Linux enthusiasts rejoice! After a long journey, according to StatCounter's data, by June 2023, Linux has achieved a 3% desktop market share.
  • Xeelee@kbin.social
    39·
    1 year ago

    Linux has a huge market share in servers. Most phones use a derivative of Linux. A lot of embedded systems run Linux. The desktop PC is basically the only niche where Linux doesn’t dominate.

  • tensorpudding@lemmy.world
    24·
    1 year ago

    This reported 3% is thanks to uncountable coder-hours devoted by crowds of volunteers, and employees at many companies, notably but not at all limited to Canonical, Red Hat and Collabora, and put into developing massive, explicitly Linux-on-desktop software packages like the KDE and GNOME projects, Wayland, X.org, freedesktop, Cinnamon, Budgie, Xfce, (many more that I can’t think of or list here), and the numerous distro developers and maintainers at Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Arch, etc. who put effort into packaging and keeping fresh these softwares for end-users to download for (mostly) free, competing against for-profit operating system desktops from Microsoft and Apple that have significant advantages in OEM bundling and testing, marketing, system incompatibility both intentional and inadvertent.

    That so many people put so much effort over multiple decades into producing a range of products that earn many of them no profit whatsoever and which has barely made a dent in the marketplace it competes, for over two decades, is a testament to optimism about the human spirit, ideology, stubbornness, and the kind of pride and satisfaction of a service rendered for public consumption that is almost alien to modern capitalism.

  • exohuman@kbin.social
    23·
    1 year ago

    Let’s not forget, this is in the slowly vanishing desktop market. Linux is already in every Android phone and powers most of the web too. We are all dependent on Linux every day even if it’s not on the desktop.

    • sizeoftheuniverse@programming.dev
      62·
      1 year ago

      The way Linux is crippled in Android is a perversion of how free software should be used. Your Android phone runs Linux, wow, is your freedom respected?

      Thanks to this perversion, Linux also powers killing drones, weapons of mass distruction, and all the evil things this world has to offer.

    • nous@programming.devEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Probably nearer 0%. These stats are from browser user agents on select sites. The chances that large amount of people are visiting these on their steam deck will likely not be very high. And there is only like 0.5% of people using the steamdeck on steam ATM.

      The Steam Hardware Survey puts Linux at 1.44% (though gaming is heavily skewed towards windows users). And 0.57% using the AMD VANGOGH graphics card (which is apparently what the steam deck uses).

      These stats are also not very accurate. My system is reporting to be a Windows PC and I don’t think I have done much to make it do that - just basic privacy settings in firefox. Not to mention that I do not think that these metrics will count for anyone with an adblocker running - which I suspect is also a higher percentage of Linux users in general.

    • Juujian@lemmy.world
      61·
      1 year ago

      Let’s admit it, it’s a pity celebration. I think the only thing that’s special about it is that Linux has never crossed the 3% threshold before, whereas 2% was an on and off thing? Disclaimer, I did not do my research and I’m relying on very vague memories of those numbers.

  • ghostwolf@lemmy.fakeplastictrees.ee
    2·
    1 year ago

    From my understanding, statcounter gets this data from web analytics. Does this mean the data is more or less legit? I don’t know if Steam Deck users browse internet much, though I doubt this device’s market share is large enough to affect the statistics.

  • frog@programming.dev
    2·
    1 year ago

    As someone who has FINALLY made the switch to contribute to that (all it took was several whole days of the summer devoted to constructing a Void environment from scratch to host VMs with GPU sharing), I gotta say the SteamDeck must be putting up gooood numbers, cause there’s no way enough people full-time switched.