Comment by nerdjon
2 months ago
I have to wonder how much of this is people switching to Linux vs the larger trend of people not having traditional computers to begin with.
Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the people that would have already had Linux desktops continuing to have theirs since they would likely be the same people (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets) less likely to be making that switch.
Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Given these numbers are percents I would be very curious.
Now yes there is a clear uptick thanks to the Steam Deck (however with Microsoft pushing their optimized for gaming Windows it will be interesting to see if that continues or goes backwards). But I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
I agree with your points, except this:
> thanks to the Steam Deck [...] but I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different. SteamOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch. If you run your Steam Deck in "desktop mode", it is very much a Linux Desktop (with a read-only system and A/B updates etc, but still).
Android systems don't even run the linux kernel in any real sense, pretty much every downstream kernel has millions of lines of patched code that will never make it upstream in their current form. Of course, that's no different from mostly any other "Linux" embedded device, but it's very different indeed from what's standard on desktop systems.
I would still count it as the Linux kernel. They don't change the syscall API, it's really mostly at the BSP level, right?
Said differently: if manufacturers cared to mainstream their changes, they could. And we would all be better for it.
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Android is Linux
Android is not GNU/Linux.
Article talks about GNU/Linux clearly. There is a point to the whole "I'd like to interject for a moment..." copypasta and Android's situation is the clearest illustration of it.
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This has been repeated for so long that in the meantime enough of the changes have been upstreamed such that Android has been able to run with the upstream kernel since 6 years ago.
> The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different.
Linux is a kernel.
Seeing how the Linux name is used in practice, it's useful to clarify.
A distinction without a difference. The point of this subthread is that the term Linux is overloaded to mean two things: a kernel and also an OS that has certain assumptions (usually glibc and some unix userspace stuff).
The point being that “Linux Desktop” means something more than “runs the Linux kernel”.
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"IT'S GNU/LINUX!" ~ rms
Which is exactly why people here talk about "Linux Desktop". Linux is a kernel, Linux Desktop is some flavour of a full OS made to run on a PC, as opposed to e.g. embedded Linux or a Linux server.
Not sure what your point is?
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So anyone saying "the Windows operating system" is doing wrong?
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The Steam Deck is absolutely a full blown Linux. But it's not a desktop. It's a handheld.
Well, unless you hook a screen and keyboard to it, I suppose. No idea how many people do that. But if you do that, phones and tablets also become desktops.
> unless you hook a screen and keyboard to it, I suppose.
You can run Steam Deck in "Desktop mode" without hooking a screen and keyboard to it, and it will be running a full Desktop Linux environment.
If I plug a screen and keyboard to my Android, it's still a mobile OS (e.g. made to run with a touch screen). Samsung has apparently "dex" and Google is working on convergence as well, but this is not yet a thing.
I'm looking forward to being able to hook a screen and keyboard to an Android phone and have it behave like a Desktop Android, though :-).
I attach screen + keyboard to it often. It has an official dock to facilitate this. In my mind, it's a device that can function as both desktop and hand-held.
It is very visible that Desktop mode is not primary function of Steam Deck, though. Some weird behavior here and there, reboot always goes into gaming mode and so on. It's a gaming handheld first, desktop second.
I mean, a keyboard on iPad is way less powerful than a keyboard on steam deck. The steam deck can plug into a monitor and runs Plasma out of the box, which is a full blown desktop environment
Typing this from my Steam Deck, its the best Linux desktop I've ever had. It's awesome to have my PC also be a handheld when laying in bed. I hope the Deckard has M+KB support too.
Admittedly yeah SteamOS does walk that line, and I guess technically given that I think these numbers are based on browser data it would only be capturing the people that actually go into desktop mode (maybe?).
But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux (or even understand that it is Linux) vs would switch to a Windows version if it worked as well.
Even in the "normal mode", I would argue that it is still Linux Desktop. A Linux Desktop init system, with a Linux Desktop userspace, with a Linux Desktop libc, with the Linux Desktop security model, a Linux Desktop package manager, a Linux Desktop compositor (it uses something based on Wayland, right?), etc.
If you open a terminal (or SSH into it), you're on Linux. It's very, very different on Android.
> how many of the people using a Steam Deck [...] care that it is Linux
Probably most don't. But that's a goal. If corporate employees could use a Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it would mean that the corporation can move to Linux, and that would be big.
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> how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux
How many Windows users care that it is Windows? They just want to click on the Internet icon.
One way to think about it is what APIs application developers are using. If most of the code running on a Steam Deck is Windows code running under a compatibility layer, it probably doesn’t help the larger Linux community in the same way that, say, iOS popularity has helped ensure that many libraries have excellent macOS support.
> But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux
If Linux adoption is to increase significantly (and I guess I'm of the opinion that would be a positive thing), then at some point that can only be done by acquiring users who don't care particularly deeply or understand much about their OS. That is, the vast majority of people. And that's probably not going to happen by converting that demographic to true believers.
Some of those people might decide they want to dig deeper later, and that's great. Most won't and that's fine too.
It would be a bit asymmetrical to restrict the definition of "Linux user" to folk who really care what Linux is or know their way around coreutils.
Think about it from a brand perspective. If you were microsoft and some flavor of windows were running on people's phone and game station, would you claim this market share? I'm sure they would.
I guess the parent discussion is partly about whether the GNU/Linux desktop experience is getting popular, & if no one is using desktop mode in practice then this is not super informative, though good to know
Totally agree. It's what finally got me to commit to a linux machine for my recent desktop build!
What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one? Many Android tablets (especially those with Samsung Dex) can certainly double up as desktops if its users were so willing, at least a lot more so than the Steam Deck.
Linux Desktop is something else. When Adobe considers if it's worth to port Photoshop to run on the Linux Desktop they don't include the market share of Android devices in that calculation. It's two completely different markets: desktop Linux apps and Android apps.
> What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one?
A desktop is a computer that sits on your desk, as opposed to being held in your hand. In concrete terms, you can install Android Firefox on ChromeOS, and it runs fine. But it is near unusable because it turns out how people interact with desktops is very different to how people interact with phones.
Also, desktop window managers tend to look like a protocol, rather than a library. That because every language can speak a protocol, but a library is written in one language and if you are lucky, someone many have provided bindings to that library to the language you are using.
Android's display is effectively a Java library. If you want to talk to it from C or Python, you have to FFI to Java, which sucks from a number of perspectives. It's not how you would implement a general purpose desktop environment, and I've never met anyone who considers it to be one.
That lack of flexibility shows up in a number of other ways. For example it's not difficult to implement an phone OS interface using XWindows or Wayland. Neither particularly care what window manager is running on top of them them. The reverse isn't true. You can't provide a the multi-window desktop environment on Android as it stands.
None of this is true for ChromeOS. It uses Wayland under the hood, and so you can install and run Debian GUI apps on it. In fact I do that, and it mostly works as you would expect. Thus I consider ChromeOS to be true Linux Desktop environment, and it should be counted as one. It isn't mind you - but I think should be.
Google seems to be in the process of replacing ChromeOS with Android, and as part of that process ChromeOS's ability to run Linux desktop apps is being ported to Android. If and when that happens, then I'd consider Android to be Linux desktop too.
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Market share only matters to geeks and commercial software vendors when deciding the total addressable market. A “Linux desktop” that is connected to a TV used to play games is not part of the market they care about.
You are being obtuse.
99% of Steam Deck users won't ever use the desktop mode except for maybe setting up emulation or Discord.
In general, that makes Steam Deck users no more Linux users than people that use Android.
Where does that 99% number come from?
The very reason why I bought a Steam Deck is because it is both a handheld and a Linux Desktop.
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Android users are Linux users. So are Nintendo Switch users, the whole "can Linux game/be used for mobile" question is already answered.
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You would be correct if steam deck users were in line with the average computer user, but they definitely skew more towards the tech savvy crowd - the crowd that would be interested in desktop/emulation.
Part of this is in order to use a steam deck, unless you want to be very limited, you kind of have to be a little more tech savvy. I love my deck, but it is definitely not plug and play/turn key like a switch is for instance. Hell until a year or so ago swapping between gaming and desktop mode resulted in a total crash like 30% of the time. It still doesn’t dock and undock seamlessly, you get all kinds of wild behavior with standard TVs still, and if you’re off your home network and it tries to update it can still lock you out. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still a distinct possibility.
I love it and frankly the machine is a marvel, especially at its price point. But I still struggle to recommend it to people.
If your belief is that Steam Deck is Linux Desktop then you need to count Switch/PS5/Xbox as desktops as well and take those into account with the OS percentages.
Steam Deck has (accessible in menu by default) desktop mode that is just KDE with desktop icons and everything.
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By picking a standard menu option I can go to a traditional desktop and use Libre Office and Firefox.
Can I so that with a Switch?
I can plug in a USB dock, with a monitor, mouse and keyboard and edit images with GIMP.
Can I do that with a PS5?
If I like the Steam Deck UI, I can install a package on my desktop and pick it on login, thus gaining basically all of this functionality. I in fact do have the SteamOS 3 UI installed on a gaming PC, and it works really well.
Can I install the PS5 UI and the ability to play PlayStation games on a BSD box?
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I can't use a Switch as a Desktop Linux, I can use my Steam Deck as a Desktop Linux.
It's not exactly a belief, it's my experience.
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here
Interesting, could you tell me which part of US you are from?
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My 2 cents, small country, mid-Europe, more or less in the middle of list of GDP / AIC per capita in EU.
Nearly everyone has some sort of PC or laptops for personal use.
Now it's changing, kids(~5-13yrs old) are using phones and tablets for school, Tiktok, Ytube, games. And only minority of kids is using PCs.
After they reach certain age, they've switched to PC games, at least in the past. Let's see what will happen now.
Gamers use primarily PC (Windows, because forced BS Anticheats), consoles are minority.
Probably because big tradition of piracy here, for long time it was legal to download anything. Even after forced change from EU, it's somewhat grey area and you can torrent anything, without VPN and nobody will care. But regarding pirating games, it changed years ago, with Steam of course. Like everywhere else.
Still it's funny that we have same price or sometimes even higher than US and our median salary is ~5x lower than US. :-) Here we call it "specific market", meaning "everybody buys it and everybody's stupid".
Only prosecuted cases I know, it was people uploading movies (usually local production) and they've made money from it.
In case of Germany and their automation of spamming letters from lawyers with ransom for €1k because someone on your internet torrented something. That's totally ridiculous from our point of view and it would spawn huge public backlash. I think that even lawyers torrents here :D
(US minnesota) recently a 23 year old new hire advised me that he doesn't have a normal computer or laptop and he buys plane tickets, files his taxes, plans projects etc on a phone or ipad. Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
> Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
Sad, but true. Recent batch of new hires where I work, same age range - mid-late 20's, none of them have computers at home except their work issued laptop. They are by far the biggest source of help desk tickets for us, and same story as you, using phone & iPad for everything at home.
Honestly concerns me for talent recruitment in the future, if AI isn't doing everything tech when that time comes - kids only tech experiences now are fully locked down walled gardens, takes away both the ability and incentive to tinker, explore, or even troubleshoot. Whole generation of new workers coming in without even the most basic of troubleshooting/problem solving skills. Have a few at my work where even just reading an error message on the screen seems overwhelming to them.
I had my first personal computer in 1986. But I can easily do all of those things just as conveniently on my phone.
90% of tax payers claim the standard deduction. That means filing your taxes just means going to Turbo tax and it importing your W2’s automatically if your employer uses one of the major payment providers like ADP or worse case taking a picture of your W2, clicking “Next” a few times after answering a few questions and it’s done.
Why would I need a desktop to buy plane tickets? I launch my airline app, get the ticket.
Plans? For my personal projects I use Trello. I have an M2 MacBook Air that I only bought when I was between jobs for around a month to do a side contract.
My wife wanted a new computer to replace her aging x86 MacBook Air and then her older iPad went out. We bought an iPad Air 13 inch and paid $70 for a regular old Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and that’s her “computer” now.
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Netherlands here. Most people I know (outside of gamers) tend to have a laptop only if they have one for work anyway, they use their phones for banking, tax, searching the correct spelling of words etc. That's in the age groups from like 30 all the way to 70.
I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.
For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
Yes, top of the list, it shows :)
Latops and desktops, it's a mix here. Older people had mainly desktops in the past. That's my experience, at least.
Banking, yeah mainly phones because of ridiculous forced banking apps from corporate masters, like everywhere else? (certain bank even lost a lot of customers because of that)
Taxes, if you are just an employee, taxes are done by your employer for you, by law. (I presume it's a post-communism BS, so people doesn't pay attention how much taxes we pay.)
If you have other types of income, you do it yourself, you have app/website to click through it, easy. Not automatic though. Self-employed IT pay less taxes than normal employees :D and overall lower-income people pay bigger taxes by percentage, what a great country :D
We call your country Holland, great country imho, If I would thinking about moving, that's top option for me.
Only thing that keeps me here are best gun laws in EU (I have Glock, AR15 clone, Bren3 ordered), you can conceal carry nearly everywhere, you can even use gun for self-defense, sadly very low criminality here :)
Hell, I can even legally carry katana, not kidding.
Linux is used only by IT people, friends cannot switch because they play MP games with invasive Anticheat running on kernel.
Personally, I'm only switching people to Linux if they cannot afford new PC because of Win11 upgrade. Zorin OS usually.
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College students will have laptops or a laptop-like device.
I’m curious to know the country, if you don’t mind sharing. I thought these EU letters of happiness are a real deal.
Must be circles. I just visited relatives, and brought my laptop as well as my phone; I barely used the laptop. But my brother always uses his, and his kids used laptops, and even one of my great nieces used a laptop. Did they have phones? Yes.
Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.
Nearly everyone in our family’s (public, Massachusetts) high school writes papers exclusively on their phone.
Wow, isn't that painful without a big screen and keyboard? [1] Most primary schools here (NL) use Chromebooks or Windows laptops. High schools sometimes have a BYOD, but you certainly have to bring a laptop.
[1] Of course, you can hook up most phones to a display, keyboard, mouse, but that blurring the lines a bit. A Samsung DeX device or future Pixel desktop mode device hooked up to peripherals is pretty much a desktop (Pixel will even support Linux apps in a VM).
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I'm a millenial and I'm touch typing. The idea of writing long texts on a phone or tablet feels ridiculous to me. I already get annoyed when I have to write an e-mail on my phone. Also, I find the mobile UX for text formatting, cut/copy/paste extremely frustrating.
Interesting. I'm also in MA, and my daughters (like all their classmates) mostly use the chromebooks issued by their public high school. They strongly prefer their macbooks tho. Granted, we live in an affluent town. But I thought the chromebooks were a statewide thing.
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Have they ever tried to use a real computer for that? Can they afford a real computer? Would they prefer a bigger screen and a real keyboard over a tiny screen and an even smaller keyboard? Maybe they just don't have the experience of using a real computer to know how far superior it is to a tiny screen/keyboard?
Using a phone to write papers seems like an exercise in masochism, if better alternatives are available.
It's also possible that their peer group that does use laptops to write papers is doing far better in many ways.
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In highschool classes forever ago we had to write 20+ page papers. I can't imagine trying to do that on a phone!
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How do you write long school papers on the phone's tiny screen and keyboard?
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Interesting. My great nieces have Lenovos (Windows) that they use for school work and light gaming. They'd like better gaming laptops, but don't have them.
This is incredible, wow.
> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.
Interesting. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a personal computer at home. Mostly laptops. With the exceptions of nerds like myself, the signifier that someone is a gamer is that their home computer is a tower rather than a laptop.
I wonder how much regional variation there is around this sort of thing? It sounds like it might be quite a lot.
FWIW, this is my experience too. I'm 50yo, live in the Boston area.
Hey, some of us are non-gamer nerds doing computing infrastructure and cybersecurity with towers too :)
>everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets
And of the remaining desktop/laptop users, 90% of their work is being done in a browser. Which makes Linux distros like Ubuntu suitable for more people.
If you are doing all of your work in a browser anyway, you might as well use a less finicky iPad with longer battery life with a regular Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Why would I recommend a Linux system?
> Why would I recommend a Linux system?
Greater control over what hardware and software you wish to run. e.g. you wouldn't have to follow Apple's decisions in making things obsolete and effectively keep old hardware running for a lot longer if you so wish. There's also a possible issue in having a U.S. based company in control of your O.S.
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A few reasons:
1. iPadOS is kind of ass. Multi-tasking is lacking, cursor support is ehhh, and applications are still dumbed-down. This means more clicks, more actions, to do the same thing.
2. Bluetooth is ass, trust me I know. Thing will disconnect and you will need to manually reconnect them. I don't know why in the year 2025 bluetooth isn't completely seamless, but it isn't.
3. Rinky-dink keyboard and real keyboard is night and day. I've used those iPad keyboards. They suck.
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>Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here.
That's very anecdotal of you. Proves absolutely nothing.
Since we're posting anecdotes here, everyone I know has at least one computer that is not "their work computer" (which is confusing, is it employer-owned, or just personally owned for their own purposes?).
Many people do not like typing on tablet or phone keyboards, real keyboards are much nicer. Bigger screens are also much nicer than tiny phone screens and most tablet screens.
I suspect your anecdotal circle is probably very young and may just not be able to afford a real computer, or have never used one, so they are fine with their tiny devices, not knowing the benefits of having a more traditional laptop or desktop computer.
The truth is, it doesn't really matter.
What's important is that we have an alternative to keep Microsoft and Apple honest. If they overdo it with their crappy ideas - like showing ads in the start menu or recording the desktop - then people can easily switch, at least for personal computing.
But those "features" exist, and people did not switch (at least not in great numbers).
Both my parents run on Microsoft Excel. Neither of them care much for phones or tablets, but if there was an ExcelDeck running ExcelOS and it had a web browser and worked like the desktop version of Excel does, maybe they would go for it.
As it stands though, that's not the case, so I'll be stuck supporting a couple of Windows desktops permanently.
Before you suggest the app versions of Excel or Google Sheets, that's already a step too far. My mom told me she's "basically done learning new technology" and that's just how it's going to be.
Why is this is a top comment? Market share is a relative measure. Even if there is a drop in the number of personal computers, still it's an achievement that the drop didn't affect Linux, while it affected other platforms.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
I disagree. Imagine that Linux became the OS used on 95% of personal computers. According to your reasoning there wouldn't be much to celebrate. Says who?
Because it's an important distinction. If all PC sales fall to almost zero, and only the most hardcore tech nerds keep using them, and use Linux like they've been doing for two decades now, did Linux really win the battle or did the entire war evaporate and they are some long lost leftover soldier in the jungle fighting some battle no one else even is anymore.
If an OS is used, then that's because people need it, not because they're fighting some imaginary fight in the jungle. It's their preferred OS. If the number of people using computers shrinks, because non-pro users move to mobiles, while the fraction of pros using Linux increases to 95%, or even 50%, I think that's a very clear win for Linux.
The reason why MacOS grew in popularity is because it started to be used by pros, myself included, i.e., I've switched from Linux to MacOS seeing many top computer scientists using MacOS. However, after over 10 years of using MacOS, I'm actually still not sure whether it was worth it, and I'm considering to go back to Linux since a few years. The main reasons stopping me from switching is a reliable Calendar app and concerns about battery life.
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> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here.
> [...] (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets)
Somewhat unrelated but something I never see discussed is how the form factor of the computing device changes our relationship to, and the types of, media that we produce and consume.
One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media; hence the concomitant rise of picture and video and the smartphone camera, which is now the primary medium through which many, many people view the world. Editing anything longer than a Tweet is torturous on a phone or even a tablet, and I suspect that this lack of ergonomics is what leads to the proliferation of reductive, simplistic, short-form, and byte-sized thinking.
Computing "interface culture" was once hyper-literate; "in the beginning was the command line" [0], and people's primary way of seeing the internet was through words, keyboards, and terminals. Now we have the "colossal success of GUIs" and a Disney-fied [0], touchscreen interface to computing, where the control mechanisms used by adults are the exact same as the ones used by toddlers.
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
> One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media
The key addition obviously being “for me.”
For others tablets (and for some others, phones) are what they use for producing long-form textual media.
I, for example, have no issue producing long-form textual media on my iPad w/ Magic Keyboard.
I’m sure that you will feel as though I’m not producing Real Long-Form Textual Media.
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> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
I've been saying this for a while, in the sense that the "year of the Linux desktop" isn't going to come from mass adoption of Linux on the desktop, but will come because overall "desktop" market share will decrease to the point where if you need a desktop, you are probably technical enough and more likely to be running Linux.
Desktop (and laptop) computing is becoming niche outside of work. Like you said, most folks just use their phones, and maybe an iPad. By having a non-day job computer at home, and having it be a core device, already puts you in a niche group of users.
Gamers, devs, media professionals and enthusiasts are the remaining desktop computing users. Linux is well suited to take over gamers and devs, media professionals will continue using Macs. So yeah, it might appear Linux usage is growing, but I think the more likely story is it's relatively stable and overall desktop usage is shrinking.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Why? If Windows & OSX desktops are in decline, but Linux isn't, I'd still celebrate that - apparently Linux is serving the more "important" / long-lived use cases?
The article is specifically claiming a shift and growth. But if all that really changed was an increase in percentage due to less devices overall there really isnt much of a shift or growth.
I think there is likely an argument that the people that would have previously used Linux are likely using Linux for tasks that would not easily work on a phone or a tablet and are likely more technical users.
Where as many users who would have previously used Windows or Mac for general basic computing can easily accomplish those tasks on their phones or tablets. (Not all tasks obviously, but there are a lot of tasks that an iPad can do that you would have previously done on your traditional computer).
That is why to me just celebrating a percent change really is not telling us much of the story. And to be clear here, I am asking the question not to say that the number is not something to celebrate but to ask why the number is the way it is and celebrate accordingly.
I'll chime in here; while I'm in one of those niches you described at the start of your comment (with multiple laptops, a gaming PC, and a homelab made up of what I'd call a reasonable number of physical computers of various descriptions), me and a few other friends of mine recently made the jump away from Windows and to various Linuxes on our gaming PCs.
I went for Ubuntu, while my friends mostly went to some type of "gaming-optimized" flavour of Arch.
I'm definitely an edge case as most computing goes, but it feels for the first time like the gaming-on-Linux train's gaining traction, and there's enough community support out there that making the jump feels like a palatable ideal.
Yeah, are there any big box retailers selling machines with Linux installed as an option? Maybe the numbers are small enough for hobbyists to make a dent, but until you see Linux machines in best buy, etc., this is probably due more to people dumping their personal windows machine in favor of a using their work laptop or iPad almost exclusively.
Dell
I'm not sure but going on 3 years now after having mostly only used it full time at a previous job where everyone's workstation was a Linux one.
It helps that I can now do all of my gaming on Linux, so I'm not touching Windows again, outside of an employer paying for my work devices to use it on.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
So, the true meaning of the "Year of the Linux Desktop" was that in the end there would only be a single unit left?
This is largely people who were previously Windows customers but who chose to go another way. Microsoft is doing a lot of shenanigans with their monopoly power, and anti-trust is largely toothless.
I know quite a lot of professionals, who for them the last straw was purchasing the professional edition, and then finding out later after an update that their company lock screens now have ad's posted; and worse, those ads frequently have malware that cause even more headaches for them in a unmanageable way.
The bean counters at MS pushed their biggest supporters over the knifes edge, and alot more people are getting serious about alternatives to MS now.
it seems grok thinks that its mainly due to more people using linux now: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_3ca6a3ae-6342-422e-9...
> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.
A Linux desktop is far better to run LLM experiments with.
My home, tinker workstation used to be Windows but there was no reason to keep it that way, when most of the build and support tooling prefer Linux.
That's a tiny minority of PC users, though.
It’s not 50% territory; but it’s enough to push it up from 1-2% to 5%.
There’s interest in LLM and GenAI beyond regular tinkerers; local NSFW image generator models are apparently a thing.
Tablets and phones have replaced PCs for casual use and content consumption. If you want to make anything beyond posts and videos you usually need a PC.
Mobile OSes are strictly designed for consumption and are too restricted for most other use cases. It’s an OS limit not a hardware issue.
How many of the Linux desktops counted here are Steam Decks?
The stats come from website trackers - do people browse the web on Steam Decks?
People do all kinds of crazy stuff with steam decks. I don't own one, but at least I give to steam that they created a general computing device that people can use however they please instead of yet another walled garden console. It would not surprise me if people actually also use them to browse the web.
I do. It's a device that is often hooked up to my TV so it becomes the shared device for watching things like Youtube.
I think this is probably it. That plus the SteamDeck and maybe other random linux running devices.
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