[PCPER] People may be migrating off Windows onto Linux

[catilley1092]

Not with Ubuntu 16.04.

That's because Ubuntu 16.04 & all derivative OS's dependent on it, including Linux Mint, has been deprived of AMD graphics drivers.

This was an outrageous dub decision on the part of Canonical, because there are untold millions of computers on retail shelves & online, not to begin to count off of the AMD graphics cards & APU's on the market. How could Canonical be so blind to this? They (nor we) have a release date cast in stone for AMD's 'net-gen' graphics, not even Microsoft stoops to these lows. They'd had either assisted AMD in creating drivers, or outright released an in-house developed one.

These are the reasons why Linux is falling behind, and some has even stated that this is a conspiracy to help kill off the AMD brand. While I'm not a AMD 'fanboy', do have one PC out of several that is of the brand, plus if there were no competition, then nVidia could charge what they dang well please for GPU's. So I appreciate the fact that AMD is around, though prefer nVidia GPU's.

There are been rumors that Microsoft 'may' purchase Canonical, yet that won't make Ubuntu proprietary, within 20 seconds will be forked by another developer, Linux was meant to be free & is, it's not for sale, period. Canonical is only a corporation, w/out Ubuntu, they're nothing, though there will be a future release of W10 that will also have a Ubuntu shell for Pro & Enterprise users to develop on.

However, this won't be a full copy of the OS & if there's a Canonical/Microsoft merger, Ubuntu will be reshaped by another developer & future releases won't be included in this deal. While the above could be a baseless rumor, it's not impossible, the chances are more likely that Canonical could partner with Microsoft.

Otherwise, Canonical has made poor decisions that will actually weaken Linux usage, as many are still hanging onto their perfectly working AMD GPU's. In the meantime though, 14.04 is supported through April 2019, and hopefully Canonical will come to their senses & smell the roses. That their plan has backfired.

Cat

 

[DrMrLordX]

Uhh

Ubuntu 16.04 totally has AMD graphics drivers. They have both the radeon drivers for older cards and the AMDGPU driver for newer cards. Eventually AMDGPU will be ported over to all the supported cards and radeon drivers will be EoLed but that may take some time.

What you are referring to are the Catalyst drivers. It's AMD choice not to update those. 16.04 uses a version of X.org Server (1.18) that is not compatible with Catalyst 15.12. Canonical wisely chose to pull that driver package from their Xenial repos since it would not work.

AMD is relying on AMDGPU to be their Linux driver from now on for all distros. Some distros may use older versions of X (or whatever else) that are compatible with Catalyst 15.12, but 15.12 is the last Catalyst that Linux gets. Period.

 

[TeknoBug]

I'm pondering on how well the AMDGPU will work with the RX 480.

 

[Yakk]

Umm, no. Mac had an uptick. Linux actually decreased.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustomb=0

I would agree with the increased Mac use, including in office use. I've myself switched over to a Mac/Linux setup with only my gaming box left running Windows now.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I'm pondering on how well the AMDGPU will work with the RX 480.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-Polaris-Updates

Take that for what it's worth.

 

[Commodus]

I would agree with the increased Mac use, including in office use. I've myself switched over to a Mac/Linux setup with only my gaming box left running Windows now.

The Mac has long struck me as the moderate person's Unix-based OS of choice. You get your command line terminal and a few other elements that aren't really present in Windows (although it is getting Bash soon), but you also get honest-to-goodness hardware support and large, consistent software updates.

This isn't to say that Linux doesn't have its advantages, of course, especially if you're the tinkering sort. But if you're not (and you're not a hardcore FOSS ideologue), why hurt yourself?

 

[Yakk]

The Mac has long struck me as the moderate person's Unix-based OS of choice. You get your command line terminal and a few other elements that aren't really present in Windows (although it is getting Bash soon), but you also get honest-to-goodness hardware support and large, consistent software updates.

This isn't to say that Linux doesn't have its advantages, of course, especially if you're the tinkering sort. But if you're not (and you're not a hardcore FOSS ideologue), why hurt yourself?

I had never really paid much attention to the Mac environment until recently. It was a combination of looking at alternatives to Windows and demand for Mac environment support which prompted me to begin looking at it. Then I started working with XCode, and so gradually moved over to OSX. It is a nice UNIX shell and Apple has some good tools with Swift and is pretty easy to use and work with.

I use Linux a bit for infrastructure, but if Apple can ever catch up on the networking front I may drop Linux completely as I have no other demand it. For myself after decades of command line use I use it without really pay much attention it. I'd say I'm a lot more practical than ideological at this point, getting old maybe.

 

[Commodus]

I use Linux a bit for infrastructure, but if Apple can ever catch up on the networking front I may drop Linux completely as I have no other demand it. For myself after decades of command line use I use it without really pay much attention it. I'd say I'm a lot more practical than ideological at this point, getting old maybe.

I'm kinda with you. It's an overgeneralization and a bit mean-spirited, but the saying "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" has some truth to it. Just as you pay a mechanic to repair your car when you don't have all day to fix it yourself, the time you save by choosing a Mac over a Linux box might be worth the higher price and reduced flexibility. Heresy for some, I know.

 

[TeknoBug]

Back in the 90's I used to mainly use NetBSD (was a support developer) and Linux (Slackware then Debian) firsthand, Windows was an afterthought for required software or gaming. But in the past ~10 years I've been using Windows more than *nix however it's going the other way for me now thanks to virtual machine capacities, I can run Windows inside Linux as if it was native and pass the GPU through to it and play games on there without dual-booting (I mostly play Planetside 2, Cities Skylines, and Project CARS).

 

[FrankRamiro]

Everyone tells me that Ubuntu is the one distro where everything is supposed to work out of the box. When it doesn't (I've seen mouse driver issues, networking issues, video driver issues, etc), the solution in the Ubuntu support forums is almost always the same: Hand edit some configuration files to fix it.

Pro tip for the Canonical guys: If you have to hand edit a configuration file to fix an issue, your UI designers have FAILED.

If you're talking about Ubuntu 16.04 i agree,piece of crap,but Ubuntu 14.04 works out of the box like a charm.
If Ubuntu 16.04 continues with this same shirty install,they want to imitate WIN 10 with all those F*** APPS ,screw them, i will never join it.

 

[mauiblue]

Well I took the plunge and jumped in with Ubuntu 16.04. It took me a while to figure out how to do the dual boot on my Windows 10 upgraded Lenovo laptop that that is about 3 years old but after a couple days of research, setting up, and finally installing Ubuntu, all is working well. No hitches at all. I was happy how all turned out. Still learning about using terminal and command line but there is so much material on the Internet it was easy to find the info I needed to set up my new OS. I tried using Linux years ago using Fedora but that was so way over my head. I am slowly but steadily figuring out Ubuntu. I know I will be having an interesting and fun time using this new (to me) OS.

 

[sn8ke]

That link says 1.56% share, this one says over 2%. A lot of Windows users who "jumped ship" were likely just a result of the poor Windows 10 adoption experience. As MS cleans up its switching/"upgrading" experience, and more new computers are sold (of course, with Win 10 installed) they will regain the share.

And yes, a lot of it is likely just Chromebooks or Android where most people don't know they are on a Linux-based OS, and I'd wager a significant amount have never even heard of GNU/Linux.

Mining realistic numbers for users isn't really possible anyway. For the link I pasted, I'd bet it's higher than 2%, but in the *nix world most users are far more interested in privacy and security and do not allow telemetry, or report false info. Most of my machines report they are running Windows 7 or 8, but none of them have ever ran it. I think that's fairly common.

 

[Commodus]

That link says 1.56% share, this one says over 2%. A lot of Windows users who "jumped ship" were likely just a result of the poor Windows 10 adoption experience. As MS cleans up its switching/"upgrading" experience, and more new computers are sold (of course, with Win 10 installed) they will regain the share.

And yes, a lot of it is likely just Chromebooks or Android where most people don't know they are on a Linux-based OS, and I'd wager a significant amount have never even heard of GNU/Linux.

Mining realistic numbers for users isn't really possible anyway. For the link I pasted, I'd bet it's higher than 2%, but in the *nix world most users are far more interested in privacy and security and do not allow telemetry, or report false info. Most of my machines report they are running Windows 7 or 8, but none of them have ever ran it. I think that's fairly common.

I'm not sure that most Linux/Unix users are interested in more privacy, but there's certainly a higher likelihood that they'll submit purposefully inaccurate info. As it is, this is usage share, which is only somewhat connected to market share.

You're very likely right about Chromebooks (Android is lumped under mobile share with NetApplications). Like it or not, the most successful Linux variants tend to... well, hide their roots. They're more about ease of use and accessibility than being a tweaker's heaven.

 

[whm1974]

Have you guys tried Manjaro Linux? I've been using it since last year and this is the most problem and bug free distro I have ever used. I highly recommend it.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Never heard of it, but it looks interesting. I'll have to play around with it some time.

 

[sn8ke]

I checked Manjaro out a couple years ago because I thought maybe it was a Mandrake/Mandriva fork due to the name, but found it to be just Arch with a GUI installer and default xfce install. It's quite similar to Antergos in that way which is also worth checking out if you prefer those types of installs.

 

[sourceninja]

...

 

[mauiblue]

Well now it's been a couple weeks since I jumped in with Linux. I formatted my drive and took off MS Windows 10, the recovery partition for the OEM OS and software, and Ubuntu. I wanted a clean drive before doing a dual boot of a clean install of Windows 10 and Linux Mint. A little over a week now with this setup and things are going smoothly. I'm a little disappointed that the wireless Logitech TouchPad is a little weird on Linux Mint. I tried a fix but the right click function always comes up when scrolling. Otherwise all is well with both OS. I'll stick with Mint to get my feet wet and decide what I want to do. So far I'm enjoying Linux and I will be using it much more for browsing than Windows.

Sent from my HTC6545LVW

 

[whm1974]

I migrated completely off Windows back in 2014 after we could watch Amazon Prime Video and Netflix on Linux without jumping through a bunch of hoops. I did all my gaming on Linux by then as well. So goodbye Windows and I sure as hell don't miss it.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Word has it that MS is trying to break Steam functionality on Windows to drive people to the Windows Store, which is basically asstastic.

 

[sweenish]

That word is FUD.

 

[quikah]

Word has it that MS is trying to break Steam functionality on Windows to drive people to the Windows Store, which is basically asstastic.

This is a fantasy proposed by an increasingly questionably sane man. The prospect of this actually occurring is the same as Linus actively trying to break Steam on Linux.

 

[TeknoBug]

Word has it that MS is trying to break Steam functionality on Windows to drive people to the Windows Store, which is basically asstastic.

That's a very stupid decision if MS really is doing that, they're going to effectively kill a good chunk of desktop users. There's not that many games on the store that's worth half an ass since you can get most of them on mobile via Android or iOS or sometimes Winphone (besides Forza).

 

[sn8ke]

Well now it's been a couple weeks since I jumped in with Linux. I formatted my drive and took off MS Windows 10, the recovery partition for the OEM OS and software, and Ubuntu. I wanted a clean drive before doing a dual boot of a clean install of Windows 10 and Linux Mint. A little over a week now with this setup and things are going smoothly. I'm a little disappointed that the wireless Logitech TouchPad is a little weird on Linux Mint. I tried a fix but the right click function always comes up when scrolling. Otherwise all is well with both OS. I'll stick with Mint to get my feet wet and decide what I want to do. So far I'm enjoying Linux and I will be using it much more for browsing than Windows.

Sent from my HTC6545LVW

I dunno what you tried, which device you mean, or how Mint handles them but sometimes it's as simple as fixing mapping issues and/or creating a custom keymap file (xmodmap). I remember an older program called Lomoco that configured Logitech devices too.

 

[DrMrLordX]

This is a fantasy proposed by an increasingly questionably sane man. The prospect of this actually occurring is the same as Linus actively trying to break Steam on Linux.

What, you talking about Sweeney?

That's a very stupid decision if MS really is doing that, they're going to effectively kill a good chunk of desktop users. There's not that many games on the store that's worth half an ass since you can get most of them on mobile via Android or iOS or sometimes Winphone (besides Forza).

It is a poor idea, for both MS and the end-user. Why do you think Newell has invested so much in SteamOS, Steam Boxes, and other alternatives to Steam on Windows? I'm sure he at least considered the possibility that MS would go after Steam eventually.