Special thanks to Microsoft for going out of their way to help make this possible
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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It is finally upon us.
THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP!
Terms and conditions apply. It could be the next year, or the year after, or not at all.
As windows sucks more, Linux gets easier, and gaming gets way easier, this trend won't stop any time soon, but I am curious about how big a chunk of that percentage is steam OS/steam decks.
Go, Linux!
Are we actually converting people or is the desktop platform just less popular for other OSs in favor of phones etc?
That's already been happening for the last 15+ years, but Linux growth is primarily in the last 3. People are definitely moving to mobile, but the ones on desktop seem to be preferring Linux more than they did even 5-10 years ago (Note that laptops are included in "desktop" here).
People are converting. Not entirely on its own merit, of course: Its competition repeatedly is enshitifying the user experience and pushing people to try other options. Combine that with steam and their work on linux's compatibility layer and you get most of the movement.
That said once you hit a certain market share developers become more willing to port or provide binaries for the growing platform. It can accelerate further from there. Linux mainstream isn't there yet but it's starting to get in striking distance of its competition.
I hate to say it but having a full desktop is becoming more and more of an enthusiast setup.
Even laptops are becoming somewhat niche as people more just use their phone for all web browsing.
They don't even do web browsing they just download the dedicated app like Facebook or Instagram
Choo choo!
Did anybody bother to look at the numbers?
I checked the stats for the last 4 years here and it looks really strange. Statistics isn't my thing... But it looks like it's wise to be cautious and not to fully trust the numbers.
Around the beginning of last year there was a huge dip in the Windows market share that seemed to be correlating with a peek in "unknown". Windows then catched up in a somewhat erratic way.
Mac OS also shows a weird behavior. Starts at 16%, up to 21% and the down to 14% between October and November...
It's not likely that a huge number of people decided to buy a Mac and then trash it one month later. Same but opposite goes for the windows stats.
I think it looks like there is an uncertainty of more than the total market share Linux is shown to have..
Not saying that Linux isn't increasing on desktop market share. Just saying that numbers seen to have quite a bit error margin and to be cautious if referring to these numbers.
Wooohooo