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Many people view webstats with a jaundiced eye--with good reason. (page)[1][2]
Linux advocate Robert Pogson finds these statistics interesting; while not taking the numbers as gospel, he finds the trends to be fascinating. In recent weeks, he noticed an upward trend in online Linux usage numbers that has continued.[3]
oiaohm,[4] in the 3rd comment,[2] suspects there is a correlation with the revelation of the preinstalled Superfish malware on Lenovo consumer PCs, with owners apparently abandoning their manufacturer-supplied "recovery" mechanisms, defecting from Redmond's easily-exploited OS, and going instead for Linux install media.
So, Soylentils, any other guesses on a cause? Any estimates on how long the current trend will last? Will it then decrease or increase?
- [1] The comment that was referenced was quickly removed by Ziff-Davis from their site, of course.
- [2] Comments on Pogson's blog are numbered top-to-bottom but appear chronologically bottom-to-top.
- [3] Did Internet Exploder ever get .SVG support?
- [4] oiaohm is a very knowledgeable guy but his dyslexia can make his writing difficult to decipher.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:28PM
Personally, I am rooting for Linux Desktop to stay right where it is. If it gets too popular it will attract the attention of the bad guys (Virus, BotNets, etc.) in much greater numbers than today.
Everybody is fooling themselves if they think that Linux is some how much more secure than Windows. Social Engineering is the same....all it takes is one bad click and your toast.
It may be a false sense of security, but I feel I can browse without too much fear that simply visiting a WWW page will get me powned.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:03AM
I'm with you but for a different reason. I've been using Linux since the mid-90s and have witnessed the community tear itself apart in the name of chasing more desktop users. We keep reinventing stuff and dumbing things down to attract the lowest common denominator. Average users aren't the problem, it's our belief that we need to modify our OS to fit their needs. Nobody modified Linux to make it easier for me when I was first learning. However, despite all the rough edges and a lack of technical knowledge, I wasn't turned off and I didn't need the training wheels. In fact, breaking stuff was part of my process and I learned many valuable lessons along the way. I didn't need safeguards to protect me from my own stupidity because I wasn't smart enough to configure a production system that mattered, let alone manage one for somebody else.
Linux is certainly better today in many ways but it's also worse in others. I have vision issues and I suffer from migraines and light-sensitivity. Back in 2010, I was able to easily invert the colors of a window (Super+N in Compiz, Ctrl+Super+U in KDE) which was such a relief at night. Fast forward to today and it's extremely hit-and-miss. Compiz is practically dead and the Invert plugin is flaky on a good day. KDE's invert, which is more modern, is just as unpredictable because of issues with OpenGL/CL versions and GPU drivers. I've got three machines of varying ages/specs and KDE's invert works on just one of them -- and often crashes. I can sometimes get it working with XFCE+Compiz but it often takes hours of troubleshooting during the initial install.
My point is that my multi-monitor 3D accelerated Linux desktop was absolutely amazing in 2010 but is much less so in 2015. How does that happen? With five years of development, all the bits should have improved, right? From what I can tell, the issue seems to be that the community keeps 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' (reinventing) in the name of chasing more desktop users.
Linux would be better today if we had stopped trying to dumb things down in the name of attracting new users who can't be bothered to read and tinker. In my opinion, we don't need those users. There is value in having a technically challenging OS (weed out the idiots). People who stick with it long enough to become 'Linux users' are generally smarter in the end for doing so. Those people are then able to help others or continue to learn and eventually contribute back. Linux itself was breeding technically-competent users and developers, but today's flavors are increasingly producing more consumer-like users. We need to stop worrying about them and start fixing the backlog of bugs and focusing on building a Linux for the tech-savvy. It's okay for the masses to use Windows and Mac...
Incidentally, I still have an old install of Ubuntu 10.10 and it still rocks! I am sad to have watched as Compiz rotted, as KDE imploded (v3->v4), as Gnome became a dumbed-down pos, as systemd divided the community, as Debian betrayed everybody... I could go on...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @03:40AM
With all due respect, no one in the corporate world wants rough edges, wants users to break stuff, or wants their IT staff to have to tinker with each and every everything. Dumbing it down and making it eaiser is necessary to make it desirable for companies and the vast majority of consumers. Except for those who want to get elbow deep in this stuff, and those who have the technical skills to do so (e.g., not your average user), no one wants things that are harder to use. They don't want technology to make their lives harder because technology is supposed to make their lives easier.
Some of us want to tweak things to no end. Mechanics can be like that with their cars. But the vast majority of people just want things to work. If being an IT wiz was required to use a computer we wouldn't have the ginormous computer industry we have today. Same goes for people having to be a mechanic in order to use a car.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Sunday March 08 2015, @04:34AM
Corporate IT wants a single image that can be deployed and managed for all users, and that is quite easy with Linux. They also want security and stability, which Linux covers quite nicely. Also, if a company is not from the US, claims it cares about security and then uses Windows, it's not thinking very clearly. The fact that non-US governments use Windows is completely beyond me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Sunday March 08 2015, @06:55AM
Many years with the availability of alternatives to Windows show that Corporate IT doesn't really care about security. Yes, there is a lot of lip service paid to security, but in the end, what they really want is to be able to pass the blame elsewhere.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 08 2015, @11:50AM
Desktop linux is a teenage boy who does well in math class and is not one of the cool kids.
The old graybeard teacher tells the kid, "keep working hard and you'll become a great mathematician". In comparison to that, some of the cool kids get tramp stamps and goof off a lot.
So the kid, wanting to be cool, gets an ugly tramp stamp and goofs off.
End result is the kid is no longer seriously in the running to be a great mathematician, has an ugly as F tramp stamp that everyone laughs at, and still isn't one of the cool kids. Because the cool kids were cool despite their stupid design decisions, not because of them. Oh well, there's always freebsd.
Meanwhile you got squads of 50-something white boys trying to figure out in their echo chamber which color scheme for tramp stamps is cooler and more likely to increase sales simultaneously to grannies and female urban minorities, because they're so cool (LOL) that they're experts on selling crap. Hmm we can make money selling dorks earrings or 3d desktop compositors... lets see if the kid is dumb enough to fall for it again and make a fool of himself while sending us sweet sweet contracting money "Hey, come here kid, we can sell you something to make you cool..."
Thank you gnome, kde, and systemd ! I'll be laughing at you from my freebsd desktop over here...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @04:48AM
Everybody is fooling themselves if they think that Linux is some how much more secure than Windows. Social Engineering is the same....all it takes is one bad click and your toast.
But your toast is not the same as my toast, or anyone else's toast. Perhaps you should read Dr. Suess's Butter Battle Book. Or learn the difference between "your" and "you are" contracted into "you're". For a better and more literate Soylent News, we rely on you, and yours.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday March 08 2015, @07:30PM
That should be "nor", not "or".
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Sunday March 08 2015, @06:02PM
You hope that it won't take off, so you can be part of the minority? Windows is targeted both because it's popular *and* is a security colander. Linux, being open source, the more users means the more security in the long term. The security of the two just can't be compared on terms of popularity alone.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2015, @11:24AM
I do hope that Linux Desktop skyrockets. Because what will skyrocket is the "standard" desktop environments. Since I don't run those, I'll not be affected by the rise of attacks on those (and the attacks will be on those environments, because they will be the easy targets). On the other hand, hardware compatibility is largely independent of the desktop environment, therefore I'll still profit from improved hardware compatibility as soon as manufacturers cannot any longer afford to ignore Linux.