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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
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 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 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.
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.
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!
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!
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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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.