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PayPalAccording to Statcounter, which should be taken with a pinch of salt of course like any sampling, the Linux share on the desktop hit nearly 4% in December 2023. Last month was a record too and a clear trend over time, as going back a couple of years, it was rarely coming close to 2% but now it's repeatedly nearing 4% so it's quite a good sign overall.
The latest from Statcounter shows for all of 2023 below:
- January - 2.91%
- February - 2.94%
- March - 2.85%
- April - 2.83%
- May - 2.7%
- June - 3.07%
- July - 3.12%
- August - 3.18%
- September - 3.02%
- October - 2.92%
- November - 3.22%
- December - 3.82%
Looking at December it shows Windows rising too, with macOS dropping down. If we actually take ChromeOS directly into the Linux numbers for December 2023 the overall number would actually be 6.24% (ChromeOS is Linux after all).
Here's how just Linux looks over time on Statcounter since early 2009 until now:
Seems like a pretty clear trend over time don't you think? Nice to see this happening elsewhere, just like we've seen over years with the Steam Survey.
You can see their stats over here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
pleasereadthemanual Jan 4
Quoting: slaapliedjeMS Write was also available for the Atari ST (I think that's what it was called before they changed it to Word). I don't think it was ever available for the Amiga though.Looks like I misread "Word for Mac was released in 1985. Word for Mac was the first graphical version of Microsoft Word." as meaning, "Word was released for Mac first, and in 1983". Don't ask me how!
Ha, had to look that up, as the Machintosh wasn't available in 1983.. Word was available on Xenix first. Classic Mac got it in 1985, Atari ST got it in 1988, OS/2 in 1989 and Windows (also 1989). The wikipedia article states that you can run Word before 2013 on Linux via Wine.
Microsoft pissed me off back in '97 after I bought 'Home Essentials' because I needed a word processor (with aspirations of becoming a writer). Paid $100 bucks for it (which was a ton of money for my crappy job at the time) and then a month later they released Office '97, with no upgrade path...
These days, I think I'll start doing my writing with Atari Works. :P
I do all my writing in Neovim...what else could fit the bill?
Quoting: tuubiAmiga users didn't need MS Write. We had the clearly superior WordPerfect. :PWordPerfect is still around under Corel's management. It had its latest release only three years ago.
Typed a bunch of my school essays on my Amiga 500 and printed them out with a very noisy Star LC-10 dot matrix printer.
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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualQuoting: tuubiAmiga users didn't need MS Write. We had the clearly superior WordPerfect. :PWordPerfect is still around under Corel's management. It had its latest release only three years ago.
Typed a bunch of my school essays on my Amiga 500 and printed them out with a very noisy Star LC-10 dot matrix printer.
Yeah I know. There were even native Linux versions at some point. Never used or saw them myself, but I know they existed.
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slaapliedje Jan 5
Quoting: tuubiI had a boxed copy, back in the day, of Corel Linux. Even came with a little rubber penguin. Sadly, they only supported it for about a year and a half; then Xandros bought it. Then they proceeded to die off...Quoting: pleasereadthemanualQuoting: tuubiAmiga users didn't need MS Write. We had the clearly superior WordPerfect. :PWordPerfect is still around under Corel's management. It had its latest release only three years ago.
Typed a bunch of my school essays on my Amiga 500 and printed them out with a very noisy Star LC-10 dot matrix printer.
Yeah I know. There were even native Linux versions at some point. Never used or saw them myself, but I know they existed.
But Corel had been, for the longest time, the largest attempt at actually making a Desktop / user friendly Linux, specifically marketed toward getting people off of Windows... actually backed by a well known company that did other stuff.
Closest we actually have to that now would be the Steam Deck in desktop mode... everyone else are companies where Linux is their core business. And even then, they don't really push it as a Desktop.
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slaapliedje Jan 5
Quoting: ShabbyXHa, I tried to find a client for macOS for LaTeX... could I find a free one? no, why would that exist on a Mac? I truly hate that platform for how everyone feels they should charge for software. Reminds me of how the Amiga was back in the day. Maybe I'm just far too spoiled with all the open source stuff!Quoting: slaapliedjeThese days, I think I'll start doing my writing with Atari Works. :P
Joke aside, look into LaTeX! Such a relief not getting bogged down with formatting vs WYSIWIG.
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pleasereadthemanual Jan 5
Quoting: slaapliedjeI had a boxed copy, back in the day, of Corel Linux. Even came with a little rubber penguin.Well, now I want one.
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Quoting: HighballI haven't taken a look at ChromeOS at all, but I'm sure the Window Manager is just a Wayland compositor.
As pointed out in the Ars article, ChromeOS replaced X11 with their own "Freon" back in 2016. As I understand it, it required different graphics drivers from the GPU vendors. It's only very recently that they switched to Wayland.
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Quoting: HighballGoogle has also been very careful not to allow hackers to run away with their devices. Any normal dev will just wax ChromeOS and load Ubuntu onto the device without a second of hesitation. Instead they control how you get access to the linux side of things; see Crostini. To me it looks like Google wants to sell devices at a loss so they can saturate the market and out compete on price. Mean while make their money harvesting data and delivering ads. "You're getting a device with security in mind. *wink*"you cant say "linux is easy to use" and say "it can run this game, just follow this tutorial on wineHQ" at the same sentence.
one of the issues with linux is that we tried to market it as something easy to use, and something that can play games at the same time, but if you wanted to do both, you had to suffer, i remember following some tutorials to play some games, end up in a rabbit hole too big and giving up on the game, normal people would give up on linux instead.
my worst nightmare was tera, 5 days to install (for some reason the installer took forever to download on linux) then, followed all the tutorial right, and... it didnt worked! the worst part was that i was not willing to delete the 50GB files, i had hope to make it work someday to not have wasted 5 days for nothing...
oh, did i mentioned that i had to try 2 because i dared to use the computer at the same time that this 5 days download took place and it crashed the installer and i had to restart?
another nightmare was games that some people were able to install using an combination of gpu vendor (eg: ati) + distro + wine version number+version of the game, but if any of those change then people werent able to run (eg: only run on ati, only run on nvidia, only run on ubuntu, only run on fedora, only run on wine 1.7.53, only run in the version 1.2 of the game)
good luck with that...
i think google was smarther , consoles cant do nearly as much as an linux device like the steamdeck can, but they dont get the bad reputation of linux for being harder to use because they can only do one thing and do it well.
dont get me wrong i dont think steam deck should be closed as an console, the way it is, is perfect, but that was only possible thanks to proton and the valve enormous effort in QA.
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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualQuoting: slaapliedjeConspiracy Mode; Have you ever wondered if one of the main reasons Office and it's ilk are moving to cloud based systems is due to Linux finally getting to the point where it can run stand alone Office? I'm pretty sure the latest version runs fine there now... (I still don't know why macOS got a port of Office, and Linux never did. You'd think MS would want Office on all the platforms they could to make more money... but then again, they figure they can force people to also buy Windows... greedy Mofos).Funny you should mention that. Microsoft Word has had an official version for Macintosh since initial release in 1983. It predates even Windows; it was MS-DOS back then. Microsoft Excel was released for Macintosh two years before a Windows version appeared. So you could say one of the reasons is Linux didn't actually exist back then.
This was a few years after Microsoft abandoned their UNIX OS, XENIX.
I've gotten Microsoft Office to work under CrossOver but Word was the only one that worked decently. Powerpoint was very crash-happy. Excel was fine, but I didn't use it much. I wonder if the Affinity Suite will be usable and stable in Wine before Microsoft Office is...
I use Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for my web design and development work on Linux. It's very complicated to set up, but as of recently, it works fantastically. Instructions: https://codeberg.org/Wanesty/affinity-wine-docs
For my rather simple usage of it (basic photo adjustments and cropping images en masse), it's been very stable and everything is working as expected.
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pleasereadthemanual Jan 6
Quoting: azuredusk10Oh, that's awesome to know! Thanks for pointing this out to me, but I've actually known about this repo and the forum posts for over a year now. I've just been putting off actually building the custom version of Wine, haha. I hadn't heard great things from the posts about how stable it was so I was wondering if it was worth the effort. I resolved to do it this week while I had some free time.Quoting: pleasereadthemanualQuoting: slaapliedjeConspiracy Mode; Have you ever wondered if one of the main reasons Office and it's ilk are moving to cloud based systems is due to Linux finally getting to the point where it can run stand alone Office? I'm pretty sure the latest version runs fine there now... (I still don't know why macOS got a port of Office, and Linux never did. You'd think MS would want Office on all the platforms they could to make more money... but then again, they figure they can force people to also buy Windows... greedy Mofos).Funny you should mention that. Microsoft Word has had an official version for Macintosh since initial release in 1983. It predates even Windows; it was MS-DOS back then. Microsoft Excel was released for Macintosh two years before a Windows version appeared. So you could say one of the reasons is Linux didn't actually exist back then.
This was a few years after Microsoft abandoned their UNIX OS, XENIX.
I've gotten Microsoft Office to work under CrossOver but Word was the only one that worked decently. Powerpoint was very crash-happy. Excel was fine, but I didn't use it much. I wonder if the Affinity Suite will be usable and stable in Wine before Microsoft Office is...
I use Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for my web design and development work on Linux. It's very complicated to set up, but as of recently, it works fantastically. Instructions: https://codeberg.org/Wanesty/affinity-wine-docs
For my rather simple usage of it (basic photo adjustments and cropping images en masse), it's been very stable and everything is working as expected.
Might as well give it a shot! Cheers for the reminder. Affinity Photo is the only one I use (still need AE and iD now and again) but it should keep more of my workflow on Linux!
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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualRight, so native applications for ChromeOS can run on Linux, because native applications for ChromeOS are written for Linux, meant to be used in containers.Yes, from the binaries perspective, this is the most correct description.
Well, I guess ChromeOS is a Linux distribution then.
ChromeOS actually IS Linux for ARM, since some developers disected it some years ago and extracted a widevine*.so (Chrome DRM) library from it and hacked this very same binary library back to RPi Linux(es), and thus enabled DRM content streaming (Spotify, Netflix, etc...) on ARM Linux on RPi.
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