Comment by taylodl
2 years ago
Not really. People don't care about libre software, they care about software that works, is supported, and they don't have to think about it. The Linux desktop appeals to developers and hackers, so 4% is probably the best they're ever going to do.
On the flip side, look how much Microsoft is losing to Linux in the server space. Consumers don't care what servers their favorite sites and services are running on: they don't have to manage it.
> The Linux desktop appeals to developers and hackers, so 4% is probably the best they're ever going to do.
Probably not. The body of the article reports 6.24% desktop Linux penetration already.
The 4% reported in the headline refers to browsers which report Linux in the user-agent string. That is more down to browser choice than kernel choice. Specifically, a popular Linux browser has chosen to omit "Linux" from its default user-agent claim, hence the discrepancy.
It may be that developers and hackers are drawn to certain browsers, but that is beyond the subject of Linux.
I would add on to the "don't care" to say that (in my experience) your typical computer user doesn't even understand what an OS is. With many people that I've interacted with they just equate the computer and OS as one thing and have no idea what OS they're using, much less that it's actually replaceable.
> Not really. People don't care about libre software, they care about software that works, is supported, and they don't have to think about it. The Linux desktop appeals to developers and hackers, so 4% is probably the best they're ever going to do.
Also, it shows the power of defaults and just showing up. Windows is as big as it is because Microsoft made the deals with OEMs 30+ years ago to ship their software as the default option. Macs would likely be an also-ran if Apple wasn't standing behind their hardware, both in terms of the hardware itself and the sales/support channel, as much as they are (just look at the relative success of their retail stores vs. the relative failure of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc., in the same space).
> care about software that works
I'm tech support for my wife's Win11 laptop, and this is rapidly becoming not the case. Microsoft is building bridges across its most.
Microsoft still wins in the end, they don't care if UNIX has won the server room, provided they still get the money for Azure OS, or Azure Sphere OS.
Looking at their earnings, it is going pretty well.
it's going pretty well right now, but if they keep massively increasing prices, it won't keep up forever.
the company i work at pays almost double now compared to a year ago, for arguably worse service. some of us in IT are looking at options, because being locked into a service that keeps shooting up in price is a huge risk.
yes it'll be hard to get away from the ecosystem. but with the increasing price, demand for alternatives surges too, and i can't see it taking too long until we get some options.
It is like running away from the lion, they only need to be better than GCP and cheaper than AWS.
Stuff like Vercel, Cloudflare or Netfly isn't the main market they are after, at least if they keep focusing on being clouds for frontend devs.
There are also people that prefer to use free / open-source software because of it giving power & control to the users & community, opposed to proprietary software where a single (typically commercial) company controls the software.
The disadvantage of propietary software is that you are at the mercy of how the company decides to maintain and develop their software. And they might do undesirable things towards their users. Like displaying adds, tracking / profiling their user's personal data. Changing the pricing. This typically happens when they gain enough market share and have enough users vedor-locked into their software.
And the vendor lock-in also makes it harder for users to make the software work with other 3rd party software. So generally propietary software isn't easy to combine with third party software, unless the company has a commercial incentive to support it. But often one of the reasons for the software to be propietary is because of the vendor lock-in. So that you will use all software from 1 company that all works well together, but doesn't work (as well) when trying to combine it with third party software.
> so 4% is probably the best they're ever going to do
Why would you say that? Take a look at the trend plot shown at the link. The trend started increasing markedly about two years ago. I wouldn't think it would suddenly flatline. At least I hope it doesn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
> with a particular focus on the "chasm" or adoption gap that lies between early and mainstream markets.
> The author argues there is a chasm between the early adopters of the product (the technology enthusiasts and visionaries) and the early majority (the pragmatists)
Early adopters are a small minority, it's hard to give exact numbers but 5% sounds about right.
It's MUCH harder to get the pragmatists, late adopters, etc to use a new product. It generally requires a revolutionary product or brilliant PR and marketing (Linux doesn't really have PR and marketing and revolutionary would be a strong term for a product that's been in the market 30+ years).
Figuring out where the chasm is can be tricky though. If we're going to see S-curve adoption, we might be at the beginning of a rocket (maybe a small one a la crossing the chasm), but it's hard to say.
I think as market share goes up, there's going to be more polished product providers offering linux (liek Steam OS), and that's going to make it very reachable to the pragmatists.
I'm almost certain steam deck has at least grabbed some pragmatists.
> People don't care about libre software, they care about software that works, is supported, and they don't have to think about it.
Which long term libre software helps them do. Without it companies just keep stealing the open source features and moving the target of "good".
Sometimes you have to use very broad definition of "works". Often (certainly not always) UX and general aesthetic design for many open source apps is extremely poor compared to their proprietary alternatives.