12 ms·

Linux desktop market share climbs to 4.45%

358 points by naves 2y ago

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Linux is getting better all the time and Windows is getting worse all the time. We'll definitely make it to 5% eventually.
pjmlp 2y ago
It only took 30 years, time to update growing projections for the next 30 to come. It will be beating the 10% mark?
randomdata 2y ago
Nearly 6%, really. Only misreported due to a certain browser not including 'Linux' in its user-agent string.
- aqfamnzc 2y ago
  Which browser?
  - randomdata 2y ago
    Chrome.
    - sva_ 2y ago
      Chromium at least does include "Linux" in its user agent string.
      - randomdata 2y ago
        I'll take your word for it, but the source code suggests not on all Linux distributions: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2594d9f12f00ecdfbc0cc13198cdc98d665e4c64/base/version_info/version_info.h#L63C1-L68C7 https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2594d9f12f00ecdfbc...
        sva_ 2y ago
        Fair enough, it reports a different string for ChromeOS. But as you can see in the OP, ChromeOS has been listed separately at 1.41%.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        randomdata 2y ago
        Right, exactly what I said in the very first comment: Nearly 6% [4.45 + 1.41], really. Only misreported due to a certain browser [Chrome/Chromium] not including 'Linux' in its user-agent string.
    - pantalaimon 2y ago
      I get Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
rgrieselhuber 2y ago
Having switched back to Linux after many years, even looking at Mac OS feels like poverty now. Not because of the UX or hardware but because of the company behind it.
- juujian 2y ago
  Feels like poverty?
  - dima55 2y ago
    They can't afford more mouse buttons?
    - GordonS 2y ago
      That'll be the "next big thing" they'll gushing about on stage: an incredible new mouse with TWO (2!) buttons! Of course, it'll be a $600 upgrade...
    - pantalaimon 2y ago
      Linux seems to be the only OS that makes good use of the middle mouse button, unfortunately many mice are not designed for that kind of wear on the button, so this is always the first to break :(
  - nequo 2y ago
    Maybe the thought of buying one brings up mental images of going broke? Decent hardware that Linux is happy with is definitely much cheaper than a decent MacBook.
- nawgz 2y ago
  That seems like a bit of an emotionally driven non sequitur, to say the least!
- adamwong246 2y ago
  Poverty is not quite the right word. "Sterility" is the word I would use. My linux machine is a complex, fiddly beast, which I treat like a bonsai tree. My mac, however, gives me "dead mall vibes" in comparison. It's not all bad, I get more work done. But it certainly does not feel "alive" in the same way my linux machines feel.
JodieBenitez 2y ago
https://yotld.com https://yotld.com
drhagen 2y ago
How much of this is due to non-technical users simply using phones and tablets instead of laptops and other devices with "desktop" OSes?
- wmf 2y ago
  So you're saying there could be a constant number of Linux desktop users who are a larger percentage of a shrinking market. I suppose anything is possible.
kibwen 2y ago
Without knowing the methodology that StatCounter is using, the numbers themselves aren't especially meaningful, although a consistent upward trend in those numbers could be showing something real. In any case, ChromeOS is also Linux, so tack that on there as well, along with whatever portion of that 7% "unknown" that you think is reasonable (which could be a relatively large portion, depending on methodology). (Also, the bar chart shown in the article is messed up because they're charting the value of each item averaged over the previous year.)
- mrweasel 2y ago
  For numbers I did like to see absolute numbers. While I have no doubt that people are switching to Linux, but an increasing number of people are also just giving up on computers in favour of just using their phones for everything. Some of the increase in percentage Linux is seeing could also be due to Windows and Mac users dropping having a computer in general. That's not to say that people aren't switching, I see no reason to get a new Mac next time I'm replacing my laptop. My work will be done more easily on Linux at this point.
- Aachen 2y ago
  It could also be showing that the market is consolidating towards big tech and that only those wanting to stay with their independent statistics provider are still with StatCounter. In turn, the users of services with such morals could be more likely to be Linux distribution users. I don't have data better than StatCounter, but if we're thinking of methodology and whether it could be accurate, this is a possibility to take into account The optimist in me wants to not leave unmentioned that Linux is more accessible than ever and information easier to come by while Windows has never been shittier (which old Windows version shipped with tracking and ads?) and macOS is still priced and protected the way it always has been: much easier to dual or live boot Mint. Come for the freedom and stay for the ease of use. It's no coincidence that Microsoft made it very easy to use Linux software within Windows now (obviously without contributing the inverse mechanism, that'd be stupid): people want it. I really hope there's more truth to this than to the first paragraph
- pjmlp 2y ago
  ChromeOS uses the Linux kernel in a browser based userspace, and offers a VM for running GNU/Linux as guest OSes, isn't quite the same as being GNU/Linux, otherwise Windows with WSL is also Linux.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jimmar 2y ago
Linux seems to be stealing more market share from OSX than Windows: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide.
- andrewmcwatters 2y ago
  Two Unix systems and one is increasingly infuriating professionals.
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  Windows is shipping with its own Linux already, so it's getting harder to complain about Windows. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Could you explain what you mean in your first paragraph? In what sense does Windows ship with Linux?
    - gamepsys 2y ago
      OP is talking about WSL. I've seen some technical documentation, such as readmes for source code, that assumes the user is on a Windows laptop running WSL. At this point in time if I see anything mentioning Ubuntu I just assume it's written with WSL/Azure in mind.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - resource_waste 2y ago
    There are ads everywhere on Windows. And onedrive hijacks your filesystem. Even at my fortune 20 company I see: "DNC RATINGS COMPARED TO RNC" clickbait crap. I'm amazed my company lets that garbage through. Probably because we have legacy software + some corruption with purchasing. Sharepoint... really?
SCUSKU 2y ago
I'm a macOS user but would be interested in getting a linux desktop, I've heard Linux Mint or PopOS are pretty good just from a ease of use perspective? I've used Ubuntu in the past and had all sorts of display graphics driver problems. I know it's an impossible question, but nonetheless, what's the best distro to use for someone who just wants a useable desktop?
- andrepd 2y ago
  Linux Mint is an outstanding project, like you said focused on stability and ease of use. It's been my daily driver for over a decade!
- zappchance 2y ago
  I was looking around a while last year and those two are the exact ones I landed on, with a slight lean towards Pop!_OS due to the team behind it striving for maximum "out-of-the-box" usability. Linux Mint has a special place in my heart as it was the first distro I used back in my high school computer science class and it holds up exceptionally well today. It's also community driven compared to Pop!_OS which is developed by System76.
- ilaksh 2y ago
  If you want to avoid all driver issues you should probably be asking about a hardware/OS combo, not just one or the other. But over the last few years I haven't had significant problems.
- benrutter 2y ago
  I think a lot of stock gets put into distros for driver issues, but a huge factor is the hardware you're running on. Some distros like popOS intentially bundle drivers for newer graphics cards and the like, but that aside, if you don't have really hardcore requirements, picking decent hardware that's a few years old will probably smooth out your journey a lot, regardless of which distro you pick. If you're coming from macOS you might be happy to pay a premium for a purpose built machine as well (I have a System 76 laptop which has served me really well for a good 5 years or so now with no sign of slowing down) As an aside, Linux Mint, PopOS and Ubuntu (the three you mentioned) are all great choices for a reliable, stable desktop.
myth_drannon 2y ago
Linux on desktop is just a solid workhorse. My 13+ years laptop is chugging along happily with Ubuntu and my Windows8 10+ years beefed up desktop takes 10 minutes to start and 5 minutes to open a browser and basically a broken mess of security holes.
- ogogmad 2y ago
  What about the 6-monthly and 2-yearly forced upgrades? How are you faring with those?
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    forced? how?
    - Aachen 2y ago
      I imagine they mean security support, but are overlooking LTS somehow
      - prmoustache 2y ago
        Appart from LTS most distros still support the n-1 release until the n+1 is released so in reality you can always do a double upgrade once a year. But ultimately it is a moot point as major distro upgrades are barely different than the regular security upgrades. There are just more packages upgraded at once.
  - myth_drannon 2y ago
    It's not forced, but it's a trivial upgrade if you have a basic setup. I also have a desktop where I do some hobby AI development and once in a blue moon, Nvidia drivers would break the system because of kernel upgrades.
wcchandler 2y ago
I've been a linux desktop user for a long time now (~25 years?). I generally don't talk about it, as it's not a suitable environment for a lot of people. So I'm always surprised when I stumble upon somebody using it. Just recently I took a Google Cloud training course and the instructor used it as his daily driver. Not only was this impressive to see "out in the wild" but it was nice to see all the tools needed to lead a remote training course worked in his setup. He had a webcam working great (even focused/panned on him as he moved). He had a powerpoint/slideshow going. He had zoom/teleconferencing software working. And it all worked through the course. There was never 10-20 minute pause because something wasn't working right. Having this level of viability and operability is something I never expected to see.
- oblio 2y ago
  Sorry to be a downer but a cloud instructor is still a techie. I'd be way more impressed with a lawyer or an accountant using it but I've never seen one so far.
  - layer8 2y ago
    > Having this level of viability and operability is something I never expected to see. It’s unexpected even in the case of techies.
  - perbu 2y ago
    fwiw; I worked in a company that was kind of a Linux pioneer back in the 90s. We ran Linux for everyone. The accountant ran a VM for his accouting software, but except that everything was Linux. And once set up, it worked very well, for techies and non-technical alike. If you get past installation and initial setup, using Linux in a desktop role isn't really challenging if you've got access to support.
    - szundi 2y ago
      I don’t believe lawyers can live without ms office
mulmen 2y ago
I switched to desktop Linux about a year ago. Fedora Sway Spin. I have done a major version upgrade without issue. None of the buttons moved. Nothing broke. Just business as usual. No complaints about the OS itself. The final straw was a Steam game that wouldn’t launch on Windows 10 but worked in Steam/Proton. I haven’t booted Windows since.
- resource_waste 2y ago
  Fedora woke me up to how Fedora is the best. I'm not even going to say Linux, because people confuse it with Ubuntu/Debian/Mint GARBAGE. Never use that later crap for desktop. Its so outdated and buggy. You are using the terminal on a daily basis to get basic features working, if your hardware works at all. Fedora is so good, I feel offended I didn't know about it until now. I am bitter against M$ and bitter against Canonical.
wafflemaker 2y ago
Is it including or excluding the SteamDeck users?
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  IIRC StatCounter's numbers are based on browser user-agent strings. I'm guessing most Steam Deck users are mostly using it for games as opposed to one web browsing, so probably not.
- KTibow 2y ago
  Most Steam Deck users aren't browsing with it
aborsy 2y ago
As a Linux desktop user, I installed windows in a VM to use an application that is not available for Linux (a printer app made by a vendor was available only for Windows and macOS). Awful! Slow, bloated, my files by default were uploaded to Microsoft (and the setting is easily reversed with updates if turned off), lots of advertisement everywhere I click, edge is slow, … Glad to be a Linux user! The quality of open source software is frankly very high. The only limitation is that some drivers or software are not made for Linux.
- tigeroil 2y ago
  I know it's a minor detail but the other day I was using Windows for something and I was amazed by how sluggish even task manager felt.
  - Aachen 2y ago
    What blows me away is how poor printers still work. On a bare Debian laptop, I just walk up to it and it prints via USB with no configuration needed. Network printers I think auto-discover reliably as well, but it has been a few years since I've done that (we have a tendency to not trust printers at our small security firm so we don't hook them up to the network) At least they've solved that you had to wait 2 minutes anymore when plugging your mouse into a different USB port before it finds the driver from Windows Update again
tambourine_man 2y ago
C'mon Adobe. Release CC for Linux. Bless a DE or ship your own. Linux's market share will only increase and your suite should be pretty platform abstracted by now, anyway.
- pluc 2y ago
  Didn't they buy then bury Corel?
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
    No, but why would that matter?
- tomovo 2y ago
  If Google is paying Apple effectively not to make its own search engine, I would not be surprised if Apple and/or Microsoft were paying Adobe not to port CC to Linux.
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
    I don’t think we need a conspiracy theory. Most likely they don’t bother with 5% market share, most of which probably have strong feelings about closed source in general and Adobe in specific. But if/when Linux reaches 10/15% that may change.
    - amlib 2y ago
      Wasn't Mac OS less than or around 5% for a long time after the 90s? If they thought that was sustainable, maybe Linux should be close by now? Of course there are many other things to also take in account, so who knows.
      - tambourine_man 2y ago
        Most apps started on the Mac, so there was no porting needed. Also, most professionals had Macs, so Adobe had a 50/50 revenue split between Macs and Windows, even though there was a huge market share difference.
conqrr 2y ago
I used Linux first as a 14 year old kid in the 90s who found Win$ows to become slow overtime and we couldn't afford a new computer. Fell in love with Linux instantly given the customization and efficiency. Not needing things like an AntiVirus was huge. I haven't looked back at all and its likely what drove me into CS. Sometimes constraints are a good thing. We had a few courses in Undergrad (outdated of course) that required students to run things like LAMP server and GCC and there was a good culture of running Ubuntu and other distros. I would have done 30+ installs for my classmates and ran into all sorts of issues with laptop drivers, overheating etc. Things are probably better on that front now with compatible hardware, (I only buy linux compatible hardware so I'm not sure).I really wish to see more widespread adoption especially in developing countries.
k_bx 2y ago
Bought $2k laptop Acer Predator Helios Neo 16. Windows 11 doesn't install at all (can't see the hard drive). Win10 installed but touchpad doesn't work (even after drivers install), network didn't work (neither ethernet nor wifi) without external USB stick, and so on. After internet connection and installing all updates touchpad and dynamics still don't work. Pop OS works near-perfectly.
- jtokoph 2y ago
  Doesn't it come with Windows 11 preinstalled?
  - k_bx 2y ago
    Mine came with no OS. I need Linux primarily, but still Windows occasionally for Mission Planner and other Windows-only apps. So I've installed a second M.2 disk and had this terrible experience with Windows installation afterwards.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  Where did you manage to get one of those without Windows pre-installed? I was looking at one to replace my outdated Predator, and was hoping to save the ~$100 on the license.
  - k_bx 2y ago
    In Ukraine. So.. it depends on how much do you want it haha https://rozetka.com.ua/ua/acer-nhqlveu00a/p416822133/ https://rozetka.com.ua/ua/acer-nhqlveu00a/p416822133/
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      The shipping might end up being more than the Windows license, haha. Thanks though!
- anemoknee 2y ago
  Today I learned there's a laptop out there with a mouthful of a name like that.
michelsedgh 2y ago
I wonder if more people are using linux as a desktop or generally, people are using less desktop devices with the rise of phones and tablets. What i mean is, before even old people and the normal users would need desktop and they would prefer windows and mac, but now i feel like they are generally less probe to use desktops and dont need them so that might be contributing to the sudden market share rise of linux maybe? U know what i mean?
bogwog 2y ago
Semi-relevant but a few years old, a 2021 VFX industry survery found that around 60% of workstations run Linux, and that number is expected to continue growing. What's interesting to me is that VFX and game dev are kind of similar in terms of software and expertise, but game devs predominantly use Windows. I wonder why that is? Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQIdp38Y/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQI... (From https://vfxplatform.com/linux/ https://vfxplatform.com/linux/)
- ido 2y ago
  Because the games have to run on windows
  - jay_kyburz 2y ago
    And both Unreal and Unity both mostly only work on Windows. (Linux support very sketchy)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- hollerith 2y ago
  >VFX and game dev are kind of similar in terms of software and expertise, but game devs predominantly use Windows. I wonder why that is? The deliverable of a VFX project is a video file or an artifact that goes into a video file (no complex dependency on Windows) whereas most games need to be able to run on Windows.
  - bogwog 2y ago
    I don't think that's it. Games also need to run on consoles, mobile phones, and sometimes web browsers. Cross platform development isn't a new concept in game development, and all major commercial game engines work on Linux (well, they do today at least) Most software used in the VFX industry does officially support Linux, and a lot of those tools are also used in game dev. Maybe Unity and Unreal's Linux support hasn't been great, and that's the only reason? I guess it's easier to get into gamedev than VFX as an indie, and if you have little/no technical background then there's a good chance you're on Windows or Mac when you start looking up Unity/Unreal/etc tutorials, and then you just stick with what you know.
isk517 2y ago
After all of the frustration I experienced getting Windows 11 setup in a way that was comfortable for me to use I'm ready to switch to Linux the next time I need to reinstall a operating system. So glad that SteamDeck is making Linux gaming viable. Now we just need the GPU manufactures to give Linus the same driver support Windows gets.
- owenpalmer 2y ago
  https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?si=fFi2L2k2J6TvTRtc https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?si=fFi2L2k2J6TvTRtc
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    The above would be Linus Torvalds saying > Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever dealt with. So, Nvidia: [angrily for moment, wags a middle finger to the camera] fuck you.
- wetpaws 2y ago
  [dead]
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  I had similar feelings about Windows 11, but I recently found the Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC build, and it works perfectly for me. Debloated and no ads. You do have to do a little bit of troubleshooting, install extra components (e.g. to install the Microsoft store), etc., but it was significantly easier than debloating a regular Windows 11 install. https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    Why would I want to roll the dice with Windows install media from a third-party site instead of just using Linux (and possibly making it work better?)
    - 2y ago
etaioinshrdlu 2y ago
I kind of wonder or suspect that user agents are being misidentified. I have heard that sometimes Android gets identified as Linux. (which I guess is actually not wrong, but you get the point...)
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I am done with windows after issues with the quality of windows updates (even security updates!), dark patterns everywhere, pushy anti competitive nudges to Microsoft products, copilot privacy issues, and things like ads in the start menu. I want to use Linux but the main issue for me is battery life of common Linux laptops, especially since standby doesn’t work reliably.
AmVess 2y ago
I hope adoption of Linux accelerates. Windows has become incredibly anti-user. I built a new PC recently. No internet because the latest version of the Windows 11 installer didn't have a realtek Wifi driver on it. This driver was present in the Windows 10 installer. If I didn't know the work around, I would not have been able to install the OS. Ok, so I got the OS installed, and was greeted with an OS with 4 different UI styles glued together from W7 on up. Keep in mind, the OS in its entirety has UI elements dating back to Windows 3.1. Still no WIFI drivers which I had to hunt down and wait because the OEM's website was spittling out corrupt data for a while. WIFI up, Windows update missed a bunch of drivers. Installed them manually. After about 45 minutes, finally got the OS ready to install apps. Basic apps. Office, dev stuff, photo stuff. This took over an hour, what with Windows updates, and all. I also put the latest copy of Fedora on my laptop. No internet connection needed. Typed in username, passcode. Installed in about 10 minutes. WIFI working out of the box. One reboot later, I had a fully functioning OS that came with everything I needed. 20 minutes total, perhaps. Microsoft has completely thrown away any notion of usability while Linux is accelerating towards it. I still can't quite wrap my head around requiring internet to install the OS while also not providing a means to access the internet via WIFI. And then of course there are all the other issues surrounding the OS that has been talked about at length here. Finally, Windows 11 is a buggy, slow, unresponsive mess of an OS, and it makes using Windows 10 feel like a breath of fresh air due to its comparative responsiveness and lack of bugs. Keyword is comparative. Windows 10 is still a corpulent waddling pig of a sloppily glued together OS.
hypeatei 2y ago
Moved to Linux Mint a few months ago and 90% of the Steam games I play work the same (or better) which surprised me. Dev experience is way better and I haven't had to tinker with much at all, Bluetooth controllers connect just fine and no more bloat + spying by default.
- gamepsys 2y ago
  I had the same experience about 5 years ago.
alphabettsy 2y ago
I don’t trust these stats at all. I’d like to see a breakdown by user agent. It makes much more sense to me that ChromeOS is becoming more common than that everyday users are switching to Linux.
- bachmeier 2y ago
  > It makes much more sense to me that ChromeOS is becoming more common than that everyday users are switching to Linux. It's not necessary for anyone to switch to Linux to see this behavior. These are shares. I'm actually not surprised by these numbers because I've noticed Windows users use their desktops less, instead doing more with other devices. I wouldn't be surprised to see the number rise to 20% or more in the next few years even if there's no pickup in folks moving to Linux on the desktop.
Workaccount2 2y ago
I switched to linux desktop about 2.5 years ago. TBH, I'm ready to go back to windows. The way I put it, driving a car with a driver's seat that looks like 747 cockpit is pretty cool and definitely very powerful. And it has auto-pilot if you just want the basics. But man, if you want to do more than the absolute basics, a regular Toyota corolla drivers seat is _way_ more accommodating and intuitive. You don't need to spend a year studying the machine to use it fluidly. Linux is cool, the idea incredible, but man, searching for guides that tell you to turn cryptic knobs, flick unlabeled switches, and push seemingly random buttons just to get the window to roll down has become too taxing for me. Especially when half the time it doesn't even work. I want a GUI, .exe's, and hover text on options. There is a reason every consumer grade linux/unix OS hides the terminal (android, iOS, macOS).
- aaomidi 2y ago
  You practically described how I feel every time I run into an issue on windows and have to resort to editing undocumented registry keys.
  - AndroTux 2y ago
    And that happens how often? Once a year? On Linux, that’s more like one a day. Once a week if you’re lucky.
    - JrProgrammer 2y ago
      I have no idea what you are talking about, I've used fedora for over a year now and aside from some tweaking, which I explicitly did myself, I've never had to go into some weird configs to change anything. It just works
    - soerxpso 2y ago
      Can you elaborate on what exactly you're doing with Linux that's causing that? I use Arch daily (programming, gaming, web browsing, etc), and the last time I had to do anything more complicated than `sudo pacman -Syu` to configure my system was over a year ago.
lovecg 2y ago
Finally, 2024 will be the year of the Linux desktop! On a serious note there seems to be an interesting lesson here about what sort of products just don’t seem to work in a non-commercial open source model. Specifically, simple user friendly UIs for non-power users seem to require financial incentives and competition.
sebtron 2y ago
Nice news, slow and steady grows in the past decade :) Regarding the article... > While Linux's growth is noteworthy, it's important to view it in the context of the overall desktop operating system market: > > Windows remains dominant with a 72.08% market share > macOS holds steady at 14.92% > Chrome OS trails at 1.41% > > Linux's 4.45% puts it firmly in fourth place, ahead of Chrome OS but still well behind the market leaders. Uhm what? And some people claim LLMs are great at summarizing data...
api 2y ago
Linux can win the desktop by just sitting still while Windows makes itself more and more awful and user-hostile.
halotrope 2y ago
Linux Desktop got so much better in recent years but it also stayed the same. If you’re trying to be productive and not just switching between editor and terminal windows there are still endless frustrations that never end.
systemtest 2y ago
I used to run Linux on my desktop as a teenager, but now as a middle aged man I just want to sit down after work, boot up my computer, click the icon of my favourite game and relax for a bit. And for that, I prefer Windows. I have stopped caring about my distro, my window manager, my desktop environment, the package manager I use. Even my wallpaper is just the default Windows 11 one.
mysteria 2y ago
With modern hardware it's also completely viable to have a Windows VM idling in the background on a Linux desktop to run things like MS Office. Local RDP performance (with FreeRDP/etc.) is excellent and suitable for business or dev work that doesn't require accelerated graphics. You can have shared directories, a shared clipboard, and so forth.
rossdavidh 2y ago
In case you're wondering if it's real growth, or just noise: 2009: 0.69 2012: 0.85 2015: 1.5 2018: 1.69 2021: 2.38 2024: 4.54
skwirl 2y ago
As a user of 27" 4k monitors, the terrible 150% DPI scaling has been a dealbreaker for Linux desktop for me for years. Every so often I will go out and search to see if it's any better, and I always find people insisting that it works "perfectly" now, and then I will go and try to replicate what they did only to find out that "perfectly" means something very different to Linux desktop users who clearly have never used MacOS or even Windows with fractional DPI scaling.
- gamepsys 2y ago
  As a 4k monitor user, I think KDE has DPI scaling on par with MacOS.
  - binkHN 2y ago
    Seconded; while the occasional legacy program might have issues, I'm happily doing 4K with scaling in KDE with Wayland.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  I'm typing this from a Debian system with dual 27" 4k monitors. Why do you need 150% DPI scaling at all? It works just fine for me without it. Just set your font sizes larger if they're too small.
  - porridgeraisin 2y ago
    You can't be serious. That approach has so many downsides you can't list them in a hackernews comment. For example, icons will not be scaled in your method. So any app like audacity where tons of icons are the primary visual component are completely unusable. Not to mention icons on the taskbar look garbage. And not to mention... You get the idea
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >For example, icons will not be scaled in your method. ... Not to mention icons on the taskbar look garbage Yes, they are. It works fine. I'm using KDE fwiw. Icon scaling is one of the easily-configured features, especially on the taskbar. (The icons are all SVG, so why would you want to do anything other than native scaling?) Everything I use it for works fine. Maybe you should try it out.
jsnell 2y ago
Statcounter's "stats" are garbage, and should not be reported on. They're computed from untrustworthy information generated from a skewed and undisclosed sample, and processed with an unknown methodology. All that's published is aggregate data that's so coarse that it's impossible to actually reason about what's happening and what's driving the changes to the number. But fairly regularly their stats are either so volatile or so absurd that it's obvious they have no relationship with reality. Like when they reporter Windows 8.1 climbing from 0.1% to 6% market share in the US in late 2023. One could easily come up with half a dozen other explanations for this Linux desktop market share number that are as plausible as the hypothesis of significant growth in desktop Linux usage.
- boomboomsubban 2y ago
  Though I agree that Statcounter's stats are garbage, their methodology is somewhat known. They have connections to supposedly 3 million websites that run their script, that script records each hit, and the end stats say 4.45% of desktop hits come from Linux. It's unclear what sites they, but I doubt it's a representative sample. Even if it is, like one person figuring out which site was tracked setting up a refresh script could be enough to meaningfully damage the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatCounter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatCounter
  - jsnell 2y ago
    We know the methodology by which they collect the data, which is why we can tell it's a skewed sample. We don't know how they process it. It's not possible to reliably determine the operating system from just the user-agent. You could try to enrich the UA data with other signals, but all of those avenues are either being closed off by the browsers as fingerprinting vectors or are going to have trouble distinguishing Linux and Android. Likewise we know they do some filtering of bot traffic, but not the details of how or even the proportion of traffic they're filtering out (which would at least allow us to reason about the quality of that filtering).
    - EasyMark 2y ago
drewg123 2y ago
FreeBSD at 0.01%. There are dozens of us! :)
eqvinox 2y ago
"Linux's 4.45% puts it firmly in fourth place," I don't think it makes sense to count "unknown" as being in third place…
franczesko 2y ago
"As awareness of data privacy issues grows, more users are turning to open-source alternatives like Linux" I'd love to see Linux for mobile devices just because of that reason. Old school "what happens on device, stays on device"
underseacables 2y ago
I think the more people that have to suffer with windows 11, the more they will turn to Linux. To the average user, Linux is still a clunky, disjointed operating system, but despite its flaws it's vastly better than Windows 11.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Every OS now is clunky and disjointed in some way. But only one of them has ads on the desktop.
yorwba 2y ago
The highest share seems to be in India with 16.21% Linux. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india I wonder whether that's real or a mirage caused by Linux servers masquerading as desktops.
- pantalaimon 2y ago
  India is rather poor, Windows screams for new hardware (and Windows 11 just obsoleted perfectly fine hardware that's still plenty fast).
- Karliss 2y ago
  Statcounter data is based on website visits. It is very unlikely that any significant fraction of them are being used for browsing web, or even have a graphical interface with web browser installed for doing it.
- boomboomsubban 2y ago
  I've always assumed the sites they track lead to some serious small sample biases in certain countries. It's an Irish company, so I'd guess most of their sites are European language based and wouldn't be surprised if there's a high amount of tech sites. For example, it wouldn't be that surprising if they got data from HN, or a similar site. What portion of Indian desktop hits to this site do you think report using Linux?
mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
Good. Linux desktop is the future.
lvl155 2y ago
I think Windows 10 was the best desktop experience. There was a period when OSX was nice. Linux is doable but it’s always 80% there (speaking strictly in terms of DE). Things break more often than I’d like. Not a problem if you do everything in terminal.
- pantalaimon 2y ago
  Windows has a lot more jank these days than the average Linux desktop.
  - lvl155 2y ago
    11 is horrible. Windows 10 was GOAT for awhile right after they released WSL2. If you can give me Windows 10 environment with Debian as the base, that’d be perfect.
    - dangus 2y ago
      And then when Windows 12 comes out you'll be saying Windows 11 was the GOAT right? I thought Windows 7 was the GOAT! I'm the person with the unpopular opinion that I would take Windows 11 over 10 any day. Windows 10 has too much in the UI that still feels like a bridge between old and new. They both run the same apps, so to me all the nitpicks and philosophical problems people have don't really matter much to me. I haven't found anything in Windows 11 that "doesn't work" or is even mildly annoying and it has a bunch of new stuff that's genuinely useful. Like, it finally has screen capture utilities that don't frustrate me to use when compared to macOS. A bunch of little basic UI stuff like that where I feel it's an improvement. The Windows Shell is a major improvement. The notifications/quick settings area makes a lot more sense now. Windows 11 remembers where your windows were when you undock from a second monitor. Little stuff like that where it was just slightly more frustrating to use than my Mac. Windows 10 is also more poorly aware/optimized of modern hardware than a lot of people realize. It is an old os now. Things like automatic HDR in games just isn't there. (Really, gaming is an area where Windows 11's new features are quite clearly worth the upgrade)
apatheticonion 2y ago
Across the week, I go between Linux, MacOS and Windows - my work issued device runs MacOS and my personal desktop PC dual boots Windows and Linux. I am biased towards Linux because I like it but it's far from perfect. UX is a passion of mine and something I'm a little pedantic about and while Linux has made strides, it still has a long way to go in this department though it's _so close_ and constantly getting better. Gnome and KDE all have their little inconsistencies and/or lack of functionality. Individually they are minor but together they make it feel unpolished or incomplete. Below is a non-exhaustive list of things that I feel could be improved - don't get me wrong, I love Linux and use it constantly - nit picking is my way of finding areas to improve it so I can recommend it in earnest to friends looking for a bit of OS strange. Some things that I think could be improved; === - Gnome; has an incomplete file manager, though generally no file manager available on MacOS or Linux beats the one on Windows 7 or 10. - Gnome; Window snapping doesn't always work for Chrome and in general window snapping needs some love. - Gnome,KDE; While Chrome has its own style on all platforms, it somehow feels less congruent to Linux desktops than it does to MacOS and Windows - plus you can't drag tabs off the window in Wayland Chrome. - KDE; Password keychain stuff. Feels like this needs to be native to Linux and not the DE. - KDE; (minor) If you have a high refresh screen, KDE will use 60hz for workspace transition animations but 144hz for everything else. - Gnome; Window decorations on Gnome are overly padded which makes the interface feel unpolished and somewhat clumsy compared to the tight fonts and spacing you see on Windows and MacOS. I assume this is because Gnome aspire to make a play for a mobile OS one day in the future? - Gnome; The Gnome/libadwaita guidelines prefer a application menu design that is obscured from view resulting in too many clicks - I think this is also related to their mobile play. I believe that Cosmic gets this right. - Linux; Please fix application installations. Flatpak is kind of okay but I constantly have issues with it so I tend to avoid it. I really love MacOS's "Foo.app" "executable folder" concept. It feels similar to AppImage but I don't think that's going to win the packaging wars any time soon. - Fedora 40 + AMD GPU; This is my configuration but it might affect other distros/hardware - Steam doesn't launch from the icon right now. You must install Steam then launch it from the terminal. === There are lots of areas for improvement but regardless - every new release of Gnome and KDE gets better and better. Steam has helped put Linux gaming on the map, that combined with the poor experience of Windows 11 has encouraged IT savvy people & gamers to genuinely consider running a Linux desktop for the first time. Also the Cosmic desktop is shaping up to be a real strong contender in the Linux DE space and I am excited to see what happens there. It's an exciting time to be watching the desktop computing space and I am hopeful that the additional attention Linux is getting will continue to push investment into polishing the desktop experience.
binkHN 2y ago
I recently migrated from Windows to Linux. I bought a new machine with Windows 11 Pro preinstalled and it was a cesspool of Microsoft ads for their services coming from within the OS and preinstalled apps. It was happening so often, and affecting my productivity while annoying the heck out of me, that I decided Windows is hindering more than it's helping; I bit the bullet and installed Linux for the first time. Fast forward and I've been on Linux for more than 6 months now and, while it's not all roses, my overall experience has been far better than Windows 11. I still remote into a Windows machine regularly for things that I have not yet migrated to Linux and, while it's a familiar space, it's no longer a space I want to be in.
leoedin 2y ago
I’m surprised about the amount of negativity in the comments here. I’ve been running PopOS on a few different machines for the last 4 years or so. It’s been almost seamless. I can’t think of the last time I even considered booting into windows - in fact I recently wiped my dual boot partition because I needed the disk space. I’m not really a desktop power user - I don’t even bother changing the wallpaper usually. I think it’s just so much easier now - almost every app is a web app. The stuff I run locally - development tools mainly - all have Linux versions.
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  +1 for PopOS as a daily driver and have barely used Windows at home in the last 5 years (outside of my work computer at least). I love being free of Microsoft and Windows (and Aople and Facebook for that matter, but they're beside the point). On the way to minimising Google as well.
- Gud 2y ago
  I’ve heard good things about popos, will ditch my windows partition and give it a try!
INTPenis 2y ago
Atomic Linuxes really are the gateway for regular people to use Linux. I've been using Linux since the 90s and I never really would recommend Linux to anyone unless there were very special circumstances. But today I'd gladly recommend for example Fedora Atomic, I haven't tried other atomic Linux distros but the key feature is being able to revert back to a previous state in the boot manager. No software will ever be perfect, but once an issue happens a non-technical user must be able to easily revert back to a functional state so they can proceed with their work and life. Otherwise the OS is worthless to them. And sure you've been able to do this with BTRFS and snapshots but Fedora Atomic is the first time I've personally seen a distro come with this feature out of box, while also being very modern and easy to use. Just the other day I did an ostree upgrade and after rebooting Firefox couldn't play videos, Steam wouldn't even start. I just wanted to get on with my day so I simply rebooted into the previous commit. An end-user is given time and breathing room to wait for the issue to be resolved and try another update.
- arcastroe 2y ago
  I've been using UWF on Windows. It essentially resets all changes on reboot so that every reboot is back to a clean state. But I'll take a look at Fedora Atomic. What you describe sounds promising.
- manx 2y ago
  NixOS does this too.
openrisk 2y ago
The beauty of this decades long race is that the end game is still ambiguous. The Windows desktop trends towards being a thin client for opaque cloud services, which means at some point the Linux desktop proposition will be quite dramatically different, with its emphasis on local, private, open source etc. In any case, for power users the Linux desktop is already a formidable platform.
- karmakaze 2y ago
  What part of Windows 11 is thin? Ads in the Start menu?
  - openrisk 2y ago
    Who mentioned Windows 11? Ever heard of Windows 365 and "cloud pc"?
    - karmakaze 2y ago
      I didn't think that was a thing folks used, or want to use.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- andrewmcwatters 2y ago
  There’s already a massive gap between Windows and macOS. Though I feel like that gap between Windows and Linux is nominal. I do think that Apple will continue to piss off engineers enough that over time Ubuntu or another mainstream distribution on a high quality laptop will be a popular choice for a plurality of developers.
geoffbp 2y ago
Year of the Linux desktop
0xcde4c3db 2y ago
I wonder just how much of this has been driven by third-party vendors dropping Windows 7 users. I know it's not zero, because I helped a die-hard Windows 7 user switch to Linux specifically due to the Steam deadline. It's easy to chalk that kind of stubbornness up to a generic "fear of change", but in his case I think he very specifically loathed the direction Microsoft took with 8/10/11.
denimboy 2y ago
This is the year of the Linux desktop
simonblack 2y ago
Ho, hum. Linux has been on my desktop for 23 years.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
The year of the Linux desktop?
vitorgrs 2y ago
I moved to Linux for a few months (currently on EndeavourOS, but just distro hopping...). The main reasons for me was because of how the latest updates on Windows 11 has been very horrible. Windows had only one OK consumer mail app, the inbox Mail apps, and they killed and replaced with Outlook Web App basically. File Explorer got super awful, unstable, slow... A ton of native things getting replaced by web apps... And each web app using their own Webview2, instead of at least using a shared webview between the apps (that's how W8 and W10 worked). The result for this is that to show a simple weather info on taskbar, it literally needs a webview. Yes, the temperature thing on taskbar uses webview. If you are low on resources, the system just can't handle all of that. Meanwhile on Gnome here, although with some issues, none comes close to that, and the design has been very consistent as well.
adham-omran 2y ago
Sadly I'm moving back to Windows by the end of the month due to the lack of audio production software, the only area where WINE, virtual machines with USB passthrough fail.. I'll still use Linux VMs for various services while my host is Windows and I'll develop in WSL but it's sad that a creative niche like audio production has practically no players in the Linux scene, I'm talking Native Instruments, Spitfire, EastWest, Dorico, even MuseScore with its MuseHub do not run under NixOS for example. Quite a shame.
masfoobar 2y ago
I remember playing with GNU/Linux since 2005 due to frustrations with the Windows XP and, eventually, Windows Vista. I think it was around 2007 I commited to it, thanks to a "beginning Ubuntu" book that came with the recent release distro CD. Since then, I have only used GNU/Linux, trying different distros. In the end I kinda settled down with Debian but open to others like Guix. However, my recent laptop which I've had for 3 years now, came with Windows 10. About a year or so ago it just upgraded itself to Windows 11. I don't mind it but there are just ** on it I don't care for. If I want it, I will install it. Even when I remove it, it comes back on the taskbar, etc. I am only on Windows due to my current job - but as I am close to resignation... it wont be long before I backup important data, wipe the hard drive, and install debian. I honestly think GNU/Linux as a desktop is far superior that Windows 11. I guess it all depends what you use a PC/laptop for. If you are stuck in a world of Microsoft products, such as Office.. I get it. It can be hard to break away what you are familiar with and, in some ways, some Micrsoft products dont really have close alternatives. For me as a programmer, I pretty much have everything I need and my wife who use her laptop as a general user, had no complaints, either. Honestly, since the rise of Steam on Linux and complaints on Windows 11 -- I am not suprised the market share for linux is rising.
tony2016 2y ago
I don't know why this is always in the news. %4.45 is still very small. Linux came out 34 years ago. That's an ion in computer years. Linux desktop is in too many flavors. MacOS is one MacOS. whatever the latest. Windows 11 is Windows 11. Not many flavors of it. I feel like Linux people are cheering for a tiny number. They'll take whatever desktop market share they can. 10 years from now maybe it will be 6%. Well... big f*king hurray! Open the champagne bottles! This is all silly.
- pixxel 2y ago
  Linux doesn’t have the capital of tech giants to be installed onto new machines via partnerships (Microsoft), or its own hardware (Apple). Linux is the greatest FOSS of all time, and small bumps in an upward trajectory are welcomed news. What is silly is jumping into such threads just to shit on progress made against the mega corporations that aren’t working for your best interests.

358 points by naves 2y ago

Linux is getting better all the time and Windows is getting worse all the time. We'll definitely make it to 5% eventually.

pjmlp 2y ago

It only took 30 years, time to update growing projections for the next 30 to come. It will be beating the 10% mark?

randomdata 2y ago

Nearly 6%, really. Only misreported due to a certain browser not including 'Linux' in its user-agent string.

aqfamnzc 2y ago
Which browser?
- randomdata 2y ago
  Chrome.
  - sva_ 2y ago
    Chromium at least does include "Linux" in its user agent string.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      I'll take your word for it, but the source code suggests not on all Linux distributions: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2594d9f12f00ecdfbc0cc13198cdc98d665e4c64/base/version_info/version_info.h#L63C1-L68C7 https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2594d9f12f00ecdfbc...
      - sva_ 2y ago
        Fair enough, it reports a different string for ChromeOS. But as you can see in the OP, ChromeOS has been listed separately at 1.41%.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        randomdata 2y ago
        Right, exactly what I said in the very first comment: Nearly 6% [4.45 + 1.41], really. Only misreported due to a certain browser [Chrome/Chromium] not including 'Linux' in its user-agent string.
  - pantalaimon 2y ago
    I get Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

rgrieselhuber 2y ago

Having switched back to Linux after many years, even looking at Mac OS feels like poverty now. Not because of the UX or hardware but because of the company behind it.

juujian 2y ago
Feels like poverty?
- dima55 2y ago
  They can't afford more mouse buttons?
  - GordonS 2y ago
    That'll be the "next big thing" they'll gushing about on stage: an incredible new mouse with TWO (2!) buttons! Of course, it'll be a $600 upgrade...
  - pantalaimon 2y ago
    Linux seems to be the only OS that makes good use of the middle mouse button, unfortunately many mice are not designed for that kind of wear on the button, so this is always the first to break :(
- nequo 2y ago
  Maybe the thought of buying one brings up mental images of going broke? Decent hardware that Linux is happy with is definitely much cheaper than a decent MacBook.
nawgz 2y ago
That seems like a bit of an emotionally driven non sequitur, to say the least!
adamwong246 2y ago
Poverty is not quite the right word. "Sterility" is the word I would use. My linux machine is a complex, fiddly beast, which I treat like a bonsai tree. My mac, however, gives me "dead mall vibes" in comparison. It's not all bad, I get more work done. But it certainly does not feel "alive" in the same way my linux machines feel.

JodieBenitez 2y ago

https://yotld.com https://yotld.com

drhagen 2y ago

How much of this is due to non-technical users simply using phones and tablets instead of laptops and other devices with "desktop" OSes?

wmf 2y ago
So you're saying there could be a constant number of Linux desktop users who are a larger percentage of a shrinking market. I suppose anything is possible.

kibwen 2y ago

Without knowing the methodology that StatCounter is using, the numbers themselves aren't especially meaningful, although a consistent upward trend in those numbers could be showing something real. In any case, ChromeOS is also Linux, so tack that on there as well, along with whatever portion of that 7% "unknown" that you think is reasonable (which could be a relatively large portion, depending on methodology). (Also, the bar chart shown in the article is messed up because they're charting the value of each item averaged over the previous year.)

mrweasel 2y ago
For numbers I did like to see absolute numbers. While I have no doubt that people are switching to Linux, but an increasing number of people are also just giving up on computers in favour of just using their phones for everything. Some of the increase in percentage Linux is seeing could also be due to Windows and Mac users dropping having a computer in general. That's not to say that people aren't switching, I see no reason to get a new Mac next time I'm replacing my laptop. My work will be done more easily on Linux at this point.
Aachen 2y ago
It could also be showing that the market is consolidating towards big tech and that only those wanting to stay with their independent statistics provider are still with StatCounter. In turn, the users of services with such morals could be more likely to be Linux distribution users. I don't have data better than StatCounter, but if we're thinking of methodology and whether it could be accurate, this is a possibility to take into account The optimist in me wants to not leave unmentioned that Linux is more accessible than ever and information easier to come by while Windows has never been shittier (which old Windows version shipped with tracking and ads?) and macOS is still priced and protected the way it always has been: much easier to dual or live boot Mint. Come for the freedom and stay for the ease of use. It's no coincidence that Microsoft made it very easy to use Linux software within Windows now (obviously without contributing the inverse mechanism, that'd be stupid): people want it. I really hope there's more truth to this than to the first paragraph
pjmlp 2y ago
ChromeOS uses the Linux kernel in a browser based userspace, and offers a VM for running GNU/Linux as guest OSes, isn't quite the same as being GNU/Linux, otherwise Windows with WSL is also Linux.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jimmar 2y ago

Linux seems to be stealing more market share from OSX than Windows: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide.

andrewmcwatters 2y ago
Two Unix systems and one is increasingly infuriating professionals.
tambourine_man 2y ago
Windows is shipping with its own Linux already, so it's getting harder to complain about Windows. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Could you explain what you mean in your first paragraph? In what sense does Windows ship with Linux?
  - gamepsys 2y ago
    OP is talking about WSL. I've seen some technical documentation, such as readmes for source code, that assumes the user is on a Windows laptop running WSL. At this point in time if I see anything mentioning Ubuntu I just assume it's written with WSL/Azure in mind.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- resource_waste 2y ago
  There are ads everywhere on Windows. And onedrive hijacks your filesystem. Even at my fortune 20 company I see: "DNC RATINGS COMPARED TO RNC" clickbait crap. I'm amazed my company lets that garbage through. Probably because we have legacy software + some corruption with purchasing. Sharepoint... really?

SCUSKU 2y ago

I'm a macOS user but would be interested in getting a linux desktop, I've heard Linux Mint or PopOS are pretty good just from a ease of use perspective? I've used Ubuntu in the past and had all sorts of display graphics driver problems. I know it's an impossible question, but nonetheless, what's the best distro to use for someone who just wants a useable desktop?

andrepd 2y ago
Linux Mint is an outstanding project, like you said focused on stability and ease of use. It's been my daily driver for over a decade!
zappchance 2y ago
I was looking around a while last year and those two are the exact ones I landed on, with a slight lean towards Pop!_OS due to the team behind it striving for maximum "out-of-the-box" usability. Linux Mint has a special place in my heart as it was the first distro I used back in my high school computer science class and it holds up exceptionally well today. It's also community driven compared to Pop!_OS which is developed by System76.
ilaksh 2y ago
If you want to avoid all driver issues you should probably be asking about a hardware/OS combo, not just one or the other. But over the last few years I haven't had significant problems.
benrutter 2y ago
I think a lot of stock gets put into distros for driver issues, but a huge factor is the hardware you're running on. Some distros like popOS intentially bundle drivers for newer graphics cards and the like, but that aside, if you don't have really hardcore requirements, picking decent hardware that's a few years old will probably smooth out your journey a lot, regardless of which distro you pick. If you're coming from macOS you might be happy to pay a premium for a purpose built machine as well (I have a System 76 laptop which has served me really well for a good 5 years or so now with no sign of slowing down) As an aside, Linux Mint, PopOS and Ubuntu (the three you mentioned) are all great choices for a reliable, stable desktop.

myth_drannon 2y ago

Linux on desktop is just a solid workhorse. My 13+ years laptop is chugging along happily with Ubuntu and my Windows8 10+ years beefed up desktop takes 10 minutes to start and 5 minutes to open a browser and basically a broken mess of security holes.

ogogmad 2y ago
What about the 6-monthly and 2-yearly forced upgrades? How are you faring with those?
- prmoustache 2y ago
  forced? how?
  - Aachen 2y ago
    I imagine they mean security support, but are overlooking LTS somehow
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      Appart from LTS most distros still support the n-1 release until the n+1 is released so in reality you can always do a double upgrade once a year. But ultimately it is a moot point as major distro upgrades are barely different than the regular security upgrades. There are just more packages upgraded at once.
- myth_drannon 2y ago
  It's not forced, but it's a trivial upgrade if you have a basic setup. I also have a desktop where I do some hobby AI development and once in a blue moon, Nvidia drivers would break the system because of kernel upgrades.

wcchandler 2y ago

I've been a linux desktop user for a long time now (~25 years?). I generally don't talk about it, as it's not a suitable environment for a lot of people. So I'm always surprised when I stumble upon somebody using it. Just recently I took a Google Cloud training course and the instructor used it as his daily driver. Not only was this impressive to see "out in the wild" but it was nice to see all the tools needed to lead a remote training course worked in his setup. He had a webcam working great (even focused/panned on him as he moved). He had a powerpoint/slideshow going. He had zoom/teleconferencing software working. And it all worked through the course. There was never 10-20 minute pause because something wasn't working right. Having this level of viability and operability is something I never expected to see.

oblio 2y ago
Sorry to be a downer but a cloud instructor is still a techie. I'd be way more impressed with a lawyer or an accountant using it but I've never seen one so far.
- layer8 2y ago
  > Having this level of viability and operability is something I never expected to see. It’s unexpected even in the case of techies.
- perbu 2y ago
  fwiw; I worked in a company that was kind of a Linux pioneer back in the 90s. We ran Linux for everyone. The accountant ran a VM for his accouting software, but except that everything was Linux. And once set up, it worked very well, for techies and non-technical alike. If you get past installation and initial setup, using Linux in a desktop role isn't really challenging if you've got access to support.
  - szundi 2y ago
    I don’t believe lawyers can live without ms office

mulmen 2y ago

I switched to desktop Linux about a year ago. Fedora Sway Spin. I have done a major version upgrade without issue. None of the buttons moved. Nothing broke. Just business as usual. No complaints about the OS itself. The final straw was a Steam game that wouldn’t launch on Windows 10 but worked in Steam/Proton. I haven’t booted Windows since.

resource_waste 2y ago
Fedora woke me up to how Fedora is the best. I'm not even going to say Linux, because people confuse it with Ubuntu/Debian/Mint GARBAGE. Never use that later crap for desktop. Its so outdated and buggy. You are using the terminal on a daily basis to get basic features working, if your hardware works at all. Fedora is so good, I feel offended I didn't know about it until now. I am bitter against M$ and bitter against Canonical.

wafflemaker 2y ago

Is it including or excluding the SteamDeck users?

HideousKojima 2y ago
IIRC StatCounter's numbers are based on browser user-agent strings. I'm guessing most Steam Deck users are mostly using it for games as opposed to one web browsing, so probably not.
KTibow 2y ago
Most Steam Deck users aren't browsing with it

aborsy 2y ago

As a Linux desktop user, I installed windows in a VM to use an application that is not available for Linux (a printer app made by a vendor was available only for Windows and macOS). Awful! Slow, bloated, my files by default were uploaded to Microsoft (and the setting is easily reversed with updates if turned off), lots of advertisement everywhere I click, edge is slow, … Glad to be a Linux user! The quality of open source software is frankly very high. The only limitation is that some drivers or software are not made for Linux.

tigeroil 2y ago
I know it's a minor detail but the other day I was using Windows for something and I was amazed by how sluggish even task manager felt.
- Aachen 2y ago
  What blows me away is how poor printers still work. On a bare Debian laptop, I just walk up to it and it prints via USB with no configuration needed. Network printers I think auto-discover reliably as well, but it has been a few years since I've done that (we have a tendency to not trust printers at our small security firm so we don't hook them up to the network) At least they've solved that you had to wait 2 minutes anymore when plugging your mouse into a different USB port before it finds the driver from Windows Update again

tambourine_man 2y ago

C'mon Adobe. Release CC for Linux. Bless a DE or ship your own. Linux's market share will only increase and your suite should be pretty platform abstracted by now, anyway.

pluc 2y ago
Didn't they buy then bury Corel?
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  No, but why would that matter?
tomovo 2y ago
If Google is paying Apple effectively not to make its own search engine, I would not be surprised if Apple and/or Microsoft were paying Adobe not to port CC to Linux.
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  I don’t think we need a conspiracy theory. Most likely they don’t bother with 5% market share, most of which probably have strong feelings about closed source in general and Adobe in specific. But if/when Linux reaches 10/15% that may change.
  - amlib 2y ago
    Wasn't Mac OS less than or around 5% for a long time after the 90s? If they thought that was sustainable, maybe Linux should be close by now? Of course there are many other things to also take in account, so who knows.
    - tambourine_man 2y ago
      Most apps started on the Mac, so there was no porting needed. Also, most professionals had Macs, so Adobe had a 50/50 revenue split between Macs and Windows, even though there was a huge market share difference.

conqrr 2y ago

I used Linux first as a 14 year old kid in the 90s who found Win$ows to become slow overtime and we couldn't afford a new computer. Fell in love with Linux instantly given the customization and efficiency. Not needing things like an AntiVirus was huge. I haven't looked back at all and its likely what drove me into CS. Sometimes constraints are a good thing. We had a few courses in Undergrad (outdated of course) that required students to run things like LAMP server and GCC and there was a good culture of running Ubuntu and other distros. I would have done 30+ installs for my classmates and ran into all sorts of issues with laptop drivers, overheating etc. Things are probably better on that front now with compatible hardware, (I only buy linux compatible hardware so I'm not sure).I really wish to see more widespread adoption especially in developing countries.

k_bx 2y ago

Bought $2k laptop Acer Predator Helios Neo 16. Windows 11 doesn't install at all (can't see the hard drive). Win10 installed but touchpad doesn't work (even after drivers install), network didn't work (neither ethernet nor wifi) without external USB stick, and so on. After internet connection and installing all updates touchpad and dynamics still don't work. Pop OS works near-perfectly.

jtokoph 2y ago
Doesn't it come with Windows 11 preinstalled?
- k_bx 2y ago
  Mine came with no OS. I need Linux primarily, but still Windows occasionally for Mission Planner and other Windows-only apps. So I've installed a second M.2 disk and had this terrible experience with Windows installation afterwards.
ziddoap 2y ago
Where did you manage to get one of those without Windows pre-installed? I was looking at one to replace my outdated Predator, and was hoping to save the ~$100 on the license.
- k_bx 2y ago
  In Ukraine. So.. it depends on how much do you want it haha https://rozetka.com.ua/ua/acer-nhqlveu00a/p416822133/ https://rozetka.com.ua/ua/acer-nhqlveu00a/p416822133/
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    The shipping might end up being more than the Windows license, haha. Thanks though!
anemoknee 2y ago
Today I learned there's a laptop out there with a mouthful of a name like that.

michelsedgh 2y ago

I wonder if more people are using linux as a desktop or generally, people are using less desktop devices with the rise of phones and tablets. What i mean is, before even old people and the normal users would need desktop and they would prefer windows and mac, but now i feel like they are generally less probe to use desktops and dont need them so that might be contributing to the sudden market share rise of linux maybe? U know what i mean?

bogwog 2y ago

Semi-relevant but a few years old, a 2021 VFX industry survery found that around 60% of workstations run Linux, and that number is expected to continue growing. What's interesting to me is that VFX and game dev are kind of similar in terms of software and expertise, but game devs predominantly use Windows. I wonder why that is? Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQIdp38Y/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQI... (From https://vfxplatform.com/linux/ https://vfxplatform.com/linux/)

ido 2y ago
Because the games have to run on windows
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  And both Unreal and Unity both mostly only work on Windows. (Linux support very sketchy)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
hollerith 2y ago
>VFX and game dev are kind of similar in terms of software and expertise, but game devs predominantly use Windows. I wonder why that is? The deliverable of a VFX project is a video file or an artifact that goes into a video file (no complex dependency on Windows) whereas most games need to be able to run on Windows.
- bogwog 2y ago
  I don't think that's it. Games also need to run on consoles, mobile phones, and sometimes web browsers. Cross platform development isn't a new concept in game development, and all major commercial game engines work on Linux (well, they do today at least) Most software used in the VFX industry does officially support Linux, and a lot of those tools are also used in game dev. Maybe Unity and Unreal's Linux support hasn't been great, and that's the only reason? I guess it's easier to get into gamedev than VFX as an indie, and if you have little/no technical background then there's a good chance you're on Windows or Mac when you start looking up Unity/Unreal/etc tutorials, and then you just stick with what you know.

isk517 2y ago

After all of the frustration I experienced getting Windows 11 setup in a way that was comfortable for me to use I'm ready to switch to Linux the next time I need to reinstall a operating system. So glad that SteamDeck is making Linux gaming viable. Now we just need the GPU manufactures to give Linus the same driver support Windows gets.

owenpalmer 2y ago
https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?si=fFi2L2k2J6TvTRtc https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?si=fFi2L2k2J6TvTRtc
- mdp2021 2y ago
  The above would be Linus Torvalds saying > Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever dealt with. So, Nvidia: [angrily for moment, wags a middle finger to the camera] fuck you.
wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]
shepherdjerred 2y ago
I had similar feelings about Windows 11, but I recently found the Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC build, and it works perfectly for me. Debloated and no ads. You do have to do a little bit of troubleshooting, install extra components (e.g. to install the Microsoft store), etc., but it was significantly easier than debloating a regular Windows 11 install. https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  Why would I want to roll the dice with Windows install media from a third-party site instead of just using Linux (and possibly making it work better?)
  - 2y ago

etaioinshrdlu 2y ago

I kind of wonder or suspect that user agents are being misidentified. I have heard that sometimes Android gets identified as Linux. (which I guess is actually not wrong, but you get the point...)

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I am done with windows after issues with the quality of windows updates (even security updates!), dark patterns everywhere, pushy anti competitive nudges to Microsoft products, copilot privacy issues, and things like ads in the start menu. I want to use Linux but the main issue for me is battery life of common Linux laptops, especially since standby doesn’t work reliably.

AmVess 2y ago

I hope adoption of Linux accelerates. Windows has become incredibly anti-user. I built a new PC recently. No internet because the latest version of the Windows 11 installer didn't have a realtek Wifi driver on it. This driver was present in the Windows 10 installer. If I didn't know the work around, I would not have been able to install the OS. Ok, so I got the OS installed, and was greeted with an OS with 4 different UI styles glued together from W7 on up. Keep in mind, the OS in its entirety has UI elements dating back to Windows 3.1. Still no WIFI drivers which I had to hunt down and wait because the OEM's website was spittling out corrupt data for a while. WIFI up, Windows update missed a bunch of drivers. Installed them manually. After about 45 minutes, finally got the OS ready to install apps. Basic apps. Office, dev stuff, photo stuff. This took over an hour, what with Windows updates, and all. I also put the latest copy of Fedora on my laptop. No internet connection needed. Typed in username, passcode. Installed in about 10 minutes. WIFI working out of the box. One reboot later, I had a fully functioning OS that came with everything I needed. 20 minutes total, perhaps. Microsoft has completely thrown away any notion of usability while Linux is accelerating towards it. I still can't quite wrap my head around requiring internet to install the OS while also not providing a means to access the internet via WIFI. And then of course there are all the other issues surrounding the OS that has been talked about at length here. Finally, Windows 11 is a buggy, slow, unresponsive mess of an OS, and it makes using Windows 10 feel like a breath of fresh air due to its comparative responsiveness and lack of bugs. Keyword is comparative. Windows 10 is still a corpulent waddling pig of a sloppily glued together OS.

hypeatei 2y ago

Moved to Linux Mint a few months ago and 90% of the Steam games I play work the same (or better) which surprised me. Dev experience is way better and I haven't had to tinker with much at all, Bluetooth controllers connect just fine and no more bloat + spying by default.

gamepsys 2y ago
I had the same experience about 5 years ago.

alphabettsy 2y ago

I don’t trust these stats at all. I’d like to see a breakdown by user agent. It makes much more sense to me that ChromeOS is becoming more common than that everyday users are switching to Linux.

bachmeier 2y ago
> It makes much more sense to me that ChromeOS is becoming more common than that everyday users are switching to Linux. It's not necessary for anyone to switch to Linux to see this behavior. These are shares. I'm actually not surprised by these numbers because I've noticed Windows users use their desktops less, instead doing more with other devices. I wouldn't be surprised to see the number rise to 20% or more in the next few years even if there's no pickup in folks moving to Linux on the desktop.

Workaccount2 2y ago

I switched to linux desktop about 2.5 years ago. TBH, I'm ready to go back to windows. The way I put it, driving a car with a driver's seat that looks like 747 cockpit is pretty cool and definitely very powerful. And it has auto-pilot if you just want the basics. But man, if you want to do more than the absolute basics, a regular Toyota corolla drivers seat is _way_ more accommodating and intuitive. You don't need to spend a year studying the machine to use it fluidly. Linux is cool, the idea incredible, but man, searching for guides that tell you to turn cryptic knobs, flick unlabeled switches, and push seemingly random buttons just to get the window to roll down has become too taxing for me. Especially when half the time it doesn't even work. I want a GUI, .exe's, and hover text on options. There is a reason every consumer grade linux/unix OS hides the terminal (android, iOS, macOS).

aaomidi 2y ago
You practically described how I feel every time I run into an issue on windows and have to resort to editing undocumented registry keys.
- AndroTux 2y ago
  And that happens how often? Once a year? On Linux, that’s more like one a day. Once a week if you’re lucky.
  - JrProgrammer 2y ago
    I have no idea what you are talking about, I've used fedora for over a year now and aside from some tweaking, which I explicitly did myself, I've never had to go into some weird configs to change anything. It just works
  - soerxpso 2y ago
    Can you elaborate on what exactly you're doing with Linux that's causing that? I use Arch daily (programming, gaming, web browsing, etc), and the last time I had to do anything more complicated than `sudo pacman -Syu` to configure my system was over a year ago.

lovecg 2y ago

Finally, 2024 will be the year of the Linux desktop! On a serious note there seems to be an interesting lesson here about what sort of products just don’t seem to work in a non-commercial open source model. Specifically, simple user friendly UIs for non-power users seem to require financial incentives and competition.

sebtron 2y ago

Nice news, slow and steady grows in the past decade :) Regarding the article... > While Linux's growth is noteworthy, it's important to view it in the context of the overall desktop operating system market: > > Windows remains dominant with a 72.08% market share > macOS holds steady at 14.92% > Chrome OS trails at 1.41% > > Linux's 4.45% puts it firmly in fourth place, ahead of Chrome OS but still well behind the market leaders. Uhm what? And some people claim LLMs are great at summarizing data...

api 2y ago

Linux can win the desktop by just sitting still while Windows makes itself more and more awful and user-hostile.

halotrope 2y ago

Linux Desktop got so much better in recent years but it also stayed the same. If you’re trying to be productive and not just switching between editor and terminal windows there are still endless frustrations that never end.

systemtest 2y ago

I used to run Linux on my desktop as a teenager, but now as a middle aged man I just want to sit down after work, boot up my computer, click the icon of my favourite game and relax for a bit. And for that, I prefer Windows. I have stopped caring about my distro, my window manager, my desktop environment, the package manager I use. Even my wallpaper is just the default Windows 11 one.

mysteria 2y ago

With modern hardware it's also completely viable to have a Windows VM idling in the background on a Linux desktop to run things like MS Office. Local RDP performance (with FreeRDP/etc.) is excellent and suitable for business or dev work that doesn't require accelerated graphics. You can have shared directories, a shared clipboard, and so forth.

rossdavidh 2y ago

In case you're wondering if it's real growth, or just noise: 2009: 0.69 2012: 0.85 2015: 1.5 2018: 1.69 2021: 2.38 2024: 4.54

skwirl 2y ago

As a user of 27" 4k monitors, the terrible 150% DPI scaling has been a dealbreaker for Linux desktop for me for years. Every so often I will go out and search to see if it's any better, and I always find people insisting that it works "perfectly" now, and then I will go and try to replicate what they did only to find out that "perfectly" means something very different to Linux desktop users who clearly have never used MacOS or even Windows with fractional DPI scaling.

gamepsys 2y ago
As a 4k monitor user, I think KDE has DPI scaling on par with MacOS.
- binkHN 2y ago
  Seconded; while the occasional legacy program might have issues, I'm happily doing 4K with scaling in KDE with Wayland.
shiroiushi 2y ago
I'm typing this from a Debian system with dual 27" 4k monitors. Why do you need 150% DPI scaling at all? It works just fine for me without it. Just set your font sizes larger if they're too small.
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
  You can't be serious. That approach has so many downsides you can't list them in a hackernews comment. For example, icons will not be scaled in your method. So any app like audacity where tons of icons are the primary visual component are completely unusable. Not to mention icons on the taskbar look garbage. And not to mention... You get the idea
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >For example, icons will not be scaled in your method. ... Not to mention icons on the taskbar look garbage Yes, they are. It works fine. I'm using KDE fwiw. Icon scaling is one of the easily-configured features, especially on the taskbar. (The icons are all SVG, so why would you want to do anything other than native scaling?) Everything I use it for works fine. Maybe you should try it out.

jsnell 2y ago

Statcounter's "stats" are garbage, and should not be reported on. They're computed from untrustworthy information generated from a skewed and undisclosed sample, and processed with an unknown methodology. All that's published is aggregate data that's so coarse that it's impossible to actually reason about what's happening and what's driving the changes to the number. But fairly regularly their stats are either so volatile or so absurd that it's obvious they have no relationship with reality. Like when they reporter Windows 8.1 climbing from 0.1% to 6% market share in the US in late 2023. One could easily come up with half a dozen other explanations for this Linux desktop market share number that are as plausible as the hypothesis of significant growth in desktop Linux usage.

boomboomsubban 2y ago
Though I agree that Statcounter's stats are garbage, their methodology is somewhat known. They have connections to supposedly 3 million websites that run their script, that script records each hit, and the end stats say 4.45% of desktop hits come from Linux. It's unclear what sites they, but I doubt it's a representative sample. Even if it is, like one person figuring out which site was tracked setting up a refresh script could be enough to meaningfully damage the data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatCounter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatCounter
- jsnell 2y ago
  We know the methodology by which they collect the data, which is why we can tell it's a skewed sample. We don't know how they process it. It's not possible to reliably determine the operating system from just the user-agent. You could try to enrich the UA data with other signals, but all of those avenues are either being closed off by the browsers as fingerprinting vectors or are going to have trouble distinguishing Linux and Android. Likewise we know they do some filtering of bot traffic, but not the details of how or even the proportion of traffic they're filtering out (which would at least allow us to reason about the quality of that filtering).
  - EasyMark 2y ago

drewg123 2y ago

FreeBSD at 0.01%. There are dozens of us! :)

eqvinox 2y ago

"Linux's 4.45% puts it firmly in fourth place," I don't think it makes sense to count "unknown" as being in third place…

franczesko 2y ago

"As awareness of data privacy issues grows, more users are turning to open-source alternatives like Linux" I'd love to see Linux for mobile devices just because of that reason. Old school "what happens on device, stays on device"

underseacables 2y ago

I think the more people that have to suffer with windows 11, the more they will turn to Linux. To the average user, Linux is still a clunky, disjointed operating system, but despite its flaws it's vastly better than Windows 11.

shiroiushi 2y ago
Every OS now is clunky and disjointed in some way. But only one of them has ads on the desktop.

yorwba 2y ago

The highest share seems to be in India with 16.21% Linux. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india I wonder whether that's real or a mirage caused by Linux servers masquerading as desktops.

pantalaimon 2y ago
India is rather poor, Windows screams for new hardware (and Windows 11 just obsoleted perfectly fine hardware that's still plenty fast).
Karliss 2y ago
Statcounter data is based on website visits. It is very unlikely that any significant fraction of them are being used for browsing web, or even have a graphical interface with web browser installed for doing it.
boomboomsubban 2y ago
I've always assumed the sites they track lead to some serious small sample biases in certain countries. It's an Irish company, so I'd guess most of their sites are European language based and wouldn't be surprised if there's a high amount of tech sites. For example, it wouldn't be that surprising if they got data from HN, or a similar site. What portion of Indian desktop hits to this site do you think report using Linux?

mrinfinitiesx 2y ago

Good. Linux desktop is the future.

lvl155 2y ago

I think Windows 10 was the best desktop experience. There was a period when OSX was nice. Linux is doable but it’s always 80% there (speaking strictly in terms of DE). Things break more often than I’d like. Not a problem if you do everything in terminal.

pantalaimon 2y ago
Windows has a lot more jank these days than the average Linux desktop.
- lvl155 2y ago
  11 is horrible. Windows 10 was GOAT for awhile right after they released WSL2. If you can give me Windows 10 environment with Debian as the base, that’d be perfect.
  - dangus 2y ago
    And then when Windows 12 comes out you'll be saying Windows 11 was the GOAT right? I thought Windows 7 was the GOAT! I'm the person with the unpopular opinion that I would take Windows 11 over 10 any day. Windows 10 has too much in the UI that still feels like a bridge between old and new. They both run the same apps, so to me all the nitpicks and philosophical problems people have don't really matter much to me. I haven't found anything in Windows 11 that "doesn't work" or is even mildly annoying and it has a bunch of new stuff that's genuinely useful. Like, it finally has screen capture utilities that don't frustrate me to use when compared to macOS. A bunch of little basic UI stuff like that where I feel it's an improvement. The Windows Shell is a major improvement. The notifications/quick settings area makes a lot more sense now. Windows 11 remembers where your windows were when you undock from a second monitor. Little stuff like that where it was just slightly more frustrating to use than my Mac. Windows 10 is also more poorly aware/optimized of modern hardware than a lot of people realize. It is an old os now. Things like automatic HDR in games just isn't there. (Really, gaming is an area where Windows 11's new features are quite clearly worth the upgrade)

apatheticonion 2y ago

Across the week, I go between Linux, MacOS and Windows - my work issued device runs MacOS and my personal desktop PC dual boots Windows and Linux. I am biased towards Linux because I like it but it's far from perfect. UX is a passion of mine and something I'm a little pedantic about and while Linux has made strides, it still has a long way to go in this department though it's _so close_ and constantly getting better. Gnome and KDE all have their little inconsistencies and/or lack of functionality. Individually they are minor but together they make it feel unpolished or incomplete. Below is a non-exhaustive list of things that I feel could be improved - don't get me wrong, I love Linux and use it constantly - nit picking is my way of finding areas to improve it so I can recommend it in earnest to friends looking for a bit of OS strange. Some things that I think could be improved; === - Gnome; has an incomplete file manager, though generally no file manager available on MacOS or Linux beats the one on Windows 7 or 10. - Gnome; Window snapping doesn't always work for Chrome and in general window snapping needs some love. - Gnome,KDE; While Chrome has its own style on all platforms, it somehow feels less congruent to Linux desktops than it does to MacOS and Windows - plus you can't drag tabs off the window in Wayland Chrome. - KDE; Password keychain stuff. Feels like this needs to be native to Linux and not the DE. - KDE; (minor) If you have a high refresh screen, KDE will use 60hz for workspace transition animations but 144hz for everything else. - Gnome; Window decorations on Gnome are overly padded which makes the interface feel unpolished and somewhat clumsy compared to the tight fonts and spacing you see on Windows and MacOS. I assume this is because Gnome aspire to make a play for a mobile OS one day in the future? - Gnome; The Gnome/libadwaita guidelines prefer a application menu design that is obscured from view resulting in too many clicks - I think this is also related to their mobile play. I believe that Cosmic gets this right. - Linux; Please fix application installations. Flatpak is kind of okay but I constantly have issues with it so I tend to avoid it. I really love MacOS's "Foo.app" "executable folder" concept. It feels similar to AppImage but I don't think that's going to win the packaging wars any time soon. - Fedora 40 + AMD GPU; This is my configuration but it might affect other distros/hardware - Steam doesn't launch from the icon right now. You must install Steam then launch it from the terminal. === There are lots of areas for improvement but regardless - every new release of Gnome and KDE gets better and better. Steam has helped put Linux gaming on the map, that combined with the poor experience of Windows 11 has encouraged IT savvy people & gamers to genuinely consider running a Linux desktop for the first time. Also the Cosmic desktop is shaping up to be a real strong contender in the Linux DE space and I am excited to see what happens there. It's an exciting time to be watching the desktop computing space and I am hopeful that the additional attention Linux is getting will continue to push investment into polishing the desktop experience.

binkHN 2y ago

I recently migrated from Windows to Linux. I bought a new machine with Windows 11 Pro preinstalled and it was a cesspool of Microsoft ads for their services coming from within the OS and preinstalled apps. It was happening so often, and affecting my productivity while annoying the heck out of me, that I decided Windows is hindering more than it's helping; I bit the bullet and installed Linux for the first time. Fast forward and I've been on Linux for more than 6 months now and, while it's not all roses, my overall experience has been far better than Windows 11. I still remote into a Windows machine regularly for things that I have not yet migrated to Linux and, while it's a familiar space, it's no longer a space I want to be in.

leoedin 2y ago

I’m surprised about the amount of negativity in the comments here. I’ve been running PopOS on a few different machines for the last 4 years or so. It’s been almost seamless. I can’t think of the last time I even considered booting into windows - in fact I recently wiped my dual boot partition because I needed the disk space. I’m not really a desktop power user - I don’t even bother changing the wallpaper usually. I think it’s just so much easier now - almost every app is a web app. The stuff I run locally - development tools mainly - all have Linux versions.

BLKNSLVR 2y ago
+1 for PopOS as a daily driver and have barely used Windows at home in the last 5 years (outside of my work computer at least). I love being free of Microsoft and Windows (and Aople and Facebook for that matter, but they're beside the point). On the way to minimising Google as well.
Gud 2y ago
I’ve heard good things about popos, will ditch my windows partition and give it a try!

INTPenis 2y ago

Atomic Linuxes really are the gateway for regular people to use Linux. I've been using Linux since the 90s and I never really would recommend Linux to anyone unless there were very special circumstances. But today I'd gladly recommend for example Fedora Atomic, I haven't tried other atomic Linux distros but the key feature is being able to revert back to a previous state in the boot manager. No software will ever be perfect, but once an issue happens a non-technical user must be able to easily revert back to a functional state so they can proceed with their work and life. Otherwise the OS is worthless to them. And sure you've been able to do this with BTRFS and snapshots but Fedora Atomic is the first time I've personally seen a distro come with this feature out of box, while also being very modern and easy to use. Just the other day I did an ostree upgrade and after rebooting Firefox couldn't play videos, Steam wouldn't even start. I just wanted to get on with my day so I simply rebooted into the previous commit. An end-user is given time and breathing room to wait for the issue to be resolved and try another update.

arcastroe 2y ago
I've been using UWF on Windows. It essentially resets all changes on reboot so that every reboot is back to a clean state. But I'll take a look at Fedora Atomic. What you describe sounds promising.
manx 2y ago
NixOS does this too.

openrisk 2y ago

The beauty of this decades long race is that the end game is still ambiguous. The Windows desktop trends towards being a thin client for opaque cloud services, which means at some point the Linux desktop proposition will be quite dramatically different, with its emphasis on local, private, open source etc. In any case, for power users the Linux desktop is already a formidable platform.

karmakaze 2y ago
What part of Windows 11 is thin? Ads in the Start menu?
- openrisk 2y ago
  Who mentioned Windows 11? Ever heard of Windows 365 and "cloud pc"?
  - karmakaze 2y ago
    I didn't think that was a thing folks used, or want to use.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
andrewmcwatters 2y ago
There’s already a massive gap between Windows and macOS. Though I feel like that gap between Windows and Linux is nominal. I do think that Apple will continue to piss off engineers enough that over time Ubuntu or another mainstream distribution on a high quality laptop will be a popular choice for a plurality of developers.

geoffbp 2y ago

Year of the Linux desktop

0xcde4c3db 2y ago

I wonder just how much of this has been driven by third-party vendors dropping Windows 7 users. I know it's not zero, because I helped a die-hard Windows 7 user switch to Linux specifically due to the Steam deadline. It's easy to chalk that kind of stubbornness up to a generic "fear of change", but in his case I think he very specifically loathed the direction Microsoft took with 8/10/11.

denimboy 2y ago

This is the year of the Linux desktop

simonblack 2y ago

Ho, hum. Linux has been on my desktop for 23 years.

DrNosferatu 2y ago

The year of the Linux desktop?

vitorgrs 2y ago

I moved to Linux for a few months (currently on EndeavourOS, but just distro hopping...). The main reasons for me was because of how the latest updates on Windows 11 has been very horrible. Windows had only one OK consumer mail app, the inbox Mail apps, and they killed and replaced with Outlook Web App basically. File Explorer got super awful, unstable, slow... A ton of native things getting replaced by web apps... And each web app using their own Webview2, instead of at least using a shared webview between the apps (that's how W8 and W10 worked). The result for this is that to show a simple weather info on taskbar, it literally needs a webview. Yes, the temperature thing on taskbar uses webview. If you are low on resources, the system just can't handle all of that. Meanwhile on Gnome here, although with some issues, none comes close to that, and the design has been very consistent as well.

adham-omran 2y ago

Sadly I'm moving back to Windows by the end of the month due to the lack of audio production software, the only area where WINE, virtual machines with USB passthrough fail.. I'll still use Linux VMs for various services while my host is Windows and I'll develop in WSL but it's sad that a creative niche like audio production has practically no players in the Linux scene, I'm talking Native Instruments, Spitfire, EastWest, Dorico, even MuseScore with its MuseHub do not run under NixOS for example. Quite a shame.

masfoobar 2y ago

I remember playing with GNU/Linux since 2005 due to frustrations with the Windows XP and, eventually, Windows Vista. I think it was around 2007 I commited to it, thanks to a "beginning Ubuntu" book that came with the recent release distro CD. Since then, I have only used GNU/Linux, trying different distros. In the end I kinda settled down with Debian but open to others like Guix. However, my recent laptop which I've had for 3 years now, came with Windows 10. About a year or so ago it just upgraded itself to Windows 11. I don't mind it but there are just ** on it I don't care for. If I want it, I will install it. Even when I remove it, it comes back on the taskbar, etc. I am only on Windows due to my current job - but as I am close to resignation... it wont be long before I backup important data, wipe the hard drive, and install debian. I honestly think GNU/Linux as a desktop is far superior that Windows 11. I guess it all depends what you use a PC/laptop for. If you are stuck in a world of Microsoft products, such as Office.. I get it. It can be hard to break away what you are familiar with and, in some ways, some Micrsoft products dont really have close alternatives. For me as a programmer, I pretty much have everything I need and my wife who use her laptop as a general user, had no complaints, either. Honestly, since the rise of Steam on Linux and complaints on Windows 11 -- I am not suprised the market share for linux is rising.

tony2016 2y ago

I don't know why this is always in the news. %4.45 is still very small. Linux came out 34 years ago. That's an ion in computer years. Linux desktop is in too many flavors. MacOS is one MacOS. whatever the latest. Windows 11 is Windows 11. Not many flavors of it. I feel like Linux people are cheering for a tiny number. They'll take whatever desktop market share they can. 10 years from now maybe it will be 6%. Well... big f*king hurray! Open the champagne bottles! This is all silly.

pixxel 2y ago
Linux doesn’t have the capital of tech giants to be installed onto new machines via partnerships (Microsoft), or its own hardware (Apple). Linux is the greatest FOSS of all time, and small bumps in an upward trajectory are welcomed news. What is silly is jumping into such threads just to shit on progress made against the mega corporations that aren’t working for your best interests.