The Linux Experiment

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Timecodes: 00:00 Intro 00:47 Sponsor: Kasm 01:48 Disclaimer 02:49 Distributions 06:05 Desktop & tiling Wms 09:29 Wayland vs X11 10:22 Hardware & compatibility 14:15 Packaging formats & apps 16:50 Other tidbits 18:34 What I learned 19:49 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers 20:57 Support the channel

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Arch and Arch based distros seem to represent 29% of answers, way higher than Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros, at 22% including Linux Mint, or 16% not including it. It's higher than Fedora at 19% of answers.

Another surprising number is NixOS, sitting at 7%. Final thing that surprised me is SteamOS: it only got 39 answers, meaning virtually no one seems to use their Steam Deck as their main computer.

89% of people who answered the survey said that they don't use an immutable distro.

Plasma is, on the surface, the most used DE out there, it sits at 30%.Vanilla GNOME sits at 14%, but if we tally up all GNOME implementations, we land on 35%, beating KDE pretty soundly.

Tiling WMs gathered up 21% of votes, meaning that they're actually the third thing used by people, far above any other DE than GNOME and KDE.

Hyprland seems to be very popular right now, at almost 48% of answers. We also have Sway, at 12%, i3 at 11%, and then a smattering of others, like AwesomeWM, bspwm, qtile, xmonad and more.

Speaking of which: Wayland got 66% of answers here, versus 34% for X11.

As per hardware, I asked people which kind of GPU and CPU they used. For CPUs, AMD and Intel are really evenly matched, at 50% for AMD and 49% for Intel, the last % being for ARM based CPUs.

As per GPUs, AMD takes the lead here, but not by much, we get to 39% of answers.

22% of people who answered only have an Nvidia GPU, so that's still pretty high, and if we add Nvidia GPUs as a hybrid configuration in a laptop, we land on 37%.

Pure Intel configurations, represent 22% of answers for integrated graphics, and 1% for dedicated Intel only, plus another % for people who run a hybrid config with a dedicated Intel GPU, so at most 24%.

As per the provenance of that hardware, a lot of people seem to build their own computers to run Linux on, at 44%. 40% of people who took the survey bought a PC from a major window manufacturer, with WIndows preinstalled, or no OS if the option was available.

Apart from that, only 4% said they used a computer from a Linux manufacturer, like TUxedo, System76, Slimbook, and the like, 2% use a mac, and, interestingly, 5% bought a computer from a major manufacturer with Linux preinstalled, so presumably from Dell or Lenovo, as these are the 2 main ones that have the option, AFAIK.

I paired that question with another one, asking how well Linux ran on people's computers, and overwhelmingly, it seems that hardware compatibility is great these days. 63% of respondents said they experienced 0 issues after installing Linux, and 23% said they did have small problems that they could fix. Only 13% said there's still hardware that doesn't work at all, and 1% said their computer performs pretty badly under Linux.

66% of people who answered use flatpaks mixed in with packages from other sources, and 6% only use this format, meaning we're at almost 3/4 of respondants that use Flatpaks daily.

The results are not as positive for other formats, with Snaps not being used at all by 84% of people who answered, and 54% of people not using APpImages at all.

On the topic of applications, Firefox seems to be the asbolute most poplar browser here, at 68%, with an extra 9% for Firefox derivatives like Librewolf.