What I see is that there is an asymptotic leveling out of the proprietary operating systems. Nothing really improves anymore at that level. On the other hand, the free operating systems are making large strides towards that same level of usability every year.
In the end, if all the OS’s end up at parity function-wise, the free one that doesn’t abuse it’s users privacy is going to come out on top.
“96.3% of the top one million web servers are running Linux. (ZDNet)”
That right there is why Microsoft cares less and less every day about Windows, as Azure continues to grow as the company cash cow.
Their share of the 53% of “professional developers” that do not use Linux keeps them interested on the desktop.
Well, to be fair, the other reason that Microsoft still cares about Windows is that Office is their other cash cow. As more and more people move to Office 365, they will start to care less about that too ( as the web versions work great on Linux ).
I wonder what they’ll do on the corporate side. It’s possible they’ll push to move everybody to VMs and VDIs with everything running in the cloud. It would cut down on expenses for certain classes of employees who can work from a thin client.
In my experience Linux tends to behave a bit more deterministic then Windows. I also love the control I have over all installed development kits, runtimes and versions. Last time I used Windows 5? years ago, it constantly messed up my build pipelines by randomly choosing the wrong programming language versions or runtimes.
1 in 2 professional developers use Linux ( many of the others probably use Macs ).
If you are working with containers ( the cloud ), Linux is the native environment. So Linux provides a great environment for most of what is headed for AWS or Azure. If you are building websites ( eg. React ), Linux is the nicest environment to work in. Node is best on Linux. Java and Python IDEs work great on Linux. C / C++ work is often embedded with is often Linux and again the tooling works great on Linux. The more offbeat your platform choice, the more likely it is to be Linux first ( Gleam anyone? ). Even the .NET experience is great on Linux ( maybe better than Windows depending on what you are building ).
I work as a professional developer in .NET on Windows, and in my free time I develop in .NET on Linux as a hobby.
Unfortunately I would say the .NET development experience on Linux (with VSCode) is slightly inferior compared to on Windows (with Visual Studio).
For instance there is no support for SourceLink during development, only during debug. And on VSCode the “go to definition” to third party assemblies works only for one level deep, whilst on Visual Studio it works for any depth level.
It is certainly still a great experience on Linux, but not «better than Windows» in my opinion. If you have any recommendations to improve it please share, I would be very grateful.
Steam is only installed on one of my computers, I have at least four running Linux. Not to mention plenty of Linux users don’t game at all, so probably not.
I’m happy to see more Linux gamers don’t get me wrong. Steam is specifically gathering specs on people who game, the other stat counter (that reports 4% Linux use) is based on what people’s browsers are reporting.
I think the original comment in this chain was mentioning that the stats from the statcounter website were using really outdated data for the percentage of Linux users on steam, I don’t think they were relating that stat to overall Linux usage.
The problem with days old threads is I never remember the context. Looks like they were asking if Steams data would be more reliable. Tbh, I think Steam is great for gaming stats, not for general use stats. Statcounter supposedly uses what the browser reports when participating websites are visited.
The OG comment is referencing the body of this post, which are stats from the website. The website is using outdated steam stats, the comment is pointing that out.
The comment you replied to that was pointing that out was not corrolating the steam stats as general linux stats, only pointing out that the linux userbase on steam has grown since those outdated stats.
100% of silicon chip development depends on it I’d have thought. Anything which needs clusters of compute power for simulation, rendering, data analysis, etc.
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