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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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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?
I think that if Linux had a 50% market share then it would be considered a very valid alternative, even though that is obviously not very realistic (at this point, at least). My comment was more about why a high market share would be desirable than about how realistic it would be to get there.
Having said that: I think that if Linux were to get to a 10% or 15% valid market share, it would be a sign that a lot of things had changed that would have made it a more valid alternative in the process.
You don't need anywhere near 50% market share to be a valid alternative. If anything market share has nothing to do with it being a valid alternative except that it more likely to be the case with higher numbers. Past 50% it is really no longer even the alternative at all - it would be the main choice.
Agreed; I was only arguing against the proposition that increased market share would not eventually make a difference.