Chrome OS saw a good raise too. OS X(Mac) saw a decrease.
Thanks, Steam Deck.
Most OS statistics come from web usage which is probably pretty minimal for Steam Decks.
It’s not so much about browsing on steam decks. It’s about the technical improvements Valve has brought to Linux gaming compatibility that has now made full Linux conversion without a Windows dual-boot for gaming (and many other Windows programs) a true reality. Once people don’t have to reboot every time they want to start a game they’ll stay in Linux full time.
Very true, more of a Thanks Valve :)
I think SteamOS might help a bit, but the driving factor might be that Microsoft decided to ditch much of good hardware on their upgrade path to Windows 11.
Yeah my current PC is only just starting to hit it’s (gaming) limits now, still plenty strong for literally any other purpose, but yeah no I’ll just build a whole new PC just so I can be forced into an OS I don’t want when they stop supporting the one I’m on. It’s a fucking joke, I hate this ride and I want off of it.
I’m only just starting to get comfortable on Linux, I had a crack many years ago but switched back promptly to windows. Once I’m more comfortable and there’s better gaming support I’ll make the switch, it’s just not quite there yet for me.
I’ve been distro hopping a bit with my orange pi, I’m glad I didn’t dual-boot my desktop as I’m already struggling for storage with these 100+gb games being the norm now. I don’t think my steam library folders have seen more transfers between HDD and SSD ever.
With that said though, I did just order all the parts for a new PC, but that was only because of some good deals and am able to bring a bunch across. I’ve got a fair few parts that are still very new or low mileage, or were overspecced for the future and still have many years of viability left.
It seems like a nice one-two punch of Microsoft shitting the bed with Windows 11 at the same time Valve is taking big strides towards making Linux a viable option for gaming. I don’t think you would see this if either happened in isolation.
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Now just release the damn thing in Australia so I can buy one from someone other than the shady fb market scalpers.
I just bought a ROG Ally.
There’s a lot of stupid stuff written/on you tube about it, but it’s great and clearly a notch up on the Steam Deck in most ways.
Were it not so extremely expensive in my currency I’d already be using one. I just spent slightly more than that for a rig that will last me close to 10years. I really want to see more competition in the handheld space, near future is looking promising, but its not there yet.
sorry, best we can do is “lol”
This comment so accurate my heart aches
If Steam Deck counts does ChromeOS count? How about Android?
ChromeOS is “sort of linux” but sandboxed and uses it’s own user agent string.
Android is the same way- Technically a Linux kernel. But sandboxed to death and uses a separate agent.
Just an FYI that at this rate it’s only going to take another 115 years before Linux has 100% market share.
2138 is the year of the Linux desktop!
What if S-curve instead of linear rate?
You mean Linux isn’t going to have 200% market share one day? Shit, I’m starting to think my calculations may have not been totally serious.
I get that, I just like math
Entirely possible if the population dubbles
Market share is usually a curve.
2138, year of the Linux desktop.
Exacting 100years after y2k38
This is the same logic that a right wing ex-president of my country used to criticize the current leftist president while talking about the COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
That’s fine, there’s no rush.
That’s for August. And the growth is exponential, not linear.
To a point. Let’s be honest it’s going to be more like an S-curve since you can’t go past 100% market share, and some people will refuse to switch.
And people not wanting to switch is fine imo. Having competition will likely help all OS’s get better over time
i mean i’d prefer the competition to be BSD and such, not windows and macos
Why would market share increase linearly?
The critical mass needed to tip the scales is not high. Once Linux has enough market share to matter as a customer base, game studios will switch to developing as cross-platform for it by default, so that they don’t lose launch sales. Once this happens, a lot of people won’t have any reason to stay on windows anymore as gaming was the only thing holding them back. This will then create a virtuous cycle of users migrating and games (and then apps) switching to it. Along then come hardware vendor supporty and then pre-built PCs and laptops. If the tipping point is reach, the rate of market share gain will be exponential.
The same thing happened with Internet Explorer 6
The only thing that can stop this is outside pressure from software giants like Microsoft through lobbying the Governments, buying out game studios or buying exclusivity, or strong-arming hardware vendors.
steam deck is helping a lot on that front.
MacOS holds a nearly 30% market share and few game developers give a shit about publishing their games on Mac. Why would Linux be any different?
Apple is notorios about being anti-gaming, yet many games support it while not supporting linux. Don’t know the actual stats though.
If you throw proton and wine into the mix, Linux is almost as good as Windows in game support
Because linux doesn’t have deprecated opengl, doesn’t run their own proprietary api for gpu instead of implementing vulkan and last but not least because linux does still have support for 32bit application.
Are you including iPhones in this market share?
Although macOS holds a high market share, it holds a smaller percentage of Steam users than Linux right now. Essentially, there’s more people on Linux known to buy games than on Mac (at least on Steam).
Gamers only seem to think that the only reason people have a computer is to game.
You can’t build a gaming mac. Or a mac at all. Apple does seem to have better gaming support than Linux does though. The majority of my steam library has macOS support. Only a couple support Linux.
30%? Wtf is the source
Other than gamers, there’s a huge share of enterprise Windows users. And they’re not likely to shift OS, because of IT admin issues. Others in this thread have commented on how Apple is struggling to get devs to build native games compared to Windows.
Sure the number of home PC users might decline, one can always hope.
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I can actually imagine a scenario where MS actually wants that to happen. They don’t really make money on windows sales anymore (comparatively to their other products). So this could free up quite a lot of resources and reallocate them elsewhere.
The majority of home consumers basically just use browser services anyways.
There are also Windows users who rely on niche business applications. Wine isn’t great for that sort of software yet. Another big one is the creative industry. While the VFX industry is very Linux-focused, and 3D is very viable, other parts of video production are not. And GIMP needs non-destructive editing before it can even think of competing with Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Inkscape is a viable vector image tool. The many other Adobe programs don’t have great alternatives, and if you need to collaborate, that means you all need to switch to a new program. Then there are the retraining costs to consider.
Gamers have the easiest time in switching to Linux. The amount of compromises and sacrifices you need to make in other industries are much greater right now.
However, Adobe is trying to bring some of their programs, like Photoshop, to the web. It’s unlikely we’ll see stuff like After Effects on the web, but Photoshop, Illustrator, maybe even inDesign could possibly, maybe be there in a few years. Photoshop web is already in beta (though it’s garbage). The web continues to be the great equalizer.
I think Krita is a more viable competitor to Photoshop than Gimp at this point… It’s also great for pen tablet drawing and arguably superior in that category.
But yeah, video editors are lacking. Kden live is ok (and awesome for the price)
Audio editors are behind too. Audacity is pretty good for 2 track. Bitwig is a great multitrack alternative to Ableton… But Ardour isn’t developed enough for a pro studio and I’ve never seen one that uses Linux. Part of this is poor support for vst plugins developed for Windows, mostly due to their copy protection.
Reaper can go toe-to-toe with any DAW, including Pro Tools.
I work in audio for film and television, and we would all drop Pro Tools and switch to Logic/Nuendo/Studio One/Reaper if Avid didn’t have a legacy stranglehold on the Audio Post industry.
I think Krita is a more viable competitor to Photoshop than Gimp at this point… It’s also great for pen tablet drawing and arguably superior in that category.
Absolutely agree it’s there for artists. Krita is a very successful project and I hear mainstream artists talk about it often, while not being an artist myself. Well, technically I own a Cintiq…
I haven’t been able to get it to work well with PSDs, though, and I find the interface clunky for the sort of image editing I’m doing. I find GIMP easy enough to use, but it unfortunately lacks some crucial features. 3.0 is right around the corner (for real this time), so I’m hopeful. Unfortunately, PSD is a must because of collaboration. GIMP’s ingest of PSD is better. But Krita does have non-destructive effects.
What I’m really hoping for is Affinity Photo to work well in Wine. Most people can get it running now but I think it’s a little buggy or lacking in performance. I’ll have to give that a shot soon.
But yeah, video editors are lacking. Kden live is ok (and awesome for the price)
As it so happens, I’ve thought about this a lot.
Kdenlive is definitely the best free software option but the lack of hardware accelerated playback really kills it dead in the water for me. I’m hoping it will improve soon, given the success of the fundraiser. DaVinci Resolve is fantastic but needing to transcode footage if you have H.264/AAC source footage (geh, I know, but some of us do) and being stuck with H.264 hardware encode in the best-case scenario is not great. I found Lightworks was the best option in terms of professional features + workflow. Proprietary, but hey, at least it works really well on Linux.
Audio editors are behind too. Audacity is pretty good for 2 track. Bitwig is a great multitrack alternative to Ableton… But Ardour isn’t developed enough for a pro studio and I’ve never seen one that uses Linux. Part of this is poor support for vst plugins developed for Windows, mostly due to their copy protection.
That’s a shame to hear! I don’t work with audio on a very professional level, so Audacity is fine for my use cases. It’s improved in a significant way since the Muse Group acquisition (mainly non-destructive editing, but plenty of other stuff). I’m also annoyed but unsurprised to hear that DRM has thwarted compatibility yet again.
Oh yeah
This is the year
People are really late to the party but better late then never…
Linux is awesome.
That was me, I switched my desktop and laptop to ubuntu.
Same here. Switched my laptop to Pop!OS + KDE and planning on doing the same with the desktop soon-ish
Haja you beat me to this comment
Is it actually truly the year of the Linux desktop?
Linux desktop has basically become the Be-so-good they-can’t-ignore-you man
It helps that Microsoft has been alienating their customers and set high bars for OS upgrades.
This is definitely a major reason. Windows 11 forces TPM 2, random hardware requirements that make no sense, and is objectively a downgrade from windows 10 (like every other windows version always is). Since Windows 10 is two years out from EoL and all major Linux distros have gotten so much better… might as well upgrade while you can still go back to 10 should you need to, before you have to be on Linux or throw out a bunch of otherwise fine computers.
Can confirm. Would probably be maining windows if the workspaces actually… functioned…
Linux gets better and and Windows gets worse.
Meanwhile Macs still cost a God damn fortune and you still can’t repair them.
The Linux handheld
Speaking of…Lenovo announced the Legion Go handheld. Can we put Linux on it?
I’ll give it 1 hour after launch
I bet someone will leak a prototype and the GitHub will be up and public before it launches. That seems to be the latest trend for people trying to make headlines on tech.
It’s very likely. But why buy a Lenovo handheld? They are shit at customer service, they are terrible at updating their software, they preferably don’t contribute back to Linux. I have a fabulous Lenovo tablet that was updated once, and the update was shit, a terrible experience, they didn’t release the source code to build the required kernel modules for it to be usable. The firmware had to be modded as hell to prevent it to be a very expensive brick.
Not until you can actually choose it. Think if you could in the store see Linux Desktop to buy and to try out.
What if EU forced computer manufactures to install both OS, Windows and Linux Desktop, and you had to choose during the first boot what you want to use. Trust me, the that will change the numbers, just because of all who picked the wrong one by mistake.
hint: the wrong one is Windows.
Is it for me this year. Both the main and couch gaming rigs are on Linux now. Glad to be free
Partly my fault - I have that page set to auto open on my browser every week
It’s ok, I’ve never been on that site and I changed windows to tumbleweed nearly 2 months ago on my laptop.
Proud to be one of them. I tried to disable the job that runs windows update, they said I don’t have permission, so I switched to Ubuntu on every single computer except the one that runs VR games.
As a bonus, as an enthusiast for artificial intelligence stuff, more programs run on Linux than they do on Windows
On the VR PC you may find O&O ShutUp 10. It has a collection of settings for privacy and generally control over your PC that microsoft didn’t make really accessible.
Powershell as admin then type set-service wuauserv -startuptype manual; stop-service wuauserv
This will disable the windows update service. If you do want to run updates again (and you should do that regularly), just type start-service wuauserv and use the windows update page in settings.
Linux is still way better though.
Wow, if it keeps going at this rate, it’ll be the year of Linux on the desktop (50% share) in 2079.
Idk, mass adoption is usually slow at first, and then gets faster as it goes on.
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Is Linux actually growing, or are other users simply buying fewer computers because their phones have reduced the need for personal computers?
I didn’t crunch the numbers, but as far as I see, most of the linux growth comes from the Steam deck, which runs a Linux OS.
This could also be the reason for the decrease of OSX, because more other, non classical computer, devices are included, which automatically reduces the share of Laptop and PC devices.
So there is a similar percentage of users in the desktop and laptop space as before but more Linux-based handheld systems. Overall market share has become too broad nowadays for at a glance look at percentage of users for each platform as different sectors of systems will have different market share percentages.
I swapped to Linux in the last month. But honestly being able to use my phone as a backup made me not worry about needing a computer right then.
Seriously considering swapping over to my Linux partition as main and virtualizing the Windows side this weekend. Still need the Windows because well, I make Windows software.
Why do you make Windows software?
Job?
Who has those?
Apparently God’s found whole new ways to test him.
🤡
Is this some r/antiwork insanity?
Every hour spent on developing Windows software is completely wasted time of your life. Especially when you understand the importance of GNU/Linux and FOSS. Windows keeps the user enslaved. But most people won’t understand that, they don’t want to. So all I can reply to that is 🤡
It’s fun, they pay me for it, I’m good at it, and I can work entirely from home.
I helped! I installed Linux Mint on 2 of my friends aging laptops.
I got quite a few friends wanting to avoid Windows 11 and taking a serious look at Linux.
Sadly less than half who’ve tried it out have wanted to stick with it, Due to technical problems or some neche software not being available/having a suitable alternative.
I’m in the same boat. I’d like to leave Windows but since installing POP!_OS I’ve had issues with ending up with two versions of Firefox installed (yes snap and yes I’ve fixed that now). My Yubikey can’t be detected until I found a post by another user with a fix. I am still yet to find a way to get VRR working.
There’s no doubt that a lot of issues are user related but honestly I don’t have this much trouble with Windows. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried Linux and each and every time I find issues that I normally just give up on and revert back to Windows. I am trying though, I even purchased a second SSD dedicated for Linux.
I gotta say though Valve’s proton software is amazing and without it I probably wouldn’t be trying so hard to leave Windows as my primary game doesn’t have native Linux support.
Pop!_OS was also the first distro I tried and I had a lot of problems with it, I dunno why people keep recommending it.
I’ve been fulltime on EndeavourOS for over a month no with no issues, but I also don’t have any peripherals that require software to work correctly which makes me a rare case these days.
I tried Endeavor for a bit before switching to Mint. May have just my me being to new to be jumping into Endeavor but I struggled and switch to mint within a couple days. was a beautiful distro though. Will probably jump back at some point since I’m running Linux on a spare PC right next to my main windows PC.
I’ll give EndeavourOS a try then. Thanks.
I tried Pop as it seemed highly recommended.
Mint and ubuntu are solid places to start linux. You can run them all pretty easy in a virtual machine btw, windows will even auto install ubuntu with the hyper v program. https://imgur.com/a/CFCSUvh Uncheck the secure boot for iso.
This may be a bit counterintuitive, but I tried Mint and it was ugly and also 21 => 21.1 upgrade tool botched my drive mounting points.
Fedora was absolutely smooth af and Debian has been absolutely lovely too.
In case either of those seem more up your alley.
I read you post and thought that it could be something i would say, too.
My Dad has a cheap laptop he uses just for banking, and he asked me to put Linux on it so he wouldn’t have to upgrade to Windows 10. It’s not much - for my Dad, or for the greater Linux market share - but it’s something!
technical problems
Like what, exactly? I can only imagine drivers and even drivers aren’t a really huge deal anymore
niche software
Again like what? Most softwares either have perfectly fine alternatives or if not, may even run transparently in Linux. A lot of times it’s just “slightly different” and requires a person to just stick with it for a while.
Also, try KDE desktop. It’s more a windows look and feel whilst being plain better and prettier and won’t scare people off so easily
Edit: why the downvotes? I’m sincerely curious to what the problems are
I’m a fairly technically savvy person. And yet, since the drivers do not support the fingerprint sensor and the windows hello camera on my laptop. I am trucking along without.
But, not everyone is going to have the same leniency for tech they bought. Also the bluetooth is ridiculously flaky. Sure I could change the driver/software and all from CLI but the layperson is not going to be adept at that.
Most complaints I got from people were over gaming mice/keyboards or audio equipment that need additional software to fully function.
I do think it’s pretty stupid that some hardware requires extra crap in order to work right but I ain’t gonna convince my friends to throw out their sometimes $100+ peripherals because the manufactures a jackass.
I will totally agree KDE is probably the best DE out their for desktops and already way better out of the box than Win10/11, I’ve been using it for over a month now and not missing Windows at all.
There is a windows theme in the Mint themer that looks like it is spot on to look just like windows. I love the look of linux over windows though so didn’t try it.
Yeah, even that is possible ( though other non windows themes look better, personally)
I guess that’s the point. Linux is all about possibilities. You can do anything you want.
