Who really uses Linux and where do they use it?

[sofasurfer]

I never looked up the stats so I always assumed that linux was right behind windows. Come to find out that is not true at all. On home computers linux is WAAAYYYYYYY behind windows. But in the corporate and professional field linux smokes windows. Apparently windows is more popular at home because of preloading onto computers that folks can afford and probably because of familiarity. But in professions and corporations linux is so far ahead of windows because of open source, affordability, self configuration, easy of use and support.
A good start to learn more is here...

 https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/linux-statistics/#gref

[grahammechanical]

Linux on desktop computers is way behind Apple and Apple is way, way behind Microsoft. The year of Linux on the desktop never came. It is too late now because personal computing is in the form of smartphones and tablets. Microsoft is way, way behind Android (first place) and Apple (second place) Android a kind of Linux. People who buy smartphones and tablets do not know and do not care to know about the operating system that runs on their devices.

Regards

[poorguy]

Linux on desktop computers is way behind Apple and Apple is way, way behind Microsoft. The year of Linux on the desktop never came. It is too late now because personal computing is in the form of smartphones and tablets. Microsoft is way, way behind Android (first place) and Apple (second place) Android a kind of Linux. People who buy smartphones and tablets do not know and do not care to know about the operating system that runs on their devices.

Regards

This is so true.

I know a lot of people who have abandoned their computers and have gone as far as given their working computer(s) to me saying they have no need for a computer.

I'm not complaining because these are all good working Windows 10 computers just waiting to become good working Linux computers.

As it stands these days I'll never have to ever buy another computer in my lifetime.

[TheFu]

I think the article has 1 factual mistake. Slackware is by far the oldest of the still in-use linux distros. I was using SLS before switching to the easy-to-use Slackware in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_...utions#History Claims that Debian followed a few months later may be true, but the first "release" was about 3 yrs later, in 1996.

I use an Android tablet multiple hours daily to consume content like web articles, books, audiobooks, videos, and music. The source for that content is other servers on the LAN or internal storage, replicated from either wallabag, nextcloud or calibre LAN servers. Sometimes being disconnected is good for a few hours.

[grahammechanical]

I think that it is ironic.

For a few years believers in Free and Open Source Software fretted about the dominance of the Windows OS and the use that Microsoft was making of that dominance. Today, there is an internet retail organisation, an internet search services organisation and a few internet social networking organisations and they dominate the use of the internet. They are very rich. They have access to massive amounts of user data. They are independent even of government control (in much of the world). There is nothing open source about these organisations. To add insult to injury these businesses are running on computer servers running Linux.

It is ironic that the General Public License which was designed to give users greater freedom from domination by proprietary software is being used by highly proprietary minded people to dominate the users of computer devices.

We are living in an alternative reality. Somewhere and somewhen there is a reality where Free and Open Source Principles along with the principles embedded in the Ubuntu Code of conduct have liberated people all over the world. Will someone please open a corridor to that reality so I can go live there.

Regards

[DuckHook]

…Somewhere and somewhen there is a reality where Free and Open Source Principles along with the principles embedded in the Ubuntu Code of conduct have liberated people all over the world. Will someone please open a corridor to that reality so I can go live there.

You already live there. I don't mean to be obsequious, but you are one of the very few with the knowledge, resources and self‑motivation to leave that other world behind and live in the one you describe. The tragedy is not that this world does not exist; the tragedy is that such a world does exist and so few care to live in it.

It has become depressingly obvious to me that most people do not care about privacy, anonymity, personal integrity or profiling sanctity. Even when these birthrights are laid out in front of them, most will happily lobotomize themselves for a momentary social media "fix".

The really sad thing is: we've become a society of virtualized drug addicts.

[TheFu]

It is ironic that the General Public License which was designed to give users greater freedom from domination by proprietary software is being used by highly proprietary minded people to dominate the users of computer devices.

Software licenses matter. When I was just starting my career, I was a software developer and never considered what license that software should/would have. It wasn't like anyone any where else would have the same hardware and there was no chance for the software to be used anywhere else for a number of reasons, including ITAR restrictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intern...ms_Regulations

My next roll (I wanted to be a baker , at the same company, was in a software team from 6 different employers, each working together with a requirement that the software had to be available to anyone in the world for use and download, but not necessarily 100% F/LOSS. We used a number of expensive, proprietary, libraries to be more efficient. None of those were F/LOSS. So, while our software source code was published, only huge corporations or govts would likely spend the money for the same time-saving proprietary libraries which were licensed per OS per developer at $12K each. I had 3 licenses assigned - so $36K for 1 package on 3 different platforms. We supported 12 platforms.

At my next job, we were 100% commercial software on commodity hardware that most companies could buy. We shipped binaries and used commercial tools and libraries. Linux was getting close to being useful, I ran the company email, usenet, and websites on Linux. I developed the splash-screen for all our Unix systems on my home Linux system one evening, but none of the commercial libraries were available for Linux at the time.
Then one of the 3rd party libraries had to be swapped out to support more DBMS options and I got pulled into reading and understanding software licenses. Commercials DBMS drivers were created by a number of different companies, but one of them had fast, cheap, and supported about 20 different DBMS options across the 8+ platforms that our software had to support. However, the driver manager was something slapped together by a college kid in about 300 lines of code and he released it "to the public domain." At the time, legal battles over F/LOSS were just beginning and our lawyers (being lawyers) said "Public Domain" wasn't an acceptable license to use. We pressed the author and he gave the software to the FSF and RMS immediately put it under the GPL. RMS - yes, THAT RMS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

The GPL isn't long or complex, but it is a viral license. That license has a few key things for every business. Each GPL licensed code can only link with other open source software, so that any component can be upgraded independent of the other components and the second you ship the software linked with other GPL software, you must make your software GPL as well and allow access to the source code AND provide reasonable instructions for someone expert in the field to build it themselves from source code. The trick with the GPL is that if you don't ship any software - i.e. you host is all on your own servers - then you never run into the viral aspect and don't have to release any updates back to the community. Every cloudy service, google, facebook, twitter, and thousands of other companies use this loophole.

The LGPL was created for things like the driver manager I mentioned above. Because the driver manager was GPL and would dynamically load the appropriate driver, which was proprietary, that basically meant none of the commercial drivers could be used with that code. We made our case to RMS to transfer the code to the LGPL and he sat on that for a few months or pondered many considerations. We couldn't tell. About 20 companies weren't willing to wait for his answer and one of the companies created their own driver manager software, put it under the MIT or BSD license and we were off. It was basically the same functionality, just with a business friendly license and lots more error checked as professional developers do more than college kids - at least back then. The company that created the software asked for help making it better and we all contributed what we could. I made it follow the Unix configuration standards - where config files are searched for in different places in a specific order and the first location found would be used. I also made it such that modifying the config file while the software was running would reload all the new settings without having the -HUP the software. Not everyone liked the updates. Nearly 3 decades later, I still think they were correct for Unix software.

About a month after we'd all moved to the BSD/MIT licensed code, RMS answered that the LGPL made sense. We didn't care at that point and that old code died like many GNU projects - fortunately it really didn't get started.

RMS saw how the world was changing and that the GPL and LGPL didn't cover the future too well. He (or his minions) created the AGPL - Affero license. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html . This one is great for cloudy companies worried that their secret sauce will be stolen by other cloudy companies and they will be pushed out of their niche. The AGPL removes the "software distribution" loophole from the GPL. Any changes have to be shared with the world whether they are shipped or not. If Google had been using AGPL software, the world would all have access to their source code all this time and whenever they did something we didn't like, a new service could popup and grow. Imagine thousands of tiny Facebooks, instead of 1? Federated services are better for everyone. Imagine if everyone had to use AOL for email still or worse, CompuServe. No other email providers existed, except within internal company networks. To communicate to other companies or different states or countries, we'd have to login into CompuServe. Terrible, right? Why do people accept only one WhatsApp or WeiPay or Twitter or telegram or Signal? That's crazy. All those systems should be federated and communicate between each other.

F/LOSS software is kinda idealistic. Basically, it brings everything we learned in Kindergarten to software. In Kindergarten, we learned:

• Sharing is good.
• Helping others is good.
• Working together is good.
• Don't steal others stuff.
• Play fair.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don't hit anyone.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands.
• Flush. (maybe swap this)
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

There are far too many companies that ignore those lessons. Many are in tech.

Software licenses matter. As an individual, you may not care more than, "can I have it for free or not?" But free isn't the same as F/LOSS. There is lots of "free" software that is still proprietary and capable developers cannot modify the code.
A few proprietary software vendors have given their source code to countries (with restrictions) as a way to prove there aren't any hidden back doors in the code. MSFT, Huawei, and some others have.
If you aren't allowed to change the code OR pay someone qualified besides the original company to modify it, then it isn't F/LOSS. To a business, being able to make small changes to software cheaply is really excellent and necessary. No enterprises use software without some customization to fit into their workflow and communicate between their different systems. With proprietary software, simple changes usually get billed around $120K + $15K/yr under "maintenance". I have to say, the $15K/yr maintenance isn't nearly enough to cover the hassles that custom code causes to a team. The initial price was definitely a "how bad do you want this" price, however. I've been on both sides of that - setting the price and having to pay the price for custom code. Most customization take a few people a few weeks, but now there is this one-off addon that even if the client skips a release, it has to be maintained.

Apple is built on BSD. iOS and OSX are based on it. Roku and Netflix too. BSD license is pretty open. Use this as you like for any purpose, just give credit to the developers. That usually means placing a text file somewhere on the system with a thank you. Chances are, none of the Apple iOS users can access that file, but it is stored on the device. MIT and Apache licenses are similar. Very business friendly. Nothing about integrating with proprietary software or distribution or supporting others building it or giving back to the community. If I were going to make a business that released software, I'd definitely target BSD, MIT, Apache licensed code to be the basis for my business and I'd avoid GPL/LGPL/AGPL stuff. Only if there wasn't any other way, then I'd find a software license lawyer to discuss the specific needs for any restricted software.

And when companies don't pay attention to licenses, they get into trouble. A few that did:
Linksys https://arstechnica.com/information-...iance-officer/
MikroTik https://legal.gpl-violations.narkive...ies-and-others
Ubuquiti https://news.slashdot.org/comments.p...5&cid=49424275 ... the source is gone, but this is a copy.
https://gpl-violations.org/

TiVo used Linux, but they also had some non-standard hardware and encryption which made having the source code nearly worthless without the hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization - Linus wasn't a fan.

It might not be known, but the Linux kernel uses an older version of the GPL for specific reasons which are beyond my understanding. I can only guess that the GPL v3 added the "or later versions" statement for which GPL version software was under which caused just a little too much heartburn for some kernel devs.

[QIII]

"... not free as in beer ... "

[mastablasta]

i noticed more and more smaller companies have linux desktop knowledge as bonus listed on their recruiting adds. so maybe something is moving. the more bad OS updates MS produces the higher the chance people will think about alternatives.

[QIII]

Many companies of all sizes are interested in Linux experience if they have Linux servers serving enterprise applications that are browser-based. That's even if they are primarily Windows-centric on the desktop.