What are the important milestones Linux has achieved this year?
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Continued not to show me anything AI-related
Valve is officially partnering with Arch (not just using it as the base for their distro).
Ooo neat I didn’t hear about this
Valrch and framemint are cute couples!
Real-time Linux makes it to the mainline kernel was a big one I can think of off the top of my head.
nVidia released drivers that aren’t a complete tire fire under Wayland.
(It’s more of a regular pile of discarded tires now, but it’s still dramatically better.)
I think It might’ve been last year but anti-cheat compatibility was huge. Still up to the studio to enable it but some games have.
Progress towards wayland is going steady which doesn’t mean much to those that don’t know much about Linux. But what that means is more modern features like VRR and HDR. Not completely here yet as far as I know but that wouldn’t have happened on X11
Note exactly a huge milestone but you can’t discredit the steady development of pipewire. Audio was annoying as fuck before it.
Honestly, I think we’re 3 years out from Windows being replacable for a gaming platform.
Anti-cheat is a big one (sure, there’s “support”, but if none of the games people play are supported, is that support?), but VRR and HDR are also huge.
That trifecta is the only reason I’m still sitting in Windows, and I find myself hopeful we land there sooner rather than later so I can dump Windows and never have to think about whatever dumb crap Microsoft is going to do next.
VRR works really well already - some Nvidia users might lose extra functionality like Reflex Ultra that, when paired with VRR, can smartly adjust the frame rate cap. But VRR itself works.
HDR is a difficult beast though… It’s hard even on Windows, and very problematic on Linux (though with Gamescope, KDE Plasma and Wayland you can kinda use it already).
I’ve been using HDR on Linux since February or March and it works pretty well. MPV works great (with vk_hdr_layer), and games work if you run them in Gamescope, which has its own complications but overall it’s pretty good.
I still get persistent black screen issues going in and out of VRR mode… It’s not as bad on displayport, really bad on hdmi.
Amd 7900 XTX for reference
The helpful thing is we are at a point people are starting to move over in larger numbers. With every extra person, there is more enthusiasm to get the next useful milestone completed; which will continue to bring in more people. It’s pretty telling that the top PC gaming handheld is a Linux offering, not a Windows one. Just a few years ago that idea was unheard of.
As a personal anecdote, I work at a company that releases Windows software. However, in active development we have intentionally decided to not cut ourselves off from Linux and MacOS, and such OS releases are on the order of a month or three of work to make happen, rather than the complete rewrite monstrosity that is the case with our previous offerings.
I think marked share on desktops has increased substantially more than the years before.
2% now, which is significant growth (seriously).
Pornhub’s 2024 statistics show that almost 5% of traffic came from Linux devices. This number doesn’t include PCs that are used purely for work (probably).
Pornhub’s audience is 75% male, and Linux users are almost all male too (and … no offence guys but probably more likely to rely on porn), so I wouldn’t take that as a representative global figure.
Statcounter gives 1.4% which is much more likely to be unbiased (and sounds way more plausible based on my experience of real life).
and … no offence guys but probably more likely to rely on porn
And 4% of gaming is on Linux. 5% of PH traffic ≠ 5% market share, because I bet mobile devices are part of their metric (and are they counting the same ones twice if the same PC uses a different IP?).
2% is excellent growth, but there’s a long way to go to even compete with Apple (which is second place at 20-25%, iirc).
I bet mobile devices are part of their metric
No, desktop and mobile are counted separately in the Pornhub survey.
You’re underestimating the market share as according to Statcounter and the Valve Hardware Survey the marketshare is at 4.03% and 2.03%.
Stay tuned for the 2024 Lemmy.ca survey as it will include questions about which operating system you use on your desktop and phone, let’s hope we can crack well past that 5% mark!
And 2% of a big number is a big number. People too often misunderstand what percentages really are about and think a low percentage is akin to nothing.
In 2015 there were an estimated 2bn desktop computers actively in use in the world. That means 40m pcs running linux - a small proportion but a big number in its own right. It’s roughly equivalent to the entire population of Canada.
Both stats are from worldometers.info, and there are likely more than 2bn Pcs in use now.
Wayland is usable now
For all major graphics cards. Except NVIDIA :(
I use it successfully with an Nvidia card
The only thing that doesn’t work is TF2
I too daily drive NVIDIA and hyprland, but it’s not a great experience.
Hyprland is worth the pain points but getting vscode or any other electron applications working is impossible.
For Dev it’s fine, neovim is great and anything that needs a webview can be cobbled together with Qwebengine or a web socket pretty quickly.
For work, however, I just have to go back to i3.
It’s actually quite fine for a while now. Sometimes I need to fallback to Xorg but that’s not related to Nvidia anyway.
I was able to switch to Wayland with an Nvidia GPU this year with the update to plasma 6. I’ve only been a full-time Linux user for a year now, but gaming has gone smooth, my install has been stable and Nvidia drivers are better. Arch install with LUKS encryption was very smooth with my last install a month or so ago.
Atomic desktop ftw.
Delaware
