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Here's why Linux market share isn't going to skyrocket anytime soon (thelibre.news)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by Pro@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

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You've heard the "prophecy": next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right? Linux is no longer the niche hobby of bearded sysadmins and free software evangelists that it was a decade ago! Modern distributions like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint are sleek, accessible, and — dare I say it — mainstream-adjacent.

Linux is ready for professional work, including video editing, and it even manages to maintain a slight market share advantage over macOS among gamers, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey.

However, it's not ready to dethrone Windows. At least, not yet!

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[–] Ooops@feddit.org 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's not wrong but a seperate problem mainly caused by lock-in strategies that are not exactly the same as marketshare or industry standards and are explicitly distinct from the actual OS's capabilties.

I know enough people who have the exact same problem but with Apple as their employer forces them to use software only available there. Yet their marketshare for desktops is just a tiny fraction of what we see for Windows (~15% if we are optimsitic).

So will we pretend that Linux with a 10 or 15% marketshare (not that far off for an OS with already 5+%) is suddenly a valid alternative. Or are we honest and acknowledge that this is indeed NOT about Linux' capability to be a valid Windows replacement but purely about the fact that there isn't (an never will be...) a massive corporation spending billions in marketing and lobbying to create perceived standards simply by throwing money at the problem for even higher future gains?

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think that if Linux had a 50% market share then it would be considered a very valid alternative, even though that is obviously not very realistic (at this point, at least). My comment was more about why a high market share would be desirable than about how realistic it would be to get there.

Having said that: I think that if Linux were to get to a 10% or 15% valid market share, it would be a sign that a lot of things had changed that would have made it a more valid alternative in the process.

[–] nous@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

You don't need anywhere near 50% market share to be a valid alternative. If anything market share has nothing to do with it being a valid alternative except that it more likely to be the case with higher numbers. Past 50% it is really no longer even the alternative at all - it would be the main choice.

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago

Agreed; I was only arguing against the proposition that increased market share would not eventually make a difference.