With MS enshitifying Windows at an ever increasing pace and the hard work of open source developers, volunteers, advocates, to make Linux better and more approachable, I won’t be surprised at all to see that percentage move up.
“You mean its free and doesn’t try to sell me other products the whole time I’m using it?”
There is the psychological factor that Windows behaves more like malware with their forced full screen overlays to shove the Edge into your ass. Over and over again. Microsoft doesn’t take No for an answer like an abusive partner.
You put words to the feeling I get whenever I turn on my work PC. It has relatively little to do with my actual work. It’s the dread of the psychological abuse of everything asking me to update, upgrade, and look at how cool our AI is, try all of our other products, share your opinion, etc. etc. etc. I would be twice as productive if they let me BYOOS (bring your own OS) and if my day to day tools were Linux compatible. There are best practices for this kind of thing, but many of the most “reputable” tech companies willingly disregard them in favor of mind games and dark psychology.
And Microsoft keeps enshitifying Windows because they know they can get away with it. So many businesses are backed into a corner and have essential parts of their business that are only compatible with Microsoft’s tech. They can’t switch, they won’t even entertain the idea (much less the time/energy required to test it out). The folks at Microsoft know they’ve won. I won’t be surprised when they make Windows 12’s compatibility even more egregious than 11’s.
I’ve got LXC’s running on my Proxmox host and been playing or working with Linux for 25 years, but on my desktop I’ve always run Windows. Linux is great right up until it isn’t and then I spend more time than I’d like troubleshooting it. On my desktop I just want things to work and Windows does that. I hate the bloatware, spyware and the nagging to switch to Edge, but everything I run, runs, including games with anti-cheat. I’m sure I could get Linux to a similar state, but it would take a lot more effort.
I stopped distro hopping around a decade ago, and just use default Ubuntu LTS releases. No shade from me.
I’m not going to pretend that Ubuntu is the coolest, hippest, trendiest distro around, but it’s good enough, stake enough, and gosh darn it I’m just used to it.
Ubuntu is great because they have a huge community and an enterprise-class, fully supported product. No shade for using it. It’s not my cup of tea, I often find myself wanting to be more on the bleeding edge, and I’ve found Endeavor (an Arch variant) to be amazingly capable.
But I’ve also been using Linux on and off since 97 and exclusove (at least in personal life) since like 2015.
StatCounter statistics are directly derived from hits—as opposed to unique visitors—from 3 million sites, which use StatCounter, resulting in total hits of more than 15 billion per month.[5] No artificial weightings are used to correct for sampling bias, thus the numbers in the statistics can not be considered to be representative samples.
I moved back to Windows for the games years ago. But I’m never going to install a copy of Windows 11 because fuck that shit, and the next time I move to Linux, I suspect games won’t be a problem.
It’s a big thing because it’s much easier to make fun of an objectively better lifestyle choice (avoiding meat or Microsoft etc.) than it is to try and argue against it. Especially because that would force people to question their own behaviour and that can be difficult and hurtful.
hey I try to be vegan for software, but a moderate and balanced diet is the objectively better lifestyle choice than forcing beans and grass down your throat, and producing enough methane to power 2 dutch ovens.(I am from a predominantly vegetarian culture, most of our meat dishes have only 10% meat in them, which I think is a good enough amount)
It’s not making fun of the lifestyle, it’s the the fact that people who partake in these things seemingly bring it up for no reason.
But honestly I can’t remember the last time a vegan brought up being a vegan for no reason. While here on lemmy it seems every opportunity someone has to claim Linux superiority, no matter how weak, they have to let everyone know how “objectively better” they are.
I’m vegan and I hate bringing it up out of any context. Obviously there’s context here since we’re talking about it.
Hell I hate even saying it at a restaurant. Get weird looks ordering pizza without cheese when everyone else is getting mozz sticks and wings. Sure I could get a salad, but have you ever had salad at a pizza place? Fucking horrid. And only oil and vinegar to slide it down your throat? Ugh.
nah it’s just a reputation because people who make these choices usually try to spread the word, but sometimes it becomes perceived as obnoxious. vegans just got a bad reputation because it was relatively early internet days, i haven’t seen vegans being as obnoxious as weed smokers, for example.
now, weed smoking is objectively not a better lifestyle choice but i think they’re much much worse than vegans ever were. has nothing to do with arguing against things, not that I would argue against veganism anyway; i admire the choice.
It’s not necessarily better, some things are a personal preference. Though some might be able to list some technical pros and cons.
Some things I appreciate are:
base systems and packages are completely separate. Packages and their configuration goes in /usr/local/ No where else. (Thought they might write to /var/ )
bsd init, not systemd. Feels more home to me as a late 90s slackware user.
first class zfs support. Linux has caught up lately, especially now that there is a shared zfs codebase for both Linux and FreeBSD. When I switched to FreeBSD on my home server ~10 years ago that wasn’t the case.
Dude I’m a beginner struggling to learn Linux because there are so many options, so few good explanations, and people like you only want to patronize me
It doesn’t mean much, it’s just a metric people like around here. This number can grow and shrink just as easily with spoofed user agents strings. I think brave spoofs it and there’s a chrome extension, there maybe a few more examples.
I wouldn’t take it at face value is what I’m getting at. There’s just no other way to measure because most distros don’t collect telemetry and Firefox doesn’t seem to make theirs public.
Websites choose to use their web analytics, then the site combines the web analytics looks at the web agent and guesses from there. I don’t think the number has much meaning, it could vary widely if a Linux centric site opted in or if a privacy extension chooses to black/white list their stuff my default.
I use both. Sadly, I have lots of software that doesn’t work (or works pretty bad) on Linux. I love Linux, but there’s no denying it can be frustrated, specially if your hardware doesn’t support it, and that applies to too many people who has no saying in the hardware they use.
So in what world? Corporate world, science, CAD modelling…
I use a Windows 10 virtual machine for this purpose and run Linux on my bare metal hardware. And if I absolutely have to use Windows, I can boot the virtual machine, use Windows, and then shut it back down again until I need it again.
There is a big misunderstanding in people’s mind. LInux claims to run on pretty much every system (and it does ofc), but people take it as in every device and drivers is supposed to run flawlessly. I bought a 200 euros thinkpad knowing lenovo supported Linux directly, and I’m more satisfied with it than my 3000 euros macbook pro. In fact I havent opened my work one for 6 months+ lol
Current distros doesn’t support many hardware platform, despite being very well funded. Compared to OpenBSD. (NetBSD is too much, right? and it is not really usable.)
Fedora: Only run on amd64, arm64, arm, ppc64le, s390x
www.openbsd.org/sparc64.htmlThe other architectures that OpenBSD supports have benefited because some kinds of bugs are exposed more often by the 64-bit big endian nature of UltraSPARC.
www.openbsd.org/want.htmlIt is important to spread sparc64 around the development community, since it is the most strict platform for detecting non-portable or buggy code.
Stuff just works on windows, I have a proxmox box with some Linux vms to run containers and I’ve tried several times over the last 20 years to move to Linux on my main pc but there are just too many faffy bits.
I really dislike what windows has become, it’s bloat ware that’s getting worse and worse, but I begrudgingly use it as I can be productive, the moment I can be as productive in Linux I’m off of windows, but even simple things like drivers are often not as good, lots of commercial software has barebones or no Linux support, there are many different package managers (on one hand great) but some have permission problems due to sandboxing when you need something like your IDE to have access to the dotnet package, also as a developer building apps/libs for Linux is a nightmare.
For example if I make an app for Windows I build a single binary, same for mac os, for Linux it’s the Wild west, varying versions of glibc various versions of gtk and that’s the simpler stuff.
Anyway I REALLY WANT to like Linux and move away from windows to it, but every time I try its hours/days of hoop jumping before I just end up going back to windows and waiting for windows to annoy me so much I try again.
(just to be clear the annoyances I have with windows are it’s constant ad/bloat ware, it’s segregation of settings and duplication of things, it constantly updating and forcing you to turn off all their nonsense AGAIN)
Linux is a far more reliable operating system at the kernel level, which is why the vast majority of the Internet runs on Linux, and is very stable compared to anyone’s personal computer (no matter O.S). It’s also lighter weight at its core, which is a big plus for servers.
The thing about Linux desktops that tend to be finicky is interop with some proprietary software (e.g nvidia drivers) or desktop environments (gnome can freeze/crash if you like running bleeding edge before bugs are ironed out). Windows has issues too however, free software often literally doesn’t run on Windows (requiring WSL, the same way games on Linux require wine), and the desktop environment is essentially indistinguishable from the base operating system. When you get a desktop environment crash on Windows, your system will BSOD and restart with no recourse, in Linux I can ssh into my still functioning computer and kill my DE, or drop to the TTL and do the same thing.
The end might not seem like a big deal for some people (who cares if you have to restart by a button press or kill your DE and login, they’ll take a similar amount of time), but for someone like me where reliability is a big concern (as in, uptime for the half a dozen services/containers I run for people), this is great. People watching media off of jellyfin don’t have to stop because of a DE bug, but on Windows a BSOD would stop their media (and within the last week we’ve had several BSODs on Windows PCs due to bugs relating things like adaptive sync or sometimes just unknown reasons).
For what it’s worth I also game exclusively on Linux, vk3d, dxvk, and proton are godsends. Somethings don’t work, developers who won’t flip the switch for EAC (e.g Fortnite), but for me the games I play always worked. This will actually change soon, Vanguard is coming to League and that only works on Windows, but also probably not my last install of Windows (I tried W11 when it came out because I’m just curious about new tech), but I had to do a TPMBypassCheck despite having ftpm enabled in the BIOS, and afaict, at least from people I know with similar builds to me, if this happened then firmware TPM probably isn’t being picked up by W11, and that means I need to buy a TPM module or drop to W10 to play League. Plus, vanguard is an intense rootkit with full 24/7 access to your O.S so I probably don’t want that installed anyway, even if it happened to work on Linux. Just going to stick to SoD for now in my free time lol
I have a steamdeck and it’s a brilliant bit of kit and if the whole Linux eco system had this same sort of cohesion and “out the box” working experience then it would probably be far more adopted.
Your point on stability is great, but for most people I would say they rarely see BSODs, windows is pretty stable too, I think a lot of the reasons that corporate servers use Linux over windows is more to do with licensing and permissions, I have seen plenty of windows server setups which works fine 24/7 so I don’t think windows is any less stable, it’s just more faff to setup things which are based on Linux conventions/features (i.e docker).
If Windows went back to how it was in window ls 7 where it didn’t ram garbage down your throat every update I wouldn’t have any problems with it.
Exactly this. To both points actually. I have a home server on debian and after a bit of setup woes(partly linux still being so reliant on CLI, partly my inexperience with it), it’s been running super smoothly. Have multiple dockers and it has been a joy. And same for the steam deck, it just works. Some glitches here and there with controller support but that’s just PC gaming. But I installed it on my laptop as well and that was a shitshow. All biometrics wouldn’t work, wifi kept dropping in and out, phantom touches now and then. Sure I could have done some cli technical wizardry but I gave up after trying to make it work half as smoothly on my workflow as in windows. And the windows 11 on it is utter garbage. Partly this is manufacturing not having linux drivers available and partly it is linux just not having guis for essential functions. Hope steam is able to have enough of a push to get much needed consumer friendly guis for more system functions.
It’s also lighter weight at its core, which is a big plus for servers.
Really? Busybox is more-or-less feature equivalent to a BSD userland (FreeBSD userland can be a bit more bloated, see the ls man page), but how many people have picked that up? Still using GNU coreutils, haha.
I saw many *BSD developers told Linux kernel developers to hang their work for a while and fix quality problems.
Honestly, you get used to whatever you use and learn to avoid the faffy bits. I was like that with Windows back in the day, I just learned how to deal with it.
Now when I have to use a Windows box, I end up in a rage because of all the stupid shit I just used to avoid or knew how. Most of the useful bits are hidden from that Settings app that seems like it’s designed for children.
So really, if you get down to it and pushed your way through the familiarity stage, you’d be fine. If you want something that doesn’t give you much visible complexity for configuration, use Gnome, if you like to have every setting at your fingertips, use Plasma.
If you want your applications in a single bundle, use AppImage which is essentially what MacOS does.
And for development, being able to do things like containers/distrobox for your toolchains right on your dev box, without whatever the hell it is that Windows does these days is pretty sweet.
I have the same experience as the author you just replied to. While some of what you are saying is true, I have never had everyday issues like these on windows. I switch to Linux once a year to change things up. Mint, arch, Debian… A few major issues I experience
login screen just freezes after standby
wifi not automatically recognizing what settings e.g. security protocol my work wifi uses
external monitors not working
updates just breaking my whole OS or not working
These are essentials, not something I can simply learn to live with or fix on the fly.
Would love to switch! I can get through work without proprietary software so that’s not the issue.
That’s exactly it. I’ve been using Linux on my desktop for literally decades now and to me it just works.
Whereas using windows is an endless string of frustrations because everything is awkward and broken and unclear and hidden in places that make no sense.
Of course I manage because I’ve been around long enough, but I always wonder why people choose to use it.
Uh, most apps are still for Windows. That’s why so many people use it.
If you tell someone to use an alternative OS, but then they are left on their own to run alternative versions of apps that don’t work the same, forced to give up features they are use to, or run dozens of different programs through Wine or Proton or emulation or virtualization or whatever, JUST BECAUSE “Microsoft bad”, they’re going to laugh at you and go right back to Windows.
It’s taken Linux 30(?) years to make it to 4%, and a lot of that is recent because of games. It’s still a niche platform.
Maybe. But this does not change the fact that managing Windows is so much pain even if some of clients I manage computers for have Windows because of the software like Adobe, I think every day how good it would be to get rid of it.
The people hating on it are either shills or people that tried linux 10 years ago and it wouldn’t run their game so they’ll talk shit. I’ve been over a year now full time linux and it plays all the games I have and have gotten. I’m really impressed with how much better it’s gotten over the past few years.
As someone who has tried it on multiple devices in recent years, it still isn’t smooth enough. And I’ve been assembling computers for 2 decades now. So not entirely technically illiterate, but just not adept in linux. Definitely heavily reliant on use cases for how smooth the experience is. The server side is very well developed with years of linux leaning heavier on that side, but the splintering of frontend has a bit of an android effect. Lots of really cool things but still some jank that you can’t get rid of.
“recent years”, yeah I agree, years ago it wasn’t very good for a daily driver, especially if you want to game. I have no complaints now and it feels great to not be using a malware os.
What distro’s and what issues did you have? I’m curious because of how good it has worked for me this past year. I wanted to switch to Linux for the past 15 years but there was always something that didn’t work out enough that it was a deal breaker. Now, I have no issues with anything.
" I have a home server on debian and after a bit of setup woes(partly linux still being so reliant on CLI, partly my inexperience with it), it’s been running super smoothly. Have multiple dockers and it has been a joy. And same for the steam deck, it just works. Some glitches here and there with controller support but that’s just PC gaming. But I installed it on my laptop as well and that was a shitshow. All biometrics wouldn’t work, wifi kept dropping in and out, phantom touches now and then. Sure I could have done some cli technical wizardry but I gave up after trying to make it work half as smoothly on my workflow as in windows. And the windows 11 on it is utter garbage. Partly this is manufacturing not having linux drivers available and partly it is linux just not having guis for essential functions. Hope steam is able to have enough of a push to get much needed consumer friendly guis for more system functions. "
The majority of people … just aren’t into OSes enough to care.
Windows does what they want it to do, comes with the laptop they bought and doesn’t require much setup for them to start using it. Even a tech illiterate can setup a Windows in 15 minutes.
The more advanced users just know how to read settings, and disable all the parts they do not like. Windows can very much be molded to adapt to the users preference, no matter what the Linux fanatics claim. Most of their arguments come from an ignorant perspective that hasn’t rang true for 10+ years.
I just built a new PC but I’ve still been booting up my old laptop from time to time to retrieve files/settings/etc. I’m going to take credit for this.
So… I have a couple 40-core Xeon servers in my homelab. What do I need to do to trigger these higher? I can Argo Workflow jobs that spin up VMs and execute a webhook / etc to whatever is needed. Let’s get that needle at least past the fisher price of OS’s MacOS.
I question the methodology here. The same site lists Linux desktop share at 2% in my country specifically. It feels like if it was that high you’d see it on people’s laptops more in coffee shops and what not… but I’ve yet to see a single other person using Linux on the desktop.
I know most of that 4% is in India… but still feels like it should be more ubiquitous if the number is that high.
With 2%, you would roughly find someone using linux for every 50 computers you stumble upon. Maybe it’s not as far off as you imagine. However, like someone already mentioned, the distribution isn’t homogenous, and maybe there are concentrations of linux computers in some universities, businesses, etc.
Or maybe linux users don’t go out as often as the average person, so you never get the chance to see them in coffee shops lol. If the other linux users are like me, that’s exactly the case…
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