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Businesses upgrading to Windows 10 forced global PC sales into the black for the first time in seven years in 2019, but it could have been so much better if Intel's chip drought had eased.
Preliminary findings from Gartner pegged shipments at 261.23 million, up 0.6 per cent year-on-year, and rival analyst IDC reckons 266.69 million found their way on the shelves of distributors and resellers, itself up 2.7 per cent.
Forced upgrades from Microsoft still seem to outweigh jumps to Linux. Will that ever change?
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Global PC Sales Up for First Time in 7 Straight Years
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You will always find something in the last place you look.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Wednesday January 15 2020, @12:48PM (3 children)
This is about PC sales. If you want to switch from Windows to Linux, you generally won't buy a new PC, you'll just install Linux on the existing PC. So, no Linux PC sale in the statistics.
Also, if you buy a Windows PC in order to wipe Windows and install Linux, then the statistics will also show that as Windows sales.
It is impossible to derive the use of Linux from PC sales figures.
Indeed, the data could also be interpreted as follows: PC sales dropped because instead of buying new computers, people preferred to install Linux on their computers. Now that those computers are perceived as too slow even under Linux, people buy new PCs again. That scenario is just as consistent with the data as the explanation proposed in the summary.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday January 15 2020, @03:25PM
Do companies like System76 and Purism publish sales numbers? It would be anecdotal rather than trend, but I would be curious to see if manufacturers that directly sell linux machines are seeing an uptick too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Wednesday January 15 2020, @05:20PM
Unless you tried Linux but found it incompatible. In the Bay Trail era, there were a lot of compact laptops whose basic features were difficult to impossible to get working under anything but Windows 8 or later. Even a decade after the release of the ASUS Transformer Book T100TA [debian.org], for example, CPU power management causes frequent freezes, suspend is still broken, the camera and light sensor are not supported at all, backlight control is buggy, and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and sound all require nonfree firmware. Wi-Fi in particular is a Catch-22: you need some sort of network access with which to download the nonfree firmware from elsewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @11:37AM
I purchased my new laptop, booted Windows 10 that came with it, cut the partition down to 100GB or so, and rebooted into a Ubuntu USB stick to slice up the rest for linux.
I've never rebooted back into Windows. Frankly the only function it was useful for was to shrink the original disk down. And to get into the GPT settings.