Windows

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Linux

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You wouldn’t download an operating system, would you?

Reminds me of the thing in Spain where the cops just immediately suspect anyone of drug trafficking for using pixel devices because thats what grapheneos runs on.

With the current political climate, my bf worries about exactly this. (Linux users being viewed as criminals, I mean.)

I’m less worried about any specific targeting of Linux than I am about some random tech bro whispering in Trump’s ear and suddenly he bans Open Source or something similarly unenforceable and insane.

My understanding of that was Facebook just gave up on human moderation and let an AI do whatever it wanted. Still unacceptable but totally foreseeable.

The irony of Facebook running entirely on Linux is not lost on me.

The bad thing is that more malware will arrive to Linux and from time to time malware that exploit undiscovered vulnerabilities.

It’s not perfect but there are different values

I consider myself a trans ally, but I’m struggling to keep up with the latest pronouns. Congrats!

Knoppix or bust

You can check the graph for all OSes from all devices combined in statcounter, and linux is also showing a growth, so it’s a real increase in usage.

I have been on Linux for over 15 years and even I don’t want to go back to the old days of manually installing Wine and having to create different prefixes to get different games to launch without sound. or some missing textures.

Absolutely. Linux in general has become very approachable. I recently came back to Linux after 15 years away and I have been very impressed with how well everything just works. I’ve only experienced very minor issues with peripherals that were solved with a simple Google search or update.

now is a good time to switch. Im so glad im off windows and their bullshit. a lot of games just work, including many online games, which is super cool. often there’s no difference between launching a game on Linux vs windows.

100% this. I’ve been on Linux for 27 years now (ffs I’m getting old), and until proton, I just wrote off gaming as a hit or miss experience, usually not worth the trouble. Now I’ll buy Windows only games without even checking compatibility in most cases. Unless it’s a full price AAA game, I’ll risk the off chance that it doesn’t work.

If we can get close to that kind of support for productivity software, I think Linux usage would explode. One of the problems with business adoption is that specialized software almost always skips Linux. The Affinity suite, for example. I’m hoping we see some snowballing now that Linux is growing so quickly, but getting Wine/Proton working with more non-game software would also be an enormous win.

Gaming on Mac was also more or less the same when it came to running windows games, had to use wine

And I’m sorry y’all I know wine is awesome but using it manually is a pain in the ass and I hated it and I consider myself more of an enthusiast

Honestly, 5 years ago Proton was already in pretty good shape. 2018 is when I switched to Linux, and already had very little trouble gaming.

I think it’s less Proton, more Vulkan/DXVK. Proton is just wrapping these amazing things. Before DXVK, games in Linux used to suck big time.

Last time I used fractional scaling with GNOME/Wayland it was a mess. Not sure of its state nowadays

Companies don't make native software anymore - most things are websites now

And the Windows version through Wine will still run better than the native… As is tradition.

🙃

It’s worth noting that some data reporting issues mean OS X and macOS are sometimes split, even though macOS is the newer branding for OS X. When combined, Apple’s desktop presence is around 24%

I’m a Mac user and everyone in my family is too (I use a Linux desktop for work), but I have a hard time believing MacOS has a 25% market share.

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I’d argue that VSCode plus extensions is a decent replacement for Visual Studio and actually superior for many other text editing tasks that are not C++.

What

Vulkan is absolutely amazing. It also runs LLMs these days almost as well as CUDA.

Don’t use the stock kernel. Use the HWE one if you want newer hardware to work on Ubuntu and its derivatives like Mint.

Or try a Fedora live-usb and see if it works with the newer kernels.

Yeah, even from inside the US it seems more and more iffy to trust our tech giants even as a paying customer. I love reading the stories about groups and governments in Europe adopting Linux/FOSS, but I’m also surprised I don’t see it more.

Everything in the news is so insane that I could see journalists ignoring/missing such mundane events as public sector software choices.

Which games? I know there are a few projects trying to improving linux modding.

Modding might not be as easy as on Windows, but for example, Mod Organizer 2 works on Linux. Steam Tinker Launch helps with MO2 installation and usage. Wabbajack also works after some tinkering, but you’ll need to search the Internet to figure out how to get it working.

I have recently played Fallout: New Vegas with Viva New Vegas modlist and Skyrim with Nordic Souls modlist under Linux. Took some tinkering to get the modding things working, and to figure out where each of the files are located, but other than those, the games worked fine.

Once you go through the pain of getting one modding tool working, you can then use it with other games without the initial hassle.

Steamdecks are still linux, I dont think they should be discounted.

AI crawler and other bots do not advertise as Linux if you want to look like normal traffic you advertise as windows or apple user

Feel free to stay on Windows or MacOS or whatever floats your boat. Won’t bother anyone.

If you migrate to it, I promise we’ll shut up.

It has no marketing budget so the only way the userbase can grow is by proselytizing.

You might be happier elsewhere.

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<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/0b669667-ca0c-4bb2-90a8-dc5fe403c01f.jpeg">

You’re in Technology@lemmy.world and we’re talking about… technology. Seems fitting.

You were never interested in the first place and are just looking for a way to appear above the discourse. Tool.

How do you side load apps onto iPhone?

Never expected to see a shoutout for my project on here. Thanks, glad it has helped you.

I share your enthusiasm. I wanted to learn Linux because so much scientific computing in my field relies on it, but when I dual booted, it was too easy to just retreat to Windows as the path of least resistance. I decided to fully make the switch to Linux as an attempt to force myself to learn stuff, but the big thing that held me back was nervousness about gaming.

Turns out that this fear was completely unfounded, and I have been utterly astounded at how easy gaming on Linux was. It wasn’t completely pain free, and there were a couple times that I needed to tinker somewhat, but it was no more difficult or frequent than I needed to do similar stuff on Windows.

I get what you mean about logging on feeling like home. Besides the scientific computing, a big part of what pushed me to Linux was how ambiently icked out I felt by using Windows — it didn’t feel like mine. Running Windows feels like renting a home from a landlord who doesn’t respect your boundaries and just comes in to make changes while you’re sleeping. Like, it’s not even about whether those changes are good or bad, but how weird it feels to constantly be reminded that this home is not truly yours.

He single-handedly changed a lot of people’s impression of Linux with a single video, and he did it gently enough to not intimidate and scare them away like many others did. I respect that.

Is he really the reason? I just started trying a bunch over the past month through vm’s to see which one I like the best because I want to take the leap soon. I am doing it mostly due to the video game performance and compatibility reaching high enough levels that I don’t think it will be a big issue anymore. I also listed out all my current Windows apps and looked up what the alternative is, and from what I see, there is nothing left that won’t run on Linux anymore. The next step is seeing how some compare to what I am used to.

I can’t be the only one who is noticing its current state and just wanting to try something different. I don’t hate windows like everyone talks about it online, but I am at the point where I am noticing they are only going to get worse with privacy and continue to make awful built in features that do more to benefit themselves over you. So the 2 lines have crossed paths, and I think it’s the perfect storm for Linux soon.

I’m out of the loop. What did he do?

Did this happen to you in particular? Most tech oriented people (and Linux users by extensions) are generally chill

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I’ve only ever found the Linux community helpful. I’m not saying there aren’t dicks out there (I saw the one in this thread even) but for the most part people are more than willing to help out.

God damn I love it :) I’ve been messing with Linux for 20 years now and there are some patterns that never seem to change.

In almost every thread about Linux there will usually be:

1 person bragging about 'Using Arch" btw (before that it was LFS or Slackware)

1 or 2 people saying this will be “The Year of the Linux Desktop”

2 or 3 people joking about it being “The Year of the Linux Desktop”

10 - 15 people explaining why it wont be or shouldn’t ever be “The Year of the Linux Desktop”

3 or 4 people complaining about how rude the Linux community is.

10-20 people saying that isn’t their experience and/or they always try to help people when they can.

1 or 2 people actually being rude (who are usually downvoted).

2 or 3 people saying how Windows/Mac OS is better in certain ways.

4 or 5 people complaining about one specific thing that doesn’t quite work for them in Linux, or one specific Windows/Mac only program they must use for work.

8- 10 people giving them suggestions about how to solve their issue or work around it.

Personally I love the Linux community. The people are mostly great, friendly, able to think outside the box, and willing to help others. I try to emulate that whenever possible. Sure you are going to get rude people in every scene, I just ignore them.

The majority of Americans are educated, but they all happen to live in the same 5 or so cities

Welcome Mr. Krabs

Despite not being a gamer myself, Gamers are or should be a hotly contested demographic for Linux to chase and capture. And thanks to Steam, there is a shift happening as gaming gets easier.

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I made the full work + home switch last year. I don’t know which experience is more improved over Windows: Installing the OS or Updating the OS.

ChromeOS is going to the Google graveyard, to be replaced by android

(Maybe this is a good thing as Chromebooks have an expiration date averaging 3-5 years where they stop getting Chrome updates, when if it’s android can get updates to the browser for a much longer time AND have Firefox as default)

Linux as an OS is generally meant as Desktop Linux, and it most definitely is in this context that is about desktop marketshare, Desktop Linux is mostly following freedesktop guidelines, which has traditionally helped standards on Linux a lot to streamline developments. So for instance XFCE/Gnome/KDE desktop apps can be run in all the different desktop environments. For instance also standardizing things like how tray icons work. Freedesktop is part of X.Org Foundation, and Chrome OS does not use X.org or Free Desktop standards at all. The newer Wayland to replace X is also an X.org standard.

So while Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel, it is NOT a Linux OS in the original sense, a term that became popular decades before Chrome OS or Android became a thing.

If you include Chrome OS you might as well include Android too. As it can run on for instance Raspberry Pi and other mini systems, and could be used as a desktop system.

Chrome OS is a Linux kernel based OS, and not much more than that.
It’s somewhat confusing in some situations that Linux as a desktop OS doesn’t have a unique name, but it wasn’t a problem originally, as what some prefer to call GNU/Linux was made 100% for desktop use originally.

The Linux kernel is way way more widespread and successful than what we usually term Desktop Linux or GNU/Linux.

TLDR:
Linux OS, Desktop Linux, GNU/Linux are generally meant as the same thing.
Chrome OS and Android do not belong in that category. They are Linux based as in the Linux kernel only, but do not follow the standards of Desktop Linux.

You can spin up a virtual machine running Tiny10 and install office on that. Should work fine.

Have you tried OnlyOffice? It has better compatibility with MS formats than LibreOffice.

I switched over to EndeavourOS around the same time. I relegated my old windows install to a virtual image, which I boot into for specific games and Excel. 10/10 recommend.

Visual Studio is a relic of the past. Does anyone still use it?

The only thing I really miss about visual studio is the automatic profiler. Everything else just felt archaic, bloated, slow, and unintuitive. Adding one line in cmake often does the same thing as clicking through five submenus which never once got updated since 2012.

People who use windows or Mac for anything but development do so for the same reasons as you, they are locked into some features. For example, at home I need a local music library manager with local sync to my phone music app and smart playlists. Mac is still the only platform with this.

At work I need MS exchange integration and all the features of native office. Even the Mac version isn’t good enough for my workflow.

My only hope would be to turn to emulators or something like that, but at that point I’m not really running Linux anyway. I’m just running something else in a container inside Linux.

In short, you want a .Net developement platform for Linux? And i assume something like VScode is not enough? The thing with .exe compilers in Linux ususally using Mingw/Msys2 because MS having their own proprietary compiler thing?

Without knowing what you are working on in Visual Studio, I would suggest checking out Jetbrains IDEs. I’ve used Rider for .NET quite successfully, and most of their other IDEs. I havent spent nearly as much time with CLion, but its supposed to be good. I haven’t used VS since like 2015, so I really don’t know how they compare these days. But I also haven’t missed it.

If it’s for C#, I’m doing pretty well with VSCode/VSCodium on Linux.

WPF and Forms does not work but I also have a Rider license from work which I use occasionally to maintain one of our old WPF applications, which we converted to Avalonia XPF. It works great and we now also have a Mac and Linux version.

It wasn’t immediately clear, I think you need to change your username to IUseArchBtw so we all know off the bat.

Real men and women run Slack. Tarballs Yum!

To head off the zealots-- ./././

This guy uses arch btw

My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting “OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!” to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.

What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it’s a major, major victory for all the distros.

The stats are from StatCounter which has this in their FAQ:

What methodology is used to calculate Statcounter Global Stats? Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device.

So it’s the percentage if web traffic (to sites that use this analytics service)

idk how you stayed on windows so long, had I tried linux sooner I wouldve dumped it faster, no software support or piracy for said software if it does have support is rough tho like houdinifx is hard to pirate if not impossible, davinci is easy tho, adobe has no support (no idea if it works well with wine pirated)

If anyone is stuck on windows and not able to switch there’s a program called wind hawk that will let you download customizations in windows 11 including moving the bar

Hey, don’t knock customization as a reason. A couple of decades ago, I was sold on Linux by silly Beryl/Compiz videos such as this one:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=038RHEGu4OY

I would say that most people who own a computer use local apps, and that the experience, and long-term costs, of using a local program is often better than doing something completely cloud-based.

They use data from webtraffic to make their charts, so talking about local apps doesn’t really have much to do with this website.

Video editors, photo editors, 3d modelers , animators, gamedevs, djs, etc.

I seriously don’t want everything to be a god damn webpage.

Me, who uses low end hardware and can’t spend several gigabytes for simple web apps that I can run locally for 10% of the hardware resources of the web equivalent.

Anyone who wants to own what they create and doesn’t want their work stolen for some startup’s plagiarism engine. Anyone who is interested in privacy. Anyone who wants a consistent user experience. Anyone who wants to be exempt from sinister targeted advertising. Anyone who is worried about censorship.

Welcome! Because we Linux aficionados are incorrigibly nosy and passionate, which distro did you pick and how are you liking it so far?

Same. It should be illegal for them to be forcing this shit on us. At least I only have to endure it on my work pc. No windows on personal devices

Do you think ChromeOS could fit that role? At least it shows that an alternative to Windows exists.

Im a long time Mac user but recently got a steamdeck. Desktop mode uses a version of kde and I really like it, if I had to switch from Mac I would definitely go with linux instead of windows. I think the steam deck will introduce a lot of people to linux.

I think the fastest way for linux to spread are a) a state-sponsored (totally open source) product that sees a free and open OS as part of a commitment to a free and open society. or 2) one of these fuckhead billionaires drops $200M or so into a trust, rather like the Poetry Foundation, which has the singular commitment to create an OS for people and to support it indefinitely.

I don’t think the answer to any of society’s ills is to get Wallmart involved. ed: walmart however its spelled WGAS.

I remember when Walmart sold boxed releases of RedHat and Mandrake. My first installs were fueled by $20 boxed releases at Walmart. I was so bummed when they stopped. But I could send away for Ubuntu releases on a CD for free.

I’d honestly be curious to see what percentage of Linux is steam decks now

That HN thread was such a shitshow lol. Also I dont think there is anything credible to suggest this increase from 4.6% to 5% is due to ‘non linux users’ or steamdeck. Steamdeck has contributed sure but desktop linux is growing but every single metric (steam hardware survey, PH Desktop user survey, US Gov traffic, tech youtuber trends, etc).

useless antidote: My friend who is a non techie gamer and she plays a lot of anti cheat type multiplayer games ASKED me to help her switch to linux mint and even when I said thats a bad idea she shouldnt switch she still wanted to. She ended up loving it even though there was a few pain points (fucken nvidia dual screen config on x11) and i think a few of her other friends have even switched after hearing her say it works well.

They’ve been showing ads in the start menu for years now. Since windows 8 honestly.

sparky linux LXQt was the one i settled to in the end. Despite having a top spec laptop and desktop PC, i wanted a light weight Linux, based on Debian, with no “fluff” at all. PC boots fast, shuts down in 2 seconds, no updates, secure, every program is instant. Windoze is plain stupid now with ads.

congratulations, you now walk with the righteous.

I did the same this month. My hardware wasn’t supported by Win11, so I installed Bazzite. It works so smoothly that I’ve already installed it on another PC and will do so on every PC in my household. I’ve been able to run every single game so far, whether they were from Steam, Ubisoft Connect, GOG, Battle.net or the EA app. I had no idea we were at this point already.

better than Linux ever was before

I did Linux on the desktop for 15 years. I was primarily Windows at home, Linux at work. With a job change, I took a detour through Mac for a couple of years, then WSL hit, and I ran Windows for quite a while.

I dropped back in, but only at home when Bookworm landed. I was playing Steam games with video acceleration right out of the gate. For a lot of people, it’s just going to work right out of the gate, and updates are just going to work. Now that a lot of shit’s going Electron, a lot of apps that had an edge in windows are now identical through their web interfaces.

If you’re not playing games with a lot of anti-cheat, using proprietary hardware or don’t need access to some windows-only apps (or you can put up with Wine), all the distros are up to the point where they operate just as you’d expect them to.

I bought a Dell with Ubuntu preloaded in 2019. I think it should still be possible (It’s their “developer edition” models).

It really depends on your hardware. I have a Dell XPS with an 11th gen Intel i5 that I’m running Fedora (Gnome desktop environment) on and it was rock solid from minute one. Things to check:

• Make sure your network card is supported. Intel network cards are some of the better choices for open source compatibility. On most laptops this can be swapped out if necessary.

• Camera

• Touchpad

• Fingerprint sensor

• Sound driver

• Any niche functions or modules. Think things like a secondary display on the keyboard, speciality ports etc.

Support is much better now than in the past and remember you don’t need everything to work to have a good time. My fingerprint sensor doesn’t work but it didn’t work well under windows so no big loss for me.

• You can always use a live bootable USB drive to test your hardware without having to commit to anything. This will tell you a lot about the experience you might have after installation. Heck, if you’re board you can try this right now and it won’t touch your current hard drive or operating system.

It’s so much easier than I had anticipated. Funnily enough, the most complicated thing was organizing a 16Gb USB stick to boot because I only had 20 year old ones with 4Gb. On a newly purchased bare AMD PC, I was able to set everything up after work and play games with my buddies the same evening.

I opted for Bazzite and everything ran right out of the box without any additional hardware drivers: gaming mouse, wifi, wireless PS4 controller, printer, NAS, Android phone. The game libraries from Steam, Epic, gog etc. can all be easily connected via Lutris and so far all the games I’ve tried have run. For programs that are only offered for other distributions, I have installed BoxBuddy, where you can create Distroboxes. For most Windows native programs Wine just works.

Admit it already, we know you run Arch.

Thanks to Trump, there appears to be some initiatives in Europe for governments to switch to open source. It seems they want to try and get out of relying on US companies for their technology. That would make a large jump in the user base.

They have tried before, and not had the best luck in dropping US vendors. Things seem to run out of steam at some point and they switch back. It will be interesting to see if things stick more this time.

I’m pulling for them to succeed.

I have Linux on my “gaming” pc and I just stopped gaming, I have like four hours of uninterrupted leisure a month and they’re spent in terminals trying to troubleshoot games

Yup. Lack of game support is a big roadblock – having just one or two friends on linux makes finding games your group can play together a real headache.

Another weird-ish hiccup, is the lack of good/cheap/trustworthy tax software. Installing windows once a year to do taxes is bonkers. Some solve it by having a VM that runs windows that they only use for taxes, but that isn’t really a fix. You’d still be a microbitch.

The biggest weakness is multiplayer games with aggressive anti-cheat. So those are the types of games you play, continue to stay away from Linux.

But for most games on Linux, it is just install and play now through a platform like Steam. I haven’t run into a game that I want to play that doesn’t basically “just work”.

I installed Bazzite last month, installed my games on Steam and I just played all my games. Cyberpunk, RDR2, Cities Skylines, Divinity Original Sin 2, no additional setup involved, no turning off the wi-fi just to create a local account. I was ready to reinstall Windows if it got too difficult. I got rid of Mint too. I thought I’d need it as people say it’s easier.

It has been very easy with Steam and GoG for a few yeara now. DXVK kicks ass.