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Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

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541–550 of 564 posts

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#541

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…

Everyone knows Linux is the number one for servers and embeded devices but the desktop market share is special. It's interesting to see how over the years the user experience of Linux Desktop ia getting better, bug are being fixed, we get better software, desktop environments are getting more features e.g.

Servers yes, embedded devices not really.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but increasingly marginal. Many schools have adopted Chromebooks (Linux in disguise) and even the MS Office suite has largely moved online.

MS is on a mission to go after schools that have adopted Chromebooks. If your school is using Chromebooks you can expect all kinds of stick-and-carrot tricks to try to get you to switch (back).

They invented the hilarious Surface SE, so bad it can't even run all Metro/Store apps. Worse than a Chromebook in every way.

Everything you want to install has to be approved by Microsoft

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#543
post #256

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.

I still have to see a single webapp that is as performant and feels the same as a native one. We might get there, and lots of companies are happy to release a half-backed webapp today, but that is definitely not the experience today.

But how do you know if an app is "native"? What does native even mean? Can I use html/js for layout in my native app?

I propose that all the apps you use that you find good you assume are native, but possibly some of those are not.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#544
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…

Wouldn’t that survey count e.g. Google as just a single public facing server? I don’t know in what way that survey would be representative.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#545
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it stings Microsoft a lot more that Windows isn't the dominant server OS.

It surely does, yet they have a better OS to sell on the server room, Azure.

Most customers I work with use mostly Linux on Azure. Lots of Kubernetes and container stuff going on there.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it. I'd take every day a native app running locally over a web app. And I am a web developer.

I have a native app (VS) and a web app (VSC) running side by side on my computer, its like an adult vs 7y old.

> I have a native app (VS) and a web app (VSC) running side by side on my computer, its like an adult vs 7y old.

Honestly, VSC is pretty decent due to all of the engineering MS put into it. Brackets and Atom both were way slower and had noticeable input lag, at least for me.

Other people have also looked into things like that: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

Personally, something like Notepad++ or Lazarus always felt the fastest to me.

Software like JetBrains IDEs, their Fleet editor, Visual Studio and even Visual Studio code all had noticeable hiccups but always seemed "fast enough". Even when the typing itself was okay, there'd be stuff like autocomplete delays/stuttering and refactoring slowdown, but nothing too annoying.

In contrast, Brackets, Atom, working through SSH, remote sessions through RDP/VNC or any device that lagged due to being underpowered always was annoying slow and disruptive.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#547
I will quote Linus :" So I think that in order to make it in a consumer market, you really do need to be pre-installed. And as Android has shown, Linux really can be very much a consumer product. So it's not that the consumer market itself would necessarily be a fundamentally hard nut to crack, but the "you need to come preinstalled" thing is a big thing.

And on the laptop and desktop market, we just haven't ever had any company making that kind of play. And don't get me wrong - it's not an easy play to make.

That said, I wouldn't dismiss it either. The whole "ubiquitous web browser" thing has made that kind of consumer play be more realistic, and I think that Google's Chrome push (Chromebox and Chromebooks) is clearly aiming towards that.

So I'm still hopeful. For me, Linux on the desktop is where I started, and Linux on the desktop is literally what I still use today primarily - although I obviously do have other Linux devices, including an Android phone - so I'd personally really love for it to take over in that market too.

"

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18419231

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#548

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…

Meh. I switched (back) to Ubuntu this January after a few years of Windows, because my AMD CPU+GPU setup kept BSODing on Windows, it kept failing to wake up from sleep (and because I got fed up with a lot of other nits), and ... surprisingly most of the things just work. Brother printer? Next-next-finish. As it was many years ago on Windows. (The same printer takes an intensive 30 minutes of cursing and downloading some godforsaken software.)

Steam and Lutris (StarCraft 2!) work pretty well, Detroit Become Human just works. (Enable proton in Steam, and click install and play.)

(I removed snap, however, as it's just in the way, but I don't remember what was my exact problem with it.)

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#549
Coming from someone that uses Linux all the time at work and for personal projects. It's amazing, but the main user experience isn't there yet.

For example I tried Ubuntu Unity on a fresh install for a week or so recently and it was popping up with unknown errors randomly. It also lacks any hotkeys. Software centre seems to have improved but is still buggy. Also there are still occasional issues which make the machine not bootable and hard to sort without stack overflow and some reasonable Linux knowledge.

Ended up swapping back to i3 and just using my old confs.

Which I think is the main issue. There isn't really a good, reliable, simple, predictable desktop experience yet like you get on Windows or MacOS.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Would you rather live in an effectively single-party state like Singapore where everything is shiny but you get caned for spitting gum on the street (MacOS) This sounds like a good place to live for me, because I don't spit gum on streets and wouldn't want to live around people who do. What kind of disgusting person would do such a thing? And who chews gum these days? Personally, I think this is a terrible analogy.…

Also, Singapore doesn't cane people anymore. However, they still don't have true freedom of speech like in many Western countries.

Yeah, they just restrict you from doing stuff; like browsing large swaths of the Internet, for instance.
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