Nothing about Linux users is quiet.
I use arch btw
I have found myself deep in the Nix and nixOS ecosystem myself.
Somehow I feel like mentioning Nix and NixOS is the new ‘I use arch btw’.
(No offense, but reading the ‘I use arch btw’ and then your response right after made me realize this)
Somehow I feel like mentioning Nix and NixOS is the new ‘I use arch btw’.
“I use Nix btw”
Rolls off the tongue in the same way. And, honestly, “I use Arch btw” just isn’t the same hipster know-it-all contrarian meme that it used to be. It has a graphical installer now, and a popular retail device (the Steam Deck) comes with a user-friendly derivative of it installed out of the box.
Meanwhile, NixOS has a huge learning curve that’s off-putting to most non-technical users and even Linux hobbiests. I mean, really—having to configure everything through a functional programming language masquerading as a configuration file format? That’s just the kind of thing that would attract masochists and pedants!
I use Nix btw.
I just left nixos after about two years, and now on cachyos (arch). nixos is pretty cool in a lot of ways, but trying to stay on the bleeding edge of packages and kernels means living in nixos-unstable land, where broken builds are common. and I just got tired of it all.
My condolences
Fun fact: if you have a Steam Deck, Nix (the package manager) is pretty much the only vendor-approved way to safely install extra packages that aren’t otherwise available as a flatpak.
Trying to screw with overlayfs to make pacman usable is/was a thing, and it was a very good way to break the OS install despite it having atomic updates.
Fun fact: SteamOS comes pre-loaded with Distrobox so you can install whatever packages you want.
That’s new. Always good to see them add more ways to customize it.
I think it has been a feature since around 6 months after launch of the Steam Deck but it’s not well known and widely used feature.
Does Steam Deck not have rpm-ostree (or an arch equivalent since RPM is fedora-specific)?
Needs “pac-ostree” or something…
Also, what about distrobox?
I haven’t really tried to do anything package manager-related on my Deck, so I’m going on what I know from Bazzite, but there are several ways to install non-flatpak software on it. In fact, I even installed yay on an Arch distrobox, and I can install things from the AUR (as well as the official repositories).
Does Steam Deck not have rpm-ostree (or an arch equivalent since RPM is fedora-specific)?
Steam Deck has a custom solution involving an A/B partition scheme of immutable btrfs filesystems and overlayfs for layering changes on top of that.
Also, what about distrobox?
If there’s a way to install containerization software with Flatpak, maybe. Docker isn’t available out of the box, though.
I haven’t really tried to do anything package manager-related on my Deck, so I’m going on what I know from Bazzite, but there are several ways to install non-flatpak software on it. In fact, I even installed yay on an Arch distrobox, and I can install things from the AUR (as well as the official repositories).
You can use pacman, but it’s volatile and requires making intentional changes to restore its functionality.
The first option is to disable the read-only flag on the root filesystem, then set pacman back up so it can pull packages. Whenever the root filesystem image is updated, you’ll lose the changes, though.
The second option is to add an overlayfs to persist the changes in a different partition or inside a disk image on the writable storage. There was a tool called “rwfus” that did this, and it worked well enough if you were careful. If you ended up upgrading a package that came installed on the base image, though, it would end up breaking the install when the next update came around.
With all the caveats, when Valve made
/nixavailable as a persistent overlay a couple of years ago, I just bit the bullet and learned how to use Nix to install packages withnix-env -i.Huh, interesting. Thanks for the info
Distrobox works really well in Bazzite, in fact I’m currently typing this comment in LibreWolf in a Fedora toolbox because I was getting a weird lag with the flatpak version. You wouldn’t even know if you didn’t set it up yourself, since it’s just an icon on my launcher like any other program. No noticeable overhead whatsoever either.
SteamOS also ships distrobox OOTB now, so you can use this anywhere.
NixOS isn’t great for non-programmers, I bet, but for programmers it’s amazing.
I’m just now starting my degree is software engineering. I’m 31. I’d gotten comfortable enough with Linux that I wanted to try NixOS to avoid having my system get borked again (in my case, KDE Plasma started having shell crashes at log in).
If I was only using NixOS to run a basic computer set up? Sure, no problem. If I want to rice and customize it? No, I wasn’t ready.
To be fair, we have to be that way to push back against the field of inveitability that omnipresent corporate marketing creates in our minds.
The extroverted nerdiness is an effective tool to communally deprogram our rheified way of looking at computers so we can envision a different future.
But but Phoronix just told me yesterday that Linux users went dramatically down on Steam from 3% to 2.99%! Almost like this weekly/monthly claim of Linux users “crossing” another imaginary threshold line hold as much value as this comment /s
Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025.
Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer.
But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?
At work, the windows outage spooked management hard. They noticed that our small amout of Linux servers didn’t go down. So now they are OK with us using Linux more. After many decades of Windows.
What Windows outage?
Maybe the CrowdStrike outage last year
Yep
I just wish it could have been longer, and affected my company (it didn’t). A day or two off would have gone down a treat
That is was a Crowdstike issue not a Windows issue. They have borked Linux updates as well. Microsoft has had their far share of bad updates but none of them were outage level assuming companies properly tested updates.
A lot of these large companies are terrible at multiple levels. It is great to pay premium dollar for junk.
That is was a Crowdstike issue not a Windows issue.
From my understanding, it’s true that CrowdStrike wrote the faulty code and submitted it to Microsoft. Microsoft shares blame in that they didn’t properly vet and test the kernel-level patch CrowdStrike had submitted.
Microsoft doesn’t vet the code. All code is required to be signed but that is it.
Yep, my org had a Falcon sensor outage take out tens of thousands of Linux servers. Fuck Crowdstrike. Also, fuck Windows and fuck Microsoft.
Not certain what others experienced, but in my company, a bad Windows Update knocked out most of our computers for a full day. It was so bad, you can see it in like monthly financial reports when it happened.
It was one of the motivators for why my job dropped Microsoft.
Is this the century of Linux?
That could actually be a reasonable view, considering Windows has fallen off since the late 90’s or early 00’s, depending on what version you draw the line on.
To be fair, it is pretty hard to keep increasing your market share when you get closer and closer to 100%.
But yes, 2000 or XP was the last respectable version of Windows. Maybe Win7, but I never used it.
2000 or XP was the last respectable version of Windows.
Generally it’s a sine wave: XP SP3 good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 10 good-ish, 11… nevermind.
Windows is falling off because they missed the mobile boat.
Most people never needed a full computer. All they do is consume and a phone and iPad is more than enough for that.
The desktop market is shrinking and the steam deck is pumping Linux numbers in an increasingly smaller pond.
yeah that’s the sad truth. I was watching a video yesterday about like “All creators should be on YouTube” because Instagram, Twitter, etc., will open your Patreon link logged-out in a WebView…
I’m the only one watching videos on a desktop I guess
Installed linux for my brother-in-law and for a professor last month. Both liked it and are probably going to use it insted of moving to win11. I’m doing my part.
o7
What distro did you go with?
Linux mint for my brother-in-law, and debian for my professor, because he said he has an aversion to stuff changing in his computer and wanted something that stayed almost the same in 10 or 20 or years from now and didn’t fail him. He seemed enthusiastic with the concept of a distro that focuses on stability and wanted it, even if I said that it’s a bit harder to use and recommended linux mint.
All my extended family has been converted to linux because all they need is a browser, libre office and rustdesk for me to tech support them. The only issue is still printers but tbh they are equally awful on all platforms these days.
I thought Linux had decent printer support compared to windows.
It does, in my experience. At least in Linux Mint.
At home, my old Brother laser is tucked off in a far corner of the house connected to wifi, and my wired home PC as well as my wifi work laptop both see it and can print to it just fine.
At work even those big printers show up and function.
Kubuntu LTS works pretty damn near out-of-the-box as well.
Mint is based on ubuntu so that makes sense to me!
I think they are comparable in that regard honestly?
Printer manufacturers obviously try their best to make their printers work well with Windows.
Printer support on Linux is provided by CUPS, which is developed by Apple. Apple wants its Mac (and maybe also iPhone and iPad?) customers to have good printer support, so they try their best to make CUPS work well.
Printer manufacturers obviously try their best to make their printers work well with Windows.
As a guy who’s worked in IT for around 20 years: LOL.
Depends on the brand really. Some like HP and Epson haven’t worked as good in my own experience compared to Brother.
Decent printers yes, some demons from ninth circle of hell somehow are more problematic on anything non-windows.
some demons from ninth circle of hell
What a rude way to invoke cupsd
I did not know about rustdesk. It looks to be very promising, I will give it a try!
Is Linux desktop marketshare increasing or is desktop marketshare decreasing as a whole, though?
If you’re sitting on a Windows 10 machine that can’t upgrade to Windows 11, or if you’re tired of Apple’s walled garden, now’s the time to explore PureOS, a FSF endorsed GNU/Linux distribution.
God damn it. This is how you scare people away from Linux.
Linux market share is increasing even in the charts with all OSes, desktop and mobile.
Yes
finally doing it as my daily driverOne of the hottest pics on the internet ❤️🐧
Please mark this as NSFW ( not safe for Windows)
Good choice! A tip: many media apps are better being installed as a Flatpak and not from the Fedora rpms. Many Fedora packages, such as VLC, are missing specific codecs and the Flatpak versions can generally play everything.
a little correction: its not VLC that misses the codec, but the distribution. most distros dont risk distributing hardware acceleration drivers for h264 and a few others because of patents
To be clear, flatpaks from flathub. Fedora has their own flatpak repository, and those are not the flatpaks you are looking for.
Be aware though, that flatpaks can fill up your drive very quickly. Using something like Warehouse and Flatsweep every now and then to clean things up can free up a shocking amount of space.
I thought this was a book at first glance
Welcome!
If you like Fedora and are looking for something gaming focused and stupidly stable, check out Bazzite. It’s based on Atomic Fedora
Hi hello, this is partly me. My bad. I’m not moving to Win11 (by force and by choice) so I installed Arch just to start to get the hang of things and, well, now I’m just daily driving it.
I’ve run distributions in the distant past and toyed with recent ones. I think this one is staying though.
Feels good that when my computer is idle, it’s not busy spouting off telemetry to some server somewhere. I can customize way more than before, and with Proton, I can still play the games I want to.
Enjoy linux :)
Enjoy RTFM with arch :)
The arch wiki is shockingly detailed at times. I’m very impressed.
I like Arch, but honestly the Arch wiki is one of the great contributions made to the Linux community, with value exceeding the distro itself.
Hi you, this is me too, didn’t want to buy new hardware too just because MS wants me to. i went with Nobara because it liked my Nvidia GPU a lot more than many other distros, and deleted my windows partition after 3 days - i expected it to take a lot longer than that to feel safe doing that, but it just works and i can do more with my PC than i ever could with windows.
We are doing our part :-)
Kids really need to be introduced to Linux earlier. None of this iPad baby shit.
Get them a raspberry Pi or equivalent for Christmas and teach them how to run a Minecraft server on it
Necessity is the breeder of invention
I cringe at parents who build there kids gaming PCs. They should just give their kids “junk” and let them figure it out.
I mean a gaming PC is awesome but getting some old garage sales PC and spending an afternoon and showing them how to build a website would be awesome.
Specifically, kids ought to be using Raspberry Pis. Linux + a bunch of other stuff designed to help them learn about computers, including an actual goddamn book (“Raspberry Pi Beginners Guide”) if you buy a Raspberry Pi 500 (the built-into-a-keyboard version).
Raspberry Pis these days are overpriced, a cheaper mini PC/old Optiplex will do fine.
Mini PCs / old Optiplexes don’t have built-in GPIO and a huge database of kid-friendly projects to do with them.
It’s that software and community and hacker ethos built into the design that makes the difference, not the performance specs of the hardware. The point is “facilitating kids learning about computing,” not merely “being a desktop computer.”
I mean, I guess you could install Raspberry Pi OS on a PC and add a GPIO breakout board (like this or this) to try to replicate the pedagogical experience of a Raspberry Pi without the “overpriced” hardware, but it’s not going to be nearly as straightforward as just using a real Pi.
Good point.
Used enterprise minis are dirt cheap. The only downside is that they guzzle electricity compared to a low spec pi, but they can do much more, so don’t be afraid to give them additional tasks.
My Dell SFF uses close to the same power as my Pi, once you start doing anything with the Pi (like swap to an SSD instead of an SD card). Pi idle: 8w. Dell SFF: 12w. Neither one show up on my power bill. Both of those are less than a single LED light bulb.
Pi is great on power at idle, with nothing else going on. But it can’t convert videos at a reasonable pace, doesn’t come in a case with mounts, extra power, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, Pi is great, it’s been fun tinkering with it, a great learning tool. But it’s hard to compete with a mini or SFF on a capability-per-watt basis or physical capability (standard brackets, expansion, etc).
Those are heavy LED bulbs you got there at 12W or more. Typically LED bulb is only like 3 - 5 W??
Honestly they don’t burn that much power but it will depend on the CPU
I personally wouldn’t buy a Raspberry Pi. Instead, give them a old computer and say “have at it”
See my other reply expanding on why Raspberry Pi specifically.
Otherwise, while your strategy worked when I was a kid – back in the DOS/early Windows days we had to actually figure out how stuff really worked out of necessity, and often without help from the Internet because we weren’t online yet – those days are gone. The expectations of easiness are too high now, and kids would just get frustrated and bitch about wanting to go back to a “just works” tablet or phone instead. They really need some additional killer feature to be excited about, that they can’t get with a generic device running a web browser, in order to be motivated to explore.
My kids have Raspberry Pi 400s but are too young to get into reading the guide book that came with them yet, so even under (what I consider to be) those ideal circumstances they mostly ignore all the local software and just try to play the web-based games they found out about from school. 😕
In other words, even a Raspberry Pi isn’t a guarantee of fostering real computer literacy, but I still think it gives the best chance (better than a generic old PC, and way better than a consumption-oriented tablet/phone).
Don’t take this the wrong way but sound like a grumpy old millennial.
You don’t need DOS or a Raspberry pi to learn tech. What you need is the right mindset and a desire to tinker. If your kid is “bitching” they simply don’t care to learn about tech. Don’t force it down their throat as that is not going to end well.
They are interested they will learn by simply tinkering and playing around. You should avoid giving them guidance as that doesn’t teach critical thinking. Let them figure out how to do whatever. It might be improving the frame rate in Minecraft or it could be doing some sort of programming project. It could even end up being desktop customization or digital art.
I also think it is perfectly reasonable to tinker with a mobile device or tablet. You can do all sorts of things especially with some of the apps from F-droid such as Termux.
Oh hell yes get them off these crappy mobile devices
Yup, every time my niece and nephew come over I show them how awesome my desktop is! They also use my laptop but I want them to know what a proper PC can do.
Next up is showing them that the files they download don’t just magically disappear into the ether on their device.
I think mobile devices aren’t all bad.
Honestly the biggest issue is the exposure to marketing
The biggest issue is the surveillance capitalism, monopolization, and walled gardens/firmware that prevent linux mobile options from becoming a viable alternative.
Android is perfectly fine. I’ve even seen people do crazy things with iOS.
Kids will use whatever they have available if they have the right mindset. You can do some crazy things on mobile.
Honestly I think we need more open less harmful mobile platforms. Mobile devices are perfectly fine but the ads and tracking can be a very serious problem.
You’re describing a sturdy tablet running Linux. Speaking of which, I just remembered the worst gift I have ever been given, a gen1 windows surface! The sack of shit couldn’t even run windows, the OS it was designed for, without freezing. Gonna see if I can dig it out and swap the OS!
Linux sucks on mobile
I wish it didn’t but in 2025 that is the state of things
And it seems like android sucks on there as well. Damn.
It is far better than anything else.
It isn’t ideal what Google is doing. However, Lineage OS and other ROMs are keeping the ecosystem alive. We also have F-droid which is great.
Eh, it’s just not worth the effort to get a tablet that will still run poorly even after poring over half deleted xda threads. Were there any chance that the original surface running another OS could be useful, I’d do it. But it’d be a poor experience no matter what, based on what I’ve read.
Me: Junior! Did you hack a Gibson???
5yo: Maaayyybe…
I mean technically its linux
iPads are technically BSD, not Linux.
Don’t forget the Mach heritage! Darwin is the mutt of kernels.
Technically, Android is Linux (but not GNU/Linux), but as @[email protected] mentioned, i(Pad)OS is based on BSD (“Darwin”), a UNIX derivate.
Both are unixoid systems.Termux
I recently wiped my 10yr running windows install that had all manner of shady hacks applied over the years to basically lobotomize it, after a hardware upgrade. As I was wiping I was largely intending to create another “lobotomized” win10 install as the second install on dual boot, but windows on top of everything is known for breaking dual boot. Working around sheer hostility at every level, and for what? Basically just to play pirated games since steam games work on Linux now. I never bothered trying to prop it back up and have been only better off for it
You can use Lutris to play pirated games on Linux
I was dualbooting of two seperate nvme drives for each os. Worked pretty well for almost a year until i distro hopped. But for some reason my windows boot partition was located on my linux drive which i purged entirely while installing the new OS. Because why would be there any windows component on my linux drive, right?
Recreating the windows boot partition on the correct drive was more complicated than anything i ever encountered on linux so far. Took like 5 hours and funnily enough was only doable via a terminal.
Also there isnt a reason left for me to put up with microsofts bullshit. A few weeks ago i got a racing game with VR and wheel support running in an afternoon. The title is even abandonware so i had to grab some repack with a windows only installer.
that’s strange, what filesystem was that? windows cannot handle linux filesystems, by itself.
wasn’t that /boot/efi? if so windows uses that too, it’s a designated fat32 partition for uefi bootables.
Uuh, could have been /boot/efi ? I dont know anymore. It was a few weeks ago and in an adhd induced rush to fix that problem now and now was until 3am.
My gamer Brother-in-law asked me about Linux gaming. Until a few years ago he was all like “Windows is super!”.
🐧🌊
Antarctica rises!
The Quiet Revolution?
is this implying that windows is catholicism and we’re mass secularizing our computers?
cause hell yea
I thought the quiet revolution was a specific thing to Quebec.
Otherwise it’s just Sparkling Nonverbal Civil Disobedience.
It happened in Spain as well. I think currently in Ireland as well.
Once again, someone misreports the number. It’s not 6% of desktop OS market share. It’s 6% of all OS market share. There’s about 50-50 split between desktop and mobile OSes, which means the correct desktop market share of Linux, according to that site, is 12%.
source: https://analytics.usa.gov/
This is the result currently (last 7 days):
Windows 35.5% 11 18.5% 10 16% 7 0.8% 2000 0.1% 8.1 < 0.1% 8 < 0.1% iOS 29.6% Android 15.9% Macintosh 12.3% Linux 5.2% Chrome OS 1.4% Other < 0.1%If we exclude Android and iOS (which make for 29.6 + 15.9 = 45.5%), then the contribution of each of the others would increase (by 100/45.5 = 2.19), leading to 11.388% (5.2 * 2.19).
Linux being in double digits: you love to see it
Windows 2000 having a larger market share than 8: you also love to see it, lol. I had some fun years where I was mostly using UNIX for school stuff and Win2k for games.
thanks for the breakdown. i was going to ask if they were counting android as linux and using other shoddy methodologies, but this looks good to me
