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.
Elisa for when i want my whole music library (it is a bit lacking in features tho), audacious w/ winamp classic skin (vibes) when im just playing files on my kde plasma box, and cmus on my qtile setup :3 also sicmuplayer on android cuz its the best
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0bda:9210 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL9210 M.2 NVME Adapter
And I don’t know if a live CD is the best method for this, due to the how I intend this to be something I can just keep files on for a while. While I do have small persistence .dat files for Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, it seems like a bandaid for what would be easiest, an installed distro where I can run the package update commands for, without juggling iso files.
That’s a good chip. As a rule of thumb, Realtek = best, Asmedia = good, JMicron = garbage. JMicron adapters run super hot and draw a lot of power, leading to low speeds and dropped connections.
The reason I suggested a Live CD with persistence is that they are better at autodetecting stuff on the host machine. You can definitely install an actual system on the SSD but it will make assumptions about things like the GPU for example – won’t expect to have to swap it at boot, you’ll have to do it manually. Or you can run your desktop environment with a pure software driver but that may get a bit annoying at times, depending on what you want to do with it.
I don’t really love any that I’ve tried so far, but I dislike Audacious the least. FLAC, Musepack, and ReplayGain support are requirements for my library.
The last one I loved was foobar2000 on Windows, which supplanted Winamp. Linux UIs mostly feel a bit clunky by comparison. When the window has focus I like to have spacebar for pause/play, arrows up/down for primary gain, and arrows left/right for seek.
I also gravitated towards Audacious, but I foobar2000 was 10/10. Might consider running it through Wine, since Audacious is not quite there unfortunately
MPD + Cantata
For the most part I just lump all my music into one playlist regardless of album or genre, but day to day I also use several different computers, and I find MPD to be the best for syncing configurations across all of them. Cantata also allows me to see album artwork and track information really easily and has good touchscreen support compared to terminal-based MPD clients.
+1 for Cantata! Although it’s not maintained, there’s really nothing missing from it. It’s complete as it is! Plays anything and you can also have your podcasts and web radio stations in it.
My fave too as it’s closest to foobar, critically with the tagging interface I prefer. Have you added any additional plugins to your install? I tried adding a few (music library, Discord Rich Presence) but must be the right sort of stupid not to understand the instructions. facepalm
If you liked Clementine, check out Strawberry. Clementine hasn’t been updated since 2016. Strawberry is a fork of the Clementine code base and essentially picks up where Clementine left off.
usually it’s an appimage, i mistakenly said binary. although there are programs that offer ELF binaries, in that case you can try running it. if it doesn’t run, check the list of runtime dependencies for the program and install what is necessary using your package manager.
They asked how to do it, I wanted to make sure that they knew that an application not existing in the repo doesn’t mean the application isn’t actually available.
This is not the only way to install apps but as a Linux user there will be times when you will need to use the terminal. Might as well know that from now.
The instructions they gave are really simple and straightforward. If you struggle with that, you may want to learn a bit about the terminal.
But since you’re on Ubuntu there is a much easier way: go to Mullvad downloads page and download the deb file. Double click it and the Ubuntu App Store should open and install it. If not, open the App Store and search for gdebi and install it. Now right click the deb you downloaded, and click “open with…” and choose gdebi from the list.
It should check dependencies and give you an “install” button. Click that and wait for it to finish. Then simply launch Mullvad as normal.
In general on Linux you install apps by looking in the distro repo: either by searching the App Store or by using the terminal.
To do it from the terminal type:
‘sudo apt update’. Enter your password.
After it’s updated type 'apt search [name of app] and press enter. It will give you a list of apps with that name. Eg apt search lollypop (a music player). Then if you see it listed, you know it’s in the repo.
To install it type ‘sudo apt install lollypop’ and press enter. It will tell you how large it is and if you want to install it. Type “y” and press enter. It will finish it in a few seconds.
Done. Launch the app as normal.
There is also something called Flatpak’s which you can get from flathub.com You will also find instructions there on how to install flatpak on your system but typing a few commands.
Welcome to Linux. You’ll either embrace and love it or abandon it.
The average Windows user doesn’t know what a terminal is, let alone use it. Whereas in Linux every user knows what a terminal is and has used it at least a handful of times.
Some distros don’t have an app store, just the terminal.
I’m also curious if anyone has any recommendations on this. I’ve used it for so many years that it’s hard to switch to anything else! I’ve just been running it through Lutris on my main computer.
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