There’s never been a bad year for the Linux desktop. The share size doesn’t matter. So, yes, it is the year of the Linux desktop in my book and it has been that way for decades.
The share size doesn’t matter.
Gotta disagree with you there. Market adoption should be a primary concern of those who care about the Linux ecosystem.
Steam deck BAYBEE. None of the other pocket computers have my attention now if they arent built for Valves version of Linux
The more it’s adopted the more it will turn into windows.
No it won’t. The beauty of Linux is that it can transform completely to fit your needs.
Making Linux more noob friendly isn’t going to take away my custom terminal-centric tiling wm arch install.
More users = more developers = more options. Linux is already awesome, but growing will only bring more good.
Growing will also bring an increased attack surface and justification for writing malware for Linux due to market adoption.
It’s not all good, there is going to be an increased security vulnerability along with it.
And so will there be more people to look into and fix the vulnerabilities, specially if we can foster a bigger community of open source developers by being a healthier community overall.
That is less likely though. Nerds who like developing FOSS for hobbyist and ideological needs are already doing so and more users will likely only increase normal users into linux, not developers usually
This is exactly the “popular => bad” mentality that needs to die. Good products are good—and perhaps more importantly, bad products are bad—irrespective of their popularity. Linux is a masterpiece as a result of millions of hours of thoughtful and rigorous engineering, not the absence of its wide adoption on desktop. Windows is a dumpster fire as a result of millions of hours of reckless code vomit, not its ubiquity on desktop. See also: the Android operating system you know and (if I had to guess) love.
I use windows and it runs prefectly fine for me so I never said it would get bad… just become more like windows.
Like Windows, how? An operating system has dozens of properties that could be “like Windows”, please specify.
Windows used to be alright/tolerable like 3 operating systems ago, each new version takes features away and brings new bugs that are more and more annoying in their attempt to get a slice of Apple’s closed garden pie. Their auto sign in feature has caused me SO MANY headaches when trying to sign in with a different user
Nah, an OS is only useful if its commonly used. Linux has never been useful for this reason.
Let’s go India
Go India! duck yeah! Woohoo \o/
And here in Sweden were I live it’s just 1.41% :(
People are dumb here, they buy apple.
"Hey look at my new iPhone that costs 20000 sek and can’t do anything important better than the last five previous iPhones "
But it’s really fast at idling in people’s pockets.
I admit the MacBook air has a nice cpu, it stays cool. But most people don’t use anywhere near what the cpu is capable of.
20000 seks hehe
And now imagine here in the US where every single person has an iPhone and everything Apple. They are completely brainwashed.
Critical thinking seems to be a thing of the past… Maybe it’s because they feel like we are on the end stretch of society anyway, may as well enjoy the days left.
Better than using windows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What???
Given the size of Estonia, I’ll assume that was the work of one single Linux supersoldier who spent the whole month entering homes at night and installing Linux on whatever computer they could find.
It looks a fish giving bass to mouth. See there’s the first fish on the left sucking the other one off on the right
U sicko
I moved to Linux last year, but from a Mac so not sure how much I’m moving needles.
Not much especially if you set up the desktop environment to mimic Mac os. Unless you do pc gaming, then depending on your hardware you get a big boost in available titles.
Wow damn 4% holy shit.
2023 was the year of the Linux desktop.
- Got Discord and Zoom off the store
- Zoom screen and webcam sharing just worked
- Was able to even switch Bluetooth profile through GUI
- Essentially any game that didn’t use a kernel level spyware works
- Chromebook hardware in the $500 range is pretty good
- Must software is web based.
I recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Install once, update weekly or biweekly. (It’s a rolling release, so it doesn’t have major upgrades like Windows 10 to 11 does.) About a month ago I did an upgrade on my old laptop. Handled 2 years of updates flawlessly.
I left tumbleweed for alpine and artix because even if you always use
--no-recommendsfor package installation it seems to ship just too much bloat and I left it after it shipped some broken software I didn’t need anyway but must’ve affected system stability too severely, iSCSI iirc
I wonder what portion of that is steam decks.
Me too. As one data point, I don’t use mine to access the web. However, it did get me confident with Linux as a viable choice for my desktop today. I went on to install it dual boot on my main and rarely if ever open Windows. It’s probably a couple months behind in updates.
In the end I just uninstalled windows because every time I opened it, it tried installing all updates and I had to wait 20-30 mins to get to the desktop
And don’t forget the ten different single app updaters because there’s no centralized update system. There’s just so much stuff running all the time.
Hey so I know you deleted the Edge shortcut from your desktop the last three times, but this time I think you’ll really like it, so I added it back!
I switched to Ubuntu 22.04 on 2023-12-31. I had used a bunch of other distros back in 2008-2012, then got tired of manually tweaking things constantly. Things have come a long way and there are way more options to make things work. I don’t have to spend hours on the CLI or reboot frequently.
So yeah, I’m going to stick with Ubuntu for a bit, then switch to something else.
These days, you probably won’t need all that tweaking.
I’d recommend Linux Mint.
Honestly Debian would be a better choice if you want a rock solid stable experience.
True that. However, Linux Mint may have a better out-of-box experience.
Note: Debian is my favorite distro.
Isn’t Linux Mint just green Ubuntu?
Entire different desktop environment+no snap+yes flatpak+nice community+light
Without snaps
The repo at the link doesn’t really explain where the data is from, does anyone know?
The URL saves ‘statcounterdata’ so maybe from https://gs.statcounter.com?
Which has Linux at just under 4% for Jan 2024, and if you include Chrome OS then it’s over 5%. link
Statcounter provides free analytics by embedding their code in your site. And their stats come from aggregating all the data from all the sites that use their analytics.
Wonder if Linux users block Statcounter at a higher rate than other OS users.
I’d assume uBlock Origin blocks it by default?
I’d think there’s a pretty high chance!
But also I wonder if Linux users are more likely to stray off Instagram and TikTok onto smaller sites that might use Statcounter?
As much as I hate to say it, I wonder how much of these are Chromebooks
It looks like ChromeOS is reported separately in those stats
Some of it’s India.
Sadly there aren’t even Indian manufacturers with linux preinstalled. I’ve heard of starlabs, slimbook, tuxedo, system76 etc. only to find out that most doesn’t ship to india and are not availiable in the stores like flipkart, amazon and local stores, where most of people computers. Still, still India is at 15% now and what if market already has linux preinstalled systems!
Growth is being driven a lot by the Steam Deck.
This is mostly from browser stats though.
Sure, you can browse on it, but I wouldn’t have thought it enough to skew the numbers in any meaningful way.
Time to Sort the Steam Deck out like ChromeOS, then the Linux market goes back to 2%?
Right? RIGHT?
