relevant xkcd

I had been dual booting for a while with Windows 11/Fedora until one day I needed to update the BIOS on my motherboard. Windows decided it was too big of an upgrade and wanted me to activate again. I called support, and they said that I had used up all my activations and would need to buy a new copy.

Thanks Microsoft, for helping me switch full time to Linux!

clean UI

I personally find their UI much cleaner than Gnome or cinnamon, but to each their own.

Would be cool to have more people on Linux finding and fixing these little details.

Unlikely to happen. This is very complicated low level stuff that's often completely undocumented. Often the hardware is buggy but it works with Windows/Mac because that's what it's been tested with, so you're not even implementing a spec, you're implementing Windows' implementation.

Also the few people that have the knowledge to do this a) don't want to spend a ton of money buying every model of monitor or whatever for testing, and b) don't want to spend all their time doing boring difficult debugging.

I actually speak from experience here. I wrote a semi-popular FOSS program for a type of peripheral. Actually it only supports devices from a single company, but... I have one now. It cost about £200. The other models are more expensive and I'm not going to spend like £3k buying all the other models so I can test it properly. The protocol is reverse engineered too so.. yeah I'll probably break it for other people, sorry.

This sort of thing really only works commercially IMO. It's too expensive, boring and time consuming for the scratch-an-itch developers.

I have a Framework laptop (Intel GPU) with Arch and KDE, and while I’ve never seen all windows crash when connecting an external monitor, I wouldn’t call it out of the ordinary for one or two to crash after I connect one, especially if I try to drag one to a new position right after.

It's a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Generation 10. I also have issues with the fan going to max at random times and generally a bad time when trying to hook it up to its docking station.

See also some previous threads I've written, here and here.

So here's the plan:

1. Grow market share

2. Grow profit

Yeah, relative. From ~4% to ~4.4%.

In 120 years, people will each have 4 linux computers

It makes sense that Steam is lower, since gaming historically has been one of the biggest things keeping people from switching. That's no longer the case, but it'll take time to convert people.

Also, putting half percent points from 0 to 5 on the y axis, while the x axis is four month intervals since 2009, makes this growth look way more significant that it really is...