Linux Hits 4% on the Desktop (opens in new tab)

That's basically the same strategy Windows is using to keep you there with WSL.

It's an Arch derivative now.

I used to dual boot too but I started playing more and more on Linux and I didn't touch my Windows for two years.

I step onto the Windows GUI occasionally for work and I always walk away missing Sway. There's those snap windows but despite that the whole UI just seems so busy and crowded.

This could just be because at some point everything I did was either in a terminal or browser (when did that happen?) and Windows always seems to be sitting around waiting for you to open some windowed app.

Late 90s argument against linux sounded like “we need to run Office”. Today i don’t need spreadsheets that are not shared in real time with my colleagues. So you use web version of excel/googlesheets and it doesn’t matter what OS is running your webkit-based browser.

Also all the “free software” is in someone else’s server.

In the past there was a binary running on your machine working with data stored locally. You had defacto control of your data. You also had defacto control of the program running since you could look at the assembly, maybe even patch it.

Now the software, all runs on the cloud on other people’s computers and your data is stored in their systems and you may or may not be able to get it out easily.

The whole point of GNU is having control over the binaries run on your local machine.

Today our situation is far worse than that, our data is held and processed by third parties.

The advantage of the latter is so great that Big Tech no longer cares of you run some weirdo OS. They own you anyway.

Unfortunately for both of us, 9% of zero is zero :(

> "Most casual users of computing devices have long switched to phones."

... which almost exclusively tend to be some bastardized Unix or Linux variant. "Year of the Linux pocket device"? ;)

Yeah, it's more likely they had a broken version of their tracking scripts on some OS/browser versions.

> …Linux is still very much a second-class citizen in the gaming world.

I understand, just citing it to put a pin in the lower end of the range. I'd bet on ~3% actual.

Steam survey might also additionaly be skewed away from GNU/Linux. In all those years I have never gottent the survey popup on any of my GNU/Linux machines (except Steam Deck), but have gotten it many time on Windows when still using it, and on the Windows machine at work which I have to use to test stuff it was also shown regularly. Not one single time on GNU/Linux machines. Is this widespread? If it is then I guess there should be even more of uss according to Steam survey.

All the data is based on page views, and they seem to support non-javascript, which means they don't even have the possibility of detecting a lot of bots.