I know this might be a couple months old, but I didn’t know we already passed 4%.
It’s cool and all, but I’m surprised it’s not 10% at this point. Microsoft is shitting in their customers mouth and Apple is a luxury brand at this point.
For desktop or everything else. Because if its:
Web Servers, Supercomputers, Android Smartphones, Smart TVs, Network Routers, Network Switches, Embedded Devices, IoT Devices, NAS (Network-Attached Storage) Devices, Raspberry Pi, Smartwatches, Home Automation Devices, Google Chromebooks, Set-top Boxes, Drones, Digital Signage Devices, 3D Printers, Medical Devices, ATM Machines, Point of Sale (POS) Devices, Digital Cameras, Gaming Consoles, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Automotive Infotainment Devices, Mainframes, Telecommunications Equipment, Scientific Research Equipment, Security Devices, Cloud Servers, Network Firewalls, Storage Area Networks (SAN), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Devices, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Devices, Big Data Analytics Devices, Machine Learning Devices, Artificial Intelligence Devices, Financial Trading Devices, Air Traffic Control Devices, Spacecraft Control Devices, Weather Forecasting Devices, Broadcast Automation Devices, Railway Signaling Devices, Electric Grid Control Devices, Smart Meters, E-Readers, Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging Stations, Robotics Devices
then Linux (or some kind of *Nix system) is probably what is running it. The only market share I dont see is desktop.
I don’t have any hard numbers, only what I have seen out in the world. But a good number of POS systems, embedded things like MRI machines, tire balancers in mechanics shops and ATMs run some flavor of embedded Windows.
It is not nearly as huge as *nix is, but it is not exactly uncommon either.
4% is high considering there are probably more corporate desktops tham personal ones
Because every computer bought by the average human being, has Windows on it.
First off, I DO NOT count ChromeOS, but whatever.
Secondly, when is 18% of anything “dominant”??? The fuck? Arstechnica back up off the pipe.
They probably mean of Linux flavored ps coverage.
(I’m aware Mac is very different than Linux, but it is more closely grouped with Linux than Windows)
I don’t think Microsoft (or Apple) want people to have personal computers anymore in the way that PCs have historically existed. That is to say, they don’t want your computer capable of running arbitrary code of your choosing. They don’t want your computer to have the potential to do everything, to run everything, to make anything.
They want to control and lock down all aspects of your machine and what it can do, retain ownership of hardware via software licenses, and monetize every click and keystroke.
Microsoft doesn’t want you to have a functional computer anymore, they want you to have a dummy terminal that runs Office 365 and Copilot.
This is EXACTLY right.
They are dividing users into two groups. Unintelligent users who run Windows or MacOS in an extremely controlled limited way with AI assisting and monitoring everything remotely and reporting it back to the mothership…
Or people who are above an IQ of 85 and willing to learn to use Linux.
They want PCs that work like smartphones, with apps completely self contained and unmodifiable, where the OS is a black box that no one but them can see in to.
I think if it was up to them, and latency was low enough, they probably would have pushed some kind of “fully remote convertible laptop” where they literally own everything you do in a cloud, I don’t even want to search if this is a thing that exist already
Linux founder Linus Torvalds, for example, has suggested that a lack of a standardized desktop that goes across all Linux distros has held back Linux adoption on desktop.
Yeah. Well, in on Linux in large part because of the diversity, choice, and options. If I wanted a monolithic, incestuous lock-in culture, I’d be on Windows, or a Mac.
Linux may have been simply making an observation, not a judgment, but fuck monocultures.
I’m thinking this comes from the consideration of taking imagery at the root of people’s brains when they hear Linux. Reiterating elements of the Windows or Mac UI over the decades, even if they had small visual changes, enable a significantly large population of the world to imagine the desktop even just while mentioned in a passing. Anyone that doesn’t use either of these OSes at least can have a basic imagery popping up about it due to constant advertising of the desktop via direct ads, support pages, tech websites using generic desktop images, screen shares, etc.
Linux is wild west in this regard. Everyone knows how Windows or MacOS looks like thanks to their abundant copies of descriptive bounty posters, but only other Linux users are familiar with other Linux desktops and that is usually as the names of fellow bounty hunters.
Yeah. When I think of Linux, I think of the terminal. It’s the only constant over the years.
My septagenarian father thinks Linux looks like Linux Mint, because that’s what I first set up for him, and that’s what I walked him through installing on a new computer.
Viva la difference.
To much diversity of options and choices are just as bad and damaging as having none at all.
But how much is too much? Diversity is a great thing for people, makes technology less authoritative and more inclusive.
Authorative drive is what makes software more inclusive. It can focus the resources and attention where its needed, to create a superior product. Linus being a bulldog with the Kernel is proof enough with that.
Design by commitee does not make things more inclusive. It just leads to people not getting their way, having a huff, and screaming “I’M GOING TO FORK THIS AND GO MAKE MY OWN VERSION, WITH BLACKJACK, AND HOOKERS!”, and now you have two teams doing the same thing, and being lesser due to the split dev time and attention. and will probably lead to more forks, and more splits of teams.
Doesnt mean it has to be monolithic/monoculture. but a single product that serves 80% of everyones wants and desires is a better, superior product to one that tries to cater to and serve 100% to each, different individual.
and most people wont even notice the 20% difference in their everyday usage and life. They just get told something, or get a wrong idea, and are hard pressed to give it up cause humans can rarely admit their own wrong.
Music and graphic art software is the only advantage I can find for MacOS over Linux at this point. I love the Apple silicon but I don’t see that being a long term advantage.
Stability and UI/UX are still lightyears ahead in Mac, and to some extent Windows. Don’t get me wrong, they suck for lots of reasons, but I think Linux has a lot of catching up to do to be as usable as Mac/Windows for the ordinary user.
I think standardizing package formats, and more mature desktop managers and proprietary drivers will go a long way to fixing that though.
I struggle to do the same things on the Mac that are trivial in Windows and Linux.
For example, I gave up on Homebrew because it was difficult to install. For one thing, it required me to set up an Apple developer account on my version of MacOS
I don’t use my girlfriend’s Mac book because the OS is not as intuitive, like I found out recently you have to drag the icon in to install things. Who comes up with this shit?
You often install binaries in Linux by moving them to a directory you can call them from. Which is the same thing MacOs has you do graphically. You can do it on command line as well.
Using a Mac is much the same as Linux. Mac OS is unix and Linux is a copy of unix systems. Your just used to the windows ways that aren’t that good to start with.
That’s fair, I think Mac’s extremely opinionated design that be grating at times. Also, heaven help you if you want to do something non-standard on a Mac, the system fights you every step of the way.
I gave up on Homebrew because it was difficult to install.
It just includes as a dependency the Mac command line developer tools, which can be installed pretty easily from what I remember.
And what I like is that it’s a normal Unix style shell, with almost all the utilities you’d expect.
you have to drag the icon in to install things.
I mean that’s about 100 times better than Windows’ default of running an installer that isn’t easily reversible.
High DPI screen support in Linux is still troublesome, especially between multiple screens with different DPI/resolution, especially between GTK and Qt programs.
And I haven’t played around with Asahi yet, but it’ll be hard to top the built-in power/suspend/hibernate/resume behavior and its effect on battery life (especially in being able to just count on it to work if you suspend for days, where it seamlessly switches to hibernate and starts back up very quickly). But on my old Intel MacBook, the battery life difference between MacOS and and Linux is probably two to one. Some of it is Apple’s fault for refusing to document certain firmware/hardware features, but the experience is the experience.
High DPI screen support in Linux is still troublesome, especially between multiple screens with different DPI/resolution, especially between GTK and Qt programs
Hopefully the success of Steam Deck will push manufacturers to increase their investment into Linux driver development. Having only used Linux servers in the past decade or so, I was pleasantly surprised when I came back to Linux desktop and realized that there were no other drivers (except Nvidia) to install since everything was baked into the kernel! Incredibly convenient!
it’ll be hard to top the built-in power/suspend/hibernate/resume behavior and its effect on battery life
Yeah, it’s difficult to compete with a fully vertically integrated stack like Apple’s, and they do lock down things so other software is always at a disadvantage. Hopefully Linux laptops become competitive so this improves.
What is your definition of stability lol
Windows crashes are standard… Linux are pretty rare. At least in my exp
Mac is powered by Unix under the hood and uptimes are generally in the months for me personally. Much stability.
Well, in my case stability refers to grub display loading at all :)
I installed Debian on my PC with an RTX 4090 and it just refuses to load the grub display on first boot (grub loads, but there’s no DisplayPort signal). I was able to get it working by switching to the latest stable backports kernel and proprietary Nvidia drivers, but then it stopped working again and now I have to figure out how to fix it.
I don’t mind this at all, and I’m even enjoying the troubleshooting process, but I think this would have been quite the headache for the average user!
People find Windows easier to use because they are used to the quirks. Of course you shouldn’t let a beginner try Arch, but there are plenty of beginner friendly distros. The complications often come from installing Linux in the first place but the average user will have just as much trouble installing Windows.
I think Linux still prioritizes the command-line for a lot of config/setup, which can be extremely daunting for new users. In addition, there are also a million options for everything, which is great for freedom, but really confusing for newbies.
I should note that both of these things are amazing pluses for me as a power user/developer.
It’s not even that.
By and large, most industry standard softwares are only available on Windows and macOS. Take word processing for example. It doesn’t matter if there are open source alternatives that gets it 95% of the way there. Companies by and large would not want to run the risk of that last 5% (1%, 0.01% doesn’t matter) creating a situation where there’s misunderstanding with another business entity. Companies will by and large continue to purchase and expect their employees to use these standard softwares. People will by and large continue to train themselves to use these softwares so they have employable skills so they can put food on the table.
No one cares about how easy or hard it is to install something. IT (or local brick and mortar computer retailer) takes care of all that. Whether or not it is compatible with consistently making money / putting food on the table is way more important.
Until we have Microsoft Office for Linux; Adobe Creative Suite for Linux; Autodeks AutoCAD for Linux; etc etc. not even the janky “Microsoft Office for Mac” little cousin implementation but proper actual first party for Linux releases, it is unlikely we’ll see competitive level of Linux desktop adoption.
Agree. Windows has almost a forty year “quirk bake-in”. All your relatives and non-savvy friends are NOT going to learn anything new (even mac) if they can help it.
The more droolproof linux can be the easier it will be adopted. Whether or not it mimics windows is a choice, but either way we’re losing computer literacy instead of everyone being computer literate. Sadly.
I think most users dont install windows period. It just comes with the computer. And if it breaks, they get a new one. Thats it.
I’m by no means a musician, let alone a professional one, but this part does admittedly suck. The actual sound backend works phenomenally well, especially when combining Pipewire and JACK for audio production, however using Windows-native VST/VST3 plugins is a horrible experience. A lot of mine are either really laggy, or just don’t load properly at all