confident enough in MacOS UX that they know it’s not a significant barrier to transition. The same is not true of Linux. So many solutions to problems require opening the CLI, and t…

> Mac users are confident enough in MacOS UX that they know it’s not a significant barrier to transition I bought my mother a Macbook during the Snow Leopard era and we sold it after 2 months because she could absolutely not get used to the UI, since she had been using Windows since basically forever. So much for "intuitive UI".

This is exactly my point, and indeed the point of the parent. If you know Windows use Windows. If you know Mac, use Mac.

There is no reason to make your mom (or my mom) switch.

And while MacOS may be intuitive, its less intuitive if you come from something else. I used one for a bit and found everything "backwards". One version of Mac to another or one version of Windows to another is trivial compared to changing from one to the other.

Obviously the Linux CLI is waaay beyond most average people. So it's a non starter anyway.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#508

Post by wheels »

einpoklum wrote: post #498
wheels wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time those packages, or the build files for them, are contributed by the distributions themselves, or avid users of those distros. (Reference: I have multiple software projects I've created that are a part of every Linux distribution. I've never packaged any of them myself.) Even big enterprise companies usually work directly with the distros under NDA, and the distros produce the packages. That works for…

> Most of the time those packages, or the build files for them, are contributed by the distributions themselves I'm not sure about your statistical claim. Of course my impression is purely anecdotal, but I'm thinking of examples like: https://mkvtoolnix.download/downloads.html or: https://www.monetdb.org/easy-setup/ (and press the Linux button) they seem to providing their own builds. And - if you wrote your build sy…

Literally most of the packages on the page you link there explicitly say that they're maintained by other people. The author seems to maintain an RPM and a DEB setup, which is already more than most. And my point is absolutely not that some people don't go nuts there, but that's not where or how most Linux users get their software. It's mostly coming from stuff packaged by the distributions.

And I am sure that's how most open source packages on Linux are built. Again, I spent a lot of time in that world. (Former KDE core developer, former employee at SAP Linux Lab, friends working at all major distros, have a bunch of my stuff in every distro, talks at lots of Linux conferences, etc.)

Building really isn't the problem. It's testing and supporting. Building is relatively easy. But you can't just ship commercial packages without testing them. Pulling out a Debian 11 VM because someone's having problems with your software there under Wayland, but not X11, but it seems to work in Sid... Again for the 0.01% of your customers using that configuration, ... it's hard. And it rarely makes economic sense unless you've got a disproportionate number of users on Linux, or a ginormus user base. You can't assume because something works on Arch Linux that it also works on Mate. Or that something on Ubuntu works on Debian. Or Redhat on SUSE. And then your users may have any of 3-4 versions of those installed. By the time you get to a specific configuration you're dealing with often debugging things for a single-digit number of users.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#509

Post by eternityforest »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #49

I wonder why they keep making these articles. Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS. It is on virtually all servers on the Internet, the majority OS on phones, its in many TVs and STBs and streaming sticks, its one of the few OSes ever in space, its one of the few OSes ever on Mars, and it is also the OS behind ChromeOS (which that article mistakenly b…

The desktop is a great test of whether an OS is actually great, or it's just free and happens to work really well because servers have professional IT staff and powerful machines.

After so many years, they still don't have reliable "Every package even the ones not in the repos just works" status. It's mostly there, like, 99.9%, but stuff still breaks more than on Windows or Android. I suspect they never will, except for things like NixOS.

I used to think Linux was behind because of legacy reasons and game companies not being interested... but now I think Linux itself has something to do with it, and we should use that as motivation to improve.

Right now I think NixOS, or just accepting Snap packages, or waiting for Flatpak, might be the best/only chance, aside from moving to a batteries included OS like Android.

Seems like Nix really just needs GUI admin tools, everything else seems to be fairly polished.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#510

Post by skeaker »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #59
electricduck wrote: post #10

I'm kinda surprised this entirely forgot to mention the SteamDeck. I'd love to know how much of an impact that had, considering apparently 3 million units have been sold (according to Valve). Alas, how many of those users know they are running Linux is another question.

SteamDecks aren’t desktop PCs. If you were including gaming consoles/handhelds, then BSD would be way ahead of Linux with all the PlayStations that have been sold (and maybe with Nintendo switches too, depending on how you chose to count those).

Steam deck is a PC by Valve's own admission and my own anecdotal experience with mine.
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