I’m not sure how true this is, but I read somewhere that when Mac got above 5% market share, it suddenly got a lot more mainstream support.
I wonder if that means we’re are a year or two away from Linux as a mainstream option.
I’d love to have an arm based Linux laptop with software support for one of my critical work apps.
The problem is I don’t think I believe those numbers represent actual desktop use as an exclusive desktop use platform.
They’re just ‘someone visited a website with a linux user agent’, which could mean an awful lot of things ranging from someone doing automated scraping with a headless chrome, to an actual user, to someone just plain lying about what OS they’re using in order to break fingerprinting.
The number goes up and down WAY too much percentage-wise between months for it to be a really good measure of how much linux on the desktop there actually is, as much as I’d like it to be true :/
Well, I currently have my browser set to fake my user agent as windows on my linux desktop. So it’s not overestimated in every case. I suspect it’s a bit higher than the true percentage, but not by very much.
At the end of the day it’s still good news. The accuracy isn’t important as is overall visibility and status in the public conscious. Folks downplay steamdeck, deepin, and chrome os, but more usage even if limited can cause a significant snowball effect which I believe will happen with steam os being formalized. The linux challenge and proton have, and will continue to do wonders for linux in the public conscious, eventually leading to better support.
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This is coming from experience in marketing.
While I know the M word is often seen as bad, I’ve long thought Linux could benefit from some actual real marketing that’s utterly divorced from any nerd shit ;)
As to who in the world would pay for that, I have no idea, but there’s a lot of like about Linux if you could get a slick, clean, polished explanation and NOT have some Linux nerdbeard (like, say, myself) try to explain, well, any of it.
GNU Linux users are stuck in the early 20th century in marketing strategies, including you. Rational marketing explaining objectively how product P will help its consumers in XYZ is not the mainstream strategy of marketing anymore. It was surpassed by Irrational marketing, where a company will try to associate specific ideas and emotions with its brand and products, like an ad with big cars riding in rough natural landscapes that will show to everyone who is the real man in the block, who has high income, who is the most sexy, most adventurous, who the hot girl will want to date, etc (and NOT an ad that explains how the SUV has 6x6 wheels, can travel 555,8 miles, carry 1,8 metric tons of cargo, with air conditioning, etc, even if those informations are true).
Apple did not really explain what their various models of computers are to its clients, they just made several marketing pieces of content (including public performances by steve jobs) that transmitted the ‘‘vibes’’ of what using them ‘‘feels like’’ (i.e. what image apple wanted to associate itself). Being ‘‘futuristic’’, ‘‘smart’’, ‘‘successful’’, ‘‘luxurious’’, ‘‘easy’’, etc.
They need some actual marketing firm that will do a full psy-ops that manages to associate using linux distros with irrational but desirable traits (ideas, emotions, etc), that common people will identify and start trying to ‘‘Keep up with the Joneses’’ (the joneses being the linux users now). Show using Arch Linux as the knack of genius people that will hack anything they want and earn millions, show using Fedora as the thing of smart successful beautiful rich people, show handsome entrepreneurs doing high middle class work in Mint or Ubuntu, show high score Gamers using RGB PCs with Garuda Linux, etc. That kind of marketing is however generally rejected by Linux proponents.
100% agree. Most Linux users and companies are trying to sell on a list of things Linux doesn’t do, or technical features which pretty much absolutely nobody gives a crap about who isn’t a tech nerd in the first place.
I was actually thinking of Apple’s I’m a Mac/I’m a PC ads as something that could actually probably work, because at this point Windows has shittified itself to the point that even non-technical people I know IRL grumble about it. (I tell them to buy a Mac because I’m absolutely not about to become level 1 Linux desktop support.)
But again, who pays for it, and why? I don’t think there’s ANY financial incentive for consumer marketing from anyone who makes a distro that can afford an actual ad, because none of them are structured to give a shit about consumer use: it’s all enterprise support contracts, and if someone happens to use it on their desktop, cool but not their actual business.
There are some hardware sellers specialized in Linux, no ? the european Tuxedo Computers, and specially the north american System 76 (who is also the developer of PopOS, therefore the closest Linux equivalent of Apple in having both hard and soft wares). They could be the ones to do it by having an incentive (selling hardware in more scale, and merchandising too, also accepting donations). Honestly, a company that focused on just assembling good enough computers that run a very hands-off but functional linux distro (pretty much Ubuntu KDE with flatpaks and lots of pre-installed programs a la Linux Mint), while having a good enough price and most importantly focusing on the marketing in the forms mentioned, could change the status-quo. I agree Fedora, Red Hat, will be catering to companies on the foreseeable future. Ads on Youtube are far reaching and not expensive, and possible to scale with time.
The amusing thing here is that I forgot all about Tuxedo and System 76.
I would suspect that might be exactly the problem: as far as I know, neither of them advertise at all, or if they do, it’s something that’s completely forgettable and somewhere that someone who’s not deeply involved in Linux is ever going to see it.
You’re right that they have the most incentive since they actually sell something you could (theoretically) want to buy, and are probably not living on large enterprise contracts since I don’t think I’ve ever seen hardware from either in the wild.
someone just plain lying about what OS they’re using in order to break fingerprinting.
The idea with avoiding fingerprinting is to look like whatever the biggest group of users looks like, because that’s who you share the fingerprint with. If you use an uncommon value for something, you make fingerprinting easier.
That’s one of the reasons why for example Vivaldi on Linux sets its user agent to match the latest version Chrome on Windows.
But the trend is up between 2009 and now.
Well, in 2009 it was what? like .5% of all desktops or something? Can’t really go down from there.
I don’t disagree the trend is up, I mostly disagree that the number provided is accurate and is likely wildly wrong: it’s possible it’s wildly low, but I really don’t think so.
Anecdata: I know more people in my circles that have switched from running Linux on their computers than to running Linux. Almost 100% of the switchers moved to Mwhatever Macbooks because they got tired of dealing with the shit that is x86 laptop hardware, and Linux use was the casualty of shitty hardware.
im not sure how similar the situations are though since Mac OS is backed by Apple. Linux doesnt have a similarly massive company to back it up. I do think there is a number where companies will rush to support linux but idk if its as low as 5%.
One difference is that retail outlets can profit from Apple products. Linux isn’t a company that makes hardware.
But you can but a Dell with Linux on it instead of windows.
I’d like to see a logarithmic version of this graph. Picking out a straight line in a log graph is easier than trying to discern an exponential. I want that juicy exponential.
Wow how can I invest in Linux
Here is my attempt at digitizing that plot and then log-scaling the vertical axis.
This is amazing! Thank you so much for doing this!! Would you mind telling me your process for extracting the data from the graph? Did you tediously manually extract eye-balled data-points? Or, did you run it through some software which extracted them? Or, perhaps, did you just find and use the original data source?
WebPlotDigitizer! It’s a great tool.
That’ll definitely come in handy. Thanks!
Without reading the article how much is this because of the Steam deck
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I would love to switch to Linux, but everytime I try to look at it seriously, I get overwhelmed by the choosing of distros and people saying its hard and complicated. I wish it was more clear cut where you should start. I used to think it was ubuntu, but then people shit on it. Then I thought it was Mint, then people shit on that. So on and so forth. Makes it hard to understand how to even approach it.
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Mint would be a perfect distro to start with. Don’t listen to them—just download Mint. I don’t like Ubuntu but honestly it would be fine too. In other words, although it does matter, it does not matter as much as people say as long as you do not start with something to too hard to install.
Mint is lovely! I started out with it years ago and still use it today.
Please do not care about people shitting on popular distros. As a gentoo user myself, it’s as niche as it gets, but I will wholeheartedly recommend Ubuntu and mint.
People shit on any distro 😂 just get whatever works for you, differences aren’t that big, after all.
I personally like the easy version of Arch (endeavourOS) and install stuff there only using yay in terminal (yay [name of program you nees])
I have a question for you, coming from a long time Linux user. How do you decide which car to buy? There are so many options, each have their own mileage, comfort, capabilities. Would you say it’s difficult buying a car?
Mint’s fine. I might also recommend PopOS - it just seems to be less crappy Ubuntu.
yea just go mint it’s goated.
Don’t listen to people. Choose any distro that is newbie friendly. If you don’t choose, you are still choosing. The worst of your choices is probably better than what you are currently using.
If you come from Windows Mint is an excellent starting point. People shit on it because it doesn’t have all the fancy bells and whistles you get with more latest releases, but on the flip side it’s super reliable and as a new user that reliability is worth more than all the bells and whistles.
Use EndeavourOS
