Scoffs derisively at the new popular thing and switches to BSD…
I’m doing my part! Switched to Linux earlier this year because Microsoft started showing ads in the start menu. I tried Nobara but ran into some glitches that I didn’t want to troubleshoot so I switched to Bazzite. So far so good.
I hopped on the Linux train when Microsoft began pushing hard for AI integration and Microsoft accounts. I fucking hate AI and I don’t need some corpo cunt looking over my shoulder and taking notes while I use my computer.
Welcome! Because we Linux aficionados are incorrigibly nosy and passionate, which distro did you pick and how are you liking it so far?
I went with Mint because my technical knowledge of Linux is very basic at the moment. I imagine I’ll jump to a more hands-on distro as my familiarity with it increases. EndeavorOS looks interesting.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Mint.
There’s a small army of Linux “snobs” that look down on it for recondite and mostly silly reasons. Mint is a great and user-friendly OS. The only thing I can say against it is that many of the binaries in the distro app manager are very out of date, but this hardly matters now because AppImage and Flatpaks are so on top of it and great.
EndeavourOS is fantastic. It’s my default distro because I love Arch, but CBA installing it manually these days. I’ve done my time with the Arch installer over the years 😂
And the community is great btw.
You don’t have to. I’m a long time Linux user and extremely well versed. I still use Mint and Debian because I’m an old fart who likes things that just work.
Same. It should be illegal for them to be forcing this shit on us. At least I only have to endure it on my work pc. No windows on personal devices
I made the switch recently for probably the strangest reason.
I’ve been running win 11 for over a year using a shell tool that allowed me to move my task bar to the top of the screen and some other win 10 functionality.
However win 11 removed the ability to move the task bar and my shell program lost most of its functionality. After that I was done.
I’ve Linux off and on since 2002ish so it’s not scary to me and I’m pretty happy with Arch and KDE right now. Still the occasional crash that appears to happen sometimes when watching YouTube.
Hey, don’t knock customization as a reason. A couple of decades ago, I was sold on Linux by silly Beryl/Compiz videos such as this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=038RHEGu4OYyo compiz is the shit. You can do ANYTHING with it. It took me a while to figure out because where the hell is the manual, but I have my own custom thing going on and it’s brilliant.
Gimme mah Cube!
And the wobblies and explosions are cool too!
If anyone is stuck on windows and not able to switch there’s a program called wind hawk that will let you download customizations in windows 11 including moving the bar
it’s sad, pathetic, and stupid that one has to download a potentially dangerous hack to do something so basic.
From my reading all ways to move the task bar have been removed.
This is working currently on windows 11 23h2
Fine… that version, not 24H2
idk how you stayed on windows so long, had I tried linux sooner I wouldve dumped it faster, no software support or piracy for said software if it does have support is rough tho like houdinifx is hard to pirate if not impossible, davinci is easy tho, adobe has no support (no idea if it works well with wine pirated)
As pointed out on hackernews, this is likely attributed to (a) decrease in desktop usage by non-linux-users, and (b) the gaming hardware industry embracing linux (steam deck etc.)
The journey of Linux has been one of slow but steady progress, accelerating in recent years. It took eight years to go from 1% to 2% (by April 2021), then just 2.2 years to reach 3% (June 2023), and a mere 0.7 years to hit 4% (February 2024). Now, here we are, at over 5% in the USA! This exponential growth suggests that we’re on a promising upward trend.
The article was written this month, so it’s conveniently ignoring the fact that the rise from 4% to 5% took 18 months. That’s actually a huge slowdown in uptake, not an acceleration.
But I’m glad it’s at 5%, even if it’s only in the US. Now let’s get there globally, and keep it going…
Mind you, the usage on the desktop, as the article says, is probably actually a significant bit higher than 5%, thanks to Unknown, and if you include ChromeOS, which personally it should be IMO.
I put Ubuntu on my year old Windows laptop and to my surprise, everything is just better. I mean better than Windows AND better than Linux ever was before when I used it previously. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing some major manufacturers shipping PCs with Ubuntu pre-loaded in the coming years.
I think the fastest way for Linux to spread is for there to be a cheap gross dirty disgusting commercial version pushed at bestbuy/walmart…etc where people can become familiar enough with it to switch to other distros and out still feel familiar.
I think the fastest way for linux to spread are a) a state-sponsored (totally open source) product that sees a free and open OS as part of a commitment to a free and open society. or 2) one of these fuckhead billionaires drops $200M or so into a trust, rather like the Poetry Foundation, which has the singular commitment to create an OS for people and to support it indefinitely.
I don’t think the answer to any of society’s ills is to get Wallmart involved. ed: walmart however its spelled WGAS.
Im a long time Mac user but recently got a steamdeck. Desktop mode uses a version of kde and I really like it, if I had to switch from Mac I would definitely go with linux instead of windows. I think the steam deck will introduce a lot of people to linux.
Do you think ChromeOS could fit that role? At least it shows that an alternative to Windows exists.
I’ve been using Linux since 2006, and been gaming on it exclusively since maybe 2018? Seen reports it’s even kicking Win 11’s ass now performance-wise. Yall are just mean.
I will mainly switch to Linux whenever I feel ready for the headache of setting it up for the first time too. Already got another M.2 SSD to run it alongside my existing Win 10 for anything that doesn’t run on Linux.
If it was simple and easy to install and play games on Linux as is on Windows, I would have switched over a decade ago.
I couldn’t find it is in the article, is this new purchases, or how is this measured. If a computer ships with windows and I install mint on it, how do they know where that tally goes?
The stats are from StatCounter which has this in their FAQ:
What methodology is used to calculate Statcounter Global Stats? Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device.
So it’s the percentage if web traffic (to sites that use this analytics service)
Ah so that should be pretty accurate then, because the amount of users spoofing their OS is likely fairly low, and I would assume would mostly be Linux users as well, meaning it wouldn’t sell the data as being higher than it is, but rather possibly lower.
Also someone who uses Linux is more likely to use adblock and telemetry blocking features. The actual count is definitely slightly higher.
Does telemetry block that? If you go to a site like this, does it get your OS correct? I figured you’d have to use the spoof features like in Firefox to get it to say something different. (Like telling it your chrome so it doesn’t block your browser on certain pages)
I know in Cromite I can do some of it from here:
You can get the browser version. But as per OP StatCounter says this
Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally.
I am assuming these are some extra js files or external scripts that the website will try to load, it won’t be part of the native website itself. Adblocker will completely prevent those file or websites from loading in the first place.
My initial point might not be quite right though, in the sense of Linux might be higher by pure numbers but not by percentage. The sheer number of people using Windows, even if a small portion use adblocker could outnumber the Linux users.
My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting “OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!” to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.
What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it’s a major, major victory for all the distros.
A lot of it kicks back to companies as well. If every time someone interviews for a new job they are telling users they need to run their programs or even just the application for the interview from a Windows machine it pressures users into going back. I always see shit like that for stuff that is even just browser based. I prefer not to install zoom, teams, and such and just open in the browser, but ive run into companies saying their typing tests and other pre employment material only run on Windows. It’s usually false, as I never actually have needed it to install Windows, but it sows doubt in people who don’t want to take chances when they are already in a potentially tight spot.
It doesn’t say how they got this number in the piece (unless I missed it), but it’s likely more than 5% if they are, say, counting the OS by user agent strings hitting a particular tracker. Linux distros use different browsers and they don’t report the OS in an accurate way all the time.
For a long time my UAS just said “Firefox, the version #, NT-based” or something like that, but now it reports Linux properly… I haven’t been paranoid enough to use a agent switcher lately.
Why does that website have the same layout as one of those AI-generated blogs that clogs up search results on DDG? It isn’t AI, but the design is almost identical.
Iine go up diamond hands
