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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Timothée Besset, a software engineer who works on the Steam client for Valve, took to Mastodon this week to reveal: “Valve is seeing an increasing number of bug reports for issues caused by Canonical’s repackaging of the Steam client through snap”.

“We are not involved with the snap repackaging. It has a lot of issues”, Besset adds, noting that “the best way to install Steam on Debian and derivative operating systems is to […] use the official .deb”.

Those who don’t want to use the official Deb package are instead asked to ‘consider the Flatpak version’ — though like Canonical’s Steam snap the Steam Flatpak is also unofficial, and no directly supported by Valve.

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[–] iopq 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

How do you figure? For example, Arch Linux community on r*ddit is bigger than the Ubuntu one

Where did you get the numbers?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Hard to find raw numbers backed by good sources.

If you filter the Steam Hardware Survey for December 2023 by Linux, you can see Arch has a market share of 7.85% (excluding SteamOS on the Deck, which is technically based on Arch and has 40.53%) while Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS - a specific Ubuntu version - already has 7.04% on its own.

But that's also just Steam users. Ubuntu is one of the few Linux distributions that OEMs ship preinstalled and officially support on some of their devices (Dell for example). Another example is Fedora iirc, which Lenovo ships or at least used to ship as an option on some of their ThinkPad notebooks.

I'd assume the Arch community on Reddit is bigger than the Ubuntu community as it's geared towards tech-savvy people. Going by Reddit community size wouldn't make much sense though. Even if you add up the member count of the r/windows, r/windows10 and r/windows11 community (which doesn't make a lot of sense as most users are probably not unique), it's only like 3-4x the members of r/archlinux, which doesn't translate to market share whatsoever.

I don't really have hard numbers, sorry. Should've checked first. I guess I just assumed because of the OEM support and being relatively easy to install and maintain for the average guy (in comparison) that it was the leading Linux desktop distro in terms of marketshare. I'm still assuming this is the case for the reasons stated, but can't tell you with 100% certainty.

[–] grue 8 points 11 months ago

I don’t really have hard numbers, sorry.

It's impossible to measure since sharing copyleft stuff can't be tracked like sales of proprietary software can. There's no need to apologize about not doing the impossible.

[–] iopq 2 points 11 months ago

Well, most of windows users don't even know they are using it, they think they are using a "PC" as opposed to Mac

Any Linux desktop user is already very tech savvy, I doubt there are any Ubuntu users that don't know they are using Ubuntu so the windows commission is not apt

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

If you're on Ubuntu, you can just ask your question in the normal Linux community or in a search engine. You don't need to go to a special Ubuntu community.

That's at least, how it makes sense to me. In general, I've seen many niche distros have very active communities, because everyone just ruts together and helps each other out.

...which is to say, I don't think there are accurate marketshare statistics, because no telemetry, but my impression is also that Ubuntu is still popular out in the wild.

[–] TheGrandNagus 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So? The AMD subreddit is larger than either Nvidia's or Intel's (in the case of Intel, by a lot). Both of them have a greater market share than AMD in their respective markets.

Porsche has over double the subs of Toyota, yet Toyota sells 33x the amount of cars.

Subs means zero.

[–] iopq 1 points 11 months ago

Again, my mom is not on the Intel subreddit because she doesn't know she has an Intel processor. In fact, she used to work for Intel, and she still doesn't care

Ubuntu is nowhere near popular enough to be a default. I'm just wondering how to count the market share accurately