Comment by petcat 4 days ago
> Every month more and more people switch to Linux
We've been hearing this for decades and yet the home Linux userbase is microscopic and somehow even smaller than ever. Unless we're going to count Google's Android and Chrome OS. Those are the only Linux-based distributions that have ever gained market share over desktop Windows.
> On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.
I _love_ Linux, but I agree with this as well. I don't think Linux will ever be easy enough that I could recommend it to an elderly neighbor. I hope to be proven wrong, though.
What frustrates me about this particular moment is that at the same time Windows is getting worse, I feel that OS X is _also_ getting worse. This _is_ an opportunity for Apple to put a big dent in Windows market share.
> I don't think Linux will ever be easy enough that I could recommend it to an elderly neighbor.
The only reason I wouldn't do this is because that elderly neighbour wouldn't be able to install Linux and might not have any obvious place to get support from. Where can Grandma go to get support for her Linux laptop, even if she's willing to pay?
However, in a world where they can buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled and receive support from the same shop they bought it from if they do run into problems, then absolutely I would (not that that support is going to be great, but then they're at least no worse off than they were when they need support with Windows or a Mac, and I imagine they'll run into less problems on Linux than on Windows, given their use cases are likely to be very narrow and simple, i.e. web browser, e-mail, maybe simple office stuff).
> What frustrates me about this particular moment is that at the same time Windows is getting worse, I feel that OS X is _also_ getting worse. This _is_ an opportunity for Apple to put a big dent in Windows market share.
Aye, I agree. MacOS has been getting a bigger slice of the pie, but it's hard to ascribe what's the main cause, and to what extent each cause is contributing. We got the M chips being ungodly good (even the M1 is still serviceable, and damn right affordable even at this point), Windows growing worse, but the laptop market is also contracting, with a steady stream of people leaking out, saying 'screw this, I'll just use my phone or tablet. I don't need a PC for anything anymore.'.
All the casuals I know use a Mac for a laptop because they want something simple and functional, and Macs do that job, but they keep doing that job worse and worse. Everybody else casual might have a Windows laptop, but barely ever use it. The rest are gamers and power users, and thus need a proper machine and can't stick to a phone and tablet.
Apple could attract from the groups who would otherwise be done with non-phone/tablet computing, but their offering is growing weaker and weaker.
> Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though
> governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech
I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a major Linux company for quite a few years, started using Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related kernel modules.
However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many non-PC systems).
I have been in projects for large companies but also government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50 employees) non-IT business with people in several countries.
People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters the least in business. Office is another, and even there most people who don't deal with it at scale are way too focused on some use case where individuals write documents and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very small setup, or even just a single PC.
However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess, duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But nobody in the world would be able to provide soooo much stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just a tool will not switch.
But something can be done.
The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.
They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once wrote some code for some government agency to manage business registrations, and it was web software.
The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches for local business to start making money using other stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same time, enact policies that let local business grow using alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does not have to compete with US based ones.
The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about the MS stack is that I can use it everywhere, in almost all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business would have to use a different local company in each country.
I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their focus is on their own business and domain problems first of all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if the US were to do something really drastic that crashes some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.
> However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.
Is there any bit of this that is not web based or does not support Linux nowadays? Office 365 runs on a browser, and even Intune supports some enterprise oriented distributions, like RH, so device management shouldn't be a problem. But even if none of that was true, there is certainly competition in the IT management space. Defaulting to Microsoft just because of a Windows based fleet doesn't sound like a great idea.
> The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.
This is stuff other vendors have been offering for ages now.
They may not be, but I can almost guarantee that Microsoft will get rid of them sooner than later.
Trading dependency on a company in Redmond, WA, USA, for one in mountain view, CA, USA does nothing for moving away from USA in the dependency chain, but it proves that it's possible. And I know it's possible as there are several billion-dollar companies in Google Workspace I know of personally. And if it's possible for them, it means it's possible for the EU to get there. The only question is will they ever? Let's form a committee to schedule a meeting to look into that question.
"Possible" is everything that does not violate any laws of the universe, that is not a useful criterion!
Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?
But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.
Go and download the archives of Reddit, there are plenty of torrents out there. Filter to a sub like r/gaming. Relative frequency graph of Linux mentions. You'll see a magnitude increase over the last 12 months compared to years before. It's real.
Must admit, not sure if the data torrents are uptodate now that Reddit anti-scrapes so hard to raise their premium on the exclusive contract to the highest bidder, OpenAI.
Calling 4-5% marketshare microscopic is not fair. I get it if it was still stuck at 1%, but it's growing, and the rate of growth has been increasing too.
Is the desktop/laptop linux market share really over 4%? What is that based on?
At least according to Statcounter, Linux is currently at 3.86% worldwide: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide.
It's slightly larger in the US at 5.28%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
In India, where I live, it's surprisingly at 6.51%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india
Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is not something to scoff at.
There's also the people like me that couldn't historically run certain games well directly on Linux, so we have Windows virtual machines with GPU passthrough. Which would read as me being a Windows user in the Steam stats, but a Linux user in other stats.
The state of gaming has improved drastically since I started doing it that way, though, and I'm considering ditching the VM entirely. Multiplayer games seem to be getting the hint about anticheat exclusion on Linux. ARC Raiders, for example, is a competitive game and runs flawlessly directly on Linux.
The high amount of "Unknown" is interesting. Especially as it doubled in the last 6-8 months.
Last time I looked on stat counter it showed 4 and something percent. That's where I pulled the number from. But it seems they updated it to 3.86 now. It's so over for the Linux community.
Statcounter isn't just "not fully accurate", it's a hot dump of analytics garbage, at least for this purpose. Take your time to reflect on these diagrams - what's happening there? What's the 55% "unknown", and what does that tell you about the quality of those stats? (I've commented on this problem before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472324 )
I suggest referring to Cloudflare instead: https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&loc=&dt=5...
They're actually even putting Linux on 5.1% for desktops as of now - strangely, down from 6.5% in June last year.
According to Statcounter, Linux's share is 3.86% and rising; but I'd imagine that quite a bit of the almost 16% 'unknown' is also Linux.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Not insignificant at all.
Maybe more interesting is that if you switch to looking at just America Linux jumps to 5.25% (unknown 7.4%) (Similar numbers for all of NA), and for Europe it is 4.32% (9.75% unknown).
Again, not huge numbers but also not insignificant. But they are quickly growing and taking share from Microsoft. If we look back at (Dec) 2021 the numbers are 1.8% and 2.2% respectively. Those gains are meaningful.
You can see that while Windows 10 numbers are going down over the past few months, the Windows 11 numbers aren't making up for it. About 2/3 of that gap are going to Linux with the other third going to Mac. So Mac is getting more market at the expense of Windows as well. There are a significant number of disgruntled Windows users leaving over the past year.
Its not ... The problem is that people do not realize that devices like Steam Deck are also considered Linux desktop devices in those numbers. Chrome tends to also inflate those numbers. Yes, they are Linux desktops but not in the way people are comparing Windows to Linux.
The real number is closer to 2.5% somewhere. What is still growth but nowhere the "year of the Linux desktop".
You tend to see a rather vocal minority that makes you feel like there is some major switch but looking here in the comments, people that switched 8 years, 12 year, 20 years ago are people that are part of the old statistics. There are some new converts but not what you expect to see despite Linux now also being more gaming compatible.
It still has minor issues (beyond anti-cheat), that involve people fixing things, less then the past. But its still not the often click and play, works under every resolution, has no graphic issue etc etc. That is the part people often do not tell you, because a lot of people are more thinkers, so a issue pops up, they fix it and forget about it.
Ironically, MacOS just dominates as the real alternative to Windows in so many aspects. If Apple actually got their act together about gaming, it can trigger a actual strong contender to Windows.
>The problem is that people do not realize that devices like Steam Deck are also considered Linux desktop devices in those numbers.
Are people even browsing on Steam Decks? Because everybody in this thread seems to be referring to stats published by a rather obscure web tracking solutions company. "High-traffic sites using Statcounter include khabarban.com, codelist.cc, and download.it"
Steam Deck is a Linux desktop device. It is literally a thin laptop with a build-in screen and joystick running linux. Does my linux system stop being that when I turn on big picture mode in steam? You can run the steam deck as your daily driver hooked up to a keyboard and a monitor.
As phones replace desktop computers for non-technical users, leaving a concentration of "skilled" users, my suspicion is that the pattern will resemble the quote "Slowly, then all at once."
Have a look at the Steam Hardware [and software] Survey [0] results. Linux has been trending upwards whist Windows has been trending down for a wee while. And the population this looks at is primarily interested in gaming, which means that this is despite a compatibility layer being needed for a large amount of the software used. I imagine in other communities (software, old people) it's trending much faster.
E.g. I recently installed Linux Mint for my grandma so she could use email and an up-to-date web browser on her old laptop that can't run (secure) Windows anymore. The UI differences are marginal for her, and she can do everything she needs to much better than she could before (which was not at all).
I mean, this is literally false? Desktop Linux userbase is growing, it's bigger than it has ever been even without including ChromeOS, and more OEMs are shipping devices with desktop linux than ever before (Valve's suite of devices, multiple laptop vendors including major ones like Lenovo, a few SteamDeck competitors)
More and more desktop apps are just becoming websites. More and more desktop apps are using Electron rather than some native app. Windows is slowly becoming a dumpster fire in terms of usability and issues. Most games these days Just Work on Linux without any tinkering.
While I hardly think that this year will be "the year of the Linux desktop" or whatever, but if these trends keep going, I really foresee Linux market share growing, slowly, each year, until it's not so microscopic anymore.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...) only ~3.6% Steam users use Linux and these statistics include the Steam Deck users. SteamOS accounts for ~26% of Linux users, which in turn brings down the count to ~2.6%. For comparision, MacOS is ~2.1% of the market share at the moment. Wake me up when Linux gets to 10%.
Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though. People are genuinely fed up with Windows and governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech. And then there is Proton which makes it much easier for Gamers to jump ship. To me it feels like there is more momentum than ever for this.
On the other hand I am also a realist and I don't think that Linux will take over the Desktop, but it will certainly have its biggest growth year ever in 2026.