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

When you go deep enough

hehehe

That’s wild!

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.

As much as I’m pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft and anti-Apple, I have to say that I don’t think comparing desktop use to server use is appropriate when it comes to security. I don’t think server use of any OS translates to desktop use in terms of security at all. If nothing else, the end user is a major difference between the two. End users download, install, run, and interact with all kinds of random software, websites, etc. without thinking and this is the main source of desktop malware. The same is not the case for servers.

That’s definitely been a catalyzing factor for me. I had fiddled around with Linux and had been pretty ‘meh’ about Windows for years, but I was just coasting along the path of least resistance. Them telling me that I could no longer use my perfectly functional computer for Windows was the ‘last straw’ that finally what made me begin to take action and get ready to say goodbye to Windows.

If you think about it, Microsoft’s timing for this is really perfect. Wait until Linux is very viable for desktop use including gaming then tell vast numbers of your customers that they need to ditch a fully working computer in order to keep using Windows. I expect that this figure will probably double by the end of the year. There’s another article by ZDNet now that says that the share is more like 6% and rapidly accelerating. I’ll post it on the main Linux community if hasn’t already been posted there.

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.

I don’t know about heavy hitters, but I just noticed a couple days ago that someone has been regularly posting on !godot@programming.dev the links to the weekly videos that StayAtHomeDev posts highlighting 5 new Godot games at a time. Here’s the YouTube channel if you want to go directly to the source: https://www.youtube.com/@stayathomedev

Some of the games look great.

2–54 years’ time

lol, the truth!