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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?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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.
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.
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.
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.