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Windows Desktop Market Share Drops Below 90% (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat's new article about desktop operating systems: Windows 7 is still the king, but it no longer holds the majority. Nine months after Windows 10's release, Windows 7 has finally fallen below 50 percent market share and Windows XP has dropped into single digits. While this is good news for Microsoft, April was actually a poor month for Windows overall, which for the first time owned less than 90 percent of the market, according to the latest figures from Net Applications.
A few months ago, I was doing some work on the PC when my sister-in-law was visiting, and she happened to walk past and glance at my screen. Noticing it looked quite different to what she was used to, she asked me about it and I gave her a quick run-down of the OS (Linux Mint). When she went home, she asked me to help her install it over the phone, and now she uses it as her daily OS. Her partner's starting to show interest too, apparently.
I'm hoping Linux snowballs. Free software (and I mean both definitions of free) can really only be beaten by quality, and I think Linux is rapidly bridging that quality gap.
I've installed Linux on my sister's aging laptop, as a replacement for the XP she had before. I'd warned her multiple times that XP was going EOL and that she should jump to an alternative, and after some time of nagging she agreed that I can put Ubuntu on her Laptop. Unfortunately the WiFi driver didn't work and the new shiny (and expensive!) printer she bought a few weeks earlier didn't have any Linux driver support at all, so she wasn't very happy with it.
Recently she bought herself a new laptop, she didn't want me to replace the pre-installed Windows.
Windows 3.x didn't have a start menu. If you're too young to remember, don't talk out of your ass.
Can anyone tell me why Linux is a good choice on the desktop? I doubt it.
I can tell you why. For me Linux Mint has been a perfect alternative to Windows.
It's free, it installed easily, everything just works, and I like not having to reboot after updating the system. All of the applications I need are available and Wine runs the few niche Windows apps I still use. I'm sure I'll find replacements for those when I get around to it but so far there's been no need.
I'm still searching for some good malware but so far I've had no luck in that department.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Its been well over a decade since those were real problems. That said, I would give you more credibility if you hadn't posted as AC. And FWIW, I've been using Linux as an everyday desktop since 1997. Yes, it actually was a bit harder back then, you had to do some reading and understanding. Nowdays, stick the disc in and reboot.
The OP was about the start menu, so here's a real goddamned problem with linux.
I'm using Linux Mint, which comes with cinnamon.
You can configure the start menu, but it's clunky. To move things around you have to laboriously click on an application, click "copy", go to the destination, and click "paste". One at a time, because doesn't support multiple selections.
Then you have to go *back* to the original location, where you now have *two* copies of the application icon, and make one of them invisible. Not delete it - that will also delete the one you just put in the new location.
About 90 minutes later (*) I had the start menu categories organized in a good way, and made the things I didn't need invisible. Some things you can't make invisible ("universal access"), but I can live with the extra clutter.
The menu system editor lets you make sub-menus. I like to have a small number of choices in each menu (so that I don't have to scan long lists to find the thing I want), so I thought I would group the wine applications (there are 3 of them) into a sub-menu named wine, so that it would only take up 1 line in the menu.
A quick google shows that this feature, of not having sub-menus, is by design, it's not going to be fixed, and the system was designed in such a way that the underlying structure format has to be rewritten to support it.
So there's this feature of the menu editor for putting things in sub-menus, but it has no effect?
Gah!
This is reminiscent of the Firefox changes, where people keep saying "Oh, this is much better! DO IT OUR WAY!"
Compare to the WinXP version of menu organizing: the start menu is a directory (on the disk), and sub-menus are sub-directories. Applications are files (links to the executable), which can be moved around trivially en-masse using cut and paste.
I keep hearing linux evangelists saying "everything is a file", but not in this case. Everything is hidden, broken, designed to be used one-and-only way, and obscure.
(I'm aware of the "alacarte" application, which makes it *slightly* easier to manipulate menus, but the end result is the same. It also borked the menu system, so I had to purge and reinstall cinnamon.)
(*) After finding this out, I originally thought I'd edit the config files manually and move things around using the editor. Editing is easy, but finding out which files to edit is highly non-trivial. I found three (yes, three) separate places that *seemed* to list the top-level categories of my start menu, but test edits (change "graphics" to "grophics" and check for changes) had no effect. Also, there are a bewildering number of possible files to edit, in several locations. Some are in $HOME/.config, some are $HOME/.local, and some are in /etc/xdg.
Linus originally wrote the Linux kernel for desktop use. It is market leader in the server world, having a market share of 100% in supercomputers, and as part of the android operating system it is market leader on the smartphone market as well.
The bar chart clarifies things. Windows down a tick. OSX up a tick. Linux flat-lined as always. Desktop Top Operating System Share Trend
More revealing, perhaps, are the numbers from Statcounter, which show OSX doing very well in the North American market, at 17.5%. Top 7 Desktop OSs in North America from Apr 2015 to Mar 2016
Statcounter doesn't break out stats for Linux, which is perhaps just as well.
I do find oddball problems in Linux, but I've been able to solve nearly all of them. One was with a so-called "WinPrinter" that relied on stuff within Windows to initialize it --- but I did find a Linux substitute and got it to work.
I had one problem with a USB wifi adapter. It was really odd in that it had worked for the longest time but then a kernel update killed it. I could have regressed my kernel to get it to work again (or done some patching) but I hardly ever used it and just let it go.
Yes, I admit using these devices would have been easier on Windows. But I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 99+% of everything I've tried works with Linux without extra hassle.
Above, someone commented that Linux was never intended to be mainstream. I interpreted that as a criticism, but actually it isn't. Linux has a certain audience. I don't see anything wrong with that. But my wife uses Linux and if she can, anyone can ... with the caveat that someone else (me, in her case) sets it up and supports it.
Windows isn't a major segment of Microsoft's revenue anymore. Because of that, they have gotten complacent, and don't really care much anymore. Remember how things went with IE when that happened? Expect roughly the same for Windows.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The problem is you pay for software that you then have modify/hack to get it right, and then fight the OS just to stop it from spying on your.....getting your monies worth for sure /s
It is market leader in the server world, having a market share of 100% in supercomputers,
100%??? I call bullshit. it has 100% of the top 10 and the vast majority of the top 500 but Linux most definitely does NOT have 100% marketshare in supercomputers.
OP pretty much got it right, it's actually 99%. Check for yourself.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Rinse , Recycle, Repeat. This is a tired argument and while once it may have been a legitimate one its really no longer the case. I am constantly amazed that with windows you usually have to install bloatware and over engineered apps when installing drivers for a new hardware peripheral. On Linux it is about as plug and play as it gets , often requiring no additional installations at all.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp