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Comment by pjmlp

6 hours ago

Linux has made it to the desktop, packaged inside VMs served by Apple, Microsoft and Google.

That's not really what everyone means.

However the recent success of gaming-related distros such as SteamOS and Bazzite seem to be succeeding where Usability-focused distros such as Mint, Pop!, and Zorin couldn't get deep traction

  • This should be a lesson about providing a product versus providing a technology.

    Ubuntu is "like Windows but not" which is mostly relevant to people boycotting Windows. Steam Deck is "a gamebox" which people who already like games might want to buy. Bazzite is "a thing that turns your computer into a gamebox." Of course, people don't actually want gameboxes either - they want to play games - but it's a few steps closer.

  • No, but that is what they will ever get from OEMs selling PCs at computer stores used by normies.

    Also lets not forget those distros play Windows games, because hardly any studio bothers with native Linux games.

    • They play both, which is much better for adoption anyway? And it's contributed substantial improvements back to wine and other projects.

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It just...has made it. Plenty of power users just use it as their primary OS. I think official figures under-estimate it because many people daily-driving will spoof user agents of other OSes.

And there's Android.

  • Ah, Android, with a userspace based on Java, Kotlin, C and C++ standard libraries, Android native APIs, without anything related to GNU/Linux, unless it is a rooted device, or one gets to package a full Linux userspace as an APK, which isn't fully compatible due to security enforcement mechanisms.

    I would look into those statistics regarding desktop world wide adoption, distribution per OS.

    • Oh come on. :-)

      Linux is not userspace. Linux is a kernel, and android is a parallel fork of the kernel. So android is a version of linux but is not GNU/Linux.

      Android/Linux, if you will. We dont have to be shy this.

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