Okay, I guess I’ll say it. Year of Linux Desktop!
Every year from now until the end of time.
I will never get tired of Year of Linux Desktopping!
So every year till 2038. XD
Whew, I was getting worried we were one day into 2024 and nobody said this yet.
Next year is the year of IPv6!
Gotta keep the party going!
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This is very good. The higher those numbers go, the more pressure there will be for better official support for both HW and SW.
FOSS is fantastic. But lack of options (FOSS or paid) for a few of my use cases keeps me stapled to Windows and WSL. Unfortunately. I’m hoping the momentum shifts.
If literally any Adobe competitor released a product for Linux they’d dominate that niche.
I tend to agree. And people need to realize that Adobe’s secret sauce is not in their apps, it’s in the multi-device interoperability. I love lightroom, but it’s not the photo editing ability (darkroom has that), rather it’s the fact that I can seamlessly work the same catalogue from any device (even if I don’t use their cloud for anything but smart previews).
I think Adobe would cash in if they supported Linux - for want of a workable alternative, I’d even pay them.
Music device manufacturers need to support Linux too. NI Maschine (and others) is simply a non-starter…
It really depends, but some tools would really do that. DaVinci Resolve, for example, has a pretty bad Linux distribution support and format, all things considered, and it’s still the go-to video editor for Linux users, despite all of the issues.
Kdenlive and shotcut are also great.
They really are, but still leagues behind the features (and online learning material) compared to Resolve. I love both of them, but still, when I need to get to work with video, I still prefer to deal with Resolve’s limitations than to deal with Kdenlive or Shotcut.
Fair enough! My only work with video has been very lightweight stuff and I haven’t needed much else. Shotcut definitely has quirks, though I know it a lot better than kdenlive. Have not played enough with Resolve to comment, though I have it on my list to try when the opportunity presents itself.
gimp noises
I say this as a foss proponent… gimp sucks ass.
Now, Inkscape is Goat, but Gimp is nigh unusable.
There are lots of individual applications that do pretty well in and of themselves (darktable, gimp, krita, etc.) they have varying degrees of niceness. But what Adobe can do has no analogue in Linux land (paid or not) - it’s the multi-device interoperability. It makes for unparalleled workflow. I am not an advocate your Adobe - I really wish there was someone else that did it, and I believe it is something worth paying for. Figma maybe? (but it’s all cloud and was nearly knocked out by Adobe…)
(FWIW, I’ve never found gimp to be pleasant to use, but that is only my own subjective experience. Others like it and that’s a good thing.)
When was the last time you used it? The newer versions are better and with Gimp 3 there will be many improvements.
That name though
FOSS or paid
I hope you know the difference between Free(Libre) and Free(gratis)
I suppose what I mean is that i am happy to select whatever software is best for the task at hand. I have no issue with paying for software if it serves my needs. In a few cases, that limits my options to running windows as commercial versions are unavailable on Linux, and it is my hope that more commercial orgs start making their wares available for Linux, especially in cases where there’s no available alternative.
As for splitting hairs on the difference between gratis and libre, life’s too short (so if I used incorrect terminology, c’est la vie…)
I guess you don’t know its difference.
Free software means freedom and not the price. There are paid free software.
By defenition, free software is software that satisfy 4 essential freedoms
Freedom 0: Freedom to run the program any way you want on any of your devices
Freedom 1: To see and study how the program works and change it according to your needs. Source code of the entire program should be visible for this freedom
Freedom 2: Freedom to share copies of the original program(sharing is caring)
Freedom 3: Freedom to share copies of the modified version which you adapted to your needs such that whole community can benefit from your modifications
So yeah this is Free software, and when you say FOSS, its not about the price, but the freedom and control you get with the software. Why is this important? Because theese non-free softwares are taking away our freedom by even limiting “us” from using our “own” devices(DRM, locked bootloader, etc.), and it will be too late to realise how most proprietary softwares we use, and ones we are forced to use, captures our freedom.
FOSS or paid?
Wowzer, ok, that’s seriously impressive though, like in 2022 I feel we were stuck at 2-2.5% and in 2023 we passed 3% for the first time and now we’re at almost 4??? That’s like DOUBLING the market share in a year
I was thinking the same thing. We’ve actually surpassed Apple on desktop. I know we’re gonna laughingly say “year of the Linux desktop,” but we have to honestly look how far we’ve come in a relatively short time.
mac has over 16% though, we still aren’t even close
You’re actually 100% right. I don’t know what figure I was thinking of, but you’re just right.
You might have been thinking Steam gaming. Mac was at ~5% and has dropped to ~2%
That is likely it. Okay, thank you.
It only took 40 years :')
When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It’s a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we’re close!
Its happening Troy
3.82% is actually pretty damn good. And if Windows 12 pushes us into a subscription model I can see that gap rising.
Also, if/when DirectX gets native Linux support, or DXVK/VKD3D matches the API in performance, that’ll be it.
Personally I’m thanking Valve for this.
I’m thanking yall for this. And also idk what so different in linux, but I just want apps on here. Like I can find an alternative, but I have to say it, most of the time it’s just worse. Like how do you replace AMD Software or Logitech Ghub or Realtek audio (or whatever is the deafult for win, it’s so seamless).
To add to this, I can install a standalone app for every feature that AMD Software has, but I don’t want to. And Ghub got de-drm-ed for like two mice, but I own a different one. Video recording and Audio settings are basically non-existen. Good luck changing the quality of your audio.
To add even more, I’m more and more used to these alternatives, so idk if I’ll still cry about it in a few years. Re-learning computers is such a pain. I hope I’ll be able to give linux to my kids as a norm (basically to use without terminal mastery).
Like how do you replace
Most of the time there is no 1:1 replacement, it all depends on which features you use from these apps. Some suggestions:
AMD Software
CoreCtrl can do most of the important stuff from the AMD software like GPU overclocking, custom fan curves and per-game profiles.
Logitech Ghub
Piper has a lot of support for different mice and keyboards, maybe yours are supported there?
Realtek audio
I’m not sure what Realtek audio does nowadays, which features do you need?
Video recording
OBS is available and does pretty much does the same stuff as on Windows. If you need to capture gameplay you will have to install obs-vkcapture which is the Vulkan/OpenGL replacement for DirectX capturing included on the Windows version of OBS.
Audio settings
Which settings do you require? What do you mean with “Audio quality”?
Unfortunately most Pipewire/Wireplumber settings are hidden behind config files and I’m not aware of any applications to manage them. The KDE audio settings are quite decent but limited in scope. However, most of the Pipewire settings have a sensible default and probably shouldn’t be changed unless you’re doing audio production.
qpwgraph is quite powerful when you need to connect multiple devices together or have virtual audio devices.
Okay update: Piper does support my mouse. Which is good, because I can now config the profiles without windows. But also sad, because I’m still having my scroll wheel problem. I’ll say it briefly maybe you know something about it. My mouse send hight res and normal scroll ups and downs inconsistently. When I scroll wirelessly it sends 5 hi res events, which get’s turned into a normal one, so it sends both. the 5 events is inconsistent, so sometimes I don’t even scroll. What apps use is inconsistent, so sometimes i scroll 5 times instead of 1, or even worse when apps wait for the 5 hi res next to each other, meaning it doesn’t even scroll sometimes. But all of this is gone when I plug in. When wired my mouse only sends “normal” scroll events and everything works perfectly. I got the leads: ([1], [2], [3], [4]) (I have to admit, I haven’t read all of these, at one point they just turned into technical gibberish for me)
Can’t say I ever had that problem, sorry. My Logitech PRO X scrolls normally over wireless and wired.
well, alright. Thanks for your time and replies!
They say sex is good and all, but I bet they never received a reply like this before. I’m going to respond one by one.
I mostly used AMD Software for instant replay, I miss this loads. Tried replay-sorcery like 3 times, failed all 3 times. I gained more knowledge since, fixed discord’s screenshare, so I might give it another shot, but I also heard that you can get instant replay with OBS somehow.
I’d like some alternative to fancontrol, I know I could set fanspeed in the bios, idk why I don’t. But I had a nice lil software that managed fans, now I don’t.
Piper also doesn’t support my mouse. It does however support the one I just switched from a month ago…
Idk what Realtek does, but I never had any sound related problems on windows. AKA it just worked, I’d like it back pls. I now use pipewire-pulse. Made Virtual Surround sink, loving the customization, hating the documentation. I’d still like to fix the bandwidth (I read somewhere that it’s limited by default) and mess around with EQs, my lead is AutoEq.
OBS just doesn’t work. But I remember it barely working on windows as well. It’s popular, I can probably fix it.
I already have qpwgraph, but I don’t have a use for it, I just used it to visualize, and fix connections when they’re wrong. Might do some soundboard fun later with it, or in-game mic trolling :p
Thanks for the links tho, I’ll look into what I can utilize. But don’t get me wrong I love linux, there is just so little support, paired with such a steep learning curve.
rant: I’m not using linux for long, and I have a bunch of stuff to get working. Password manager, find nice image and PDF viewers (web browsers feels cheap), fix recording (obs can’t capture and barely can anything else), get (or make) a nice theme, try out tiling window managers, set-up WMs so I don’t have to dual boot anymore. While don’t even get me started on stuff I have no Idea how works on linux. Like grep’s powerful, how does regex work, links?, everything in /etc, bash script. hopefully I can get these answered in 2024. I hear the memes that this is the “year of linux desktop”; well it’s certainly for me.
Which distro do you use? I don’t really have much sound issues here and I have a pretty exotic setup.
I mostly used AMD Software for instant replay, I miss this loads. Tried replay-sorcery like 3 times, failed all 3 times. I gained more knowledge since, fixed discord’s screenshare, so I might give it another shot, but I also heard that you can get instant replay with OBS somehow.
Yes, I use OBS for that. The feature is called “Replay Buffer” and I have it running with no issues with hardware encoding. I would recommend you use the OBS flatpak, depending on your distro you might also want to use Steam in a Flatpak to make things easier.
I’d like some alternative to fancontrol, I know I could set fanspeed in the bios, idk why I don’t. But I had a nice lil software that managed fans, now I don’t.
I’m not aware of a software that controls all fans but I didn’t really look since I just let them do what they want. CoreCtrl can do the GPU fan but I also leave that alone.
Piper also doesn’t support my mouse. It does however support the one I just switched from a month ago…
You might have some luck requesting support for your mouse/keyboard on their git page, maybe support can be added.
Idk what Realtek does, but I never had any sound related problems on windows. AKA it just worked, I’d like it back pls.
What does not work?
I’d still like to fix the bandwidth (I read somewhere that it’s limited by default)
There’s no bandwidth limit on Pipewire that I’m aware of. The default sampling rate is 48000 if you mean that but it’s a sensible default and you probably don’t want to change it.
and mess around with EQs, my lead is AutoEq.
AutoEq sounds good. EasyEffects definitely can do your EQ and much much more.
there is just so little support, paired with such a steep learning curve.
The learning curve can be steep but don’t be afraid to ask, there’s a lot of helpful people on here. Also most Github/Gitlab projects might look intimidating but they also gladly offer support for applications there.
PDF viewers
Okular is included with KDE and is pretty competent.
Like grep’s powerful, how does regex work, links?, everything in /etc, bash script. hopefully I can get these answered in 2024.
Those are not strictly needed in order to “use” Linux but if you want to learn about them you there’s a lot of resources for them out there. ChatGPT is also pretty useful in helping with bash scripts/commands since they’re sometimes hard to read.
Thank you. I’ll look into this “Replay Buffer” and OBS in general, as it doesn’t work atm. I’m on Arch, and when I plugged in my laptop to the TV via HDMI it didn’t play any sound. With some brute force commands (can’t remember, could maybe check
history) I managed to play a static noise on the TV, but I couldn’t get it recognized as an audio device. Gave up after a while as we just wanted to watch the movie, so we found another way instead of me holding up my family with debugging.
Password manager
Basically the same as in Windows: Keepass with manual sync between devices(using Syncthing for example) or Bitwarden (Vaultvarden if like you like to selfhost and don’t have enterprise account).
image and PDF viewers
I’d use a desktop environment defaults, but https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications
grep’s powerful
Awk and sed are great too. Sed will also turn 50 this year.
how does regex
It’s magic. You can(and should) test your regex here https://regex101.com/
I wonder if native D3D would really help at all. Most OpenGL drivers in Mesa are really Gallium drivers. Gallium is a low level internal Mesa API uses to implement support for higher level APIs, including OpenGL and Direct3D 9. Vulkan support isn’t implemented on top of Gallium, because Vulkan is apparently lower level than Gallium is. These drivers are still pretty damn fast, despite having to go through and intermediate API. If Gallium is fast enough for OpenGL drivers, I don’t see why the lower level Vulkan can’t be fast enough for Direct3D drivers. As far as I’m aware, the performance difference between DXVK/VKD3D and Direct3D drivers on Windows is already negligible.
I thought the performance hit was quite substantial, like 20% to 30% lower frame rates from using dxvk. Maybe things have improved?
Native Vulkan support is of course the holy grail but so few games support it. The only few I can think of are Valve games.
Not even World of Warcraft supports Vulkan, and they’ve supported OpenGL for so long.
It’s definitely not 20%-30% behind. I’d say the difference is usually 10% or less. Sometimes DXVK is even a little ahead. Does depend on the game and drivers, tho.
Meanwhile in India: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india (14.51%)
indias growth is so important, it’s such a dense country so growth will be rapidly exponential unlike 95℅ of other countries. it’s the perfect mixing pot of technologically literate, dense, money conscious, and distrustful of western influence for linux to thrive in. once india is dominated by linux, it will expand outwards so fast.
Will the scammers finally stop telling me to go to the start menu to check if I have their virus?
Seriously, I’m impressed on just how much influence Linux has in India, not only as an OS, but as a community. I’m in charge of some of the Fedora social media accounts and it really impressed me at first how India is consistently one the top 3 countries our followers are from in all of them.
I mean, it’s no secret that the SteamDeck is a huge reason why. Praise Gaben, may we game on every platform equally.
I’ve seriously been writing down the pros and cons thinking about switching over to Linux on my main desktop at home. It covers all the games I play now. I was very surprised.
Without the games to hold me back, I don’t see why I wouldn’t.
Follow Up: I’m on Linux mint! And my two favorite Windows games work just fine with zero configuration with Steam.
I literally did this two weeks ago, switched Win11 for Fedora and so far it has been an amazing experience. So far, I only had to dual boot to Win once, and that was because I wanted to play some SteamVR games, which is the only thing I didn’t manage to get working (I know there’s ALVR, but SteamVR refuses to launch for me unfortunately).
Just go for it, get a new SSD drive and dual boot your choice of distro. You can always go back, and unless you use bitlocker you can just access your windows files from the Linux, so there’s not need to move stuff around that much. With dualboot, you have nothing to loose.
I don’t have money for a new SSD right now but my current SSD is mostly empty, 2TB. I turned off BitLocker to facilitate easy copying of files and because I’m pretty sure secure boot would be a pain. I’m running Linux Mint and I hope to go back into the windows install as little as possible. Maybe one day I’ll dump it entirely.
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India is the eye opener … an enormous market of 1.5 billion people and the majority of them are too poor to pay for any specialty OS … it’s going to turn into a futuristic dystopia down there … people living in slums but scrounging up old neglected and forgotten hardware to bring them back online with Open Source Software.
Ok as an Indian allow me to interject. The reason people use linux is not because of poverty. Even the cheapest laptops come preloaded with activated windows.
We get introduced to Linux based OSs in schools. That plus people are heavily pushed into engineering and lately computer science and software engineering.
I was probably too hasty in my assumptions … simplistic, stereotypical maybe even a bit racist
I just thought it made economic sense … why build an entire economy or business using foreign owned software and basing it all on a foreign company, especially one with unknown loopholes that would put the company’s and country at risk by a foreign power.
Thanks for the correction and insight … I’ll be more careful about my assumptions in the future.
Thanks for acknowledging it.
Also another thing you are wrong about: You may be surprised to know that the second hand market for computer electronics is non-existent. As far as I know, there are only a handful of cities in the whole country where there is a second hand local market. Cheap electronics don’t last that much and in laptops there are only so many components you can buy separately and install. (Overwhelming majority of the computers are laptops, not the traditional CPU towers)
Also another thing I failed to mention is, the government tried to make a distro for govt use at one point but idk if anything came out of that. But I want to say there’s definitely a growing presence of linux here
Most people in software around me in Europe are moving to OSX for the convenience and better hardware. How does it look like in India?
Honestly I’m a little surprised it’s so low relative to linux. It definitely has a strong presence. I’m thinking it won’t be as popular because of the lower cost to value ratio
Are you from kerala?
No. What prompted such a random guess?
It was not so common to use linux in schools in other states and in kerala, all government schools use a Kite Ubuntu which is fork of lts ubuntu. Its like the law to use free software for education in kerala. Me also got introduced to linux from school so i expected you are from kerala too. And Free software is most popular in kerala afaik.
The intensity of free software user group in kerala shows it too https://fsug.in/
Oh. I studied under a Gujarat board school. We had mint in our computer labs and textbooks 8 years ago. Idk what they’re now
an enormous market of 1.5 billion people and the majority of them are too poor to pay for any specialty OS
piracy is still a thing, though
Hi from Turkey, We have nore linux users than MacOS users and I tell everyone I know to switch like the foss evangelist I am
My journey to Linux pretty much started with the reddit thing. I moved to Lemmy and started slowly eliminating corporations out of my life.
This but corps
I suspect that it’s not Linux that is on the rise, but overall PC market that is shrinking. It’s been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.
The desktop/mobile ratio chart aligns with this
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet
I remember looking at pc sales data, and they have been shrinking in the last decade, with the curve flattening until the pandemic, when sales grew substantially, almost to the 2000s level. Now it’s shrinking back slowly. I’m not sure if people are abandoning desktops in favor of phones as much as we think. desktops are durable and we tend to have only one, while mobile devices are gaining different forms, and people are getting more of them. Perhaps the desktop market has not much more room to grow while mobile devices are still booming.
But that’s just one possible explanation, I might be wrong. I was going to post the data, but statista requires login to see it.
I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.
What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.
I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.
And yet here I am looking to expanding my devices with a replacement server (linux) and a NUC (linux).
Finally ditched Windows on the desktop forever, about 7 months ago.
I agree with you on mobile. I my country many ppl ditched laptops and desktops for their phones.
Although I have a hard time understanding how they can actually get some work done on the phone, if they do any work from home that requires a computer. Well those ppl probably have an old laptop laying around.
I don’t know what everyone else’s case is, but my work provides a laptop. None of my home machines have Windows, but the work laptop does.
Yeah, many workplaces here do not offer a laptop, its more of “bring your own device” kinda thing.
But of course, some do.
I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.
In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.
It’s been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.
Can’t do that if you play games.
Also that’s half of the reason Windows hasn’t lost the war on home desktop PCs yet. Another half is office applications.
Actually, these are thirds.
Another reason making me say so is that no major user-friendly distribution wants to be just that, they all have a particular madness with no good reason for it.
So I don’t know what to recommend, there should be something off the top of my head, but that’d be “just install Debian, it’s fine”.
So, any single reason of these going away would accelerate Linux adoption notably. Any two would make it a trend visible to housewives. And all three would resemble the flight of ICQ users to Skype.
Can’t do that if you play games.
I recently been arguing with some dude about some PUBG mechanics. It took me quite some time to realize that he was playing PUBG mobile, never played the PC version or even knew that it even existed for that matter. For him, PUBG simply meant PUBG mobile. For those people, they don’t even consider using PC for gaming. They might consider console, but PC to them is just more or less a typewriter for school/office tasks.
I’ve been thinking for some time what to answer and concluded that the normie world is a world of pain.
We - as in FOSS OS users and FOSS paradigm users - desperately need open hardware, so that the rest of the industry could eat all the rubber dicks they want without affecting us significantly.
And I mean not only hardware design, but fabs.
It may seem an impossible future, with semiconductor deficit etc, and Taiwan being that important.
And with starting a fab being so expensive.
Still, they only way a conclusive FOSS victory resulting in even balance happens is if there is a public fab producing general-purpose hardware with public design.
Because right now lots of resources are being wasted on catching up in inherently disadvantageous areas, like supporting proprietary hardware which is always harder for FOSS developers than for MS or Apple.
Without full-chain FOSS hardware production it’ll always be bare survival.
What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.
I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.
No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.
Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.
It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.
And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.
What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”?
I remember that it does too much, but without specifics. It’s been 4+ years since I touched Ubuntu.
They used to be a little FOSS-only
I vaguely remember that “Amazon lens” for Unity, I don’t think they ever were that much FOSS-only.
No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives.
It’s fine. That’d still be goal fulfilled.
Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it.
How so?
There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.
I recently had a problem with LO, while editing a document with lots of math formulae - from time to time while adding a formula about half of others (in the whole document) would just become empty.
Not sure something like that would happen under Apple suite’s analog of Word, whatever it’s called.
It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both.
With that I agree, somewhere in 2012 I somehow realized that it’s already much better than the alternatives, and yes, for a housewife’s desktop just as well, if one’s honest and thinks of their own needs.
And if one’s comparing it to advertising of the competing commercial products, then it’s hopeless.
I am not saying “This is the Year of the Linux Desktop”. That said, things languished below 2% for decades and now it has doubled in just over a year. With the state of Linux Gaming, I could see that happening again.
Also, if ChromeOS continues to converge, you could consider it a Linux distro at some point and it also has about 4% share.
Linux could exceed 10% share this year and be a clear second after Windows.
That leaves me wondering, what percentage do we have to hit before it really is “The Year of the Linux Desktop”. I have never had to wonder that before ( I mean, it obviously was not 3% ). Having to ask is a milestone in itself.
I’ve never been a Linux guy but recently I’ve switched to Pop!OS on my laptop and bought a Steam Deck. Other than a few teething issues with the laptop I’ve had a great experience and I wouldn’t consider myself ridiculously tech savvy. I’d absolutely consider switching my gaming PC over but my worry is loss of performance and being unable to use my game pass games. I’d be super happy if I could switch my PC over in the next couple of years.
Game pass is the one problem with no great solution in sight… But not great doesn’t mean none. If you have an Xbox you can play them on the pc streamed over your Lan, and you can also stream games directly from the web as well.
Again, not great solutions, but it is unlikely we will see Xbox game pass running on Linux. I think MS will do anything and everything to prevent that.
Then there’s the not-solution of running a windows vm. You aren’t ditching windows with that entirely and, at least from what I understand, you’ll need a second graphics card to dedicate to the vm to get “bare metal” performance.
Just finish out the gaming PCs life and evaluate a Linux one for the next buy.
I wouldn’t say ChromeOS can be clarified as Linux for the sake of this number. While it of course is bases on the kernel, it still is in the hands of one company and definitely not free software. While we may talk about ChromiumOS, I would differentiate here for the sake of control over your OS.
year of the linux desktop is based on how many third party apps are there, not how many people use it imo. they correlate and impact one another but arent the same
I switched my gaming PC to Linux two months ago and I’m loving it. I’ve only had to boot my Windows drive twice.
What did you have to boot Windows for?
I wonder if that dip in Windows in April, going down to like 62%, and the correlated boost for “Uknown” operating systems to 13% might somehow simply be Windows not being recognized properly and categorized as unknown?
It seems a bit far-fetched to me that a bunch of Windows users would for 1 month suddenly all decide to use ReactOS, FreeDOS, BSD, Solaris, Illumos, Haiku, Redox, and Plan 9.
Yeah probably some chrome update which made statscounter to fail to determine the OS, probably
Let’s go! It’s always great to see people wrestle control back from the corporations.
https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology
Considering their methodology, I wonder how many of these are Steam Decks registering as “desktops” when they visit a website in the web broweser?
I would consider the steamdeck to be a linux desktop if someone is browsing the internet on it.
I agree, but it’s definitely marketed as a gaming console of a sort, and not really marketed as a full-fledged PC.
So, imho, that technically skewers the numbers a bit, as it’s not a “desktop” in the traditional sense.
I mean, I’m still not calling 2023 the “Year of the Linux Desktop.” I’m calling it the “Year of the Portable Linux Gaming Console.”
The growth in percentage in Linux in Steam metrics is almost entirely because the Steam Deck.
As stated from official Valve’s page https://www.steamdeck.com/en/oled
“Use your Deck as a PC, because it is one.” So Valve did market it as a PC and it’s one of the reasons I bought one more than a year ago. And it’s really my desktop (that I bring with me to places occasionally)c
You cant be sure, Valve pushing Steam Deck and Proton is what made me switch to Linux as lot of games now works but I haven’t bought a Steam deck
When you are using the steamdeck in handheld mode there is no web browser unless configured from desktop mode. The desktop on the steamdeck is no different to my computer therefore I don’t think it’s fair to wave it off as a console. It’s far closer to a pc than a console.
It’s far closer to a pc than a console.
Ehhh, you have to spend money on a decent dock to be able to use it with any consistency as a desktop. Sure, software-wise, it’s not a console, it plays PC games.
However, it’s physical form factor is a console. It looks and functions out of the box far more like a Nintendo Switch than a IBM ThinkPad.
It’s literally a gamepad with a screen and no keyboard or mouse. So despite being a PC platform, I would still consider this a “console,” based on outward-facing form factor alone, personally.
That’s a fair point. Since we are talking about linux os share, the software that’s running on the device is more important to me than the form factor. What’s running on my steamdeck is so close to what’s running on my desktop pc that when I’m browsing the web on my steamdeck I’d consider myself browsing on linux rather than browsing on specifcally steam os.
