I’m a new Linux user since the start of the year. Windows has become so stressful to use for a pc I just want to game on. Before I was stuck using windows, but proton has changed the game so much I don’t feel like I’m missing anything now using Linux.

ChatGPT has also helped a lot by giving me all the technical support for Linux I could ever need. It’s taught me a ton while also helping me with all my problems.

Linux needs better multi-monitor support. It's better than it's ever been, but it's still janky and giving black screens on tertiary screens at times.

EDIT: It's funny how the comments are all over the place. "works for me", "it's broken on KDE but works on XFCE", "it's broken on XFCE but works on KDE", etc. I think that's a good sign there are problems with multi-monitor support.

Might be, china plans to implement their "opensource" version of kylin os to ditch windows

There are literally dozens of us!

I wonder if Steam Deck is helping with that number (but I don’t know if that many of them were sold to make that much impact).

according to StatCounter's data

Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally.

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology

Such statistics are always to be taken with a grain of salt.

There are more than 1.5 billion websites worldwide. Statcounter therefore covers only a small fraction of them. So chances are good that you as a Linux user do not use any of these 1.5 million websites that Statcounter uses to create their statistics.

Furthermore, I suspect that many Linux users use tools like uBlock Origin or Pi-Hole, so that the things that are used to track users are blocked.

Apart from that, I have several Linux installations with which I never access a website. Sometimes they have no direct connection to the Internet. Thus, they are also not recorded.

But now to the most important. 3 percent of what? Percentage numbers don't tell anything if you don't know the number of users behind them. Let's assume that there were 2.8 percent Linux users in May. In June, only 2.6 percent. Nevertheless, it is possible that there were more actual users in June if the total number of all users increased accordingly.

Next year it might go up to 10%? Privacy is a serious concern these days.

I'm loving the comments on the article.

Things that should have disappeared 30 years ago are still problems in the operating system. Not least of which is the handling of locales. I cannot transfer Excel files from my Windows machine to my Linux machine because my Windows machine uses points to denote decimals (as in most companies and homes in South Africa) while Linux does a hard-enforce of the documented standard in South Africa which is a comma for decimal. This breaks my files and I am unable to perform calculations on Excel files due to this. Ridiculous, relevant and sad.

I was previously unaware of the kernel doing such things.

People are indifferent, unknowing, fearful, or just plain lazy to learn new apps. Got to get Office, QuickBooks, Quicken, Adobe, and other major apps to run on Linux.

Most of these are fringe cases nowadays, and often used in environments where the user has no control over the OS anyways. I don't really use Office at home (for the three times per year, LibreOffice is good enough and that's what most Windows users I know run at home anyways).

Also it's not as easy as to just "get Office, QuickBooks, Quicken, Adobe, and other major apps to run on Linux". The wine project is doing miraculous work already IMHO…

While I agree with you on the advantages (performance, stability, reliability, security, customization, privacy, lightweight nature, no corporate bloatware, etc) of Linux, its rate of adoption is considerably weak and consistently weak because of various reasons and causes that your article does not mention.

"Your article doesn't mention the real reasons, which conveniently enough I won't list either."

Nah, its just that services like Disney fixed its analytics and Linux users don't need to camoflage as Windows user to use Disneyplus /s

great now Linux is mainstream enought i have fo over to free bsd to keep my hipster status

I'm genuinelly not sure if it's sarcasm or delusional.

Is fair to say that long term Linux users who are very proficiant in command line know that Linux will never have any relevence on the desktop and that the year of the Linux desktop is a delusional fantasy, it's never going to happen?

At this point it's humourous when there's some new feature in whichever distributon and someone says "Year of the desktop!", it's legitimately comical, if it's said to mock all of that talk

Why do websites do this? 😮‍💨

Is that including Steamdeck in that 3%, or users becoming aware of Linux based on Steamdeck? 3 percent may not seem like much but it moves the 2 percent from 1 in 50 people to close to 1 in 30 people. So more chance of bumping into a fellow user. I met up with an old work colleague just before the pandemic, we got to chatting about computers he mentioned he had dumped W10 for Mint around the same time I'd dropped W10 for OpenSUSE. Seems the Windows 10 was a tipping point for more savvy computer users who understood there could be other Operating Systems out there besides Windows or MacOS.

Ayo