I don't think Microsoft (or Apple) want people to have personal computers anymore in the way that PCs have historically existed. That is to say, they don't want your computer capable of running arbitrary code of your choosing. They don't want your computer to have the potential to do everything, to run everything, to make anything.

They want to control and lock down all aspects of your machine and what it can do, retain ownership of hardware via software licenses, and monetize every click and keystroke.

Microsoft doesn't want you to have a functional computer anymore, they want you to have a dummy terminal that runs Office 365 and Copilot.

I've had LMDE on a USB stick for a few months now, waiting for the right time to boot it up on my wife's PC, and she finally agreed to try it tonight. Cross your fingers, boys; we may soon have another convert.

How much of this is decline at the expense of Windows 11, due to Steam lowering barriers to entry, fatigue with Windows' hard selling, and/or extending the useful like of hardware that W11 abandoned.

First off, I DO NOT count ChromeOS, but whatever.

Secondly, when is 18% of anything “dominant”??? The fuck? Arstechnica back up off the pipe.

You're welcome guys. I installed Linux on an iMac yesterday. It was all me.

Played csgo last night and this guy brought up he was playing on Linux Mint. Lfg, I was so happy.

It's cool and all, but I'm surprised it's not 10% at this point. Microsoft is shitting in their customers mouth and Apple is a luxury brand at this point.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds, for example, has suggested that a lack of a standardized desktop that goes across all Linux distros has held back Linux adoption on desktop.

Yeah. Well, in on Linux in large part because of the diversity, choice, and options. If I wanted a monolithic, incestuous lock-in culture, I'd be on Windows, or a Mac.

Linux may have been simply making an observation, not a judgment, but fuck monocultures.

Just a reminder to take the data in that site with a grain of salt. I used to share them a lot, but then decided to read more about their methodology, and turns out it's mostly a black box, so they may be subject to several kinds of biases, and we can't even know. For example, we don't know which sites use their analytics and if there's a geographical bias. We also don't know how their scripts work and how the data is collected from devices. It would be nice if we had more sources of marketshare data to compare

Yes, this was big news all over Lemmy when it happened.

Thanks for bringing it up though! Not everyone might have known that.

Glad for Linux going up, but the numbers should really come from Windows more than from MacOS.

Three cheers for King Torvalds and Lord Gaben!

How much of this is regular people just not buying new computers anymore?

A lot of households that used to have had a laptop for each person have replaced those devices with phones and tablets. They weren't using Linux, so by removing them Linux market share would go up even if it hasn't actually grown.

Music and graphic art software is the only advantage I can find for MacOS over Linux at this point. I love the Apple silicon but I don't see that being a long term advantage.

"dominance"... You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means

What happened in Nov 2023?

OSX and Windows move in opposite directions at the same time? Seems a little weird.

Anti Commercial-AI license