As the article points out, we’re not sure about the validity of these numbers.
Anecdotally though, the idea of major creators like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee putting out Linux content was unheard of a few short years ago.
I have been seeing a wide trend among the Windows tech-savvy universe of frustrated users who have social media platforms suggesting strongly that people give it a try.
Plus, you’ve got Steam, which has made Linux an excellent game platform for the very large percentage of Windows desktop users who play games.
I also find that the availability of AI makes troubleshooting for newbies way easier. Dump your error message in or describe what’s not working and you’re on your way.
It is truly the year of the Linux desktop. I switched away from Windows thinking I’d still need a dual boot partition but so far I really don’t.
In my experience, LLMs are not great at resolving linux issues, but they are better than what we've had in the past. Trying to use forums and web searches was exhausting, and you'd often deal with people who were trying to show how smart they are and rather than answering your questions they demand to know "what are you really trying to do?"
Hard disagree. Claude with full access to a system is an amazing forensic, digging through obscure dumps, configuring tracing and measuring results, fast. It's also an amazing interface, from setting up environments, tweaking hidden parameters and everyday operations. I don't have such a customized (and functional) system since I was a way more energized teenager with plenty of time to fiddle around. Now it's instant.
I do think llm assisted linux has a bright future. It feels like scifi using a system with them, gluing all the power scattered in small tools.
I dare say LLMs were one of the things that finally pushed me over the top to be a full time Linux user. For a lifetime Windows user Linux novice like me they really helped me get unblocked on basic stuff like installing Nvidia drivers and setting up a samba share.
LLM's also came at a time of search decay. Getting google to surface good results was approaching impossible, (although the new ai categories somehow are even worse as they are adding strange terms or location data to create new unrelated searches.)
Hopefully there is a middle ground, where I can explain to my crawler which results look good, which dont, what it got wrong, and it adapts. A return to crawler/surfacer agents that work to find and retrieve would be a step in the right direction.
I totally disagree there. My medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude. As the resident IT person among my friend group this blew my mind.
I’ve noticed that it’s helped me as well, because it’s able to give me diagnostic commands that I can run and report back with the results. For example, I fixed/set up a virtual machine with libvertd and I just wouldn’t have gotten that far without it, especially for when I broke the setup later.
> medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude
I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just fine, what did Claude help them with?
I do use LLMs for random debugging questions (most recently laptop dual graphics for instance) but the base install has always worked fine for me
> However, the sharp monthly increase needs context. Statcounter’s June figures included an “Unknown” category that accounted for 9.24% of North American desktop usage. Its reduction seems to have coincided with Linux’s rise, possibly indicating better identification of previously unclassified traffic.
Still good news for those wanting to see broader Linux adoption, but the news really is the usage was correctly recognized as Linux for the first time.
Their source is StatCounter. I would trust the trends but not their absolute values. This month, Steam reported an increase to 4.01% while Cloudflare's human activity reports ~6%.
I am very happy to hear this. Usually, when I tell people that my main operating system is Linux, they don't even process it and assume it's either Windows or Mac. Sometimes, they get confused and claim that no one uses Linux.
Now that there is data in terms that people can understand (capitalism), I think people will finally accept that Linux is an OS. The next thing is the false equivalence between Linux and Android.
Several people at a LAN party in April were surprised I was running Linux. It runs everything you can imagine playing except a handful of games that rely on kernel anti-cheat by choice, like Fortnite.
I have Windows on dual-boot in case I need it, but I'm in Linux 99% of the time now.
As the article points out, we’re not sure about the validity of these numbers.
Anecdotally though, the idea of major creators like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee putting out Linux content was unheard of a few short years ago.
I have been seeing a wide trend among the Windows tech-savvy universe of frustrated users who have social media platforms suggesting strongly that people give it a try.
Plus, you’ve got Steam, which has made Linux an excellent game platform for the very large percentage of Windows desktop users who play games.
I also find that the availability of AI makes troubleshooting for newbies way easier. Dump your error message in or describe what’s not working and you’re on your way.
It is truly the year of the Linux desktop. I switched away from Windows thinking I’d still need a dual boot partition but so far I really don’t.
Don't forget PewDiePie, the last person I expected to do a video about migrating to Linux.
whatever happened to that guy? He used to be the biggest thing on Youtube.
stopped with gaming content for the most part, moved to japan and does the occasional vlog about his kid or family or whatever. retired, basically.
A known racist
irrelevant in context, assuming you're right, but considering you made a throwaway to say it, probably not
You don't need to attempt to defend a known racist.
In my experience, LLMs are not great at resolving linux issues, but they are better than what we've had in the past. Trying to use forums and web searches was exhausting, and you'd often deal with people who were trying to show how smart they are and rather than answering your questions they demand to know "what are you really trying to do?"
Hard disagree. Claude with full access to a system is an amazing forensic, digging through obscure dumps, configuring tracing and measuring results, fast. It's also an amazing interface, from setting up environments, tweaking hidden parameters and everyday operations. I don't have such a customized (and functional) system since I was a way more energized teenager with plenty of time to fiddle around. Now it's instant.
I do think llm assisted linux has a bright future. It feels like scifi using a system with them, gluing all the power scattered in small tools.
I dare say LLMs were one of the things that finally pushed me over the top to be a full time Linux user. For a lifetime Windows user Linux novice like me they really helped me get unblocked on basic stuff like installing Nvidia drivers and setting up a samba share.
LLM's also came at a time of search decay. Getting google to surface good results was approaching impossible, (although the new ai categories somehow are even worse as they are adding strange terms or location data to create new unrelated searches.)
Hopefully there is a middle ground, where I can explain to my crawler which results look good, which dont, what it got wrong, and it adapts. A return to crawler/surfacer agents that work to find and retrieve would be a step in the right direction.
I totally disagree there. My medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude. As the resident IT person among my friend group this blew my mind.
I’ve noticed that it’s helped me as well, because it’s able to give me diagnostic commands that I can run and report back with the results. For example, I fixed/set up a virtual machine with libvertd and I just wouldn’t have gotten that far without it, especially for when I broke the setup later.
> medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude
I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just fine, what did Claude help them with?
I do use LLMs for random debugging questions (most recently laptop dual graphics for instance) but the base install has always worked fine for me
> what did Claude help them with?
https://askubuntu.com/
There's decades of this stuff.
> However, the sharp monthly increase needs context. Statcounter’s June figures included an “Unknown” category that accounted for 9.24% of North American desktop usage. Its reduction seems to have coincided with Linux’s rise, possibly indicating better identification of previously unclassified traffic.
Still good news for those wanting to see broader Linux adoption, but the news really is the usage was correctly recognized as Linux for the first time.
But the question is "which" distro? If it's one of the "hyped" ones, I wouldn't be surprised if people migrate back to Windows.
Their source is StatCounter. I would trust the trends but not their absolute values. This month, Steam reported an increase to 4.01% while Cloudflare's human activity reports ~6%.
Article is blocked in India.
Yeah. I had to access it by archive[dot]org
What ISP do you use?
The blocking is being done by linuxiac.com, not by the government or by your ISP.
I am very happy to hear this. Usually, when I tell people that my main operating system is Linux, they don't even process it and assume it's either Windows or Mac. Sometimes, they get confused and claim that no one uses Linux.
Now that there is data in terms that people can understand (capitalism), I think people will finally accept that Linux is an OS. The next thing is the false equivalence between Linux and Android.
Several people at a LAN party in April were surprised I was running Linux. It runs everything you can imagine playing except a handful of games that rely on kernel anti-cheat by choice, like Fortnite.
I have Windows on dual-boot in case I need it, but I'm in Linux 99% of the time now.