Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS. It is on virtually all servers on the Internet, the majority OS on phones, its in many TVs and STBs and streaming sticks, its one of the few OSes ever in space, its one of the few OSes ever on Mars, and it is also the OS behind ChromeOS (which that article mistakenly breaks out as its own numbers; so by their own admission, its at least 7%).
The largest desktop OS on that list? Windows.... made by a company who makes more money off Linux than anything else, is the largest corp contributor to Linux, and has far more Linux machines internally than Windows ones, and hires software developers who do not develop for Windows.
And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it :).
You can conquer the world, dominate every space and yet there's thus little voice inside saying "but you're not good enough. See over there, in that one space, you're a weakling. "
No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice.
What stung before was that people were forced to use
Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more. If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it.
The only area I wish had a better story was the enterprise desktop space (like Windows domains or jamf on macOS) but currently I can’t justify allowing my team to run Linux because having its hard enough for small companies to manage a mixture of macOS and Windows fleets without adding a 3rd platform into the mix.
> What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more.
That's a funny conclusion to make. In the business world that still exists and even my kids are forced into the Microsoft eco-system by their school because the software they insist you run (for which perfectly good web alternatives exist) only runs on windows.
A lot of people are stuck on Windows or MacOS because of one killer app - Photoshop, a CAD/CAM package, a video or audio editor, or some proprietary bit of business software. Many of these applications have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dev time invested in them and it just isn't realistic to expect an open source alternative to compete.
I'm in that boat, but I don't especially mind. I run Windows because it allows me to run Fusion 360, but Windows Subsystem for Linux gives me a full Linux dev environment. A younger me would have got angry about it, but present me accepts that platform lock-in effects are very strong; fortunately for Linux, it dominates every new category of platform. I sincerely doubt that anyone will ever develop a new proprietary OS from scratch, because the business case for putting a pretty UI on Linux is overwhelming.
I know the evidence is that plenty of people are totally happy with applications running in a browser -- Office Online, Google Sheets, etc. are compelling evidence -- but I strongly prefer dedicated and native applications for something I'll be spending a lot of time using.
I'm not even necessarily blaming this on the performance difference, although that is a pertinent topic, but just the mental structure of something I'm using living in a browser tab rather than actually running on the computer.
MS is on a mission to go after schools that have adopted Chromebooks. If your school is using Chromebooks you can expect all kinds of stick-and-carrot tricks to try to get you to switch (back).
Yes, but many schools lock down their Chromebooks so that you can't run Linux on them. I somehow managed to unenroll mine last year, but I have no idea how I did, and to make it worse I had to switch out my Chromebook after it stopped working.
So in practice, no, it's not very useful. Most students are still forced to use a web browser and nothing more, else they run the risk of getting in trouble for hacking their Chromebook.
Tangent: That being said, it's hilarious how much worse the schools are at locking down Windows computers. As far as I can tell, they just bought a few commercial solutions, set them up on the Chromebooks, and paid no attention to the Windows computers. The BIOS isn't even locked. They're only restricted at the network level.
My middle school's computers (desktop pcs with windows at the time) fidn't have passwords on the bios
We would bring linux "live users to boot on and play minecraft
A loss for the school, but definitely a win for our education
Nah... We've had Workspace for a long time and there are still users that adamantly refuse to use Google Apps over MS. They actually have good reasons as well. Since Google just has web apps only there's always extra steps uploading all the office docs they get from other businesses.
We tried blowing Office 2013 away on everyone's machines after being told most users didn't think they needed it. Now, a few months later 90% of our users have asked for a 365 license.
What typically happens from what I can tell is that most businesses just end up having a mix of both 365 and Workspace.
If the parents are talking about choice, then forced Chromebooks are not choice. The students must use them, and schools like them because they are very locked down and centrally observable.
People aren't forced, they choose it. They are clueless about technology and don't trust anything that may look like a dark horse. They want reassurance. It's not just the "enterprise" or corporate world. Home users have that mentality. Mac computers cost an arm and a leg and people still pay for it because the advertising machine has hammered it into the heads that "it just works." Most people only trust big brands. The bigger the better.
No they don't. There aren't any schools nearby that do not force Windows on the students and I can have my whole house on Linux it doesn't matter: if you want to participate in highschool around here then Windows it is. My personal views of MS, their crimes past and present are worth absolutely nothing. I would not be surprised if you dig deep enough that you'll find some level of corruption but even that doesn't help me, it would just lead to a long and drawn out court case the outcome of which will likely be resolved long after my kids are out of school.
So, I have no choice other than to take my kids out of school and that too - rightly so - isn't an option.
It's more than a little bit ridiculous too because there isn't anything in the highschool curriculum that per-se would require access to a windows computer. But they make it so that it just simply doesn't work otherwise, starting from windows native applications for the agenda and messaging system and ending with sending documents in proprietary formats.
I hope that was sarcastic. FWIW I think that government institutions, educational institutions, banks, insurance companies, health care service providers etc should use only open standards. No proprietary stuff at all. So no banking apps, no voting apps, calendar apps, no healthcare claim apps and definitely no client side software (Mac or Windows). Just the web and properly managed infrastructure.
One important reality, though, is that "forced" is a sticky word here. Anyone sufficiently anti-FAANG and tech-savvy enough will find a workaround, so the constraints are far less than most dominant forces across the lens of history.
> What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more. If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it.
The danger that the history will repeat for browsers instead of OSs is real. The less market share for browsers other than Google Chrome or Chrome-based ones, the more likely it is, that we will be forced to use those because of incompatible web applications.
E.g. at work, using a Linux Computer, I switched to Chrome for Teams and Outlook, because of compatibility issues.
Did you try setting your User Agent to Chrome? I have to use Teams for work. Under Firefox it has problems and missing features, setting my user agent to Chrome solves all of it. Highly uncompetitive if you ask me.
Also, pro tip: copying the most popular user-agent string gives you a bit of extra protection against fingerprinting. As of the time of writing, the most populated user-agent string is this: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
To me that sounds more like bad software dev/test procedures at MS than anything intentionally uncompetitive. For example, maybe they don’t keep their Firefox support up to date because not enough Teams users use Firefox to warrant the effort, but maybe Firefox is increasingly Chrome-compatible. Firefox is not popular enough for MS to intentionally cripple.
> If there is one good thing about web apps, it’s that browsers are now the application run time and browsers are more cross platform than any software libraries that have come before it.
I'd take every day a native app running locally over a web app. And I am a web developer.
> I have a native app (VS) and a web app (VSC) running side by side on my computer, its like an adult vs 7y old.
Honestly, VSC is pretty decent due to all of the engineering MS put into it. Brackets and Atom both were way slower and had noticeable input lag, at least for me.
Personally, something like Notepad++ or Lazarus always felt the fastest to me.
Software like JetBrains IDEs, their Fleet editor, Visual Studio and even Visual Studio code all had noticeable hiccups but always seemed "fast enough". Even when the typing itself was okay, there'd be stuff like autocomplete delays/stuttering and refactoring slowdown, but nothing too annoying.
In contrast, Brackets, Atom, working through SSH, remote sessions through RDP/VNC or any device that lagged due to being underpowered always was annoying slow and disruptive.
Not anymore. Last gen phones have enough performance to run webapps without a single loss in performance, look and feel compared to native apps.
Native apps will remain, but you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look.
Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower. Although native knowledge is still required for Auth, billing, advertising and other required native stuff.
I still have to see a single webapp that is as performant and feels the same as a native one. We might get there, and lots of companies are happy to release a half-backed webapp today, but that is definitely not the experience today.
I could post a mini saas that I made in php and mysql, using jQuery on the front end, that outperforms just about any webapp and most modern local apps, but I don't want to attract too much attention because I'm sure technically it's easily breakable to pros and malicious people.
Also, it runs on a $4 a month namecheap server.
Why is so fast? Because I came from the land of slow crms, and performance was my #1 goal. Instead of making it faster to develope, I made it faster for the end user.
Is that a worthwhile business goal? I don't know. But I know it's fast.
Render speed of browser engines is really good these days on mobile phones. Getting fluid animations is maybe even easier and faster with css than with the Android sdk or ios. Plenty of frameworks out there to create nice SPAs.
Some parts still have to be native like Auth, billing etc. But majority of the app can be web.
Why would the browser render engine slower than the Java Android UI render engine?
I am almost certain that the browser css engine is better optimized than the Android native render. IOS is a different story since their render engine is heavily optimized against their own hardware. But still I know that webapps can have the same performance as native apps. And the end of mobile native UI kits will finally arrive. Webapps/spas will take over.
They do, but they are the exception, not the rule. The bulk of the free software that I use I use locally, in fact I don't think I use even a single package that is a free software web app that is operated by some third party and if it were then I probably would try to find an alternative.
But the lack of driver support still does. Linux on a modern laptop is just full of headaches. I mean, https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-7840u this is typical: GNOME doesn't work, graphical glitches... In my own experience, operating MFC devices over several years is a nightmare, Bluetooth is problematic as well, some proprietary VPNs do not have Linux clients which might not be Linux's fault but if I can't log in I can't work.
Life is too short for this, sorry. Windows + WSL is the way. The right tool for the right job, Windows for drivers, WSL for, well, everything else.
So, they took a cutting edge Windows PC, slapped Linux on it, and it didn't work well.
How well did OSX do when they tried it? Clearly, OSX isn't ready for the desktop! No wonder nobody runs it!
Modern computers are complex enough that they can work well with Windows, OSX, or Linux, but they don't work well with more than one of them (unless the designers work really hard). See, for example, how to reboot: https://mjg59.livejournal.com/137313.html
If you want to run Linux on a computer, buy it preinstalled, with support. Anything else is an exercise in chasing down small glitches, as you describe. (This happens for Windows too! The difference is that the laptop vendor has a team of people (the system integration team) to fix the issues, either by modifying drivers, modifying the firmware, or having the ODM change the hardware. If you slap Linux on some random bit of Windows kit, you get to be the system integration team, but with only one of three avenues open to you to fix the glitches. And that only halfway, since you cant get the OEM or ODM to give you the time of day. And that's assuming you're a proficient kernel hacker.)
Slapping Linux on a Windows box is a mug's game. The only way to win is not to play.
WRT corporations, they can do what they like with their own hardware and software. And yes, a lot are short-sighted. Most won't be using Mac any time soon, because they've locked themselves in quite effectively.
It's not about the fee (generally it's small for you (though for the OEM it's critical, and one of the ways MSFT gets OEMs to do their bidding (a small example is how they all "recommend Windows" on their sites; it's a discount on the fees they pay MSFT)). The fee also is why you get so much crapware on new Windows boxes.
It's about the hardware's support of the OS (see the firmware discussion above).
It's also about your support experience as a customer (do you have to reinstall Windows before the OEM will give you the time of day, let alone fix the hardware glitch you're hitting)
i dunno. i work on completely cross platform things and use a system76 laptop and the experience is still pretty garbage. the real problem is the linux userspace. its a huge arbitrary mess that is made worse by the insane number of packages that have to work together for a remotely usable desktop experience.
it's possible of course, but invariably breaks, especially if you need to install any single third party thing.
i hate flatpak etc but it really makes u think about why people are putting effort into fat packages for desktop stuff
> What stung before was that people were forced to use Windows because of lock-ins, software compatibility, etc. That doesn’t really exist any more.
What? This is very real and a key driver not to use Linux or Mac for millions of users. As soon as even a little performance is required webapps just can't compare. Look at anything graphics related especially 3d, CAD or video. You might be able to build shitty infographics for Instagram on Canva but real work still requires access to compute at the edge and most software providers in those spaces target Microsoft only.
>No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice
That was the case in 1999 too. The Linux on the Desktop dream wasn't about removing choice, but about MORE people making the choice to run Linux.
Also, market share translates to support, resources available, people and companies working there, drivers, and so on. Personal choice to use X doesn't magically offer those.
What a joke. Web standards move under our feet -- and browsers break -- all the time. I personally work for a company that forces me to work online and only pretends to support Linux. They say I have to use the latest version of Chrome (so I can't choose a browser that won't spy on me), I use it and it still breaks occasionally. I know they count on everybody using Windows and don't want to bother with Linux. So much for cross-platform. That pipe dream was proven false years ago.
> No. I will use the OS I like and others will use the OS they prefer. It’s called choice.
But I can't use the OS I like. I can't go in a store, pick a laptop I like, and get it with an OS I like. I can get it with an OS I don't like; and gamble that I can install on it an OS that I do like. It would have been very different if Linux market share on the desktop were in double digits.
This is a wholly valid point when it comes to Linux desktop penetration. However as an aside, it seems to me that the computers for sale in actual stores are usually of terrible quality. They’re the last the computers I would choose, and this isn’t really a Windows or ChromeOS thing. (I’d just wipe them and install Linux in any case) This doesn’t detract from your point at all, but it just seems like the most-available computers are the ones companies _want_ to sell rather than the computers that savvy consumers _want_ to buy.
I agree, and am sad to observe that it is very different with Apple, where laptops available on display in a physical Apple store are often the ones a savvy customer would want to buy.
I'm sure as hell locked in. Linux Desktop doesn't even remotely come close to offer the things I ask out of a PC (high quality music production and image editing). On the other hand, both Windows and macOS do.
I have run high quality music production software on Linux. It was Windows software, that runs thanks to Wine. It works and it's even better than native applications because native applications expire when a distro version is discontinued and the application is not packaged for the current version. Windows applications installed in Wine never expire. Wine is Linux, Linux does the job.
And high quality image editing is possible, though it's probably done differently from whatever you're used to. There are plenty of graphic artists making their work on Linux and bragging about it.
So "doesn't even remotely come close" is either a lie or a display of your ignorance.
I know quite a few graphic artists and musical engineers who use Linux professionally. I think the difference, really, is which tools you're used to using. There aren't really any Linux tools for these sorts of things that work the same as the tools for Windows, so if you're expert with one, you still have a rather large learning curve if you want to use the other. That can be prohibitive.
Both these things are very well possible on Linux. Maybe you are more concerned about specific applications which have not been ported by their developers?
Oh, the lock in still exists. In many fields. You need a certain software to be competitive, so you have to use whatever os supports it. I know people who have switched from Mac os to windows because office is slightly janky on Mac os. Lock ins happen all the time.
There's also a thing where software supports Mac and Windows, but really needs a lot of memory and storage, so the absurd markups Apple went back to charging in the Apple silicon era make it unviable for all but the most profitable workloads. I looked into Apple when laptop shopping recently, but couldn't justify or afford the markup to get the storage and memory I can put in the laptop I went with for a fraction of the cost.
Only if said OS exists. It does require a critical mass of users otherwise drivers wouldn't exist for desktop hardware and distros wouldn't exist. We're just lucky that the critical mass is actually quite low.
Market share/popularity correlates directly to amount of available software, and their support. So it is completely rational to care about these metrics.
Could be both tbh. There are definitely ways in which Linux is better - no ads (cough Microsoft) or artificial restrictions (e.g. recording desktop audio cough Apple).
But in the most important ways - software availability and reliability - it is much worse.
Reliability for sure, though it has gotten better. You could argue that availability is better because it's all free, but I see what you are saying. Often enough I can't use a program natively on Linux.
What do I care how many people use the thing I do? The only thing that matters to me is how good the toys I get to use are.
> See over there, in that one space, you're a weakling.
A lot more people eat fast food that gourmet food. I wonder if the people who can afford gourmet food feel like weaklings because of that. My guess is: No they don't.
Linux's culture abhors everything required to be a great desktop OS and I don't think that will change any time soon.
For the average person, they don't care what a window manager is or pulse/alsa/jack or whatever. They just want a singular consistent experience that "just works", whatever software they install, whatever hardware they plug in. And the Linux community is obsessed with the complete opposite of this.
Apparently a lot of the systemd pushback was because it was making everything "too similar and compatible with each other". Now isn't that just laughable; that's what most people want!
It is a little worse that that for Linux - you have conquered the whole world except for the place where you were born - where you are still a nobody.
You can't just forget about that place either because you wake up there every day to rule the rest of the world from.
ok maybe i'm a sore loser, but looking at where the popular desktop OSes have been going going i think i'm fine with linux remaining an enthusiast thing
Exactly my thoughts. I think Linux is in a good sweet spot; popular enough so that applications advertise support for Linux, but not popular enough to be spoiled and optimized for the "casual" user.
>but not popular enough to be spoiled and optimized for the "casual" user
I'm trying really hard to come up with a scenario where optimizing the desktop experience for the average user is a bad thing.
For example, what keeps me on Windows (and WSL2) at the moment is that the freesync/variable refresh rate technology doesn't always behave as you would expect it to be, resulting in games that stutter, frame dip and eat inputs. Gnome devs have a branch pending final tests for vrr for months. KDE on Wayland is the best for what I'm asking atm but even that has its problems during gameplay.
And let's not forget the pains Nvidia's drivers cause compared to AMD on Linux for desktop. I built my desktop using AMD GPU and CPU specifically for Linux to play nice, and yet it doesn't for the only 2 games I play during my downtime. It's just sad.
> I'm trying really hard to come up with a scenario where optimizing the desktop experience for the average user is a bad thing.
Again, maybe I'm a sore loser, but it definitely feels like a lot of software is becoming increasingly hostile to me, personally because it's being optimized for a presumed average user. I have no beef with this average user and it's globally a totally correct optimization to make stuff work for them as well as possible, but it means that software makes tradeoffs that are inconvenient for me personally.
The most common use case is streamlined by removing options that clutter up the settings menu or banishing the buttons I press a lot into some tertiary menu, or niche features I rely on become unsupported and then get removed (of course with forced auto-updates, because the average user experience is improved by them) to free up developer bandwidth for the core features. And then I end up using a different off-brand window manager with the serial numbers filed off that barely works in general, but works for my specific 'workflow" exactly like I want it.
Of course, at the same time I also benefit from general improvements targeting the average user. It's only about the tradeoffs.
> I'm trying really hard to come up with a scenario where optimizing the desktop experience for the average user is a bad thing.
It's a bad thing if you're not an average user, because software aimed at the "average user" tends to be a pain in the butt for the non-average user. I would point to Windows, the entire web browser space, etc., as examples of this.
And it's not just about the average user. It's also about the compromises needed to make a product suitable for mass production. I already see the effects of that on Linux, in the form of things like systemd, snaps, flatpack, etc.
I think we're past the sweet spot, things are starting to go "casual user", you only need to check what Ubuntu and Fedora are pushing,in a way the "windows ification" of Linux: gnome 3/4,systemd+,snapd,telemetry etc.
It's not so much that systemd is designed to lure in casual users, it's that it (like other software on the list) reflects an attitude that separates "developers" who decide how a system should work, from "users" who have to take what's given to them. This stands in opposition to the traditional unixy world order, where the two groups are one and the same "hackers".
I'm using ubuntu among other distros, and it never tried to push gnome to me. Using i3 is literally one "apt install" away. As of systemd I'm old enough to remember when initialization was managed by a pile of unreadable shell scripts and I never wanted it back.
It's odd that you included systemd in the list. It's something that a casual user isn't going to notice, but that has made life easier for system administrators and desktop tinkerers. With systemd, I can write a few lines of config to turn a simple Python script into a daemon with syslog integration, process monitoring, and resource limits. I understand the concerns about scope creep, but I'd take systemd any day over the maze of distro-specific shell scripts that was there before it.
Systemd definitely belongs in the list, even if some admins like it.
"Windowsification" is a admittedly vague concept, but tends to cover software that is gratuitously different, not a team player in the bazaar, prone to making land grabs through "embrace and extend", and reluctant to offer configuration options that conflict with its "opinionated" stances.
As an aside, I'm really sick of the systemd / "random pile of shell scripts" false dichotomy. It's trivial to turn a python script into a system service with runit, too. Simple, stable, and focused.
Systemd was widely adopted because it makes life easier for the distros. It is directly resulting from the increased popularity of Linux putting an increased demand on them.
There's nothing stopping different organizations from making very different distributions of Linux, with some optimized for casual users and others optimized for techies. We're already had this for ages, with Ubuntu being aimed at more casual users and Gentoo/Arch/etc. being aimed at more technical users for instance. If Microsoft dumped Windows and made a new version of Windows based on Linux internals (but of course lots of big changes to make it more like Windows, plus a bunch of telemetry and advertising crap), that wouldn't prevent other distros from continuing to do their own thing.
It also helps that there have been very few important (big, complicated) applications in the past decade or two. Firefox is there? My development environment is there? I'm probably good.
Steam is there, with Proton, and Lutris. It's almost a better experience than the twelve different launchers situation I left behind (though they're annoying in very different ways!)
I was recently surprised to find installing battle.net with Steam Proton is not only possible, but dead simple, and actually worked.
I had been trying for days using the lutris installer, but just shit keeps breaking endlessly. At some point I compiled lutris into a venv just to try and solve all the dependency shit that was lurking in there.
But lutris as it stands now breaks everything almost every time I use it.
I had steam unlaunchable for over a week because of something lutris was doing implicitly. Now running steam directly off the CLI seems to be working for 90% of the games I play (which isn't a very long list).
Only thing I doubt I will be able to figure out is stuff like fortnite or anything that uses easy-anti-cheat (since their devs give a fuck about linux and effectively believe we are all hackers trying to ruin their game).
That's all I got, don't bother with Lutris unless you have an insane amount of time to debug which component is missing.
Yeah I admit at this point in my life, much like I used to start up the SNES to play Zelda back in my parents' living room, I start up my Windows system to play Monster Hunter or whatever, while trying really hard to ignore the whole desktop thing on that system.
To be fair, SteamOS is just a barely customized Arch Linux.
All the UX work is being done in the steam client itself and is not exclusive to the Steam Deck. In fact, the SteamOS ui is now available 1:1 in the good old PC Steam client, replacing the old Big Picture mode.
The only thing that doesn’t comes directly with Steam is Gamescope (but you can install it yourself easily).
Other than that, the SteamOS is just an Arch Linux with Steam installed, KDE and a Steam wallpaper.
And the SteamOS UI doesn't have the same game controller configuration options as the old Big Picture mode had. That is a good example of "dumbification" of the UI in order to make things cheaper.
Honestly, it feels like mentioning the concept of "desktop" seems a little weak, like someone from 2010. Chances are you have linux running in a VM, or container, or phone, or other device right beside you.
It has full presence on my desktop, which is all that matters.
Despite the lack of any exponential moonshots in marketshare, compatibility layers like Wine and Wine derivatives, as well as platform agnostic package management tools, have made Linux desktops much more pleasant to use compared to just 4-5 years ago. This has allowed me to almost completely de-Windows my computer usage without abandoning Windows-only applications.
I do try to shill Linux to friends from time to time as a casual tease. Haven't had much success in that regard but it's not a concrete goal of mine. Despite having all gone to the same STEM program that required Linux environments for most courses, I'm the only one using it as a daily driver outside of work among the 15-20 people I still regularly contact.
They still have the dominant desktop OS and they barely care about that. Microsoft in it's current form wants to sell you subscriptions and in that context the operating system is less relevant.
What stings me a bit is that Microsoft is the dominant player on the desktop and then they are so little about making the making it a good and consistent experience. Windows 95 was never amazing, but they put the work in and gave us the impression that they at least tried. Now it's 2023 and my desktop has ads, tracking and UI elements that are 30 years old, because they could never be arsed to update them.
I'm sure it stings a lot! Windows Server is expensive, and a huge money earner for MS.
They currently have around 20% market share (as Internet servers - much higher inside business LANs), which is a very nice chunk. And I'm sure encourages them to keep working on it.
Frankly the tooling for MS server keeps it in the hunt - they really understand the concept of making things easier to use.
> They currently have around 20% market share (as Internet servers -
Extremely big doubts about this. How would anyone even know? All the hyperscale datacenters built by FAANG must be 99.9% Linux, and those DCs alone would probably be enough to make 20% impossible to hit for windows.
Incidentally this is public facing Internet servers. The % -inside- enterprises us much much higher.
Tools like Active Directory allow you to scale enterprise operations, which is important for companies that have hundreds-of-thousands of desktops etc.
In any event your estimate of 99.9% is unlikely. AWS offers Windows based EC2 instances, and one presumes they're not doing that for 0.01% of the market. Azure will likely have an even higher %.
From the data though, not just guessing, I'd say it's about 20% overall.
> Incidentally this is public facing Internet servers. The % -inside- enterprises us much much higher.
I can believe private enterprise usage is higher, but I imagine FAANG and similar companies also have quite a lot non public Linux servers. Not trying to rebut your overall point, but I'm not sure the total non public % is much different.
Of course, we might not believe that all of those internet facing servers are of equal size and represent an equal number of servers, right?
We know that all the top 25 websites are 100% Linux and represent a lot of servers each.
Also a whole lot of that cited report seems to be misidentified. The top Windows site other than Microsoft properties listed is nih.gov, which looks like Drupal on Linux behind Akamai GHost -- all Linux.
I do accept that Windows is probably about 20-25% of server instances and slowly contracting. But public facing webservers and the infrastructure that directly supports them? Nothing close to this.
It might be expensive but I wouldn't at all be surprised if MS already makes more money annually on Linux instances on Azure and I'm almost certain that Windows instances on Azure makes more than the regular enterprise installations.
Let’s not pretend it wouldn’t be good if I could run Linux on the desktop the way we run MacOS. It would be great to only have to learn one OS and it worked really smoothly.
Like macOS, that is, all locked down, with abilities to customize things revoked with every release, with most software paid, and only available on a narrow choice of pretty expensive (though powerful) hardware?
No, not really.
You can't make things smooth and flexible at the same time, it takes too much effort. You can't support a ton of varied hardware and make everything work smoothly in every case; it again would take non-viable amounts of work.
You can have a pretty smooth desktop Linux experience if you pick a large mainstream distro, pick reliable, well-supported mainstream hardware, and pick a polished desktop environment such as KDE or that Gnome variant of Pop OS.
But if you want to tweak things, you've got to tweak things.
IMHO, desktop Linux could use a little bit of locking down and progress is slowly being made in that direction.
It feels a little bonkers that in 2023, Flatpak or something like it isn’t the default way software is installed. That calculator you just installed should not have access to your camera or microphone or file system. That weather app may need your location, but you should be able to grant access to sensitive resources always, never, or only after asking.
> It feels a little bonkers that in 2023, Flatpak or something like it isn’t the default way software is installed. That calculator you just installed should not have access to your camera or microphone or file system. That weather app may need your location, but you should be able to grant access to sensitive resources always, never, or only after asking.
This approach was widely ridiculed in the Vista days. Maybe I’m old but I still think it’s absurd security theatre that trades off a ton of usability for a tiny amount of imaginary security. It annoys me to no end that on macOS, for instance, opening a terminal emulator and trying to `ls` inside my home directory freezes on a security popup that wants me to allow my terminal emulator to access my home directory.
If you want a locked down appliance, there’s always Chromebooks. Which run a linux kernel btw.
> And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it
No. In fact, as a Linux user, I'm happy that Linux doesn't have a major share of the desktop. If it did, then I think it would have a terrible (to me) effect on the direction of Linux development, because it would be more tempting to aim for the most common denominator, and we already have good options for the most common denominator.
It doesn’t sting at all because my personal worth isn’t tied to what OS is used where. But this comment explains a lot about the mentality I see where people argue it’s a failing of Linux that it’s not intuitive for non-technical grandmothers.
Well, people also argue that it's a virtue of Linux that it's easier for non-technical grandmothers to use than Windows. I'm not making that up, either.
> And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it :).
NOO IT DOESN'T!!
Love the can of worms you opened with that comment. It does sting, because the desktop market is optimized for proprietary software. Open source, even if superior, is always behind on a hill that is upwards both ways. Proprietary firmware, drivers, patents, vendor lock-in, etc., have become very high walls.
Agreed, it stings. I see it as a measure of how brainwashed/psychologically coerced the masses are. Why would a sentient, rational agent expend resources for an inferior product while a superior alternative exists which costs nothing.
> And yet not having a presence on the desktop stings a bit doesn't it :).
Depending on how you define "desktop" i would argue that Linux has a very big presence on the desktop. Considering the "new desktop" is a smartphone, and Android is based on Linux, that alone would account for a very large desktop presence.
Unfortunately there is no real “transmission” between the two, pretty much only the kernel is shared, absolutely nothing in userspace. Hell, it is ridiculously difficult to even run/emulate android on a normal linux distro.
Which is a shame, because while android’s model is far from perfect, it is definitely eons ahead of the traditional linux userspace, especially on the security front.
Sure, Linux is on many, many devices which have proprietary UIs. And there it does pretty well, because the kernel just provides generic functionality cheaply. It’s a commodity backend that could be swapped with another commodity backend without any users knowing or caring. Hooray. Linux is the go to choice when you could just as well be using something else that’s really cheap, like BSD.
However, desktop Linux is where the product is 100% OSS. That’s the apples to apples comparison. And that’s where it can’t compete without vendors writing property code to put in front of it to make it actually work well.
Server side Linux gets a lot of support from professional programmers paid by big corps. They have improved it beyond hobbyist level, and it works pretty well. And of course cheap makes up for a lot.
The kernel does not provide "generic" functionality; it provides very specific, often top-notch functionality which you can't easily find elsewhere, at least not as an easy replacement.
Linux has the largest collection of various hardware drivers, and a rather wide community of kernel developers who know how to produce them.
Linux has a number of specialty filesystems, some pretty important for embedded development.
Linux kernel has real-time extensions, which is not entirely a commodity, AFAICT.
Also, stuff like io_uring, BPF VM inside the kernel, namespaces (see "containers"), etc.
No, I don't think you can easily replace Linux kernel with whatever BSD kernel, Darwin, VxWorks, Contiki, FreeRTOS, etc, or, well, Windows. Much of the larger embedded stuff is Linux-specific, and much of big server stuff is either Linux-only or has extensive specific support.
It was designed for portability from the beginning and was ported to x86:
> Various versions of NT family operating systems have been released for a variety of processor architectures, initially IA-32, MIPS, and DEC Alpha, with PowerPC, Itanium, x86-64 and ARM supported in later releases.
> In order to prevent Intel x86-specific code from slipping into the operating system, due to developers being used to developing on x86 chips, Windows NT 3.1 was initially developed using non-x86 development systems and then ported to the x86 architecture. This work was initially based on the Intel i860-based Dazzle system and, later, the MIPS R4000-based Jazz platform. Both systems were designed internally at Microsoft.
We're talking about "devices which have proprietary UIs" so in that case, the company creating the proprietary UI is free to choose the hardware. At that point, all of the benefits of Linux over BSD cease to exist, because the vendor can simply choose hardware that supports BSD (or pay someone to develop drivers). So yes, in those specific cases (again, "devices which have proprietary UIs"), you could easily replace Linux with BSD.
The "operating system" is not really operating the system anymore. They're just an app sandboxed away from the real hardware by the real operating systems hidden away in the machine.
> Sure, Linux is on many, many devices which have proprietary UIs. And there it does pretty well, because the kernel just provides generic functionality cheaply. It’s a commodity backend that could be swapped with another commodify backend without any users knowing or caring. Hooray.
Sour grapes.
> Linux is the go to choice when you could just as well be using something else that’s really cheap, like BSD.
You actually couldn't be just as well using BSD. Corporations would love to be able to take Linux and not contribute their changes back (and that's frequently what happens when they use it internally but don't distribute it). They don't use a BSD licensed kernel in many such places (e.g., Android) because Linux is more advanced.
More advanced in terms of supported features and hardware.
Taking one off the top of my head that was relevant around the time Android was being developed, dynamic ticks which is important for low power operation. Linux supported this in 2007 about 5 years before FreeBSD and I think NetBSD still doesn't support it. Could not field a phone OS without that, at least not back in those days.
They keep making these articles because your points are irrelevant to the discussion here. People want Linux desktop market share, because they know what the more market share Linux gains, the better the experience will be (more testing, more apps ported, etc.) Nobody who is cheering on the 3% number is going to be satisfied by obscure facts like "Android is Linux" (it isn't to the users of locked-down phones) and "Servers run Linux" (does that matter in the slightest to the person loading the webpage?)
They've been saying it so long it's part of our psyche. It doesn't matter the other places Linux is running, it hasn't conquered that one place they've been trying to conquer since the start. You never get over the one who got away.
When explaining linux to skeptical non-techies, I tell them it's the OS running the nuclear submarines right now. Suddenly they're more confident it can handle their ecommerce dashboard.
That's a bit of a mistatement/overstatement. That's like saying the Windows XP thin-client at Barnes and Noble runs the, mostly Linux/Unix, backend.
For US nuclear subs: All of the core components and electronics use a custom RTOS; older ones built in Ada, newer ones built in C++. The "control computers" (the computers that humans interface with to tell core components what to do) aren't running anything like Ubuntu or Fedora, but instead run a heavily ruggedized and customized Linux system based on the Titanium suite from Star Lab.
For UK subs, they run a similar custom OS for the modules and electronics and (until 2017 or so, at least) run Windows XP for their control computers.
I have no idea what other nations use; but I would assume they are similarly setup.
That's not to disavow the fact that clearly the US govt trusts those Linux computers to be reliable, thus their investment in them. So it is an accomplishment, they just don't "run" anything.
> (the computers that humans interface with to tell core components what to do) aren't running anything like Ubuntu or Fedora, but instead run a heavily ruggedized and customized Linux system based on the Titanium suite from Star Lab.
That’s not to be minimized. Sounds like very much on the critical path, and definitely not some shitty infotainment sidecar. If that crashed, you couldn’t control core functions of the sub? Are there overrides?
Btw, thanks for sharing these details. I would never have learnt this. Love HN sometimes.
> That’s not to be minimized. Sounds like very much on the critical path, and definitely not some shitty infotainment sidecar. If that crashed, you couldn’t control core functions of the sub? Are there overrides?
Sure, it's an important component of the entire system. Much as a steering wheel is an important component of a car, it still doesn't "run" the car. You need to interface, yes obviously; but if the machine crashes the sub operates merrily along like usual and any of the other control computers can continue to give it commands.
As to overrides, if you lost every single control computer and the direct interfaces (the analog control boards you see in crucial areas of naval vessels) then the overall system has a fallback procedure. It's not documented or public knowledge, but assumedly it would surface and activate an emergency beacon as the vessel is crippled (and likely damaged) at that point.
If the goal of such parallel is to show how Linux is more reliable than Windows, then being the steering wheel is sufficient, compared to Windows not being a part of the car at all.
> For UK subs, they run a similar custom OS for the modules and electronics and (until 2017 or so, at least) run Windows XP for their control computers.
You're mostly right, but this is incorrect. MS was the largest kernel contributor for a few days 10 years ago, but overall companies like Intel, Google, Oracle and IBM contribute a lot more.
>Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS.
Yes, but that's kind of a moot point.
The decades old dream was "Linux on the Desktop" (not just as some 3% market share or "works for me" - it worked for people in 1999 too), but overtaking Windows as the desktop OS for the masses).
And of course all those billion of Android devices, hide everything about what people meant and wanted from the Linux experience. It's just the kernel and some basic userland stuff, on top of which everything else is totally foreign, closed down, and tied to proprietary services under Google's control (with Samsung and co's own touches).
Linux is so irrelevant to the visible part of Android's functionality, that Google could very well change the backend to Fuchsia when that's ready, and those billion devices would be un-Linuxed within a few years, as they get old, and their owners replace them by new Fuchsia running smartphones.
> made by a company who makes more money off Linux than anything else, is the largest corp contributor to Linux, and has far more Linux machines internally than Windows ones, and hires software developers who do not develop for Windows.
Huh? This is...totally wrong. Software devs at Microsoft are supplied with Windows machines by default, a lot of software is built on Microsoft-specific technologies like C#, and most of the server footprint is Windows Server.
My team only uses MacBooks at Microsoft. It’s true that I was forced to receive a PC, but it sits in a drawer collecting dust and only gets booted up when compliance throws a tantrum.
Can you elaborate on this? I have always been curious when a group works on an inferior (in terms of popularity!) product such as Ask Jeeves how they themselves work day to day in the workplace. So you worked for Microsoft and didn't use their flagship product?
What do you think the flagship product is? It’s not Windows, if we are ranking by revenue, it’s barely hanging in third place.
I don’t think it’s too shocking when you consider that most of the Office products need to developed and compiled for other operating systems, and obviously Azure is not Windows dependent.
Culture has changed, nobody cares if you use a Mac. Hell I bet half the employees are taking Teams meetings on their iPhones.
> Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS
Depends on what and why Linux. Original dream/vision selling it was a libre OS developed in the Bazaar that will give user full control over their devices against the tyranny of the corporations. You can't with straight face claim that all the billions of phones and embedded devices represent that freedom.
As about kernel, it may be BSD, Linux or maybe even NT or Plan 9, it honestly doesn't matter.
> The largest desktop OS on that list? Windows.... made by a company who makes more money off Linux than anything else, is the largest corp contributor to Linux
The desktop is a great test of whether an OS is actually great, or it's just free and happens to work really well because servers have professional IT staff and powerful machines.
After so many years, they still don't have reliable "Every package even the ones not in the repos just works" status. It's mostly there, like, 99.9%, but stuff still breaks more than on Windows or Android. I suspect they never will, except for things like NixOS.
I used to think Linux was behind because of legacy reasons and game companies not being interested... but now I think Linux itself has something to do with it, and we should use that as motivation to improve.
Right now I think NixOS, or just accepting Snap packages, or waiting for Flatpak, might be the best/only chance, aside from moving to a batteries included OS like Android.
Seems like Nix really just needs GUI admin tools, everything else seems to be fairly polished.
Meh. I switched (back) to Ubuntu this January after a few years of Windows, because my AMD CPU+GPU setup kept BSODing on Windows, it kept failing to wake up from sleep (and because I got fed up with a lot of other nits), and ... surprisingly most of the things just work. Brother printer? Next-next-finish. As it was many years ago on Windows. (The same printer takes an intensive 30 minutes of cursing and downloading some godforsaken software.)
Steam and Lutris (StarCraft 2!) work pretty well, Detroit Become Human just works. (Enable proton in Steam, and click install and play.)
(I removed snap, however, as it's just in the way, but I don't remember what was my exact problem with it.)
The kernel is not the operating system, even if it is a key component of it. Android phones do use the Linux kernel - well, not exactly; some kind of modified version of it - but they do not use the GNU/Linux operating system. The OS is different in many ways: Filesystem hierarchy, daemons/services, graphics stack, etc.
Charitably: a wider userbase on desktop means there's more attention given to consumer hardware support, vendor/driver support, app support, desktop environment and distro work, etc etc, all of which makes the experience better for the people who already use it on desktop. So I think that's a good reason for them to be excited
Everyone knows Linux is the number one for servers and embeded devices but the desktop market share is special.
It's interesting to see how over the years the user experience of Linux Desktop ia getting better, bug are being fixed, we get better software, desktop environments are getting more features e.g.
Etc. All of which agree with you. But, it turns out, most people don't care about what OS runs their toothbrush or thin client. Only their mobile device or desktop, which is why these reports are so much more popular.
I'm kinda surprised this entirely forgot to mention the SteamDeck. I'd love to know how much of an impact that had, considering apparently 3 million units have been sold (according to Valve). Alas, how many of those users know they are running Linux is another question.
Just want to say that all of these replies missed the mark so much by debating desktops and desktop modes and BSD on a game console...
While this graph says that 3% of desktop users are running Linux, what it means is GNU/Linux and not just the Linux kernel. The steam deck runs GNU/Linux as the OS regardless of it being in desktop mode or console mode. a Chromebook runs Linux, but that is still ChromeOS. Any android device runs Linux, but that is Android. we are not talking about the kernel. We are talking about GNU on top of Linux as an OS that people use in some way as a desktop.
By that logic these articles should be about FreeBSD/NetBSD not Linux cause they have more presence by running on every PS3/PS4/PS5. Roughly ~250m compared to the 3m
But other than through unofficial modding how many of those expose an open BSD environment? The Steam Deck has a desktop mode as a selling point which functions exactly like a Linux desktop.
That desktop mode is very inconvenient to use in handheld mode so the vast majority of users use it only to apply fixes to specific games, install emulators and the like and then switch back to the Steam GUI asap.
I've had mine for about a week now, and am using it more than I use my laptop. The "desktop" mode works more than well enough for web browsing and such.
The biggest thing that changed for me was learning that you can use both trackpads on the keyboard at the same time, and use the trigger buttons to "press" a key - or to press shift if you use the opposite trigger from the side your finger is moving.
The Deck can be compared to a laptop computer with specialized controls and a touch screen. It runs a desktop OS, with desktop programs and games. You can use it as a normal desktop computer, connected to a screen and peripherals, and this is by design.
The same can't be said of the PS; the PS isn't a desktop computer.
> The native operating system of the PlayStation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a fork of FreeBSD version 9.0 which was released on January 12, 2012.[6][7]
That doesn't mean it's running BSD. For example, MacOS runs a non-BSD kernel with lots of BSD networking code added on-top. It is not a BSD-based Operating System but it does use BSD code to create it's environment. I would not for a single second believe that the PS4 runs an unmodified FreeBSD kernel. There is just no upstream code to support this claim.
>Alas, how many of those users know they are running Linux is another question.
That's the whole point. Probably 99% of computer (anything that uses a processor I guess qualifies a computer these days) users in this world don't really care what's running underneath as long it gets the job done. If something can run linux underneath and can still pass as acceptable that's a huge win I think.
This is about desktop market share. Even though Steam Deck has KDE on it, out of the box it boots into Steam and I suspect it is enough for majority of users.
SteamDecks aren’t desktop PCs. If you were including gaming consoles/handhelds, then BSD would be way ahead of Linux with all the PlayStations that have been sold (and maybe with Nintendo switches too, depending on how you chose to count those).
It’s still not a desktop PC. You’ll notice that iOS, Android and iPadOS aren’t included in the list either, even though the devices that run those operating systems can also replicate some subset of the desktop pc experience (and much more comprehensively than the steam deck can).
At best it would be a general purpose mobile device, but even that is rather contrived. How many users do you imagine are using a steam deck as a substitute for a desktop or a different mobile device? I would guess something very close to 0.
Anecdotal but I bring my steam deck with a dock and M&K with me when I visit family since I don't have a desktop computer there.
Also, the Steam Deck's OS is by far the closest you can get to a traditional Linux distro since it's GNU+Linux under the hood. The built-in desktop mode is extremely close to a basic KDE Arch install, especially after you disable read-only mode. Android doesn't have as full-featured of a desktop experience unless we count Samsung DeX and even then display out is available on a vast minority of devices. iOS has no native display out and iPadOS doesn't even support normal 16:9 screens without black borders. The issue with all of the above devices is that their "desktop" modes are janky afterthoughts while on the Steam Deck it's a core feature.
Your guess is very wrong. I've been using my deck as a laptop occasionally, and I've seen a lot of posts on a sub on the recently deceased site of people using it as such.
And why not? It's basically a touchscreen laptop without a keyboard and with a small screen.
Also, the deck does not replicate a subset of the desktop experience, it just contains a desktop experience. Unless the KDE desktop is not a desktop now. If that's the case - it runs windows.
> that run those operating systems can also replicate some subset of the desktop pc experience
But Steam Deck is just running a fork of Arch not some other operating system. From analytics perspective it's indistinguishable to any Linux PC. Also IIRC you can just connect it a display which would turn into a desktop PC.
> At best it would be a general purpose mobile device, but even that is rather contrived. How many users do you imagine are using a steam deck as a substitute for a desktop or a different mobile device?
Is it contrived? They've shown, in their official marketing videos, demonstrations of the steam deck being hooked up to an external monitor and being used to run KDE and Windows 10.
A desktop PC is not a type of operating system. It’s a type of computer designed for a specific use case, distinct from servers, mobile devices, handheld gaming devices or gaming consoles. A windows server or Linux server with KDE/gnome is not a desktop. A mobile phone isn’t a desktop, and it wouldn’t become a desktop even if you installed a plain Linux distro with KDE on it. A PlayStation, switch or Xbox isn’t a desktop PC, and neither is a steamdeck.
It’s an arbitrarily defined category of computer, and this statistics site doesn’t mention how they’ve specified that definition, but it seems they haven’t included any server, mobile/handheld, or gaming console devices at all, not just the steamdeck.
It really sounds like you don't understand how the OS is set up on the steam deck. It's a normal desktop environment with a customized version of steam installed.
If laptops get to be included (which they usually are), then steamdeck gets to be included.
It doesn't replicate "some subset" of the desktop experience. It does everything a small tower can, plus things it can't do.
Steam Deck's desktop environment is barely usable without connecting it to a dock and using an external keyboard and mouse.
You won't use it as a daily driver in handheld mode. The virtual keyboard covers half of the screen, the touchscreen is unusable as a mouse and touchpads are inconvenient.
I deliberately didn't compare it to a laptop, because the topic at hand is whether it qualifies as a "desktop". If it can function without an external keyboard and mouse that's a bonus feature.
I would. It's designed to be used as a desktop by plugging in a DisplayPort cable, hooking up a keyboard and mouse, and switching it to KDE desktop mode or installing Windows. This is a documented and officially supported feature, and has been shown in Valve's marketing material.
The problem is the desktop situation is such a mess. Do you go with a gtk or qt desktop and which one? And then X11 which is ancient and creaky, or wayland which is fatally nerfed in design (if not it's entire development philosophy) even when it does do what you need which is far from always?
OTOH windows is becoming adware/spyware and macos is becoming big brother lockdown-wear, so maybe it is time for linux to shine.
Personally windows (actually, almost anything microsoft) enrages me anytime I'm unfortunate enough to have to use it, and I'm getting increasingly annoyed at macos limitations and won't be buying apple again, so my next machine will run linux.
Last time I checked, I could run Qt apps on my MATE desktop and Gtk+ apps on my KDE desktop. I prefer X11 because it's mature and works perfectly for me. I might try Wayland sometime, but it had better support all of the weird things I do with X11.
More to the point, the choice is a feature, and it comes with a bit of chaos. Would you rather live in an effectively single-party state like Singapore where everything is shiny but you get caned for spitting gum on the street (MacOS), Russia which is a third-world mafia state masquerading as a gas station masquerading as a world power (Windows), or a messy democracy like The Netherlands where everyone has a voice but sometimes the government collapses because they can't agree on everything (Linux)?
I live in The Netherlands and I've run Linux on the desktop for 30 years.
Before that, whatever Linux it was it came on about half a dozen 1.44MB floppies. I remember it used a Linux 0.9 kernel, but not much else - except it was a Real Proper Unix System like I had at university, except *on my very own desktop PC*! With a compiler and everything! And SLIP!
Oh that brings back memories, yes I'm sure I tried that one too.
One of them came on a bunch of floppies in sets, for the main system, X, and whetever, I think there were more like 12-13 of them in total; took a whole day to copy them and install IIRC. Not quite as bad as installing AIX from 5 1/4" on a 6150 I snagged somehow.
Let's see, I think Lasermoon and Zipslack were on the cover CD with Computer Shopper in about what, 1993? Pink and yellow CD. I think I only binned it a couple of years ago - stupid of me!
That’s a hilarious analogy. I agree with the general sentiment.
However… there is a difference between meaningful choice and choice that is simply a byproduct of grumpy disagreements from 20 years ago.
Choice has compound costs. Primarily, it creates interop issues. The best is example is, of course, software distribution (hey what ppa do I need to install node). It also creates an explosion of configuration options and points of failure.
The desktop distro maintainers should, imo, put their disagreements aside and find common ground to the most pressing issues. Perhaps funded by some billionaire or their mega-corp.
>Would you rather live in an effectively single-party state like Singapore where everything is shiny but you get caned for spitting gum on the street (MacOS)
This sounds like a good place to live for me, because I don't spit gum on streets and wouldn't want to live around people who do. What kind of disgusting person would do such a thing? And who chews gum these days?
Personally, I think this is a terrible analogy.
As an outsider, the Netherlands seems a lot more stable than many other democracies, including Germany and the US.
I went KDE Plasma. It works pretty well, it feels close enough to Windows that the transition is as painless as possible, and it's got tons of advanced tweaks for power users. GTK and Qt apps both seem to run fine under it. Most importantly, it gets out of my way and lets me work.
(Other alternatives I enjoy include Cinnamon and Xfce. I cannot stand gnome-shell, it's like a tablet OS or something.)
Lots of popular distributions support KDE out of the box (Kubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora KDE, etc), and it'll install on pretty much anything else with minimal fuss. That's the most fun part about desktop environments on Linux: you don't have to pick just one. You can install a bunch side by side and switch between them when you log in. Once you know this, it becomes fun to experiment :)
If you want a full-fledged modern DE with active development, the choice is only between GNOME and KDE imo.
>GTK or Qt
I used to worry about whether to go full GTK or Qt, these days I don't really care. Both work in either environment and the theming is usually consistent as well unless you have a custom theme, so they don't even look out of place.
>X11 or Wayland
It seems like Wayland is going to be the future, so it's only really a matter of whether it works well enough for your uses yet or not. If it does, great, use Wayland, if not, stick with X11 for a bit longer.
It honestly doesn't seem like that much of a mess to me.
IMHO, this is more a choice overload [1] than a technical problem. You can pick whatever distro (another choice overload) and start using the default desktop environment, which is more than enough. Qt vs. gtk for desktop development? Use whatever you think will work for you, they are stable enough, and you can use almost any (even remotely popular) language under the sun for development. Java/Scala/Kotlin + Swing (or SWT) will also do the job (and let's put aside that Swing looks "old"; when you know what you are doing, you can make a modern looking-app with JVM stack as well, e.g. IntelliJ).
On Windows and macOS, you don't have any choice, so people usually see that as good enough because they can't compare it against alternatives on the same platform.
The other side of overchoice is that the community won't focus on maintaining, supporting, and optimizing one of them in particular, which does become a technical problem as old things fall into disrepair. Even sticking with Ubuntu meant having your entire UI change for no reason a few times. Whereas Mac OS is smoother than all the Linux DEs, isn't too different to use vs 1-2 decades ago, and you can search "how to do X on Mac" pretty easily.
Every Linux desktop user says "use what works best for you, we're all different," but I really don't buy that we're so different to warrant multiple competing DEs / window managers / whatever on top of the same OS.
Been using for 15 years, I've never sat there and worried about gtk or qt, Maybe wayland or X11, but I've just naturally moved to wayland?
Just install something like Fedora, and you won't worry about it, it will just work.
I personally hate Ubuntu btw Canonical is just not for me. I have no idea how it's so popular. Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.
>I personally hate Ubuntu btw Canonical is just not for me. I have no idea how it's so popular. Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.
Ubuntu got popular years ago because they made a distro that supported everything and was really easy to install and use. Fedora has always been a pain because it doesn't support a lot of stuff out of the box (i.e. codecs): a distro that can't even play MP3s was a non-starter for many people 10-15 years ago. NixOS isn't nearly as easy to install and get started with.
Ubuntu has been coasting on its inertia for a long time though, and many other distros have caught up with it or surpassed it, such as Mint, while Ubuntu has been shooting itself in the foot with things like Snaps.
Personally, I prefer OpenSUSE to Fedora. I've been running Leap for several years. Fedora didn't perform as well on my hardware nor was it as stable. Over the last several months, I've been piloting Arch and will likely settle there. Canonical and SUSE are both moving in directions that I'm not in favor of, e.g., tighter coupling to the enterprise/money making side. From a company perspective, sure it makes sense. But from an individual perspective, perhaps less so. I'm not looking for the Linux equivalent of Windows: bloated, telemetry, privacy invading, etc.
NixOS is great in many ways, but it’s really quite difficult to use. Anything that requires use of the command line is a no-go for everyone but hardcore enthusiasts. Even I, who have contributed to Nixpkgs, wish I could just stick to a GUI sometimes. Not to mention how NixOS breaks assumptions software has about your computer and therefore makes development much more difficult than it really needs to be.
>Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.
Could be. I should try NixOS or fedora again but seriously don't overstate it. Cannonical are not my fav company. Installing an LTS ubu works fine, it has annoyances (maybe nixos and fedora are better?) but it's still so incredibly far ahead of windows or macos it's not even close for me. Sure, I'm used to linux on my laptop (thinkpad t480s intel graphics) that anything else will be a massive hassle to maintain, with driver issues, os-level spyware and all that other headache. When I use my kids' macs they always feel janky, windows? Forget it, it's just so unpolished and ew.
Pretty different to RH7 in 2002 in quality and polish when I first tried linux.
With respect I was trying to point out quietly that I've heard that kind of distro-jingoism for 20 years and the failure to appreciate another person's distro of choice to the point where you think nobody should ever be using it is just a bit silly. The distro I use is fine, if yours is even better, great!
Fair enough, like you said, these aren't new, though.
> Then why can't I change the spaces animation (turn it off)? Windows snapping without leaving a gap on the edge of the screen? Etc, etc.
Spaces is irritating, I just don't use it, Apple has a tendency to introduce new workspace and window management solutions and then abandon them. Yabai or Amethyst might be you closer to what you want (both open source).
> And are they now doing scans for copyright-infringing media and so on - I wouldn't be surprised.
Its title claims they are, but that appears to be clickbait.
In the body of the article, the author confuses the cancelled always on filter for illegal images that reports to authorities and an opt-in, on-device filter for unwanted adult images.
For casual computer users, that animation/delay is the difference between “oh no, what just happened?!” and “oh, that button sucks this window down into the taskbar picture where I can easily find it later. Cool.”
You want the window to just vanish (which I get), because you have a model of computing that doesn’t need the genie animation. Most everyone on HN has a model of computers far in excess of the median computer user.
Interesting. I could have sworn in older macOS that it could be disabled entirely. In Ventura, via settings, I can adjust it from taking 11 frames, 23, or 29 frames (manually counted in a screen recording), but I can't seem to completely eliminate the animation. TIL.
Well for Windows users the only real answer is KDE, since it's almost the same in terms of interface and has a similarly high degree of configurability (imo a baseline requirement for any desktop OS). Kubuntu is pretty good, with only a handful of incredibly annoying things, compared to a never ending river of incredibly annoying things on GDM3.
It doesn't really matter which desktop you pick, they're all the same.
If you went to buy a car, would you be fatally paralysed by indecision at seeing two different makes that looked ever so slightly different parked side-by-side?
Right, all those car review mags, test-drives, manufacturer design language, not to mention handling characteristics, performance, etc, is all really stupid when all everyone wants is just to go from A to B.
Going from A to B is more complicated than it sounds when you're considering reliability 5-10 years into the future, but the reviews don't go into that either. All you can really do is pick a reputable brand.
Well if your use case is say, off-roading, and you decide all cars are the same and end up with a minivan in a ditch you kind of did that shit to yourself.
Most people don't need to choose a Linux distro at all, cause Windows or Mac works fine for them and will never have obscure problems.
The car analogy is that you've got the boring Toyota (Windows), the boring but somewhat nicer Honda (Mac), the slightly more efficient CVT Mitsubishi (typical Linux) that needs some major component (X11 or w/e) replaced in 2 years and fewer people will know how to deal with it, or the same Mitsubishi except with stanced wheels and degen exhaust setup to be cooler (Arch Linux w/ XFCE or w/e).
The lack of pro-audio software is definitely a thing. Mixxx is pretty good though for DJing. It's better than most of the rest of the pro-audio landscape on Linux. There are now also pretty good DAWs (Bitwig, especially).
Releasing binaries is still a PITA for Linux. That's one of the main reason it has so little support from closed source consumer software. If you care, see my comment history on my company dropping Linux support for a pro-audio app, even though our software works on Linux.
But for development tools, it's you-win-some-you-lose-some. There are some development tools (the Valgrind suite, for example) that I still miss after mostly switching to macOS. Going from Linux to macOS also means losing great tools.
Most of the time those packages, or the build files for them, are contributed by the distributions themselves, or avid users of those distros. (Reference: I have multiple software projects I've created that are a part of every Linux distribution. I've never packaged any of them myself.) Even big enterprise companies usually work directly with the distros under NDA, and the distros produce the packages.
That works for FOSS, but not for smaller closed-source consumer apps. And it's not just building, it's also testing and debugging. It's just not tractable for a small company to test on dozens of different distros / versions for such a small percentage of users.
they seem to providing their own builds. And - if you wrote your build system reasonably (e.g. CMake, properly check for dependencies etc.) - then building on different distros would not be much of a headache. You may not provide 40 different binary packages, and they may only fit recent versions of the popular distributions, but - after you set this up once, I wonder if it isn't just running a script after you have your versioned source tarball release.
Literally most of the packages on the page you link there explicitly say that they're maintained by other people. The author seems to maintain an RPM and a DEB setup, which is already more than most. And my point is absolutely not that some people don't go nuts there, but that's not where or how most Linux users get their software. It's mostly coming from stuff packaged by the distributions.
And I am sure that's how most open source packages on Linux are built. Again, I spent a lot of time in that world. (Former KDE core developer, former employee at SAP Linux Lab, friends working at all major distros, have a bunch of my stuff in every distro, talks at lots of Linux conferences, etc.)
Building really isn't the problem. It's testing and supporting. Building is relatively easy. But you can't just ship commercial packages without testing them. Pulling out a Debian 11 VM because someone's having problems with your software there under Wayland, but not X11, but it seems to work in Sid... Again for the 0.01% of your customers using that configuration, ... it's hard. And it rarely makes economic sense unless you've got a disproportionate number of users on Linux, or a ginormus user base. You can't assume because something works on Arch Linux that it also works on Mate. Or that something on Ubuntu works on Debian. Or Redhat on SUSE. And then your users may have any of 3-4 versions of those installed. By the time you get to a specific configuration you're dealing with often debugging things for a single-digit number of users.
Windows is about 66% of our customers, macOS about 33%, Linux about 1%. On Windows we currently only test on x64 for Windows 10 and Widows 11. On macOS we test 4 configurations. Each Windows configuration we test is 33% of our users. Each macOS configuration about 8%. Linux is starting at 1%, and previously we tested only one configuration, which was already 8x more costly than macOS. But there were a lot of complaints from people using other distros / versions, which resulted in anger, bad reviews, claims that we don't understand Linux...
To get reasonable coverage of the Linux desktop landscape, we'd need to test probably 20+ different configurations, meaning each of them would cover about 0.05% of our customers. The QA tests take multiple hours to run through. That makes supporting a Linux user a staggering 160x more expensive than supporting a macOS user, and 660x more expensive than supporting a Windows user.
Again, you need either a giant user base, or a disproportionate number on Linux (which is the opposite of true in pro-audio) to even hit break-even on Linux users.
dunno but for example you got more than one audio stack on linux so they should at least test both, with different hardwares, etc. Not sure flatpak would help here...
I was talking about about the problem of having to package software per distro.
Regarding audio, if you decide to target several audio stack yes indeed. I hope this get eliminated by Pipewire really soon. It's already the case as a end user (Pipewire replaces Pulseaudio, Jack and the userland part of Alsa) but I don't know if all use cases are covered yet.
If I'm not mistaken Pipewire started from the need to be able sandbox multimedia streams in Flatpak , so I guess Flatpak might be indirectly helping here :)
Regarding hardware it's the same problem for any operating system though, testing with all hardware can be tricky for a small company.
Operating systems have a really high degree of lock-in. Such that while you -can- change OS, there's simply no incentive to do so.
That's why you're still running the same OS you always have. [1]
You accumulate software yes, but you also accumulate habits and knowledge. Changing OS means discarding all the accumulated knowledge, which 0% of "normal users" want to do.
Throw in the change in software, ending up with at least some proportion of worse software, and the desire to change is 0.
[1] where "you" applies to a rounding error away from 100%
Hmm I don't find this true at all for really any of the systems.
If you stick to windows xp or roll your own Linux distros maybe this is true, but I barely know how to use any windows box. Bunch of black registry magic and constantly changing UI nonsense, literally Google and sometimes msdn are how I survive there.
Ubuntu/Fedora all go through fits of hipness and constantly change how things are done. Config files one day, services and runtime the next. UIs are really non-standard and always breaking something or other.
OSX...first time I used it I was learning Unix systems. I went back to it and it was an unholy mess of gotchas.
Android is still hurtling through versions every year and I have no idea what "current" phone looks like, I probably hate it.
When I have been unfortunate enough to use iOS it was like being made Legos trying to build other Legos. It was a right pain.
There are some common design patterns and the like but that tends to be in spite of the OS, not because of it.
The change from say one version of Windows to the next is tiny, and happens every 5 years or so.
Changing from one OS to another is orders of magnitude more complex. As you point out above jumping between them is painful.
Your job may require you to do that, but you're a tiny sliver of the work-force, never mind everyone else. My book-keeper has never encountered the Windows Registry.
You're thinking of the OS as an actual bit of software you interact with. For 99.99% of users it's invisible. They just want printing to happen when they press the print button.
> The change from say one version of Windows to the next is tiny
Huh?! That's bullshit. I had recently tried to fix something on family's PC that upgraded itself to Win11 and had absolutely no clue how to navigate all the new settings panels even though I use 10 near daily.
"The change from say one version of Windows to the next is tiny, and happens every 5 years or so."
This is simply not true - the OS can and does change with monthly patches. Windows and Linux are both worse than Android or iOS/OSX in this regards I find, but that's to due with vendor preference not an underlying guarantee.
A lot of people are locked-in Windows, but as Microsoft more and more ruins the OS by pushing advertisement, telemetry, slow cloud services, new versions of apps optimized for those who don't know how to use a computer, rather than experts - there will be plenty of users switching to Linux.
Most users are not even aware of telemetry. Those who find the cloud services slow can just stop using them.
The advertising seems to be local to the US because I've never seen it, but I expect users will ignore it just like they ignore it on TV, Google, Facebook, Twitter, on every roadside, at every mall and do on. Frankly advertising is everywhere, avoiding it doesn't seem to be a priority.
I think you summed it up. Computer Experts may want to switch to Linux, and likely already have. My mom, who is 40 years a novice, cares less about any of what you listed. Her skill set is small, and her interest in changing is miles below 0.
And there are 97% of the world like her and, 3% like you ;)
>> Those who find the cloud services slow can just stop using them.
Microsoft has made sure users can't stop using cloud services, unless they spend a ton of effort every time a new update that re-enables them is released.
E.g. try to disable the web search in the Windows start menu.
>> And there are 97% of the world like her and, 3% like you ;)
If the 3% expert users switch away from Windows it will be the beginning of the end for Windows.
WSL being a recent counter factor, as much as I don't enjoy Windows it got a lot more bearable for me since I can manage it through a Debian installation. Filesystem access, Windows program execution and running cmd.exe/powershell commands without having to open either of them removes some of the pain
Heavily doubt that those would make people switch. Maaaybe, if their social circle already uses Linux.
However, make the next Minecraft, Fortnite or Roblox work only (or considerably better) on Linux desktop[], and you will suddenly gain a lot more new users. Some of whom will stick around, since all their other apps work the same in the browser.
[] Whatever that term means, even the article makes a distinction between that and Chrome OS.
It made me switch, anyway, recently - specifically another one of those "Oh, let's finish setting up your computer" (i.e., try to trick you into trying Edge again, probably, or set up a "Microsoft" account) with my only options being "Remind me later" or "OK" was the straw that broke the camel's back.
That said, I'm far from your typical desktop user. I'm vaguely Linux sysadmin adjacent, and I ran Linux as my primary OS for many years - until one day I noticed I was mostly booted into Windows for gaming and decided to reclaim that SSD space.
Gaming on Linux has come... leaps and bounds. It's actually extraordinary. Still many sharp edges, but the Steam Deck might in fact be the first spark of a revolution here. We'll see, I guess.
Is this where I'm supposed to say Wine Is Not an Emulator? ;-)
Jokes aside, totally right, and unfortunately, in my experience it's often a better experience to run the Windows port under Wine than it is to use the native version. e.g. the native version of Tyranny is just a black box for me, but the Wine version works pretty flawlessly.
I think userspace is just too unstable, and game companies probably don't want a forever-ongoing maintenance cost just to keep their old games running.
>However, make the next Minecraft, Fortnite or Roblox work only (or considerably better) on Linux desktop
And lose lots of money in that process. :)
And what Linux OS should you target? Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Arch, Android? Target KDE or Gnome? Or maybe XFCE? X Windows or Wayland? Use ALSA, Pipewire or Pulse Audio? Bionic or glibc?
I imagined anyone making the next hugely popular game in the same category as those that I mentioned is not going to put much money in developing it, just time.
And doing so, they'd likely just target the particular Linux system they happen to have or like---whether Arch, or Android, or even Alpine. It might well work on other Linux systems (or even non-Linux), or it might not.
Maybe I'm off base here, but that's what I see (even casual) gamers do, especially younger ones: go to great lengths to get the game they want, to run. If that system which runs the game also supports their other hobbies, school or work, then that's what they will use.
Steam runs games inside of a container to provide a consistent environment for the game. It largely ignores the OS and only uses the kernel as a result. Linux distros have tons of differences that make it otherwise untenable to target. You need an army of package maintainers to maintain per distro packages and sort out differences which seems to work for oss, but doesn't for commercial closed source software.
This is actually a great way of running stuff in "foreign" distros where you can't guarantee the presence or absence of libraries.
For example DaVinci Resolve is packaged for (now quite old) CentOS but runs just fine installed on Ubuntu, with absolutely no problems at all. The only thing that might catch out the unwary is that CentOS packages a couple of libraries as default which Ubuntu doesn't but if you're savvy enough to edit video you're savvy enough to catch this.
You can also run Resolve in a Docker container so it "sees" a CentOS environment no matter what, and it's transparent across any other distro. There's no real need to do this, although it makes running more than one version easy.
A lot of people are also locked-in linux if they have to use e.g. docker or kubernetes, not to mention FOSS hooked to systemd or other linux-specific technologies. Say goodbye to compatibility and portability to other systems.
How did you go from "a lot of people will switch" to "the year of Linux on desktop"?
Microsoft is making a lot of changes that will annoy the expert users. Stuff like a Settings app that has a single screen - e.g. one makes changes to his network setup, decides to increase the brightness of the screen - the Settings app navigates from network to screen and the user progress with network is lost.
> Changing OS means discarding all the accumulated knowledge, which 0% of "normal users" want to do.
More and more upgrading the OS means discarding a large amount of accumulated knowledge as well, which normal users don't want to do, but don't have much of a choice.
> You accumulate software yes, but you also accumulate habits and knowledge. Changing OS means discarding all the accumulated knowledge, which 0% of "normal users" want to do.
I only ever hear Linux users make this argument. Mac users are confident enough in MacOS UX that they know it’s not a significant barrier to transition. The same is not true of Linux. So many solutions to problems require opening the CLI, and that’s just an automatic fail for the vast majority of consumers.
Honestly, I would like Linux fans to just accept Linux for what it is: an amazing kernel with incredible GUIs built by and for developers. App developers just do not care about (or do not have the resources for) making simple and intuitive software. Valve is a welcome and notable exception with the Steam Deck. Linus Torvalds explains it perfectly: https://youtu.be/Pzl1B7nB9Kc
> Mac users are confident enough in MacOS UX that they know it’s not a significant barrier to transition
I bought my mother a Macbook during the Snow Leopard era and we sold it after 2 months because she could absolutely not get used to the UI, since she had been using Windows since basically forever.
This is exactly my point, and indeed the point of the parent. If you know Windows use Windows. If you know Mac, use Mac.
There is no reason to make your mom (or my mom) switch.
And while MacOS may be intuitive, its less intuitive if you come from something else. I used one for a bit and found everything "backwards". One version of Mac to another or one version of Windows to another is trivial compared to changing from one to the other.
Obviously the Linux CLI is waaay beyond most average people. So it's a non starter anyway.
Godot is primarily developed on Linux, but I recently tried it out on Ubuntu (NVIDIA drivers) to check compatibility, and it was shockingly laggy. Worse than macOS, and far worse than Windows, where it runs quite well.
Maybe there was something about my configuration I could've tweaked to mitigate the lag, but I have zero interest in fiddling with Linux. That stuff's fun if your goal is to learn about the OS, but absolutely intolerable if you just wanna get work done.
I can’t speak to Godot specifically, but a recent switch from Nvidia to AMD on my Ubuntu machine magically fixed a whole bunch of random jankiness that I wouldn’t otherwise have assumed was directly related to the GPU. Beforehand I would have said that running on Nvidia was “just fine”–I only switched because I got a good deal on an AMD card, but it has been a great improvement.
Re: debugger. It's the opposite for me. rr is the best debugger period, so I am miserable whenever I need to debug on Windows or macOS where rr doesn't work.
What I think Linux is missing is a good "first intention" debugger.
rr is great, I have used it a few times with great success, but always as a heavyweight, for solving really tricky bugs. Usually, printf is first, then gdb and/or valgrind, then rr.
On Visual Studio (which has a great debugger), the debugger is the first tool I reach. It is simply more convenient, more reliable on a day-to-day basis, plus, there is "edit and continue". Generally I prefer the Linux dev tools (rr is one of the good ones, I also love valgrind), but for interactive debugging, for me, Windows wins.
Me, too. I tried to use Linux on the desktop since 2000. I can't run the software I need like Visual Studio, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, 3ds Max. I don't care free/libre about alternatives as they are not doing the same. The OS takes time to be configured, managed, there are always things breaking and needing a fix. I still have a linux distro installed on a spare drive but haven't booted it in more than an year.
Whatever Linux specific stuff I need to run (mostly for development), WSL2 and Docker takes care of that.
I want an OS that just runs and doesn't stay in my way.
I want an OS that just runs and doesn't stay in my way.
YMMV. For me, Linux is the OS that just runs and doesn't stay in my way. For my work flows, the tools on Linux are far superior. I recognise that may not be the case for the tools you use.
Nowadays Apple gives it away for free, but it used to be part of the paid iWork package (or bought separately from the Mac App Store).
I believe there was also a time period where it was given to users who activated a new Apple product, but for people still running older machines had to pay.
You also can't use uBO if you want to help get it to 4% as this data comes from statcounter which is blocked in many filter lists. I run linux but my browser useage won't count towards it.
It does not have to be all black and white. You could use GNU/Linux for everything else. Or you could have it on a separate machine to try workflows on or just to be able to use both separately.
I chose the opposite, I run OSX as my primary os and Linux in a VM for when I want Linux (which is pretty much just for developing stuff that will run on a Linux server). I used to run Linux as my primary desktop OS, but got tired of things almost, but not completely working. Things like not always waking from sleep, sound, fingerprint reader, etc.
Probably 70 or 80% of cloud workloads are Linux, and like 60% of embedded devices, of which there are billions.
And of those embedded/mobile devices, the rest will either be running iOS, vxworks, freertos or zephyr.
I think the joke has always been "this is the year of Linux", but in all honesty... it's the decade of Linux. It's probably one of the few areas where there is growth in computing capacity and by far most of the net new is running Linux.
AOSP with the more modern kernels and less vendor garbage in giant forks will help with that.
Unix was king in the 80s, maybe early 90s for anyone doing terminals, banks, government and universities were all ok the big iron train. But when nt3.1 and 3.5 came out, if you were a business not looking into it, you felt like you were behind the times. We had DEC and iris at our house, so weren't in a good position to switch, but it wasn't long before the change happened.
> The only places where NT managed to succeed on server room have been Microsoft shops, or places where .NET was adopted as the main development stack.
.NET came out well after NT was replaced with windows 2000 (unless you claim that 2000, and thus XP and later windows OSes were also NT)
> In the 80's many banks were either on mainframes/micros, or using stuff like Novel Netware.
In my experience in the late 90s NT crushed Netware. It rode the wave of computerisation of SMEs and gained massive amounts of users (with desktop often being 3.11 onwards rather than NT).
Until then it was all about ASP, Outlook, and SMB shares, nothing else.
All big stuff was on UNIX.
Again, when talking about the server room.
From 1999 to 2003, I was doing project delivery across Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT/2000, so I might have an idea of how our customer based actually had their server rooms configured.
Likewise the university campus was wired to DG/UX, Solaris, eventually Red-Hat came into the picture as DG/UX server died.
Computer labs desktops were a mixture Windows 9X, NT, Mac and some lucky professors had a couple of NeXT Cubes, which they eventually replaced by Red-Hat (before Apple's aquisition).
> Good luck trying to run a proper GNU/Linux on those Android devices.
The Termux App [https://termux.dev/en/] provides a full linux terminal with zsh, emacs, and apt based package manager. I've been using it in lieu of creating full apks for personal projects -- much easier to spin up a database and local webserver via ssh on my phone than to build a proper app package.
I find it fits most of my linux on the go needs; for example I can pull up a node REPL and quickly test code on my phone, or curl a API endpoint
Does that actually use the underlying system or is it just a virtual thing though? It calls itself an emulator after all. Windows can run an emulated Legend of Zelda ROM but that doesn't make it a NES.
>Good luck trying to run a proper GNU/Linux on those Android devices.
How is toybox not good enough to replace the GNU coreutils for a phone? Or what GNU software are you talking about that someone would even want to run on a phone?
I'm my family we have two desktop computers and a laptop. One desktop is running Linux, the other and the laptop are windows.
But we're also running Linux on all our phones, two tablets, two TVs, the vacuum cleaner, our router, and probably more devices I'm forgetting or not aware of.
> Are there really 20-30% of cloud workloads not on Linux?
> What do they do? Who uses them?
I don't know about the percentages but there is at least one b2b e-commerce website application thing with the latest version built with ASP.NET MVC on dotnet 4.8 so it has to be on Windows.
It isn't "cloud" by any means but you can create an EC2 instance or an Azure VM or whatever and put Windows on it and run IIS and all those things.
That and I think on Azure, you can run things like Azure functions and Azure web apps on Windows.
I also don't understand why people would pick Windows to run modern software where you have a choice.
I work at Microsoft and I see so much "cloud" Windows. Some of it is running Kubernetes even. But a lot Azure is Windows VMs orchestrated by "Service Fabric".
Azure Service Fabric is actually excellent. Deployed a web service on top of it 5 years ago, so far it hasn't gone down even once. Service fabric is used in scale by internal Microsoft teams such as Bing and Xbox, so the bugs and the scaling issues have been ironed out.
Yes! Especially if your application is legacy/old and requires Windows anyway. I used to think why people would do that when you can dockerize SQL Server and just use Debian or Fedora or whatever but I once tried that on a legacy application and things... were not quite right.
It was easier to install on Windows than to debug the issue so I just let it go.
I think things would be different if the code was new or I was familiar with it enough to anticipate how it could break in different ways.
If the code/framework is new enough, it might be worthwhile diving into that rabbithole.
But you need SSMS on a Windows client to manage it effectively. Unless you are doing everything cli, which is just not practical in the enterprise. Anyway, running it in Linux is pretty niche. Cool for show and tell, but you need balls of steel if you're going to try running even a small $100 million dollar business on it.
Last I checked, Azure data studio did not have feature parity with SSMS. Sure you can write TSQL, view and edit procedures. But that’s about where it ends.
You can’t deploy SSIS packages, can’t edit user accounts and permissions, can’t manage linked servers, etc. Sure you might not do those every day, but if you have to jump through all these hoops to do something I wouldn’t call ADS a full replacement.
ADS can't really do this, as others have mentioned. Years in the future, they will get there. It's not remotely capable yet. And even many of the dialogue boxes that they've added recently are just opening in SSMS which still requires Windows.
Yes, which is why I said “and signal”, which is to say it isn’t marketed as such and so consumers don’t know that. To them, they’re running Android OS, for better or worse.
Quite hilarious to see some HNers who cannot even read the title of the article and are compelled or have the urge to bring up other irrelevant statistics to hide the little to no desktop usage when compared to other desktop operating systems.
The more things change... I've seen mostly identical (in spirit, not in technical details) discussions about the "Year of Linux on Desktop" in 2013, which was 10 years ago. I am quite sure I can safely bet the discussions 20 years ago, in 2003, were also pretty much the same.
For over 20 years Linux has been my main desktop OS and also my profession. And I hope the year of the Linux desktop never comes. Why? Because I've seen what happened with other niche hobbies of mine that went mainstream. Once the money started pouring in and the race for market share took over the priorities changed drastically from enthusiast hobby to whatever brought one more ounce of commercial success. This already happened to the server side of Linux which has become a pile of over-complicated unstable undocumented mess.
Desktop Linux has reached perfection IMHO. People complain about too many distros, package formats, desktop environments, init managers, audio servers and so on. I just love it, I pick and choose whatever I like and I like pretty weird things. I have excellent support and QA from community disto packaging - my Arch install is over 10 years old and I never had to do anything to it besides tinkering for fun. My Debian private server requires 30 minutes every 2 years to switch to the new release. The documentation is heavenly. The commercial offerings (that run on Linux) that pay my bills aren't even in the same league. Neither is Windows or Mac.
I want Linux to remain an enthusiast OS. It's not good for my parents, my non-tech friends, and maybe it's not good for you either. That's not a bad thing and I do not want it to change.
Seems that this website blocks any access from HK completely through cloudflare...
Cloudflare making it easy to block entire countries, allow people to be lazy in protecting their websites and goes completely against the open web. Of course I could use a vpn but it's getting tiring that I have to do so more and more often.
I'm used to government blocking websites and I see this kind of blocking as pure evil. VPN almost never turns off on my phone and my computer. That is, until I moved to a different country
What I can't understand is why people are willing to shut their websites from like half of the world. Especially Linux bloggers. Open source, "free as in freedom", right? These people should fight practices like that, not follow them.
Amazingly, the country I'm in right now is blacklisted on this website.
Blocked from India too. After reading your comment I thought Asia was blocked. But I could read after changing location to Japan with a VPN. Cloudflare straight up blocking countries instead of putting up a captcha.
As observed by StatCounter, a web analytics company...
I guess this is accurate for people who are in the web ads business, but otherwise obviously it's a bad proxy and seems likely it's undercounting a lot since Linux users tend to be savvy enough to block analytics and probably do less web browsing on StatCounter monitored sites.
I can tell you how much it is in 40000 requests from a "national representative sample" in the Netherlands obtained in the last 6 months: 393 user agents specify Linux without Android. That's just under 1%. Firefox is 2395, or 6%.
I am fairly confident that the best days of the linux desktop are ahead of us. 3% might become 30% in a few years.
Technology adoption takes strange paths but the history of linux is one of remarkable resilience and capability which augurs well for the future.
My guess is that a key driver of growth will come from power users that will make best use of local AI and data science tools, preserving privacy and commercial secrecy.
While many many casual users will continue using thin clients, effectively outsourcing their digital lives to the "cloud", this is unlikely to continue being the 97%.
The opportunity is, e.g., for all the apps of the linux desktop to start making use of the python ML tools to empower users with unprecedented functionality. There is no reason that all of that new universe must be ceded to a small number of actors.
This opportunity was there for a long time now, ML is not new, but the broader FOSS community is quite reactive. Emulating proprietary / closed tools to a fault (eg the libreoffice suite) rather than exploring the unique opportunities of alternative paths has been the norm.
Luckily the AI hype will work as a kick in the butt. The future is for linux to lose.
It's curious that there seemed to be a 6% classification shift between Windows and Unknown in April, and that was reverted for the June data. I wonder what UA string caused that, and it honestly doesn't inspire confidence in their methodology if they don't double check a 6% shift.
> While someone may seem the figure modest, it signifies a growing acceptance and recognition of the power and versatility of Linux.
Does it? It’s 3%. If it was 15% or 20% maybe you could say that.
It’s less than “unknown” and less than ChromeOS which is just over 4%. If it wasn’t a round number, I don’t think anyone would ever write this article because the number is just too small.
It’s nice that it seems to be growing. I just don’t think this is a big achievement.
my wife primarily uses a chromebook (she likes the small form factorfits in her purse and is cheap to replace if she breaks it). She also has a Windows laptop, but she uses that much less often, and almost never takes it places.
(my computers, by contrast, all run Linux, and have for the last 17 years...)
Somewhat recently, OpenBSD binaries for Chromium and Iridium were changed to identify as Linux instead of OpenBSD in the useragent, I think to pass dumb "security" webapps that refuse to talk to unknown clients. Firefox still identifies as OpenBSD.
I think that is an important milestone.
An OS whose hardware support is largely closed source on one side and painfully reverse-engineered on the other. Thisnk about the graphics hardware.
For years, during the desktop boom in the 2000s, most of the support for networking hardware, wired and wireless, was based on binary blobs coming from Windows OSs and "imported" into a Linux system. How could you dare to use Linux as a desktop?
As of today still most of the PC hardware comes with Windows preinstalled. It would be like offering people pink cars which they can paint in a different color, more or less.
Nope. I think 3% is a lot if you take into account the amount of efforts needed for people to contrastate the so-called "market push".
Linux world is "fragmented" by definition: each main tool and even desktop environment has a number of variants, developed by smallish (fragmented) teams in the name of freedom and choice. Windows, on the other side, has a basically monolithic environment in the name of ... dunno what. Normal (non-techie) people are scared by Linux. Because they have never tried the blue pill. They have never seen how deep the rabbit hole can be.
I once installed an Ubuntu 17 on an old desktop and my mother used it just fine. Most people don't need Windows. It's just that it comes with anything you buy and most people won't learn something new unless forced to. And to be fair why should they? They don't mind the extra cost and couldn't care less about our oss. We need to get them when they're young and impressionable and turn them into little linux evangelists.
I have met a lot of idealist linux evangelist but I was yet to meet the Machiavellian linux evangelist. I am glad to meet you and support your quest for world desktop domination.
Take a page from other minorities/activists work and push for affirmative action for Linux in schools, universities and workplaces. If a place uses another OS, that means Linux users are being discriminated against.
I'd venture to say 99% of people don't give a damn on what their os is. All they care is to run their apps without the os getting in their way or breaking. They don't feel the need to and don't want to be forced to tweak, customize, fine tune and manage that os a lot.
I'll go even further and say that most people, even younger people, still think in terms of "computer" and not OS, like it's an appliance. It's about as sophisticated an understanding out there as it was in the 90s. When I'm asked for computer buying advice, they ask me "Mac or PC?" or maybe "Mac or Dell?" For phones it's, "iPhone or Samsung"? Eyes would glaze over if I tried explaining that Dell, Lenovo, HP machines etc all run Windows, except the ones that are Chromebooks... and I would never EVER recommend Linux to a normie unless I wanted to forever be their tech support.
That's nice. Currently in my house I have 11 machines with a linux kernel, including 3 running a desktop gui (xfce), 1 android tablet, 1 chromebook, couple of pis, and the rest being routers and APs. I've also got a windows 10 enterprise laptop I use for testing things at work, a macbook (same purpose).
That's ignoring the "iot" vlan with god knows what on (printer, plugs, speakers, even a bulb), but most of that's linux.
I wish more devices ran "not-linux" really.
For most people, a desktop OS is just a platform to run a web browser on. Chrome's dominant state in that area concerns me more than the dominance of linux in computing.
if they really start to shove ads in the start menu of windows 11 then Linux will have a real chance on the desktop.
Also you don't need windows for office - you can have it in the browser, and google docs is enough for most users.
Only the "Unknown" category has decreased in market share, which leads me to believe that the linux market share has not increased at all. Just that the data is more complete.
I would say that Linux is the second desktop for development (behind MacOS, in front of Windows), however...
I wonder if any of you tried to develop C/C++ on MacOS. It seems that it's impossible to find leaks and misbehavior, while on Linux there is this valgrind that does everything for you. MacOS have some `leaks` tool but it does not really do half of the things valgrind does. So probably I would say "Linux is in the first place". /Writing this on my company's mac/
What is your primary language? I’ve worked at some pretty well known tech companies over the last couple of decades, and it’s been nothing but Macs for at least the last 15 or so years.
Interesting: looking at Statcounter data, Linux has been gaining traction in India[0] since 2022 and now accounts for almost 14% of desktop operating systems (it's the 2nd most used OS already).
Ten years ago I started on Linux because my ADHD ass needed pcs last minute at college and the Ubuntu machines were always the ones open whereas the Windows and Mac ones had lines out the door. Though my main pc runs Windows now, I don't think my next one will. I'm continually getting let down with the inflexibility and bloat on these systems, which probably parallels an increase of knowledge and skills. As for Mac, I tried to set up an old iPad last night and nearly put it in the garbage due to the silly restrictions set by the OS. I'm a researcher and keep hearing colleagues complaining about declining computer skills and after trying to use that iPad I understand why. I hope Linux becomes more mainstream in the future. I think it would be a collective net gain.
I will quote Linus :"
So I think that in order to make it in a consumer market, you really do need to be pre-installed. And as Android has shown, Linux really can be very much a consumer product. So it's not that the consumer market itself would necessarily be a fundamentally hard nut to crack, but the "you need to come preinstalled" thing is a big thing.
And on the laptop and desktop market, we just haven't ever had any company making that kind of play. And don't get me wrong - it's not an easy play to make.
That said, I wouldn't dismiss it either. The whole "ubiquitous web browser" thing has made that kind of consumer play be more realistic, and I think that Google's Chrome push (Chromebox and Chromebooks) is clearly aiming towards that.
So I'm still hopeful. For me, Linux on the desktop is where I started, and Linux on the desktop is literally what I still use today primarily - although I obviously do have other Linux devices, including an Android phone - so I'd personally really love for it to take over in that market too.
Me and along with people who do not work on DotNet or iOS app development, that includes Java, PHP, BI, Salesforce and even Sales and Marketing guys use Ubuntu for last 15 years (50 - 70 people). We do normal dev stuff like program & emails & meetings & docker and etc.
When I installed Ubuntu on HP Pavillion dv4 laptop for one of the friend, who was casual user, said - what kind of OS is this, which is still working after 6 years. :)
Are people fleeing the Windows as Ad Space direction?
Are they fed up with Mac OS oddities?
Do they use their Steam deck more?
Or are they just enjoying the Linux experience....
I know that after years of Linux usage I can't stand Windows in-your-face Ads and "use our accounts". And I can't stand the locked down Apple ecosystem either. But what drives others? Are there any good sources on that question?
For programmer / power user, I guess linux desktop is now in good state, for programming I find very minimum difficulty on using Ubuntu. It is now a viable choice beside mac and windows.
Furthermore with steam proton and lutris we can play many games with linux which was impossible. The programming device and gaming device now can use single Linux os
> In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 5 billion page views per month, by people from all over the world onto our 1.5 million+ member sites.
The majority of Linux desktop users that I know off are especially privacy focused and potentially blocking attempts at fingerprinting.
After years of BSD and Linux on my desktop, I finally figured out that the desktop is about applications. Many of us need to actually accomplish things in addition to develop Open Source software.
Had M$ been broken up, maybe it would be different. Until things change, I am happy that at least I can run applications on UNIX based MacOS.
Coming from someone that uses Linux all the time at work and for personal projects. It's amazing, but the main user experience isn't there yet.
For example I tried Ubuntu Unity on a fresh install for a week or so recently and it was popping up with unknown errors randomly. It also lacks any hotkeys. Software centre seems to have improved but is still buggy. Also there are still occasional issues which make the machine not bootable and hard to sort without stack overflow and some reasonable Linux knowledge.
Ended up swapping back to i3 and just using my old confs.
Which I think is the main issue. There isn't really a good, reliable, simple, predictable desktop experience yet like you get on Windows or MacOS.
The decision of Microsoft to withdraw from Russia has had a significant impact as well, particularly due to the emergence of government-supported Linux distributions that are gaining popularity among various organizations and companies in the former USSR and BRICS nations.
I've been buying machines with Linux preinstalled for 7-8 years now, both for myself, my wife and my kid.
It is possible, and that's great, but boy Dell et al do obfuscate the choice on their sites. You have to know the machine exists, need to know the generation, the year, etc.
It's almost as if they don't want people to buy these machines.
I am happy to run Linux on servers and Windows on the desktop, for me that means the right tool for the right job.
If other people like to run Linux on the desktop or Windows on the servers, I don't have anything against it. Everyone should run what it suits him best.
Android/linux did confirm the following: until it does a not too shabby job at being an operating system, the only thing that matters: mass default installation on devices.
How to do it when the devices are already locked-in by a monopoly? That would be ultra hardcore regulation (USA grade) with alternatives which would have to be financially backed by some means to keep those alternatives "out-of-the-economy", until it reaches economic equilibrium (if ever... since big tech has infinite money...).
That said, current elf/linux distros have a lot of nasty too (planned obsolescence is very strong).
Had to use Linux on a desktop for a few days recently. Have to admit: it has become usable. My previous time was about 10 years ago and then it was a pile of unusable, poorly designed UI.
Market share is a quantity ratio. For me it is not important that a lot of people use Linux besides me. But it is very important who uses it. That is because this is not a consumer good with buyers and sellers, and therefore this not a market. Important is that competent people are using Linux, because that guarantees that it gets better every year, which it does since I use it for 30 years. From my personal experience the most competent IT people I met were using Linux.
I am not sure I want Linux to be super popular on the desktop, just usable enough for anyone who wants an alternative desktop OS to use.
It's thanks to redhat and corporate types using it so much that all sorts of controversial and divisive changes were introduced. The monetization aspect is also hard to resist when 100M+ people use your OS, takes a lot of character to resist becoming a billionaire by selling out your original users who heleped you succeed.
I am part of the 3% having moved my main driver a few months ago. This is not the first time I move from Windows to Linux (Ubuntu). The last time I moved back to Windows was because Unity was dropped in favor of Gnome and I decided I didn't want a non mainstream DE. Things were already bad as they were.
I am happy with it but yesterday morning the computer wouldn't boot so I had to do some hand waving to fix the problem. No idea what caused it.
A number of people are moving away from the *ubuntus due to the Snap packages and many are moving to Linux Mint (Cinnamon, XFCE, MATE) or PopOS (Gnome). When Canonical moved away from Unity was the point where they abandoned the desktop. Mint and PopOS are better desktops in my opinion.
Can we really trust such data? How good is it statistically? I mean by looking at User-Agent string of web page requests you can try to guess what OS made it, but it is just about the web requests and an arbitrary string that the user can change – can you figure the real OS market share just based on that? They even say they cover only 1.5 mil websites but for sure there are magnitudes more hosted.
As a game dev who uses Windows threads like this are super interesting. I’m still moderately convinced that Linux users are suffering Stockholm Syndrome. Linux devs still don’t have a debugger as good as Visual Studio and insist that printf is good enough. Y’all are crazy and don’t realize how horrible your workflows are. IMHO. Of course it could be me that has Stockholm Syndrome!
I use all 3 OSes everyday. Work on Windows / WSL (Ubuntu) and macOS for personal. Gdb is great but nothing can touch VS debugger. printf only is insanity.
At some point of time, I ended up with a Linux desktop that I rebooted to play games, and a MacOS laptop. And if I'm being honest, I switch between these so seamlessly it's barely visible to me. I would never have thought we would have gotten here. But Mozilla blazed the way making standards real and now all apps are Electron and the cross-platform future is here.
Linux desktop adoption being bad might be a good thing. UNIX-like systems are very obsolete and something to move away from.
I'd rather it be the next system that takes off. Hopefully a properly engineered system based on a microkernel (such as seL4) multiserver architecture, preferably with capabilities.
I do of course use Linux, as a stopgap until such a thing is here.
Linux (especially Ubuntu and Kubuntu) nowadays is so much more user friendly than it was 5 years ago. Before, you couldn't do anything without bringing up the terminal. As a developer, I'm a big fan of Kubuntu. I use an Apple laptop during my day job and my productivity is way lower on MacOS. I need Kubuntu's workspaces feature to quickly switch between console, browser and IDE - With MacOS workspaces, I need to keep tapping on the arrow key until I see the window I want and then I need to release the keys; by that time, I've already lost my train of thought. I need workspace switching to rely on my muscle memory to switch to any workspace with a single set of hotkeys.
MacOS has so many annoying things which drive me nuts; like it doesn't show the full path in finder (and can't easily manipulate it), deleting files feels like a hassle. I hate that screenshots go to my Desktop and I can't quickly tell it where to go. The experience overall feels restrictive, obscures what's really going on and prioritizes the wrong things. I already tweaked my settings to fix some of these things but it's still not as good as Kubuntu... The main positive thing I have to say about MacOS is it's better than Windows.
Don't know, it used to be 100% in my company in 2007 and now it is like 80% because there are some iOS developers who need macOS and designers who use Sketch, which is insanely great and which alone is worth buying an alApple computer and suffering macOS to run it.
I've been daily driving Linux since March 2020. The only thing I miss is Adobe products. Most games work. VR is still a bit janky. I run Gentoo so I have typical bleeding edge upgrade problems but otherwise it's relatively stable.
Linux is fine for tech people, but it is far behind on list for non-tech people. It is (was? im not into Linux) just less friendly and usable. I would guess that most of the people are not that much tech-familiar.
Technically, but not usefully. It depends what you're trying to communicate. ChromeOS is based on Linux but most Linux enthusiasts aren't going to consider it Desktop Linux. The website is clearly catering to a Linux enthusiast market so the numbers communicate the right thing for its readers.
It's a Linux kernel and a Linux userland on top of `glibc`. It's not a weird libc, like Bionic in Android. You can run a Debian container and Debian apps; my own ChromeOS Flex machine runs Firefox and DOSemu.
It's a Linux. It's the most successful desktop Linux there is, and so of course all the advocates decry it as not being a True Linux, but then again the Fedora lot think Ubuntu is junk, and the Debian lot think everything is junk, and the Arch folk think they're more cutting-edge, and the NixOS folk think all the rest are still in the stone age somewhere...
Honestly I don't think this is playing silly games with words, I think it's just a website knowing their readership.
Linux is two things: a kernel and an ecosystem of distributions. This website is clearly targeting users of distributions that brand themselves as "Linux distributions". In that way, ChromeOS is obviously not a Linux distribution to anyone that cares about Linux distributions.
I find it interesting that you, and @n6h6 below, say more or less exactly the same thing. :-)
This is exactly what I expect in this corner of the FOSS world, though.
Linux is like Christianity: somehow the Unix world encourages schisms and splinter sects who all deny that each other are legitimate. It's sort of a defining characteristic.
Ignoring all the commercial ones, as they are effectively all dead now, and just looking at the FOSS ones, there are at least a dozen or so rival sects: NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, Minix, HURD/L9 and its various splinter groups, Plan 9 (9front, HarveyOS, Jeanne, etc.), Inferno, and of course, Linux and its thousand distributions.
Precisely two (2) Linux-based OSes have enjoyed large-scale commercial success as user-facing GUI systems for non-technical users. One has billions of users, the other a large fraction of a billion. Both are from Google, and both share a defining attribute: the FOSS world rejects them.
ChromeOS comes in 2 flavours: there's ordinary ChromeOS, which you can only get by buying hardware built to run it (just like Apple's macOS), and there's ChromeOS Flex.
Neverware grew from Hexxeh's remixed and rebuilt ChromiumOS for ordinary PCs. Hexxeh made ChromeOS Flow, and that is the direct grandparent of ChromeOS Flex: both are ChromeOS for generic PC hardware.
And that, for me, is the significant angle. It shows that this is just another Linux distro.
No, it doesn't say "Linux" in the branding. Neither did Ubuntu for the decade or so it took for it to grab some 75% of the desktop Linux market.
Even today, if you go to https://ubuntu.com/ you must scroll quite a long way down the page before the first mention of the word "Linux" and then it's a negative: that line says Ubuntu Pro (a subscription support service) is more than just Linux.
If someone said "Android is not a Linux" I could see that being defensible. You can't download it for free, you can't run it on your own generic off-the-shelf computer, you can't run ordinary Linux apps on it, and so on. It's a different sort of beast, even though, technically it is a Linux because it has a Linux kernel.
By default and unless cracked, it has nothing else Linux-like about it. No shell, no desktop, no X11 or Wayland, nothing.
But ChromeOS Flex is different. It is a Linux in every way that matters. It's free, it's Free, it's open source, there are remixes and rebuilds. It runs on generic kit. It has a desktop, albeit its own unique one. You can pop a shell. You can run containers on it and in them run any arbitrary Linux app.
It looks like a Linux, it acts like a Linux, and it runs like a Linux. It is based on a generic Linux kernel and userland from Gentoo, and it does Linuxy stuff with Linuxy binaries like any other desktop Linux.
It doesn't have systemd, but thank the great god Torvalds and his apostle St Cox, that is not yet a requirement for a Linux distro. It has `upstart`, which was one of the most widespread init systems before ~Lucifer~ Lennart spread his dark blessing across the land.
It is 100% on-brand for the Linux world that when one specific form of Linux-based OS went mainstream, and is now used by billions, the True Believers of the Linux world disowned it. Android is not Linux. OK, they kind of have a point.
But ChromeOS is a Linux. It's not a typical Linux, because typical Linuxes are nerd tools and that kind of OS will never, ever go mainstream unless someone forces people to use it. (As the government of the People's Republic of China are currently doing, but that is irrelevant right now.)
ChromeOS is a desktop Linux with the Linuxiness stripped out. No choice about partitioning. No weird dual-boot mechanisms. No choice of desktops or package managers: No package manager!
But in every way that matters, it is mainstream, it is commercially successful, it's a good polished end-user desktop OS, and it's a Linux.
So of course the Forces of FOSS hate it. Of course they do.
And how do they express that contempt? By saying it's not a True Linux.
There are valid reasons to consider ChromeOS "not real Linux" or "not real Desktop Linux". In my opinion, you are being needlessly reductive (mainly in your final paragraph).
Does anyone have a recommended security checklist or config guides for secure Linux on desktop? Despite my previous assumptions I've read some recent indications that it's not as secure as windows and macos.
Basically the difference is that open source needs experts to maintain it, so it works really well for server side stuff and predefined environments. Not as much for desktop.
I'd argue it is more inertia and lock in, and the fact that the vast majority of desktop PCs come pre-installed with Windows.
Honestly, I spend less time maintaining my Linux desktops than I do fixing the Windows boxes in my house. Had to reinstall Windows completely several times to fix issues with updates not applying and other things that just don't work properly. And don't get me started on the endlessly nested configuration UI in Windows, some bits are modern, some bits seem to date back to XP, nothing is in one place.
Linux is on more computers both today and all of the computers ever made put together than any other OS. It is on virtually all servers on the Internet, the majority OS on phones, its in many TVs and STBs and streaming sticks, its one of the few OSes ever in space, its one of the few OSes ever on Mars, and it is also the OS behind ChromeOS (which that article mistakenly breaks out as its own numbers; so by their own admission, its at least 7%).
The largest desktop OS on that list? Windows.... made by a company who makes more money off Linux than anything else, is the largest corp contributor to Linux, and has far more Linux machines internally than Windows ones, and hires software developers who do not develop for Windows.