I am from india. These numbers are inflated due to our population and government and health sector office pc using linux (ubuntu). These office pcs just require a chrome browser and all the work is done on the browser Nobody here cares what os they use in their office pc. I don’t see anyone here switching to linux on their personal pc other than the IT students who are forced to install kali linux. And most of them are running linux on virtualbox on windows.
Steam deck is not even officially sold here and imported ones that are sold cost 950$ for the 512 gb variant. So it is a ultra niche item here. .
People here buy desktops only for gaming/content creation, which means most households here doesn’t need/require a desktop. And these people always prefer mac or windows.
Also gaming scene here is dominated by mobile games (because gaming pcs and consoles are too expensive and we have the cheapest internet and phone prices) As for pc games it is dominated by valorant, Minecraft and gtav (fivem rp).
Edit - Many consider this a huge win. But getting market share in the office space for basic browsing and word processing inflates the numbers for actual game/app developers who wants to support linux and they will disappointed seeing the actual usage and they will abandon the linux support. Also the indian market isn’t buying laptop/desktops for browsing, they just use their phone because pc hardware is expensive and phones prices are cheap. And anyone who is buying desktops for serious tasks stick to windows and mac.
OP, you say those folks only launch a chrome browser and so aren’t choosing Linux themselves. Fine. But looking at it from the system perspective, they’re inadvertently learning how to use Linux. How to make WiFi selection in that interface. How to deal with patches and upgrades and vulnerabilities and hacks. Sure, they’re basically only using the browser. But do they never download a file? Open it in the system file browser? Attach it back in the browser?
All of these user interactions are what define a person’s experience on a system. If you think of one of the main differences between iOS and Android, you’ll see how in iOS files are a second class citizen and apps are first class citizens. That means iOS defers to the app first and then considers a file as an independent entity. That’s a strategic decision that defines how generations of iOS users perceive the world around them. It’s what helped companies like Notion become the behemoths they are because everyone accepted that if you want to build a knowledge base, you can just start writing text in an app or browser and not consider files as the first point of contact for the knowledge base user.
By using Linux on a day to day basis, those users are slowly unlearning what they’ve come to understand is the default behavior of a system - most likely whatever Windows does.
Somewhere down the line they’ll crib and hate on windows enough to what something different. That might end up being Mac, but for a large swathe of people, it might end up being some Linux variant too.
What do you want? A stat counter for everyone’s personal PC?
The government of India, the largest country by population, using Linux is… a huge win?
It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.
I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.
But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.
It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.
Most people on MacOS only use a web browser. Most people on Windows only use a web browser. Its nothing to be ashamed of.
No one said it was shameful?
He is trying to discredit the stat just because most of the use is opening a web browser. That’s a fine use for an operating system and just as valid.
All they need is a chrome browser, so why would the government waste money on windows licences? A huge win is when personal pcs switch to linux. Linux doing basic web browsing and word processing is not a huge win.
