great. some people finally realized that windows is shit.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Baby steps i guess.
slowly but surely.
I've known for a while but Linux really isn't newbie friendly. I've tried several times over the years. Most recently I tried Mint and within a week or two the GUI software update stopped working. I switched to Ubuntu because I have a little familiarity and quickly realized the only way to stay updated is apt. Firefox will work for a while and then have days where almost every tab is crashing constantly. Sometimes you can get a page to work with reload or two, other times not. So I installed chrome under protest as a backup. Mostly it doesn't crash although sometimes it does the same thing as Firefox (but usually not at the same time). Those are really my only complaints at all.
I will say, though, that gaming has come a long way, especially with Steam. I don't think SteamVR is there yet, but otherwise I haven't found anything that wouldn't run (but I play AAA on PS so I'm not really pushing it hard). I thought I was giving up gaming when I moved to Linux, but not at all.
I left a big partition free in the expectation of dual-booting windows, but I really haven't had any reason to at all.
Not saying you are wrong, but I made other experiences. Installed Mint 3 months ago and Firefox and also the GUI updater work like a charm.
I think maybe it was when I started installing things other ways? Like there's apt and snap and ... one other thing I can't remember. But not all the software I needed was available through the GUI.
So it could be that's related to the breakage. Or maybe not, but that was my experience. If it's working well for others that makes me happy because I'd like to be able to recommend Mint to some of the less demanding users I know.
I totally understand, "user-friendly" is a system that let's people install things in different ways without breaking, the user should not have to care too much about it.
I have been attempting to use Linux for 20 years now. It has found its niche used for me over the years. For example when my kids were toddlers they had a old machine that defaulted to PBSkids. Before that I used it to run a gaming server.
Currently I have a old laptop that I dual boot with win 10 and whatever Linux distro I feel like trying at the moment.
The win 10 on the laptop barely meets the minimum hardware requirements and takes 10 minutes to load.
I have tried a few different distros and always had a few issues with the setup. All sorts of different ones - screen orientation, WiFi connection, printer hell, keyboard layout etc. Takes me days to fix the bugs or give up.
Mint takes 2 minutes to load and so far is working seamlessly. It's apt manager is the easiest I have used in a Linux distro. It found my network printer automatically. It runs smoother than windows 7 did on my laptop.
With Microsoft ending win 10 for the shitty win 11, I imagine many people are looking for alternatives. If Mint continues to work to make setup and usage easy, it will gain market share rapidly. It's not all the way there yet, but it's a hell of a lot better than before.
Completely agree. It's getting very close for consumer grade. I just fall in the niche of Linux-novice-prosumer. But fixing problems is how we learn more.
Try VanillaOS or Fedora Silverblue. They are immutable distros so breaking them are harder than usual. (OpenSUSE was also making one iirc) If you just want something that works out of the box, try them.
I played with Fedora many years ago. That might be familiar enough to try again.
I'm a bit of a power user so if anyone can manage to break an immutable distribution, I probably can.
Anyway, thanks!
Just a word of warning, Windows may fuck your dual boot plans up with an update. I lost all the data for my filesystems on my main drive with a Windows update. It decided to delete grub and the partition data. I recovered a lot of it, but I was never able to get Windows to boot again. That's why I'm 100% Linux now. I just decided Windows wasn't required anymore and installed everything fresh, and gave 100% of the drive to Linux.
Yeah, I think I'm just going to repartition that space to grow /home and call it a day.
Actual Linux Market Share could be Higher
Steam doesn't agree. It's a 2% there. I don't know which site would report more than 5% market share for linux.
I would assume Steam to be lower because gaming was one of the major roadblocks for gaming until recently, and many gamers are still scared of switching over. It also assumes no dual booting and whatever they ran the check on is the registered OS. This would register both potentially.
Team's data is also useful, but it's different data.
I dual boot. I use Linux most of the time for everything, but I switch to Windows whenever I want to play on Steam. I just don't have the time to bother with abstractions layers, drivers and whatnot, even if I read that Steam makes it easy to run Windows games on Linux now.
Have you tried it yet? Try installing Proton on your Linux install and pointing Steam to your existing folder that you use on Windows. It should be able to just boot them up like that without an issue.
I tried in the past, but I think there were problems about the fact that the Windows partition is NTFS, if I recall correctly.
I'd really like to ditch Windows once for all, but I'm sure there's going to be some games that have problems on Linux.
Maybe. It's unlikely except for multiplayer, and even then pretty rare. The Riot games won't work because of the rootkit, but nearly everything else has. Protondb.com if you want to check or ever need help getting something to run.
if you make a symlink to your linux installation compdata folder in your windows steamapps folder you can use NTFS for a steam library.
I use it to have my other NTFS drives still be able to hold steam games
Windows is more prevalent with gamers so I guess it would make sense for the Steam survey to show less Linux users than there are in the general population.
That's just for Steam
Steam is gaming not desktop
Keep up the growth folks 🤍
Year
of the Linux 4.5%
Hey, by the end of the year we might reach 5%!
Which will be a very important milestone when it comes to hardware and software developers taking Linux seriously, which will in turn accelerate adoption even more.
I mean, macOS is not even 10% and most vendors release apps for it. So this is promising for Linux.
because macos fanboys are rich hipsters and spend large amounts of money on software and accessories for their already expensive computers. Linux users usually aren't very alike, the first 4,5 % isn't anyhow.
It's funny how members of the same species can seem so much like different species.
The uncertainty of this number is probably at least 1%, more likely 2 to 3%. Giving this number with 2 digits precision makes no sense.
There are margins of error I'm sure, but you're just making things up.
True! We need a margin of error for the margin of error!
What do I make up? I guess what the uncertainty could be and saying that they shouldn't give such a precise number, if it's in reality not that precise.
Ehh some linux setups may go into unknown but linux users are also more likely to own multiple devices. I dont think its that precise but its impossible to make it precise
HOFDL Boys! 5% is right around the corner!!!
5% by the end of 2024? 👀
If I'm using both Windows and Linux interchangeably how am I counted? 🤔
Yes
https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#page-views-uniques
We measure internet usage trends. To accurately measure usage, we have to base our stats on page views (and not unique visitors). Let's look at an example:
Person X uses two browsers. On a particular day, they load one page in Browser A. They load 500 pages in Browser B.
If we based our stats on unique visitors then usage of Browser A and B would both be recorded as 50%. This is obviously incorrect. This does not fairly represent the usage of the browsers given that Browser B was used 500 times more than browser A.
Using page views as the basis of our stats means that Browser A will be recorded at less than 1% in our stats whereas Browser B will be recorded at over 99%. In our view, this gives a more accurate representation of actual browser usage.
I love the fact that when some companies make software they just casually ignore 25% of the world. Why the hell is there so much software that only supports windows. I know its because people are lazy and they cant code but its still really annoying