Here's why Linux market share isn't going to skyrocket anytime soon
Here's why Linux market share isn't going to skyrocket anytime soon
You've heard the "prophecy": next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right? Linux is no longer the niche hobby of bearded sysadmins and free software evangelists that it was a decade ago! Modern distributions like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint are sleek, accessible, and — dare I say it — mainstream-adjacent.
Linux is ready for professional work, including video editing, and it even manages to maintain a slight market share advantage over macOS among gamers, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey.
However, it's not ready to dethrone Windows. At least, not yet!
Let’s say there are 2 billion desktop computers in the world and that Linux is installed on 3% of them.
That is 60 million Linux desktop users.
That is more than enough to sustain a vibrant ecosystem. Linux does not really need more market share to keep being an excellent option.
You've heard the "prophecy": next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right?
Yes, every year since 1997
Usually the current year is the year of the Linux desktop. At the very least in the first half of said year.
Maybe when you don't need to do everything in the terminal.
You don't, it's just more convenient. And according to the windows people, it's the same thing there (except fewer people know how to use the terminal because it's so arcane).
You don't, it's just more convenient.
If you have the time to commit thousands of commands to memory, I'm sure it is. Most of us are just trying to get shit done.
according to the windows people, it's the same thing there
It is very much not. I used Windows for 30 years and never touched the terminal.
Look up "how to do x on Windows/Mac" and you'll get "click here, click there".
Look up "how to do x on Linux" and you'll get fed a bunch of random letters to type into a literal black box, at which point you get returned a generic error and have to go back to the drawing board over and over for hours.
And even if drivers do exist, they may not include the extra software that comes bundled with drivers on Windows. The most obvious example is NVIDIA GeForce Experience suite.
This goes in the pro column if you ask me. I would pay extra for a printer that just has vanilla drivers and no software suite.
Using cups is infinitely better than whatever windows has going on.
But what will I do if marketshare of Linux does not increase properly? Oh, wait... who cares? I just use Linux for my daily work but are not a shareholder that needs constant massive growth of imaginary numbers.
You may be lucky enough to use Linux for your fault work, but some of are forced to use Windows because it is the industry standard. If Linux were widely enough used that I could use it at work then that would be a huge benefit to me.
That's not wrong but a seperate problem mainly caused by lock-in strategies that are not exactly the same as marketshare or industry standards and are explicitly distinct from the actual OS's capabilties.
I know enough people who have the exact same problem but with Apple as their employer forces them to use software only available there. Yet their marketshare for desktops is just a tiny fraction of what we see for Windows (~15% if we are optimsitic).
So will we pretend that Linux with a 10 or 15% marketshare (not that far off for an OS with already 5+%) is suddenly a valid alternative. Or are we honest and acknowledge that this is indeed NOT about Linux' capability to be a valid Windows replacement but purely about the fact that there isn't (an never will be...) a massive corporation spending billions in marketing and lobbying to create perceived standards simply by throwing money at the problem for even higher future gains?
Also makes you feel good when Linux opponents look goofier over time.
Instead, it's about the irretrievable, sunken costs associated with a loss of incompatible software and hardware that the person would no longer be able to use after switching to Linux.
... When windows has made its latest release incompatible with most existing hardware out there because of some arbitrary requirements. I have not seen any major hardware compatibility issues with Linux in quite a few years now. It is not common at all for some hardware to not work. In less then about a year Windows in going to make a huge amount of existing hardware unusable for supported versions of windows. That alone will help with Linuxs market share.
Most arguments in this article are overblown out very outdated. Software compatibility is a issue, but much less then it used to be. Big companies like Adobe and Microsoft which refuse to support Linux are also starting to alienate their user base making the cost of switching more and more apprising all the while the linux friendly alternatives are growing in popularity. And as I said above hardware is not a big issue these days and about to be a big issue for Windows systems.
It does touch berfily on the main point sa to why linux os not very popular ATM:
Most people don't even know what Linux is because they've never seen it pre-installed on a laptop in a store. But I digress.
That is the problem, defaults. Most people don't care or want to change their OS and most people have hardware and workloads that are easily compatible to Linux. It is really only a minority of people that require things that Windows supports better - sadly those are also the types of people more willing to break from the default OS.
The year of the Linux desktop won't come until we, the Linux community, find a way to balance the cost of switching with the future benefits of daily driving Linux from the perspective of an average user. Until then, Linux will remain more like a niche thing, made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
No it wont. The normal user will only switch when they are forced to by their current system stopping working or new hardware comes with Linux by default. The average user is your aunt how uses their computer to log into facebook or look up recipes online. A professional that requires adobe suite is not an average user and only makes up a tiny fraction of the overall userbase. It would be nice to support their workloads, but even if adobe was fully supported on Linux that would still only be a fraction more users that would be willing to move. For the average user it is the defaults that their system comes with that makes the biggest difference.
These are probably the biggest reasons, but I think even after literally decades of development the actual desktop is still far behind Windows XP in many respects.
For example today I wanted to add a "start menu" shortcut to a program I had downloaded. The most popular answer is to *manually create a
.desktopfile and copy it to some obscure dot directory! Hilarious. Even Windows 3.1 had a built-in GUI for this.Ok so there is a GUI to do it, but it isn't actually integrated into desktops and isn't installed by default. You have to install it separately.
It's the same for things like WiFi settings! There are some settings in GNOME but most are hidden in the third party
nm-connection-editor(from memory) and of course GNOME doesn't have an "advanced settings" button to open that.There are so many of these paper cuts I think Linux would be quite a frustrating experience for many people even if if had Windows-level hardware support.
I also can't see this changing any time soon. Not that many Linux devs actually care about this sort of thing and many of them don't even understand that it is a problem in the first place. Cue replies.
For example today I wanted to add a “start menu” shortcut to a program I had downloaded.
I get what you're saying, but this is like "I tried to use Linux like it was Windows, and it was hard." It's a different OS. Go on, move the taskbar of Windows 11 to the left or right edges of the screen. I can do that on Linux, why can't I do that on Windows? It's not even hard, it's just plain impossible. If you try to do things manually in Linux, it's not going to be intuitive. It will feel like editing the Registry in Windows. Unintuitive and like arcane magic.
Fuck yes. I switched to Linux after Windows got all control freaky over my task bar. On Linux I can have 30 task bars if I want, 100 task bars. I can setup a mouse-task bar that opens radially around my cursor. On mac I can put that shit left, right, bottom, which is something, and i can resize it which is the bare fucking minimum.
On Windows? Bottom. Full width. Don't like it? Fuck you. Shut up and cope.
Oh but there's a registry hack to... nope. Not dealing with that shit again after I tried to make the fucking icons smaller AND IT BROKE THE TASK BAR.
Love that proprietary feeling, those crisp millions of dollars of development being used to innovate and develop a robust and perfected operating system.
but I think even after literally decades of development the actual desktop is still far behind Windows XP in many respects. […]
This argument is incomplete and unnuanced. Gnome ≠ Linux. While I use EndeavourOS and Linux Mint's Cinnamon as a desktop environment, I am completely confident that if computers shipped with Linux Mint*, then 95% of the population would have a far more pleasant experience compared to any other Microsoft Windows, especially the schizophrenic bloatware-laden Windoze 10/11 versions. Why such a high percentage? Because most users simply use the browser and don't need advanced proprietary software such as AutoCAD, Photoshop (†), nor specific driver software for niche twenty-something-button gaming mice.
*Linux Mint or any other Linux distribution that uses Cinnamon, KDE Plasma, Budgie, Xfce or similar desktop environments.
Caveat: Xfce hugely depends on how the distro configured it. Some, like Debian, badly configure the taskbar to have a—to me—unintuitive / unresponsive to shortcuts menu.
† Use Photopea instead. It's practically a copy-paste of Photoshop but in the browser, created by one person. Or if one has never used Photoshop before, try GIMP first.
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
Because most users simply use the browser
This is the same problem as saying "an electric car with 100 mile range is totally fine because most journeys are well under 100 miles".
Most of the time I'm only using a browser (or VSCode). The annoying thing is the 1% of times when I want to print something, create a shortcut, use bluetooth headphones, configure a static IP, etc.
Use Photopea instead. It’s practically a copy-paste of Photoshop but in the browser, created by one person. Or if one has never used Photoshop before, try GIMP first.
Saying Photopea or GIMP is "practically a copy-paste of Photoshop" is laughable. Paint.NET, maybe.
I've never needed to manually create a start menu entry. I install everything through the default repository or as a flatpak using the default software manager. I did have to manually enable flatpaks in the software manager (point for OP, admittedly).
Everything I've ever installed, including AppImages from time to time, always gets a start menu entry.
I cannot think of a single time I have manually created a
.desktopfile rather than using a GUI in the decades I have used Linux, and it has been a long time since I have even needed to edit the Start Menu at all installing packages takes care of it for me. Furthermore, even if this is a "paper cuts", I doubt that people spend a lot of their time adding Start Menu items; by contrast, in Windows I get to experience the paper cuts of advertisements every single time I want to launch a program, and if I mistype the name of the program and press enter, then every single time I get to experience another paper cuts of launching Edge (which is not my default browser) to do a search in Bing (which is not my default search engine) for my typo.Likewise, for the last few years that I have been using WiFi with Linux, I have never once had to go outside of the GUI to adjust the settings.
I won't say that Linux has no annoyances, but I find using it to be a significantly more pleasant experience than using Windows overall, and my wife has never had a problem with it either.
I really do not think that these "paper cuts" are representative of peoples' general experiences with Linux.
Every OS has paper cuts. You learn to live with them over time as you have no other choice. When you switch OS it cuts in different ways and they feel fresher then the old ones you had gotten used to over time. It does not matter if you switch from Windows to Linux, Linux to Windows or to or from MacOS. They all have papercuts.
Gnome is garbage lol
However, it's not ready to dethrone Windows
Is this how we define "the year or the Linux desktop"? The year when the market share is larger than Windows? That's setting the bar a bit high, no?
For me, the year or the Linux desktop was 2007 or so. That's when I started using it instead of Windows. 🤷♂️
I think if you wiped everyone’s prior experience and knowledge and all that stuff, like just wiped the slate clean and presented all the OSes for what they are and let everyone choose which on they got to use, things would land pretty much where they are right now. Linux is generally way easier than it was 10 years ago but it’s still far too tricky for most normal users. If it’s too difficult for them to use then they effectively don’t have a computer and it’s useless to them. Linux may be free but after dropping £1000+ on a laptop people don’t mind so much paying an extra £70 for the software.
The two most important things to normal people are good looks and ease of use and Linux comes in last in both of those races.
Linux isn’t for normal people, it’s made by nerds for nerds.
Depends on how you define wiping the slate clean? Just for the users or also for the hardware and software vendors?
Because the difficulty of Linux comes from the lack of hardware and software support. If you just compare the OS then for the average user there little to no difference in terms of functionality. People probably would ever prefer Linux due to it being just generally faster than Windows. You wouldn't pay extra to to get something that runs worse.
What people will pay extra for is the guarantee that their hardware and software just works. The only benefit Windows has is that you don't have to worry if your hardware or software will work because in 99.9% of the time it does and if it doesn't you can contact support and they won't instantly tell you your system isn't supported.
Could you be more specific about exactly what about Linux makes it so difficult to use that a typical person would not be able to use their computer at all if it were installed on it?
I think one thing that was trickier for me on linux than windows was mounting a network share from my server to my laptop. I had to search online what to do, after I figured out how to edit fstab it was pretty simple but if I didnt already know how to edit a file with something like nano or how to change directories in the terminal it would have seemed way more complicated, then again the fact that Im mounting a nas share is already well beyond most peoples use case and already means I have the knowledge to look up what I want to do. I think in order to jump to linux you have to be wanting to not deal with enshitification so you are willing to put a little effort to get away from bigger annoying problems, or if they are just handed a linux machine and all they really need is the browser and you are there for any questions then it works
at least bassite seems quite easy to use for someone who would use it just for browsing and games. Actually it feels a bit too custodial as i cant even install portmaster due to its writeonly nature. So you cant do complex stuff even if you wanted to. It makes it very safe too, since if its awful for user to do that, malware couldnt do anything at all.
If you dont want to do anything complex with linux and dont need to use microsoft products, its easier to use than windows imo since there is no corporate bullshit you have to deal with. Though you still need to learn the basics just like when you start using windows for first time. Then again, maybe i'm overestimating the abilities of average user who doesnt really know anything about computers.
What's your opinion on the european movement?
Just asking because you don't mention it
Hardware support really sucks, as many hardware manufacturers only care about supporting M$ Windows.
There's a way to force them to provide drivers for Linux, let's say the trade commission in any country forces all devices to have drivers for Linux.