Report: Linux was on 6.34 percent of computers last month if you count ChromeOS.

I know this might be a couple months old, but I didn’t know we already passed 4%.

  • fiercekitten@lemm.eeEnglish
    82·
    5 months ago

    I don’t think Microsoft (or Apple) want people to have personal computers anymore in the way that PCs have historically existed. That is to say, they don’t want your computer capable of running arbitrary code of your choosing. They don’t want your computer to have the potential to do everything, to run everything, to make anything.

    They want to control and lock down all aspects of your machine and what it can do, retain ownership of hardware via software licenses, and monetize every click and keystroke.

    Microsoft doesn’t want you to have a functional computer anymore, they want you to have a dummy terminal that runs Office 365 and Copilot.

    • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      5 months ago

      They want PCs that work like smartphones, with apps completely self contained and unmodifiable, where the OS is a black box that no one but them can see in to.

      • flop_leash_973@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        5 months ago

        Smartphones are actually a good window into what computers in general would have been like had the IBM bios not been reverse engineered and survived a bunch of legal challenges.

    • egeres@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      I think if it was up to them, and latency was low enough, they probably would have pushed some kind of “fully remote convertible laptop” where they literally own everything you do in a cloud, I don’t even want to search if this is a thing that exist already

      • Matthew@midwest.socialEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        We’ve been most of the way their for a long while with thin clients. They have just enough computational capacity to connect to someone else infrastructure. Its also how schools use Chromebooks for the most part too

    • 1995ToyotaCorolla@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      Now that we don’t have to pay for any of the infrastructure, it turns out that mainframes and timesharing is awesome. Can we go back to that please? - Silicon Valley, 2024

    • notanaltaccount@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      This is EXACTLY right.

      They are dividing users into two groups. Unintelligent users who run Windows or MacOS in an extremely controlled limited way with AI assisting and monitoring everything remotely and reporting it back to the mothership…

      Or people who are above an IQ of 85 and willing to learn to use Linux.