The "unknown" is Windows. If you change the graph to see the whole range from 2008 to date, you will see that whenever there's a big spike or dip on Unknown, it's the exact opposite for Windows.
Windows 11 is a strong motivator. I suspect like many other people, the only reason I was keeping Windows around was gaming. But thanks to Proton and the Steam Deck, the number of games in my library that won’t run on Linux is vanishingly small. I deleted my Windows partition a few months ago and haven’t looked back.
More limited, but also less enshittified than Windows.
If you want a good, well-polished experience for certain creative workloads, or even programming, MacOS is great and their Apple Silicon CPUs are excellent.
If you want to do ANY gaming besides WoW (which surprisingly enough has always had great MacOS support) or you can't stand the lack of configurability, Linux is immediately the superior choice by far.
It does. Gaming on mac is a pain. Gaming on linux is a much better experience, and has much better support at this point. Apple really alienates developers.
I didn’t mean for gaming specifically, probably should have used a transition statement. For creative and professional use cases, macOS is still far far better than Windows. For gaming yeah that’s not your platform, Linux is.
Gaming works pretty damn well as far as I'm concerned, the few that I can't get to work are irrelevant.
I'm keeping Windows around for work... fuck Autodesk and fuck Dassault. So I am trying to get a VM with GPU pass through to work (had it working once but then I screwed it up and now I can't seem to get it working again).
Having done the transition some months ago, there is still some stupid shit one has to deal with (especially, but not only, for games NOT from Steam) at times, more than in Windows, but it's all so much better than it was before and by now quite close to the Gaming experience in Windows.
Then on top of that there are all the the longer term peace of mind things versus Windows: upgrading your Linux costs zero, changing your hardware won't invalidate your Linux "OEM License" (plus it will probably just boot up as normal with if you just move your SSD to a whole new machine rather than throw you into driver nightmare), games that work in today's Linux will keep on working in tomorrow's and so on - this is actually massive advantage of Linux versus Windows which is seldom talked about: more often than not, hardware migration with Linux is to just move your SSD to a whole new machine, with all the stuff just the way you like it and all you files, and it just boots with and keeps on working.
(PS: Especially relevant for gamers who have to upgrade due to the increasing demands on hardware from the gaming side of things even though the hardware is fine for everything else they do in that machine, and who would rather that all those other things they've installed and kept on using rather than uninstall after "finishing the game", just carry on configured just the way they like it and working just the way they've always did, even when they do upgrade the hardware because of games. People who are fine with hardware dedicated to gaming and with replacing the whole thing - hardware and software - for newer games, just get XBoxes or similar consoles, not PCs)
Linux not only saves you from enshittification, keeps control in your hands and preserves your privacy, it's also a reliable and functional long term OS layer for your hardware that doesn't force hardware upgrades on you.
I dicked around with the VM route for a while and could never really get it working 100% to my liking. There was always a trade-off. I ended up just getting a second PC and tucking it in a cabinet out of sight. When I need Windows I just use remote desktop to connect to it.
the number of games in my library that won’t run on Linux is vanishingly small
at this point, it's pretty much only about Roblox.
...which I don't want to play, I'm not happy about my nephews playing, but that seems like the only big one which really continues to struggle on Windows.
edit: that's from my limited POV, as someone who loves gaming but i don't follow or try out big new titles, I'm pretty much happy with my 30 favs, trying out like 5 new games a year, usually older or indie titles.
Roblox is about the only reason why I can't switch my kid's computer to Linux, they play almost exclusively that and Minecraft. Once win10 goes EOL, I'll probably start budgeting to replace my laptop with a new PC and give them the laptop. The old PC will then get Linux and handle 3d printer stuffs
Give it a shot again, something changed recently in Proton (I assume) that made Vortex "just work" for me on my Steam Deck. I didn't even need to do any fiddling, I just ran the installer exe from desktop mode using Lutris and whatever Proton was latest, and it installed perfectly. Vortex now runs entirely as expected, even from game mode.
Literally the only reason I keep Windows around is because modding Skyrim (using MO2, not Vortex) is a nightmare. I use Wabbajack as well, so the idea of installing 500+ mods manually in Vortex doesn't sound ideal, also since Vortex's conflict management is an absolute nightmare compared to MO2's.
The only real reason to switch to another distro nowadays is because you want to get updates faster (rolling release [like Arch] vs steady releases) and/or you want the ability to customize the OS more easily. Also, if you wanna be that person that wants to remove SystemD from Linux or have a version controlled OS.
What?!
All that noise about Switzerland mandating usage of open sourced software in gov (there was a great step, but it's far from mandating anything) was already weird, now we are switching to linux? And caring about security and fiscal responsibility? There has to be another country called Switzerland than the one I live in.
You're right, I believe the only thing Switzerland mandated (or wants to mandate?) is for projects built FOR the government to be open sourced - and even then, there are exemptions.
Of course, unlike you, I don't live in Switzerland, so I'm probably not as informed.
I'm sorry, can you clarify what you wrote? I read it but then got distracted by my cursor moving on its own while I was reading an article about xzutils. Perhaps I should read it again since it made no sense the first time.
I think Gentoo with no binaries should be the new archlinux. I've literally used archlinux virtually unchanged outside of updates for years now. It's been trouble free outside of some minor bugs and I change my settings in the kde settings panel 90% of the time.
If only MS Office worked well on Linux, due to her muscle memory, my wife would've switched to Fedora for her laptop. Aside from light gaming (Sims 4, mostly), she's not a tech-person at all, so that's saying something in my book!
She might adjust to LibreOffice, it borrows heavily from the MS Office UI. I think it's also available on Windows if she wants to try it before switching. Sims 4 works great on Linux too.
Call me naive, I know I am. But how can Linux be a moderated product to sell for desktop? I know phones run Linux, and many other products like streaming pucks run Linux (or is called unix?), but what would it take for an operating linux system to be centralized into a package to toss into a lenova laptop you're staring at in best buy?
how can Linux be a moderated product to sell for desktop
It kinda depends on each individuals' use case; there's lots of different Linux distributions that are better (or worse) for specific workloads.
Any given laptop I'm staring at in a store will probably work perfectly fine as a general-use machine with Linux Mint installed. This is my go-to distro when repurposing a machine because it works great out of the box. If I were running a computer store and wanted to sell consumer laptops with Linux on them, I'd default to Mint.
If someone is looking to turn their PC into something more specialized for gaming, they can look at something like Bazzite or Batocera. These will generally require some tinkering.
If an individual or company is looking to build an office with many workstations and user accounts, they might consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux so they can benefit from official support channels if something needs troubleshooting. Many computer labs at NCSU used RHEL when I attended many years ago.
Want a stable server environment? Debian is a standard pick.
Want a barebones system with no bells and whistles (but great battery life)? Alpine oughta work.
So Linux has many options for end users to pick from, which can be seen as a good thing (more options is generally good), but also a bad thing (many end users might consider the plethora of options to be overwhelming if they've never used Linux before).
Linux (or is called unix?)
Linux (Or GNU/Linux) operating systems are a modern implementation of an old research OS that was called "Unix". Spiritual successors to Unix like Linux and BSD try to bring a lot of the design philosophies of Unix into modern OSes (I believe this is generally called the "POSIX" standard. e.g.: macOS is a POSIX compliant OS, iirc).
If I've gotten any of this information incorrect, please don't tell Richard Stallman.
It's a tough sell because there is no monetary incentive to get Linux on laptops and desktops. Dell has a few computers that ship with Ubuntu, and Lenovo with Fedora, and there's System76. The problem is that the big manufacturers (namely Dell) get push-back from Microsoft if they start to sell other OSes with their products, so they no longer have 100% domination. Microsoft will say "Oh you're selling a few products that come with Linux? Well, we won't offer you the ability to sell Windows anymore..." which would obviously be a huge impact to their business. They have gotten around this, but their offerings are still really slim. The market just isn't there compared to Windows based computers. Shelf space is expensive so they go with what sells: Windows based products.
Some laptop manufacturers (and at least one of the larger ones) already offer Linux (Ubuntu) as a pre-installed OS. I suspect this will become more common if/when Linux becomes more popular as a mainstream desktop OS. Most likely it will still be 1 or 2 pre-selected distros though even then.
One way to do it is for each company to develop their own flavor to ship with their laptop, in much the same way phone manufacturers just modify Android and ship it.
As an example, check out System76 and their laptops featuring their Pop!_OS distro, which is very user friendly and stable in my experience.
This is what I was thinking when it happened. Businesses lose a shit ton of productivity and money due to Microsoft and Windows being a clusterfuck in multiple ways and they decide it's time to switch to something more stable.
So like 6% if you class ChromeOS as Linux (which it essentially is, just with a proprietary DE)
Then 7% unknown, you'd imagine a disproportionate amount of those would be Linux users, who are more likely to have unusual useragents or things that mess with telemetry. But who knows.
Yes, although it's not evenly distributed. Much of this rise is due to India doing some heavy lifting - they're on like 16%, and they're not exactly a small population.
There's some kind of network effect associated to it, so the greater the numbers, the more likely to grow even more, and faster. For example, when linux was used only by a very few people in IT, most people were unlikely to even give it a try, but now that every class or working group are likely to have one or two linux users, more people will be likely to try it, and so on.
on Reddit I think it makes sense but on Lemmy it's usually obnoxious in my experience, because it's not so populated and busy, the default browsing experience already gives you posts from all over... so unless you strictly browse followed communities (which i don't know if most people even do this) you end up seeing the same thing over and over.
I have been dual booting for some time now. Come back to windows 10 for gaming. But then I suddenly realize that the blizzard games that I play can run on Linux, and even from the same folder with the NTFS partition. I was stunned. No notable performance difference either.
I recently shows my mum that have an old Core 2 Duo that it can run Linux Mint. She said it works, and the computer shutdowns directly when I tell it to do. No more updating windows to wait for before unplugging the power cable.
Still have to dual boot Windows 10 for Microsoft Office Word document compatibility and Google Picasa.
She also just have bought a new computer with Windows 11, could barely make it through the installation. So many questions and configuration needed to get rid of ads and popups in Edge. Need to evaluation Mint more before I try to dual boot it on this machine as well.
Picasa because it had worked fine. And the replacement, Google photos, is not an option with storing everything in the cloud.
Both Darktable and Digikam looks too advance. I think Gwenview will be a good fit. Will try later when she has the time to test. Just viewing the images in the folder, that is all that is needed.
It would be a good idea with the Office 365 but we don't want things in the Cloud. If the PWA could run offline it would be a different story.
If you want you can try OnlyOffice, it works really well as a replacement for Office. That is if you only use Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I even convinced some Windows people to use it as its free, open source, cross platform and perhaps even easier to use at this point.
For Picasa maybe digikam? It maybe isn't a perfect replacement though. You could always try to run Picasa in a VM (or maybe even wine?)
Microsoft does not follow its own standard for doc and docx. Any other software tries to follow the standard, thus you can get different view of the document depending on what editor you use.
Picasa I think is easier to replace. Just need to relearn. Leaning towards Gwenview. VM is not an option, too complicated and slow for her. Picasa has been depricated for a long time now so it is time to move on.
It is not a steam user percentage, but according to the site by user data from web pages, it explicitly mentions search engines and social media. I doubt that the steam deck is extremely significant here.
Yeah, these results are skewed because it's only desktop Linux, so mobile devices (which I believe the Steam Deck and other portable PCs/gaming devices fall under) aren't counted, and those primarily run Linux. It seems that the foothold of Linux never was, and probably never will be, the desktop PC.
Is it that more people are buying Linux, or fewer Windows customers are buying new computers at all?
A few years ago, you'd have households with a laptop for every member of the family. Now with tablets and phones doing so much of the heavy lifting, many families are dropping to just 1 Windows or Mac laptop that mostly gathers dust.
My experience is more people having those devices on top of having laptops. I don't know a single person in Uni that does not have a laptop at all. At last when it comes to writing reports or thesis you just need a proper keyboard device.
Meanwhile gaming and also PC gaming has become much bigger over the years, which keeps driving computer sales.
Believe it or not - but most people actually aren't college students. Crazy, right?
Anybody in this forum isn't a typical tech user.
I carry 3 laptops in my backpack (one for 8-5 job, one personal, and one for teaching night classes at the University) along with a foldable phone, a work phone, and e-ink notepad.
Between my 3 laptops, Rog Ally, 2 desktops, and some old laptops I keep around for media devices and network interfaces around the property, I've got like 10 Windows machines in my life.
or people are like me, not gamers, so perfectly contented to upgrade old used PC gear....shoehorn a CPU in with higher core count, max out RAM with a new matched pair of sticks, install a fresh NVMe drive, good to go!
I recently ordered parts from China to repair my old mechanical keyboard =_= Also ordered fancy new mice for other PC's & wife's laptop woo just a little tech refresh goes a long way for me =_=
It's also interesting to notice that linux is growing in that chart, which means that linux is really growing in popularity, and it's not just an effect of the desktop market possibly shrinking or something.
I used to think that I'd be glued to my PC forever, but ever since getting a foldable I've found that I'm no longer reliant on computers anymore for daily tasks. Plus there's no point in eating up 300w of electricity during the summer (according to my watt meter), just to watch YouTube.
These days the only time I boot my PC is to play a game, search for a job, or make a large purchase. I'm a MilleniaI, so big purchases have to be done on the big computer. The phone is more than adequate for everything else. It's not the 2010s anymore; phone screens are finally large enough now to replace a PC, and there's an Android equivalent for almost everything a computer can do.
I'm actually gearing up to convert all of my Windows machines to Linux once the updates for 10 stop coming. This will be especially easy once the new WINE gets integrated and the few windows game apps that I use can run well on Linux.
Better to do it at least a few months before end off life just in case you need to move back for some reason. The alternative is Windows 11 which is very similar to Windows 10
Unsurprisingly, usage numbers for distros are hard to get due to lack of telemetry and what not.
However, some measurements do exist; like data from ProtonDB. These are used by Boiling Steam for their excellent reports in which some representation regarding usage across distros can be found. Their most recent report can be found here.
Note, however, that the following, as has been excellently touched upon by Boiling Steam, applies:
COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS
Since we hear some of the following comments EVERY SINGLE TIME, let’s address them here and now:
“Duh, it’s not representative of Linux usage in general!”: And nowhere does it claim to be. As often as possible we make it clear this is Linux usage in a gaming context. The usage of Debian and Ubuntu on servers is safe for now, no need to panic.
Use user agent switcher and set it to something random. However that makes your fingerprint unique. I've read that people set it to windows just to blend in the masses
i didn't need this date; i already knew this because the number of people coming up to me on the street and telling me they use Linux btw unprompted has increased noticeably.