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Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

linuxiac.com

81–90 of 564 posts

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#81

The problem is the desktop situation is such a mess. Do you go with a gtk or qt desktop and which one? And then X11 which is ancient and creaky, or wayland which is fatally nerfed in design (if not it's entire development philosophy) even when it does do what you need which is far from always? OTOH windows is becoming adware/spyware and macos is becoming big brother lockdown-wear, so maybe it is time for linux to shi…

Last time I checked, I could run Qt apps on my MATE desktop and Gtk+ apps on my KDE desktop. I prefer X11 because it's mature and works perfectly for me. I might try Wayland sometime, but it had better support all of the weird things I do with X11.

More to the point, the choice is a feature, and it comes with a bit of chaos. 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), Russia which is a third-world mafia state masquerading as a gas station masquerading as a world power (Windows), or a messy democracy like The Netherlands where everyone has a voice but sometimes the government collapses because they can't agree on everything (Linux)?

I live in The Netherlands and I've run Linux on the desktop for 30 years.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#82

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…

And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it :). You can conquer the world, dominate every space and yet there's thus little voice inside saying "but you're not good enough. See over there, in that one space, you're a weakling. " Welcome to the human condition.

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

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#83
post #65

Seems that this website blocks any access from HK completely through cloudflare... Cloudflare making it easy to block entire countries, allow people to be lazy in protecting their websites and goes completely against the open web. Of course I could use a vpn but it's getting tiring that I have to do so more and more often.

Blocked from India too. After reading your comment I thought Asia was blocked. But I could read after changing location to Japan with a VPN. Cloudflare straight up blocking countries instead of putting up a captcha.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#84
post #75

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…

Sure, Linux is on many, many devices which have proprietary UIs. And there it does pretty well, because the kernel just provides generic functionality cheaply. It’s a commodity backend that could be swapped with another commodity backend without any users knowing or caring. Hooray. Linux is the go to choice when you could just as well be using something else that’s really cheap, like BSD. However, desktop Linux is wh…

> Sure, Linux is on many, many devices which have proprietary UIs. And there it does pretty well, because the kernel just provides generic functionality cheaply. It’s a commodity backend that could be swapped with another commodify backend without any users knowing or caring. Hooray.

Sour grapes.

> Linux is the go to choice when you could just as well be using something else that’s really cheap, like BSD.

You actually couldn't be just as well using BSD. Corporations would love to be able to take Linux and not contribute their changes back (and that's frequently what happens when they use it internally but don't distribute it). They don't use a BSD licensed kernel in many such places (e.g., Android) because Linux is more advanced.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#85

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…

And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it :). You can conquer the world, dominate every space and yet there's thus little voice inside saying "but you're not good enough. See over there, in that one space, you're a weakling. " Welcome to the human condition.

ok maybe i'm a sore loser, but looking at where the popular desktop OSes have been going going i think i'm fine with linux remaining an enthusiast thing

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there really 20-30% of cloud workloads not on Linux? What do they do? Who uses them?

I work at Microsoft and I see so much "cloud" Windows. Some of it is running Kubernetes even. But a lot Azure is Windows VMs orchestrated by "Service Fabric".

Azure Service Fabric is actually excellent. Deployed a web service on top of it 5 years ago, so far it hasn't gone down even once. Service fabric is used in scale by internal Microsoft teams such as Bing and Xbox, so the bugs and the scaling issues have been ironed out.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#88

It’s the year of the Linux desktop!

Linux is the desktop OS of the future, and always will be.

Windows may be the desktop OS of the past.

If we still had Windows 7, with no ads, no recurring charges, and no built-in cloud services, I'd still be using it.

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#89
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Operating systems have a really high degree of lock-in. Such that while you -can- change OS, there's simply no incentive to do so. That's why you're still running the same OS you always have. [1] 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. Throw in the change in software, ending up with at…

A lot of people are locked-in Windows, but as Microsoft more and more ruins the OS by pushing advertisement, telemetry, slow cloud services, new versions of apps optimized for those who don't know how to use a computer, rather than experts - there will be plenty of users switching to Linux.

Most users are not even aware of telemetry. Those who find the cloud services slow can just stop using them.

The advertising seems to be local to the US because I've never seen it, but I expect users will ignore it just like they ignore it on TV, Google, Facebook, Twitter, on every roadside, at every mall and do on. Frankly advertising is everywhere, avoiding it doesn't seem to be a priority.

I think you summed it up. Computer Experts may want to switch to Linux, and likely already have. My mom, who is 40 years a novice, cares less about any of what you listed. Her skill set is small, and her interest in changing is miles below 0.

And there are 97% of the world like her and, 3% like you ;)

Re: Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share

#90

Every once in a while I'm tempted to switch back to Linux (I used to have that as my desktop between 10 and 15 years ago), but then I remember: - My DJ software (which I pay for) is not supported at all on Linux (likewise true for most common music production software). - The Affinity suite (which I paid for) is not supported on Linux. - The best debugger I can find (remedybg, which I paid for) doesn't work there. -…

Operating systems have a really high degree of lock-in. Such that while you -can- change OS, there's simply no incentive to do so. That's why you're still running the same OS you always have. [1] 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. Throw in the change in software, ending up with at…

Hmm I don't find this true at all for really any of the systems.

If you stick to windows xp or roll your own Linux distros maybe this is true, but I barely know how to use any windows box. Bunch of black registry magic and constantly changing UI nonsense, literally Google and sometimes msdn are how I survive there.

Ubuntu/Fedora all go through fits of hipness and constantly change how things are done. Config files one day, services and runtime the next. UIs are really non-standard and always breaking something or other.

OSX...first time I used it I was learning Unix systems. I went back to it and it was an unholy mess of gotchas.

Android is still hurtling through versions every year and I have no idea what "current" phone looks like, I probably hate it.

When I have been unfortunate enough to use iOS it was like being made Legos trying to build other Legos. It was a right pain.

There are some common design patterns and the like but that tends to be in spite of the OS, not because of it.

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