Cricket@lemmy.zip

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Joined 6 个月前
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Cake day: 2025年6月4日

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  • I hear what you’re saying and you got a point because doing only the kind of analysis I did can sometimes be misleading; however, I think looking at relative growth instead of absolute is more informative in this case because it better illustrates a growth trend. The number of Linux PCs running Steam more than tripled in 5 years. I think that that is worth highlighting and I wanted to point it out to balance what the article had to say about Linux growth, which I really thought was minimizing how remarkable that growth is.



  • I’m not sure if this qualifies, but I have a friend who way back when, like decades ago, probably before the extensive surveillance we have now, would do something rather ingenious and devious to get major discounts on whatever expensive things he wanted at stores: he would print out a sheet of barcode stickers for a product that was similar but much cheaper than the one he wanted and plaster it on a bunch of the items like the one he wanted. Take it to the cashier and get a super discount.

    For example, if he wanted some fancy model of an electronics gadget, he would print barcodes of a much cheaper but similar model from the same manufacturer. According to him, he had even done this for fancy cuts of meat. The reason for applying it to a bunch of them and not just the single one he planned to buy was for plausible deniability. If someone questioned him, he could say, I don’t know, I just picked one off the shelf - they could go check and see that there were many labeled as the cheaper item.




  • Speaking of Linux, this OS family’s slice of the Steam Software Survey pie sits at 3.20%, with a not all that impressive 0.15% overall gain compared to the previous month.

    Not impressive when you (deliberately?) use the absolute increase over one single month to minimize how fast the Linux share appears to be growing. If you look at its increase over approximately the last 5 years, there’s a significant and strong growth trend. November 2020 to November 2025, that’s ((3.2% - 0.9%) / 0.9%), which equals a 255% increase over that time frame. Not only is that solid growth, but the graph shows that this growth seems to be accelerating. Source for the numbers: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/








  • I’d be interested to know why Linux has such bad update in Chinese-speaking regions.

    I wonder if language in particular may be a factor hindering Linux adoption there?

    1. How does the documentation for Linux (including forums, how-tos, blogs, etc) available in Chinese dialects compare to what is available in English, and how well does machine translation work for translating the English sources?
    2. The documentation available online for Linux very often involves the command line. How much of a pain is it for people who only speak Chinese dialects to use an English command line? If the commands are available in Chinese, how well do the machine translations of the English documentation sources work for that purpose.

    I feel that there are probably significant language barriers that have an effect here, and effectively create a chicken-and-egg problem for Linux adoption, possibly limiting Linux usage to Chinese people who are relatively proficient in English.

    For reference, here’s an article about what proportion of Chinese people speaks English (it seems to be around 5%?): https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/how-many-people-in-china-speak-english