Desktop OS Market Share graphic

brent

^ stumbled upon.
With a keen eye you can see the actual emergence of a linux 'share' in the 00's then a bizarre several month disappearance than a re-emergence. wth?
Note the consistent status of 'other' and the bizare spike it takes in the teens before taking its normal single digits.
I'm too tired to pretend to interpet it but how bizarre how bizarre
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Harvey

Reality is there is no good way to see actual market share, every single metric that tries has its flaws and inherent biases.

Steam for example does not ask everyone all the time. It seems completely random and from my experience if you have steam auto start it never asks. I have only been prompted after exiting and starting again which is rare for me. Regions where internet cafes are popular taint the results event more, Linux users are far more likely to be concerned with privacy and not participate in surveys etc.

Then consider 1% is generally within margin of error. I know some companies unrelated to these statistic that when reports seemed off stated being out by up to 10% was fine but we were out by more so fix it! (rounding to too few decimal places and at every input instead of the total throwing the total way out).

So it is easy to see how something with a small market share can just fall off the map entirely depending on how and where the data is collected and calculated.

brent

Harvey So it is easy to see how something with a small market share can just fall off the map entirely depending on how and where the data is collected and calculated.

I had a long deep response to this and the variables of data collection and the illusory nature of digital info. then I remembered I used to be Neo, now I'm the child

jordan4ibanez

My favorite thing about this discussion is something that no one really talks about. If you have no telemetry in your OS there's no way to see how many people are using it. People on Linux are using tracking/cookie/session blockers quite a bit. Let that market share stay tiny, it's better that way.

Brucehankins

jordan4ibanez

brent

jordan4ibanez all true especially the last sentence: I, too, am one of the people NOT rooting for Linux to have as high a profile as Windows or Mac. "It's better that way" indeed.

Analogy: sometimes I pick up a cheap lager called XXXX. It's cheap and it tastes good. this is rarely the case with swill. I will tell not a soul about it. Once it gets popular the price goes up and the bandwagon comes.

That said, my dream for Solus has remained the same as when I found it years ago: that Solus someday turns a profit commerically because it's that good.

Still my question is the same: who the hell is "other" in this graphic?

stalebrim

brent TempleOS

elfprince

brent who the hell is "other" in this graphic?

BSDs probably, as well as HaikuOS and company.

Brucehankins

elfprince brent don't forget about OS/2 (now AcraOS 5.0). It's still alive and in the wild. It's the OS that will never die.

brent

stalebrim this is funny as snot🙂. and probably true.

brent

elfprince : Brucehankins

as Harvey has me justifiably skeptical of the source I wasn't sure source was going to sweep in unix and unix-like in the Linux category. But BSD would be a true Other. Haiku and BeOS are both Windows knockoffs. I think there's a couple more Windows knock-offs (all .exe driven)....I did forget OS/2, thanks! ....still don't know what Solaris is but I think it's Unix.
thanks both edit: there's probably more

elfprince

brent Haiku and BeOS are both Windows knockoffs

What do you mean by that? Haiku is POSIX compatible, and has no .exe things to my knowledge. Yes, BSDs would take quite an offence to being thrown into a Linux camp. They are quite different by design. True, all are unix-like. But the map stated 'Linux', so that cannot be BSD. 😆

brent

elfprince haiku: off the top of my head from a distrowatch description some time ago. remembered it that way at least. or got it in my head it was related to BeOS. You are correct, BSD is a band apart, seperate and distinct.

brent

elfprince
In a quest to guage any incoming memory impariment I had a second look. Not yet🙂. But unknowingly I did not know about Posix.
It was as I remembered it. Be Os was a 90's invention whose purpose was to emulate Windows and competed with Windows....I assumed it was .exe driven. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-beos-filesystem/ there is no evidence of this from this great article....
...but I was correct that Haiku was a descendant of the Be OS windows rival stripe...

...the thing is that Distrowatch blurb and that article never mentioned Posix and I have no idea what Posix is.
That's a critical detail I missed and you did not miss. So now you gotta tell me what Posix is🙂. Did it ever gain any traction as an alternative?

elfprince

brent "POSIX = UNIX; as, after all, POSIX is the “single UNIX specification.” As we are (largely) POSIX compliant, we are thus a UNIX. There is no requirement for X11, systemd, or any other application for something to be a UNIX; otherwise, the first UNIX machines would not have been UNIX either! "

copied from https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/is-haiku-a-unix-like-os/8801/3

elfprince

brent Did it ever gain any traction as an alternative?

It is still in Beta 2 stage, so not yet ready for hay time. 😄

brent

elfprince POSIX=UNIX then d-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-mn my eyes decieved me.

Haiku and BeOS VISUALLY (i tried one of them) resemble W98/2000 so closely I had to assume .exe was the currency there...so closely that I couldn't imagine anything else underneath the shell but reinvented/recycled WIN stuff.
thanks for responding I love the learning, in this case: Looks like Win, Talks like Win, Quacks like Win, Sharp Square Boxes Like Win, Same Deep Blue as Win, Same Menu as Win but it's UNIX---did not see that one coming🙂

elfprince

brent I've tried Haiku a few months ago to see how far they've gone so far.... The window manager and layout is unique for me, nothing like a Windows. Perhaps 'copying' BeOS instead?

brent

elfprince Haikiu I did not try at all. BeOs I did run live once. I have no idea how I got an iso since its gone but I got it. I was in a retro phase I knew that. It was like having a cool (functional) dated Windows OS in the looks dept. What I remember was like this picture

Haiku must have evolved from that over time into its own distro.
So Haiku experience like the BSD experience? Or different? (Haiku I always see in distrowatch)

elfprince

brent Haiku desktop is totally different from this. Why don't you spin it up and take a ride? 😊

WetGeek

Desktop OS Market Share graphic

elfprince Why don't you spin it up and take a ride?

Alright, I'll bite. I woke up at 1 am with a nosebleed in progress, and didn't want to take a chance on lying down again, so I decided it was safer to plug my nose, sit up for a while, and see what's going on in the forum. Haiku sounds like an Other REALLY Interesting Distro, so I thought I'd take a look.

I didn't want to take a chance booting a real computer with it, though, so I created what seemed to be a fairly vanilla VM, installed the .ISO file, and launched it. This is as far as I got.

I'm pretty sure it's too soon to try to go back to sleep, so I'll mess with the VM's properties in the VirtualBox manager for a while and see if I can get anywhere with it. I did notice that it really got the laptop fan running like it never has before.

I didn't have a lot of confidence that this would work, but after all, VirtualBox simply a simulates a hardware computer. I thought there might be a chance.

brent

WetGeek "I had a nosebleed at 1AM so I decided to test a distro..." is by far the best lead you have ever written and my personal favorite.🙂.
Was just writing to back to tell elfprince that I would give it a try. I will get the .iso and launch it from Ventoy first. I am interested too.
EDIT: am moving it down the list to-do list. I got the .iso. maybe tonight I will attempt.