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Survey Finds Most Popular Linux Laptop Distros: Ubuntu and Arch (phoronix.com)
After collating 30,171 responses, Phoronixhas released some results from their first Linux Laptop Survey. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
To little surprise, Ubuntu was the most popular Linux distribution running on the respondents' laptops. 38.9% of the respondents were said to be using Ubuntu while interesting in second place was Arch Linux at 27.1% followed by Debian at 15.3%. Rounding out the top ten were then Fedora at 14.8%, Linux Mint in 5th at 10.8%, openSUSE/SUSE in sixth at 4.2%, Gentoo in seventh at 3.9%, CentOS/RHEL in eighth at 3.1%, Solus in ninth at 2%, and Manjaro in tenth at 1.6%. The other Linux distributions had each commanded less than 1% of the overall response.
Only 10.3% of respondents said their most recent laptop purchase came pre-loaded with Linux. But 29.3% are now dual-booting their Linux laptop with Windows, while another 4.4% were dual-booting with yet another Linux distribution.
Only 10.3% of respondents said their most recent laptop purchase came pre-loaded with Linux. But 29.3% are now dual-booting their Linux laptop with Windows, while another 4.4% were dual-booting with yet another Linux distribution.
I prefer a proper workstation myself but all the other developers at work use laptops, I'm the outlier there. They claim it's so that they can take them home but at home I have another workstation with all the code on anyway so that one does not fully compute either.
Agreed. I want to give M$ as little power as I can on my laptop. Within VM, if by chance I can't do something on Debian. Which almost never happens
If you make your decisions based on what the masses want, you must have a tedious life.
Linux on the desktop today is excellent. Sometimes there's problems (for instance I found out that Wayland still has some kinks especially with Java GUIs) but overall, the user experience on a recent Fedora or Mint is vastly superior to the user experience on Windows 10. Or install OpenSUSE and see how futuristic bleeding-edge KDE has become, it's like using a computer in a Hollywood sci-fi movie.
Is the Linux desktop ready for the enterprise? Maybe not, and that's because a vital part of computing at work revolves around spreadsheets, and LibreOffice is just not there yet. Until browser spreadsheets improve an order of magnitude or until Microsoft release Office for Linux it's going to be a tough sell. But apart from that, the stability and quality of the Linux desktop is definitely better than that of Windows or OSX.
lucm, indeed.
Or (like me) prefer to have the exact same OS on their Laptops as on their servers. Makes S/W development easy.
The Stability is as you say a key point. 10 years of patches with CentOS and built from the same sources as RHEL. Great.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Apple laptops do quite well. iOS is just a candy coated version of Linux.
1. Apple laptops run OS X, not iOS.
2. OS X is based on BSD not Linux.
Perhaps you are thinking of Android, which is based on Linux, and accounts for way more instances than all the servers in the world combined.
Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops - by hiding it in the BIOS
In 2015 it installed some Lenovo executables into the system32 dir that ran with admin permissions (so they could download more Lenovo rubbish).
They seem to have stopped doing it. It didn't affect Linux (afaik, since it exploits WPBT which is Windows-only). And ironally I actually own a stack of old 2008 Lenovo thinkpads precisely because they can have the firmware removed and replaced with a safer FOSS version (Libreboot).