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Linux Desktop Market Share Crosses 3% (netmarketshare.com)
Data for the month of August 2017 from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications is here, and it suggests that Linux has finally surpassed the three percent mark, quite possibly for the first time in recent years. According to Net Applications, the desktop market share of Linux jumped from 2.53 percent in July to 3.37 percent in August. There's no explanation for what accounted for this growth.
Desktop is over. Now its all about smartphones.
And well. The year of Linux on smartphones was a couple of years ago.
Linux has already won. Poeple don't really know it yet.
Just saying it like it are.
I really don't get why people consider Android to be Linux.
Is the Linux kernel present? Yeah, but it's buried so deeply that most Android developers, and pretty much all Android users, have absolutely no idea that it's there.
When you develop Android apps you have pretty much no direct interaction with the Linux kernel. You aren't writing POSIX-style applications that could be ported to the BSDs or macOS or Solaris or HP-UX with ease. You aren't using the GUI toolkits commonly used with other Linux systems. You're actually writing apps for what's effectively a proprietary Java-based environment.
When you use Android, you really aren't using the GNU utilities, systemd, X, Wayland, or any of the desktop environments typically found on a Linux system. You're using other software that is quite specific to Android.
Android is "Linux" in the most minimal sense. It clearly doesn't resemble other traditional Linux distributions. In fact, that's probably why it has been successful: a lot of the userland software that makes Linux a rather hostile environment for users has been totally discarded and replaced with far more effective, albeit essentially proprietary, replacements!
Google could probably silently switch the Linux kernel to the NetBSD kernel or some other kernel, and nobody else would have any idea it happened. That's how irrelevant and hidden the Linux kernel is to Android developers and users.
Perhaps that's what will eventually happen with something like the Fuchsia project.
We shouldn't consider Android to be an example of Linux being popular. I think it's the opposite: we should see it as Android (that is: what's essentially the proprietary software and environment running on top of the Linux kernel) being popular, and the Linux kernel just happens to be along for the ride.
> According to Net Applications, the desktop market share of
> Linux jumped from 2.53 percent in July to 3.37 percent in August.
> There's no explanation for what amounted for this growth.
A 30% jump in one month, after two decades of "YYYY will be the year of Linux on the desktop!" ?
The explanation is obvious: bad data.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
1. Microsoft Windows 10 which removes user control and adds spying/telemetry/etc.
2. Tim Cook as the CEO of Apple believes iPad Pro can replace computers, macOS is receiving mostly visual updates that do nothing and even removes useful features for pro users and Mac updates are a joke, they remove things users need, add features no one asked for and the machines are more overpriced than ever.
#DeleteFacebook
"on the server. They've fixed most of the major issues. You still have to reboot them for no good reason, but with load balancing that's not really an issue."
The biggest issue is that it's a less capable platform with more overhead and no upside except where it supports windows desktops. Nobody uses SQL server, IIS, or SharePoint because they are the best answer to their problems, they use them because of interaction with other products in the windows ecosystem (including things produced by windows focused developers). Without the windows desktop there won't be new generations of developers and admins who took the easy path of developing and learning on the windows platform their desktop runs on. Also without the windows desktop, you have no AD servers, without AD servers the rest of it becomes a major headache and platform doesn't make sense.