this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Linux

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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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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 weeks ago (15 children)

I’m not sure how true this is, but I read somewhere that when Mac got above 5% market share, it suddenly got a lot more mainstream support.

I wonder if that means we’re are a year or two away from Linux as a mainstream option.

I’d love to have an arm based Linux laptop with software support for one of my critical work apps.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

The problem is I don't think I believe those numbers represent actual desktop use as an exclusive desktop use platform.

They're just 'someone visited a website with a linux user agent', which could mean an awful lot of things ranging from someone doing automated scraping with a headless chrome, to an actual user, to someone just plain lying about what OS they're using in order to break fingerprinting.

The number goes up and down WAY too much percentage-wise between months for it to be a really good measure of how much linux on the desktop there actually is, as much as I'd like it to be true :/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

someone just plain lying about what OS they're using in order to break fingerprinting.

The idea with avoiding fingerprinting is to look like whatever the biggest group of users looks like, because that's who you share the fingerprint with. If you use an uncommon value for something, you make fingerprinting easier.

That's one of the reasons why for example Vivaldi on Linux sets its user agent to match the latest version Chrome on Windows.

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