I would like to see a breakdown of useage by region. For example I found stats that said India’s share of linux users rose from 9% in May to 15% in July. That’s quite a sharp increase in only 2 months! With a population of over 1 billion people, I’m betting this rise would have a significant increase in global stats, so I wonder what is behind it…
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india
India is introducing a Data Protection Bill (based on the GDPR, but with controversial exemptions for the government itself), so companies could be restructuring their IT systems. As to why India is high in general, our government has had a policy of encouraging free software for quite some time. Most schools and many government offices use either Ubuntu or BOSS (Debian with improved support for Indian languages).
Oh that’s interesting, exposing kids to it is a great idea because then they won’t have the whole barrier of the ‘fear of the unknown’ when considering installing it on their own PC. Thanks for sharing!
That’s amazing.
Here in Brazil, we had the government encouraging free software in the 2000s, but the projects and policies were all abandoned.
And to think we could have a similar adoption to yours today… sigh…
Back then, people didn’t understand how such projects give benefits in a long timeframe, and wanted immediate results, something impossible.
To be fair, I think the main reasons they support FOSS are (a) saving on licence fees and (b) not being dependent on a foreign company, which can be forced to stop supporting our infrastructure if we piss off the US / China.
But still good reasons, anyway.
IT’S HAPPENING !!! YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP !!!
The Beginning of the Revolution is upon us, my friends
For me it’s been year of the Linux desktop since maybe 2010 or something… Don’t remember exactly when I switched all computers to Linux. But something like that.
I think it was Ubuntu 8 or something when I first started using Linux everywhere at home. I remember the name Hardy Heron… And that was released in 2010.
I’ve had Linux on my work laptop for at least the last 5 years. It’s very reliable these days.
And I have been gaming on it full time for the last 2 years.
It’s all very much progress. Very much fun.
Ubuntu version numbers are very easy to track against the years, because they are the years. Ubuntu 8.X was released in 2008. If it was 2010 it would have been Ubuntu 10.X.
Ok thanks. Yeah memory is a bit fuzzy from that time and I probably switched a bit back and forth between other Linux also.
Same, but ~2007 for me. I switched when Windows crapped out on my rented computer at school and Linux just worked. I’ve been essentially Linux-only since then, with occasional returns to Windows for one-off tasks (e.g. play a certain game with friends, run an app, test something, etc).
The only time I’ve booted into Windows in the last year was to install Minecraft Bedrock edition so my kid could play with his friend, but his kid flaked and we haven’t been back since.
Top 10 anime comebacks
How is it rising so quickly, speculations as to what it is? Windows 11?
I hope people also support foss developers economically.
Does the SteamDeck contribute to the Linux number?
Linux is like 3% of Steam users, where maybe half are from Steam Deck users. So if it does contribute, it’s probably not a big factor in these totals. I’m guessing devs/enthusiasts are the main contributors
i mean it says it’s based on page views so SteamDeck wont have much of an impact unless its being used to browse the web id assume
Definitely
That’s cheating. The Steam Deck is a game console, not a desktop.
@argv_minus_one
@bzxt
Functionally it’s a laptop with a controller built in instead of a keyboard, plug it in to a dock with a keyboard and mouse, and even an external monitor, and you have a linux computer
probably yes
Probably not? Why would Steam Deck users access StatCounter? I have used the browser like 1-2 times total on my Steam Deck, but since it’s annoying, I just don’t bother anymore.
So I’m guessing Steam Deck doesn’t contribute much at all to this since it’s based on browser user agents.
@sugar_in_your_tea
@EliteCow
If that *is* the case, then the Deck probably still contributes indirectly, at least in my case I switched a few months before the Deck started shipping, but after it was announcedAnd while I was slightly familiar with linux and interested in switching before, the Deck made it so that I felt safer and more confident doing so
Sure, it’s certainly helping Linux adoption, but for every person that switches to Linux after buying a deck, there’s a ton that don’t.
I have two coworkers with a Steam Deck and neither have any interest in using Linux.
Wtf, wasn’t it like 2% a few weeks ago? That grew fast
I don’t quite believe it, but secretly hope that the metric is correct and it’s indeed accelerating.
Linux desktop has been ahead of its competitors, both Mac and Windows, for a while now. While Windows keeps getting worse and worse.
And now all games run on Linux desktop too (except Destiny).
May be people are slowly realizing and catching on?
I wouldn’t say that almost all games run on Linux. For example pirating Windows games are more finnicky, and running a game from Lutris (non-steam) can have more problems. I’ve had several games which couldn’t run, run brutally poorly (fixed it tho), crash with some type of interaction or just give 0 sound output, when it worked the last time. (Partly venting here)
It’s probably mostly perfect with Steam games.
Even on Steam it’s far from perfect, but it is getting a lot better and quickly too. The Steam Deck deserves a huge amount of praise for that. I just wish EAC would force their Linux compatibility option rather than leaving it to devs to opt-in. It would be nice if other anti-cheats got on board with similar things too.
It would be nicer if other anti-cheats and DRM systems would just stop being so invasive. IMO, anti-cheat should largely be server-side, with only basic behavioral checks client-side. Surely they don’t need kernel access to track mouse movements and whatnot.
Regardless, I just don’t like MP games very much anymore, so I just avoid anti-cheat in general. There are plenty of games that work really well on Linux that I’m really not starved for selection. In fact, most games I’m interested are either “verified” or “playable,” and most that aren’t seem to run just fine on my Steam Deck w/o any effort required.
I do occasionally run into games that don’t work, so I have a collection on Steam for games with “Technical Issues,” and there are only a handful in there. It’s very much the exception rather than the rule.
Hopefully so
Linux desktop has been ahead of its competitors
That really depends on what you’re looking for. It’s better for me, but it’s definitely not better for my wife. Her games don’t work on Linux (mostly Lost Ark), nor do her apps. She’s Korean and uses KakaoTalk, and that flat-out doesn’t work on Linux.
The Linux desktop is certainly great for many people, but it’s hardly the best option for everyone. I have coworkers that absolutely love macOS, but I just don’t see it (I use it for work, but that’s not by choice; even after 2 years, I still hate it).
Korean corporates really forces people to be backwards like this
MacOS in the streets, Debian in the sheets.
Lol. I actually use OpenSUSE in the sheets. ;)
I think that was steam and this is some other metric, maybe browser stats?
Yup, StatCounter uses browser stats. So 3% of browsers that access statcounter (or whatever network of sites they have) report as Linux. That’s a pretty unreliable number, so I’d expect that number to be off by ± 2% or so in either direction (though probably higher than 3% because why would you pretend to be Linux?).
Ha! I just converted two old HP laptops from ChromeOS Flex to MX Linux. A lot more useful for me…
@Kaped Good to hear
Microsoft office on Linux soon, I hope.
I know there are alternatives but my files do not work with them. I use it professionally and truly need Microsoft office… sadly.
Damn Microsoft and their proprietary things they add to office documents…
Have you tried free office? It’s really good. If be surprised if your files didn’t work in it but if they don’t I guess your waiting for office for Linux or perhaps trying office 365.
Thanks, office 365 doesn’t even work.
I’m in the process of converting the files so I’m it dependent on office, but it’s hundreds of files and it needs to be done manually.
I run Office 365 as a PWA at work, it works good enough. And I pretty much use it just for Outlook anyway (I never can get the shared calendars to work in the native Linux email clients), LibreOffice is good enough for my word docs, diagrams and spreadsheets. It helps that we use SharePoint, which doesn’t support all of the formatting features of desktop Office anyway
I don’t think they would do that because a lot of governmental institutions could easily switch to Linux.
That and why give away their market share? They have people in a stranglehold because of their incopatibilities with other office clients. Just like they did with Internet Explorer.
I did not consider that. I am surprised that any government even allows Windows to be used.
They use an enterprise or custom government version which has a lot of the tracking and annoying crap disabled
But can they be sure the nsa is not watching?
The relevance of this extends even beyond the specific circumstances. This is the metric that should be keeping corporate social media up at night. Viable open-source competition offering equivalent services appearing and gaining an established user base is the beginning of the end of a constant-growth business model.
Tbh, Linux atm needs a good way to restore incase something goes wrong. The rule to use a USB stick and then chroot and fix is not the best idea.
A week ago I ran into issue where my Storage ran full (I was downloading+ manjaro was updating in BG) and then apparently the system didn’t boot up coz of this. It took me sometime to realise this issue and fix it.
You can’t expect an avg user to be able to perform so much.
Another incident, My friend somehow ended up in a state with no kernel installed and thus couldn’t boot up.
That sounds like a job for btrfs snapshots, they’re provided by default in openSUSE
Cries in ext4
You can try doing an in-place conversion, here’s a guide and the official documentation, remember to BACKUP and TEST your BACKUP at least twice, if things don’t go well, you’ll be able to fall back.
If you want to avoid all the setup headache, just reinstall with btrfs by default (I suggest Fedora Silverblue or openSUSE Tumbleweed for that) of course you’ll still have to backup, just your data though, to be restored on the new systemSecond suggestion for SilverBlue today. Maybe I will try it out once I have enough time on hand to backup my system and then restore.
I’ve been loving it honestly, I used to mess up my systems pretty often in a way that upgrading to new releases had to be done from the command line because of random repositories I added, so things felt unstable.
Immutable systems on the other hand are dumbass (me) proof and I can still do what I used to do with those repos in safe environments or Flatpak now that it has become so ubiquitous for packaging.
Immutability is not a must, even though I really like the philosophy, in fact, if you’re comfortable with what you have, you might be fine just converting over your current OS to btrfs.Good luck, whichever option you try!
Thanks for informing. Will be definitely trying it.
Pretty sure this is exactly what the “immutable OS” is for, like what’s found in Fedora Silverblue (and less notably in the SteamDeck).
It essentially lets you break whatever you want in userland, but it mounts the root filesystem in read-only, and literally re-images the entire machine each update w/ the added bonus of halting and rolling back the update if any errors are detected during the update. All of which occurs “magically” behind the scenes upon shutdown, so it requires essentially little to no user interaction to manage core updates.
Also all graphical software is limited to flatpaks, so you really take out a lot of the user confusion about installing on Linux and dealing with system-specific weirdness.
Woah. Didn’t knew about this. Looks very promising.
Yeah, honestly without memeing, if it ever does happen it would probably be the causes of “the year of the linux desktop”.
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I wouldn’t say that tbh. Sure it has some issues, but it has been stable enough for me for the past 2+ years.
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Yup. If you are updating on regular intervals it works pretty well.
Is Linux meant for the average user then?
If the average user doesn’t need some specific products, yes. Gaming is not an issue anymore. You are only constrained by products that can’t run on a browser and lazy ass companies like Adobe.
Honestly, the current DEs like GNOME and KDE are at the point that they can be driven by your avg user without much efforts.
So polishing these parts of the system will really help in adoption.
Depends what the average user needs to do.
A lot of distros already implement different methods to avoid this. There are already comments about a couple of methods, timeshift is another one, it’s pushed heavily by Linux Mint, for example.
I see most of these tools are more to prevent them from going broke. A GUI recovery tool which is distro-agnostic would be gold honestly .
and there was much rejoicing!
And this is through summer and universities break. Its fair to expect a higher increase through the last Quarter of the year and probably surpassing ChromeOS with 3.24%
I do wonder how steams mau looks throughout the year.
Currently running Windows 10, but refuse to upgrade to Windows 11. Next rebuild will hopefully be Linux-based, and am getting my head around it slowly through my Steam Deck. It has immensely improved since my uni days in the early 2000s.
Gnome 45 and Plasma 6 are coming by the end of the year. Add that Wine/Proton further development to bring in even more games. It’ll all increase Linux user experience even further to what Windows is offering right now.
Penguins together strong
