https://redd.it/v8l8vi

These people keep bringing up “mArKeT sHaRE”

  1. Linux is free. How would it get market share?
  2. It’s quite difficult to get an accurate “market share” since user-agents can be faked.

EDIT: I wonder if Microsoft are making anti-Linux accounts to try and hamper Linux.

  • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
    39·
    2 years ago

    Might seem a little far-fetched, but i’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the community that basically worships conspicuous consumption of electronics with complete disregard for e-waste and electrical consumption in support of being a better gamer, a consumer identity fabricated by marketing companies, and have thus turned it into an implicit contest might not be interested in practicality, liberty, nor freely available goods unless they’re the most visually appealing

      • rysiek@szmer.infoEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        Actually, if we’re nit-picking, it means “Personal Computer”, but the colloquial meaning has shifted somewhat since the good old IBM times to first mean desktop computers (as opposed to laptops), and then to mean non-Apple computers (including laptops), which for most people means “a computer that runs Windows.”

        Which is the basis of my heavy sigh.

        • planish@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          It would have been anything that implements Bios enough to boot MS-DOS, more or less.

          But now that’s not what anyone actually wants anymore since Windows, the thing people usually boot, wants UEFI instead. So I would say now it is probably anything that can run x86 code and boot Windows, even if it’s from System76 and meant to run Linux.

  • Helix 🧬@feddit.de
    18·
    2 years ago

    Linux is free. How would it get market share?

    Not all Linux distributions are free. A market share can also be taken by a product which is free. It’s just a piece of the market.

    You don’t count OS market share by the amount of money you spent for an OS (because then, MacOS would be free, since it’s technically given away bundled with Apple hardware) but by the number of installs.

  • incici@lemmy.ml
    10·
    2 years ago

    Reddit is getting worse and worse. Not sure what happened, but it started losing it’s way around 2014-2015.

  • PureTryOut@lemmy.kde.social
    6·
    1 year ago

    EDIT: I wonder if Microsoft are making anti-Linux accounts to try and hamper Linux.

    Lol. No, they’re not. Really.

    What kind of conspiracy theory is that, Microsoft really doesn’t feel threatened by Linux.

  • planish@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 year ago

    Probably because they’re big meanies.

    The market share thing is real though. Computing is like 1% actually making hardware and software and 99% about getting the humans to agree with each other about how the hardware and software is meant to work, how pieces cooperate, and what it is meant to mean when any given piece does any given thing.

    Proton et al. are amazing, but swapping out the whole system underneath a program for one it was never tested on, to provide APIs that are not actually expected to vary in their implementation details, and using GPU drivers that weren’t extensively tested by the manufacturer in exactly these circumstances and individually tweaked to do specific things for that specific workload, is necessarily going to get you a worse result than doing it the way the program authors expected.

    And you don’t need very precise numbers to know that Linux is much less used on the desktop.

    Maybe with developers targeting and testing on Steam Deck the situation will change, but trying to get two things to work together when only one of them is willing to change for it is extremely hard and I understand why one might compromise principles to avoid having to do it.