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India is the eye opener … an enormous market of 1.5 billion people and the majority of them are too poor to pay for any specialty OS …
it’s going to turn into a futuristic dystopia down there … people living in slums but scrounging up old neglected and forgotten hardware to bring them back online with Open Source Software.Edit: I don’t normally make big corrections or changes to my comments but after rereading this, I think I went a bit too far with my assumptions about another country and culture … thanks @embed_me@programming.dev for putting it to my attention
Ok as an Indian allow me to interject. The reason people use linux is not because of poverty. Even the cheapest laptops come preloaded with activated windows.
We get introduced to Linux based OSs in schools. That plus people are heavily pushed into engineering and lately computer science and software engineering.
Most people in software around me in Europe are moving to OSX for the convenience and better hardware. How does it look like in India?
This is very good. The higher those numbers go, the more pressure there will be for better official support for both HW and SW.
FOSS is fantastic. But lack of options (FOSS or paid) for a few of my use cases keeps me stapled to Windows and WSL. Unfortunately. I’m hoping the momentum shifts.
Okay, I guess I’ll say it. Year of Linux Desktop!
https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology
Considering their methodology, I wonder how many of these are Steam Decks registering as “desktops” when they visit a website in the web broweser?
I would consider the steamdeck to be a linux desktop if someone is browsing the internet on it.
My journey to Linux pretty much started with the reddit thing. I moved to Lemmy and started slowly eliminating corporations out of my life.
if we add chromeOS to it which is also linux we have more than 5 percent. The future is ours.
It’s Linux, but worse
I wouldn’t count ChromeOS just as we don’t count Android.
Android uses the linux kernel but is not regular linux we use which is GNU/linux but ChromeOS actually is GNU/linux a “real” linux distro
If so, then why we cannot boot other Linux distributions on Chromebook devices and cannot run standard Linux apps/programs without using Crostini virtual machine?
Android just use Linux kernel, that was trawled by Google, then SoC manufacturer, then device maker.
ChromeOS is better, as it is based on Gentoo, but is incompatible with the rest of ecosystem and most devices do not have drivers for mainline Linux kernel.
If you don’t believe me, look at the community effort to reverse-engineer some Chromebook laptops to run normal Linux distro on them: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Thus I think we should not mix them in statistics. It would be like mixing MacOS with FreeBSD…
Meanwhile in India: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india (14.51%)
indias growth is so important, it’s such a dense country so growth will be rapidly exponential unlike 95℅ of other countries. it’s the perfect mixing pot of technologically literate, dense, money conscious, and distrustful of western influence for linux to thrive in. once india is dominated by linux, it will expand outwards so fast.
When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It’s a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we’re close!
Wowzer, ok, that’s seriously impressive though, like in 2022 I feel we were stuck at 2-2.5% and in 2023 we passed 3% for the first time and now we’re at almost 4??? That’s like DOUBLING the market share in a year
I use Linux (Arch actually) as my daily driver - I’m the MD of a small IT business in the UK. I have at least one employee who is asking me to create a Linux standard deployment to replace Windows because they don’t like it anymore - W11 is quite divisive.
For a corp laptop/desktop you might need Exchange email - so that might be Evolution with EWS. You’ll want “drive letters” - Samba, Winbind and perhaps autofs. You’ll need an office suite - Libre Office works fine. There’s this too: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for more MS integration - if that’s your bag.
I often see people getting whizzed up about whether LO can compete with MSO. I wrote a finite (yes, finite) capacity scheduler for a factory in MS Excel, back in 1995/6 - it involved a lot of VBA and a mass of checksums etc. I used to teach word processing and DTP (Quark, Word, Ventura and others). LO cuts it. It gets on my nerves when I’m told that LO isn’t capable by someone who is incapable of fixing a widow or orphan or for whom leading and kerning are incomprehensible.
I use Arch too, BTW.
I suspect that it’s not Linux that is on the rise, but overall PC market that is shrinking. It’s been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.
The desktop/mobile ratio chart aligns with this
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet
I mean, it’s no secret that the SteamDeck is a huge reason why. Praise Gaben, may we game on every platform equally.
I switched my gaming PC to Linux two months ago and I’m loving it. I’ve only had to boot my Windows drive twice.
3.82% is actually pretty damn good. And if Windows 12 pushes us into a subscription model I can see that gap rising.
Also, if/when DirectX gets native Linux support, or DXVK/VKD3D matches the API in performance, that’ll be it.
Personally I’m thanking Valve for this.
