Linux desktop marketshare has grown for three consecutive months

I've tried Linux several times over the past 10/15 years and always came back to Windows for gaming and because of the complexity of Linux.

I've switched again beginning of this year (to Linux Mint) because I was so fed up with Microsoft's pushing on W10 and because of their policy on privacy as well as on what you can control in W10 (like it does what it wants regarding downloading updates). I now have a dual boot, using W7 only for playing Battlefield 4, I switched the kids computer completely to Mint, my dad's computer also and my mom's as well.

I must say that if I was not so angry about Microsoft I would maybe not have remained under Linux as it's still very complicated when compared to Windows. I'm running into issues all the time. To make Steam work I needed to either switch to proprietary drivers for my AMD card or suppressing some Steam libraries conflicting with the OS's libraries, that's after hours of forum surfing when it's a double click away in Windows. Then I installed Tomb Raider and it wouldn't launch either, some more hours of reading and I found out that I had to replace a file in the Tomb Raider folder by a file of another working title of my Steam library, this also never happens in Windows. Then Tomb Raider launches but says my driver is not supported so I play laggy because after many more hours of reading I didn't find out which driver would be pleasing Feral's launcher...
Then on the kids computer I made the mistake to install proprietary drivers on Mint 18..... seems they were not supported, black screen on boot up and I was left with a terminal and no clue on how to fix that. So instead of doing the usual Start in recovery mode > Select the last Windows save point > Restore working parameters, I just reinstalled the OS from scratch.

All in all I'm hanging in and slowly learning how everything's working but it's definetely not a smooth experience for someone addicted to Microsoft's clickodromes :)

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: whitewolfguy

Quoting: BeamboomI see many of you speculating if this has anything to do with win10 but looking at win and mac percentages it rather looks more like we've taken users from Mac, not Windows...(!)

Hmmm...according to the site data shown in the article, in January Windows had 90.61% and in July it had 89.79%, Mac OS had in January 7.68% and in July it had 7.87%, then considering only NetMarketShare data, Window had a slight drop and Linux had a small increase. But I do not I analyzed the data from the other sites mentioned in the posts.

Look at the numbers for the time span we talk about here, April to July. Mac drops, Linux rise, Windows stays practically the same.

It is true and it is very interesting this data, but 4 or 6 months is a short period to draw conclusions, it may be just a normal variation in the statistics, but we will follow this data to the end of the year and see if the numbers will keep this trend or not ;)

My guess is that the rise is too big to be accurate. 0.33% probably means millions of new users and that's simply too big to happen in one month. Still good to see though.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Grim85

Quoting: tmtvlNot if they don't upgrade their boxes.

If you're not going to upgrade it, then why bother with a rolling release? The longer you leave an Arch box without upgrades the more likely that upgrades will break it anyway

I’m not tmtvl, but who said the boxes wouldn’t be updated*? The *users* don’t update their boxes. The "admin" ("you") can install software and update them at the interval they see fit. Also works with Gentoo btw ;).

*I assume that by "upgraded" you both mean "updated".

That said I’d rather recommend a distro where users can do the update themselves with a couple mouse clicks and where it never breaks.

I've been considering Manjaro lately for this purpose. Looks more stable than Arch, and more up to date than those LTS distros. I have encountered many hardware support problems lately with Mint and alike, so having a rock solid rolling distro would be nice.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: PompesdeskyTo make Steam work I needed to either switch to proprietary drivers for my AMD card or suppressing some Steam libraries conflicting with the OS's libraries, that's after hours of forum surfing when it's a double click away in Windows.

Yeah unfortunately it’s more complicated with AMD hardware than with nvidia cards. And Valve included unwanted libraries in Steam for Linux, for some reason, so non-Steam games often run better (with nvidia hw too).

To be honest, my experience reflects the exact opposite.
Edit: that said, the libraries bug is quite well known and has been around for a long time. I am amazed that valve didn't bother fixing it yet.


Last edited by MayeulC on 6 August 2016 at 7:45 pm UTC

This is good news. :) Hopefully this trend continues. I look forward to the benefits that come along with greater marketshare if it does.