Personal use numbers:
- Ubuntu: 27.7%
- Debian: 9.8%
- Other Linux: 8.4%
- Arch: 8%
- Red Hat: 2.3%
- Fedora: 4.8%
Haiku
Personal use 0.2%
Pro. use 0.1%
Some people love a challenge I guess. No disrespect to Haiku.
And Solaris just above it. Has to be a joke.
Makes sense. Ubuntu just works and is popular. Debian is the same, some people are just more conservative.
Can confirm. I have used one or the other exclusively for 20 years. Mostly on laptops. And these days with just a tiling window manager and terminal.
It just works.
Exactly. And here I am, after 2 days of trying to bend NixOS to my will, and I gave up. Tomorrow, I’m going back to Fedora, where everything worked perfectly, because I fell for “Shiny thing sindrome”, or the “grass is greener on the other side” stuff. Should have never doubted it. After 2 years of full time Linux and a lot of distrohopping, one would think I’d have known better.
NixOS is a nightmare. It works then you want to do something that can be done on another distro and you can’t. Same just went to silver blue at least acts like a regular distro.
I’ve been trying the same with Bazzite and ublue. Also gave it 2 days, and then left it as well, right before doing that with NixOS.
Interesting how the numbers between “computer pros” and hobbyists (Steam Survey) diverge. Unsurprisingly for Steam gamers the Windows numbers are way higher but for Linux specifically Ubuntu is crashing hard since a few years from absolute domination to all Ubuntu versions + derivatives (Mint + pop_OS) combined barely making up 20% of the Linux user base whereas at Stack Overflow there’s a clear lead of Ubuntu over the rest.
Edit:
I think for games, people need newer kernels and drivers to support the newer hardware needed to play newer games, and they’re willing to put up with the bugs that come along with thay. Ubuntu and Debian (stable) aren’t strong at that by definition. I always use an older GPU that supported well by the Ubuntu LTS I run. If it doesn’t play something, I’ll wait till a new driver lands in that LTS or the next.
Latest non-LTS Ubuntu could be high up the Steam Survey list but isn’t. The strongest general purpose distribution is Arch Linux.
Probably because everybody with a Steam Desk shows up as Arch in the survey.
Probably because everybody with a Steam Desk shows up as Arch in the survey.
Had you looked up the current stats, you would have known that this is completely false. SteamOS is in massive lead and I used the phrase “general purpose distribution” for a reason.
I looked at the August 2024 results and SteamOS was not mentioned anywhere in the OS version section.
I looked at the August 2024 results and SteamOS was not mentioned anywhere in the OS version section.
Ah, I didn’t expect the results to be different when looking at the overview, this is what I saw…
Any way to break down that “Other” and see what it contains? If it counts Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as different operating systems there might be some more Ubuntu versions hiding in there.
I’m on the Other category, both for home and work. I use Tumbleweed in both.
I see a crazy amount of Tumbleweed on protondb. Must be good for gaming or the users are knowledgeable.
It is. It’s a rolling release so it has the latest packages. It’s not bleeding edge like arch. All software goes thru an automatic testing in OpenQA before they are allowed in the repo so there’s some quality control. It’s also very stable.
I’m on the Debian/Ubuntu/TuxedoOs team !!! 😊
