I am not saying “This is the Year of the Linux Desktop”. That said, things languished below 2% for decades and now it has doubled in just over a year. With the state of Linux Gaming, I could see that happening again.
Also, if ChromeOS continues to converge, you could consider it a Linux distro at some point and it also has about 4% share.
Linux could exceed 10% share this year and be a clear second after Windows.
That leaves me wondering, what percentage do we have to hit before it really is “The Year of the Linux Desktop”. I have never had to wonder that before ( I mean, it obviously was not 3% ). Having to ask is a milestone in itself.
I’ve never been a Linux guy but recently I’ve switched to Pop!OS on my laptop and bought a Steam Deck. Other than a few teething issues with the laptop I’ve had a great experience and I wouldn’t consider myself ridiculously tech savvy. I’d absolutely consider switching my gaming PC over but my worry is loss of performance and being unable to use my game pass games. I’d be super happy if I could switch my PC over in the next couple of years.
Game pass is the one problem with no great solution in sight… But not great doesn’t mean none. If you have an Xbox you can play them on the pc streamed over your Lan, and you can also stream games directly from the web as well.
Again, not great solutions, but it is unlikely we will see Xbox game pass running on Linux. I think MS will do anything and everything to prevent that.
Then there’s the not-solution of running a windows vm. You aren’t ditching windows with that entirely and, at least from what I understand, you’ll need a second graphics card to dedicate to the vm to get “bare metal” performance.
year of the linux desktop is based on how many third party apps are there, not how many people use it imo. they correlate and impact one another but arent the same
Adobe looks at Linux market share and thinks, “Hmm, we could make some money from this,” and ports Photoshop, After Effects, and inDesign to Linux
Or:
Adobe looks at ChromeOS and thinks, “Hmm, we could make some money from this,” and ports all their programs to the web except After Effects because that involves massively extending web protocols again to support all the codecs and improving performance.
ChromeOS can run native Linux apps, so realistically if Adobe wanted to support ChromeOS they’d probably go for a Linux port anyway. A lot less work than trying to reimplement every single UI from the ground up as a web interface.
I wouldn’t say ChromeOS can be clarified as Linux for the sake of this number. While it of course is bases on the kernel, it still is in the hands of one company and definitely not free software. While we may talk about ChromiumOS, I would differentiate here for the sake of control over your OS.
ChromeOS is as much Linux as anything else is. It’s controlled by a greedy megacorp, but so is Red Hat (IBM) or, idk, Oracle Linux. Yes it’s based on an unusual immutable design, but immutable distros are now cropping up out of lots of projects (Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, amongst many others, not to mention the Steam Deck). It avoids using the GNU tool chain, but the alternatives that it uses are already used by other Linux distros (like Alpine). It now uses the standard Wayland graphics stack, and is in the process of moving from upstart (a previously widely used Linux init system) to systemd.
It’s hard to come up with a definition of “Linux distro” that excludes ChromeOS without excluding a bunch of unambiguously Linux distros too.
I think you raise an interesting point. I haven’t considered Red Hat Linux, but according to my definition this shouldn’t be Linux then… I still don’t think I feel fully comfortable calling it Linux, because a lot of stuff is watered down. Years ago I used Cloudready, and even though it was based on ChromeOS it used Flathub. I think for me that made a huge difference, because then I could install Steam, LibreOffice, Zoom and Firefox on my ChromiumOS laptop, without having to go through a Linux emulator. I still want to knoe why Google didn’t use this functionality in mainstream ChromeOS.
In the current version of ChromeOS, as far as I know, either you sideload Linux or Google completely controls all app stores. For me that is a fundamental conflict with the promise of freedom and user control that Linux gives - with a simple sudo you can be lord of the world. I think your comment made me realize that that ChromeOS cannot be called not Linux, because it clearly has similarities. But Red Hat doesn’t control your way of getting new apps. For me that is a major difference. Ultimately one could raise a point that MacOS is also Linux, because it uses Darwin - and so I think we need to use different definitions than just a pure “we share same technical basis”.
Ultimately one could raise a point that MacOS is also Linux, because it uses Darwin
There’s no basis for calling MacOS Linux. There’s a legitimate basis for calling it BSD, as Darwin was forked from FreeBSD, but BSD and Linux aren’t directly related. Also, Darwin has diverged considerably from FreeBSD, and only a small amount of the stack outside of the kernel shares any code, so it’s not necessarily meaningful to think of it as a “FreeBSD distro” in the same sense as you would ChromeOS a Linux distro (which uses, as I mentioned in my previous comment, a more-or-less standard Linux technology stack).
In the current version of ChromeOS, as far as I know, either you sideload Linux or Google completely controls all app stores
ChromeOS lets you install Linux native applications out of the box, although it does so in containers (Crostini, which I believe is based on LXD, another standard Linux technology stack). Once you enable Linux apps, it automatically hooks you up to the Debian repositories, and you can install using apt like you would on any other Debian install.
Whether you consider Crostini to be “sideloading Linux” is a matter of semantics, but fundamentally it’s no different from installing containerised LXD/LXC apps on Ubuntu or whatever, which is a common use case for developers and production servers.
For me that is a fundamental conflict with the promise of freedom and user control that Linux gives - with a simple sudo you can be lord of the world.
I think you’re making an argument for why it’s a bad Linux distro (from a certain perfectly valid point of view), but not that it’s not a Linux distro.
There are few if any other distros which are as locked down ChromeOS out of the box, but all Linux distros can be locked down, and if you’ve ever used a corporate provisioned machine in a workplace or education setting then odds are you won’t have any admin freedoms regardless of the distro chosen. Sudoer privileges is something you might have on your own home machine, but not something that you can expect on every Linux machine. Even on devices you own, there are devices that you might buy (such as wifi routers, DVD players, smart TVs) which run standard Linux but which are as locked down (and more) than a Chromebook; it’s just that most people don’t expect to have unrestricted sudo privileges on their router in the same way as they do a laptop.
For the record, I am not a Chromebook fan. I owned one once for a few years, and thought it was a disappointing, artificially limited experience, and I don’t intend to have one again. ChromeOS is not my idea of a good Linux distro. But I’ll still argue firmly that it is a Linux distro in all ways that matter.
I think you have raised an excellent point, which also led me to reconsider my thoughts. Truly, when you argue with my definition, a Fedora workstation in an enterprise where an end user cannot install apps shouldn’t be considered Linux, because the end user isn’t able to install apps on it. A few of the points you raised (e.g. LXD) I haven’t even known existed. But I e.g. use Fedora Silverblue, and with Toolbox you can emulate a Ubuntu distro. Should then Silverblue be not considered a Linux distro because it doesn’t offer installing native packages by itself? That would be a risky argument to make. So in the end, I thank you for the points you raised. You have led me to reconsider the topic. I especially didn’t knew that Crostini was based on a Linux stack, I always thought that it was a side-loaded emulator which “replaced” ChromeOS - which even isn’t logical, as I now see. So thank you, I learned something new from today and will pay more attention to see ChromeOS not as something distinct from Linux, but just as a distro with a “Google-y touch” on it. Especially now with ChromeFlex, where you can install it on every PC with a processor => toaster, it has truly become a Linux distro.
Totally useless “article”. You learn nothing, you have to navigate between poor writing with high usage of explectives. It’s like reading a 11 years-old rebel child blog.
Took ya that long? As soon as they went “That’s right fuckface.”, it was over lol. I knew whatever was gonna follow would be some unhinged shit…and it was, save for that one nugget of wisdom that was thrown in there about shutting up and using what you wanted (that of course, they wouldn’t follow. If they did this wouldn’t exist in the first place)
“rofl” as you want. We know your mental age and how broken your toilet mind is. You probably get some professional help to fix that. Just don’t laugh at that. It’s no joke.
Every 10 years, a new abstraction layer will be added to the system. I wonder how an average linux desktop would look like under the hood in 100 years.
There is a lot of ‘reinventing the wheel’ in software, and I did not claim otherwise.
When new abstractions are beneficial, other programs take advantage of them and the whole ecosystem moves forward. When they are not, nobody cares and they are ignored and die. In that respect, open source software development is very much like evolution.
Judging by apps using it, looks like this abstraction is indeed useful.
Apple software team is on another level. You don’t even have to try to find the feature. We all instinctively shake the mouse to locate the cursor, so it just happens.
Distro packages and to some extent Flatpaks, use shared libraries which can be updated independently of your app.
So for example, if a vulnerability is discovered in say, curl, or imagemagick, ffmpeg or whatever library an app is using: for AppImages, this won’t be fixed until you update all of your AppImages. In Flatpak, it usually can be updated as part of a dependency, or distributed as a rebuild and update of the Flatpak. With distro packages, you can usually update the library itself and be done with it already.
AppImages are convenient for the user in that you can easily store them, move them, keep old versions around forever easily. It still doesn’t guarantee it’ll still run in distros a couple years for now, it guarantees that a given version will forever be vulnerable if any of its dependencies are because they’re bundled in, it makes packages that are much much bigger than they need to be, and you have to unpack/repack them if you need library shims.
Different kinds of tradeoffs and goals, essentially. Flatpak happens to be a compromise a lot of people agree on as it provides a set of distro-agnostic libraries while also not shifting the burden entirely onto the app developers. The AppImage developer is intentionally keeping Wayland broken on AppImage because he hates it and wants to fulfil his narrative that Wayland is a broken mess that won’t ever work, while Flatpak developers work hard on sandboxing and security and granular permission systems.
It is very unfortunate. It’s fine to point out problems, but then when you become part of the problem, that’s not amazing.
He’s had the same meltdown with fuse2 being deprecated in favor of fuse3 which, guess what, also broke AppImage and we had a huge rant for that too.
Flatpak has a better chance of being forward compatible for the foreseeable future. Linux generally isn’t a very ABI/API compatible platform because for the most part you’re expected to be able to patch and recompile whatever you might want.
Then optimize what actually needs optimizing. There’s no easy, generic answer on how to get a given electron app to “appear performant”. I say “appear”, because even vscode leverages various strategies to appear more performant than it might actually be in certain scenarios. I’m not saying this to bash vscode, but because techniques like “lazy loading” are simply a tool in the toolbox called “performance tuning”.
BTW: Not even using C++ will guarantee a performant application in the end, if the application topic itself is complex enough (e.g. video editors, DAWs, etc.) and one doesn’t pay attention to performance during development.
All it takes is to let a bunch of somewhat CPU intensive procedures pile up in an application and at some point it will feel sluggish in certain scenarios. Only way out of that is to measure where the actual bottlenecks are and then think about how one could get away with doing less (or doing less while a bunch of other things are going on and then do it when there’s more of an “idle” time), then make resp. changes to the codebase.
I hope this isn’t going to be the default. I know, the average granny might prefer to have a BSOD with a QR code, but I think a lot of the people who are more tech-savvy, like me, would prefer to see log messages when booting because then you could see which service failed and why or why it’s all of a sudden taking so long to boot. That’s also why I choose not to have a splash screen when booting.
Anyways, this BSOD thing doesn’t apply to me because I use Gentoo with OpenRC.
You don’t think there are significant maladaptive thought patterns that would lead you to base an entire identity based off some bull shit “suit vs creatives” imagining of the world? They took “dell guy vs apple guy” and made it there identity.
That doesn’t answer my question, it avoids it. Passions come in many flavors, and are not all-consumimg. For some its music, and culminates on an instrument. For some it’s sports, and revolves around one. Do you have anything you are passionate about?
That isn’t the reason most of us use Linux, and even if it were, the “administration vs. creatives” divide probably goes back to Ancient Egypt, if not further. But fight it if you want to. I give it six months before you burn out, and the division in question will still be there, and some people will still be basing their identities around it. (I mean, what do you think is a good thing to base your identity around? Your degree of appreciation for Taylor Swift? 'Cause I think you’d find that one is a lot more common.)
This isn’t about most of you. It’s about those that take a love of foss too far and invent narratives that just aren’t true. If you commit and are active, that is fantastic. This person is imagining an entire reality that just isn’t true.
KDE has a lot of nice points, I do really like the customization and I think I prefer a lot of the default KDE apps over their GNOME counterparts.
But there’s just something about GNOME I find really comfortable to use. I feel like on paper I should like KDE more, but I always end up going back to GNOME and being happier with it.
I have a similar feeling about it. I think I would prefer the customization of KDE, etc, but GNOME just works for me right out of the box. I don’t think I change anything except the monospace font nowadays (in Tweaks). It works great and gets out of the way. For people who do not like the GNOME workflow I suspect it would be horrific because there is far less customization.
I don’t think I change anything except the monospace font nowadays
Which font do you use?
It works great and gets out of the way.
I think that that’s why some Gnome users just stick with it. I personally don’t want to customize anything, if possible. I don’t even want to concern myself with the DE at all if possible. Any time I spend on the DE is time I don’t spend doing the things I actually want to do. But that’s the beauty of Linux: everyone can use whatever fits their needs best, be it Gnome, KDE, xfce or anything else.
I will swap out the default font with a monospace Nerd Font. I’m currently using the Cascadia Code Mono Nerd Font, but I will change it every so often.
I hear you there. I like the workflow of GNOME, and I wish I could make the app launcher in KDE be as minimalist as the GNOME launcher in ArcMenus. But at the same time, a number of things I was using the launcher for can be done as a keystroke in KDE, so it kinda makes up for it.
KDE fortunately doesn’t have to be a Windows clone. There are several guides available on how to customize the UX / workflow to something completely different. I get what you mean, though, the default UX seems to be at least inspired by Windows.
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