Okay, I guess I'll say it. Year of Linux Desktop!

I mean, it's no secret that the SteamDeck is a huge reason why. Praise Gaben, may we game on every platform equally.

When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It's a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we're close!

3.82% is actually pretty damn good. And if Windows 12 pushes us into a subscription model I can see that gap rising.

Also, if/when DirectX gets native Linux support, or DXVK/VKD3D matches the API in performance, that'll be it.

Personally I'm thanking Valve for this.

Wowzer, ok, that's seriously impressive though, like in 2022 I feel we were stuck at 2-2.5% and in 2023 we passed 3% for the first time and now we're at almost 4????? That's like DOUBLING the market share in a year

My journey to Linux pretty much started with the reddit thing. I moved to Lemmy and started slowly eliminating corporations out of my life.

2024 YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

Meanwhile in India: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india (14.51%)

It was me checking out all the distros

Say the line, Bart!

I switched my gaming PC to Linux two months ago and I'm loving it. I've only had to boot my Windows drive twice.

I just installed Linux on a six-year-old budget laptop this morning. My first time using Linux. What was a uselessly slow machine is now just humming along.

I'm doing my part!

I am not saying “This is the Year of the Linux Desktop”. That said, things languished below 2% for decades and now it has doubled in just over a year. With the state of Linux Gaming, I could see that happening again.

Also, if ChromeOS continues to converge, you could consider it a Linux distro at some point and it also has about 4% share.

Linux could exceed 10% share this year and be a clear second after Windows.

That leaves me wondering, what percentage do we have to hit before it really is “The Year of the Linux Desktop”. I have never had to wonder that before ( I mean, it obviously was not 3% ). Having to ask is a milestone in itself.

Steam Decks?

At least two dozens of us

For me the turning point was when a failed Windows forced upgrade ended up deleting me important files. I had backups, but I lost days of work because Microsoft felt so insecure in the face of piracy that they had to upgrade my computer despite me constantly telling them not to do so.

That was around 10 years ago. I went through various KDE distros; in the end I settled for Kubuntu.

The recent developments in KDE plasma are excellent. I haven't had to open a command prompt in years. I hadn't had a tech problem until this year when my tmp folder got full.

I use Linux (Arch actually) as my daily driver - I'm the MD of a small IT business in the UK. I have at least one employee who is asking me to create a Linux standard deployment to replace Windows because they don't like it anymore - W11 is quite divisive.

For a corp laptop/desktop you might need Exchange email - so that might be Evolution with EWS. You'll want "drive letters" - Samba, Winbind and perhaps autofs. You'll need an office suite - Libre Office works fine. There's this too: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for more MS integration - if that's your bag.

I often see people getting whizzed up about whether LO can compete with MSO. I wrote a finite (yes, finite) capacity scheduler for a factory in MS Excel, back in 1995/6 - it involved a lot of VBA and a mass of checksums etc. I used to teach word processing and DTP (Quark, Word, Ventura and others). LO cuts it. It gets on my nerves when I'm told that LO isn't capable by someone who is incapable of fixing a widow or orphan or for whom leading and kerning are incomprehensible.

I suspect that it's not Linux that is on the rise, but overall PC market that is shrinking. It's been a trend for quite a while for non-linux people to dump the PC entirely in favor of using just phone.

The desktop/mobile ratio chart aligns with this

https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet

Let’s go! It’s always great to see people wrestle control back from the corporations.

date '+%Y is the year of the Linux desktop'

On my laptop, I've switched to Linux since, despite being built in 2017, doesn't meet Win 11's min requirements. This is horseshit, I don't care how MS explains it or justifies it, there's nothing wrong with it. I'm sure during development, they realized a 20 year old computer could run Win 11 and decided to make up requirements to force people into buying new PCs.

Anyway, I'm using KDE Neon and I'm loving its ease of use and simplicity. I have barely needed to dive into the terminal to fix anything and KDE Plasma feels very polished and user friendly. To me, it feels like the new "normie-friendly" Linux. And without the horseshit telemetry and Microsoft spying, it's like a brand new PC.

I wonder if that dip in Windows in April, going down to like 62%, and the correlated boost for "Uknown" operating systems to 13% might somehow simply be Windows not being recognized properly and categorized as unknown?

It seems a bit far-fetched to me that a bunch of Windows users would for 1 month suddenly all decide to use ReactOS, FreeDOS, BSD, Solaris, Illumos, Haiku, Redox, and Plan 9.

I just ditched my old Windows 10 PC for a raspberry pi 5, and am running KDE Plasma.

It's refreshing to have an operating system that doesn't suggestive sell to me.