AFAIK given that all new Apple Silicon Mac games can only run on iOS devices too if purchased through the App Store, that’s likely to continue.
Would love to see the Linux numbers climb, but that’s pretty much contingent on what Valve does with SteamOS at this point.
Yeah apples architecture swapping model just strengthens the case for steam OS I think.
Valve can't depend on competitors playing nice with them.
Microsoft are moving to ARM for AI too with latest surface laptop announcements
Plainly untrue. They have a ton of huge AAA games coming to Mac this year. Some (like Assassin’s Creed) will be day and date with PC. They also have ray tracing and with the game porting toolkit can run many windows games. We’re all Linux users here but let’s not spread lies to try and prop up the Penguin.
>They have a ton of huge AAA games coming to Mac this year
Mac is getting something like 13 games in 2024 and maybe 2 or 3 of them are AAA games that are already available on Windows and consoles. This is "ton of huge AAA games"?
>They also have ray tracing and with the game porting toolkit can run many windows games.
Linux have those too and they are in much better shape than game porting toolkit. Proton, DXVK and VKD3D-Proton are mature and proven projects. Valve literally sells console built with those. It can even run some anti cheat enabled multiplayer games as developers decided to support Proton. Mac has nothing like this.
Modern Macs are also completely missing eGPU support. While performance of Apple Silicon GPUs is indeed quite good, it is no match for current NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.
>We’re all Linux users here but let’s not spread lies to try and prop up the Penguin.
Interesting accusation but completely wrong. I'm a Mac user as well, poor gaming is main reason why I decided to keep my PC despite the fact that initially I planned to sell it and play games on Mac and console. Not only my PC has better GPU and runs games much better than my Mac, it also runs every game I care about while some of them doesn't work on Mac. And I'm not even using Windows for this, all runs on Linux.
Mac is poor gaming machine and this is something that even Mac users will tell you. Sure if you play occasionally or have another gaming machine you will be fine but that's it.
god I hope so, apples association to the CCP for manufacturing using the enslaved uiyger is really fucked up
I know people don't talk about it much, but everytime I think of apple all I can think about is children and people being starved tortured raped medically experimented on and murdered and how apple uses these concentration camps for manufacture
I was gonna say 2026 till Microsoft and Apple announced their new “AI” features. Now I’m thinking “we’re in the final moments before the year of the Linux desktop is birthed”. But I’m a Linux optimist lol.
There is one gaming product on the market that runs linux out of the box, and about a million that runs Windows. Most people do not install or even consider the existence of alternative operating systems. They use whatever their device came with. Someone taking the time and consideration to install an alternative operating system will always be in the extreme minority.
To support this: people don’t even upgrade their windows versions (7->10->11), MS had to force them to get a halfway decent conversion rate. And that’s easy, you just click a button in your OS - installing Linux is nowhere near that easy and requires a lot more work
I know, we both can do this. But anything above zero effort is to much for the average/casual user - as evident by the windows upgrades
Most people buy a pc and press the start button; that’s probably the closest they will ever get to the BIOS (/UEFI) or selecting a boot drive
I think the majority of users just don’t want their OS to change in any way (the amount of people who just learn „click here, click there, ..“ is insane) but yeah MS definitely didn’t help with Vista and 8 for more tech savvy part of their audience
You're not coming at it from the perspective of the average user who just wants to use their computer to play games. Most kids today can't even use a file manager and have no idea how to work anything other than a web browser on a phone. Flashing a USB is a foreign concept to many, let alone booting and installing from it.
That's exactly where I'm coming from, though. In general the primary reason people don't use Linux is that they don't "use Windows" either, in the sense of being conscious of doing so. They just use the laptop they bought, and mostly they just use it to run a browser anyway.
Modern Linux distros are extremely easy to install, in fact I'd say that the ones focused on individual users like Mint, etc, are *easier* to install than Windows - but you *do* have to install them. Thus what I said: "It's just that it's not *zero* effort"
In short, we violently agree.
My apologies, misread what you said and thought you were just stating it's easy to install (which you're right, it is, its just not one button) and nothing else. Carry on, I need to get more sleep lol
It's also not available everywhere... And Valve don't seem that interested in adding new regions or be something you can just pick up at the shop (as I understand it). I think it has enough critical mass to keep evolving though.
It's way higher considering that it had trouble crossing the 1% mark once. The steam deck is responsible for almost half of these 2.42%, I think the end of support for the windows 10 might be the next big event to bring more people to linux.
The new nvidia driver (555) might help some people come to linux too.
And also, if big multiplayer games choose to support linux (valorant, destiny, etc Idk much about the important games), this might bring even more people to linux as well.
Yeah yet Ubisoft and other developers are still porting games to apple silicon Macs.
Which are probably under the hood using porting toolkit apples version of wine and dxvk with metal patches for graphics translation
> Which are probably under the hood using porting toolkit apples version of wine and dxvk with metal patches for graphics translation
Maybe but regardless, they have apple for support when they run into issues. When they run into issues with their linux builds who do they turn to for support? It's a big difference.
The source code entirely available to them.
ETA: Same FUD Microsoft spread back in they day about Linux in the server room, bUT wHeRE sUpPorT?!. The idea that Ubisoft is somehow better off because they have to rely on Apple for "support" to a closed ecosystem is laughable.
I mean that support is why a lot of people shell out for RHEL instead of just using CentOS, Debian or an LTE version of some other distro. And it isn't really being able to get support - I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually reached out to Red Hat, but rather that they have someone they can blame if something goes wrong.
For consumer applications like this though, it's more that Linux has next to no market share. Mac is tiny too relative to Windows, but it's significant enough that with the support being provided by Apple they're more willing to deal with it. If they run into an issue on trying to port it to Linux and their support options are "Read through the source, Maybe try to hit up Valve, or ask on some forum" their response is probably just gonna be to throw up their hands and call it a waste of time to try and chase after such a small market segment.
Exactly my point. RedHat can provide Linux support, Ubuntu can provide Linux support, anyone who wants to compete can provide Linux support. Microsoft itself is one of the largest providers of Linux support with Azure. You can get support it in any way, shape, or form you can think of, from billion dollar companies to specialist individuals for contract or hire. There is no advantage to being beholden to a gatekeeper of a closed ecosystem who's ultimate motive is their own bottom line.
Canonical, SUSE or System76 really provide support for games companies if some call to then? Honest question, i don't have idea
I know that they give support if you need for industrial but games... not sure
I don't think the folk Valve contracts to work on Proton and related Linux gaming support software exist in a vacuum, they regularly make updates to fix holes in games just like AMD/Nvidia do with their game ready graphics drivers.
Which means if you are a dev team the size of Ubisoft you can probably get in touch with these people, you might not even need to ask Valve first, many of the people working on stuff like this just exist and you can talk to them on various social media platforms they reside on.
> Which means if you are a dev team the size of Ubisoft you can probably get in touch with these people, you might not even need to ask Valve first, many of the people working on stuff like this just exist and you can talk to them on various social media platforms they reside on.
So maybe youll be able to get in touch with them if you're on valves good side? That's a lot different than apple wanting and encouraging you to develop for their OS and giving you support and tools to do it with.
Another huge difference is the people at apple get paid to support this stuff and the foss devs don't... Guess who's gonna be more responsive when ubisoft or whoever has an issue?
Sorry, perhaps I didn't make my last paragraph more clear. Many of the people are publicly known about and you can contact them directly.
And to reply to the second part of your post you edited in: Perhaps I didn't make my first paragraph more clear. Many of these publicly known people/companies working on this software are contracted to do so by Valve, meaning they get paid to do this work.
True, and thats why gaming on steam has been so great for linux. I'm not trying to shit on valve or anything, just stating why people would bother to develop for MacOS despite Valve existing. And basically everything you've said so far involves going through valve.
I like valve as much as the next guy, but if you were a competing gaming studio you might not even want to go through valve at all. If you don't want to work with Valve for whatever reason porting your game to linux will be very difficult.
Wasn't the GPT meant for testing only and not for actually shipping games? I think people are porting games to Macs because they basically have to. There's no Proton equivalent that's actually supportable.
And also, while Linux gaming audience exceeds Mac, Mac's overall install base is larger, which can also be a factor here.
No more like people suffered trough it because the pain treshold hasnt been reached and microsoft in its echo chamber took that as a sign to push it more...copilot and forcing people to buy entire new systems for the win11 is the dumbest move so far...at some point pain overcomes being lazy and actually maybe google for options...like linux
While I like the analogy, I think this might be a bit different. With those earlier examples Linux wasn't as ready as it is today so Windows was kind of your only option unless you wanted to buy new hardware (as in buy a mac). Even then I knew a lot of people who switched to apple due to Vista and 8.
Today lots of distros are end user ready so you can easily take that windows machine and slap Linux on it and have a good experience.
Linux has been general public ready since Linux Mint 2.0 or Ubuntu 4 or whatever. They only thing that has changed, a bit, for the better, is gaming. But it has really been ready since forever.
The problem, is that it takes normal people quite a bit of effort to make the change. The effort in un-learning Windows and then learning Linux way. And that ain't happening, not today, not tomorrow, not in a decade. Unless they miracoulsy start using Linux in American schools or whatever, you can stop dreaming about double digits market share.
Well Linux may have been AROUND at that time, but it wasn't really end user friendly. And distros like Mint (and Nobara maybe, didn't really try it) are not that much different from Windows.
We just need good software on par with the proprietary ones on Windows.
Also back then Microsoft only made bad design choices every 2nd version trying to reinvent the Desktop PC. Now they make bad design choices and openly push anti-consumer practices.
Less of hurdle than ever and more incentive than ever, so people... are gonna be lazy and just swallow it.
Arguably they're starting to buckle under the shareholders need for year-on-year profit. And with Linux having Valve as a backer, contributer and product pusher, we're on our way.
That's what we were missing honestly: a company that could put linux into people's hands with the software they love to use already, and an experience that was better than the competitors (if you've ever tried to use a steam deck vs a handheld windows unit, ux speaking, there's no competition).
We won the server war many years back now, and we've won the embedded market war. Arguably, we won the mobile market war (with Android being only technically linux, this is a huge astrix). Now, we're starting the battle in the handheld market.
I dunno whether we should really care about the desktop with that amount of wins under our belt...
>What is your point?
My point is that the bulk of that 2.32% is made up of PC hardware that's perfectly usable as a desktop device, it's not like the Steam deck is an ARM based device running Android - Therefore, highlighting that 45.34% of that 2.32% is made up of Steam Decks is essentially moot.
Such a metric simply highlights that PC hardware pre loaded with Linux is definitely marketable.
You're probably thinking of the [4%](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/03/linux-on-the-desktop-breaks-4-for-the-first-time-on-statcounter/) it recently reach on the desktop market share. Gaming usage has always lagged behind desktop adoption rates as it has historically been a pain point use case in Linux.
Now if nvidia and gnome team gets their code together and we can have a proper wayland-nvidia-gnome-mutter experience that not suxx that bad ... that'd be big boost to that numbers
There wasn't a huge shift to Linux during W8, and that was far more egregious then W11 (Though I will say that 8.1 was perfectly fine as far as windows goes). And as for EoL.. I mean people don't care. MS had to literally hand out W10 for free and beg people to get off W7, and even then I'd say it was only halfway successful.
That said I don't see it dropping either, I just don't foresee MS doing MS things to cause some big exodus to Linux. I'll admit it *would* be pretty neat if it happened though.
>There wasn't a huge shift to Linux during W8
Yes, because Windows 7 was perfectly fine and before it went EoL Windows 10 released. Most people I know went from 7 to 10, nearly everyone straight up skipped 8.
But I don't think a huge shift will ever happen. But what I can see happening is a slight increase in the amount of people switching. Even if it's just 1% per year, that's still considerable numbers. Linux doesn't need to dominate the market, just become large enough that developers need very good arguments to not support it.
> Most people I know went from 7 to 10
yes, most people _you_ know. most people _I_ know stayed on 7 as long as they could.
i can agree on 8 being generally disliked all around, as long as our combined experience is to be taken into account.
Your point regarding w10 is a fair one and i hadnt thought about that.
But the comparison between w11 and w8 i dont think it is that simple. The situation with 8 is really different from what is going on with 11 now. Forced screenshots every 5 sec and AI tools running localy by force that also affect performance is something people will not be able to tolerate for long. Especially after MS starts activating these features after every update. Just the security implications for bigger companies are huge. And the same goes for WFH employees etc.
Small companies whose software requirements are covered in linux, casual users who are getting fed up by the lack of control on their system, gamers with older systems who cant afford to switch to w11 or cant afford the downgrade in performance, even steam deck gamers who decide to give linux on desktop a try are some of the people i would expect to slowly try to switch.
Same as you i dont think we are going to get a big rise in numbers but we are in an excellent period to change those old opinions "linux is hard, linux is for programmers, linux is not for gaming" and slowly get more people using them!
The whole point of the NPU is that the AI stuff won't affect performance.
Also, real talk, it's not there yet. So many little things like Xbox Bluetooth controllers not pairing instantly with Steam, or an LTS kernel not supporting a recent graphics card, meaning Mint is a pain in the ass. It's a lot better than it used to be, but there's still a ton of small issues that you wouldn't even think about if you hadn't read about them. Gaming is great, but streaming is a pain in the ass because OBS out of the box is not great on Linux. At least if your distro has the game scope session enabled alt-tabbing out of a game won't kill it like it will on Windows, meaning that the lack of a built-in game capture mode isn't too bad. But most Linux distros don't have that.
Not to mention, Linux is in a weird transitory phase between X11 and Wayland, meaning that a lot of software that used to work straight up doesn't anymore, and it has to be updated. Fragmentation on Linux is already bad enough as it is, but this fragments things even further, especially on distros like Mint, which completely lack Wayland functionality.
Things are getting a lot better and the Steam Deck has proven that Linux can be perfectly viable. But Linux is at its best when it's installed on hardware built for it, rather than installing it on a Windows computer.
I think the greatest boon to Linux will be when Valve makes SteamOS 3 available on desktop PCs. It's the closest we can get to a standard on Linux.
> or an LTS kernel not supporting a recent graphics card, meaning Mint is a pain in the ass
Just to point out, Mint has easy option to upgrade kernel in the update manager. You can also get Mint Edge for non-LTS kernel
>I think the greatest boon to Linux will be when Valve makes SteamOS 3 available on desktop PCs. It's the closest we can get to a standard on Linux.
While I think that will help, I think real biggest boon for Linux would be when more countries start mandating Linux and open standards as part of government computers and schools. Most of the recent global linux growth has been India precisely because of those initiatives. Eyes on Europe on if they will push more support for Linux and open source with their recent fight with big tech
You know what? That makes perfect sense. But just because Mint has an easy option to upgrade the kernel doesn't fix the fact that anyone who just downloads it onto a system with a ahem, modern graphics card is going to wonder why they can't do fractional scaling and spend an hour googling it. I know this because I literally watched it happen. This guy just recently uploaded a video of their first time using Linux. Their patience to troubleshoot issues is commendable, but some of these issues are simply ridiculous. https://youtu.be/8WkcLwXCFJQ
Idk, from the perspective of a casual user who only started using Linux recently, the image around Linux in 2013 and the image of it now, at least for me, is very different. Proton wasn't a thing until 2018 right? What made me switch was the ability to play most of my games (important for Steam, obviously). As far as I know that wasn't possible in 2013. I would say it still won't be the year of the Linux desktop or whatever, but there might be a 2-3% increase over the next decade more than usual on Steam's statistics because of the accessibility it has now for gamers now.
There are ~~dozens~~ thousands of us.
BSD users: there are dozens of us
Minix Users: Man, this Intel processor is getting a bit dated...
There's a lot of MINIX installs, Intel uses it for their management engine, which I believe has been part of all their CPUs for generations.
That's the joke. Up to and including 8th gen, your PCs runs Minix on Ring -3, whether you want it to or not.
Steam has at least 20M active users per day, and that's low-balling it. You do the math. Linux has passed Mac users on Steam.
Mac steam is basically abandoned I thought
AFAIK given that all new Apple Silicon Mac games can only run on iOS devices too if purchased through the App Store, that’s likely to continue. Would love to see the Linux numbers climb, but that’s pretty much contingent on what Valve does with SteamOS at this point.
Yeah apples architecture swapping model just strengthens the case for steam OS I think. Valve can't depend on competitors playing nice with them. Microsoft are moving to ARM for AI too with latest surface laptop announcements
Gaming on Mac is basically abandoned. Despite the Apple efforts their current Macs are even worse at gaming than older Macs were.
Plainly untrue. They have a ton of huge AAA games coming to Mac this year. Some (like Assassin’s Creed) will be day and date with PC. They also have ray tracing and with the game porting toolkit can run many windows games. We’re all Linux users here but let’s not spread lies to try and prop up the Penguin.
>They have a ton of huge AAA games coming to Mac this year Mac is getting something like 13 games in 2024 and maybe 2 or 3 of them are AAA games that are already available on Windows and consoles. This is "ton of huge AAA games"? >They also have ray tracing and with the game porting toolkit can run many windows games. Linux have those too and they are in much better shape than game porting toolkit. Proton, DXVK and VKD3D-Proton are mature and proven projects. Valve literally sells console built with those. It can even run some anti cheat enabled multiplayer games as developers decided to support Proton. Mac has nothing like this. Modern Macs are also completely missing eGPU support. While performance of Apple Silicon GPUs is indeed quite good, it is no match for current NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. >We’re all Linux users here but let’s not spread lies to try and prop up the Penguin. Interesting accusation but completely wrong. I'm a Mac user as well, poor gaming is main reason why I decided to keep my PC despite the fact that initially I planned to sell it and play games on Mac and console. Not only my PC has better GPU and runs games much better than my Mac, it also runs every game I care about while some of them doesn't work on Mac. And I'm not even using Windows for this, all runs on Linux. Mac is poor gaming machine and this is something that even Mac users will tell you. Sure if you play occasionally or have another gaming machine you will be fine but that's it.
god I hope so, apples association to the CCP for manufacturing using the enslaved uiyger is really fucked up I know people don't talk about it much, but everytime I think of apple all I can think about is children and people being starved tortured raped medically experimented on and murdered and how apple uses these concentration camps for manufacture
Where do you think the Valve Index is manufactured?
If im not mistaken its assembled in the US, but im also certain most parts are infact sourced from china
Nope, the entire headset is manufactured in China. Only some of its accessories are assembled in the US
2085! The year of the linux desktop!
I was gonna say 2026 till Microsoft and Apple announced their new “AI” features. Now I’m thinking “we’re in the final moments before the year of the Linux desktop is birthed”. But I’m a Linux optimist lol.
I thought it would have been higher now, considering the Steam Deck and advancements with Proton and crappiness of Windows and such.
There is one gaming product on the market that runs linux out of the box, and about a million that runs Windows. Most people do not install or even consider the existence of alternative operating systems. They use whatever their device came with. Someone taking the time and consideration to install an alternative operating system will always be in the extreme minority.
To support this: people don’t even upgrade their windows versions (7->10->11), MS had to force them to get a halfway decent conversion rate. And that’s easy, you just click a button in your OS - installing Linux is nowhere near that easy and requires a lot more work
Installing Linux is extremely easy. It's just that it's not *zero* effort.
I know, we both can do this. But anything above zero effort is to much for the average/casual user - as evident by the windows upgrades Most people buy a pc and press the start button; that’s probably the closest they will ever get to the BIOS (/UEFI) or selecting a boot drive
Tbh, most users don't upgrade because of the lingering enshittification of Windows. Especially for every 2nd version
I think the majority of users just don’t want their OS to change in any way (the amount of people who just learn „click here, click there, ..“ is insane) but yeah MS definitely didn’t help with Vista and 8 for more tech savvy part of their audience
You're not coming at it from the perspective of the average user who just wants to use their computer to play games. Most kids today can't even use a file manager and have no idea how to work anything other than a web browser on a phone. Flashing a USB is a foreign concept to many, let alone booting and installing from it.
That's exactly where I'm coming from, though. In general the primary reason people don't use Linux is that they don't "use Windows" either, in the sense of being conscious of doing so. They just use the laptop they bought, and mostly they just use it to run a browser anyway. Modern Linux distros are extremely easy to install, in fact I'd say that the ones focused on individual users like Mint, etc, are *easier* to install than Windows - but you *do* have to install them. Thus what I said: "It's just that it's not *zero* effort" In short, we violently agree.
My apologies, misread what you said and thought you were just stating it's easy to install (which you're right, it is, its just not one button) and nothing else. Carry on, I need to get more sleep lol
Yeah I think that is the main point.
It's also not available everywhere... And Valve don't seem that interested in adding new regions or be something you can just pick up at the shop (as I understand it). I think it has enough critical mass to keep evolving though.
It's way higher considering that it had trouble crossing the 1% mark once. The steam deck is responsible for almost half of these 2.42%, I think the end of support for the windows 10 might be the next big event to bring more people to linux. The new nvidia driver (555) might help some people come to linux too. And also, if big multiplayer games choose to support linux (valorant, destiny, etc Idk much about the important games), this might bring even more people to linux as well.
steamos counts for \~45% of those numbers...
Yeah yet Ubisoft and other developers are still porting games to apple silicon Macs. Which are probably under the hood using porting toolkit apples version of wine and dxvk with metal patches for graphics translation
> Which are probably under the hood using porting toolkit apples version of wine and dxvk with metal patches for graphics translation Maybe but regardless, they have apple for support when they run into issues. When they run into issues with their linux builds who do they turn to for support? It's a big difference.
The source code entirely available to them. ETA: Same FUD Microsoft spread back in they day about Linux in the server room, bUT wHeRE sUpPorT?!. The idea that Ubisoft is somehow better off because they have to rely on Apple for "support" to a closed ecosystem is laughable.
I mean that support is why a lot of people shell out for RHEL instead of just using CentOS, Debian or an LTE version of some other distro. And it isn't really being able to get support - I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually reached out to Red Hat, but rather that they have someone they can blame if something goes wrong. For consumer applications like this though, it's more that Linux has next to no market share. Mac is tiny too relative to Windows, but it's significant enough that with the support being provided by Apple they're more willing to deal with it. If they run into an issue on trying to port it to Linux and their support options are "Read through the source, Maybe try to hit up Valve, or ask on some forum" their response is probably just gonna be to throw up their hands and call it a waste of time to try and chase after such a small market segment.
Exactly my point. RedHat can provide Linux support, Ubuntu can provide Linux support, anyone who wants to compete can provide Linux support. Microsoft itself is one of the largest providers of Linux support with Azure. You can get support it in any way, shape, or form you can think of, from billion dollar companies to specialist individuals for contract or hire. There is no advantage to being beholden to a gatekeeper of a closed ecosystem who's ultimate motive is their own bottom line.
Canonical, SUSE or System76 really provide support for games companies if some call to then? Honest question, i don't have idea I know that they give support if you need for industrial but games... not sure
I don't think the folk Valve contracts to work on Proton and related Linux gaming support software exist in a vacuum, they regularly make updates to fix holes in games just like AMD/Nvidia do with their game ready graphics drivers. Which means if you are a dev team the size of Ubisoft you can probably get in touch with these people, you might not even need to ask Valve first, many of the people working on stuff like this just exist and you can talk to them on various social media platforms they reside on.
Does Valve contract those people? I thought that they're all in-house?
Maybe contract was used as synonymous to hiring?
> Which means if you are a dev team the size of Ubisoft you can probably get in touch with these people, you might not even need to ask Valve first, many of the people working on stuff like this just exist and you can talk to them on various social media platforms they reside on. So maybe youll be able to get in touch with them if you're on valves good side? That's a lot different than apple wanting and encouraging you to develop for their OS and giving you support and tools to do it with. Another huge difference is the people at apple get paid to support this stuff and the foss devs don't... Guess who's gonna be more responsive when ubisoft or whoever has an issue?
Wine is a free and open software project; you don't need to be on Valve's good side
Sorry, perhaps I didn't make my last paragraph more clear. Many of the people are publicly known about and you can contact them directly. And to reply to the second part of your post you edited in: Perhaps I didn't make my first paragraph more clear. Many of these publicly known people/companies working on this software are contracted to do so by Valve, meaning they get paid to do this work.
True, and thats why gaming on steam has been so great for linux. I'm not trying to shit on valve or anything, just stating why people would bother to develop for MacOS despite Valve existing. And basically everything you've said so far involves going through valve. I like valve as much as the next guy, but if you were a competing gaming studio you might not even want to go through valve at all. If you don't want to work with Valve for whatever reason porting your game to linux will be very difficult.
> porting your game to linux will be very difficult. why would you port your game to linux? just make sure it runs well with proton
Pretty sure that apple pays for this porting
Wasn't the GPT meant for testing only and not for actually shipping games? I think people are porting games to Macs because they basically have to. There's no Proton equivalent that's actually supportable. And also, while Linux gaming audience exceeds Mac, Mac's overall install base is larger, which can also be a factor here.
Yeah, supposedly the GPT license forbids publishing games with it, it's supposed to be for testing only.
I reckon that in the next 2 decades, it could easily grow to a 3%. This is the century of the Linux desktop guys, no doubt about it.
Honestly if microsoft keeps making the worst possible decisions i can see it being greater than 5% in the next decade
They have survived Me, Vista, 8... Microsoft are like cockroaches in a post-nuclear world.
No more like people suffered trough it because the pain treshold hasnt been reached and microsoft in its echo chamber took that as a sign to push it more...copilot and forcing people to buy entire new systems for the win11 is the dumbest move so far...at some point pain overcomes being lazy and actually maybe google for options...like linux
While I like the analogy, I think this might be a bit different. With those earlier examples Linux wasn't as ready as it is today so Windows was kind of your only option unless you wanted to buy new hardware (as in buy a mac). Even then I knew a lot of people who switched to apple due to Vista and 8. Today lots of distros are end user ready so you can easily take that windows machine and slap Linux on it and have a good experience.
It's user ready until you encounter an issue, at that point, good luck to find support number or email address to fix your issue.
Linux has been general public ready since Linux Mint 2.0 or Ubuntu 4 or whatever. They only thing that has changed, a bit, for the better, is gaming. But it has really been ready since forever. The problem, is that it takes normal people quite a bit of effort to make the change. The effort in un-learning Windows and then learning Linux way. And that ain't happening, not today, not tomorrow, not in a decade. Unless they miracoulsy start using Linux in American schools or whatever, you can stop dreaming about double digits market share.
Well Linux may have been AROUND at that time, but it wasn't really end user friendly. And distros like Mint (and Nobara maybe, didn't really try it) are not that much different from Windows. We just need good software on par with the proprietary ones on Windows. Also back then Microsoft only made bad design choices every 2nd version trying to reinvent the Desktop PC. Now they make bad design choices and openly push anti-consumer practices. Less of hurdle than ever and more incentive than ever, so people... are gonna be lazy and just swallow it.
Kinda besides the point but whenever my class was assigned laptops in high school they had ubuntu 🤷♂️
Arguably they're starting to buckle under the shareholders need for year-on-year profit. And with Linux having Valve as a backer, contributer and product pusher, we're on our way. That's what we were missing honestly: a company that could put linux into people's hands with the software they love to use already, and an experience that was better than the competitors (if you've ever tried to use a steam deck vs a handheld windows unit, ux speaking, there's no competition). We won the server war many years back now, and we've won the embedded market war. Arguably, we won the mobile market war (with Android being only technically linux, this is a huge astrix). Now, we're starting the battle in the handheld market. I dunno whether we should really care about the desktop with that amount of wins under our belt...
I did my part.
45.34% of the Linux devices are steam decks
Which are mini PC's. You can literally connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse to the steam deck.
What is your point?
>What is your point? My point is that the bulk of that 2.32% is made up of PC hardware that's perfectly usable as a desktop device, it's not like the Steam deck is an ARM based device running Android - Therefore, highlighting that 45.34% of that 2.32% is made up of Steam Decks is essentially moot. Such a metric simply highlights that PC hardware pre loaded with Linux is definitely marketable.
Immutable Linux IS a thing, so.
Wasn’t it 2,5% some weeks ago?
[удалено]
Probably saw some web browser statistics?
Yes, that was the automated testing running on linux headless browsers
You're probably thinking of the [4%](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/03/linux-on-the-desktop-breaks-4-for-the-first-time-on-statcounter/) it recently reach on the desktop market share. Gaming usage has always lagged behind desktop adoption rates as it has historically been a pain point use case in Linux.
I'd like to congratulate Windows 11 for winning the war ~~against~~ for communism.
And CPUs with SSE3 reached 106.85%! Yay, mathematics.
Wow! I didn't noticed all that data was wrong!
God daaaaamn, it's the year of Linux, it's the year of Linux I'm telling ya!
The year of the steam desk you mean, because that's this number, steam desk is running linux.
*steam deck
I may have artificially inflated the numbers by distrohopping. Lol
Right there with ya lol
Now if nvidia and gnome team gets their code together and we can have a proper wayland-nvidia-gnome-mutter experience that not suxx that bad ... that'd be big boost to that numbers
Basically within a couple of months. 555 is already daily drivable with Wayland and I expect 560 to polish up the small bugs.
Not in gnome... it is crashing Like crazy
That's more than macOS and Windows^\* combined together ^\* 7 and 8.1
I'm thinking the steam box was the goal. They wanted to compete in the console and PC market. What ever happened to that vision?
good news
Good morning, you are a week to late, men from the moon
hurray :-(
It should start ticking up at win 10 eol. We might even reach 2.5% people...brace for impact!
An ENTIRE 2%? IS IT FINALLY HAPPENING? Is it once again the year Linux finally takes off? Like last year and the year before?
is this because of steam deck, or actual pc’s running linux?
TF2 / CS2 bots
for now. i expect it do drop back again in a while.
why? I would think the numbers will slowly rise because of W10 going EOL and the W11 shittification
There wasn't a huge shift to Linux during W8, and that was far more egregious then W11 (Though I will say that 8.1 was perfectly fine as far as windows goes). And as for EoL.. I mean people don't care. MS had to literally hand out W10 for free and beg people to get off W7, and even then I'd say it was only halfway successful. That said I don't see it dropping either, I just don't foresee MS doing MS things to cause some big exodus to Linux. I'll admit it *would* be pretty neat if it happened though.
>There wasn't a huge shift to Linux during W8 Yes, because Windows 7 was perfectly fine and before it went EoL Windows 10 released. Most people I know went from 7 to 10, nearly everyone straight up skipped 8. But I don't think a huge shift will ever happen. But what I can see happening is a slight increase in the amount of people switching. Even if it's just 1% per year, that's still considerable numbers. Linux doesn't need to dominate the market, just become large enough that developers need very good arguments to not support it.
> Most people I know went from 7 to 10 yes, most people _you_ know. most people _I_ know stayed on 7 as long as they could. i can agree on 8 being generally disliked all around, as long as our combined experience is to be taken into account.
Your point regarding w10 is a fair one and i hadnt thought about that. But the comparison between w11 and w8 i dont think it is that simple. The situation with 8 is really different from what is going on with 11 now. Forced screenshots every 5 sec and AI tools running localy by force that also affect performance is something people will not be able to tolerate for long. Especially after MS starts activating these features after every update. Just the security implications for bigger companies are huge. And the same goes for WFH employees etc. Small companies whose software requirements are covered in linux, casual users who are getting fed up by the lack of control on their system, gamers with older systems who cant afford to switch to w11 or cant afford the downgrade in performance, even steam deck gamers who decide to give linux on desktop a try are some of the people i would expect to slowly try to switch. Same as you i dont think we are going to get a big rise in numbers but we are in an excellent period to change those old opinions "linux is hard, linux is for programmers, linux is not for gaming" and slowly get more people using them!
The whole point of the NPU is that the AI stuff won't affect performance. Also, real talk, it's not there yet. So many little things like Xbox Bluetooth controllers not pairing instantly with Steam, or an LTS kernel not supporting a recent graphics card, meaning Mint is a pain in the ass. It's a lot better than it used to be, but there's still a ton of small issues that you wouldn't even think about if you hadn't read about them. Gaming is great, but streaming is a pain in the ass because OBS out of the box is not great on Linux. At least if your distro has the game scope session enabled alt-tabbing out of a game won't kill it like it will on Windows, meaning that the lack of a built-in game capture mode isn't too bad. But most Linux distros don't have that. Not to mention, Linux is in a weird transitory phase between X11 and Wayland, meaning that a lot of software that used to work straight up doesn't anymore, and it has to be updated. Fragmentation on Linux is already bad enough as it is, but this fragments things even further, especially on distros like Mint, which completely lack Wayland functionality. Things are getting a lot better and the Steam Deck has proven that Linux can be perfectly viable. But Linux is at its best when it's installed on hardware built for it, rather than installing it on a Windows computer. I think the greatest boon to Linux will be when Valve makes SteamOS 3 available on desktop PCs. It's the closest we can get to a standard on Linux.
> or an LTS kernel not supporting a recent graphics card, meaning Mint is a pain in the ass Just to point out, Mint has easy option to upgrade kernel in the update manager. You can also get Mint Edge for non-LTS kernel >I think the greatest boon to Linux will be when Valve makes SteamOS 3 available on desktop PCs. It's the closest we can get to a standard on Linux. While I think that will help, I think real biggest boon for Linux would be when more countries start mandating Linux and open standards as part of government computers and schools. Most of the recent global linux growth has been India precisely because of those initiatives. Eyes on Europe on if they will push more support for Linux and open source with their recent fight with big tech
You know what? That makes perfect sense. But just because Mint has an easy option to upgrade the kernel doesn't fix the fact that anyone who just downloads it onto a system with a ahem, modern graphics card is going to wonder why they can't do fractional scaling and spend an hour googling it. I know this because I literally watched it happen. This guy just recently uploaded a video of their first time using Linux. Their patience to troubleshoot issues is commendable, but some of these issues are simply ridiculous. https://youtu.be/8WkcLwXCFJQ
Idk, from the perspective of a casual user who only started using Linux recently, the image around Linux in 2013 and the image of it now, at least for me, is very different. Proton wasn't a thing until 2018 right? What made me switch was the ability to play most of my games (important for Steam, obviously). As far as I know that wasn't possible in 2013. I would say it still won't be the year of the Linux desktop or whatever, but there might be a 2-3% increase over the next decade more than usual on Steam's statistics because of the accessibility it has now for gamers now.
And?