this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Look....I use Linux. I love Linux. But let's be honest. That 4 percent is largely due to the steam deck; a gaming handheld where the vast majority of users don't know (or care) what operating system it uses as long as they can play their steam games on the go.
That's not "year of the Linux desktop", because it's not a desktop. It just has one hidden under the hood if you want to dig past the steam layer (which, as I said...the vast majority of users never will)
The year of the Linux desktop won't arrive until there is sufficient market share that software manufacturers are inclined to support us natively. That won't happen with a gaming handheld because no one would want to use a gaming handheld as a daily driver.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, folks. Downvote away....
India, the country with the largest population, has a 15% desktop Linux marketshare.
Additionally, these surveys are highly inaccurate. They are at best a "conservatively low balled figure". Linux installations don't send a ping to a server anywhere to count the install, and there's no other facility to gauge or count through the Linux ecosystem itself. Most computers used for Linux are also sold with Windows pre-installed, which means there's no clean way to use sales figures either.
All that leaves is the browser user agent when visiting select websites that track and share the number of unique visitors that identify as Linux.
I did the math a few months ago in a different discussion (not on Lemmy) and my math at the time came up to about 50 million desktop Linux users, and that was using the "official" reported numbers of 3.x% at the time.
That also ignores that the Stack Overflow developer survey puts desktop Linux at over 50% for personal use, and (IIRC) about 47% for professional use.
You can't be honest if you look at a single boiled down percentage of a very large, very diverse and technical landscape with more variations and caveats than the English language.
Also, in case anyone is wondering, the Stack Overflow numbers didn't include WSL. If you do include that then desktop Linux usage was over 70% for personal use.
Obviusly stack overflow users use linux but they are very specialized minority. India on the other hand is actually very interesting statistic. Unusaly high, i wonder why.
I’m Indian. I’m willing to bet a bunch of kids who just built their first pc didn’t realize windows was paid just googled free OS and installed Linux lol
(This is a sarcastic whit at the frugality of my people. Truth is a lot of Indians my age are extremely tech savvy and care about privacy)