From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
These people keep bringing up "mArKeT sHaRE"
EDIT: I wonder if Microsoft are making anti-Linux accounts to try and hamper Linux.
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
Dude, the subreddit is named r/pcmasterrace. Even if they aren't anti-Linux, maybe you shouldn't take them too serious
Well duh. "PC" means "Windows", obviously.
sigh
"PC" means "Desktop" /s
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.
>and then to mean non-Apple computers
I call Macs PCs to this day becouse of those ads
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.
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.
Reddit is getting worse and worse. Not sure what happened, but it started losing it's way around 2014-2015.
When they announced they would make their codebase proprietary it was definitely a turning point. In hindsight, you can clearly see a shift in their way of doing things from that point on.
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.
All I ever got for trying to help on that sub was called an elitist and have people go through my comment history to prove them selves and its the linux community thats toxic
/r/PCSlaveRace
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.
