[AnthonyMouse]

OEMs don't care about that. It's Qualcomm in particular that sucks. If you buy a Linux PC from System76 it comes with their own flavor of Linux but it's basically Ubuntu and there is nothing stopping you from putting any other version you want on it. The ones from Dell just use common distributions.

Meanwhile Linux is getting a huge popularity boost right now from all the PCs that don't officially support Windows 11 and run Linux fine, and those are distribution-agnostic too because they didn't come with it to begin with.

[pjmlp]

I would not call huge the 4% market share.

Usually what is stopping us are the drivers that don't work in other distro kernels, or small utilities that might not have have been provided with source.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I would not call huge the 4% market share.

4% was last year, it was 5% by this summer (a significant YoY increase and about what macOS had in 2010) and the Windows 10 end of support was only last month so the numbers from that aren't even in yet.

> Usually what is stopping us are the drivers that don't work in other distro kernels, or small utilities that might not have have been provided with source.

A lot of these machines are pure Intel or AMD hardware, or 95% and then have a Realtek network controller etc., and all the drivers are in the kernel tree. Sometimes the laptops that didn't come with Linux to begin with need a blob WiFi driver but plenty of them don't and many of the ones that do will have an M.2 slot and you can install a different one. It's not at all difficult to find one with entirely open source drivers and there is no apparent reason for that to get worse if Linux becomes more popular.

[pjmlp]

Better do the math, which means 15 years to reach where macOS is nowadays, which is still largely irrelevant outside tier 1 economies, while assuming nothing else will change in the computing landscape.

I was around when everyone was supposed to switch in droves to Linux back in the Windows XP days, or was it Vista, maybe Windows 7, or Windows 8, eventually 8.1, I guess Windows 10 was the one, or Windows 10 S, nah really Windows RT, actually it was Windows 11,or maybe....

I understand, I used to have M$ on my email signature back in the 1990's, surely to be found in some USENET or mailing list archive, yet we need to face the reality without Windows, Valve would not have a business.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Better do the math, which means 15 years to reach where macOS is nowadays

macOS nowadays is closing in on 20%. And you can only buy macOS on premium-priced hardware and by now Linux supports more games than it does. The thing holding either of them back has always been third party software compatibility, which as the web has eroded native apps has been less of a problem, which is why both macOS and Linux have been growing at the expense of Windows.

And these things have tipping points. Can your company ignore Linux when it has 0.5% market share? Sure. Can you ignore it when it has 5% market share? There is a less of a case for that, so more things support it, which allows it to get even more market share, which causes even more things to support it. It's non-linear. The market share of macOS would already be significantly higher than it is if a new Mac laptop didn't start at a thousand bucks and charge $200 extra to add 8GB of RAM. Linux isn't going to have that problem.

Now, is it going to jump from 5% to 50% in three days? Of course not. But it's probably going to be more tomorrow than it was yesterday for the foreseeable future.

> we need to face the reality without Windows, Valve would not have a business.

Valve makes money from selling games and Steam. If Linux had 70% desktop market share and Windows had 5%, what would change about how they make money?