looks like 2023 is finally the year!
Linux enthusiasts rejoice! After a long journey, according to StatCounter's data, by June 2023, Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share.
I’m a new Linux user since the start of the year. Windows has become so stressful to use for a pc I just want to game on. Before I was stuck using windows, but proton has changed the game so much I don’t feel like I’m missing anything now using Linux.
ChatGPT has also helped a lot by giving me all the technical support for Linux I could ever need. It’s taught me a ton while also helping me with all my problems.
I had never considered this as a valid purpose for ChatGPT. Well done you for being resourceful!
ChatGPT is a fantastic tutor. Even if it doesn't know already, you can copy a dense technical document and paste it into the chat, then ask it questions in plain english in subsequent messages
ChatGPT has probably trained on the bulk of the Internet's Linux support threads and manages for various commands now that I think about it.
I've basically stopped using google for tech support, a computer is now teaching me how to use a computer.
I was thinking the same thing. Maybe this year is the year I make the same jump. Really good, practical use of the tool.
Not to sound rude but isn't this like the main use of ChatGPT?
I basically use it as an interactive docs that I can ask questions.
Do you feel performance is good while using Linux to game? How is it compared to windows?
I would love to switch, the only two things keeping me away is potential performance decrease and the fact that my GoXLR doesn't work with Linux and it was way too expensive for that.
I have found that some games that are problematic on Windows actually run better on Linux through Proton. Performance in general can be slightly worse or slightly better depending on the game, but these days it definitely rivals Windows. That said, if you like multiplayer games; those usually do not work well on Linux, especially when they have anticheat. Also, native Linux versions are often broken, the Windows version through Proton usually works better.
Can't speak to the GoXLR, you might be able to find some info on linuxmusicians.com. I got my Tascam audio interface and my Mooer GE200 working out of the box though (with less latency than on Windows).
This is the place to check how well your games run on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/, it shows at least 10k games running well, including recent triple As.
I don't have a gaming PC or anything, I just have a laptop, so ymmv, but performance in Linux, even of Proton games, is noticeably far better for me. Things are faster, I can crank the graphics settings up higher without lag, and my fan spins less angrily. Linux is just generally less resource-intensive than Windows by a very wide margin, so I think it leaves more for the game? Idk. All I know is it works better.
For the most part it works really well! 90% of games on steam work without any hassle and the 10% with errors have workarounds. It's not perfect but it's definitely getting better as time goes on, especially with more anticheats having compatibility with linux than 5 years ago. When it comes to standalone games, it can be a mixed bag because sometimes it works perfectly and other times it doesn't, but launchers like lutris help get the games that don't work run decently. When it comes to emulators, they work really well, sometimes better than running them on windows, but keep in mind where you're getting them. I have less issues overall with the flatpack variants of emulators.
I’m using a 4070 (which has very new and slow release Linux drivers) and I don’t see any worse performance. But I barely used my 4070 with windows before switching over to Linux. However I seem to get similar results to other people on windows with the same hardware.
One of the first things I asked ChatGPT early on as a test was how to edit the pacman config to make little pacmans eat pellets as the progress bar. It was having none of it and just explained the difference between the package manager and the Namco character in a mocking fashion. While it wasn't the correct response, I was pretty entertained.
What distro are you currently using?
Pop os
Linux needs better multi-monitor support. It's better than it's ever been, but it's still janky and giving black screens on tertiary screens at times.
EDIT: It's funny how the comments are all over the place. "works for me", "it's broken on KDE but works on XFCE", "it's broken on XFCE but works on KDE", etc. I think that's a good sign there are problems with multi-monitor support.
Plasma has really good multi monitor support since 5.27. Use latest versions and be happy 🙂
I haven't had any multiple monitor problems since switching to KDE that weren't actually Nvidia driver issues. My "TV" is a third monitor on a long ass HDMI cable.
My only remaining issue is that wayland has slightly more input latency when playing games, enough that it's noticeable (or a very convincing placebo effect).
This makes it so that I have to use X11 and that I have to disable compositioning when playing games as my displays have different refresh rates. All in all, not a big problem but looking forward to be on wayland for good soon.
Its more of a Desktop thing rather than Linux. If you use the right Desktop like Plasma then you have no issues at all.
I really don't see any problems with Multi monitor, I actually have more issues with Windows 11 right now in terms of multiple Displays
I've been messing with this on and off for a few years now and I still haven't seen support for multiple monitors running at different scaling levels (like running a 4K monitor at 125% alongside a 1080p monitor at 100%). This is a feature I use in Windows on one of my setups. I hope this gets some attention soon. I run Linux on most of my machines but this problem still gets in my way on others.
While this is probably still true, I doubt it's a big factor when talking about mass adoption.
How many people total do you think use more than display? How many Linux users or users that would be willing to use Linux would want more than one display? I'm betting it's a lot if not most. So while it may not be a big factor it probably is a factor that applies to most. Then you add up all the other stuff that just doesn't quite work right and you lost the incentive or motivation to switch.
Wayland fixes multi monitor
I had the reverse experience. I have had no issues with multi-monitor (OpenSUSE, nVidia driver direct from nVideas own maintained Opensuse rpms) but on Windows I'm having Windows open black, or delayed, not recognizing external display, etc. Too many variables to make proper apples to apples comparisons.
I've never had issues with multi monitor, what desktop are you using?
Might be, china plans to implement their "opensource" version of kylin os to ditch windows
There are literally dozens of us!
I wonder if Steam Deck is helping with that number (but I don’t know if that many of them were sold to make that much impact).
I tried to look it up and they may haveeither sold about 3 million already or are projected to have sold around that many by the end of the year.
That’s huge number for sure! I think what Steam is doing to make playing games on Linux easier is a big factor too.
I've trying to move my main desktop over to Linux for years, and getting a Steam Deck was the last thing to convince me. It's been about 8 months now and I won't got back to Windows.
The only exception is the few Forza games I "own" on the Microsoft store, but that's around every other month at best. Really hope the popularity of the Stream Deck can get support for them.
according to StatCounter's data
Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally.
Such statistics are always to be taken with a grain of salt.
There are more than 1.5 billion websites worldwide. Statcounter therefore covers only a small fraction of them. So chances are good that you as a Linux user do not use any of these 1.5 million websites that Statcounter uses to create their statistics.
Furthermore, I suspect that many Linux users use tools like uBlock Origin or Pi-Hole, so that the things that are used to track users are blocked.
Apart from that, I have several Linux installations with which I never access a website. Sometimes they have no direct connection to the Internet. Thus, they are also not recorded.
But now to the most important. 3 percent of what? Percentage numbers don't tell anything if you don't know the number of users behind them. Let's assume that there were 2.8 percent Linux users in May. In June, only 2.6 percent. Nevertheless, it is possible that there were more actual users in June if the total number of all users increased accordingly.
Yeah man that's how statistics work. It's not a census. The people behind statscounter make calculations and approximations based on the data they get from they trackers. I think they know that there are people with tracking-blockers. And not only on windows.
They don't just present simple numbers they get. They polish them and that's literally their job.
yeah. It is weird statistics. Maybe ethic telemetry on Linux will help with user counting.
Next year it might go up to 10%? Privacy is a serious concern these days.
And usability, windows gets more and more complicated IMO, and not in the "fun" way Linux can be completed.
Familiarity is big part of usability though. And people are more familiar with Windows.
This ^ I ended up loading up NixOS and Gnome desktop for my wife's old computer. She is not a computer person and was struggling with the slowness of W10 but also how complicated and inconsistent the interface became. She seems placated now.
I'm loving the comments on the article.
Things that should have disappeared 30 years ago are still problems in the operating system. Not least of which is the handling of locales. I cannot transfer Excel files from my Windows machine to my Linux machine because my Windows machine uses points to denote decimals (as in most companies and homes in South Africa) while Linux does a hard-enforce of the documented standard in South Africa which is a comma for decimal. This breaks my files and I am unable to perform calculations on Excel files due to this. Ridiculous, relevant and sad.
I was previously unaware of the kernel doing such things.
People are indifferent, unknowing, fearful, or just plain lazy to learn new apps. Got to get Office, QuickBooks, Quicken, Adobe, and other major apps to run on Linux.
Most of these are fringe cases nowadays, and often used in environments where the user has no control over the OS anyways. I don't really use Office at home (for the three times per year, LibreOffice is good enough and that's what most Windows users I know run at home anyways).
Also it's not as easy as to just "get Office, QuickBooks, Quicken, Adobe, and other major apps to run on Linux". The wine project is doing miraculous work already IMHO…
While I agree with you on the advantages (performance, stability, reliability, security, customization, privacy, lightweight nature, no corporate bloatware, etc) of Linux, its rate of adoption is considerably weak and consistently weak because of various reasons and causes that your article does not mention.
"Your article doesn't mention the real reasons, which conveniently enough I won't list either."
Windows chance , and . depending on the language settings, so yeah so so simple and helpful :-/
While I do like Excel, its handling of values as dates is also a big issue that has hit a lot of people in the past – the format is just not very portable or exchangeable. It's not just an issue from Excel to other solutions… my point was rather that it's not a "Linux" issue and the way it was worded sounded like the kernel had something to do with it.
Nothing to do with the kernel, these are all application issues.
The reasons aren’t worth listing because they’re all known but here we go
You need to use linux shell to get anything done.
There, that’s the reason.
Linux will never be popular until you can do everything, and I mean, everything without entering a single command in a terminal.
As someone else has said, on distributions that go for ease of use, the terminal isn't really needed.
However, I do consider it a convenience feature even for users who are not savvy with it: You can either troubleshoot an issue by giving instructions like "Open application X, navigate to Option, open Tab, press Button, then enter Text, hit OK and repeat for each" or "copy and paste this command into your terminal". The amount of work on both sides is likely lower plus there's less room for error.
You would have to Give SUSE / OpenSUSE a try. It has Yast2-GUI so everything from setting up a samba share, ftp server, to kernal tweak, system services, and boot setup can be done entirely in the GUI environment. Very similar to how the older Windows Control Panel looked. Also One-click install for rpm files. Oh and system rollback if you blow up the system, no command line fixes needed.
Nah, its just that services like Disney fixed its analytics and Linux users don't need to camoflage as Windows user to use Disneyplus /s
You jest but as you know this really is something Linux users have had to do with many things, like games. Game works with wine/proton but only has windows support? You're a windows gamer now. If you use linux and FF, some sites break unless you spoof as windows and edge. We have been doing this to ourselves, hopefully it gets better.
If a service doesn't want you, why even give them money? I'd like to think that Linux users know better.
Ayo
Is that including Steamdeck in that 3%, or users becoming aware of Linux based on Steamdeck? 3 percent may not seem like much but it moves the 2 percent from 1 in 50 people to close to 1 in 30 people. So more chance of bumping into a fellow user. I met up with an old work colleague just before the pandemic, we got to chatting about computers he mentioned he had dumped W10 for Mint around the same time I'd dropped W10 for OpenSUSE. Seems the Windows 10 was a tipping point for more savvy computer users who understood there could be other Operating Systems out there besides Windows or MacOS.
Why do websites do this? 😮💨
Do you use a VPN?
No, but I'm away from home, so I'm on mobile data at the moment.
Edit: I got around it by accessing its archived version. It's kinda sad though that I had to resort to that. Thanks anyway!
Yall are making me wanna fuck with Linux. Lmao
Fuck around. Find out.
A couple of days ago i switched from Windows to Linux Mint, since W11 22H2 was slow, like really slow. I haven't looked back to windows since
I joined the community before the 1% mark. It has been such a nice journey.
The irony here, for me, is that after 2 years of not needing windows at all, even for gaming, I've had to tuck my tail and return to windows to play Apex. It's been solid for 2 years, but about 2 months ago I started getting weird file validation errors. A patch seemed to fix it, but then last week its come roaring back and its unplayable. I've tried all the tricks, validating game files (always finds files that need to be redownloaded), clearing game cache, completely uninstalled, trying the flatpak version vs deb, etc etc.
The most irritating thing for me is that I dont have a clue who to report this too or what kind of information I can provide. I was using inotify tools to see what was happening to the files that corrupted them, but there is nothing I can see. It appears as though the corruption happens when steam is accessing the files (but there is no obvious writes happening, its all reads as far as I can tell. But who do I file a bug with? the proton devs? Apex devs? Steam devs? PopOS devs? Steam support will tell me to pound sand.
Could this have something to do with NTFS not being case sensitive? I remember somewhere there is an option in Steam to ignore upper/lower case.
Where is StatCounter getting this data from?
I'm genuinelly not sure if it's sarcasm or delusional.
Is fair to say that long term Linux users who are very proficiant in command line know that Linux will never have any relevence on the desktop and that the year of the Linux desktop is a delusional fantasy, it's never going to happen?
At this point it's humourous when there's some new feature in whichever distributon and someone says "Year of the desktop!", it's legitimately comical, if it's said to mock all of that talk
I also think "year of the desktop" is a unicorn (even if it were to come, you wouldn't pin it on one year - it's a process) and I personally believe that if Windows is going to die, it will be replaced by some web-only shit instead of another local desktop-based OS.
However, Linux desktop adoption did increase quite steeply in the past few years and to a point I confidently moved also my wife's and mother's computers to Linux because it actually causes me less headache than Windows did.
So, no need to be condescending and sarcastic about it.
ChromeOS has a massive market (10%-20% depending on who you ask) and that's basically linux with a chrome frontend.
So it really depends on what you mean by 'year of the desktop' as you can spin the definition either way.. either it'll never happen or it happened years ago.
Would you agree that what makes Linux laughable as a replacement for consumers is how splitered or fractured it is?
Although up to a certain point I believe the choice of GUI desktops to be a good thing, but I believe the only choices should be Plasma and Mate, with all the customization available for each one, the format for software insallation is what kills it. I never understood why when Linus started it, he never developed a built-in way of handling software installs along with tools for making changes to programs that got install.
Making people learn about which distribution they are using means it's better for them to forever stay on Windows where they can use any program they want without learning anything beyond looking for a Windows file to install.
As Theo de Raadt says, people want to use the software, not study it.
I was being sarcastic, tbh. I'm happy to see this (I use Linux everywhere), but I'm realistic. 3% doesn't look super impressive. I'm not sure where the line would be, though. 10%?
I would guess Linux desktop means nothing until it gets close to 15% for software developers to include a Linux version for new software releases, of any kind or type of software.
I do PC gaming and I only use Windows on that one gaming computer, so I can play any and all games, and have the best graphics hardware performance.
All of my other computers are only a mix of BSD and Linux, but for playing games I'm not willing to use anything other than Windows.
If my damn steelseries keyboard would just be supported for Linux. On Reddit they said the Linux market was just too small to support it,I hope they'll have a change of heart.
if they keep it up at this rate Linux will be the only OS people use by the year 3090 (16.66 years per percentage point)
We did it!
Personally I have to thank Steam for their commitment for gaming on Linux. Without I would not have been able to make the switch fully.
![[HN] After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share](https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/pictrs/image/8d2d4d23-5b93-4bdd-86b4-4bc2e7faa4c7.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)