I have a feeling there will be a critical threshold crossed that will explode Linux’s popularity and install numbers and I think we’re getting close to that point now.
Just in time for the Rust debate to kill its momentum development wise! (/s, likely)
I’m unfamiliar with the “Rust” situation, has something gotten crusty or something?
Long time “old-school” kernel maintainers don’t know Rust and don’t want to learn Rust (completely fair and reasonable). But some of them don’t want to work with the Rust guys for lots’o’technical reasons.
It’s by far not an easy situation technically. Like this is a huge challenge.
But some of those old-school C guys are being vocal about their dislike of Rust in the kernel and gatekeeping the process. This came to a head at a recent conference (Linux Plumbers Conference?) and now one of the Rust maintainers has quit.
The big technical challenge is being confounded by professional opinions.
Yea, so mainly one situation that isn’t explained here. Is that the moment you introduce a different language besides C, you now need to talk between C and this other language. This is called language bindings.
The problem with this, is the moment something is changing in C, and this method or interface is used by some Rust code, the Rust binding to C or C to Rust binding is failing, cause all kinds of issues.
Long story short, is that by introducing this additional language you created this technical issue of language bindings. And people who just want to work with C code, now suddenly also need to think about Rust bindings, while they previously didn’t need to think about that. As if the Linux kernel isn’t complicated enough, introducing this language binding issue is cause more (unwanted) work for some people.
In the end the “C” people are blaming Rust if something fails. And the “Rust” people are trying to explain and help the “C” people to introduce those bindings. waaaahhhh
It’s not about the bindings. It’s, as always with kernel devs, about gatekeeping and unprofessional if not outwardly hostile behavior.
Maintaining bindings is a hard problem for sure, but no hard problems have ever been solved by the key stakeholders refusing to partake in honest discussions. Asahi Lina’s breakdown of her rejected contributions to the fundamentally flawed
drm_sched, which do not involve a single byte of Rust, demonstrates an unwillingness to collaborate that goes much further than the sealioning about muh bindings.
The un along with other governments are requiring all software including open source to be validated by a 3rd party security audit, C is notorious for its memory leaks and so switching to Rust is almost legally mandated but C is the foundation of modern society and switching will literally require rewriting linux from the ground up since Rust didn’t exist when it was made needles to say developers are not happy having to essentially learn a new language and start from scratch only harder because they can’t change anything they just need to rewrite it in another language and get nothing in return but happy bureaucrats as happy as bureaucrats can be anyway.
Is that one sentence?
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Yea that whole Rust drama is a pain. Linus unfortunately brought this upon himself. I believe he is also the guy that can fix it be either: Let’s remove Rust from the kernel again or… Saying: Just deal with it, we also support Rust, but Rust isn’t mandatory.
And in the latter, he also need to think about Rust FFI bindings to C… But I digress now. I don’t want to discuss this here.
He can focus on solving the technical problems. Like have a list of things that has to be done in order for people to be happy with it. Missing feature? Starting guide? Limit what features can be used? C to Rust converter? He does not have to solve it alone, like he did with git. He just need to decide the direction.
I think that point either was steam deck or will be steam os 2.0
The current steam OS version is 3.6
I think that’s wishful thinking. The vast majority of people simply don’t give a shit. While the enshittification of Windows continues, Linux numbers will slowly go up. But I’ll be quite surprised if I see it go over some significant margin like, say, 25% during my lifetime.
Back when it was creeping up to 3% i said its probably 5% and i still hope its that because we are getting really close to global 5%. The other thing is it should probably overtake unknown because then you can really call it the third most popular option without some old windows versions getting in the way.
I don’t think so. At this point Linux isn’t really held back by software availability - 90% of things are web based now and games apparently work pretty well (certainly better than on Mac).
The main issue is hardware support and driver quality. Especially on laptops, if you install Linux you’re really rolling the dice on whether or not you’ll get something that works.
Someone always replies to comments like these with “it works for me!” which is not really relevant when it has to work for everyone.
For a while at work I was in the Linux slack channel even when I was using a Mac, just to follow the amusing problems people had (and they had a lot!).
Then I moved jobs and have a Linux laptop… I get to experience it first hand. Hard reboot when it runs out of RAM, or 20% or the time when you undock it. Doesn’t work at 60Hz/4K on some work monitors but only if you are using HDMI. The exact same laptop model & OS works for other people. Battery life is hilarious. I don’t think I’ve ever got over 2 hours.
I have a lot of experience with Windows and some with Linux.
The driver problems with Laptops are not only on Linux, though it is a lot more common, depending on the manufacturer Windows also has a ton of problems if you don’t want to use the 8 year old pre-installed driver that was never updated.
And Linux is held back by (proprietary) software availability as well. Most of the time it would be Microsoft Office (a lot of people I know complain about alternatives like Google Docs or Libre Office not being up to par by a long shot). Another big thing is Games. Sure, most of them work quite well out of the box, but if they do not it would be beyond most of my friend groups skills to fix it. Not to mention the massive library of competitive games that some people play exclusively that just don’t work at all.
even touchpad support on Linux is hit or miss, but steadily seems to improve.
Next year will likely explode.
There are those of us who think windows 10 is passable, have used it for many years, and were never planning on switching to Linux because we’re normies.
Windows 11 changes that, and when security updates for Win10 end in 2025, I’m switching to Linux.
Crazy to think that one of twenty people I meet outside use Linux
I doubt one in twenty people I meet outside even use a computer regularly.
You guys have met 20 people?!
Yeach i have a high suspicion a lot of those gains is not ( or not only ) beacuse linux is gaining popularity but beacuse desktop pcs are loosing one. Especialy if the methodology is based on web stats ( i myself quite often use smartphone to browse even if i actually use pc right now to do whatewer im doing right now ).
This is measuring desktop market share only. You can click to see all platforms where you can see Windows seems to be losing most of its market share to Android in the last few months.
But that’s my point. Pepole abandoning pc all together are likely for lack of the better word normies that are very very unlikely to use linux. Wheras pepole who are sticking with PC for whatewer reasons are more likely to be in a group that uses linux. Its just a hypotesis tho , nothing more than a mere speculation.
No, the ones who use Linux don’t go outside.
Your assumption is that 100% people you meet outside use a Desktop PC at all.
A laptop also counts.
Actually depending on the definition, everyone that uses the www uses Linux, but that doesn’t help.
I know 4 irl. all are my converts
Religion of Holy Linux
I prefer “cult” 🥰
I don’t write in rust
but do you write while wearing programming socks
Well what a intelligent decision it was to bombard people with ads in OSs that were paid for.
I switched the day Microsoft clickbaited me into clicking on an ad while testing the new outlook with the paid 365 subscription I had. At this point I was having a constant stream small annoyances at least every week since Windows 7.
My host is running Linux mint now and 365 was replaced by only office (since this seemed to be the most similar and compatible office package I found). Trouble free since January. Battery lasting twice as much. Zero work lost because of unexpected update reboots 👍🏼
I’m so happy, I even bought a Steam deck to support Valve/Proton
Ah youre one of the lucky ones. Battery life on linux is really hit or miss. Sometimes double, sometimes half, sometimes the same. This is because every laptop has to have its own profiles which is not easy to do because that means every laptop has to be owned by someone who can and is willing to develop patches for it.
on my (HP envy x360 ryzen 7) the battery life is largely dependent on what the cpu governer is set to.
Not surprisingly norway is the highest(i could find). Kinda dissapointing as someone who lives in sweden where its really low. Sadly i see this in everyday life as well. Everyones so tech ignorrant in everyday life and most people just find it strange if you dont use the same stuff as everyone else(tbf the culture is also like that) so everyone uses windows with all the spyware. Im not even kidding most people i know use edge and bing…
As a Norwegian, that got to be our coolest stat, however I have no idea how it can be true. Even in my engineering bubble there aren’t that many people using Linux. It’s all Windows and macs for home computers.
I dont live in norway so i cant say but the number of github users is also really high in norway if i remember right and most norwegians i know are pretty tech literate so i could believe this stat. But you never know how accurate the measurments are and how well your social group represents the whole country. For example hungary only has 3.4% while if i had to guess i would have said like 8~10% because i knew so many people who just used it because it was faster/worked better/was cheaper.
“Unknown” is my favourite OS personally
100% probably some privacy protected flavor of Linux that doesn’t show up on whatever survey they used
Or just another user agent. Those things update so frequently, it’s likely just some analytics that checks user agent.
I am one of these 5% of people, and haven’t regretted it since I switched when Win7’s support ran out. Unfortunately, I still need to use Windows for work, but since most stuff at work is done in MS Office or browser, it’s managable.
I switched last weekend. I got new parts for a build due to a leak in the radiator of my watercooling loop. Really everything except hard drives and the case was replaced.
Previously, me switching to Linux was planned before Windows 10 support would end. My old hardware didn’t support Windows 11 (6th Gen i7). And most, if not all things I heard were pretty negative, at least for non commercial users without active directory with cloud sync. But the same holds true for the experience with it on our work computers. So I decided to switch to Linux anyway.
And as it is required now when I write a comment: I’m using Arch btw. No problems so far.
FreeBSD went from 0.01% to 0% last month. 🪦
Sad story. Best OS I ever run was around 2002 NetBSD on a desktop. It is quite bad that Linux is the only viable player for an operating system on desktops/laptops. (With viable I mean has drivers for all of my my hardware and runs the software I need for personal and professional life.)
Redox looks like it’s up and coming, hopefully something useable pans out from it once cosmic is rolled out of alpha.
Microkernel is an uptime and security benefit on modern hardware.
I would be happy if something usable comes out of it. OTOH, the classical problem is and has always been driver support. I am not sure I like the plan of running a complete Linux as a subsystem for driver support, and I have doubts Redox will have native drivers for all hardware within the next decade.
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With the same logic, Microsoft’s dominance also helps the user in not having to choose between multiple types of systems.
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According to your logic we should all use Google Chrome. ;-)
Comparing Linux with the BSDs is really apples and oranges. The BSDs have a very nicely integrated base system, everything just works™ and everything works together. When you only ever used Linux or Apple with homebrew, you never experienced a system where all basic tools really fit and work together.
Linux is a pragmatic choice, but it is an Unix-clone made by PC people. The BSDs are a Unix operating system for PCs made by Unix people. We loose something very important if the BSDs get totally out of style/forgotten.
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Well, I funnily enough also agree with you, having just one widely used browser engine for all platforms sounds great in theory… (Until someone decides to not let you block advertisement anymore…;-))
Docker is one of the reasons I use Linux and for all practical purposes nearly all open source software is developed for Linux and later ported to the BSDs (if one is lucky) - so, again, I am also using Linux because it runs what I need to run.
I simply would love to have some practical and relevant options for OSS operating systems. I fully understand that this is not going to happen and Linux won.
Anyway, have a good day!
That’s not really true. Without some fragmentation there is no need for standards
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I’m honestly surprised. Germany has been the home of OpenSuse for a decade or so now, has had Christian “democrats” torpedoing any effort to get Linux into government (Munich) and yet, now it’s at 5.25%? What’s going on?
I think Germany also has above average market share of Firefox.
I think europe in general has above average usage of Firefox. It did not die there as much. Alghtough germany is certainly above average in that regard.
it makes sense since most germans care about their privacy
Eh, that’s a bit of a stretch. There’s more awareness by default here because of GDPR and such, but I wouldn’t say people really care that much more here
true
After I read that windows is pushing recall on the home editions on windows 11 I moved all my writing work to a dual booted Linux Mint os.
15% here
India?
Yea (atleast we lead in something positive now)
Are you hopeful for the future of Linux in India? It’s a large country with lots of people. I don’t know if Linux is “just” a regional thing in India or if it’s spreading across the entire country.
And, do you know what kind of status / reputation it has in India or the people know you? In my small circle, people only know of it through me. People outside of it either don’t know of it or think it’s for geeks / unusable to them.
I think most people here dont even use PCs, smartphones are used a lot more than that. And those who use PCs, a majority of them use old hardware forcing them to find alternative operating system (I have experienced this personally and has installed mint on PCs of 6-7 peoples like that). I think old hardware is what pushing them to use linux. Moreover, most geeks use either mac or linux until forced by the company to use windows. Its definitely not a regional thing, as far as reputation is concerned, for normal people its just like windows like people who want to edit files, pp presentations, excel sheets, etc all of it is same as windows due to awesome tools like libreoffice. What else people need mostly? linux GUI has evolved enough to help them for all “normal” use cases, otherwise internet is always there. I think it will continue to grow as a result of recent microsoft F ups and as people become aware.
Thank you for the insight! It makes me hopeful about linux’s position in India. Hopefully an increase of prosperity, meaning better hardware, won’t mean an increase of windows or mac users.
What distros are used? Is there a good Indian distro?
There’s dozens of us! Dozens!
Germans saw the swiss investing in open source software and decided they couldn’t be left further behind. Long live open source Munich!
Didn’t Munich famously switch back to windows?
That’s low ngl, I thought Linux in Germany already reached 10% by now
RIP FreeBSD. Wonder what the “Unknown” ones are though.
TempleOS
The browser were set to report a different OS, the few bank terminals still running OS/2, a few industrial PCs still running MS-DOS, etc.
