Comment by rglullis
2 years ago
4% starts getting it into the threshold of Nassim Taleb's "intolerant minority" to take effect. It is too big of a market share to be served only by a niche player like System76 or Starlite, so we should start seeing all major manufacturers (beyond Dell and their XPS line) to add Linux-only hardware.
And from there, what's stopping them from joining Valve to make Proton work for all the Windows-specific applications that are still used in the enterprise?
> And from there, what's stopping them from joining Valve to make Proton work for all the Windows-specific applications that are still used in the enterprise?
If they tried, which I don't expect, I'd guess adoption would stop it. Microsoft is entrenched with the public sectors and companies all over the world. The cost of switching would exceed any potential savings for years...
There are already directives in some EU countries to choose open source solutions over proprietary ones whenever they are equivalent.
There are already plenty of schools and universities that are using cloud based solutions and just run ChromeOS.
All I'm saying is that we are closer to the point where the customer will be able to treat the OS as a commodity. That by itself works already as a bargaining chip against Microsoft and in favor of customers when it's time to negotiate their contracts.
The switch won't happen overnight, but the trend has been long in favor of Linux. This 4-5% mark is significant and can lead to acceleration.
With current windows shenanigans and data slurping at least there is some sort discussion about it and switching.
In my opinion main blocker which introduces huge switching cost (and even bigger policy problems) is missing group policy alternative.
Lenovo also ships Linux laptops, although their Linux team needs the ability to veto hardware choices that were made in support of Windows. (I wonder if the XPS team can choose their hardware; my developer edition XPS was rock solid.)
Lenovo's Linux team seems to use up a lot of their QA/support resources because they are handed a dozen new laptop designs each year with (for instance) a MIPI IPU6 webcam having no kernel driver, S0ix suspend broken at the EC-level, new types of forcepads and trackpoints and touchscreens and styli and soldered on Wi-Fi card with a track record of crashing in Linux... and told to figure it out.
Plus, I think they occasionally get sidetracked by stupid bullshit like getting the boot logo to not flicker moving from BIOS to Plymouth.
Also, they maybe should have pushed really hard on AMD (and possibly Qualcomm and their BIOS supplier) for having _multiple_ kernel releases that reached the stable "updates" on non-Rawhide Fedora that then broke suspend on several ThinkPad models. Bisect. Blame. Revert. If Linus used a newer AMD ThinkPad, some choice words would have landed on the mailing list.