According to the StatCounter, Linux on the desktop has continued to rise and remains above 4%, with this being the healthiest it's ever looked on the desktop.
The attrition is slow, but every user lost to Linux is likely lost forever. After a year or so of totally free software, who is going to build a new windows compatible PC, buy a Windows 11 license, and pay for subscription service just to do word processing, or play a few incompatible games?
Windows completely overestimates people's willingness to throw out their laptop or PC just to get a new OS paintjob. For every person who does it, another one will leave their ecosystem forever.
i honestly just wanna express my gratitude to all the people who made linux what it is today over the last decades, the experience is incomparable to the one i had when first installing debian in 2007. i wish i were more skilled in order to meaningfully give back to this community.
and to all the newbies: thanks for joining our ranks! please dont be scared by the rather elitist attitude that some users display. we secretly all love you!
At this point I use Linux for everything except my music production hobby (Mac for that) and even then I use Renoise and BitWig on Linux. I've been on Linux since 1996 but I haven't been 100% Linux until the past two years.
What’s odd to me is the cultural zeitgeist has moved to folks being aware that Microsoft (& Google & Apple) is collecting data on them to being the butt of jokes, yet those folks aren’t adopting an alternatives. With over a decade on Linux I’m now pretty out of touch with the opposite feeling. I guess the closest analog I have is not being able to realistically leave Android behind, but that is more hardware than software (banking app already don’t let you root or otherwise flash your device so I have given up hope in trying with them).
I bought Windows 11 early on so I'm still using it to justify the purchase on my desktop, but I moved my OEM licensed laptop over to Debian a few months ago.
Can confirm that as soon as Windows 11 is no longer supported or it gets slightly more ass, I'll be moving my desktop over to Debian or Arch or something as well.
With the advent of gaming becoming so much more accessible on linux either through native support or through something like proton, I am very hard pressed to find any reason to stay.
Now that gaming is effectively a solved problem thanks to Proton, Adobe Lightroom is just about the only thing keeping my desktop PC on Windows. My laptop is already running Linux. I’ve tried the FOSS alternatives but none of them fits my workflow like Lightroom. This is a me problem more so than a problem with any of these pieces of software.
There is the theory, that to convince everyone of something, you have to invest very hard work to convince 4% of the populace of what you are doing is right. After that, the rest will learn to know of this by themselves.
I just got a steam deck and I'm surprised how well it runs games. It's not quite as refined as a switch but it can run games were designed to run windowed in Windows with a mouse and keyboard. It can translate the game to run on Linux, the inputs to a gamepad and convert the game from being windowed to fullscreen. It's impressive and if the games were actually designed for the deck I feel like it could feel as seemless as the switch.
It is really making me consider Linux for my desktop once Windows 10 reaches EoL. The only game I've found that doesn't work is Destiny 2. Even the desktop mode on the deck is surprisingly nice
I tried to give Windows 11 another go recently just to see how it is, I pulled all my files over including my gog games files which had wineprefixes in the folders, with /appdata folders for each prefix.
Windows decided "you know what, screw c:\users\appdata, lets use the appdata folder in this random gamefolder on a different drive instead" and proceeded to cannibalize itself just breaking the majority of apps. No idea how it can't recognize that the random wine "windows" files that aren't in the correct locations aren't the actual location for them. Couldn't fix it because it thought the "c:" folder in the wine directory was my actual c: drive and refused to delete it
Sure it was an extremely niche issue a Windows user would never realistically run into, but it reminded me just how fragile it is for uncommon usecases
I have been slowly switching to Linux for the last year. I have 2 Lenovo ThinkPad's and an HP EliteDesk running Ubuntu. I have my gaming PC dual booted but, for the moment, mainly using Linux Mint.
It has been an easy transition and I am not some Linux whiz.
First hitting over 4% in February, their March data is now in showing not just staying above 4% but rising a little once again showing the trend is clear that Linux use is rising.
A number that is getting steadily harder for developers of all kinds to ignore.
It terms of overall percentage, it's still relatively small but when you think about how many people that actually is, it's a lot.
For those thinking it may be due to Steam Deck with SteamOS, it's unlikely, at least not directly.
StatCounter gather their info from web traffic across over 1.5 million sites globally.
There's going to be various other bigger factors at play here though, like Linux nowadays actually being properly good on the desktop.
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it's not gonna decrease from there. linux only needs some product to push usage percentage, like steam deck. it's key to the mass adoption but i also don't care that much about percentage
I've driven my laptop for years on Linux, previously mint and recently fedora KDE and given Microsoft's recent moves 10 Will be my last windows os on my desktop and I'm considering moving before support ends
Good. While the number's been generally trending upwards it's been unsteady and there have been plenty of months where it went down. If it went back below 4% this month we would have had endless posts about how the earlier milestone was a fluke.
Hopefully when the next backslide does happen (and it will) it'll stay above 4%.