The Decade of Linux on the Desktop. You're in it.

[liam_on_linux]

Apple macOS is a UNIX™. It's the best-selling commercial Unix of all time. I wonder if how many old-school Unix folks consider all Mac users in the 21st century to be their brothers-in-arms? Not many, I'd guess.

When it happened, many Unix folks don't consider it a _real_ Unix. Even thought just a few years later, and AIUI after spending a _lot_ on the exercise, Apple got the UNIX™ branding.

 

Now, by contrast:

 

I've spent proper time trying to get some rough estimates on Linux distro usage. Ubuntu is cagey but claims ITRO low double-digit millions of machines fetching updates. Let's say circa 20M users.

 

Apparently, over 95% on LTS and the vast majority on the default GNOME edition. (Poor sods.)

 

The others are cagier still, but Statistica and others have vaguely replicable numbers.

 

My estimates are:

 

~2x as many Ubuntu as Debian users

 

Between them they are about 2/3 of Linux users

 

All Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora derivatives are about 10% of the market.

 

Comparing them to Steam client numbers, Arch is much of the rest: the gap between ~75% Debian family and ~10% RH family.

 

In China, the government has been pushing Linux *hard* for 8-9 years. Uniontech (Deepin) is one of the biggest and last November boasted 3M paid users. 

 

Is that all? 

 

Kylin is also big but let's guess it's #2.  

 

So, if, optimistically, 10% pay, then that's only 20-30M, comparable to Ubuntu in ROTW.

 

Maybe Kylin (also a Debian BTW, they both are) brings it to 50M. 

 

ChromeOS is a Linux. It's Gentoo underneath. Google sells hundreds of millions. Estimated user base is 200-300M and probably a lot more.

 

Chromebooks outsold Macs (by $ not units, so 10x over) in the US by 2017 and worldwide by 2020.

 

Which means there are, ballpark, order of magnitude scale, 10x as many ChromeOS users as all other Linuxes put together.

 

The year of Linux came 5-6 years ago.

 

But it's the _wrong kind_ of Linux so the Penguinisti didn't even notice. 

Comments

[lovingboth]

Given the number of bots, I wouldn't trust any stats from web browsing.

Be interesting to know the splits of, for example, downloads of Zoom.

[liam_on_linux]

A fair point... and something that is getting worse and worse...

[lovingboth]

The other thought is to wonder how many of those Ubuntu repository hits are from servers - I started using them on servers rather than Debian back in 2020, I think, because they do do some things noticeably better than pure Debian unsurprisingly given this is where the income comes from - and so don't really count as 'desktop Linux'.

Of the rest, a bunch are going to be downstream distros like Linux Mint which sort of count for counting them as 'Ubuntu' and sort of don't.

[dboddie]

And how many hits are from virtual machines used for building or continuous integration?

[dboddie]

I think the milestone of Linux on the desktop is pretty much irrelevant these days for most people in the home. If you have a desk job, it might have some relevance, but I imagine that most people don't care too much about what they have to use as long as someone else maintains it.

It becomes more relevant if you have to work somewhere with a bring your own device policy, especially if you don't get the choice of OS yet you still have to keep it running.

I would guess that Linux passed the milestone of being the dominant consumer OS when Android got popular. Not that it did much good for user freedom.

[liam_on_linux]

There's a sort of Zen koan like sequence here, it seems to me.

"How can we solve the problems of updating?" "Aha! Well, 2 independent boot partitions, so there's fallback and it will also help if failing disk blocks destroy one... And we can keep a known good one by having one update the other..."

"So, then, how do we solve the problem of app packaging?"

"Ahh, grasshopper, the answer is simple. Allow no additional apps."

The answer to multiple packaging systems is... not to have a packaging system.

But I think it's hilarious that a Linux has come along and solved public-facing desktop Linux, sold hundreds of thousands of units and used by millions of people... and the Linux world didn't notice and denies it when pointed out.

[dboddie]

To be flippant, it's either NIH Syndrome or the No True Scotsman fallacy. ;-)

A more serious observation would be that ChromeOS solves a problem that most hardcore (GNU/)Linux developers wouldn't care about.

I used to think that Android was the Windows of the modern era, but perhaps it's Chrome OS.

[liam_on_linux]

A more serious observation would be that ChromeOS solves a problem that most hardcore (GNU/)Linux developers wouldn't care about.

Fair point. Who wants dead easy and tough as old boots, anyway?

I used to think that Android was the Windows of the modern era, but perhaps it's Chrome OS.

Ha!

Android sort of is Windows, yes. The low-rent knock-off of Apple's product that actually manages to be usable and get the job done, for less.

But like Windows itself, creeping featurism is setting in...

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure about the Featurism, the most recent version of Android doesn't seem to have any new interesting features in it.

[history_monk]

The thing that old-time Unix people recognise as "Unix" is the user interface that consists almost entirely of programming languages. Shells, text processors, and so on. Lots of data in human-readable text files, processed with those tools, and with custom ones you write for yourself.

For nearly thirty years, I worked that way, on all kinds of Unixes (HP, Sun, DEC, AIX, Irix, Linux, and macOS), using Xterms displayed by a good X server on a Windows machine. This was pretty good: I had the Windows that the company insisted I use, but it didn't get in the way of work. Then the company didn't want to pay for X servers any more, and the old one can't do SSH.

So now I VNC to a Linux machine (Currently Rocky 8.10) and use a Linux desktop there. It's not good. I basically don't like GUIs, but if I turn Windows down hard, it's usable. macOS is determined to entertain me in ways that just annoy me. The desktop I'm presented with on Linux has not been polished. It is crude and clunky, and terrible at window management. It seems to have been designed by someone who had been told about GUIs, but took all the wrong lessons from that, making using the GUI the thing you have to concentrate on, getting in the way of working.

It appears that if you have a multiplicity of GUIs, you get a lot of half-arsed ones. If a commercial organisation puts a lot of work into polishing one, it can at least be less crude.

[liam_on_linux]

It seems to have been designed by someone who had been told about GUIs, but took all the wrong lessons from that, making using the GUI the thing you have to concentrate on, getting in the way of working.

Firm agreement from here.

This is part of the tragedy and the mystery of Ubuntu's Unity.

One distro vendor made a serious effort to make a good desktop. It succeeded. But a lot of people don't know how to drive Windows via the keyboard, and they don't know OS X, and they couldn't use it and wouldn't learn.

SUSE got forcibly merged with a GNOME company. Before, it sponsored a fair bit of KDE, and had the best KDE. Now, it's another GNOME distro and KDE is turning on itself without any adults at the wheel and it's going insane.

(GNOME did that a decade ago.)

It appears that if you have a multiplicity of GUIs, you get a lot of half-arsed ones. If a commercial organisation puts a lot of work into polishing one, it can at least be less crude.

Indeed. The odd thing is that the Chinese, unbothered by Western flailing, have made two pretty and usable desktops: UKUI and Deepin.

UKUI is somehow under the auspices of Ubuntu, at least loosely, and it could do worse than make it official.