People can't go to work and log in, ergo, a noticeable drop in Windows 10 usage, because Windows is used by a lot of people at work.
But, since we are looking at relative market shares, that means every other OS' share goes up, even if the actual number of users remains almost the same. (And the article points this out at the end.)
This will be followed by each of those OSs seeing massive drops in relative market share once people go back to work and all the dormant Windows 10 computers start running again.
If all companies stopped using Microsoft Word / PowerPoint / Excel and switched to open source I bet you’d see a 60% decline in Windows desktop use at least. Office software compatibility is the golden handcuffs of corporate Desktop OSes.
Ubuntu is becoming more and more suitable for normal users. Most of the work is done in web browsers these days.
I do ubuntu minimal installation and almost everything works out of box. More people would be using if laptop makers start giving ubuntu as default option.
You still get weird gotchas. My wife wanted to install Microsoft Teams to talk to our doctor. She got the the Linux download page then asked “should I download the .rpm or the .deb?”. Luckily I was there to tell her. Then she installed it like a champ and got it working, so that was nice.
But there’s no way she’d have just “known” this, and it’s just another hurdle to non technical users. Why should you have to know that Ubuntu is a downstream distro of Debian to install a program?
I get your point that there's clearly further to go, but it's not that unusual to need to know something relevant like this if installing from a source that's not your OS app store. After all, we often expect Windows users to know their install option is "PC" (a historic piece of info that isn't "Windows") rather than than Mac.
There are a few ways round this but they would generally require action on the part of all the software suppliers who post packages via websites. In your example it wouldn't be hard for MS to figure out the Ubuntu users and send them just the right link and likewise several other Linux distros - I guess it's still not worth it.
Maybe this is an area where a JS library for websites would avoid each one rolling their own and thus make the experience better across the board?
My experience is that people will be happy to use other things if you just ask them to, and have a ready-to-go solution on hand.
Just say "teams doesn't work well on my computer, it's very poorly made. Can we use jitsimeet? It's much easier for me." and them drop them a jitsi link without waiting for their response.
Teams is the official video chat at my company, I've been successfully ignoring that for more than 2 months now. At this stage, jitsi usage is starting to spread to other teams.
For working on print, Inkscape and Gimp pale in comparision with adobe's suite. Not to mention sharing files with the "de facto market standards" world .
For working on audiovisuals, no cigar.
For working on development, well, none of my external hardware was supported (my last experience was Ubuntu 18+) but ok, the IDE worked.
In any case, going to the original question: normal user who?
Inkscape: For professional print I can't answer (never had to use CMYK), but Inkscape works well enough for 99% of people who need it IMO (web developers, logo designers, CNC/Milling)
Gimp: Agree, most features are there but finding them is a chore
File sharing: Illustrator uses .ai files which are .pdf (compatible with inkscape), can't speak about .psd compatibility with Gimp, never tried it
Audiovisual: DaVinci Resolve is awesome, and adequate for most if not all home users
Development: I'm assuming you mean embedded development, this relies on support from the vendor, community can't do much about this. Most development are not embedded developers, and in my experience boards by SiLabs worked pretty much out of the box. Obviously anything web (except ASP I guess, I may be wrong) is a breeze on Linux
Regardless, the normal user needs none of this. They need a web browser and an office suite. The Linux ecosystem needs a more intuitive office suite, but libreoffice is good enough and Google Docs/Office365 online work for many people too
> Ubuntu’s overall share of operating system usage ballooned from 0.27% in March to 1.89% in April.
This is when a new version of Ubuntu was released. Since it's measured by web visits, this could be a bunch of people installing 20.04 in a VM and checking it out
>One key thing to note: Ubuntu isn’t seeing a 599 percent increase in additional users. That jump represents its increase in overall operating system market share from month to month. But it’s still an astonishing number
So... a whole bunch of servers using Ubuntu got fired up?
The numbers being reported are based upon visits to websites which are part of the NetMarketShare data collection network, so a bunch of servers using Ubuntu getting fired up wouldn't account for the increase.
An increase in market share higher than the increase in actual users would be accounted for by the size of the market overall decreasing while the number of Ubuntu users either stayed the same, increased but at a lower rate than the increase in market share or decreased at a rate lower than the decrease in the number of users of other operating systems.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows Windows users to install a Linux distro (several downloadable from the Windows Store) and WSL 2 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-index) recently arrived. There's mad bit of satisfaction in being able to do this and it's useful. I was able to work on a Python/Linux stack project and other developers on the team were using WSL too. You can even open a WSL terminal in VS Code.
I would love to use Ubuntu as my main device but unfortunately there are always some stupid driver issues.
I tested Ubuntu 20 last week and couldn't get second screen working through HDMI. For the sake of it :(
I'm a recent Fedora->Ubuntu convert. I recently found a multi monitor hack for the Gnome dock that has had a hugely positive impact on my productivity. It allows you to localize an app to it's respective dock / monitor with this one weird trick: https://github.com/ericbets/essential
Open source creative and professional tools are on par with proprietary tools (MS Office, Adobe) in terms of function and UI,
GUI applications are written for every conceivable setting a non-technical user would need,
Gaming is easier (it's getting better)
And, Ubuntu, Mint and other popular distros streamline everything even more so that even an idiot (and lots of people are idiots when it comes to tech) can use it.
Once those things happen, there is a chance we'll carve out more of the market, and create a snowball effect. If 10% of the market starts using Linux because OEMs preinstalled it to cut costs, software devs will notice, and it will only get better from there as more popular programs are ported to Linux.
TBH we don't require open source desktop software equivalents to popular windows stuff, just good enough web based software. I don't think Adobe is #1 in their market anymore, there's a lot of competition from things like Figma. Same with office, we use Google Drive and so I feel like it should easier than ever to switch!
The nearest linux has been from dominance is back in the glory days of Android when it was thought mobile would conquer everything. Now it's increasingly clear it is going to dominate only the mobile market, and even then the power uses of phones are extremely limited.
Except Linux isn't exposed to user space, and its syscalls aren't part of NDK stable APIs, so Android Next can use BSD, Fuchsia, NT, NuttX or whatever Google comes up with and very few would notice.
In that regard the only thing I appreciate is their approach to securing native code.
As for everything else, kind of agree.
10 years and still a broken NDK experience, Java stuck on a pseudo Java 8 subset, every IO the best practices get rebooted, Vulkan requires cloning github repos, already went through 3 animation frameworks, JetPack Composer still has no idea how to match existing GUI tooling, ....
The developer experience is a horror show, and the people who control it have been making head-scratching decisions for years (you forgot to mention releasing libraries via SDK manager and git repos long after switching the recommended build system to Gradle and encouraging people to use Maven repos for dependencies), but that doesn't mean the OS architecture isn't sensible. Especially for current app-consuming use cases, the security model makes far more sense than MacOS's security model.
Windows allows the Linux layer and Ubuntu is the most popular option. Because the Windows market share goes down slightly doesn’t mean the new ubuntu users are exclusively separate users. There’s just an addition funnel of access now, creating more ubiquity amongst platforms. Yay!
It does seem possible at this point. They did it with their browser: the rendering engine changed from a point of differentiation to a liability, so they threw in with #1 to have some influence over it. The OS is headed that way.
But, since we are looking at relative market shares, that means every other OS' share goes up, even if the actual number of users remains almost the same. (And the article points this out at the end.)
This will be followed by each of those OSs seeing massive drops in relative market share once people go back to work and all the dormant Windows 10 computers start running again.