I suspect that it’s not Linux that is on the rise, but overall PC market that is shrinking. It’s been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.
I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.
In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.
It’s been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.
Can’t do that if you play games.
Also that’s half of the reason Windows hasn’t lost the war on home desktop PCs yet. Another half is office applications.
Actually, these are thirds.
Another reason making me say so is that no major user-friendly distribution wants to be just that, they all have a particular madness with no good reason for it.
So I don’t know what to recommend, there should be something off the top of my head, but that’d be “just install Debian, it’s fine”.
So, any single reason of these going away would accelerate Linux adoption notably. Any two would make it a trend visible to housewives. And all three would resemble the flight of ICQ users to Skype.
What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.
I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.
No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.
Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.
It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.
And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.
I remember that it does too much, but without specifics. It’s been 4+ years since I touched Ubuntu.
They used to be a little FOSS-only
I vaguely remember that “Amazon lens” for Unity, I don’t think they ever were that much FOSS-only.
No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives.
It’s fine. That’d still be goal fulfilled.
Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it.
How so?
There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.
I recently had a problem with LO, while editing a document with lots of math formulae - from time to time while adding a formula about half of others (in the whole document) would just become empty.
Not sure something like that would happen under Apple suite’s analog of Word, whatever it’s called.
It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both.
With that I agree, somewhere in 2012 I somehow realized that it’s already much better than the alternatives, and yes, for a housewife’s desktop just as well, if one’s honest and thinks of their own needs.
And if one’s comparing it to advertising of the competing commercial products, then it’s hopeless.
I recently been arguing with some dude about some PUBG mechanics. It took me quite some time to realize that he was playing PUBG mobile, never played the PC version or even knew that it even existed for that matter. For him, PUBG simply meant PUBG mobile. For those people, they don’t even consider using PC for gaming. They might consider console, but PC to them is just more or less a typewriter for school/office tasks.
I’ve been thinking for some time what to answer and concluded that the normie world is a world of pain.
We - as in FOSS OS users and FOSS paradigm users - desperately need open hardware, so that the rest of the industry could eat all the rubber dicks they want without affecting us significantly.
And I mean not only hardware design, but fabs.
It may seem an impossible future, with semiconductor deficit etc, and Taiwan being that important.
And with starting a fab being so expensive.
Still, they only way a conclusive FOSS victory resulting in even balance happens is if there is a public fab producing general-purpose hardware with public design.
Because right now lots of resources are being wasted on catching up in inherently disadvantageous areas, like supporting proprietary hardware which is always harder for FOSS developers than for MS or Apple.
Without full-chain FOSS hardware production it’ll always be bare survival.
And yet here I am looking to expanding my devices with a replacement server (linux) and a NUC (linux).
Finally ditched Windows on the desktop forever, about 7 months ago.
I agree with you on mobile. I my country many ppl ditched laptops and desktops for their phones.
Although I have a hard time understanding how they can actually get some work done on the phone, if they do any work from home that requires a computer. Well those ppl probably have an old laptop laying around.
I remember looking at pc sales data, and they have been shrinking in the last decade, with the curve flattening until the pandemic, when sales grew substantially, almost to the 2000s level. Now it’s shrinking back slowly. I’m not sure if people are abandoning desktops in favor of phones as much as we think. desktops are durable and we tend to have only one, while mobile devices are gaining different forms, and people are getting more of them. Perhaps the desktop market has not much more room to grow while mobile devices are still booming.
But that’s just one possible explanation, I might be wrong. I was going to post the data, but statista requires login to see it.
I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.
What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.
I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.
About 2 years ago, I moved my music to Jellyfin and have been using their media players on every platform I use (iOS, FireTV, Ubuntu, and Windows). At this point my music library is close to 200 GB, kinda hard to store that much on every device I own.
All the things ypu said abouy GNOME and OpenSUSE I will give a +1. It really is polished and tweaked to be reliable. YAST is truly a great way to onboard to pinux withouy having to drop into CLI to configure things. I don’t think it is 100% Vanilla Gnome there are aome subtle things like OpenSUSE nautlius has a paste button, where as NixOS excludes this. While keyboard short cuts are OK, sometimes you want to just go into the hamburger menu and click paste without having to find white space in the list view to right click on. I have run it for about 7 years now, every distro upgrade has gone smooth.
Can I be ridiculous here and say that a nook e-reader or kobo e-reader, and a steamdeck would suffice?
Maybe just a kobo?
I know it’s not Linux and that’s what you asked for, but at the end of 2022 when I looked into this I had a hard time finding Linux tablet with a good UX.
E-reader sounds like good advice though, unless they really need colour (e.g. are planning to mainly read comics). MEGA sync probably won’t work, but Pocket might be good enough?
Kobo’s are basically Linux, and have quite a few customisation options.
I had reasoning for the steam deck when I wrote that but I’m struggling to recall why. There was some niche with Linux for it since it has good support for Linux applications but I can’t remember how I thought it would fit
Mpd and Cantata. Deadbeef for playing from a directory or for conversation. I haven’t found anything as good as cantata but I have to admit that I miss the monolithic and do everything of musicbee.
chezmoi.io is one of the best dotfile managers available. Great template language if you need different, many ways to distribute secrets safely, merging works well even with templates, not limited to homedir.
I would recommend using a native 2fa app for Ubuntu. This answer askubuntu.com/a/1460646 recommends keepassxc, which is also a password manager that I personally use for passwords but I’ve not used its 2fa function. I also found this app gitlab.gnome.org/World/Authenticator
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