Thanks!

You mean the attachment in my comment above? It’s a webp file copied from the article, the table of year-by-year Linux desktop market share (global).

I’m not sure about the legal intricacies of it, but there is commercial software being distributed through flatpak on Flathub for a while now. The first example that comes to mind is Bitwig, a well-known, paid, commercial Digital Audio Workstation: https://flathub.org/apps/com.bitwig.BitwigStudio

Also, Flathub is working on offering paid apps: https://news.itsfoss.com/flathub-paid-apps/

I thought this may be a consideration too, but I would expect it to be a minority of websites that would do this, no?

I thought this may be one of the considerations.

For sure, it seems to be much less talked about than the distro itself. I’m not sure how well it works on other distros, so that would warrant research.

Out of genuine curiosity, what is the reasoning for using the Win user agent?

I know! This article kind of addresses that with this line: “although we can’t be certain of the exact numbers, Linux is clearly growing”.

Interestingly enough, reading through again, the 6% figure is from US government sites, but the growth numbers in the line I quoted in the post is actually global. Here’s the graph they’re referring to:

I hadn’t noticed that dip in 2025 until I looked at this graph more closely!

I believe I’ve heard that you can use the Nix configuration tool that gives this functionality on any distro? But yes, I’ve also avoided it so far because it seems complicated. Perhaps in the future, when I’m more versed on Linux.

If you list what specific software you use and whether you’re willing to try alternatives to any of it, people may be able to give you guidance on how your Linux experience may be. There are lots of people doing music production and digital art on Linux, but it depends on your specifics whether it will work for you or not.

Regarding distros, I’ve seen many people here make the argument that immutable/atomic distros like Bazzite are not ideal for newbies or more complex use cases. If you’re considering immutables because of the comfort that comes with their being more easily recoverable from OS update or configuration issues, I would suggest looking into one of the OpenSUSE distros, either Tumbleweed or Leap. Those two give you many of the advantages of easy recovery without the disadvantages of immutables.

They do this by taking a different approach to recovery. Instead of making the OS root immutable/atomic, which forces you to do a lot of workarounds in certain circumstances, they used the approach of automatic and transparent system snapshots whenever you update or install any software, plus hourly (I believe?).

This is the main factor that led me to choose OpenSUSE for my own personal use. There are other positives such as a reputation for stability, excellent integration of KDE, and YaST, which is their easier to use configuration tool for many system tasks. I’m only at the beginning of my journey though, so I can’t fully endorse it yet because I haven’t fully settled into it and spent much time daily driving it.

I’m not sure about the 5% story, but this 6% one is specifically about US government sites. Sorry I didn’t mention that in the post.

Agreed. I think we’re still going to see a LOT of growth in Linux market share by the end of this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 7%-8% by then.

Same here!

That’s what I was wondering too. Doubling time halved already.

They used a different data source for this one and mentioned why they preferred this one over the one from the day before.

It’s not what you would normally call an ergo keyboard with a curved / split key bed, but I think they’re superior to the majority of recent laptop keyboards, especially compared to the flat square chiclets of MacBooks and the others who blindly copied them. The keys are curved so you get tactile feedback of where your fingers are and the action also feels good to type on.

The 5% story was published yesterday. This new article from today says that they trust the government site figures more than StatCounter which was cited on yesterday’s story.

I personally enjoy a lot of videogames that feature AI, especially roguelikes. I don’t think there’s any shame in using an automatic spell-checker. Autotune has helped make music better (and worse, any tool can be misused). Automatic subtitles, while not the most reliable, have allowed a lot of video media that otherwise would never have been captioned to become accessible to the hearing-impaired.

It sounds like you and OP are talking about different things. Neither Autotune nor automatic captions have anything to do with Generative AI.

Edit: * as far as I am aware. Autotune at least was around way before Gen AI. Automated captions too, but perhaps AI has improved those. A quick search wouldn’t tell me if any of the AI subtitling tools actually use Generative AI or some other kind of AI.

I want to switch to Borg backup but haven’t found the time yet.

Since you haven’t switched yet, perhaps consider restic too. I looked into Borg when I was trying to decide which backup software to use, but ended up deciding on restic instead and using resticprofile to ease implementation.

Thankfully I have some requirements for laptops that very significantly narrow my options:

• It must have a good, ergonomic keyboard
• It must have a good pointing stick

That only leaves Thinkpads for me to consider.