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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 was really surprised to see that Software Development was the second most popular primary application for Linux laptops. Personally, I use a couple of tower systems with a couple of big monitors for software development that I can upgrade periodically with new M/Bs, Processors, etc. The code that I write is mostly (C/C++) firmware with some Java followed by scripting/Javascript but I feel like there's no way I can be productive (other than emergency bug fixes) on a laptop and I worry about losing a laptop with any kind of code on it (even though it's backed up on GitHub). A laptop for me is something to do presentations, demos, emails and the occasional spreadsheet, not for developing code.
Is it a personal style thing that I prefer the desktop systems or are there reasons why people use laptops for their software development?
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I can understand CentOS/RHEL on servers, but on desktops, who would choose that? While Fedora is bleeding edge and ships with 10-minute old kernels, CentOS/RHEL are possibly even more conservative than the Debian "stale" branch.
Unless one has antiquated hardware, there's just no reason to pick antiquated libraries and kernels. I mean, if you buy a recent laptop, why would you want a kernel that was released 3-4 years before the hardware you bought was designed? Or who in their right mind would possible desire Java 7?
lucm, indeed.
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.
Never ever, Ubuntu on the workstation and Windows 10 as a Virtual Box guest for the rare occasion where I have to make a Windows build (using GCC on MSYS2 since VS is cancer).
Mint @5th? Not buying it.
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.
The way the question was worded it didn't mean "use it full-time for software development".
I have a couple of projects I sometimes like to hack on sitting outside.
Or when travelling.
Or on the kitchen table, because the computer room got too hot with the computer running full speed and heat outside.
So I answered that I do use it for software development, even if it's below 20% of the time.
Thought most Linux users would stay away from Lenovo after the bios incident
systemd needs rebooting far more often than windows
Academic here. Most of my programming are physics simulations programs, which are a bit too heavy to run on a laptop, but can be tested comfortably on a workstation, and are then run on a supercomputer to produce the final results. However, I still do most of my programing from a laptop. What I typically do then, is that I ssh from my laptop to my office desktop computer, and keep open a terminal with one nvim tab for development, one cmake tab for recompiling, one tmux tab for running test simulations, and one tab where I tail -f the output logs and plot any resulting data (relying on X forwarding).
The main reason I do this, is that I find a typical office setting very uncomfortable over time — I much prefer switching rooms, furniture, and working positions every few hours when doing longer programming sessions. That's something you can do with a laptop with a decent battery, but not with a desktop computer. Also, I do a lot of work from home, where I haven't even had a desktop computer for the past 5 years, as a decent laptop now does everything I want from it.
I'm the same. I like as light and small form a laptop as possible, and that makes for a fairly shitty development machine. I also like to monitor setups, and while you can do it with laptops, I find it interesting awkward.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I had been running Linux Mint on my notebook for nearly a year. About 25% of the time it would not get through a cold boot-up. I had to power down and restart. Thinking It might be an install quirk, I wiped and re-installed Mint. Same thing. Now I run Debian with no issues at all. (notebook is a ThinkPad)
I was really surprised to see that Software Development was the second most popular primary application for Linux laptops.
Like any solicitation-response based survey, this one suffers from a huge selection bias. The Linux users that see the solicitation differ from "typical" Linux users, and those that take the time to respond differ even more.
Ubuntu and Mint are Debian based, so the Debian total is 65%. Manjaro is Arch-based, so Arch is 28.7%. I also tend to lump RPM-based distros together, Fedora + SUSE + RedHat is at 22.1%.
Personally, I started with Red Hat (5.0 IIRC, and note this is not Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which started a new number sequence), obtained as a boxed set on CDs purchased at Barnes & Noble. It wasn't long before I gave Debian a try, starting with 2.0 (Hamm), and I was hooked. Within a couple of years I had stopped using Windows completely, so Windows 2000 was the last version I used, and that only briefly. For many years I ran Debian unstable, then I backed off to running testing, since it was less fiddly, not that unstable is bad, really. It's quite solid; the name refers to the changing nature of the contents, not to the reliability of the system. Along the way I tinkered with Gentoo, Slack and a few others, but always came back to Debian.
These days I just use my work machines which run a customized version of Ubuntu (desktop) and OS X (laptop). If I did have a personally-owned laptop, it would probably be a MacBook running Debian testing. Though I'd probably give Arch a try. I like the rolling release model and Debian testing undergoes occasional lockdowns as the project gets close to a release. If Arch is less fiddly than Debian unstable, I might like it better.
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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.
I don't know how much time they should spend optimizing it for AMD GPUs, maybe first they should make it work on computers that have high resolution monitors. Every time I launch Calc by mistake (because I type "Calc" in the Gnome search box and press enter too quickly) I chuckle when I see how LibreOffice looks on my 32 inch high-dpi display.
lucm, indeed.
I hate being tied to an office, and because my development 'gig' is a sideline for me often I find myself at my kids' extra curricular activities with spare time, so I develop from swimming pool lobbies, sometimes parking lots. I develop all the time, mostly web server and mobile app development. It works fine on a laptop for me.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Also, there is nothing candy-coated about it. I find I have to configure macos far more than I have to configure linux to get it to do what I need to do.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So what do you do when a systemd update comes in? Just leave the system running?
Not exactly. Linux is Unix-like, macOS is officially certified Unix.
Circumcision is child abuse.
They don't call it OS X anymore, now it's macOS.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Don't get me started on Java apps period.
"No Linux DE or GUI even approaches OSX's visual polish and core design"
This is true, but it doesn't matter. Linux is incredibly efficient from the command line.
"Linux will never be adopted by the masses."
This is probably true, but again it doesn't matter. Those of us who are productive with it every single day are quite happy. On the other hand, many casual users who have a Linux system set up for them use it and barely know that they're not using Windows. How many of us have set up Linux systems for grandparents, spouses, etc.? Many. They browse the web in relative safety and don't care what the operating system is called.
"No profit because of "information wants to be free" thievery."
This argument has been debunked many times in the past.
http://distrowatch.com/awstats...
Ubuntu is only 2.3% of the 14,445,000 hits running Linux this month. The rest of the name brand distros hoover around 0%.
The most popular distro is Unknown:
GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution) 12,446,745 44.4 %
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Whaaaaat?
I've been running Neon on top of Ubuntu 16.04 for two years and systemd has NEVER forced me to reboot. I'm also running my NVidia GT650M via nvidia-378 and it makes my secondary GPU, which cannot be set as the primary in the BIOS, act like the primary.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I usually do the update, pray, reboot, swear when the new version of systemd that was just installed fails in some way, swear again, get out my phone so I can google for a fix or workaround, try to find a Linux live disc so I can boot the system and make the fix, pray again, reboot again, wait for systemd to screw up again, fix it again, pray once more, reboot once more, give a sigh of relief when the system seems to finally be booting properly, and then kick myself for not switching to FreeBSD.
on this thread reminded me of the great uptime wars 15 years ago. Linux users were claiming uptimes of 200, 300, 400 and more days, only to be countered by Windows users who claimed equal or longer uptimes.
The argument was settled abruptly and permanently when Microsoft announced the 32bit clock bug which automatically rebooted ALL Windows installations after an uptime of only 49.7 days. Any Windows user claiming 50 or more days of uptime was lying.
My longest uptime was 410 days (IIRC) on an in office PostgreSQL server running SuSE 6.3.
I've been retired for nine years and I no longer need 24/7/365 access to my computers, all of which are laptops, so I turn them off every night.
Today I see in this comment sections lots of criticisms about the "usability" of KDE, Plasma, Gnome, Mint and other Linux DE's and it is obvious from the nature of the complaints that the complainers are less than truthful about their assertions. The more things change the more they remain the same! :D
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Totally agree..
What surprises me is how many times Im asked to fix someones Linux system - find that it is Ubuntu and why?
It is basically Debian testing or worse and yes - there are bugs that an average user will have trouble dealing with - why not just use Debian stable?
I have also fixed other Linux systems and find them better than Ubuntu. Just dont get why it is so popular..
Most of my programming life (11 years) was as a consultant where I'd frequently be working on site so a laptop was a must. I never really felt like coding on one was any real hindrance though a second monitor when at a permanent location was a nice plus.
Coding on a laptop is another reason I really like vi/vim keybindings in any editor I can get them in. I'm very used to only using smaller laptop keyboards that don't always have the arrow keys in handy locations.
And to this day I sorta despise the giant 17" laptops because they're a pain to lug around. My wife has one but I prefer my 14.1" Lenovo. It's underpowered and ancient but travels so nice.
Does not work if you want to provide proper QA to paying customers. Also one of our products puts data into MS SQL Server among other things and running that beast on Wine is no fun when you have some 200K updates per second.
Yeah right, the macOS GUI is so polished and nice that whenever I boot one up in Virtual Box I only ssh to it, at least Apple haven't managed to idiotize that yet.
I do mostly server-side Java stuff and have been using the same Linux laptop for it for the last 6+ years.
But since working on a laptop for more than a couple of hours is literally a pain in the neck, I connect an external keyboard, mouse and monitor.
So from a practical, prouctivity-related point of view, there really isn't a difference between laptop and desktop for me.
I'm mostly using the laptop instead of a desktop because it's nice to have my current environment wherever I am AND because I work mostly at home and it saves a lot of electricity.
From my measurements, calculations and comparison of electricity bills, this 1000EUR laptop is getting close to having paid for itself.
The CPU is fast enough, so the only upgrades during those years were to replace the optical drive with an SSD and upgrading the RAM from 8GB to 16GB after SuSE 13.x reached its end of life (the current SuSE and KDE have become incredible memory hogs and moving all work from Java 7 to Java 8 didn't exactly help either).
I was really surprised to see that Software Development was the second most popular primary application for Linux laptops.
No kidding. I write a little code on my laptop while traveling, but for day-to-day work I want a beefy workstation with multiple, large monitors, and I want a better keyboard than I've ever found on a laptop, and a good trackball. My workstation is has two 24" monitors and one 30" monitor (and I'm looking to upgrade that 30" to a 40" 4K display) and has a Kinesis Advantage Pro keyboard (with foot pedals!) and a Kensington Expert trackball (which I'm not entirely happy with -- recommendations welcome!).
I can work through a porthole, but why would I want to?
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My cousin owns his own software company that largely creates middleware solutions, and while I'm not sure what he has at home, he always has his laptop with him so he can work anywhere in nearly any environment. In the car, at a hotel, in an airplane, in a hospital waiting room, a coffee shop, etc.... He can take calls, open a project on his laptop and edit code and issue patches. He's often travelling.
There's really no other solution for someone who lives on-the-go so much.
Another friend is a programmer working for a large software company. He works almost exclusively on his Apple laptop in either OS X or Linux. I'm not sure what he's working on these days, though. He used to mostly work with systems integration and web page back-end scripting, but he's proficient in many areas and languages. System speed and compile time aren't always as important as other factors -- especially if one has more than one machine to work with or more than one project to work on simultaneously... and since the changes go to a development server anyway, there's usually no rush if a project is planned properly.
Slackware is actually number one by a wide margin, but everyone knows Slackware users don't bother responding to stupid surveys, duh.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Don't! That'll be the best one. Either they'll realize what a bad idea systemd is and chuck it away, or Lennart will have handed it over to someone competent who'll have knocked most of the bugs out of it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've always run Arch on my desktop/laptops [when running a Linux distro] but I always though that it was "too hard" for most Linux newbies. And when I recommend a Linux install to new Linux users, it's ALWAYS Mint, bc it's so easy and built ready-to-go after install. Currently use a MacBook for my main system (work perk), but I do still use Arch in a VM when necessary, and run Arch on my personal laptop.
You probably do more coding than I do; When I am at work I dock my notebook to a KVM, large monitor, etc and find that setup just fine for what I do, including some light development. I completely agree with your point on SW development on the small screen- I'd do that when docked.
What kind of Software Development Work on Laptops?
I've been writing software for the last around 18 years for various employers, who all provided the machines. For the first 4 years or so did I have a desktop (Windows 3.1 then NT, MSVC, those cluncky CRT monitors... - mostly C, with 4GL and database clients), then also for a short stint at a European subsidiary that had a fairly locked-down environment. But for the rest I've worked mostly for contracting houses that wanted their workforce to be mobile - even if based at the same client's office for years. For the last 3 months or so I'm working at a big banking client that just issues everyone a (fairly heavily locked-down) laptop (seems easier to obtain than a parking spot or logins to the Dev servers); I don't even take the thing home. This business also have Agilified their office environment with a lot of first-come-first-serve desks, open-plan stretches with lots of whiteboards on wheels, etc. - not that conducive to a fixed workstation (or concentration or avoiding getting the flu every other week - but I'm digressing).
I'm sure it depends on the type of application being worked on, but my impression is that the more high-end modern laptops (given enough RAM) are quite capable of running all the usual FOSS as well as commercial suspects like Eclipse/Rational platform/Netbeans, MySQL/MariaDB/Oracle/DB2, Glassfish/Firefly/Webspere AS, etc. etc. locally without too much of a performance issue. (And I'm guessing a lot of the Linux crowd would be in the FOSS, LAMP etc. type space) I've never worked on a project that really needed some server hardware for dev-level compiling and running - production of course being a different matter.
The only issue I've ever had with laptops is screen real estate. Even taking into account that I started in the 80x25 terminal world, modern IDEs do want that extra. I do see the benefit of the "see as much as possible code on one screen" principle and format Java code to 120 columns minimum these days, but find that a 1920x1080 screen is fairly sufficient (as a minimum). Yes, a multi-head setup may be nice, but through years of not being available I've become accustomed to the Alt-Tab window switch - hardly even use multiple desktops were they are available. At some workplaces second (plug-in) screens are available, but I have found that I hardly use it. It shows a lot less activity than the primary. Maybe I'd have the e-mail client open on it or a spec (IF available...).
So in summary, there are all sorts of setups that can work and that people are used to, one is not really more "proper" than another :-) It depends and everyone's mileage can vary.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Linux Mint is so good that i am shocked it does not reach the number one spot. I really love Mint.
Our customers run a wide variety of systems so in order to support the poor ones who run Windows I do occasionally have to both provide a Windows build and perform QA.