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Linux Desktop Market Share Crosses 3% (netmarketshare.com)

Posted by msmash on from the milestone dept.

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.

1 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. Android is not really a "Linux" smartphone OS. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.