[bawolff]

I imagine a big part of the puzzle is that many people do not even use laptops/desktops regularly anymore, just phones and tablets

[sgt101]

I guess almost all laptops/desktops are corporate, student, gaming or own business use.

I have never, ever, seen a corporate linux desktop outside of devs.

I have never, ever, seen a student using a linux desktop apart from CS students and a few physics/maths.

Linux is not for gaming.

See above answers for Linux in own business.

[2000UltraDeluxe]

That, and the endless stream of automated requests from various crawlers identifying themselves as browsers.

[nwah1]

Also, Chromebooks.

[Brian_K_White]

I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.

I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.

[tapoxi]

Yea Chromebooks are wildly popular in American education. They've replaced the school desktop PC.

[mattlondon]

My wife has one. Been rock solid for years. I recommend them to relatives who just do email and browsing etc.

[eru]

I used one in the wild, but I was working for Google at the time.

[alpaca9]

It would be hell being forced to use these things for your job. What departments were? Because I can't imagine a software developer using one.

[eru]

I wasn't forced to use anything. This was in the mid-2010s when the first ARM Chromebook came out; I bought one out of curiosity. But I learned about it at work.

Independent of that: some of the modern higher end Chromebooks can be quite nice, and you can (A) run general Linux on them, and (B) VS Code dev tunnel in the browser runs on them just as well as on any other laptop.

[alpaca9]

yeah i forgot about their linux capabilities they got. In my mind they didn't seem a lot different than simple android tablets with a keyboard but indeed if the hardware isn't bad it could be valid option now I think about it.

[esseph]

Vscode can run in a browser, your code is often in git, and it normally is going through CI/CD (being compiled/packaged/deployed elsewhere).

All you need for that is a dumb terminal.

[olyjohn]

Boy I hope VSCode runs better in the browser than all of Microsoft's other terrible web apps.

[michaelmrose]

I have seen several because family members have owned them. They are nondescript black rectangles that are owned by cheap people and kids. There is no reason for you to notice them in particular and it's useful to remember our perception isn't a representative sample of anything.

[fragmede]

The problem is, we have no way of knowing if our personal experiences are actually representative of everyone else's experience. I have 2 Chromebooks but I'm a computer nerd so I know I'm not your average user, but going off 2025 shipment data, it's something like 223 million Windows laptops to 25 million Mac's and 22 million Chromebooks.