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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america/#monthly-200901-202607
Cloudflare stats also seem to support peaks of 15% usage but around 9-10% on average. In the United States alone, the market share for Linux is nearly 12% now for the whole month and Cloudflare stats suggest peaks of up to 25% (!) Linux desktop usage on certain days and times.
The trendline suggests this is just the start. When will companies realize they cannot ignore Linux anymore?
People should stop posting StatCounter, it's so unreliable and noisy.
But I am surprised by the Cloudflare numbers, which are a lot more reliable, and still have Linux at ~5% worldwide, which is still higher than I thought! And even ~6.5% for the past two months, though I imagine that's a seasonality effect - maybe Linux users in the northern hemisphere are more likely to use their computers at home during summer? :P
5% is realistic. Steam survey says 4% of their users are on Linux too. These two numbers approximately match
What’s the difference between “OS X” and “macOS” on this chart?
Surely 20% of the market share isn’t Mac’s that are so old their OS is over 10 years old? I don’t know how else to interpret that…
I'm one of em. Finally listened to the linux evangelists on here and put mint on my laptop a few months ago. I'm not a very technical person but installation was a piece of piss, and setting everything up was easy too. Didn't have to use command line once. Feels like I've got my laptop back, was hardly using it before because windows 11 was such a fuckin pain in the arse.
What I find interesting is that windows traffic collapses at night and during weekends, linux is much more stable.
Probably because people have to Windows at work
nvidia is a big hurdle imo
We made it folks!!!
YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP BABY (im still stuck on windows 11 because of CAD)
FreeCAD has become quite usable over the past couple of years, and it keeps getting better with every update. I know you maybe don't get to choose which CAD program you use since you're a student, but thought I'd put it out there. I've been really enjoying it so far.
You might be interested in Winboat if that's the only thing keeping you
I looked at Winboat's website, and it seems really interesting but as an engineering student idk if it's a good idea to take the risk of running a WIP software to access it. Plus, when I tried installing Linux last time (mint) it caused my trackpad, keyboard backlight, power mode options, and gpu/screen drivers to break (couldn't run hdr, resolution locked to 1080p60, games only ran with integrated graphics). I know I can fix a good chunk of this is stuff on my own with downloading the right drivers/programs and enough time, but I don't really want to spend any time doing that (and risk doing it incorrectly) since all my school work is on here
Some of that may have been fixed since last time you tried. Like, stuff is moving really fast right now. A lot of things that used to be stand alone fixes have been upstreamed.
Debian derived distros tend to move a lot slower (for the sake of iron clad stability), so even if something was fixed a year ago it might not be fixed in Mint, Ubuntu or the like.
Arch based distros like catchy will show what’s working right now.
Again, like, it still might not be to a point where you feel comfortable with it as a daily driver, but it’s still worth checking on from time to time, just to see if the issues you had have been fixed.
Good point. I've been eyeing Fedora KDE for the next distro I want to try out, and I've heard that's among the most up-to-date distros that's not straight-up rolling release
what gpu does it use? bazzite has a wizard for downloading isos that trivializes the whole driver problem
Im waiting to see how big corpos will ruin Linux.
By first putting age verification in systemd.
It will be like Android. You have to use their app store to install new programs.
Well android is Linux. That is exactly how Google twisted it to be their own walled garden. And as you can see they are raising the walls and requiring IDs to continue to be a part of it.
Honestly, this is too good of a news to be true. There has to be some kind of error somewhere. Not used to this.
Yeah how much is ai bots or other scrapers
This was my thought, too, especially with how stable Linux traffic is relative to other OSes.
It might just mean that more people are web scraping, and that web scraping is easier/cheaper on Linux.
The Steam numbers are more interesting to me, as a measure of consumer usage, since they should mostly represent people actually using their computer.
PornHUB puts out annual usage stats, too, but idk if they include OS. (When I used Reddit, their stats would come up on dataisbeautiful frequently enough to come to mind years later—they had some interesting stats, like average visit duration and that the most Republican states were the most likely to search for gay and incest porn, but I digress.). Would bots make up a high volume of traffic for them? I imagine not, since there's little economic value in scraping it (to train LLMs, in particular — I think it would poison the training data rather dramatically!)
I remember whn Linux hit 4% as if it was yesterday.