Fact is most modern Linux Kernels >6.8.x don't support the legacy nvidia driver 470. Thus, on modern OS distros a lot of legacy video cards and laptops running Linux >6.18.x just isn't practical without a GPU upgrade.
The situation will probably get worse in the next few years as perpetual permutation kernel culture hits unmaintainable EOL hardware driver Blobs.
Most dual boot a Windows 10/11 ssd, as it still sort of works. YMMV =3
I'm not sure what the state of the open-source drivers is for the really old nvidia GPUs, but for Pascal and such it's pretty decent. No video hwaccel though. However, for hardware encoding, NVENC has improved a lot over the generations. So the old chunkers are probably beat on every metric by e.g. a T400 card. Or Intel Arc (business model: "Quick sync for AMD").
Depends on the hardware codecs use case, as some legacy cards are valuable to people that own legacy workflows.
Without CUDA + hardware-encoders a GPU is just a paperweight regardless of age for some use-cases. =3
From the chart, it looks that Windows took some small share to some older OSX in December and Linux stayed mostly the same.
Measuring growth along a tiny time frame; nice try.
The slow but steady move to 6+ CPU core systems seems at least a bit more interesting.
My kneejerk says it is more likely the first explanation as it’s either leave windows (unlikely) or finally go to 11 whereas the latter is about making a deliberate, pricey purchase. But I don’t have a lick of data to support that of course ha
Meanwhile, the most recent estimates show the Steam Deck, the most popular handheld gaming PC by far, having sold around 4 million units, while every other handheld gaming PC (including the Asus ROG Ally, the predecessor to the ROG Xbox Ally) having sold around 2 million units combined. While the Xbox name carries some weight, I highly doubt the Xbox Ally has sold significantly in the two months since its launch.
TLDR: You’re likely correct that numbers from Windows handhelds did not contribute significantly to the added Windows 11 users in December.
That's just noise
Use habits in Dec diverge from the rest of the year because of the holidays. People are gifted new systems that come with windows 11 pre installed, and people who don't usually have time to game come online. I would not take this to mean that anything has stopped using Linux and is using windows 11 instead.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-December-2025-Survey
A company that bet the farm on gamers back in the '90s needs to embrace their bread and butter. AI is cool, but don't forget what got you here.
Edit: Here we go: https://wallpaper-house.com/data/out/9/wallpaper2you_359831....
Switch to Linux today. Unless you're working with a shit company, chances are pretty good that all of your software and workflows will work on Linux too, and possibly even work better. Plus, you'll be able to actually triage your own computer (if you want).
I wouldn't call the company where I work shit, but in Germany many big companies are deeply entrenched in the whole Microsoft ecosystem, and some sectors are even more entranched. So, I am very certain that a lot of insanely business-critical software at the company where I work at (which is about a market where easily billions of EUR/USD are moved) will not work in a GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Over many, many years, many parts of the (often custom-built) software was developed to work together with the existing big ecosystem of existing (also often custom-built) software. Some parts of the programs that I work on are deeply intertwined with various products from Microsoft - if they weren't, the users would not be able to work so productively with these programs (i.e. the workflows would take a lot more time for the (highly qualified) users, which would cost the company a big load of money).
While I (generally) like the hardware, I don't like the UX in MacOS but more than that I have a strong distaste for having my runtime deployment environment be entirely different from my working environment. I prefer to eat my own dogfood and have Linux all the way through, and I really like my own tooling and configuration I've set up over the years.
I had a job recently where the whole deployment stack was NixOS (to Aarch64) but the issued devices were Mac laptops, and you couldn't even build the software on MacOS (not even Nix Darwin) so had to do everything inside Parallells etc and it was a giant PITA.
I've never understood why .. if you're going to pay people six figure salaries for their time why would you slow them down with process and tooling that makes them less efficient...
If I have a laptop, it boots and contacts Microsoft, but I wipe it and install Linux, does that count? Microsoft doesn’t say.
andrewstuart•2h ago
Says “Windows Central”.
Numerlor•2h ago
DoctorOW•1h ago