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> I'm still believing that there will be a year of desktop Linux coming. Maybe even sooner than we expect. It started 9 years ago. That's the year ChromeBooks
by lproven 25d ago
> I'm still believing that there will be a year of desktop Linux coming. Maybe even sooner than we expect.
It started 9 years ago.
That's the year ChromeBooks first outsold Macs in the USA. And note, that is by value, not units, meaning at least 4-5x as many Chromebooks were sold as all Mac hardware put together.
By 3-4y later this was worldwide.
So desktop Linux computers are now comprehensively outselling macOS machines and have been for nearly a decade… even with Apple's migration to Arm, which means better small machines but worse big machines.
But it's the wrong sort of Linux and so the Penguin taleban don't count it and are still arguing about... oh, systemd vs SysVinit, or glibc vs musl, or Emacs vs Vim, or something.
- wolvoleo 25d agoEh of course we don't count a totally locked down walled garden as Linux.
- lproven 24d agoIt's still a Linux distro. Ext4 partitions, glibc, upstart as the init. The GUI is weird but it's just another desktop. I don't use it myself but my wife's laptop does. So, example: it has no video player. Solution: Ctrl+Alt+T, just like Ubuntu. In the terminal, `apt install vlc`. Done. File associations and things just happened automatically. Once VLC was there, double-click a movie file on the local drive and it opened and played. It's based on Gentoo but the bundled container-VM thingie is Debian. ChromeOS is a lot more like any other distro than Android, which is different from the libc and entire userland on upwards.
- senfiaj 24d agoYeah, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory for desktop Linux if it conquers the desktop. You can't even use it normally without Google account.
- lproven 23d agoVery true and an excellent point. There is a fork that doesn't need Google accounts. It's called Fyde OS. I tried it: https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/08/21/fydeos-offers-chromeos-without-the-google-strings-attached/363124 https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/08/21/fydeos-offers...