I work in the refurb department of an ewaste recycling company. Because we don't have a Windows OEM license, we officially can't install Windows on any of the PCs we sell. (I'll direct people to download the Windows install media if asked.[0]) On the systems I sell[1], Linux Mint has a nice OEM install option that after installation, there's a 'ship to customer' script[2] that starts an OOBE after the next boot, so I don't have to make up a login, and hope it doesn't get lost anywhere.
I'm not sure how many people keep the Linux install after they buy it, but it's cool to think we're helping move the needle on this! FWIW, I've had several people directed to me specifically for Linux systems, so I know it's more than 3.
Yes, I run Linux everywhere at work (it's the wild west without a Windows domain), and at home.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11 (ewww)
[1] https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling
[2] https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/lates...
Personally, I typically use gray market Windows keys. I have a hard time moving machines with Linux on them.
But I think you are doing a really good thing!
Disclaimer: I am an employee, I did not found the company.
Anecdotally though, the idea of major creators like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee putting out Linux content was unheard of a few short years ago.
I have been seeing a wide trend among the Windows tech-savvy universe of frustrated users who have social media platforms suggesting strongly that people give it a try.
Plus, you’ve got Steam, which has made Linux an excellent game platform for the very large percentage of Windows desktop users who play games.
I also find that the availability of AI makes troubleshooting for newbies way easier. Dump your error message in or describe what’s not working and you’re on your way.
It is truly the year of the Linux desktop. I switched away from Windows thinking I’d still need a dual boot partition but so far I really don’t.
In over 30 years of using the Internet I have seen this question form countless times, and I have posed it myself countless times.
I have never had it in mind to "show how smart I am", and cannot recall ever walking away with the impression that someone else was doing so.
The goal is to solve the other person's problem; the rationale is a genuine belief that the other person has an https://xyproblem.info/ . This belief is, often, motivated by confusion over the description of what's happened so far, or by the OP taking actions that seem inconsistent or needlessly convoluted.
Getting help from other people, as a beginner in a field (any field) requires accepting that you might not yet know the right question to ask, or how to ask it. That's just how knowledge works.
The worst thing about forums in my experience, by far, is people who pose as wanting help but who really just want to rant. Specifically for Linux forums, rant about Linux because it doesn't work like Windows.
Hopefully there is a middle ground, where I can explain to my crawler which results look good, which dont, what it got wrong, and it adapts. A return to crawler/surfacer agents that work to find and retrieve would be a step in the right direction.
I do think llm assisted linux has a bright future. It feels like scifi using a system with them, gluing all the power scattered in small tools.
I’ve noticed that it’s helped me as well, because it’s able to give me diagnostic commands that I can run and report back with the results. For example, I fixed/set up a virtual machine with libvertd and I just wouldn’t have gotten that far without it, especially for when I broke the setup later.
I've also had it build me a nix flake for a piece of software that wasn't in the repo and save me a ton of effort running it.
If it can solve Nix issues that well, given how relatively obscure Nix is, I don't think it'll struggle with most topics. Though the entire Nix repo being written in Nix and on GitHub might give it a huge boost in training visibility. It's not like other Linux topics aren't also very well represented though.
I guess especially now as new hardware skyrockets in price people think twice before buying a new rig just so they can update Windows, Linux starts to look really good for these folks.
Anyways, I'm saying this because we expected ~1% Linux users, but we needed something to stand out against our competitors. I just pulled our latest data, and 7.5% of our paying users are on Linux.
For older hardware that won't run Windows 11, I'm a huge fan of Linux Mint, especially for people migrating from Windows.
- high hardware prices push people to keep their 5-10 y-o PC that crawl under updated Windows versions
- stupid Windows practices, like ads and updates, that make people feel, well, stupid
- improvement of Linux distro support, mainly due to instant help by LLMs
- a series of other goodies, like games on Steam, practically non-existent malware, strong security, lack of privacy invasion and the most important: legally FREE.
At about 30-35% market share there will be a tipping that will accelerate the adoption through support by big corps, mild monetization and by being just a "sexy compute".
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-ame...
I don't know what their methodology is but it's hard to take their findings seriously when it shows windows dropping over five percentage points between may and June, or when Linux almost doubled during the same time period, or when it shows an "OS X" spike in October 2025, or when it has OS X and macOS on the same graph…
So as much as I want to believe that others share my taste, I'm not sure how to interpret the two statistics in this article.
Sadly, I'd lean towards this article's attribution:
"Cloudflare’s unfiltered figures may include automated requests unless human traffic is classified. This is especially relevant to Linux, widely used for servers, automation, development environments, and headless browser workloads"
I suspect many people are running AI agents on cloud servers, which are most likely running Linux, and many of those agents are browsing the web. That's more likely what is driving this adoption. That, and as the article points out, more accurate OS classification on the part of StatCounter (from unknown to "Linux"), especially if its over the span of 1 month.
Increasingly you'll see a new tool or library or language, and there'll be installation instructions for everything except windows.
Or Windows will be "supported" but when you go to run the tests they just don't work.
Development has often been more Linux friendly, but it was rarely the case that Windows got completely ignored.
Windows is just a profoundly awful development environment. So bad they think “run everything in a Linux VM” is a good answer, despite all the performance footguns and complexities it raises.
If you choose to run windows for development, it’s either because you were forced to (e.g. building WPF full time) or you are deliberately choosing a painful rake-filled path.
Not to mention for ~5 of the past 6 years it has simply been impossible to get a good Windows laptop given where Mac set the bar for good.
all the other windows apps - will be either through a wine layer or migrated to web.
Still good news for those wanting to see broader Linux adoption, but the news really is the usage was correctly recognized as Linux for the first time.
What ISP do you use?
Realistically, windows probably doesnt even break 1% these days.
Now that there is data in terms that people can understand (capitalism), I think people will finally accept that Linux is an OS. The next thing is the false equivalence between Linux and Android.
I have Windows on dual-boot in case I need it, but I'm in Linux 99% of the time now.
Some other commenter recently said "the law is not autistic".
In this case of course, there is an ocean of valid keys that were purchased or otherwise obtained legally, but under terms that said "you can't resell them or use thim for this or that purpose" but those terms may just be wishful thinking. Just because you write down a demand, even in a contract, even in a contract that both parties agreed to, doesn't garantee you actually ever had a right to that demand or that the other party is obligated to honor it. It might be, or it might be only in some juristictions and not others, or anything else could happen if you put it to the test, and whatever result might even not be final even if you do get your way.
Even if the act of selling or using the key was able to be squarely established illegal, that does not necessarily matter to any downstream recipients. Maybe the key itself is still invalid and MS can detect it and invalidate it any time they want, but that doesn't necessarily mean the end user in in any legal risk since a lawyer might be able to argue that they didn't knowingly do anything wrong (they just bought a computer). Even the recycler might be able to say the same thing, that they just bought keys from someone else. Their legal obligation and cuplability would have to be proven, not just assumed.
The world, including legal departments, has almost no black or white anywhere in it. Merely people with interests in trying to convince you that there is black & white, and they know which is which, and you better give them everything they want with no questions or contest.
tl;dr: I don't think you and I have the same meaning associated with the word 'retired'.
There was that odd moment where he was competing for subs with T-Series, the Bollywood music company, but when he realized he wouldn't be number 1 on YouTube forever, he just stopped giving a shit.
I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just fine, what did Claude help them with?
I do use LLMs for random debugging questions (most recently laptop dual graphics for instance) but the base install has always worked fine for me
In Linux, I now have a custom Arch install which Gemini did help with a lot. It helped unblock significantly where I wanted to get fundamental understanding. A Debian installer will just work though (ironically, some years ago, I had issues with Ubuntu working out of the box but not Debian).
There's decades of this stuff.