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
The attrition is slow, but every user lost to Linux is likely lost forever. After a year or so of totally free software, who is going to build a new windows compatible PC, buy a Windows 11 license, and pay for subscription service just to do word processing, or play a few incompatible games?
Windows completely overestimates people's willingness to throw out their laptop or PC just to get a new OS paintjob. For every person who does it, another one will leave their ecosystem forever.
Old Brazilian hack to use Windows: just don't buy it.
Thanks for exporting this to the US, I made extensive use of it ~1999-2008
I think I didn't buy a Windows license ever. Got Win 7 free from my college and always could upgrade for free to the next version. I never used MS Office, mostly did use the Google suite. Games were the only thing that kept me, especially since I got more privacy continuous over the past few years.
I'm currently dual booting Win 11 and Linux mint as a test phase. Actually just running windows for the proprietary phone client I need for work. Otherwise I'm newly exclusively using LM right now. Though I might make the switch to EndeavourOS for it's rolling release approach and AUR.
Only thing I really hate is that there are some proprietary software like ICUE, L-Connect a proper scanning software for my printer including OCR (there is a version for Linux but it doesn't include OCR) or shitty driver support for my graphics card. But none of those are issues coming from Linux itself but rather from the lack of support from the developers. Also, I love DLSS and Ray tracing but seriously.. fuck Nvidia.
For the OCR, have you tried tesseract? For printed documents it can take image input and generate a pdf with selectable text. I don't OCR much but it has been useful when I tried a few times.
You might be able to have a script that takes the scanner input into tesseract and output a pdf. It only works on a single image per run so I had to make script to run it on whole pdf by separating it and stitching it back together.
Windows licenses AFAIK are already rarely bought on their own. The vast majority of users get one by having it bundled to a new device they purchase.
I'm never daily driving Windows again, but im not sure if I will ever be free of dual booting for some games.
i honestly just wanna express my gratitude to all the people who made linux what it is today over the last decades, the experience is incomparable to the one i had when first installing debian in 2007. i wish i were more skilled in order to meaningfully give back to this community.
and to all the newbies: thanks for joining our ranks! please dont be scared by the rather elitist attitude that some users display. we secretly all love you!
If you want to give back but don't have coding skills, you can always be nice and help onboard new users! There's always been this attitude of 'linux is better' immediately followed by 'rtfm n00b' when users try to get started. A more sympathetic crowd would go a long way.
thanks for the piece of mind! while i do have some skills due to my work, its not remotely enough to work on linux. im gonna be a recruiter then..
Probably not a recruiter, but supporting those who are trying to switch or are needing support on forums like here or other places. Help them find solutions, be kind to them when they are struggling, encourage them if another user is derisive.
The games I play work just fine under Linux. I'm EXTREMELY thankful for every single person that has contributed to Linux or the apps they can use.
If I wasn't such a monkey I'd help any way I could.
I'm not such a monkey, and I could probably contribute if I put my mind to it, but I just don't have the time.... Instead I try to contribute documentation and money when I can. Everything helps!
At this point I use Linux for everything except my music production hobby (Mac for that) and even then I use Renoise and BitWig on Linux. I've been on Linux since 1996 but I haven't been 100% Linux until the past two years.
Fuck yeah Bitwig. I mainly chose it so I'd have the flexibility to move to Linux in the future. That and the unmatched sounds design and modulation abilities.
At this rate we might just see the Year of the Linux Desktop^TM^ on our deathbeds!
What’s odd to me is the cultural zeitgeist has moved to folks being aware that Microsoft (& Google & Apple) is collecting data on them to being the butt of jokes, yet those folks aren’t adopting an alternatives. With over a decade on Linux I’m now pretty out of touch with the opposite feeling. I guess the closest analog I have is not being able to realistically leave Android behind, but that is more hardware than software (banking app already don’t let you root or otherwise flash your device so I have given up hope in trying with them).
A few days ago I tried to install Windows 11 on the PC of a friend. It didn't work because of missing SATA drivers. Anyway, I was shocked how many points there are where Microsoft or Apple (we used his mac to create the USB drive) tries to sell something (buy pro version of fan controll now) or wants your permissions to gather all your data.
I convinced him to let me install debian. When it came to creating the default user he was hesitant to use his full name, because telemetry :D
Made the switch this year, I'm not going back.
I bought Windows 11 early on so I'm still using it to justify the purchase on my desktop, but I moved my OEM licensed laptop over to Debian a few months ago.
Can confirm that as soon as Windows 11 is no longer supported or it gets slightly more ass, I'll be moving my desktop over to Debian or Arch or something as well.
With the advent of gaming becoming so much more accessible on linux either through native support or through something like proton, I am very hard pressed to find any reason to stay.
Honestly with this rate we may even reach 5% on end of this year or maybe even earlier Proton FTW
Now that gaming is effectively a solved problem thanks to Proton, Adobe Lightroom is just about the only thing keeping my desktop PC on Windows. My laptop is already running Linux. I’ve tried the FOSS alternatives but none of them fits my workflow like Lightroom. This is a me problem more so than a problem with any of these pieces of software.
Try running those adobe apps on a windows virtual machine. Use KVM with virt-managet instead of virtualbox. If the performance is acceptable for you, now you can use Linux as the primary os and only use the VM for adobe apps. VM boots faster too because you can just hit suspend and resume it again later.
Adobe Lightroom is just about the only thing keeping my desktop PC on Windows
Have you tried any of these?
https://itsfoss.com/raw-image-tools-linux/
There is the theory, that to convince everyone of something, you have to invest very hard work to convince 4% of the populace of what you are doing is right. After that, the rest will learn to know of this by themselves.
Hopefully this is similar
I work in a very large hospital. I left for 3 years and just came back. When I went to open a document at work, it opened in Libre Office. I was pretty surprised that they ditched Microsoft Office for Libre. Makes financial sense to me, especially because most of our use-cases are simply opening and reading a document or slideshow. But I was still surprised they made that switch, and I doubt half of the employees honestly even notice that much
Now, they still run Windows Desktops, and I doubt that would ever switch in my lifetime. So no linux for us. But still pleasantly surprised at the step forward
I just got a steam deck and I'm surprised how well it runs games. It's not quite as refined as a switch but it can run games were designed to run windowed in Windows with a mouse and keyboard. It can translate the game to run on Linux, the inputs to a gamepad and convert the game from being windowed to fullscreen. It's impressive and if the games were actually designed for the deck I feel like it could feel as seemless as the switch.
It is really making me consider Linux for my desktop once Windows 10 reaches EoL. The only game I've found that doesn't work is Destiny 2. Even the desktop mode on the deck is surprisingly nice
what happened in 2021 that started this trend?
Windows 11 got quite a few people to look into trying Linux
I personally didn't think Win11 was that big of a downgrade over Win10, But I also didn't like 10 to begin with so I didn't need much convincing.
Windows 11 is what finally got me to permanently switch over to Linux too lol
Probably a number of factors. Some I can think of that may have contributed:
Did you dare to say something positive about Electron? Blasphemy!
Pandemic lockdown maybe? Everyone got bored a few months into 2020. By 2021 they finally figured out their wifi drivers 🤷
(I'm joking, I haven't seriously struggled with wifi for a long time. I use Debian btw.)
Let's stop pretending that Linux has a small market share. It is flipping 4%
For gaming. For gaming its 4%. Which is the thing everyone says its bad at.
If the latest Steam survey is anything to go by, it’s actually lower of a percentage when it comes to gaming, representing 1.94% of the market. The stats mentioned in the article come from StatCounter which monitors web traffic.
I'm doing my part! Just moved to Mint, 3 weeks ago. I had tried with a dual boot previously but moving over to a clean install forced me to find solutions instead of just switching to windows
I have been slowly switching to Linux for the last year. I have 2 Lenovo ThinkPad's and an HP EliteDesk running Ubuntu. I have my gaming PC dual booted but, for the moment, mainly using Linux Mint.
It has been an easy transition and I am not some Linux whiz.
Keep running it for a while and after some time 5 or 10 years you will struggle when people ask you about (basic) Windows stuff.
I tried to give Windows 11 another go recently just to see how it is, I pulled all my files over including my gog games files which had wineprefixes in the folders, with /appdata folders for each prefix.
Windows decided "you know what, screw c:\users\appdata, lets use the appdata folder in this random gamefolder on a different drive instead" and proceeded to cannibalize itself just breaking the majority of apps. No idea how it can't recognize that the random wine "windows" files that aren't in the correct locations aren't the actual location for them. Couldn't fix it because it thought the "c:" folder in the wine directory was my actual c: drive and refused to delete it
Sure it was an extremely niche issue a Windows user would never realistically run into, but it reminded me just how fragile it is for uncommon usecases