this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Never understood why "market share" matters to so many Linux enthusiasts. It's not like Linux is a product that needs to generate revenue.
Because the biggest practical downside of Linux is a lack of natively developed big name software. It’s annoying to find some great software that perfectly meets your needs and then discover than it can’t run with decent performance on Linux.
Market share growing means that Linux becomes a better and more accessible option.
So what's the magical percentage of market share that gets Adobe to port their proprietary software over to Linux?
Something more than what it currently is.
But as a linux-only user since 2007, it's my opinion that this sort of thing is less and less of a problem for most (note I did not say all) use cases.
There's very few things I have wanted to do with a computer (as a tech enthusiast since the 80s) that isn't doable on Linux. At this point I find most things I personally want to do are easier on Linux.
Gaming is coming along nicely thanks to Proton, which is not as good as native support, but which is still such a turnaround from even 10 years ago that it's pretty amazing.
Non-gaming applications usually (not always) have a Linux equivalent that requires nothing more than decoupling what you need to do from the software you think you need to do it. That's a hard sell if your boss or your teacher tells you all your tasks MUST be done in tool XYZ, but for other things it's not so bad.
99% of what a non-professional thinks they need photoshop for is going to be doable in Krita or Gimp for example. Inkscape and Blender are well regarded for their purposes even outside the Linux community, very few people are really doing something in Word that can't be done in Libre Office Writer, etc...
This isn't intended as a campaign speech for Linux - I've long ago realized that for various reasons it's not a good fit for some folks, or it could be but they aren't interested. That's fine, IMO. However, for the vast majority of what people use a PC for these days, I personally am doubtful that Linux is an obstruction to completing those tasks so much as it might be a paradigm shift for folks to rethink how they intend to complete those tasks.
It's been many years since I've even wanted to run anything from Adobe on Linux. YMMV.
If they support Macs then whatever these things' market share is, I suppose.
Wikipedia is using this site as the source, and that site shows around 20% market share for Mac. Linux is at 3% and ChromeOS is at 4%, so if you combine them and double that it still isn't at 75% of the market share Mac has.
This isn't mentioning that dealing with Linux compatibility is more annoying than Mac or Windows compatibility. Macs are very uniform, Windows has a giant making sure everything is compatible, and Linux has 900 distros that will never agree to co-operate.
Flatpak
Windows is also ridiculously good at backwards compatibility. Mac frequently just breaks old software and Linux is largely unconcerned because they assume anyone that cares will find a way. That backwards compatibility is over of the major keys to Windows success with developers.
But Linux is good at backward compatibility tho. Linus Torvalds leadership made sure that very few if at all any changes to the kernel will break existing userland. This means that if you have a program with their needed dependencies in the right version (which is easy with docker/flatpak/appimage) your programs will run flawlessly even if they are from the 90s.
I'm pretty sure that's just default userland and foreign packages still update frequently and kernel updates might've broken syscalls not used by default userland.
Though Linux the kernel might be stable and considerate, Linux the ecosystem is not.