It peaked at 4.05% in March. The last 2 months it went just below 4% as the Unknown category increased. For June the reverse happened, so 4.04% seems to be the real current share of Linux on Desktop as desktop clients were read properly/werent spoofed.
Sorry, I stopped playing factorio on my work Linux computer. I will play next month to get us back up.
Don’t worry, I’ve been playing plenty of Linux factorio for the last few weeks to make up for it.
Thank you for your service
Can we commit to only posting about round number percent changes?
No, we have to post these when it’s the year of the Linux desktop
What’s interesting is that multiple trackers are now saying it’s above 4 percent. Last time something was posted, people questioned the data and where they got their data (which they should). Now there’s multiple sites showing a real increase.
No, we will not stop
4.040000000000000000000001!
We could contact that person as a community
Based on a world population of 8 billion, that would be roughly 0.000000000000008% of a person. It’s also not even representable as a 64 bit float so I had to do this math in my head (Calculator just says 0)
So you’re saying that that number keeps going up as I get closer and closer to the actual weekend when I install it as my daily driver?
I have had to do some work on my windows pc and I hate it. I have been away from desktop for a while now and changed to linux for personal one. At work it is all G suite, which does work to its credit, but the windows OS and microsoft cloud documents suck so much. The look and feel is clunky, so clunky. Constantly refreshing and just being shit.
Never forgive forcing outlook.
I work in email Marketing and Outlook is the worst client, especially desktop. Everything I make has to have accommodations for this shitty inbox
As a service outlook (microsoft mail) sucks, as a web service their page sucks andnisnpoorly laid out and optimised and the new desktop client is atrocious.
They made me change from hotmail outlook, created a hotmail folder for under the new outlook and now I dont get notification for that address on the outlook app. If something gets marked as spam that isnt, marking it not spam sends it to the outlook inbox regardless of intended destination. If I reply to a mail it prioritises outlook despite the mail being sent to hotmail. As a result I cant log into shared files that people gave access to one but not the other.
And as a user do I hate it too. It is too many times while I edit an email and click delete that is deletes the email instead… It seems if I click a word and get the spell window does the focus always change to the list of emails… And it also force a spell correction if I click space… I didn’t pick one of the options I just want to edit the word myself!!! And if I scrolldown to remove some parts of the email thread or just want to copy a part won’t it let me if I don’t click twice… and it jumps around…damn I hate it so much. Sorry that I replied to you with all these anger. But I really felt it when I saw yours and ops comment. I hope we one day will at least think it is an ok client to work with
All the different versions as well. Outlook web is decent, desktop is terrible. The Mac version seems to be closer to web, some problems I have are fine in one version of outlook and only appear in another. Why can’t the app just be a container for the web version?
1980s: Hey guise, computers are now cheap and small enough that you can run an entire system and all your programs on your own machine at home instead of having to dial in to the mainframe!
2010s: No, we’re putting it all back on the servers, you get a thin client.
No technical reason btw, just because “fuck you”.
From a macro economic perspective, (and im not advocating for a conspiracy, just aggregate business interest) they’re dropping energy usage so they can pay less on their electricity bills.
So actually a double fu. get less so they can pay less rent, to provide lesser service.
Because rent seeking is the only tech bubble left.
In theory I guess it provides better security in some ways, but certainly not all over giving you hardware and a VPN. So there’s that. But yeah, it sucks.
The combined forces of microsoft reaching new heights of greed and intrusion, plus the massive dev efforts for the best ever GNU Linux and Proton 📈📈📈
I use Linux for personal use, and Ive been using windows for work due to necessity.
There is one app I need that does not support Linux. I contacted their support asking about a Linux version and they suggested using waysroid to run the android version of the app.
So, when I have free time I’m working on switching things over.
My main motivation is Microsoft pushing ads everywhere and being aggressive about using online accounts and stuff that like.
Whats interesting is that both income , profits and the stock have been growing well for years, maybe they are just monetizing more aggressively because they can’t compete on product quality (unlike other markets that are still evolving, AI and Cloud). not a ton of stuff to improve in operation systems it seems.
There are system dialogs that have unused space for ads, still plenty to improve!
In all seriousness, cloud (azure) and office subscriptions blew up and account for like 70% of MS profits. They know the Windows experience is lacking, but when they already capture so much of the market and it’s such a small slice of revenue, they have no incentive to improve.
Microsoft set themselves up the bomb
Microsoft: As long as Adobe, Office, Autodesk are on my side, I have nothing to worry about.
All your corporate greed are belong to us
dont forget soystemd and wayland
i don’t have a strong opinion on systemd, i just heard someone call it soystemd in some YouTube video once and it just stuck in my head for years
why do we negate chromeos we are 10% at least so there we really are
For starters doesn’t it only run apps from the Google play store?
and what kernel would you say it and android runs? relevant?
This is the format collision discussion that has no solution so far. A tablet that runs windows is counted as Windows. A laptop that runs android does not. Neither does an android cellphone. It all boils down to web browser user agent fuckery. This is why steam’s numbers are more reliable than other sources, they’re direct hardware surveys.
But the point is that a steam deck is not (but in a way it is basically just) a PC. There are tablets than run desktop interfaces and now there are laptops that can be used as tablet. Eventually the artificial mobile vs. PC/desktop/laptop schism will stop making sense.
true, but in this case you can look at the same graph that was linked and see another Linux distro clearly marked that they choose not to treat as one in their headline. seems a little silly to me
You can “sideload” apps outside the google store.
For example I’ve been using myinsta instead of IG. It was very easy to download and install.
The youtuber matt from thelinuxcast sucks.
I am regular user, i don’t code for living and my job is not tech related. I wanted to try linux and many of you guys supported and now I’m using Linux since 2 weeks its linux mint. That matt guy was so against linux mint that i thought it was shit too. But when i installed and started using it. It has been a smooth journey. Many people in linux community were helpful. But people like matt really make it for us regular guys scared to use linux. I really hope many good linux user help regular people switch to linux and increase this number.
I assume the problem is hardware. Matt’s hardware didn’t work well with LM, therefore Matt thinks LM sucks… I do wish there was better hardware support but it’s the reason apple went with 1 product = 1 OS = 1 general set of hardware. Sure not every iPhone has the same hardware, but that’s why they have the model numbers, and it’s so much easier to test 200 model mixes than 2,000,000 (Android). Windows gets all the debug info sent directly to them like the others but they also have a huge stack of hardware they can use or they can buy it to test.
Did Matt try putting the regular build on a newish machine? That’s what I did with my current and was struggling until I put the latest kernel on it, should have gone with Edge, but had little trouble after)
Mint is great and is absolutely enough for most people using computers, still as of now. It comes with its limitations though:
- By default it runs pretty old kernel. This is fine if your hardware is at least 3 years old. It allows to easily switch to newer kernel with just few clicks, but I expect newbies to not be aware of this at all. Oh, and I don’t know if it offers some custom kernels like tkg etc, which some might want to squeeze best gaming perf etc.
- Cinnamon is still limited to X11. If you have multi-screen setup, VRR, mixed refresh, mixed DPI etc, it’s better to switch to Wayland. Plus, Xorg server gets less and less maintenance and development. All the innovation moved to Wayland, so the experience on X will remain pretty stale.
- The Ubuntu base makes it so that for 3rd party software you either need deb packages or PPAs. Some will argue (me included) that it’s not the best solution
All of the above can easily be irrelevant to you and Mint is just perfect for what you need. It’s important to point out limitations of that choice, but crapping on it because you don’t like it is just pointless fuss
Cinnamon can run Wayland in experimental mode. It’s just an extra click during login. Mint also has direct support for flatpaks repositories, with flathub by default directly on the software center.
Any experience you can share on how complete and stable is that experimental session? I probably wouldn’t throw newbie on that
There’s a bug where flatpaks seemingly disappear from the system the first time you run Wayland. But it resolves with a reboot. It happens too if you change back from Wayland to X11. Other than some minor glitches from very old software that hasn’t seen an update in decades, it runs perfectly fine.
On your last point, there’s also Flatpak which is available right from the baked in software center… That’s not without its issues too, but they’ve been an overall smooth experience for me so far
Yes, Flatpak fixed a lot of the old shenanigans we used to have when everything was either native package, or a binary to hope for the best and install libraries manually, or source code to collect everything that’s needed for building and again, hope for the best. It is however designed to provide a way to install graphical apps, but can’t handle everything native package does (like out-of-tree kernel modules, CLI utils, system services)
I believe it can do CLI, but that’s not always been the case and not a lot of CLI apps adopted it as a result
But for most of what the typical user, or even a lot of what a technical user, needs, it does a good job
Do you have an recommendation for a distro? I wanted to use mint, but i probably need wayland for a multiscreen setup with different scalings.
ubuntu
Well, if your GPU is NVIDIA, you will also need a bleeding edge rolling release distro for now. Other than that, anything that ships recent version of KDE Plasma or GNOME (the first one handles Xwayland with DPI scaling a bit better imo and is generally more functional)
Garuda (Arch-based distro) is worth looking at, but has a ton of UI customization that I personally don’t like and, same as with Manjaro, I’d spend some time on cleaning it up to more vanilla state.
Endeavour is cool option as well, but other than GUI installer, it provides you with Arch base and is purely terminal-centric.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed - personally never liked RPM based distros, and Zypper (the package manager) is pretty slow, but the distro itself is beloved for being great balance between bleeding edge and stability and set of GUI tools for system management.
Fedora (defaults to GNOME but has decent KDE spin) is great option for a workstation, but it has couple of advanced configurations that not everyone needs (like SELinux getting in your way sometimes) and because it’s very concerned about licensing, you might need to manually add extra video encoding/decoding drivers and media codecs with royalties.
Nobara is modification of Fedora that comes pre-packed with gaming related stuff. It’s pretty cool, but in my experience it tends to ship experimental packages with regressions.
Last but not least, if you’re patient enough to read through some documentation and follow guides step by step, can invest some time and want to learn, go with Arch Linux. The ISO ships now with text-based
archinstallinstaller that guides you through basic install and brings fairly functional Linux system out-of-box EASY, but still pretty bare bones without any assumptions on what you’re going to use it for and how. Everything that you need (like gaming, bluetooth, printing, file sharing…) has its Wiki pages with thorough explanation in form of step-by-step guide. It’s all about installing packages and changing config files, it’s not doing anything automatically for you.Well, if your GPU is NVIDIA, you will also need a bleeding edge rolling release distro for now. Other than that, anything that ships recent version of KDE Plasma or GNOME (the first one handles Xwayland with DPI scaling a bit better imo and is generally more functional)
I keep hearing people say this. But I’ve got an nvidia card, and I just went with the default Mint Cinnamon install and I’ve had no problems whatsoever. I guess maybe my card isn’t new enough to run into whatever problems other people are talking about.
… Actually, there is one minor annoyance. I get lots of nvidia flatpak updates; and they are large downloads. I’d prefer not to be downloading gigabytes of graphics card updates every week. But other flatpaks demand that I have the latest nvidia stuff, so … I guess that is an nvidia annoyance that I experience. I don’t expect that to be fixed by a bleeding edge distro though!
Yeah, Flatpak installing user-space driver for itself is unfortunately not solvable until there’s open source driver that is part of the Mesa project. Every time you update the driver in your system, Flatpak must update its nvidia-utils too, because their versions must match exactly. For Mesa drivers, Flatpak also installs the drivers as Flatpak, but they’re compatible back and forth and it only updates when it ships new version.
The cleanup should be more automatic, but try
flatpak uninstall --unusedBecause it always worked on X11 and Mint Cinnamon is just that. I used NVIDIA graphics on X11 in 2007 and, apart from the extra dkms driver that could break at times, it was fine, and much better anyway than ATI/AMD with proprietary fglrx driver. Rest in piss son of a bitch.
The question was what would I recommend for Wayland. Only the brand new 555 driver combined with most recent compositors (and other packages like mesa, xwayland,…) offers decent NVIDIA experience. It’s a matter of new distro releases around this fall.
Mint should have Waylant support if you don’t use Cinnamon; I know Xfce has Wayland support (though I don’t use it, they can pry X11 from my cold dead hands)
Neither Cinnamon, XFCE or Mate have stable Wayland support. You need GNOME or Plasma for that if you want a desktop (or wait for the new Cosmic desktop and new PopOS)
atm Mint only has experimental wayland support, i tried it an got instant graphical issues on the desktop. :(
I get what you mean. I see a decent chunk of often more tech-proficient Linux users putting down Linux Mint, and it saddens me because even though I don’t use Mint anymore, it was still the first distro I properly daily-drove and I still consider it an amazing system for people who are new to Linux.
I’m very glad you’ve been having a good experience with Mint!
I don’t get them putting Mint down either, and I’ve built multiple Gentoo systems… I don’t need an easy distro but still use Mint and like it for what it brings (basically, it’s Green Ubuntu, what Ubuntu was supposed to be before they lost their way)
This is an interesting post. I know the YouTuber you are talking about. I do not really like him but I would have considered him harmless. It is interesting to get your take.
Mint is great and quite popular. So, if you are going to make a YouTube video saying otherwise, I guess you have to go out of your way to come up with reasons why. I am sure that makes it sound worse than it is. Something to think about.
I have distro preferences too but most of the differences really only make a difference to those already using Linux. It is a bit like arguing about Ford vs Chevy in front of people that have never seen a car ( or truck ). In the grand scheme, they are both amazing and mostly the same thing. To listen to a fan though, one is God’s gift and the other is trash. Same with Linux distros.
uMatrix prevents me from loading this statcounter website. :-( Can’t lookup how they measure things. In the comments people assume the stats would be counted by just looking up the user agent, which is a naive approach. I don’t think agencies dedicated to stats are doing it this simple. They have way more possibilities to track and to look what browser you are using. The stats are more accurate than you probably think. They do not need to know the exact version of browser you are using, just which type and maybe what operating system you are on.
If a script for Windows does not work on Linux and fails, then they know you are not on Windows in example.
Why are you still using uMatrix in 2024? Wasn’t it discontinued 3 years ago or smth?
It’s still useful with all its functionality. Even if it does not get updates, it still blocks most stuff and I can enable or block stuff too. Plus the blocklists it uses are still updated, as they act independently from the main addon. There is no better alternative in my opinion. I use uMatrix + uBlock Origin.
I assume the proportions of people who spoof their OS is slanted towards Linux
Statcounter numbers are to be taker with boulders of salt. you can look at many metrics and especially when you filter by country. you will see a lot of erratic unexplained changes. jumping down and then a few months lather up by sometimes up to double digits.
I switched to librewolf so I will now show up as windows
I unspoofed Librewolf back to Firefox + Linux. That way I’m not contributing to Chrome and Windows market share and perceived dominance. Plus the more people don’t spoof, the less of a need there will be to actually spoof at all as the Linux market share increases.
The problem is that websites sometimes change there behavior.
Do you have any examples of this?
Yeah me too, safety in numbers. Maybe if Linux desktop gets bigger than Windows they’ll swap it around 👨💻
After seeing Garuda Linux set my user agent to Windows, I set my Windows install user agent to Linux.
Seeing Twitch.tv login break after changing my user agent was hilarious
What did it say? Why does it break?
Same, there must be a percent or so of Windows actually being Linux instead.
OK, who did you guys bully over basic tech support questions?
404: Not found
I wonder what’s on the ‘unknown’
Netcat, mostly
That 6% attributed to “unknown” is the one true OS, the only one ordained by the Almighty… Temple OS!
True Temple OS has no networking
It does have networking if you truly believe!
Heretical, you will burn in hell
Based security approach
Amiga.
likely content blockers preventing the trackers from working properly and invalid user agents. So i would expect about the same ratio of usage on there as well. Maybe very slightly more Linux since maybe the users are more likely to tinker with their browser configs and install content blockers, but even there Id say its an extremely slim minority of even linux users who do that
StatCounter also sometimes miscounts when new versions of windows or macos come out. At one point (I think at windows 11 release) there was a huge dip in windows 10 users and a huge gain in “unknown” and it was quickly fixed.
Bare Metal, they are injecting Ethernet cable directly into their bloodstream.
In essence Netrunner then?
Case on his Ono-Sendai
If only linux gaming and thermal became more and more robust, in few year I will switch too with pleasure. Adobe suite can still be a problem but not for me anymore at least.
Playing on Linux for a year now. I wouldn’t say it was flawless, but a lot has to do with me learning how to do it correctly. Like using steam and heroic game launcher, trying a different version of Proton or wine, and it’s beginning to be very easy now that I have the right recipe so to say.
Good to know, the main problem is that a good % of gamer doesn’t have time to a tryhard with different version of things, drivers… I have skill to setup a linux gaming machine but I don’t have time to do this. If Linux gaming becoming more and more straightforward (not as windows but similar, starting from gpu driver), more and more ppl could ditch at least windows second partition.
I must be clear that the problem is not that it rakes time to do the things if you have the right recipe to do them. It takes time to find it when you make a mistake.
The good way is simple: you need a system that’s well updated, so debian stable is not ideal and that was my first mistake. You need to use Proton on steam, or heroic game launcher for gog. And that’s it.
The setup for these things is straightforward, simply follow a guide for your OS.
Things got better and better in the last 2 years, and they’re still improving. I would argue that today Windows is not better. People learned how to install graphic drivers on windows, and any setup on Linux now is not harder than that.
Where do they get data from?
From cookies.
What kind? Personally I wouldn’t trust any kind with raisin.
From analytic cookies.
What about peanut butter? Or are you more of a salted chocolate kind of person?
Both are very trustworthy.
They get the data from user-agent strings, so it may not be 100% accurate
User agent strings are frozen these days, at least in Chrome. They still have the browser major version and OS name at least, but Windows will always report Windows 10, Android will always report Android 10, MacOS will always report 10.15.7, and Linux is just “Linux x86_64”: https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/
User agent strings are essentially deprecated and nobody should be using them any more. They’ve been replaced by User-Agent Client Hints, where the site can request the data it needs, and some high-entropy things (ie fields that vary a lot between users) can prompt the user for permission to share them first.
Shit started hitting the fan when everyone started faking Netscape’s “Mozilla” user agent. Then “KHTML, like Gecko” and after that every fork kept the originating name in the string and extended it.
There’s a good explanation about that here: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
The issue is that a lot of sites used the user-agent to determine if the browser supported particular features (e.g. show a fancy version of a site if the user is using Netscape, otherwise show a basic version for Mosaic, lynx, etc). New browsers had to pretend to be the old good browsers to get the good versions of sites
This is why getting rid of the user agent is a good thing. Sniffing the UA is a mess.
Oh nice. Googie once again deciding for the entire Internet what it should be using and forcing it down everyone’s throats.
User agents were commonly used for the wrong reasons - fingerprinting, sites that block particular browsers rather than using proper feature detection, etc. so I’m glad to see them slowly going away.
@Tixanou @Madiator2011 Plus they are basing themselves off of a sample of websites, so it’s like polls it’s made to be representative but cannot be 100 % accurate
