I know this might be a couple months old, but I didn’t know we already passed 4%.
I’ve had LMDE on a USB stick for a few months now, waiting for the right time to boot it up on my wife’s PC, and she finally agreed to try it tonight. Cross your fingers, boys; we may soon have another convert.
If she doesn’t like it, find a new wife!
I am so happy for you two!
🤞 Make us proud, bud!
What’s your review of LMDE over Debian? I recently took the Linux desktop jump recently and started with Linux Mint.
I really didn’t like the Mint desktop as it seemed very dated, so I’ve switched to Debian/KDE. It was only much later that I realized how easy it would have been to just customize my window manager instead of getting a different distro. Having said that, I’m really digging Debian in spite of Nvidia issues being a headache, and Debian’s glacial update pace making me look longingly at Arch.
I also didn’t like the way Mint looked/felt, even though I’m aware of its popularity and good reputation.
I’m on Pop!_OS which is mostly a GNOME desktop, but they do add [remove] features and it’s very smooth and clean. I guess this is one of the miracles of “linux” where we can all be using “linux” but with 1500 different varieties.
I love pop os.
Yeah, I’ve heard really good things about Pop!_OS, especially for Windows migrants.
Funny enough, if you “need it to look like windows 7” Mint looks pretty close.
but yes, prior to October my house was 5 windows PCs. A couple weeks ago it was officially 5 Pop machines. No prior Linux experience, except for copy-paste setup of a pihole.
I like Debian a lot, and Mint seems fine too, but I don’t like the styling, or Cinnamon really. I use Fluxbox (WM only, no DE) with a bunch of tiny customizations.
The main reason I picked it is that I like to tinker and she doesn’t, so I think that Cinnamon will be the easiest for her coming from Windows 10.
We both have AMD GPUs (and she has a AMD CPU too) so I haven’t had to deal with Nvidia headaches.
I like the glacial updates so things don’t break as easily. I don’t want to spend hours fixing a system (hers or mine tbh) unless I have to. For anything that I need the latest features for, there’s usually a repo I can add to Aptitude or a Flatpak.
It’s cool and all, but I’m surprised it’s not 10% at this point. Microsoft is shitting in their customers mouth and Apple is a luxury brand at this point.
Because every computer bought by the average human being, has Windows on it.
“dominance”… You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means
First off, I DO NOT count ChromeOS, but whatever.
Secondly, when is 18% of anything “dominant”??? The fuck? Arstechnica back up off the pipe.
They probably mean of Linux flavored ps coverage.
(I’m aware Mac is very different than Linux, but it is more closely grouped with Linux than Windows)
How much of this is decline at the expense of Windows 11, due to Steam lowering barriers to entry, fatigue with Windows’ hard selling, and/or extending the useful like of hardware that W11 abandoned.
Nearly zero. Gamers make up less than a rounding error of desktop installs.
Wut? It’s an industry bigger than football and TV and film combined! Somebody’s getting all those games and they have to be played on something too.
Gamers do, the vast majority of which are mobile gamers. Followed by console gamers and then PC gaming which makes up less 15% of industry revenue.
Is less than
Percentages are the easiest statistical figure to bullshit. Just like it happens with “Linux desktop is only 4%”. We are then talking about over a hundred million PCs. PC gaming is 15% means that PC gamers are several hundred millions of devices. Sure, it is less than mobile gaming. But less doesn’t mean irrelevant, and much less a rounding error. You don’t call a fifth of the market that expends almost a quarter of the revenue a rounding error.
I know it technically counts and all, but it bothers me that “mobile” is included in “video games”. Mobile “games” are clickbaits and doomscrolls and it seems weird to compare them in the same graph as Nintendo/PC etc.
HOWEVER - in terms of REVENUE there is no denying how much money they make on mobile games! Probably due in part to the clickbait/doomscroll nature of them.
I know it technically counts and all, but it bothers me that “mobile” is included in “video games”. Mobile “games” are clickbaits and doomscrolls and it seems weird to compare them in the same graph as Nintendo/PC etc.
I didn’t post this graphic for the mobile and console games. I posted it because of the claim that PC games are “an industry bigger than football and TV and film combined!” USD 45Bn is big but not bigger than football and TV and film combined. The combined PC games revenue is about half of Disney’s yearly revenue.
Steam surveys would like to have a word
With you, maybe.
They consistently show that several percent of gamers are using Steam on Linux
Attaboy gamers. Figure it out! You can do it!
Copilot / Recall was the last straw for me. My only relationship with Microsoft for the last 10 years has been, “how much more of Microsoft’s sh*t am I willing to put up with?”
Played csgo last night and this guy brought up he was playing on Linux Mint. Lfg, I was so happy.
Music and graphic art software is the only advantage I can find for MacOS over Linux at this point. I love the Apple silicon but I don’t see that being a long term advantage.
This isn’t going to be the standard much longer. Gimp, Krita, and inkscape are extremely well developed and maintained.
Ardour is almost a full replacement for logic and the gap from it and protools is closing quick.
Stability and UI/UX are still lightyears ahead in Mac, and to some extent Windows. Don’t get me wrong, they suck for lots of reasons, but I think Linux has a lot of catching up to do to be as usable as Mac/Windows for the ordinary user.
I think standardizing package formats, and more mature desktop managers and proprietary drivers will go a long way to fixing that though.
What is your definition of stability lol
Windows crashes are standard… Linux are pretty rare. At least in my exp
Well, in my case stability refers to grub display loading at all :)
I installed Debian on my PC with an RTX 4090 and it just refuses to load the grub display on first boot (grub loads, but there’s no DisplayPort signal). I was able to get it working by switching to the latest stable backports kernel and proprietary Nvidia drivers, but then it stopped working again and now I have to figure out how to fix it.
I don’t mind this at all, and I’m even enjoying the troubleshooting process, but I think this would have been quite the headache for the average user!
That is a headache… No idea of grub is either
Running 3000 series nvidis with popos drivers that were included zero issue.
I deff had issues with mint tho.
As I discovered, nvidia are infamous in the linux world for causing all sorts of weird issues. Things are getting a lot better now as they seem to be giving a lot more attention to the drivers in linux like they do for Windows. The open-source (Nouveau) drivers in linux seem to work well in many cases (maybe for 3000-series cards too?), but as you get to newer cards like the 4090, the proprietary linux drivers they provide are often needed. It’s still huge progress!
I see. Yeah looking forward to 555
Mac is powered by Unix under the hood and uptimes are generally in the months for me personally. Much stability.
No it isn’t. That’s not what UNIX means. It’s just a certification and they have lost it once in the past. You can’t be powered by Unix, you can be Unix compliant or not. It’s like a company advertising themselves as “powered by OSHA”, that’s not how this works pal.
High DPI screen support in Linux is still troublesome, especially between multiple screens with different DPI/resolution, especially between GTK and Qt programs.
And I haven’t played around with Asahi yet, but it’ll be hard to top the built-in power/suspend/hibernate/resume behavior and its effect on battery life (especially in being able to just count on it to work if you suspend for days, where it seamlessly switches to hibernate and starts back up very quickly). But on my old Intel MacBook, the battery life difference between MacOS and and Linux is probably two to one. Some of it is Apple’s fault for refusing to document certain firmware/hardware features, but the experience is the experience.
People find Windows easier to use because they are used to the quirks. Of course you shouldn’t let a beginner try Arch, but there are plenty of beginner friendly distros. The complications often come from installing Linux in the first place but the average user will have just as much trouble installing Windows.
I think Linux still prioritizes the command-line for a lot of config/setup, which can be extremely daunting for new users. In addition, there are also a million options for everything, which is great for freedom, but really confusing for newbies.
I should note that both of these things are amazing pluses for me as a power user/developer.
Have you tried Mint or something similar? You can absolutely run and install it without using the command line.
Yes but the more refined and simple it can be the better. Mint or otherwise.
Agree. Windows has almost a forty year “quirk bake-in”. All your relatives and non-savvy friends are NOT going to learn anything new (even mac) if they can help it.
The more droolproof linux can be the easier it will be adopted. Whether or not it mimics windows is a choice, but either way we’re losing computer literacy instead of everyone being computer literate. Sadly.
I think most users dont install windows period. It just comes with the computer. And if it breaks, they get a new one. Thats it.
Yes, that’s my point. If people could buy Linux PCs at Best Buy or Walmart, most of them would get on with it just fine.
Agreed.
I struggle to do the same things on the Mac that are trivial in Windows and Linux.
For example, I gave up on Homebrew because it was difficult to install. For one thing, it required me to set up an Apple developer account on my version of MacOS
I don’t use my girlfriend’s Mac book because the OS is not as intuitive, like I found out recently you have to drag the icon in to install things. Who comes up with this shit?
That’s fair, I think Mac’s extremely opinionated design that be grating at times. Also, heaven help you if you want to do something non-standard on a Mac, the system fights you every step of the way.
There isn’t much you can’t do on Mac if you use the terminal, much like Linux. It’s much better than the convoluted mess that windows settings is.
I gave up on Homebrew because it was difficult to install.
It just includes as a dependency the Mac command line developer tools, which can be installed pretty easily from what I remember.
And what I like is that it’s a normal Unix style shell, with almost all the utilities you’d expect.
you have to drag the icon in to install things.
I mean that’s about 100 times better than Windows’ default of running an installer that isn’t easily reversible.
I’m by no means a musician, let alone a professional one, but this part does admittedly suck. The actual sound backend works phenomenally well, especially when combining Pipewire and JACK for audio production, however using Windows-native VST/VST3 plugins is a horrible experience. A lot of mine are either really laggy, or just don’t load properly at all
What happened in Nov 2023?
OSX and Windows move in opposite directions at the same time? Seems a little weird.
Since Unknown matches Windows only inverted some windows update was probably unclassified for that time period.
Probably sampling bias. Happens in steam surveys all the time, correlates to Chinese users being more or less represented in the sample
