Chrome OS saw a good raise too. OS X(Mac) saw a decrease.
The critical mass needed to tip the scales is not high. Once Linux has enough market share to matter as a customer base, game studios will switch to developing as cross-platform for it by default, so that they don’t lose launch sales. Once this happens, a lot of people won’t have any reason to stay on windows anymore as gaming was the only thing holding them back. This will then create a virtuous cycle of users migrating and games (and then apps) switching to it. Along then come hardware vendor supporty and then pre-built PCs and laptops. If the tipping point is reach, the rate of market share gain will be exponential.
The same thing happened with Internet Explorer 6
The only thing that can stop this is outside pressure from software giants like Microsoft through lobbying the Governments, buying out game studios or buying exclusivity, or strong-arming hardware vendors.
steam deck is helping a lot on that front.
Other than gamers, there’s a huge share of enterprise Windows users. And they’re not likely to shift OS, because of IT admin issues. Others in this thread have commented on how Apple is struggling to get devs to build native games compared to Windows.
Sure the number of home PC users might decline, one can always hope.
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I can actually imagine a scenario where MS actually wants that to happen. They don’t really make money on windows sales anymore (comparatively to their other products). So this could free up quite a lot of resources and reallocate them elsewhere.
The majority of home consumers basically just use browser services anyways.
Oh yeah
This is the year
That was me, I switched my desktop and laptop to ubuntu.
Same here. Switched my laptop to Pop!OS + KDE and planning on doing the same with the desktop soon-ish
Partly my fault - I have that page set to auto open on my browser every week
Is Linux actually growing, or are other users simply buying fewer computers because their phones have reduced the need for personal computers?
I didn’t crunch the numbers, but as far as I see, most of the linux growth comes from the Steam deck, which runs a Linux OS.
This could also be the reason for the decrease of OSX, because more other, non classical computer, devices are included, which automatically reduces the share of Laptop and PC devices.
So there is a similar percentage of users in the desktop and laptop space as before but more Linux-based handheld systems. Overall market share has become too broad nowadays for at a glance look at percentage of users for each platform as different sectors of systems will have different market share percentages.
I helped! I installed Linux Mint on 2 of my friends aging laptops.
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Do you all think that if the market share gets high enough we’ll see ports of professional software like autocad or adobe?
Maybe.
The investment vs payoff is all they care about
We would probably have to go way beyond 3%
Ye most definitely
Bricscad runs on linux- a lot of professional work could be moved over, but its the hack’n’patch stuff that’s holding a lot of things together that won’t work.
Of all devices are steam decks probably no
After many years of thinking about it i finally gave Linux a try on my main PC and was met with the unfortunate realization that HDR support was non existent for NVIDIA cards and had to switch back to Windows.
Only for Nvidia?
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I’m in the same boat. I’d like to leave Windows but since installing POP!_OS I’ve had issues with ending up with two versions of Firefox installed (yes snap and yes I’ve fixed that now). My Yubikey can’t be detected until I found a post by another user with a fix. I am still yet to find a way to get VRR working.
There’s no doubt that a lot of issues are user related but honestly I don’t have this much trouble with Windows. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried Linux and each and every time I find issues that I normally just give up on and revert back to Windows. I am trying though, I even purchased a second SSD dedicated for Linux.
I gotta say though Valve’s proton software is amazing and without it I probably wouldn’t be trying so hard to leave Windows as my primary game doesn’t have native Linux support.
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I’ll give EndeavourOS a try then. Thanks.
I tried Pop as it seemed highly recommended.
Mint and ubuntu are solid places to start linux. You can run them all pretty easy in a virtual machine btw, windows will even auto install ubuntu with the hyper v program. https://imgur.com/a/CFCSUvh Uncheck the secure boot for iso.
The revolution is coming!
Clear victory
If I wasn’t a noob gamer I’d have no use for Windows. Unfortunately I’m too dumb to figure out how to make games work, even on Mint.
It takes less than you think. It’s not always windows-easy but a little troubleshooting and googling is usually all it takes. The biggest sticking point is anti-cheat, if the kind of games you like require it.
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I kind of don’t want Linux to become mainstream tbh because then corporate enshittification becomes a much more real threat.
They’ve already tried. Ever heard of Ubuntu?
That’s why you just use a community run distro. Also if the kernel it self gets enshittified then I’m sure there will be a fork someone will make. Heck right now there’s the libre kernel that is just the Linux kernel with no proprietary blobs
