Linux

If it hits that It'll go much higher very quickly, linuxes problems are literally all related to marketshare or need a few more years of ironing out the wayland transition... which by then will likely be done.

If Microsoft keeps shooting itself and its user base in the foot in new and inventive ways it’s possible. It’ll probably have to wreck its business clients more first though.

Who gives a shit what other people use, i switched to linux some years ago and i am never going back, why bother about market shares

maybe it already does... https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/

First you have to define what is Linux (does ChromeOS count? How about Android? Alpine? What makes something "Linux"), and what is a desktop (do laptops count? How about portable handhelds/phones with a desktop mode?).

I think that with enough community effort, it could.

Some of what I think is missing is just community documentation (manuals, tutorials, troubleshooting pages) that are easy to find and recent. While yes, solutions from 5 to 10 years ago still work, they often don't reflect the full recent reality, never mind the tendency for CLI solutions (which are great, but plenty of people are intimidated by the CLI).

The other thing that I think is missing is polish around things that are just off the beaten path... the kinds of things that not everyone will do, but that most will do at least one of.

I think it's coming sooner than a lot of people think.

We may even hit it within a year or so if we count the Steam machine and how that launch goes

Less and less people even have a home desktop these days. It's basically gamers, programmers/IT/etc. types, and old people who refuse to learn how to use a smartphone.

A decent amount of those techy types are either already using Linux, or at least have some familiarity with it from working on servers and such, and it's only a matter of time before a lot of them switch out of frustration with Microsoft's enshitification

Gamers are already moving in pretty great numbers, valve has made it so that most games can now run fine on Linux which kept a lot of people from switching previously, and the steam deck has made a lot of people curious about it. And there's a lot of people who have perfectly serviceable rigs that they can't "upgrade" to windows 11 now that they won't be getting regular security updates for 10, and with the price of RAM now, they may not want to invest in hardware upgrades and may turn to Linux to at least squeeze a couple more years out of their system.

And as far as the old luddites go, most of them could probably use Linux just fine. They're not doing anything besides browsing the web checking their email, and using basic office programs anyway.

I recently switched my parents over to Linux Mint because their computer was just too bogged down with windows 11 bullshit and everything was going at a crawl. They've been on it for about a month now and it's been smooth-sailing.

And I think as more of us gamers and tech nerds get more familiar and comfortable with Linux, more people are going to do the same thing. For those of us who have made the switch ourselves and play tech support for our parents and grandparents, the next time they call you up to come take a look at their computer, bring a Linux flash drive and boot that up for them. Tell them to play around with it a bit to see if they can live with it (I left my flash drive plugged into their computer for about a week for them to play around with it before I installed it for them) show them that libre office is basically the same as Microsoft office, install whatever web browser they're used to, make sure their printer is working, etc.

And eventually, maybe they'll even tell their old people friends about it. I can definitely see one of my mom's friends complaining about how slow their computer is, and my mom saying "well my son put this Linux stuff on our computer, and it sped everything right up" and then boom you got old people getting curious about it too.

Going with a definite maybe 🤔

The fact that I'm having more and more discussions with non tech people about what even Linux is, that they heard of GrapheneOS or /e/OS, makes me thing that yes, it's possible.

What also makes it potentially possible is that Microsoft is doing like NVIDIA alienating gamers. They are "just" gigantic corporations which only go where there is more money. There is no ideology except capturing whatever drives profit up for the next quarter. They currently see AI data center as they place to earn more so they are giving up on the rest.

SOs HP laptop borked Win11pro OS, wouldn't load or recover. Tried reinstalling clean but Win11 installer can't see SSD. Driver loading during install results in install crashing error.

Linux, here we come.

I dont think the free linux desktop for everyone that we all dream about will ever come to fruition. Even if everyone moves away from windows some other corporation will find a way to attract everyone to there platform.

Twenty years ago, we were speculating whether open source browsers would survive or catch on.

Now there aren't any closed source browsers left.

Vendors will find other forms of lock in, anyway, of course.

Microslop is doing everything to promote Linux. So yes, I think 10% is possible.

If you look at OS on steam its about 3%, but filtered for English, its 7% in that market.

Its kinda on its way there already in some markets.

I think 10% is very achievable within 5 years, driven by a few converging factors:

1. Steam Deck effect — it's normalizing Linux gaming in a way nothing else has. People who game on Deck start wondering "why not on my desktop too?"
2. Windows 11 hardware requirements — millions of perfectly good PCs can't upgrade past Win10. When support ends, Linux is the obvious path for those machines
3. Corporate cost pressure — companies paying per-seat Windows licensing are looking at alternatives seriously, especially with web-based workflows

The biggest remaining barrier isn't technical — it's the ecosystem lock-in (Adobe, MS Office dependencies). But even that's eroding with web apps replacing native ones.

Yes. It's already grown from ~1% to ~6% within the last couple of years. There are several major external factors at play: Valve helping to push gaming on Linux, the continued and increasingly big enshittification of Windows, and the current deranged US regime (resulting in less trust and less users of US-company-produced proprietary operating systems). Remember that Linux or the open source BSD variants are the only (usable/practical) operating systems you can use if you want to achieve digital sovereignty. Plus, it's also getting even better over time by itself of course (that's the internal factor).

Yes. Not because Linux PCs become so much more common, but because Windows PCs become much less common.

More and more people (normies) don't own a desktop and only use tablets or phones. As the percentage of normies who own a desktop decreases, it will become more of just a nerd thing to have an actual desktop PC ... and those kinds of people are much more likely to run Linux.

I personally feel pretty confident we're gonna hit 10% in the coming years. 20% could be doable but i feel like it might take a lot longer to get there. But depending on how badly microslop keeps fucking up, who knows lol.

For the education sector and software developer sector these numbers are already met and well exceeded. For the consumer desktop, yes, I think so. I think some big company other than Valve and Google will sell a Linux desktop machine, be it x86 or ARM. When most of the stuff consumers use is through the browser, OEMs clinging to Windows is not going to last forever.

yes, fuck windows. Shitty fedware destined for the dustbin of history. Execute bill gates.

To my mind, Linux used to be a niche alternative to Windows, but it's grown a lot and I forsee it becoming the default alternative to MacOS. I think Windows is done as a platform in the short-medium term.

Yes, as long as Windows will keep getting worse.

Ever is an extremely long time.

Seeing as its the year of the Linux desktop, yes

Yes, I think it's realistic if we look at how things in computing have changed even just within the last few decades.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-202603 in early 2009, IE was at ~65%, Chrome at <2%, we've gone from that to "IE does not exist" and Chrome in the same spot IE was then

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202603 in early 2009, Windows was at ~94%, now it is at ~26% with Android having taken the top spot, even that is just at ~37%, so there is now no dominant operating system overall

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide#monthly-200901-202603 even disregarding mobile devices, Windows has fallen from ~95% to ~61% in that time frame

and maybe I'm just old but early 2009 doesn't seem an enormously long time ago somehow

The only reference people have for these kind of judgements is polling by browser.

You're talking about users of a specific OS who would spend time to not make that known. They would also opt-out if any reporting about there machine specifics for polls, should they be asked.

I can guarantee real world usage is always higher than these polls suggest. I don't know about 10%, but they are higher in actuality.