[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46026579

Turns out if you keep pushing stuff on people, you might open their eyes to the fact that they are not free to choose how they do their computing.

Stallman was right. Choose Free software.

Maybe the way to really hit windows is to put pressure on the gaming companies to support steam os

This is a bit misleading. They have have achieved 1 million downloads of their new version that just released. The downloads coming from Windows machines is not definitive as many Linux users mask their user agent.

Not to mention I'm very skeptical that 780K Windows users just happened to discover a more obscure Linux distro suddenly and switched to it in October while Windows 10 is still supported. This is basically an ad for the OS.

I hit the wall over the last month. The last version of Firefox that works on my Win7 workstation where I do almost everything is too old for some banking websites to work so I have been using a Win10 tablet for a couple of sites. That is the straw that shifted the pile from Windows to Linux for me. I have had to sort through family member's issues when they upgraded, intentionally or otherwise, to Win11 and from that I know that I have reached the end of the trail that began with PC-DOS 3.0 a long time ago.

If Windows was my main OS, I'd probably be the same and use Omarchy or something. Thankfully I saw the light and have been using Mac personally for the last 15 years, used Mac at my last workplace for 8 years, but unfortunately my current workplace is Windows only. Makes me lose the will to live - it's so bad!

Fedora 41 KDE had a neat bug on intel graphics where a kernel update caused black screen on boot. no fix, just a “downgrade or update to beta”. those are the issues that truly make linux desktop a non starter for most people.

i use it because i know how to fix it, but linux desktop needs a proper recovery system for normal users to handle that kind of problem.

Interesting take. To me it seems like a big leap. Take it from a serial Linux dabbler, about once a year I download 10-20 of the top Linux distros and try them all. I download them on my main machine, which is Windows, and copy them all to USB sticks and try them one by one. If someone is only looking at metrics, 20 people just switched to Linux!

Save 2000 dollars (two computers) by using free, lightning fast software that will keep my hardware alive for another decade. Or buy new hardware that Microsoft is going to brick in three years, and will have poor performance the whole time. Tough decision.

Microsoft is tech support for non tech-savvy users at this point.

Saying this as a long time lover of Linux, that's not impressive. Put another way, 0.056 percent of the user based attempted switching to Linux. Whether users stick with it, we'll see.

Probably because of the system requirements

My gods, out of 1.4 billion Windows users, one out of every 1,800 downloaded this Linux distribution? Yawn.