I use it because it’s truly a “complete system” in a way that Linux and even the BSDs are not—every program is an example in itself and it comes with a ton of various scratch-built utilities that you don’t usually find as part of a typical Linux distro. Stuff like a basic torrent or IRC client just sort of fall out of the way Plan 9 is organized and implemented.
It also provides me with a distraction-free environment and a set of tools that I enjoy using, even if some aspects of Plan 9 as, say, a laptop daily driver are inconvenient or awkward. It really is better suited for networked computing.
I was pretty much sold from first contact because Plan 9 is the way that I feel best matches what I’ve always wanted from my machines: a simple grid of networked appliances where I can route the various resources and hardware in whatever way I require.
What happens with the Plan 9 system after the boot camp has ended? From what I can see on that site, their Plan 9 shenanigans will end by mid-September. (SDF is NetBSD-centric AFAIK.)
It used to be that everyone in the Boot Camp got their own VM that was wiped each season, but recently everything was migrated to a single installation that doesn’t reset and everyone uses.
In short: now you get a permanent account.
And yes, SDF itself is NetBSD-based—the largest single installation as well as a primary testing environment, if I’m not mistaken.
That’s not too hard, given that NetBSD is a niche in a niche. But a permanent Plan 9 server account which I do not have to keep running sounds intriguing… thank you!
I never bother with venti/fossil, honestly. I’m more of a cwfs kind of person, but Ori’s https://orib.dev/gefs.html has been attracting my attention lately.
The “unknown” is Windows. If you change the graph to see the whole range from 2008 to date, you will see that whenever there’s a big spike or dip on Unknown, it’s the exact opposite for Windows.
What?! All that noise about Switzerland mandating usage of open sourced software in gov (there was a great step, but it’s far from mandating anything) was already weird, now we are switching to linux? And varying about security and fiscal responsibility? There has to be another country called Switzerland than the one I live in.
You’re right, I believe the only thing Switzerland mandated (or wants to mandate?) is for projects built FOR the government to be open sourced - and even then, there are exemptions.
Of course, unlike you, I don’t live in Switzerland, so I’m probably not as informed.
I suspect it’s a bump due to Windows Recall. I know I fully switched because of it after 25 years of off and on the Linux Desktop. And I will not be going back.
Maybe not, but, anecdotally, I know of a number of people who have made the switch because of Recall. Steam Deck surely adds to it, but people who have the choice to stop using Windows seem to be doing so.
Maybe not, but, anecdotally, I know of a number of people who have made the switch because of Recall.
Tbh I don’t get it. Wasn’t this feature only on Copilot+ PCs that almost nobody had? Why did so many switch if it wasn’t even confirmed that it’s coming to regular x86 machines? I always find it extremely weird.
Microsoft showed their hand and for some it was the last straw. It might not come to non-copilot pcs (for now) but they showed users they are OK with turning the OS into spyware.
100% switched because of Recall. Been a Linux user on and off for 20 years, windows was my daily driver for the past 5 or so (windows 10 was OK in my mind). Once Recall was announced, I bounced back to Linux. Having Steam popularize gaming on Linux has helped a ton
I wasnt thrilled about upgrading to win11 - it adds an irritating layer of stuff that I didnt want or need. The ads and telemetry bugged me too. I was probably going to reluctantly upgrade at some point though.
But then recall was announced and I realised how much worse it could get. Been really happy with the switch to Linux.
Steam deck alone isn’t much. It’s not even popular in a lot of places in the world. But there are a lot of things happening in the market, and each small factor adds up to a general trend. So, there’s no single factor that we can point that will explain the linux growth in marketshare.
Yes, although it’s not evenly distributed. Much of this rise is due to India doing some heavy lifting - they’re on like 16%, and they’re not exactly a small population.
Indeed it is. But this is also calculated based on monthly page views, so it only really covers devices that are used in that month.
There’s a non-trivial amount of Windows users that have a dusty laptop that they only pull out when they need to write a document or fill in a form that they got emailed, and will otherwise do all their computing on their phone.
My guess would be that Mac and Linux have fewer of these types of users? But who knows. I have a couple of Linux devices that I almost never use 🤷♀️
There’s some kind of network effect associated to it, so the greater the numbers, the more likely to grow even more, and faster. For example, when linux was used only by a very few people in IT, most people were unlikely to even give it a try, but now that every class or working group are likely to have one or two linux users, more people will be likely to try it, and so on.
It does not mean that something happened with MacOS / OS X. If it stays the same and everyone else gets bigger, then the same gets smaller relatively speaking. Look at the dip for OS X in Nov 2023. Looks like almost the same amount of up for Windows. Also Chrome OS went a bit down and Unknown went up, only Linux stays the same.
So either something in their software changed or it was really a phase of people buying new computers and changing their OS. For a fact, I also build my PC in Nov 2023 (but stayed on Linux). Maybe that was a time of new hardware or lower prices, don’t remember exactly.
I didn’t think of it, because I always think or archive.org as older pages/versions. The problem is, is it updated to current? It’s a big site, so probably it will be. Good idea, I’ll check that next time through archive.org.
You can always* request a new archive of a website. If you log in (warning: it has to load google code at least when registering) you can also request a screenshot (which I don’t know how you find later on, but right after you get a link) and recursive archiving with a depth of 1.
Interactive elements remain interactive nowadays, but it has limitations.
In some cases archive.today is worth a try too. It has workarounds for e.g. facebook, or at least in the past it had a fake account to be able to save facebook content.
But this one loads whatever code from yandex, so if that’s problematic for you be sure to block it. uMatrix is best for that task, probably uBO can do it too, the Firefox version I mean.
These sites are basically my “remote browser”, and often it’ll be even useful for others that I requested an archive. Quite often I’m requesting the first one.
mostly, but you can’t if the site was very recently archived, like in 30 minutes. Then there are some sites that are blacklisted for some reason but not much.
If only MS Office worked well on Linux, due to her muscle memory, my wife would’ve switched to Fedora for her laptop. Aside from light gaming (Sims 4, mostly), she’s not a tech-person at all, so that’s saying something in my book!
She might adjust to LibreOffice, it borrows heavily from the MS Office UI. I think it's also available on Windows if she wants to try it before switching. Sims 4 works great on Linux too.
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 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.
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.
The question is, if they only evaluate the User Agent? This is an organization specialized into statistics, they know it can be modified too. The ad industry tries to track you and find out everything about you despite these modifications. Don’t underestimate them!
Use user agent switcher and set it to something random. However that makes your fingerprint unique. I’ve read that people set it to windows just to blend in the masses
Unsurprisingly, usage numbers for distros are hard to get due to lack of telemetry and what not.
However, some measurements do exist; like data from ProtonDB. These are used by Boiling Steam for their excellent reports in which some representation regarding usage across distros can be found. Their most recent report can be found here.
Note, however, that the following, as has been excellently touched upon by Boiling Steam, applies:
COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS
Since we hear some of the following comments EVERY SINGLE TIME, let’s address them here and now:
“Duh, it’s not representative of Linux usage in general!”: And nowhere does it claim to be. As often as possible we make it clear this is Linux usage in a gaming context. The usage of Debian and Ubuntu on servers is safe for now, no need to panic.
Depends entirely on your needs. There is a use case for Arch. However, if you’re completely new to Linux, then it’s very likely that a ‘slower’-moving distro (like (anything based on) Debian (or Ubuntu)) might better suit you.