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Clickbaity title on the original article, but I think this is the most important point to consider from it:
After getting to 1% in approximately 2011, it took about a decade to double that to 2%. The jump from 2% to 3% took just over two years, and 3% to 4% took less than a year.
Get the picture? The Linux desktop is growing, and it’s growing fast.
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Damn Linux becoming mainstream. How will I feel like a superior tech elite now?
Only use TTY
Plan 9 it is !
Not even trying the Plan B?
If they’re typing I fear it may already be too late.
Delete all browsers. Only access the web using curl.
Curl? You thunk I can’t craft my own web requests??
Piefed is actually weirdly usable in w3m.
You could use Arch, btw
I assume you mean raw? Because I’m a noob and I installed Garuda, which is Arch, and it’s been dead easy.
Everyone could use Arch! Let’s all flex together!
Switch to BSD
Pretty sure BSD is dying, Netcraft confirmed that like 30 years ago.
That’s why we need to switch to TempleOS
Plan9 all the way!
Maybe it’s dying, but it won’t die in our lifetimes, so it’s fine.
I am actually also thinking about creating customized version of OpenBSD as a side project.
Is it any good
I only installed it once for fun in a VM but didn’t really use it. It’s different to Linux but you could get used to it. As far as I know however the hardware that it properly runs on is quite limited, mainly older stuff. So I wouldn’t recommend it as a daily driver but I would recommend to try it out.
I would definitely recommend OPNSense. The hardware support is quite good
Can you use OPNsense for general things or is it tailored to one specific usecase?
You can install packages on it, I’d say it’s tailored to be a firewall/router
GNU HURD.
Lots of “elite” distros to use. No need to ditch Linux.
You can still use arch (btw) and be a superior tech elite to me, who just uses bazzite because i don’t want to tinker in my free time
Guess it’s time to move to Gentoo ~ or Nix
Still rocking BeOS :)
One day Haiku will be ready
About to be 6.0000001% when my Kubuntu download finishes. I’m finally taking the dive boys, linux on main here we go.
I think kubuntu was the very first distro I ever installed in a VM when trying out Linux 10 years ago. I’ve since moved on (an aging Arch install right now, which will eventually be replaced by a NixOS install whenever I get around to it), but just wanted to say that a whole new world lies at your footsteps, my friend. Enjoy it. It’s like discovering the wonder of computing for the first time.
welcome!
i use ubuntu and its a good choice, but id recommend installing gnome-software and its flatpak plugin and using that instead of the slower snaps. its perfect otherwise, enjoy!
KDE has its own Discover thing for downloading Flatpaks FWIW.
You still need the underlying package manager installed (it’ll prompt you to do so), and on Plasma 5.0 you also need a special integration plugin for each package manager (merged into Discover since I think Plasma 6.0).
Discover is a joy to use.
Congrats and welcome. You are a good man.
Congratulations, and welcome to the Linux world. You won’t regret it. But also don’t get scared if something doesn’t work right away!
Cool, welcome! I assume you’re aware that it won’t be all sunshine and rainbows from day 1, but give it time and leverage the community to solve any issues you run into. Effective bug reports and knowledge sharing make the experience better for everyone.
To me it’s worth having control over my hardware, and an OS that’s designed to work for me and not some corpo against me.
Nice! That’s what I use. Don’t see alot of others talk about Kubuntu. I enjoy the heck out of it. It doesn’t play games all that well, but that could also be user error as well. Still, so far it’s my favorite distro. Good luck on your journey!
FWIW, Fedora with KDE is fantastic - been using that as my distro of choice (for systems I want a UI on at least) for a few years now and I love it.
Wow it was 5% yesterday
at this point linux will have more than 100% market share by next week!!!
They used a different data source for this one and mentioned why they preferred this one over the one from the day before.
So what you’re saying is that if we just keep switching to different data sources, we could get above 50% in less than two months!
Invest now!
I read a similarly sensationalist headline with 4% two months ago and 5% yesterday. What’s up with the headline makers?
Linux is gaining market share quickly as the Windows 10 EOL rapidly approaches. There is still a massive amount of perfectly great hardware out there that isn’t officially supported by Windows 11, and only 3 months until Windows 10 reaches EOL.
According to more realistic data, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-202406-202506 the market share has been around 4% for the last year, even slightly declining in the meantime.
But that doesn’t make for nice, sensationalist headline stoked by wishful thinking.
Sorry to say, Linux isn’t going mainstream anytime soon and by and large the end of Win10 just means that the comparatively small group of users still running 5+ years old hardware will just buy a new PC or keep using their outdated OS.
In fact, if you combine the market share of outdated Windows versions (XP-8.1) you get a market share very close to the market share of Linux.
As much as we all would love it if the Linux market share goes to 50% in fall, it’s not going to happen.
The main issues with Linux adoption (it’s not preinstalled and most people have no idea which OS they are using and really can’t be bothered to reinstall) are just as present now as they were for the last 30 years.
All it takes is momentum. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, and I think it’s gaining momentum because of Valve. Gaming was always the one thing stopping people from checking out Linux.
Now, however, more and more people are trying it out. More tech YouTubers are trying Linux, which means more exposure. Distros are becoming more refined. KDE is much better than it used to be because of Valve. All in all, there’s true momentum building.
In due time, Linux will be preinstalled on computers and laptops, and because of this, more people will contribute to Linux. People are fed up with the bloat and heavy AI push of Windows 11.
Bursting the Linux hype bubble on Lemmy, that’s courage!
And even though I have seen that the average price of machines with Linux preinstalled may be close to some machines with Windows, I would guess that most people are going to go with the latter. Easier access to purchase one, familiarity etc.
This. Personally, I’m scrambling to get all my shit sorted out on my desktop before switching over
Same here!
Agreed. I think we’re still going to see a LOT of growth in Linux market share by the end of this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 7%-8% by then.
Literally switched to Linux on my desktop yesterday.
Good job! And welcome :)
When it gets to 7%, is that when there is more malware designed for Linux desktop ?
There is already plenty of malware targeting devs on Linux where is it’s strongest userbase.
Yeah, unfortunate to rain in the parade but GNU/Linux definitely needs some attention sooner rather than later. Plenty of design benefits, but also plenty of pitfalls from an OS sec POV.
Average users aren’t installing SELinux or Qubes so I hope no-one was actually going to reply with what Linux can do as opposed to the everyday user experience.
A few years outdated, but relevant: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html
but also plenty of pitfalls from an OS sec POV.
Can’t possibly be more vulnerable than Windows, the system where you can elevate yourself to highest privileges by simply clicking “Yes” on a prompt without a password, and where most users are running outdated versions of their software because they never update anything, or have a thousand background “updater” applets that are scheduled to run periodically and have the ability to install arbitrary executables from their servers.
If you run a repo-only system, where everything you install comes from the first-party distro repo, you’ll likely be fine. Just as you are on Windows or Android if you only download apps from the first-party store.
But like on Windows and Android, you’ll quickly reach the limit of what you can do with first-party store only.
Especially stuff like gaming requires non-repo/non-store stuff pretty quickly, and then you are on exactly the same turf as on Windows.
There’s no world where Windows users only use the official store. In fact, that’s why every “S” version of Windows always failed.
Exactly my point. Also on Linux you quickly get to the limits of what you can find in the first-party repos without ppas or downloading .rpm/.deb/… files. And same as on Windows, having a malware-free first-party repo/store won’t protect you from malware if you download your programs from elsewhere.
where everything you install comes from the first-party distro repo, you’ll likely be fine.
Canonical’s Snapcraft has a bad reputation for a reason. Many reasons. But compromised apps is a major one.
Can’t possibly be more vulnerable than Windows
The linked article provides many examples where security techniques lag far behind Windows. Vulnerability isn’t as simple as being ‘more vulnerable’ or ‘less vulnerable’, it’s a complex concept, and both GNU/Linux and Windows have design decisions which make each better than the other in various ways. We need to understand security in a more nuanced way than “x is better than y” if we actually want to protect ourselves from threats.
A Linux installation can be set to run root with no password or prompt. A Linux user can choose to never update their software - one could argue that Windows forced OS updates are an improvement here. The argument that the typical user has more technical understanding is a weak defense (as in, we really really really should not rely on that) and also irrelevant when we’re talking about Linux gaining a wider audience.
Yeah, but the user might need to package it first for their distro.
But it is only in the US and not globally. Anyway, competition is good.
wtf I love Norway now? Sweden is at like 2%.
But Norway’s Linux spiked up to almost 30% in July 2024 as well. So I don’t really trust these sites. My guess is that it’s due to Tesla’s web browser or something? Tesla is the most popular electric car brand in Norway: 77k Model Y and 50k Model 3 are registered, and the only model with higher numbers is the Nissan Leaf with 81k, but that’ll be taken over very shortly (so far in 2025, there have been over 11k Model Y registrations, with the next runner-up being the Toyota BZ4X with 4,6k)
Possibly, but it does explicitly state desktop operating systems and I don’t know if Tesla’s would count towards that.
Wow. Impressive. And in Sweden we are only 2% or something like that. Why so many in Norway. How did you do it?
9% in India. But this is down from a peak of ~15% late last year when the govt was worried about US sanctions and was pushing for Linux adoption.
Why did go back to 9%? They all forgot about that theat or what?
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There’s an uptick in ‘Unknown’ (currently at 26%).
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Linux adoption might have slowed down because India - US relations have improved since then, because Trump can be distracted by promising him trade deals. Of course the deal he wants (giving US agri companies access to the Indian market) will face opposition from farmers’ unions, so I’m not sure what the govt’s long-term plan is.
One good thing is that when a govt dept switches to Linux, it sort of sticks. And govt contracts are very profitable, so we’ll likely see greater interest from both hardware and software companies.
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Exponential growth!
It makes perfect sense, the resistance of having Windows legacy software etc becomes smaller the more of that goes out of use, the resistance of everyone only knowing Windows becomes smaller with nobody even knowing Windows, and the resistance of corporate interests becomes smaller because it’s all in the Web, and the Web has been corrupted and Chrome works on Linux.
So. Listen to me carefully. If Linux domination happens without FreeBSD and Haiku normalization, then things are bad.
The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
Windows’ market share is being nibbled to death by cats.
Nah it’s just being replaced with phones.
Low tech users used to have cheap windows machines, now they have phones and tablets.
Zathras, holding up a thumb drive with a Windows Installer ISO:
“No, never use this.”
New distro: ZathrOS
Only allowed to use if your hostname is Epsilon3. And instead of systemd you get TheGreatMachine.
Error message: This why ZathrOS not have nice things.
A king once summoned a wise man who had done him a great service and said, “Name your reward.” The wise man replied, “Your Majesty, I ask for a simple thing. Give me one percent Linux desktop market share for the first square of the chessboard, two percent for the second square, four percent for the third square, and so on, doubling the amount for each of the 64 squares.” The king, thinking this was a modest request, said, “Surely you jest! Such a small reward for such a great service? Ask for gold, land, or jewels instead.” But the wise man insisted, and the king agreed. The king ordered his treasurer to calculate the total. Starting with 1% for the first square, 2% for the second, 4% for the third, 8% for the fourth… by the time they reached the tenth square, they needed 512% of the desktop market. The treasurer, pale with realization, informed the king that by the 64th square, they would need more market share than could possibly exist in the entire universe of computing devices. The king then understood that what seemed like a humble request was actually impossible to fulfill, and he gained a new respect for the power of exponential growth.
It already goes over 100% market share after only 8 squares. 512% seems like a weird place to stop? How can you have more than 100% market share?
In the original it also supposedly amounts to more grain then there is in the kingdom.
Not supposedly, but mathematically. Even if the grateful king ruled the entire planet and the great warrior were willing to settle for grains the size of a single atom, the king would be unable to pay in full; the total of grains on the whole chessboard would be 2^64 grains, but there are only 2^50 atoms on Earth.
Ooh, so I am thinking we make a black hole seeded with nothing but rice.
Theoretically you could make a black hole with a single grain of rice. You just have to figure out how to crush it down enough.
Obviously this is just more theory, but I think I’ve heard that the minimum size for a black hole is about on the order of a big mountain’s mass; something to do with the amount you can increase density before you’re actually forced to compress electron clouds down toward the proton.
I think that happens is any black hole formation. At least that’s my understanding of how neutron stars are formed. The electrons get forced into the nucleus and turn the protons into neutrons. From there it’s quark gluon plasma then a black hole.
In any case, I have no idea how either a grain of rice or a mountain could be made to do such a thing.
It also wouldn’t last very long due to Hawking radiation, but that’s another thing.
Fun fact: while Hawking radiation will eventually evaporate away almost all of a black hole’s mass, the black hole will eventually become small enough that physicists think the system would stabilize (because it would have so little mass that it would actually have to reduce entropy in the system in order to evaporate any further). It would then just wander the universe, interacting with gravity in a tiny way, but being utterly invisible to any other means of detection we have. Add to that the fact that there were likely a huge number of black holes in the early universe, which was long enough ago for sufficiently-small black holes to have evaporated to this stable state, and you come up with a plausible explanation…for dark matter.
Yeah, I appreciate the reference, it’s just that my brain got stuck on the comparison breaking due to using percentage instead of some absolute count.
Better start populating some more planets. See you on Manjaro Delta Prime.
KDE Plasma is genuinely good
Kubuntu is a drop-in replacement for Windows 10
If you game Cachyos (just installs everything relevant for you, coming to linux itll help you figure out whats commonly used), endeavoros if you wanna set up arch quickly, grab stuff for yourself and build your own desktop, bazzite if you game and are scared to break shit, idk if I would reccomend ubuntu just because I don’t like snaps or the snap store, just comparing it to flathub, flathubs missing a few games/apps like rexuiz but nothing important.
Bazaar is pretty nice to use (new bazzite default), one thing I disliked coming to linux was lack of gui download manager and progress in the appstores, tried them all and hated them, while Bazaar feels great and comparing the search to others it actually works, like if I search fps all the fps games pop up, while on others maybe one or two that have it in the title.
KDE Plasma is so good, I love it. But I think that Cinnamon (the default environment for Linux Mint) is also super user-friendly.
There’s no good excuse not to use Linux in 2025 if you’re a home user. Except maybe if you rely on some software such as SharePoint, the Adobe or the Serif Affinity suites.
Linux Mint Cinnamon was my first stepping stone off of Win10. It’s been wonderful.
I wonder what percentage of people given a Kubuntu laptop, when asked what OS they’re using, would say “Windows?”. I’m going to guess 20%
Most technology adoption follows an S curve, it can often take a long time to start to get going. Linux has gradually and steadily been improving especially for games and other desktop uses while at the same time Microsoft has been making Windows worse. I feel more that this is Microsoft’s fault, they have abandoned the development of desktop Windows and the advancement of support for modern processor designs and gaming hardware. This has for the first time has let Linux catch up and in many cases exceed Windows capabilities on especially gaming which has always been a stubborn issue. Its still a problem especially in hardware support for VR and other peripherals but its the sort of thing that might sort itself out once the user base grows and companies start producing software for Linux instead.
It might not be enough, but the switching off Windows 10 is causing a change which Microsoft might really regret in a few years.
I’ll hang on to 10 as long as they’ll let me, but I am never going to 11. Then it’ll be a distro for dis bro.
Sorry.
Just curious and not judging your decision in anyway, but… “What are you waiting for?”
For me, VR support. Rocking win10 IOT LTSC on my main PC until compatibility improves, but already switched to Mint on my work laptop (and likely the main PC before/during 2032)
Awesome! Mint is great, it’s my number one recommendation.
I’ve never tried vr before and I’d really like to at some point.
OpenXR/SteamVR is an amazing system, and it’s easy to buy a second hand headset and just replace the face gasket (The Valve index has them attached with a few magnets). Especially with games like VRchat, Half Life ALYX, and modded support in games like Minecraft, PCVR is pretty good right now for newbies!
The desktop has been Microsoft’s to lose for 30 years…
Microsoft has been making Windows worse. I feel more that this is Microsoft’s fault, they have abandoned the development of desktop Windows and the advancement of support for modern processor designs and gaming hardware.
Moores law is dead since a long time except for graphic cards and GPUs. This means you can’t keep adding things to desktop software in the style of “What IBM giveth, Microsoft takes away”.
Existing development paradigms don’t add significant qualities to many-processor hardware.
Which also explains part of the AI craze. It is investment money searching for a sensible use.
Most technology adoption follows an S curve
For successful technologies. Sometimes technologies just don’t catch on, like 3d TVs, or VR or Segways. Then the curve is more up then back down to zero.
But yeah, this time might be different. Linux has more or less reached feature parity with Windows. Games run just as well or better under Linux, with only a little bit of fiddling. That alone might not be enough, but having that happen when Windows 10 is reaching end of life, and Microsoft wants you to buy new expensive hardware for the privilege of moving to Windows 11, and just as they’re adding all kinds of new ads and AI bullshit into Windows.
Personally, I’m already on Linux, so my main reason for hoping it gets more momentum is so that device manufacturers make sure their drivers work well in Linux. Full driver support and full software support for devices is the main thing that’s still a bit of a pain.
Does it count that I have four computers running Linux because I can’t help myself?
These stats are actually just tracking the number of linux desktops you have
At a few work computers I once changed the user agent to say Firefox and Linux some years ago.
As a daily Linux user, this makes me VERY VERY happy!!
Chaotic Good Billionaire does a solid for Linux, Windows users devastated
Gabe Marx
Jumped to Bazzite never looked back. Let’s goooo
