I know this might be a couple months old, but I didn’t know we already passed 4%.
I don’t think Microsoft (or Apple) want people to have personal computers anymore in the way that PCs have historically existed. That is to say, they don’t want your computer capable of running arbitrary code of your choosing. They don’t want your computer to have the potential to do everything, to run everything, to make anything.
They want to control and lock down all aspects of your machine and what it can do, retain ownership of hardware via software licenses, and monetize every click and keystroke.
Microsoft doesn’t want you to have a functional computer anymore, they want you to have a dummy terminal that runs Office 365 and Copilot.
They want PCs that work like smartphones, with apps completely self contained and unmodifiable, where the OS is a black box that no one but them can see in to.
Smartphones are actually a good window into what computers in general would have been like had the IBM bios not been reverse engineered and survived a bunch of legal challenges.
I think if it was up to them, and latency was low enough, they probably would have pushed some kind of “fully remote convertible laptop” where they literally own everything you do in a cloud, I don’t even want to search if this is a thing that exist already
Now that we don’t have to pay for any of the infrastructure, it turns out that mainframes and timesharing is awesome. Can we go back to that please? - Silicon Valley, 2024
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This is EXACTLY right.
They are dividing users into two groups. Unintelligent users who run Windows or MacOS in an extremely controlled limited way with AI assisting and monitoring everything remotely and reporting it back to the mothership…
Or people who are above an IQ of 85 and willing to learn to use Linux.
First off, I DO NOT count ChromeOS, but whatever.
Secondly, when is 18% of anything “dominant”??? The fuck? Arstechnica back up off the pipe.
They probably mean of Linux flavored ps coverage.
(I’m aware Mac is very different than Linux, but it is more closely grouped with Linux than Windows)
Played csgo last night and this guy brought up he was playing on Linux Mint. Lfg, I was so happy.
I switched over to Fedora a number of months ago and switched to plasma a few weeks ago. 0 complaints on any game I’ve played between halo, cyber punk, doom, and forza.
How much of this is regular people just not buying new computers anymore?
A lot of households that used to have had a laptop for each person have replaced those devices with phones and tablets. They weren’t using Linux, so by removing them Linux market share would go up even if it hasn’t actually grown.
Last I checked, Linux users also use phones.
I think the argument is that as less people have desktops and laptops, the only people left will be more technical (otherwise they’d just use a phone or tablet). The more technical people are also likely to use Linux. So as non-technical people move to tablets and phones, technical people make up a larger share of laptop/desktop users.
Music and graphic art software is the only advantage I can find for MacOS over Linux at this point. I love the Apple silicon but I don’t see that being a long term advantage.
Honestly for art I’ve started using my iPad for it, and transferring the results onto my Mint install. Since mint or gnome (not sure which one) integrates Apple file sharing into the files app.
I’m by no means a musician, let alone a professional one, but this part does admittedly suck. The actual sound backend works phenomenally well, especially when combining Pipewire and JACK for audio production, however using Windows-native VST/VST3 plugins is a horrible experience. A lot of mine are either really laggy, or just don’t load properly at all
This isn’t going to be the standard much longer. Gimp, Krita, and inkscape are extremely well developed and maintained.
Ardour is almost a full replacement for logic and the gap from it and protools is closing quick.
Three cheers for King Torvalds and Lord Gaben!
“dominance”… You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means
Inconceivable
Isn’t ChromeOS just a flavour of Linux?
Technically, yes. Practically, it’s complicated. It doesn’t really exist within the same ecosystem as other Linux distros.
It’s not as different as Android (which is also technically a Linux distribution), but running a normal DE and all the programs that come with it is very clearly still an advanced user thing locked behind knowledge of how bash and virtual environments work.
Linux people generally use adblockers so I somewhat doubt all these analytics websites that don’t have a methodology that wouldn’t be blocked by adblockers listed
seems I’m too boomer for this shit, apparently phones count as “personal computers”.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/
look at this graph and tell me that mac os is “dominant”.
(the numbers for those who don’t want to click the link)
Android = 43.86%
Windows = 27.97%
iOS = 17.8%
OS X = 5.64% (when did they stop calling it mac os?)
unknown = 1.96%
Linux = 1.44% (we’re still last place guys!)
