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The Quiet Revolution: GNU/Linux Crosses 6% Desktop Market Share—And It’s Just the Beginning (puri.sm)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 89 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Installed linux for my brother-in-law and for a professor last month. Both liked it and are probably going to use it insted of moving to win11. I'm doing my part.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    What distro did you go with?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Linux mint for my brother-in-law, and debian for my professor, because he said he has an aversion to stuff changing in his computer and wanted something that stayed almost the same in 10 or 20 or years from now and didn't fail him. He seemed enthusiastic with the concept of a distro that focuses on stability and wanted it, even if I said that it's a bit harder to use and recommended linux mint.

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    • [–] 66 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Hi hello, this is partly me. My bad. I’m not moving to Win11 (by force and by choice) so I installed Arch just to start to get the hang of things and, well, now I’m just daily driving it.

    I’ve run distributions in the distant past and toyed with recent ones. I think this one is staying though.

    Feels good that when my computer is idle, it’s not busy spouting off telemetry to some server somewhere. I can customize way more than before, and with Proton, I can still play the games I want to.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Enjoy linux :)

    Enjoy RTFM with arch :)

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Hi you, this is me too, didn't want to buy new hardware too just because MS wants me to. i went with Nobara because it liked my Nvidia GPU a lot more than many other distros, and deleted my windows partition after 3 days - i expected it to take a lot longer than that to feel safe doing that, but it just works and i can do more with my PC than i ever could with windows.

    We are doing our part :-)

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    • [–] 174 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    Nothing about Linux users is quiet.

    I use arch btw

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    I have found myself deep in the Nix and nixOS ecosystem myself.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    My condolences

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Fun fact: if you have a Steam Deck, Nix (the package manager) is pretty much the only vendor-approved way to safely install extra packages that aren't otherwise available as a flatpak.

    Trying to screw with overlayfs to make pacman usable is/was a thing, and it was a very good way to break the OS install despite it having atomic updates.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Fun fact: SteamOS comes pre-loaded with Distrobox so you can install whatever packages you want.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Does Steam Deck not have rpm-ostree (or an arch equivalent since RPM is fedora-specific)?

    Needs "pac-ostree" or something...

    Also, what about distrobox?

    I haven't really tried to do anything package manager-related on my Deck, so I'm going on what I know from Bazzite, but there are several ways to install non-flatpak software on it. In fact, I even installed yay on an Arch distrobox, and I can install things from the AUR (as well as the official repositories).

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Does Steam Deck not have rpm-ostree (or an arch equivalent since RPM is fedora-specific)?

    Steam Deck has a custom solution involving an A/B partition scheme of immutable btrfs filesystems and overlayfs for layering changes on top of that.

    Also, what about distrobox?

    If there's a way to install containerization software with Flatpak, maybe. Docker isn't available out of the box, though.

    I haven't really tried to do anything package manager-related on my Deck, so I'm going on what I know from Bazzite, but there are several ways to install non-flatpak software on it. In fact, I even installed yay on an Arch distrobox, and I can install things from the AUR (as well as the official repositories).

    You can use pacman, but it's volatile and requires making intentional changes to restore its functionality.

    The first option is to disable the read-only flag on the root filesystem, then set pacman back up so it can pull packages. Whenever the root filesystem image is updated, you'll lose the changes, though.

    The second option is to add an overlayfs to persist the changes in a different partition or inside a disk image on the writable storage. There was a tool called "rwfus" that did this, and it worked well enough if you were careful. If you ended up upgrading a package that came installed on the base image, though, it would end up breaking the install when the next update came around.

    With all the caveats, when Valve made /nix available as a persistent overlay a couple of years ago, I just bit the bullet and learned how to use Nix to install packages with nix-env -i.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Huh, interesting. Thanks for the info

    Distrobox works really well in Bazzite, in fact I'm currently typing this comment in LibreWolf in a Fedora toolbox because I was getting a weird lag with the flatpak version. You wouldn't even know if you didn't set it up yourself, since it's just an icon on my launcher like any other program. No noticeable overhead whatsoever either.

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  • [+] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    I’m just now starting my degree is software engineering. I’m 31. I’d gotten comfortable enough with Linux that I wanted to try NixOS to avoid having my system get borked again (in my case, KDE Plasma started having shell crashes at log in).

    If I was only using NixOS to run a basic computer set up? Sure, no problem. If I want to rice and customize it? No, I wasn’t ready.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    But but Phoronix just told me yesterday that Linux users went dramatically down on Steam from 3% to 2.99%! Almost like this weekly/monthly claim of Linux users "crossing" another imaginary threshold line hold as much value as this comment /s

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    To be fair, we have to be that way to push back against the field of inveitability that omnipresent corporate marketing creates in our minds.

    The extroverted nerdiness is an effective tool to communally deprogram our rheified way of looking at computers so we can envision a different future.

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    • [–] 119 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    At work, the windows outage spooked management hard. They noticed that our small amout of Linux servers didn't go down. So now they are OK with us using Linux more. After many decades of Windows.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    What Windows outage?

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Maybe the CrowdStrike outage last year

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    That is was a Crowdstike issue not a Windows issue. They have borked Linux updates as well. Microsoft has had their far share of bad updates but none of them were outage level assuming companies properly tested updates.

    A lot of these large companies are terrible at multiple levels. It is great to pay premium dollar for junk.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That is was a Crowdstike issue not a Windows issue.

    From my understanding, it's true that CrowdStrike wrote the faulty code and submitted it to Microsoft. Microsoft shares blame in that they didn't properly vet and test the kernel-level patch CrowdStrike had submitted.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Not certain what others experienced, but in my company, a bad Windows Update knocked out most of our computers for a full day. It was so bad, you can see it in like monthly financial reports when it happened.

    It was one of the motivators for why my job dropped Microsoft.

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    • [–] 55 points 1 year ago*

    https://endof10.org/

    Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025.

    Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer.

    But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?

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    [–] 41 points 1 year ago

    My gamer Brother-in-law asked me about Linux gaming. Until a few years ago he was all like "Windows is super!".

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    [–] 40 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I recently wiped my 10yr running windows install that had all manner of shady hacks applied over the years to basically lobotomize it, after a hardware upgrade. As I was wiping I was largely intending to create another "lobotomized" win10 install as the second install on dual boot, but windows on top of everything is known for breaking dual boot. Working around sheer hostility at every level, and for what? Basically just to play pirated games since steam games work on Linux now. I never bothered trying to prop it back up and have been only better off for it

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I was dualbooting of two seperate nvme drives for each os. Worked pretty well for almost a year until i distro hopped. But for some reason my windows boot partition was located on my linux drive which i purged entirely while installing the new OS. Because why would be there any windows component on my linux drive, right?

    Recreating the windows boot partition on the correct drive was more complicated than anything i ever encountered on linux so far. Took like 5 hours and funnily enough was only doable via a terminal.

    Also there isnt a reason left for me to put up with microsofts bullshit. A few weeks ago i got a racing game with VR and wheel support running in an afternoon. The title is even abandonware so i had to grab some repack with a windows only installer.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    that's strange, what filesystem was that? windows cannot handle linux filesystems, by itself.

    wasn't that /boot/efi? if so windows uses that too, it's a designated fat32 partition for uefi bootables.

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    • [–] 58 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

    finally doing it as my daily driver

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  • [+] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)
    [deleted]
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    • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    All my extended family has been converted to linux because all they need is a browser, libre office and rustdesk for me to tech support them. The only issue is still printers but tbh they are equally awful on all platforms these days.

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  • [–] [S] 15 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    I thought Linux had decent printer support compared to windows.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It does, in my experience. At least in Linux Mint.

    At home, my old Brother laser is tucked off in a far corner of the house connected to wifi, and my wired home PC as well as my wifi work laptop both see it and can print to it just fine.

    At work even those big printers show up and function.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I think they are comparable in that regard honestly?

    Printer manufacturers obviously try their best to make their printers work well with Windows.

    Printer support on Linux is provided by CUPS, which is developed by Apple. Apple wants its Mac (and maybe also iPhone and iPad?) customers to have good printer support, so they try their best to make CUPS work well.

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    • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Is this the century of Linux?

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    That could actually be a reasonable view, considering Windows has fallen off since the late 90's or early 00's, depending on what version you draw the line on.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    To be fair, it is pretty hard to keep increasing your market share when you get closer and closer to 100%.

    But yes, 2000 or XP was the last respectable version of Windows. Maybe Win7, but I never used it.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Windows is falling off because they missed the mobile boat.

    Most people never needed a full computer. All they do is consume and a phone and iPad is more than enough for that.

    The desktop market is shrinking and the steam deck is pumping Linux numbers in an increasingly smaller pond.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    yeah that's the sad truth. I was watching a video yesterday about like "All creators should be on YouTube" because Instagram, Twitter, etc., will open your Patreon link logged-out in a WebView....

    I'm the only one watching videos on a desktop I guess

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    • [–] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Is Linux desktop marketshare increasing or is desktop marketshare decreasing as a whole, though?

    If you’re sitting on a Windows 10 machine that can’t upgrade to Windows 11, or if you’re tired of Apple’s walled garden, now’s the time to explore PureOS, a FSF endorsed GNU/Linux distribution.

    God damn it. This is how you scare people away from Linux.

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