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Windows 11 is a strong motivator. I suspect like many other people, the only reason I was keeping Windows around was gaming. But thanks to Proton and the Steam Deck, the number of games in my library that won’t run on Linux is vanishingly small. I deleted my Windows partition a few months ago and haven’t looked back.
Install Linux or buy a Mac, fuck Windows.
Don’t buy a Mac. That’s more limiting than a Windows. But yeah install linux.
More limited, but also less enshittified than Windows.
If you want a good, well-polished experience for certain creative workloads, or even programming, MacOS is great and their Apple Silicon CPUs are excellent.
If you want to do ANY gaming besides WoW (which surprisingly enough has always had great MacOS support) or you can’t stand the lack of configurability, Linux is immediately the superior choice by far.
I would like to add that if you want to do any real customization of your setup don’t get mac either.
Even though I do hate Apple as a company, they do make great products, they just charge out the ass for them
Nah, even their hardware consists out of laptops with screen protection falling off, phones bending themselves into breakage and cables with the sensitive connectors on the outside so they’ll break often.
Their OS is surprisingly buggy, too.They’re actually just shit all around, in my experience.
I dislike Apple as a company but I love Apple hardware. Old Macs are my favourite thing to run Linux on.
The whole business model of Apple is to force a hardware upgrade cycle on you and force all your devices to be in that same ecosystem.
I mean, I can see the advantages of it on the short term, but on the longer term having stuff that keeps on working even as always even in older hardware (or you just install new hardware under it and it just recognizes it and keeps on working) is a massive benefit versus a $1500+ bill every
twofive years and having to migrate your stuff.It’s more like 6-7 years and the migration tool basically clones your drive in 15 minutes
Gaming works pretty damn well as far as I’m concerned, the few that I can’t get to work are irrelevant.
I’m keeping Windows around for work… fuck Autodesk and fuck Dassault. So I am trying to get a VM with GPU pass through to work (had it working once but then I screwed it up and now I can’t seem to get it working again).
Having done the transition some months ago, there is still some stupid shit one has to deal with (especially, but not only, for games NOT from Steam) at times, more than in Windows, but it’s all so much better than it was before and by now quite close to the Gaming experience in Windows.
Then on top of that there are all the the longer term peace of mind things versus Windows: upgrading your Linux costs zero, changing your hardware won’t invalidate your Linux “OEM License” (plus it will probably just boot up as normal with if you just move your SSD to a whole new machine rather than throw you into driver nightmare), games that work in today’s Linux will keep on working in tomorrow’s and so on - this is actually massive advantage of Linux versus Windows which is seldom talked about: more often than not, hardware migration with Linux is to just move your SSD to a whole new machine, with all the stuff just the way you like it and all you files, and it just boots with and keeps on working.
(PS: Especially relevant for gamers who have to upgrade due to the increasing demands on hardware from the gaming side of things even though the hardware is fine for everything else they do in that machine, and who would rather that all those other things they’ve installed and kept on using rather than uninstall after “finishing the game”, just carry on configured just the way they like it and working just the way they’ve always did, even when they do upgrade the hardware because of games. People who are fine with hardware dedicated to gaming and with replacing the whole thing - hardware and software - for newer games, just get XBoxes or similar consoles, not PCs)
Linux not only saves you from enshittification, keeps control in your hands and preserves your privacy, it’s also a reliable and functional long term OS layer for your hardware that doesn’t force hardware upgrades on you.
I dicked around with the VM route for a while and could never really get it working 100% to my liking. There was always a trade-off. I ended up just getting a second PC and tucking it in a cabinet out of sight. When I need Windows I just use remote desktop to connect to it.
the number of games in my library that won’t run on Linux is vanishingly small
at this point, it’s pretty much only about Roblox.
…which I don’t want to play, I’m not happy about my nephews playing, but that seems like the only big one which really continues to struggle on Windows.
edit: that’s from my limited POV, as someone who loves gaming but i don’t follow or try out big new titles, I’m pretty much happy with my 30 favs, trying out like 5 new games a year, usually older or indie titles.
Roblox is about the only reason why I can’t switch my kid’s computer to Linux, they play almost exclusively that and Minecraft. Once win10 goes EOL, I’ll probably start budgeting to replace my laptop with a new PC and give them the laptop. The old PC will then get Linux and handle 3d printer stuffs
Mac?! Darwin no, that’s doing the opposite of liberating yourself and it has less gaming than Linux I’d say.
It does. Gaming on mac is a pain. Gaming on linux is a much better experience, and has much better support at this point. Apple really alienates developers.
I didn’t mean for gaming specifically, probably should have used a transition statement. For creative and professional use cases, macOS is still far far better than Windows. For gaming yeah that’s not your platform, Linux is.
I don’t think “liberating” your machine is the reason people are just now getting mad at windows.
- “I can’t choose when to update, anymore”
- “I can’t uninstall all sorts of things, anymore”
- “I can’t even use my perfectly fine laptop of 6 years old, anymore”
It’s all about liberation, I’d say.
“I can’t choose when to update, anymore”
That changed with windows 8 12 years ago.
“I can’t uninstall all sorts of things, anymore”
Unless you installed the embedded versions of windows you’ve never been able to do that, best you could do was turn like 5 things off in the features screen.
“I can’t even use my perfectly fine laptop of 6 years old, anymore”
I wouldn’t call your computer not getting updates so you install a different OS “liberating” it.
Also your computer not getting updates doesn’t magically turn it into a brick, you can still use it just fine. This is something I’ve never understood. As long as your web browser still gets updates that’s the biggest security vulnerability that I’d be afraid of. Chrome supported Windows 7 until 109 in 2023, and Firefox ESR is still going until September this year. 10th gen and older intel machines don’t get graphics updates anymore, are those machines ewaste? Shit some shitty laptops never get bios updates and there’s a whole host of vulnerabilities there.
And not to mention specific equipment such as train management that uses Windows XP, Windows 98 or 95. Just one example.
That changed with windows 8 12 years ago.
Oh yeah, it’s been a gradual process.
I’m Linux user since 2008 and as much as I want to agree with you, I can’t. Even if Mac is much closer to Linux with its BSD roots, I probably would choose Windows over Mac. Why? Because Windows is much more open and less restrictive than OS X. And there is the support and compatibility of Steam games (and games in general) in Windows. The hardware repair ability is terrible on Apple too.
Yes, Microsoft is bad, Windows is bad; so is Apple and OS X. I personally can’t live with the restrictions Apple has.
Same here. If I could get Vortex Mod Manager to work under Wine/Proton, I wouldn’t use Windows at all.
What games are you using it for? I’ve used Mod Organizer 2 for Skyrim SE and it’s worked great on the deck
Really? The last few times I’ve tried (granted it was a year or more ago) I got like 15 FPS on a heavy modlist running on my desktop, which had a GTX 2080 and was running Arch, btw. Trying to get MO2 to launch the Linux version of Skyrim running via Steam/Proton and not the Windows version of Steam running through WINE was a fun mess to deal with. Once all that was handled, then half of the modding programs (xEdit, Nemesis, BodySlide, etc…) didn’t work with MO2s virtual FS. It was just way too many layers of abstraction to deal with 🤯
Yes, really haha. I don’t think I would consider the mod list I used heavy, at least not graphically. I didn’t use any of those programs you mentioned.
Trying to get MO2 to launch the Linux version of Skyrim running via Steam/Proton and not the Windows version of Steam running through WINE was a fun mess to deal with
I recall using some sort of script that installed MO2 and handled all of this (at least for the Steam Deck).
Either way, I hope their new cross-platform launcher works out well.
Nice, thanks I’ll give it a try again because Windows 10 is really pissing me off regarding how practically anything that you used to be able to easily disable now requires one or multiple registry hacks that may or may not work anymore.
I totally understand you not giving all that a try because while it is a handheld Linux PC, it’s probably more of a pain in the ass to use on that screen and with the standard input (obviously docking it would solve these issues) than it’s worth. I just keep Windows on my Desktop to play a few games, my home server is my workhorse and I have a Linux laptop that work gave me (literally, they laid me off and never asked for it back).
Microsoft’s advertising campaign for people to switch to Linux is working great.
7.14% unknown!
The year of Plan 9 on the desktop!
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Serious question: you’d use that for your daily driver?
A rare sighting of a Plan 9 user! You need to be protected at all cost! Your species is extremely rare and important for future studies.
BTW for a moment I was upset, because I thought this is a screenshot of Reddit. I kinda like the old look of it.
Out of curiosity, do you use it for fun, or does it provide you with some specific features?
I use it because it’s truly a “complete system” in a way that Linux and even the BSDs are not—every program is an example in itself and it comes with a ton of various scratch-built utilities that you don’t usually find as part of a typical Linux distro. Stuff like a basic torrent or IRC client just sort of fall out of the way Plan 9 is organized and implemented.
It also provides me with a distraction-free environment and a set of tools that I enjoy using, even if some aspects of Plan 9 as, say, a laptop daily driver are inconvenient or awkward. It really is better suited for networked computing.
I was pretty much sold from first contact because Plan 9 is the way that I feel best matches what I’ve always wanted from my machines: a simple grid of networked appliances where I can route the various resources and hardware in whatever way I require.
I wish someone would port Python and BorgBackup to it. Venti/Fossil are not quite as nice for multi-OS backups.
Python 2.5.1 was distributed as part of 9front back when it used
hg, but it was ultimately removed from the base system once we switched over togit9. 9legacy still packages binaries, however; they’re up to 2.7.6 for Python and 2.9.2 for Mercurial.I never bother with venti/fossil, honestly. I’m more of a
cwfskind of person, but Ori’sgefshas been attracting my attention lately.
You explained it so well, that you actually got me interested in trying it some day.
If you ever want to just poke around a Plan 9 system, SDF Public Access UNIX System offers an ongoing Plan 9 Boot Camp.
Stop by and join us in
comsometime!
I mean, leave it to us weirdos on sdf for stuff like this.
What desktop environment is that? Or is it built in by default or doesn’t work quite similar to linux?
They got a DE built in and say GNU is bloated. Foolishness
Surprisingly many people don’t need the “modern” “web” for daily driving.
One of the few times I think where this is not only correct, but also most accurate
GNU HURD remains ignored.
Good.
I unironically would use it
Additionally, for those that may want a Plan 9 that’s being actively developed and will actually work on modern hardware:
There’s also 9legacy, which is basically “classic” Plan 9 with some patches from 9front.
It says “THE PLAN FELL OFF” and “DO NOT INSTALL”, everything OK over there?
Please do. Why don’t you yet?
The “unknown” is Windows. If you change the graph to see the whole range from 2008 to date, you will see that whenever there’s a big spike or dip on Unknown, it’s the exact opposite for Windows.
Thanks for ruining it for me.
Sorry but Linux is becoming too mainstream for me now. Time to hop on to BSD
Oh no, I feel it already the “I was on Linux before it was cool”
Dragonfly BSD, or else it will still be mainstream :)
Check out mister Mainstream over here. The rest of us snooty OS connoisseurs use Collapse OS.
It is 16% in India, lessgo!
I have been dual booting for some time now. Come back to windows 10 for gaming. But then I suddenly realize that the blizzard games that I play can run on Linux, and even from the same folder with the NTFS partition. I was stunned. No notable performance difference either.
I recently shows my mum that have an old Core 2 Duo that it can run Linux Mint. She said it works, and the computer shutdowns directly when I tell it to do. No more updating windows to wait for before unplugging the power cable. Still have to dual boot Windows 10 for Microsoft Office Word document compatibility and Google Picasa.
She also just have bought a new computer with Windows 11, could barely make it through the installation. So many questions and configuration needed to get rid of ads and popups in Edge. Need to evaluation Mint more before I try to dual boot it on this machine as well.
Or… Just fuck off windows altogether?
There is a learning curve for old people. It takes time. So dual boot is a must until then.
It also doesn’t help that my dad still isn’t filly convinced Linux isn’t a virus/dangerous to my PC.
He is just afraid of learning new things. Best way here is to show him how it works. Learning.
Oh I’ve been trying. He’s tech adverse in general, so the concept of open source software scares him because it means trusting others with regards to tech.
This. It feels to me like driving a stick shift when you’ve been using an automatic transmission for years. You have to do a little more fiddling but I honestly don’t mind learning a new OS that isn’t actively working against me.
With Windows . . . on the other hand . . . every time I’ve had to go “under the hood” (tweak Registry settings, Config files, etc) it’s been to prevent Microsoft from doing something crappy to me.
Yes, with Windows it is a fight about disabling all the new stuff they come up with. Here, you must use OneDrive if you save a file. Here, lots of ads in the start menu, nothing is installed. Or here, please try copilot+ or bing. Do you want to set bing as your startup page? If you say no, we will ask you again… A new windows update? Lets ask everything again.
Picasa? That’s been google-bandoned for a while now. What does she use it for? Plenty of photo management tools in Linux. Darktable, Digikam…
If the office alternatives in linux don’t cut it, and she uses Office 365, you can run it in Linux as a PWA
Picasa because it had worked fine. And the replacement, Google photos, is not an option with storing everything in the cloud. Both Darktable and Digikam looks too advance. I think Gwenview will be a good fit. Will try later when she has the time to test. Just viewing the images in the folder, that is all that is needed.
It would be a good idea with the Office 365 but we don’t want things in the Cloud. If the PWA could run offline it would be a different story.
You might want to check out Libre Office. It’s document compatible with MS-Office and I think it comes pre-installed on Linux Mint.
If you want you can try OnlyOffice, it works really well as a replacement for Office. That is if you only use Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I even convinced some Windows people to use it as its free, open source, cross platform and perhaps even easier to use at this point.
For Picasa maybe digikam? It maybe isn’t a perfect replacement though. You could always try to run Picasa in a VM (or maybe even wine?)
Microsoft does not follow its own standard for doc and docx. Any other software tries to follow the standard, thus you can get different view of the document depending on what editor you use.
Picasa I think is easier to replace. Just need to relearn. Leaning towards Gwenview. VM is not an option, too complicated and slow for her. Picasa has been depricated for a long time now so it is time to move on.
Are steamdecks getting counted in this?
I had a discussion about this 1 months ago: https://beehaw.org/post/14768525 And decided not to bring it up again. :D
My argument is, from the eyes of the website you visit, the Steam Deck user would be identified as a desktop user. That’s because the browser you are using (most likely Firefox) and the desktop environment (most likely KDE) in the Desktop mode would be seen as a desktop. In short, yes, I think Steam Deck would be counted, but only if people visit the pages in Desktop mode. So not all Steam Deck users are counted here.
Game mode doesn’t have a browser. I would be interested to find out of the steamdeck sales almost directly correlate to this increase. Not that I am complaining, it’s a great way to use a linux desktop experience. I didn’t really read how these numbers were measured.
The other explanation I could think of is that linux desktop is being adopted widely in India. I don’t think that government’s adopting linux desktop accounts for a significant portion of the machines.
Most likely. Steam decks are PCs.
My work laptop is windows and I hardly use it for anything personal. I just unplug the usb-c dock from it and plug it into my steam deck and use it as my desktop. I’ve done everything with it you can do on a computer.
Unknown
I’m so happy.
But also liked when linux felt like a secret.
Microsoft finally did something right: they made their shitty product shitty enough for people to realize it.
But also liked when linux felt like a secret.
Don’t worry. You can still tap into that sweet sweet Linux elitism by running an Arch based system or a tiling window manager.
That’s old news, NixOS is the new hotness
Only if you’ve installed Arch itself, using a GUI is noobs.
I see your Arch and raise you a Gentoo.
Also what the fuck is a tiling window manager? I want it!
Instead of having your windows float around, they perfectly snap and fill the space of the monitor depending on how many windows you have open. A new DE in alpha right now called Cosmic has both floating windows and tiling, you can change with just a toggle.
Cosmic is great so far, I run it on Fedora.
I want my windows anywhere I want them, and in Cinnamon I can snap windows to corners, o top, or bottom… Being forced to work tiled is backwards.
If as someone mentioned in Cosmic you can toggle it off and on ( and the toggle is esasily accesible, not buried in settings) I’m fine with that
“Being forced to work tiled” that’s the main feature of a tiling wm though…
If you tried it for a while, you’d realize just how annoying floating windows really are. All that manual positioning, focus issues, getting them stuck or hidden behind other windows, etc. For big monitors, I would say tiling is just flat superior to floating windows managers.
Oh my gosh I need this now.
Fedora? 🤢 jk
The big common ones are i3, Hyprland, or Awesome. However, there are tons out there and there is no right answers.
I think Gentoo with no binaries should be the new archlinux. I’ve literally used archlinux virtually unchanged outside of updates for years now. It’s been trouble free outside of some minor bugs and I change my settings in the kde settings panel 90% of the time.
im doing my part 💪
switched to arch a week or so ago, absolutely loving it
I’m doing my part
Linux Mint here. Soon to switch to a more “manual” distro.
The only real reason to switch to another distro nowadays is because you want to get updates faster (rolling release [like Arch] vs steady releases) and/or you want the ability to customize the OS more easily. Also, if you wanna be that person that wants to remove SystemD from Linux or have a version controlled OS.
Or if you’re sold on the hype of atomic distros (such as Fedora Kionite)
Or if you’re sold on reproducable OS configuration (Nix)
Or if you simply like the defaults of another distro better and don’t want to have to deviate from standards.
Or…
Nah, there’s still a lot of variety to Linux systems.
I like mint cause it stays out ofy way for literally everything.
I can’t think of time where I needed anything more than Mint for a desktop. It’s been on at least one device in my house since 2010.
In my head it’s like half a percent, 4.45% seems huge.
about 1/20 computers that browse the web run linux, thats pretty goofy
To what extent could it be acceptable?
Goofy like silly, not like unacceptable. Reckon all three of us are happy it’s as high as it is!
4.45 is huge. 0.5 is normal sized.
Huge is just about 9 times the size of normal.
nice
The crowdstrike failure is probably helping Linux.
This is what I was thinking when it happened. Businesses lose a shit ton of productivity and money due to Microsoft and Windows being a clusterfuck in multiple ways and they decide it’s time to switch to something more stable.
Actually, crowdstrike has a very bad record regarding this, their services even managed to break Debian servers one time.
Source: some article.
In fact, that failure occurred this year. Now all that’s left is for macOS to have a failure with that company and the collection is complete.
I believe BSD has more servers than macOS.
I highly doubt businesses would have been this fast in making the switch.
It helps to move quickly when your entire infrastructure crashes.
One crash will absolutely not make this big of an uptick. The amount of highly specialized software and hardware that is OS dependant means switching will only be possible when those companies, hell really entire industries, decide to move over to a more open standard soft/hardware setup. In this case, a crash is a big deal, but the IT teams get on it and fix it in a day or two.
Also, certain Linux machines were affected by the cloudstrike outage. Even less reason to switch when the alternative was effected as well.
I’m actually gearing up to convert all of my Windows machines to Linux once the updates for 10 stop coming. This will be especially easy once the new WINE gets integrated and the few windows game apps that I use can run well on Linux.
what’s the new wine?
Better to do it at least a few months before end off life just in case you need to move back for some reason. The alternative is Windows 11 which is very similar to Windows 10
Time to speak to our representatives to switch to Linux Systems as Switzerland did for cyber security and for fiscal responsibility.
We must not fall behind that smart country once again.
What?! All that noise about Switzerland mandating usage of open sourced software in gov (there was a great step, but it’s far from mandating anything) was already weird, now we are switching to linux? And caring about security and fiscal responsibility? There has to be another country called Switzerland than the one I live in.
You’re right, I believe the only thing Switzerland mandated (or wants to mandate?) is for projects built FOR the government to be open sourced - and even then, there are exemptions.
Of course, unlike you, I don’t live in Switzerland, so I’m probably not as informed.
FREEBSD >0.009% RAAAAAH 👹👹👹💪💪💪💪💪🦾🔥🔥🔥
BSD is dying
It is sad but we build up Linux so we have a libre privacy and freedom alternative
