Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA

better than Linux ever was before

I did Linux on the desktop for 15 years. I was primarily Windows at home, Linux at work. With a job change, I took a detour through Mac for a couple of years, then WSL hit, and I ran Windows for quite a while.

I dropped back in, but only at home when Bookworm landed. I was playing Steam games with video acceleration right out of the gate. For a lot of people, it's just going to work right out of the gate, and updates are just going to work. Now that a lot of shit's going Electron, a lot of apps that had an edge in windows are now identical through their web interfaces.

If you're not playing games with a lot of anti-cheat, using proprietary hardware or don't need access to some windows-only apps (or you can put up with Wine), all the distros are up to the point where they operate just as you'd expect them to.

congratulations, you now walk with the righteous.

sparky linux LXQt was the one i settled to in the end. Despite having a top spec laptop and desktop PC, i wanted a light weight Linux, based on Debian, with no "fluff" at all. PC boots fast, shuts down in 2 seconds, no updates, secure, every program is instant. Windoze is plain stupid now with ads.

They've been showing ads in the start menu for years now. Since windows 8 honestly.

It really depends on your hardware. I have a Dell XPS with an 11th gen Intel i5 that I'm running Fedora (Gnome desktop environment) on and it was rock solid from minute one. Things to check:

• Make sure your network card is supported. Intel network cards are some of the better choices for open source compatibility. On most laptops this can be swapped out if necessary.
• Camera
• Touchpad
• Fingerprint sensor
• Sound driver
• Any niche functions or modules. Think things like a secondary display on the keyboard, speciality ports etc.

Support is much better now than in the past and remember you don't need everything to work to have a good time. My fingerprint sensor doesn't work but it didn't work well under windows so no big loss for me.

• You can always use a live bootable USB drive to test your hardware without having to commit to anything. This will tell you a lot about the experience you might have after installation. Heck, if you're board you can try this right now and it won't touch your current hard drive or operating system.

That HN thread was such a shitshow lol. Also I dont think there is anything credible to suggest this increase from 4.6% to 5% is due to 'non linux users' or steamdeck. Steamdeck has contributed sure but desktop linux is growing but every single metric (steam hardware survey, PH Desktop user survey, US Gov traffic, tech youtuber trends, etc).

useless antidote: My friend who is a non techie gamer and she plays a lot of anti cheat type multiplayer games ASKED me to help her switch to linux mint and even when I said thats a bad idea she shouldnt switch she still wanted to. She ended up loving it even though there was a few pain points (fucken nvidia dual screen config on x11) and i think a few of her other friends have even switched after hearing her say it works well.

I'd honestly be curious to see what percentage of Linux is steam decks now

Same. It should be illegal for them to be forcing this shit on us. At least I only have to endure it on my work pc. No windows on personal devices

Welcome! Because we Linux aficionados are incorrigibly nosy and passionate, which distro did you pick and how are you liking it so far?

I think the fastest way for linux to spread are a) a state-sponsored (totally open source) product that sees a free and open OS as part of a commitment to a free and open society. or 2) one of these fuckhead billionaires drops $200M or so into a trust, rather like the Poetry Foundation, which has the singular commitment to create an OS for people and to support it indefinitely.

I don't think the answer to any of society's ills is to get Wallmart involved. ed: walmart however its spelled WGAS.

Im a long time Mac user but recently got a steamdeck. Desktop mode uses a version of kde and I really like it, if I had to switch from Mac I would definitely go with linux instead of windows. I think the steam deck will introduce a lot of people to linux.

Do you think ChromeOS could fit that role? At least it shows that an alternative to Windows exists.

Hey, don't knock customization as a reason. A couple of decades ago, I was sold on Linux by silly Beryl/Compiz videos such as this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=038RHEGu4OY

If anyone is stuck on windows and not able to switch there's a program called wind hawk that will let you download customizations in windows 11 including moving the bar

idk how you stayed on windows so long, had I tried linux sooner I wouldve dumped it faster, no software support or piracy for said software if it does have support is rough tho like houdinifx is hard to pirate if not impossible, davinci is easy tho, adobe has no support (no idea if it works well with wine pirated)

This guy uses arch btw

It wasn't immediately clear, I think you need to change your username to IUseArchBtw so we all know off the bat.

Real men and women run Slack. Tarballs Yum!

To head off the zealots-- ./././

ChromeOS is going to the Google graveyard, to be replaced by android

(Maybe this is a good thing as Chromebooks have an expiration date averaging 3-5 years where they stop getting Chrome updates, when if it's android can get updates to the browser for a much longer time AND have Firefox as default)

Linux as an OS is generally meant as Desktop Linux, and it most definitely is in this context that is about desktop marketshare, Desktop Linux is mostly following freedesktop guidelines, which has traditionally helped standards on Linux a lot to streamline developments. So for instance XFCE/Gnome/KDE desktop apps can be run in all the different desktop environments. For instance also standardizing things like how tray icons work. Freedesktop is part of X.Org Foundation, and Chrome OS does not use X.org or Free Desktop standards at all. The newer Wayland to replace X is also an X.org standard.

So while Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel, it is NOT a Linux OS in the original sense, a term that became popular decades before Chrome OS or Android became a thing.

If you include Chrome OS you might as well include Android too. As it can run on for instance Raspberry Pi and other mini systems, and could be used as a desktop system.

Chrome OS is a Linux kernel based OS, and not much more than that.
It's somewhat confusing in some situations that Linux as a desktop OS doesn't have a unique name, but it wasn't a problem originally, as what some prefer to call GNU/Linux was made 100% for desktop use originally.

The Linux kernel is way way more widespread and successful than what we usually term Desktop Linux or GNU/Linux.

TLDR:
Linux OS, Desktop Linux, GNU/Linux are generally meant as the same thing.
Chrome OS and Android do not belong in that category. They are Linux based as in the Linux kernel only, but do not follow the standards of Desktop Linux.

You can spin up a virtual machine running Tiny10 and install office on that. Should work fine.

I switched over to EndeavourOS around the same time. I relegated my old windows install to a virtual image, which I boot into for specific games and Excel. 10/10 recommend.

Have you tried OnlyOffice? It has better compatibility with MS formats than LibreOffice.

The stats are from StatCounter which has this in their FAQ:

What methodology is used to calculate Statcounter Global Stats? Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device.

So it's the percentage if web traffic (to sites that use this analytics service)

My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting "OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!" to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.

What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it's a major, major victory for all the distros.

He single-handedly changed a lot of people’s impression of Linux with a single video, and he did it gently enough to not intimidate and scare them away like many others did. I respect that.

I'm out of the loop. What did he do?

Is he really the reason? I just started trying a bunch over the past month through vm's to see which one I like the best because I want to take the leap soon. I am doing it mostly due to the video game performance and compatibility reaching high enough levels that I don't think it will be a big issue anymore. I also listed out all my current Windows apps and looked up what the alternative is, and from what I see, there is nothing left that won't run on Linux anymore. The next step is seeing how some compare to what I am used to.

I can't be the only one who is noticing its current state and just wanting to try something different. I don't hate windows like everyone talks about it online, but I am at the point where I am noticing they are only going to get worse with privacy and continue to make awful built in features that do more to benefit themselves over you. So the 2 lines have crossed paths, and I think it's the perfect storm for Linux soon.

Welcome Mr. Krabs

Despite not being a gamer myself, Gamers are or should be a hotly contested demographic for Linux to chase and capture. And thanks to Steam, there is a shift happening as gaming gets easier.

I consider myself a trans ally, but I’m struggling to keep up with the latest pronouns. Congrats!

It's not perfect but there are different values

If it's for C#, I'm doing pretty well with VSCode/VSCodium on Linux.

WPF and Forms does not work but I also have a Rider license from work which I use occasionally to maintain one of our old WPF applications, which we converted to Avalonia XPF. It works great and we now also have a Mac and Linux version.

Without knowing what you are working on in Visual Studio, I would suggest checking out Jetbrains IDEs. I've used Rider for .NET quite successfully, and most of their other IDEs. I havent spent nearly as much time with CLion, but its supposed to be good. I haven't used VS since like 2015, so I really don't know how they compare these days. But I also haven't missed it.

People who use windows or Mac for anything but development do so for the same reasons as you, they are locked into some features. For example, at home I need a local music library manager with local sync to my phone music app and smart playlists. Mac is still the only platform with this.

At work I need MS exchange integration and all the features of native office. Even the Mac version isn't good enough for my workflow.

My only hope would be to turn to emulators or something like that, but at that point I'm not really running Linux anyway. I'm just running something else in a container inside Linux.

The only thing I really miss about visual studio is the automatic profiler. Everything else just felt archaic, bloated, slow, and unintuitive. Adding one line in cmake often does the same thing as clicking through five submenus which never once got updated since 2012.

In short, you want a .Net developement platform for Linux? And i assume something like VScode is not enough? The thing with .exe compilers in Linux ususally using Mingw/Msys2 because MS having their own proprietary compiler thing?

Visual Studio is a relic of the past. Does anyone still use it?

I think it's less Proton, more Vulkan/DXVK. Proton is just wrapping these amazing things. Before DXVK, games in Linux used to suck big time.

I have been on Linux for over 15 years and even I don't want to go back to the old days of manually installing Wine and having to create different prefixes to get different games to launch without sound. or some missing textures.

100% this. I've been on Linux for 27 years now (ffs I'm getting old), and until proton, I just wrote off gaming as a hit or miss experience, usually not worth the trouble. Now I'll buy Windows only games without even checking compatibility in most cases. Unless it's a full price AAA game, I'll risk the off chance that it doesn't work.

Honestly, 5 years ago Proton was already in pretty good shape. 2018 is when I switched to Linux, and already had very little trouble gaming.

Gaming on Mac was also more or less the same when it came to running windows games, had to use wine

And I'm sorry y'all I know wine is awesome but using it manually is a pain in the ass and I hated it and I consider myself more of an enthusiast

If we can get close to that kind of support for productivity software, I think Linux usage would explode. One of the problems with business adoption is that specialized software almost always skips Linux. The Affinity suite, for example. I’m hoping we see some snowballing now that Linux is growing so quickly, but getting Wine/Proton working with more non-game software would also be an enormous win.

now is a good time to switch. Im so glad im off windows and their bullshit. a lot of games just work, including many online games, which is super cool. often there's no difference between launching a game on Linux vs windows.

Absolutely. Linux in general has become very approachable. I recently came back to Linux after 15 years away and I have been very impressed with how well everything just works. I've only experienced very minor issues with peripherals that were solved with a simple Google search or update.

I made the full work + home switch last year. I don’t know which experience is more improved over Windows: Installing the OS or Updating the OS.

🙃

Yeah, even from inside the US it seems more and more iffy to trust our tech giants even as a paying customer. I love reading the stories about groups and governments in Europe adopting Linux/FOSS, but I’m also surprised I don’t see it more.

Everything in the news is so insane that I could see journalists ignoring/missing such mundane events as public sector software choices.

The irony of Facebook running entirely on Linux is not lost on me.

You wouldn't download an operating system, would you?

I'm less worried about any specific targeting of Linux than I am about some random tech bro whispering in Trump's ear and suddenly he bans Open Source or something similarly unenforceable and insane.

Reminds me of the thing in Spain where the cops just immediately suspect anyone of drug trafficking for using pixel devices because thats what grapheneos runs on.

With the current political climate, my bf worries about exactly this. (Linux users being viewed as criminals, I mean.)

My understanding of that was Facebook just gave up on human moderation and let an AI do whatever it wanted. Still unacceptable but totally foreseeable.

God damn I love it :) I've been messing with Linux for 20 years now and there are some patterns that never seem to change.

In almost every thread about Linux there will usually be:

1 person bragging about 'Using Arch" btw

1 or 2 people saying this will be "The Year of the Linux Desktop"

2 or 3 people joking about it being "The Year of the Linux Desktop"

10 - 15 people explaining why it wont be or shouldn't ever be "The Year of the Linux Desktop"

3 or 4 people complaining about how rude the Linux community is.

10-20 people saying that isn't their experience and/or they always try to help people when they can.

1 or 2 people actually being rude (who are usually downvoted).

2 or 3 people saying how Windows/Mac OS is better in certain ways.

4 or 5 people complaining about one specific thing that doesn't quite work for them in Linux, or one specific Windows only program they must use for work.

8- 10 people giving them suggestions about how to solve their issue or work around it.

Personally I love the Linux community. The people are mostly great, friendly, able to think outside the box, and willing to help others. I try to emulate that whenever possible. Sure you are going to get rude people in every scene, I just ignore them.

I've only ever found the Linux community helpful. I'm not saying there aren't dicks out there (I saw the one in this thread even) but for the most part people are more than willing to help out.

Did this happen to you in particular? Most tech oriented people (and Linux users by extensions) are generally chill

The majority of Americans are educated, but they all happen to live in the same 5 or so cities

And the Windows version through Wine will still run better than the native... As is tradition.

Companies don't make native software anymore - most things are websites now