[TUHS] Re: AIX moved into maintainance mode

[Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 17:43, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Look, Linux users are tiny compared to Windows / MacOS, I think the
> desktop users is around 1%.  BSD users are even more tiny than Linux.

Actually, I think that's not true any more.

ChromeBooks outsold Mac in the USA in 2017, and worldwide by 2020.

(Sales have fallen off a cliff since the pandemic, but that's because
so many people have one and are happy with it, I think.)

I think that's in the region of 250-300 million desktop Linux users.

Secondly, the PRoC has a "5-3-2 programme" in place to compel all
organisations to move to Linux and get rid of American OSes. Last year
was the nominal completion when 98% of machines were to have been
replaced or reinstalled; the assumption was that there would be at
least 2% of Windows boxes that they _couldn't_ readily replace.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/09/china_orders_ban_on_us_computers_and_software/

I've looked at OpenKylin. It's Ubuntu. Deepin is Debian underneath
although they're planning to move away from it.

It's hard to get any reliable figures, but frankly, Ubuntu Kylin and
Deepin are good, attractive, friendly OSes. They are frankly better
and friendlier than GNOME or KDE, IMHO, and they're working on things
like dual root partitions with failover, like ChromeOS has.

I suspect that there may be another 100 million to maybe 250M users there, too.

Which means about half a billion Linux desktops and laptops out there.

It's not that Linux on the desktop never happened. It did, from
2017-2020. It's over. It's history.

But the Linux world, predictably, didn't notice and doesn't count
these as "proper" Linuxes.

ChromeOS is a 100% a Linux, based on Gentoo, but it's not aimed at
Linux users. It doesn't even have a package manager.

And too many of we Westerners don't bother looking at stuff with funny
writing from far away, so they don't notice this stuff. I've lost
count of how many Ubuntu distro roundups just dismiss Kylin as "the
version for China" and don't even try it. (The few that do, like it.)

I tried to give an overview:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/30/kylin_the_multiple_semiofficial_chinese/

If I am right, and I don't have strong evidence, then I suspect that
there, ballpark, as many Kylin and Deepin users as ChromeOS users, and
that put together, they account for about 90% of Linux users. In other
words, the estimates of western distro usage are about 1/10 of the
real picture.


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