Liam_on_Linux (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
liam_on_linux) wrote2025-07-05 02:38 pm
liam_on_linux) wrote2025-07-05 02:38 pm
The Decade of Linux on the Desktop. You're in it.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fair point. Who wants dead easy and tough as old boots, anyway?
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...
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