There’s never been a bad year for the Linux desktop. The share size doesn’t matter. So, yes, it is the year of the Linux desktop in my book and it has been that way for decades.
The share size doesn’t matter.
Gotta disagree with you there. Market adoption should be a primary concern of those who care about the Linux ecosystem.
Steam deck BAYBEE. None of the other pocket computers have my attention now if they arent built for Valves version of Linux
The more it’s adopted the more it will turn into windows.
No it won’t. The beauty of Linux is that it can transform completely to fit your needs.
Making Linux more noob friendly isn’t going to take away my custom terminal-centric tiling wm arch install.
More users = more developers = more options. Linux is already awesome, but growing will only bring more good.
Growing will also bring an increased attack surface and justification for writing malware for Linux due to market adoption.
It’s not all good, there is going to be an increased security vulnerability along with it.
And so will there be more people to look into and fix the vulnerabilities, specially if we can foster a bigger community of open source developers by being a healthier community overall.
That is less likely though. Nerds who like developing FOSS for hobbyist and ideological needs are already doing so and more users will likely only increase normal users into linux, not developers usually
This is exactly the “popular => bad” mentality that needs to die. Good products are good—and perhaps more importantly, bad products are bad—irrespective of their popularity. Linux is a masterpiece as a result of millions of hours of thoughtful and rigorous engineering, not the absence of its wide adoption on desktop. Windows is a dumpster fire as a result of millions of hours of reckless code vomit, not its ubiquity on desktop. See also: the Android operating system you know and (if I had to guess) love.
I use windows and it runs prefectly fine for me so I never said it would get bad… just become more like windows.
Like Windows, how? An operating system has dozens of properties that could be “like Windows”, please specify.
Windows used to be alright/tolerable like 3 operating systems ago, each new version takes features away and brings new bugs that are more and more annoying in their attempt to get a slice of Apple’s closed garden pie. Their auto sign in feature has caused me SO MANY headaches when trying to sign in with a different user
Nah, an OS is only useful if its commonly used. Linux has never been useful for this reason.
Linux runs people’s cars, phones, routers, sometimes even fridges. And don’t even get me started on servers. Linux is the most useful OS on the planet. The desktop is just another thing for it to conquer.
You’re wrong though. Linux kernel might be running on all of these things, but Linux desktop OSes do not because they’re shit.
And why are they so shit in your opinion?
Lack of standards, compatibility and totalitarian control of a single person. Pretty much everything that’s important for a Linux kernel is lacking in userland.
We have standards like pipewire, xdg portals and wayland in active development that try to cover anything a desktop OS might need. Lately there has been a huge push towards them, as the standards they replaced weren’t future proof at all.
But I take it that you are more concerned about fragmentation of these standards. I can almost guarantee that a lot if it will just whither away with time. Noone wants to maintain ancient protocols like X11 anymore. We might have another turbulent few years in this transition, but the end result will be worth it.
And I don’t get what you mean with compatibility exactly. There are lots of ways to define that, and the Linux desktop is excellent in many of them. We have xwayland for legacy applications, loads of translation layers to bring together older graphics APIs under the main vulkan drivers, WINE to run windows software, etc. You’re gonna have to be more specific there.
Yeah, some things are getting standardized, that’s great. But many are not even on a roadmap. People still argue which init system is the best, lol. And don’t get me started on package managers…
As for compatibility, even if we forget about the apps, let’s just focus on some modern features. Multi monitor DPI settings work in some distros, but don’t work in others. HDR works in some, but not the others. DRM, proprietary tech, etc. Why the fuck things just don’t work everywhere?
I’ve been tinkering with it since the late 90s and running it as my daily driver both at home and at work for nearly 20 years now. It’s extremely useful.
It is only rivaled in its uselessness by templeOS. The only useful distro is tails which is good for drugs.
And here in Sweden were I live it’s just 1.41% :(
People are dumb here, they buy apple.
"Hey look at my new iPhone that costs 20000 sek and can’t do anything important better than the last five previous iPhones "
But it’s really fast at idling in people’s pockets.
I admit the MacBook air has a nice cpu, it stays cool. But most people don’t use anywhere near what the cpu is capable of.
And now imagine here in the US where every single person has an iPhone and everything Apple. They are completely brainwashed.
Critical thinking seems to be a thing of the past… Maybe it’s because they feel like we are on the end stretch of society anyway, may as well enjoy the days left.
20000 seks hehe
Your Fedora must be huge!
It’s amazing to me in 2024 we still have fanboys saying this shit ad nauseum since 1995.
Linux is a shitty desktop environment unless you like to tinker. Apple and Windows provide a far better experience to those who want shit to just work and be compatible.
Nothing just works.
I run Linux, not because I think it’s great, but because Windows is awful, and keeps getting worse. Furthermore it keeps abusing its majority market share to get away with increasingly scummy behaviour.
My Linux experience has been a lot more tinker free than Windows. There’s a ton of distros to choose from for the uninvested, my 60 year old mum runs Linux at this point and the only difference is she stopped calling all the time for tech support.
Odd. What distros have you had such poor experiences with? What sort of things do you use Linux for?
Mint has been tinker-free for me for years as my main desktop. I have had Mac and Windows laptops during that time, as well. But I rarely use them for any of my hobbies.
I use it to actually do stuff so the last thing I want is tinkering getting in the way of that. And it hasn’t for years.
Now, to be fair, gaming is another story since not everything works easily.
Anyway, I doubt Mint is the only distro that doesn’t require much fiddling with.
Things have come a long, long way since the 90s (I was using Mandrake at that time).
For example, the install process for Fedora and Mint are slicker than for Windows if you ask me.
I mean, my kid has been using Linux as her desktop since she was like 10 and she doesn’t seem to have any problems (except ok sure, stupid Nvidia …we went AMD with her new system). Granted she mostly just surfs and plays Minecraft.
I wouldn’t hesitate to set up a non-techie with one of the mainstream, stable distros depending on what they want to use.
I don’t think it is the year of the Linux desktop by any stretch but I do think the numbers will trend slightly up over the next five years as steamdeck-alikes get more popular and more progress is made on compatibility and natively written games, and as Windows enshittification continues.
I’ve personally had poor experiences with Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu, Manjaro and one or two others I’ve tried. Every single one required a few hours of tweaking in the terminal to get it even close to being functional, and I constantly found new things it wouldn’t work with (hardware, software, games, etc)
After about a week of being unable to use my computer as I’d like to (online gaming and photo editing) I went back to Windows.
Weird that so many mainstream distros would be unusable out of the box.
Install Linux Mint with the GUI installer a la windows, done.
You are factually wrong unless you specify a distro. But even arch has arch install now.
Does the audio work? Including the microphone?
What about the Nvidia drivers? Wifi drivers? Printer drivers?
Maybe it works when you don’t do anything with your computer, but most people aren’t like that. Linux just really requires you to tinker more than other OSes. Sometimes that is a good thing, but never for a non-techy.
You will just have to come to terms with that.
Everything you listed would be solved if Linux was as mainstream as Windows.
For me, I don’t use Nvidia, WiFi works, old HP printer works, just need to install a package, a 1-year old Canon printer works out of the box on Ubuntu, but on Arch I need to extract the stuff from the driver .deb and place into the it into the right directories. Audio and microphone works flawlessly. This is the case on ASUS ZenBook, an underpowered ASUS Vivobook or something and a 2012 iMac, though on that one I need a modification to
/etc/default/grubto be able to control the brightness.I have never had to worry about wifi drivers, and my microphone has always worked out of the box with my computer.
Proprietary nvidia drivers are a bit trickier, but mostly painless.
Printers work flawlessly for me, I have a modern cheap hp printer, so I had low expectations, but my laptop running mint can print and scan with the built in applications.
Better than using windows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What???
Given the size of Estonia, I’ll assume that was the work of one single Linux supersoldier who spent the whole month entering homes at night and installing Linux on whatever computer they could find.
It looks a fish giving bass to mouth. See there’s the first fish on the left sucking the other one off on the right
U sicko
Go India! duck yeah! Woohoo \o/
Let’s go India
2023 was the year of the Linux desktop.
- Got Discord and Zoom off the store
- Zoom screen and webcam sharing just worked
- Was able to even switch Bluetooth profile through GUI
- Essentially any game that didn’t use a kernel level spyware works
- Chromebook hardware in the $500 range is pretty good
- Must software is web based.
I recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Install once, update weekly or biweekly. (It’s a rolling release, so it doesn’t have major upgrades like Windows 10 to 11 does.) About a month ago I did an upgrade on my old laptop. Handled 2 years of updates flawlessly.
I left tumbleweed for alpine and artix because even if you always use
--no-recommendsfor package installation it seems to ship just too much bloat and I left it after it shipped some broken software I didn’t need anyway but must’ve affected system stability too severely, iSCSI iircartix
Wow, are you able to use the new s6 supervisor or service manager yet, or is it too early yet? I saw an initial post once but didn’t follow it’s development.
Sorry you had problems with Tumbleweed. The forums and subreddit are very supportive, no matter how you installed the distro. It’s actually why I moved to Tumbleweed from Arch.
tbh I simply haven’t tried it yet. OpenRC works really well for me though I haven’t looked into why I would switch to s6 either.
I switched to Ubuntu 22.04 on 2023-12-31. I had used a bunch of other distros back in 2008-2012, then got tired of manually tweaking things constantly. Things have come a long way and there are way more options to make things work. I don’t have to spend hours on the CLI or reboot frequently.
So yeah, I’m going to stick with Ubuntu for a bit, then switch to something else.
These days, you probably won’t need all that tweaking.
I’d recommend Linux Mint.
Honestly Debian would be a better choice if you want a rock solid stable experience.
True that. However, Linux Mint may have a better out-of-box experience.
Note: Debian is my favorite distro.
Isn’t Linux Mint just green Ubuntu?
Without snaps
Entire different desktop environment+no snap+yes flatpak+nice community+light
I moved to Linux last year, but from a Mac so not sure how much I’m moving needles.
Not much especially if you set up the desktop environment to mimic Mac os. Unless you do pc gaming, then depending on your hardware you get a big boost in available titles.
That’s honestly quite a lot, nice
I switched to Linux last year so I’m doing my part
Wow, I was just going to ask if it was 2% a couple years ago, then checked the link. That is a really fast increase.
I’m trying my very best to love Linux but I’m having so much trouble with Mint.
I’m running a Mint vm on a proxmox to try it out and for some reason my back button and forward button on my mouse maps to the scroll wheel. The scroll wheel is mapped correctly. I installed Spice to improve performance and so far it’s amazing, but the mouse is annoying.
If I run RDP, it works perfectly, but the lag is too annoying.
Does anyone here have suggestions? Thanks.
If I were you I would install Mint on a second drive.
Pretty sure your issues aren’t with Mint they’re with the virtualization platform.
You can get a cheap $40 SSD and install the OS on that.
Be sure to unplug the windows drive before installing Mint to the other drive. Then plug the Win drive back in. Now you can use the bios boot menu to boot into either.
Be sure to unplug the windows drive before installing Mint to the other drive.
Why would you do that? Totally unnecessary. When Windows is already installed any Linux installation respects it without issues. The problem is the other way around, if you install Linux first and then install Windows afterwards on a second partition/drive it nukes your Linux bootloader.
Especially in times of M.2 drives (which are often behind the GPU) you only annoy people by telling them to unplug their Windows drive first. And they might want to use a second partition on that drive if it’s bigger.
I would do that because the last time I tried installing a new distro it fucked my windows bootloader. So your statement isn’t universally true, sorry to say. I have only had this issue once on one distro. I have not spent the time digging into the underlying cause yet. It may well be distro related. I figured I would save a noob a potential gotcha, however.
always unplug the windows drive I’ve fucked my windows bootloader so many times because if your windows drive shows up in drive order before your Linux drive it’ll fuck with it
All I can read is “I don’t know how to install linux”
Does the mouse need drivers? You could search for the model name and “Linux drivers” to see if the company offers anything
Its a logitech G502SE. It doesn’t look like it has drivers. I also had problems with a logitech steering wheel when I was running Mint on bare metal. Just not a very linux friendly company.
you could try installing antimicrox I had to install it for my azeron keypad to even work for some reason I don’t remember why it was a long time ago
The repo at the link doesn’t really explain where the data is from, does anyone know?
The URL saves ‘statcounterdata’ so maybe from https://gs.statcounter.com?
Which has Linux at just under 4% for Jan 2024, and if you include Chrome OS then it’s over 5%. link
Statcounter provides free analytics by embedding their code in your site. And their stats come from aggregating all the data from all the sites that use their analytics.
Wonder if Linux users block Statcounter at a higher rate than other OS users.
I’d assume uBlock Origin blocks it by default?
I’d think there’s a pretty high chance!
But also I wonder if Linux users are more likely to stray off Instagram and TikTok onto smaller sites that might use Statcounter?
I wonder what portion of that is steam decks.
Me too. As one data point, I don’t use mine to access the web. However, it did get me confident with Linux as a viable choice for my desktop today. I went on to install it dual boot on my main and rarely if ever open Windows. It’s probably a couple months behind in updates.
In the end I just uninstalled windows because every time I opened it, it tried installing all updates and I had to wait 20-30 mins to get to the desktop
And don’t forget the ten different single app updaters because there’s no centralized update system. There’s just so much stuff running all the time.
Hey so I know you deleted the Edge shortcut from your desktop the last three times, but this time I think you’ll really like it, so I added it back!
I feel this is now being driven by the decline of desktops in general.
Every now and again I meet someone who somehow gets through life without a desktop.
I can understand someone who owns a Mac/Windows PC just binning it out of frustration and not buying another one. They are just life-sucking levels of horror at this point.
Tablets cover >90% of the regular person’s usecase, anyway, nowadays.
It’s been years since I owned a tablet. I felt that they were redundant because I have a phone and a desktop and a laptop and a Chromebook.
Yes, in that case, it really is. But if you have both a phone and a tablet with a keyboard, any kind of PC might be redundant, if you don’t do any specialized task like coding/video/gaming/photography,…
fuck even some photographers ik don’t even have a damn computer just an ipad
Wow damn 4% holy shit.
My reaction too. This is fantastic!
Until you realise it is mostly steam deck and indian govt office pc running linux.
Really curious about all those “unknown”. Solid piece out of everybody.
Year of the TempleOS Desktop
As much as I hate to say it, I wonder how much of these are Chromebooks
It looks like ChromeOS is reported separately in those stats
Some of it’s India.
Sadly there aren’t even Indian manufacturers with linux preinstalled. I’ve heard of starlabs, slimbook, tuxedo, system76 etc. only to find out that most doesn’t ship to india and are not availiable in the stores like flipkart, amazon and local stores, where most of people computers. Still, still India is at 15% now and what if market already has linux preinstalled systems!
Growth is being driven a lot by the Steam Deck.
Time to Sort the Steam Deck out like ChromeOS, then the Linux market goes back to 2%?
Right? RIGHT?
This is mostly from browser stats though.
Sure, you can browse on it, but I wouldn’t have thought it enough to skew the numbers in any meaningful way.
School districts buy Chromebooks by the thousands. Steam Deck is definitely paving the way in terms of demonstrating a consumer use case for Linux, but I would be shocked if there are even 1/100th the number of them in the wild as there are Chromebooks.
ChromeOS is listed in a separate category.
