PieFed DKUnprecedented Linux Growth in Europe Amid Windows 10 End-of-Life
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The numbers suggest that 2025 could be a turning point for Linux on desktop computers
Ah yes, the year of the Linux desktop
(in all seriousness, this is looking really good, my main hope from all this is that hardware manufacturers step up their FOSS drivers game)
Alph4d0gWhen Linux hits 10%, you will see hardware ship with Linux drivers day one.
Most consumer hardware on earth does already (Android phones). The problem is those drivers are usually proprietary bullshit that's very difficult to integrate with anything but OEMs kernel fork & Android version. Unfortunately I don't really foresee that changing in the near future, hopefully if Linux becomes more mainstream, Linux phones become too and then we get some progress.
And for laptops/desktops, I think the situation is pretty good already as well. Many mainstream OEMs have an option with Linux pre-installed now, and the drivers there are mostly FOSS. I'm hoping that the problematic part vendors e.g. NVidia and Broadcom step up and provide sources for their drivers - otherwise they will continue to be a buggy mess that most people hate.
Nvidia recently started NVK for Turing and newer and even more recently it was made conformant going back to Maxwell, but that still doesn't give me a lot of hope for everything between Maxwell 1 (so basically just the GTX 750/750Ti for desktop Maxwell 1 cards) and Turing after driver version 580.
Also, Nouveau works for Maxwell 1 and earlier but ymmv with that stack, and it's still not like Mesa RADV and AMDGPU for Radeon cards going back to GCN1.
☂️-A big factor in Europe right now is a shifting relationship with the US.
Companies, governments, and individuals have some incentive to find alternatives to big US tech. For operating systems, Linux is really the only option.
ArdensI really hope that people will make the transition instead of just buying new... Linux is great - and more users will equal more support for it.
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆Indeed, it kills me how much perfectly hardware is constantly thrown out because Windows refuses to run on it.
Ok is what is the "META" answer to grandma's laptop is going to get borked.
Put this USB stick in her laptop and press next a bunch of times and she can keep using it.
You have 5 lines of text to explain this solution.
I think the trick has to be that somebody who has a bit of technical skill sets the laptop up initially. I did this for my mom a while back, and once I set it up once, it just worked from there on. Non technical users tend to have a fairly small set of things they need to do like check email, browser the web, and play media. Once that's working, they never need to change anything. In fact, they don't want to change anything because they get used to the workflow, and they're comfortable.
It would be great if people set up community centres where people can bring their old laptops, and somebody switches them over to Linux for them.
Ok, what I am hearing is Nixos but with an installer like this
Rufus ISO to usb stick
stick usb stick into computer
press magical button to boot usb <-- this should be the most difficult part of the process
Screen appears, least amount of text possible
Ask only the important questions, on a single screen
then one last big scary page
"this will erase everything on your computer"
Check "I understand"
then press"ERASE BUTTON" (or cancel and reboots)
then it reboots and everything your average grandmother needs right there
a google button
an office button
and that's pretty much it
Yeah basically, a turn key solution where your machine gets wiped and imaged with a Linux distro that does all the basic stuff most people need would be an ideal solution. A good way to look at it would be making sort of a Linux based console for non technical users as opposed to a general purpose computer. Tech people want the latter, but non technical users just want a reliable tool that can reliably handle a few tasks.
Yes, I find it baffling that this does not yet exist.
I was installing debian the other day and the incessant one-question-at-a-time installation with long delays between the question was aggravating.
In particular since none of these questions really needed to be answered at the time.
Proxmox does it better, but still with annoying questions and limitation like having a mandatory static IP address and making your enter an email address notification. This is all actually optional stuff and it could all be dealt with after the install is completed.
Yup, it's frustrating that there's still no process that's easy enough for a non techie to go through easily.
Hmm, I'll pitch this idea to a couple of Nixy lfriends, maybe we can hack something together. Also throw a Linux install party!
Cool, so we need two things,
The most streamlined installer possible.
"Grandma's Universal Nix.Conf"
The installer should be written using 4th grade simple english, no jargon
In the top right corner there should be a language selector.
There should be only one page of questions.
The installer should work completely offline.
The installer should detect all peripherals and modify the nix file accordingly.
The second page should only be tge warning about erasing everything
The installer should detect if a nixos installation already exist. If it does, then offer the user to repair the bootloader
Optionally, the installer coukd detect a windows installation. Check the amount of free space left on the drive.
In this case instead of a wipe, offer to shrink the windows partition and install nixos in the liberated space. Install a bootloader setup for dual boot. Auto mount the ntfs partition and place a shortcut to the c:\user folder on the desktop.
I think we can be even simpler than that. Don't ask any questions. Simply generate the hardware-configuration.nix and have a single configuration.nix that is unchanged:
- Some easy-to-use and simple DE. I'm thinking something like lxqt or xfce, maybe Pantheon - but that would be more familiar to Mac users than Windows. KDE seems way too complicated to just have it in configuration.nix without touching it, and it can sometimes break on updates.
- Chromium (with pre-installed ublock origin)
- Libreoffice
- Some flatpak store (so that people can install apps without touching
configuration.nix) - Make a simple "update" app that just pops up once in a couple weeks or so, prompts you to click a button and then runs
npins updateandnixos-rebuild boot, and finally annoys you until you reboot (it should also update to the next stable channel when that becomes available, and make that a big deal so that a user understands it might change some of their workflows) - Set up the bootloader so that if a generation "fails" (some script in the autostart of the DE doesn't set a flag somewhere) on the next boot it boots a previous generation, kinda like Android's A/B slot system but better. I don't think systemd-boot allows this sort of thing, but I think it's possible with a GRUB script
- Maybe add a shortcut to open tmate and copy the URL to clipboard, so that you can send it someone in the know and they can help you troubleshoot
- Finally, use impermanence to make sure everything outside
/home,/nix, and wherever flatpak are stored, is wiped on every reboot and recreated from the generation, so that "reboot it" is a viable troubleshooting strategy.
Sounds reasonnable,
Installed should be downloaded by going to grandmasnixos.com
On the front page, a single click starts to download a single file, that contains everything
It is a tailored rufus executable with the ISO that contains everything to make it to first desktop boot
When download ends, no internet connection will be required to make it to grandmasnixos desktop
When the file is clicked and a usb stick has been inserted beforehand, the grandmasnixos ISO is preselected, rufus autochooses the usb stick
User only needs to press "start"
The motherboard version is checked against a lookup table, and the user is told
Reboot computer a press $KEY_TO_USB_BOOT and choose to boot the usb key
Installation is a single screen that says "This will erase everything on this computer, to continue, click the checkbox below"
[ ] I understand this will erase everything on my computer
buttons below
[ ERASE AND INSTALL GRANDMASNIXOS ] or [ CANCEL AND REBOOT] (first button only clickable if the checkbox is checked)
(there is an "Options and settings" button somewhere, it does not have to be clicked to continue)
No further user interaction until it boots into a working desktop
There is no password by default, the desktop auto-logs in, no remote access is possible until a password is set, sudo works passwordless
There should be no updating unless enabled, no telemetry, no call home of any kind,
the system should be able to work offline and forever without an internet access and never nag the user.
The desktop environment should be something occasional win10 using grandma will not get lost in
Taskbar at bottom
Desktop that you can dump files onto and start stuff by clicking those files
systray on the right
Large font start menu
Start menu includes a single settings panels that does everything a user needs (passwords, wifi, power management, update, timezone, language, locale, host and domain name, remote desktop etc..)
taskbar should have pinned the most important apps
file browser, browser, calculator, notepad, word-like and maybe a mail client maybe a zoom? client or something equivalent but open source and usable ?
If updating is turned on, it should be very conservative, updates hand curated by grandmasnixos, basically never uses software that hasn't been proven rock solid for at least 6 months. Rolling back any update should be one-click-trivial
On first boot there could be an "out of box experience" screen that allows setting up
wifi password
region/timezone/locale/language
power settings
host and domain name
password
enable updates
enable remote desktop and services
open easy user guide
So total, from download to desktop it should be 8 clicks total counting press F9 during boot as a "click"
I've got only one machine left running Windows 10 at home: a desktop PC I use exclusively for gaming. I increasingly look forward to purging Windows from it and installing Bazzite when the EOL date comes around.
Just switched to Fedora Kinoite and I’m loving the immutability of the OS. Oh bad update? lol rollback and golden. Can’t do that shit with each bloatware force push from MS
MudManI mean, good thing, too. They just broke the lock screen this week. That was an annoying half an hour of troubleshooting to do in the middle of a work day.
Pros and cons in each, I suppose.
They just broke
Who did? I didn't quite follow.
Captain AggravatedA KDE update broke its lock screen. Locking the computer would bring up a message reading "The lock screen is broken and doesn't work anymore, to unlock the computer, hit Ctrl+Alt+F1, login and enter this command."
Interesting that there's a "failsafe" like that though.
Hah. Those used to be a lot more common, this is actually a bit of a blast from the past.
Early graphical Linux interfaces were constantly breaking and telling you to go back to a terminal to restart your X server or fix whatever was broken manually.
That used to be the "but you have to use the terminal" of very early Linux, back when "can you install Debian from scratch?" was the old "can you install Arch from scratch?"
Man, I'm old.
It's a thing on hyprlock as well 🙂 If I ssh into my desktop and kill hyprlock, it will give me instructions on how to get it running again.
Yeah actual error messages with helpful information are a thing on Linux.
The last time I tried to install Windows on something, there was some problem with the BIOS config, and Windows would get part of the way through installing and then a "FAILED TO INSTALL ERROR 0xA9BF4DAFDEB99B7AD46" or something. Installing Linux on the same machine said "Unable to install due to BIOS config. See here for details." "here" was a hyperlink to the Ubuntu wiki, which you could open in Firefox because this is a live session with the whole desktop there, not some useless installer environment, nevertheless it gave a QR code to the same wiki page so you could visit it on a mobile device if you wanted to.
It's like it's meant to be used by humans, not the Borg. And not even like Borg Queen Seven of Nine Borg, like TNG era Borg.
Yeah, I don't know who made the offending changes. I don't think it's fixed yet, I'm using a workaround at the moment.
It was a ufortunate situation as it coincided with Fedora infra move which lead to delays all around. Anyhoo, the new version, with fix for broken lockscreen on Plasma is available with qt6-qtwayland-6.9.1-3
I know the fix was up for testing, but I saw some people complaining about other issues with it and it wasn't rolled into the latest live update for me last I checked, so now I'm using a lock screen wallpaper that doesn't break and I'm not sure I have a way to tell when it's fixed other than manually checking.
Also, the error message suggesting a way to manually unlock using keyboard shortcuts to a virtual terminal does not match the defaults on my distro, so that added to the confusion.
Say what you will about Windows, but it was a stark reminder of the places where a single monolithic commercial owner would prevent some issues that can happen in Linux/open source projects. A commercial software developer would almost certainly not have shipped something broken in this way, and if they did they would have rolled it back in an update immediately. They also wouldn't have had a black screen with some tips on how to bypass the issue, presumably, and if they did they certainly wouldn't have been just... wrong, or mismatched.
Like I said, pros and cons, but it was a disappointing experience. Mostly because... well, yeah, I can understand what happened and troubleshoot it, but a) I didn't have the time, so I certainly was glad I am dual booting and could just flip to Windows for the time being, and b) a whole bunch of people would not have been able to troubleshoot this or comfortable tryign to do so even if the provided instructions in the workaround were accurate to their system.
And cloudstike did never happen...
I have Timeshift setup for fast and easy rollback.
Bad updates will happen to any OS. It is about if you want to update fast and having a rollback plan. There are dostros that updates more slow as they actually do their own testing and hence was not affected at all.
For me the lock screen instructions worked fine. The kernel update only broke Ghostty but a workaround fix was available the same day. I could also just have booted into the older kernel from Grub.
Been running Bazzite for a while now, and love it. Basically Kinoite but built for gaming.
Took me a little bit to get a grasp on ostree, but I really like it.
Just wanna add another Bazzite recommendation! If you're on the fence and feeling like "but my games!" - Bazzite's got your back. Shit works great.
It is already the year of the Linux Desktop for me and has been for years. Anyone who run GNU+Linux exclusively is already there.
Living in Finland is doubly humiliating. The country where Linux started, and IT chiefs almost in every company are going "oh yeah? I'm gonna use Microsoft products even harder"
I don't like to say this about people I don't know but fucking idiots, man.
I mean, just to be clear on what 
...
That'd be the red line, there. Assuming you take Statcounter numbers at face value, even.
Incidentally, how have the MacOS and OSX not converged more, speaking of end of life stuff?
Also note the drop in Chrome OS mirrors the rise in Linux so I wouldn't rule out this just being user agent changes.
Statcounter is... a valid proxy, but I don't know if I trust it for fine grain changes. Big trends, maybe. Windows overall certainly seems to have lost some ground over time. Whether that's desktop PCs becoming less popular, the laptop market moving a bit towards Mac, the handheld market being weirdly represented because this only counts devices used for web browsers or whatever else is harder to parse.
Why do they even have two lines for OS X and macOS? It's the same thing.
They officially changed the name in 2016. I have to assume they changed what the browser reports earlier this year. For tracking purposes it would probably make more sense to count the ARM version separately from the Intel version, but I don't know if that's correlated to this change or what is. I'm not a MacOS user, though, so maybe the change is public knowledge and I just don't know about it.
17lifersstatcounter checks user agent strings. it probably depends on the mac browser used to report the user agent string.
I know. Then they process those user agent strings to decide what OS it is. The question is why are they treating OSX and macOS as different OSes when they are the same? It was literally just a rebrand.
Nice to see the word unprecedented before some good news!
Honestly I wasn't expecting to see a significant increase. It's a nice surprise. If we get to 6-7% Linux will be much harder to ignore for software and hardware providers. Personally I'm good on software but better wifi drivers would be welcomed.
Europe breaks their own procurement laws to choose Windows, because they are idiots.
SwedneckI don't want them to, but I don't get why Microsoft don't just roll out updates the way Android/Linux do. Free.
They've already adopted the Google method of moneymaking by embedding spyware into everything in the OS.
Surely they could stop most of their headaches by doing that?
Not that I care. Linux user here for roughly 16 years, sometimes having to go back to Windows hurts.
It hurt a lot recently, having to dig out an old windows laptop to ironically install Ubuntu touch on to a phone (OnePlus Nord N10).
I had tons of updates and had to install features and so much other stuff just to use it. 🤕
I think this is good. This means increased competition and that the none compatible Windows computers can keep running without going to the trash bin - better for the environment.
THIS IS THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP! LETS GO!
Fresh twist?
Like a multi decade old and proven system is the new kid in the block?
My 2010 audio drivers would like to have a word with you
proven? how is a system proven for usage by common people that can't even do automatic updates safely? It's just recently getting to that point, with offline updates!
yeah you and me can use it fine. we can run apt upgrade, dist-upgrade, and fix when it does not boot anymore, but most of us are aware that our parents but also non-tech friends can't.
that's actually a huge increase!
I am not surprised. Windows 11 is an utter shit. It is much worse than 10.
The start menu is a Web app as I understand.
What the actual fuck? How the fuck does that even work? So if you don't have any Internet connection you can't use the goddamn start button what the
No, I think it works without a network connection. But it's
an Electrona React Native app now, which means it's a glorified webview displaying an HTML document pretending to be an app because apparently even Microsoft don't give a shit about MAUI.Electron apps (and similar shit like React Native) are notorious for being slow and extremely resource-hungry. You know, exactly what you don't want a care part of your OS to be.
It's worse that that. Only parts of the start menu are in react native (but it still needs to initialized every time you open it)
I don't know that I would say "much worse." But it's more than incrementally worse, which is what most of the updates to Win10 have been over its lifetime. So straw, meet camel's back.
Still in disbelief how they wreck it even in the simplest things.
Remember how clicking the audio system tray icon would open... The common audio settings and nothing else, idem dito for the network icon. For some incomprehensible reason they jammed those system tray icons menus all together a few years ago, you need more clicks, it's less intuitive and less efficient. For what reason? No one knows.
Remember how right clicking an icon would open a quite extensive context menu? Gone. Now it's a few BS options I never need. For example "open with...": gone. Now in the freaking context menu you have to click "more options" for another, full context menu to appear.
Incredible BS tiny changes with a big negative user experience impact I truly cannot grasp why they'd do it. Only reason everyone sticks around is (bad) habits, vendor lockin and obligations for certain software by school or work who insist on keeping Microsoft because they themselves are also vendor locked in or just very very scared of change.
Try managing your printers in the modern interface.
Not to mention the other great features of the shiny new context menu: Annoying little lag when opening, and changing of the content about 1.5 secs after it has opened — right when you have started to click some item so you end up doing some random unintended thing. Chef’s kiss
Exactly!
I think this is the smartphonification of the desktop. Android and iOS hide most settings, it works out of the box, while the user has no idea what's happening in the background. To be honest: at least the reliability of the software has drastically improved. Nowadays the network just works, so no need to know the details. I remember the days of Win95 and BNC network, where it always took an hour and several tries until the network was up.
Obligatory mention of the Windows 10 Enterprise Edition that goes through 2032 of support.
Eh, no. LTSC has an extra 13 months and you can get extended support for W10 enterprise, but MS made the pricing very unattractive (support cost basically doubles each year).
But W10 enterprise is going eol for mainstream support in October just like the home, pro and education editions.
I've been preparing our migration to W11 for 18 months now (we combined that with some other changes, otherwise a simple feature update would have sufficed). And no, linux is not an option.
Would you mind sharing why Linux is not an option? I'm planning to switch a fintech team of 20 to Ubuntu and wondering if I missed anything when doing the PoC
I think you should be good. If I only had some office people, it would make it a lot easier. But we have a lot of engineers who require specific CAD products (Catia, autoCAD) which would make it difficult, as well as we are completely locked into the Microsoft eco system (M365, MSSQL, Azure). Not even saying it wouldn't be possible for most users, but it would be a massive undertaking (we have around 2000 users in 20 different locations) and I just don't see us getting any type of support for this kind of project. Not in the least because we only jist migrated from on-prem to M365 cloud which was a multi-year project.
We are starting to use Linux more in the server space (Ubuntu and for some applications like Abaqus we will use RHEL) and I'm drafting a proposal to start switching certain databases to Postgresql to save on license costs, but that's about it.
Is there lightroom on Linux? That's basically how I earn my bread
It might work in Proton or WINE, or in a VM with a GPU passthrough. But that's not something I'd bet my workflow on. Maybe try Darktable on Windows as an intermediate step, or have a separate work machine.
They're referring to the Enterprise LTSC IoT version: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-iot-enterprise-ltsc-2021
hmm it's still good to be reminded that it's not actually until 2032, but just 2027. 2 years is more than none, but yeah, not as much as I originally thought