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The growth of Linux desktop marketshare, in percent of total, since 2009
(sh.itjust.works)
References
- "Linux hits another all-time high for July 2024 according to Statcounter". Liam Dawe. GamingOnLinux. Published: 2024-08-01T11:35Z. Accessed: 2024-08-04T19:21Z. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/08/linux-hits-another-all-time-high-for-july-2024-according-to-statcounter/.
I really really hope this will lead to some major UX improvements as more "normal people" start trying to use Linux. Currently, it's still often too complicated or cumbersome, if not downright buggy.
Example: I run Kubuntu and about 20% of the time when I plug in my external monitors, all my windows just crash. Things need to get to a state of "just working" much more often and in many more cases. I hope this surge of users will motivate people to move towards that or maybe bring in more contributors to advance that area.
I installed a new GPU and it changed the device name of my NIC so all my network setup suddenly broke.
Now every ~5th time I wake my computer from sleep the monitor comes on briefly and I then get a black screen. If I turn the monitor off and back on it fixes it.
Would be cool to have more people on Linux finding and fixing these little details.
Unlikely to happen. This is very complicated low level stuff that's often completely undocumented. Often the hardware is buggy but it works with Windows/Mac because that's what it's been tested with, so you're not even implementing a spec, you're implementing Windows' implementation.
Also the few people that have the knowledge to do this a) don't want to spend a ton of money buying every model of monitor or whatever for testing, and b) don't want to spend all their time doing boring difficult debugging.
I actually speak from experience here. I wrote a semi-popular FOSS program for a type of peripheral. Actually it only supports devices from a single company, but... I have one now. It cost about £200. The other models are more expensive and I'm not going to spend like £3k buying all the other models so I can test it properly. The protocol is reverse engineered too so.. yeah I'll probably break it for other people, sorry.
This sort of thing really only works commercially IMO. It's too expensive, boring and time consuming for the scratch-an-itch developers.
If Linux adoption reaches a critical mass then the manufacturers will start fixing these issues themselves. If Linux was 30% of all users and AMD paid a team to fix Linux support, they would eat the competition alive, but if Linux is 3% it doesn't make sense for them to devote resources to fixing Linux.
True but it'll have to be like 10% and I don't see that happening ever really. Unless Microsoft really screws up, which to be fair they are doing their best.