What a great news.
it would be very interesting also the kids had some aknowledge on school about linux, besides windows. Would be open mind to get new apprentices. Besides that, for the normal human being/worker, who only uses PC for internet and office, linux can be taken into account, since it is open source.
I know linux is harder to learn than windows for an average joe, but I guess teaching kids with two OS (windows and linux) give to them more capacity too choose and give them more software/hardware skills
(Im not using linux rn just because imo windows is more stable to edit videos, but in the future, is probably to return to the pinguin)
(Sry about my bad english)
No need to apologize for your English ability.
I have been trying to start a community here where people can ask English questions.
I can see a few mistakes with your grammar and I would be happy to help or answer any questions you may have.
Thats class! Ty for the reply and your help. Sometimes I use translator apps/sites, but I know is not too accurate and I do some corrections (I guess?! Ahah) from these apps/sites. And yeah, other times i just write without any help.
My problem is with grammar plus I dont have too much vocabulary too understand certain things. But, one more time , ty for your help, appreciated a lot!
I’m one of the converts. Didn’t like Windows 11 at all, decided to try Ubuntu/Zorin before going back to 10 and ended up staying. I’ve tried various distros many times over the past ~15 years but it never felt “ready” to me until now.
The last few years have had great improvements. For any average user (like a kid or adult that just browses web, streams video, zoom calls, etc) there is no reason a Linux desktop can’t be their main system.
I’ve been really happy with fedora, specifically the KDE spin. Looks amazing and a lot of things just work.
Steam Decks?
Would that show up in browser stats though?
Steam Deck is neat and all but I’ve never thought of it as anybody’s main browsing device.
idk about others but I do use my Steam Deck for web browsing quite heavily. It’s basically my laptop right now.
This is very good. The higher those numbers go, the more pressure there will be for better official support for both HW and SW.
FOSS is fantastic. But lack of options (FOSS or paid) for a few of my use cases keeps me stapled to Windows and WSL. Unfortunately. I’m hoping the momentum shifts.
FOSS or paid
I hope you know the difference between Free(Libre) and Free(gratis)
I suppose what I mean is that i am happy to select whatever software is best for the task at hand. I have no issue with paying for software if it serves my needs. In a few cases, that limits my options to running windows as commercial versions are unavailable on Linux, and it is my hope that more commercial orgs start making their wares available for Linux, especially in cases where there’s no available alternative.
As for splitting hairs on the difference between gratis and libre, life’s too short (so if I used incorrect terminology, c’est la vie…)
I guess you don’t know its difference.
Free software means freedom and not the price. There are paid free software.
By defenition, free software is software that satisfy 4 essential freedoms
Freedom 0: Freedom to run the program any way you want on any of your devices
Freedom 1: To see and study how the program works and change it according to your needs. Source code of the entire program should be visible for this freedom
Freedom 2: Freedom to share copies of the original program(sharing is caring)
Freedom 3: Freedom to share copies of the modified version which you adapted to your needs such that whole community can benefit from your modifications
So yeah this is Free software, and when you say FOSS, its not about the price, but the freedom and control you get with the software. Why is this important? Because theese non-free softwares are taking away our freedom by even limiting “us” from using our “own” devices(DRM, locked bootloader, etc.), and it will be too late to realise how most proprietary softwares we use, and ones we are forced to use, captures our freedom.
Okay, I guess I’ll say it. Year of Linux Desktop!
Gotta keep the party going!
Next year is the year of IPv6!
Wowzer, ok, that’s seriously impressive though, like in 2022 I feel we were stuck at 2-2.5% and in 2023 we passed 3% for the first time and now we’re at almost 4??? That’s like DOUBLING the market share in a year
I was thinking the same thing. We’ve actually surpassed Apple on desktop. I know we’re gonna laughingly say “year of the Linux desktop,” but we have to honestly look how far we’ve come in a relatively short time.
mac has over 16% though, we still aren’t even close
India, Greenland, Greece and Turkey are the four countries with the fastest growth of Linux users. I’ve checked their neighbouring countries, and it looks like they are still in the 1-2% range.
Hi from Turkey, We have nore linux users than MacOS users and I tell everyone I know to switch like the foss evangelist I am
India is the eye opener … an enormous market of 1.5 billion people and the majority of them are too poor to pay for any specialty OS … it’s going to turn into a futuristic dystopia down there … people living in slums but scrounging up old neglected and forgotten hardware to bring them back online with Open Source Software.
Indian here. The reason isn’t Windows’ price tag - pirated Windows is very cheap and common - but a government push to make us less dependent on foreign (i.e. US / Chinese) companies. Schools, government offices, hospitals etc. have shifted to, or are shifting to, Linux (mostly Ubuntu and Mint). This shift started over a decade ago, but the US sanctions on Russia have spooked the government into speeding things up now.
Ok as an Indian allow me to interject. The reason people use linux is not because of poverty. Even the cheapest laptops come preloaded with activated windows.
We get introduced to Linux based OSs in schools. That plus people are heavily pushed into engineering and lately computer science and software engineering.
That sounds like a great education setup. Hope we mirror that in the west.
Most people in software around me in Europe are moving to OSX for the convenience and better hardware. How does it look like in India?
Are you from kerala?
No. What prompted such a random guess?
It was not so common to use linux in schools in other states and in kerala, all government schools use a Kite Ubuntu which is fork of lts ubuntu. Its like the law to use free software for education in kerala. Me also got introduced to linux from school so i expected you are from kerala too. And Free software is most popular in kerala afaik.
The intensity of free software user group in kerala shows it too https://fsug.in/
Oh. I studied under a Gujarat board school. We had mint in our computer labs and textbooks 8 years ago. Idk what they’re now
I was probably too hasty in my assumptions … simplistic, stereotypical maybe even a bit racist
I just thought it made economic sense … why build an entire economy or business using foreign owned software and basing it all on a foreign company, especially one with unknown loopholes that would put the company’s and country at risk by a foreign power.
Thanks for the correction and insight … I’ll be more careful about my assumptions in the future.
Thanks for acknowledging it.
Also another thing you are wrong about: You may be surprised to know that the second hand market for computer electronics is non-existent. As far as I know, there are only a handful of cities in the whole country where there is a second hand local market. Cheap electronics don’t last that much and in laptops there are only so many components you can buy separately and install. (Overwhelming majority of the computers are laptops, not the traditional CPU towers)
Also another thing I failed to mention is, the government tried to make a distro for govt use at one point but idk if anything came out of that. But I want to say there’s definitely a growing presence of linux here
I wonder if that dip in Windows in April, going down to like 62%, and the correlated boost for “Uknown” operating systems to 13% might somehow simply be Windows not being recognized properly and categorized as unknown?
It seems a bit far-fetched to me that a bunch of Windows users would for 1 month suddenly all decide to use ReactOS, FreeDOS, BSD, Solaris, Illumos, Haiku, Redox, and Plan 9.
Yeah probably some chrome update which made statscounter to fail to determine the OS, probably
https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology
Considering their methodology, I wonder how many of these are Steam Decks registering as “desktops” when they visit a website in the web broweser?
I would consider the steamdeck to be a linux desktop if someone is browsing the internet on it.
I agree, but it’s definitely marketed as a gaming console of a sort, and not really marketed as a full-fledged PC.
So, imho, that technically skewers the numbers a bit, as it’s not a “desktop” in the traditional sense.
I mean, I’m still not calling 2023 the “Year of the Linux Desktop.” I’m calling it the “Year of the Portable Linux Gaming Console.”
The growth in percentage in Linux in Steam metrics is almost entirely because the Steam Deck.
You cant be sure, Valve pushing Steam Deck and Proton is what made me switch to Linux as lot of games now works but I haven’t bought a Steam deck
When you are using the steamdeck in handheld mode there is no web browser unless configured from desktop mode. The desktop on the steamdeck is no different to my computer therefore I don’t think it’s fair to wave it off as a console. It’s far closer to a pc than a console.
It’s far closer to a pc than a console.
Ehhh, you have to spend money on a decent dock to be able to use it with any consistency as a desktop. Sure, software-wise, it’s not a console, it plays PC games.
However, it’s physical form factor is a console. It looks and functions out of the box far more like a Nintendo Switch than a IBM ThinkPad.
It’s literally a gamepad with a screen and no keyboard or mouse. So despite being a PC platform, I would still consider this a “console,” based on outward-facing form factor alone, personally.
That’s a fair point. Since we are talking about linux os share, the software that’s running on the device is more important to me than the form factor. What’s running on my steamdeck is so close to what’s running on my desktop pc that when I’m browsing the web on my steamdeck I’d consider myself browsing on linux rather than browsing on specifcally steam os.
As stated from official Valve’s page https://www.steamdeck.com/en/oled
“Use your Deck as a PC, because it is one.” So Valve did market it as a PC and it’s one of the reasons I bought one more than a year ago. And it’s really my desktop (that I bring with me to places occasionally)c
Which is still good.
Let’s go! It’s always great to see people wrestle control back from the corporations.
if we add chromeOS to it which is also.limux we have more than 5 percent. The future is ours.
I wouldn’t count ChromeOS just as we don’t count Android.
Android uses the linux kernel but is not regular linux we use which is GNU/linux but ChromeOS actually is GNU/linux a “real” linux distro
If so, then why we cannot boot other Linux distributions on Chromebook devices and cannot run standard Linux apps/programs without using Crostini virtual machine?
Android just use Linux kernel, that was trawled by Google, then SoC manufacturer, then device maker.
ChromeOS is better, as it is based on Gentoo, but is incompatible with the rest of ecosystem and most devices do not have drivers for mainline Linux kernel.
If you don’t believe me, look at the community effort to reverse-engineer some Chromebook laptops to run normal Linux distro on them: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Thus I think we should not mix them in statistics. It would be like mixing MacOS with FreeBSD…
It’s Linux, but worse
At least two dozens of us
We’ve arrived, boys!
Nice, at this pace we’ll reach 50% in less than 50 years!
I know it’s a joke, but if linux keeps growing steadly, without saturating, it can reach a point in which it breaks the “I don’t use it because no one else does/ I don’t use it because my software isn’t supported” barrier and start to grow exponentially.
When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It’s a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we’re close!
