this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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Linux

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (7 children)

Would be interesting to know how much of that the steam deck is

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (4 children)

In my head it’s like half a percent, 4.45% seems huge.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

4.45 is huge. 0.5 is normal sized.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Why is it OS X but Windows doesn't specify which number?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

One for every current ~0.5% market share!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (17 children)

How far down are PC sales in general though?

Is it that more people are buying Linux, or fewer Windows customers are buying new computers at all?

A few years ago, you'd have households with a laptop for every member of the family. Now with tablets and phones doing so much of the heavy lifting, many families are dropping to just 1 Windows or Mac laptop that mostly gathers dust.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Is the data of specific distros available somewhere ?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I'm actually gearing up to convert all of my Windows machines to Linux once the updates for 10 stop coming. This will be especially easy once the new WINE gets integrated and the few windows game apps that I use can run well on Linux.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

How do I hide which OS I am using? What is behind the high Unknown number?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Every browser has a description like "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; SM-T580) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36" called User Agent. You can set this value to something else, but be careful. If you set it to something that does not exist, then it makes it more likely to be identifiable. Or some things could potentially not work right if it expects a specific operating system, in example when downloading files. Usually not a big deal.

So ultimately you want to set this value to something that exist and something that is used by many people. There are addons which can make this process much easier or even change it automatically after some time period in example.

Chameleon at https://sereneblue.github.io/chameleon/ is such an addon for the browser. There are lot of other alternatives, I used a few of them in the past, but stopped using them because there was here and there trouble. If you do, I recommend to install this addon from the addon store of your browser and not from the website, but that is just my personal recommendation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

Thanks. So what is measured is merely the browsers people are using? Then I can see why the metrics are more general ballparks than precise measurements, seeing that the user agent can be modified with ease.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago
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