Except that the Linux part of ChromeOS is still open-source and the growth of ChromeOS still would yield benefits to Linux users across the board.

It’s almost certainly much higher than that

First of all, ChromeOS is Linux. It’s a weird Linux, but it is Linux and can be made to run regular Linux software. It’s based on Gentoo. It’s not just “technically” Linux; it just straight up is. It’s even more Linux than Android is.

That adds another 2.69% up to 7.69%

But also, the 4.77% Unknown is almost certainly made up of primarily Linux machines.

So really, it’s a range of percentages anywhere from 7.69% to 12.46%. I would guess Linux users are at least 10% of the US market now

Source: The StatCounter pages the article is referring to for US: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america

World wide is also similar: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/

There we’re potentially even higher: 5.33% to 14.5%. That’s just shy of the worldwide Mac users! macOS + OS X is 15.35% worldwide.

I’ve not heard of “Firefox Send.” Why would I use something like this instead of scp or Nextcloud?

I can finally learn cobol?!?!?

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Really depends on the games. For the vast majority, probably not. If you play competitive multiplayer games, then it’s 50/50.

Check out protondb to see if the games you play the most work well.

Also semi-depends on hardware. Old Nvidia cards may struggle. AMD is def king in the Linux world, but it’s getting better for Nvidia

But as you are probably aware, the steam deck has been pretty successful. That wouldn’t happen if Linux gaming was all bad.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

Hit or miss. Sometimes the mod tools have to use wine and don’t work. Sometimes they use wine and work. Sometimes they don’t use wine and work.

I have just done some modding of Monster Hunter Wilds, and it was about 50/50

When it works, it’s just as easy as Windows.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

WINE or a Virtual Machine

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

.NET is cross platform as of several years ago.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

It depends on the distro. Typically you just run a command in the terminal to “update all packages” or click a button in a store front.

It’s way easier than on Windows and is never forced.

Genuinely one of if not the best thing about Linux is how software management works.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Less vulnerable due to being open source. You have all the security experts in the world, including Microsoft’s, able to view and fix any vulnerabilities as soon as they appear. Thousands of people getting their eyes on it.

There’s a reason that Linux is the back bone of the internet and nearly every server runs it.

And FYI, you don’t use antivirus on Linux.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

If it works, it will always work.

Whether it works is dependent on your GPU.

Like I said, AMD is basically perfect, Nvidia can have problems, but these days that’s less and less true (I use a GTX 3080 w/ out issue).

Mostly if you have an old, less-supported nvidia card (like pre-GTX) you may have issues.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

I’ve never heard of something like that happening.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

For beginners the correct option is almost always Linux Mint

Well, it’s gotta be a tiling system. And a good one. At this point I can’t function in a non-tiling environment. Specifically a manual tiler with an auto-tile a la i3 w/ i3-alternating-layout or a dynamic tiler that still let’s you break stuff (doesn’t really exist).

It’s just a better way to use a computer, and I can’t go back. It’s so much nicer. I would stop using a computer before I go back to dragging windows around.

And that rules out most DEs. It rules out Mac OS and Windows, as well, but at least on Windows I can almost get by with Fancy WM. It’s “okay.”

And speaking of just getting by, that’s Polonium with KDE. KDE is pretty good as an “environment,” but it doesn’t have a tiler that meets my needs, or at least I thought it didn’t until recently. Then I discovered Polonium. It works pretty well. Used it for several months (and still do on one machine). It’s very bare bones tho, and is hard to configure the handful of floating windows I do want like popups. So KDE is just scraping by.

GNOME on the other hand has the excellent Pop Shell 2. But well, GNOME is GNOME. It’s buggy when you try to use it a different way than intended. God forbid I want Qt, Gtk2, Gtk3, Gtk4, and libadwaita apps to all look nice on my system! It’s clunky, but the tiling is excellent at least.

Now you mention XFCE. So what about that? You could use i3 as the WM for Xfce. I used i3 for years and years and years as my WM and know how to build a DE around it. Why not use Xfce + i3?

Well, the thing is X11 is as good as dead, and while XFCE now supports Wayland, you can’t use a tiling system with the Wayland version of XFCE.

So what does that leave me?

Nothing. At least for a full on DE, which is what you asked.

There is not a single (pre-made) Desktop Environment that suits my needs. Not a one. Either it doesn’t support good tiling, is too rigid, or hasn’t switched to Wayland.

My only options are:

• Roll my own DE built around Hyprland/Sway, and since I’m on nvidia, those aren’t fantastic options (albeit Hyprland works a lot better on Nvidia these days), and that’s what I’m using.
• Deal with the slight annoyance of the under-implemented Polonium in KDE

Right now I’m on Hyprland. May go back to KDE bc multi monitor is being weird on Hyprland rn.

My one hope is that COSMIC polishes itself up and gets to its first real release.

KDE fs

Or roll your own via a compositor and various tools a la Hyprland

Tbf the devs said “compatibility layer”

Pantheon desktop from elementaryOS.

You can use it on their distro (Ubuntu based with lots of curated apps) or on its own (you can still get access to their curated apps, just not in the store)

EDIT: Sorry, I misunderstood. You want classic Mac. I’d say get Xfce4 and theme it yourself then.

• PlatiPlus for window manager theme
• Platinum Gtk2 Theme
• Platinum9 for the Icons

complete dealbreaker issues

.

inability to use 240hz

Opinion disregarded

And yeah I know about NixOS but I like to distro hop and experiment

If you know about NixOS, then you probably know this, but Nix, the package manager/the language behind NixOS, is cross-platform.

I daily drive NixOS, but I also use Nix (and home-manager) on my Fedora music laptop, my Ubuntu home file-server, and my work Windows machine (WSL) to install and configure neovim automatically instead of copying a config, installing all the packages, and running check health over and over again until everything is set up.

I just copy my neovim.nix file over (also other things like zsh.nix) and run home-manager switch

You don’t have to use NixOS to take advantage of its benefits.

Ext4 bc of its speed for games and my main files. Btrfs on the root for compression

Having used OS X, there is no way they’ve done usability testing. Doing basically everything is hard on OS X

They should be worried. We don’t want them comfortable.

So many negative things have entered our culture bc people don’t care about dangers. Nearly every app should have a warning

AI is mostly just hype. It’s the new blockchain

There are important AI technologies in the past for things like vision processing and the new generative AI has some uses like as a decent (although often inaccurate) summarizer/search engine. However, it’s also nothing revolutionary.

It’s just a neat peace of tech

But here come MS, Apple, other big companies, and tech bros to push AI hard, and it’s so obv that it’s all just a big scam to get more of your data and to lock down systems further or be the face of get-rich-quick schemes.

I mean the image you posted is a great example. Recall is a useless feature that also happens to store screenshots of everything you’ve been doing. You’re delusional if you think MS is actually going to keep that totally local. Both MS and the US government are going to have your entire history of using the computer, and that doesn’t sit right with FOSS people.

FOSS people tend to be rather technical than the average person, so they don’t fall for tech enthusiast nonsense as much.

Back when I was a kid, I was using Ubuntu. Ubtunu 14 and 16.

At some point I got really into Elementary OS and Pantheon

Then I rejected clone distros and embraced the mother distro, Debian.

In college, I experimented a bit, like most people. I tried various DEs and WMs on Debian. I tried Arch. I tried Pop_OS!. I tried Gentoo. Man, Gentoo is the WORST. Compiling stuff takes WAY too long and even after using it for 6 months it never got better. Worst distro on the planet. No one should ever use it. Eventually I settled on Arch.

I stayed an Arch i3 guy for 3.5 years, but eventually I got fed up with it.

I then finally gave Fedora a try, and I thought it was great. It was up to date like Arch but unbreakable. At the time I was also looking into BTRFS and immutability and making my own distro, and Fedora is great for that bc of CoreOS and Kinoite and all that stuff.

While on Fedora I did a lot of weird things in search of my goals. Like I figured out how to install Pacman and get AUR applications working on Fedora, notably archiso which I was using to build my own immutable, declarative OS that would be AppImage-based and utilizing an AppImage package manager and store front I wrote myself.

But then, about a year in, I discovered NixOS. It’s the best thing ever. It solves all the problems I had with other distros that I thought I’d solve on Fedora or Arch with programming. It’s everything I could want in a distro and then some. I’ve now been on it longer than I was on Fedora, and there’s no sign of switching to anything else.

Parallel to all this is various tool hopping. For instance, trying GNOME/KDE/Xfce/i3/Sway/Hyprland/etc at various times with various setups as well. Or bash vs zsh. Etc

Currently, I’m on NixOS with Hyprland, and it’s great. I’ve also used it with i3 and with GNOME + Pop Shell 2 for tiling which are both solid as well.

Now, that’s my daily driver and gaming machine. I use other OSs on other computers.

I have a computer for music production that got Fedoraized when I was a Fedora fanboy for a year. I don’t change it bc it doesn’t need to change. It just needs to run Ardour, yabridge, etc and maintain my system audio configurations that I don’t remember how to set up now. If it ever gets messed up, I’ll switch to a fork of my NixOS configuration and refigure out my audio settings and put them in a configuration.

I have a home nextcloud server as well. It also was once Fedoraized, but I gave up on that and went to Ubuntu bc that’s the only thing that should ever run a Nextcloud server. It just does not work correctly if it’s not on Ubuntu, at least that’s my experience. I’ve tried hosting on Arch, Fedora, Debian, Pop_OS! and more, but only Ubuntu works well for Nextcloud, so Ubuntu it stays.

Windows -> RedHat -> Windows -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> RHEL -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch

NixOS

Have you tried usbmount?

This automatically mounts usb drives if they’re vfat, ext4, or hfsplus. Options: sync,noexec,nodev,noatime,nodiratime

I believe it puts them in /media/run/DEVICE_NAME or something like that

Absolutely unusable for one big reason: still no good tiling options in KDE. They got me hopeful with their tiled area system but then dropped the ball on execution. An OS without tiling is functionally unusable for real work. There aren’t even any good KWin scripts for it. At least Windows has stuff like FancyWM. Will not be using any time soon. GNOME, with the ability to install Pop Shell 2, is by far the superior DE, and it’s not even close, and I’ll stick to that for most things and a WM/compositor (in this case Hyprland) on my main machine. KDE is and will continue to be trash until they can add true tiling support. Might as well some 1980s looking WM like OpenBox. That’s what KDE is. Old and unusable. Nothing else they “improve” matters since the core of operations doesn’t function.

True, but with files, you really benefit from the speed that ext4 provides