According to more realistic data, e.g. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-202406-202506 the market share has been around 4% for the last year, even slightly declining in the meantime.

But that doesn’t make for nice, sensationalist headline stoked by wishful thinking.

Sorry to say, Linux isn’t going mainstream anytime soon and by and large the end of Win10 just means that the comparatively small group of users still running 5+ years old hardware will just buy a new PC or keep using their outdated OS.

In fact, if you combine the market share of outdated Windows versions (XP-8.1) you get a market share very close to the market share of Linux.

As much as we all would love it if the Linux market share goes to 50% in fall, it’s not going to happen.

The main issues with Linux adoption (it’s not preinstalled and most people have no idea which OS they are using and really can’t be bothered to reinstall) are just as present now as they were for the last 30 years.

I read a similarly sensationalist headline with 4% two months ago and 5% yesterday. What’s up with the headline makers?

If you run a repo-only system, where everything you install comes from the first-party distro repo, you’ll likely be fine. Just as you are on Windows or Android if you only download apps from the first-party store.

But like on Windows and Android, you’ll quickly reach the limit of what you can do with first-party store only.

Especially stuff like gaming requires non-repo/non-store stuff pretty quickly, and then you are on exactly the same turf as on Windows.

Exponential doesn’t mean fast.

You can not change history for any published changes - like I said, doing so makes your repository incompatible with any other clone.

That’s the same on Git.

Looks like Mercurial can change the history just fine using the hg command. You just need to enable it first.

https://book.mercurial-scm.org/read/changing-history.html

Git can also be configured to disable history rewrites.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2085871/strategy-for-preventing-or-catching-git-history-rewrite

So the difference between git and hg really just comes down to the defaults.

I got weirdly invested in this, and by the end I was kinda happy that it was “just” a bug in the tooling and not anything actually malicious.

Android runs an only slightly modified Linux kernel, and yet the OS requires much less from the user than e.g. Windows or MacOS.

Chromebooks run a bog-standard Linux kernel and the target audience is kids.

My car’s entertainment system runs a standard Linux kernel, and the UX is so cut down that PC expertise really doesn’t matter when using it.

MacOS and iOS, two systems known for their ease of use, both stem from BSD, which comes from Unix.

The kernel has nothing to do with this.

In fact, the only mainstream kernel used in user-facing operating systems that doesn’t “come from Unix” is Windows. Everything else is derived either from Linux or BSD, which both are derived from Unix.

There isn’t even a mainstream phone OS anymore that doesn’t “come from Unix”.