I wonder what has the other half of the Linux market. Linux, perhaps?
If Linux only makes up half the Linux market, what the heck makes up the other half? 🤔
We’ve had one Linux, yes… what about Second Linux?
Linux 2
It’s the year of Linux on the Linux Desktop.
TL;DR: ChromeOS is Linux but it’s not Linux but it’s a Linux so count it as a Linux but not Linux. Half.
A quick summary of this [frankly, rather crappy] article boils down to “I don’t understand, why people ignore the 4% of ChromeOS usage when talking about the 3% of Linux usage?” written in the most facepalm-worthy way, spamming fallacies like there was no tomorrow:
- “Which is also Linux, but the wrong kind of Linux.” - strawman
- “which means that [desktop Linux]¹ has less than half of the [desktop Linux]² market.” - ambiguity (“1” refers to a subset of “2”)
- “It’s not a typical Linux, because typical Linuxes are tools for nerdy hacker types, and that kind of OS will never, ever go mainstream unless someone forces people to use it” - begging the question + ad hominem
- “So naturally the Forces of FOSS hate it. Of course they do. And how do they express that contempt? By saying it’s not a True Linux.” - repeating the strawman again, for an ad nauseam
Also note that the same type of stupid reasoning from the article would also “prove” that MacOS is a *BSD.
What a weird hill to die on.
But nobody considers MacOS a BSD.
I thought the author’s point was pretty well-made. Some implementations are so far removed from the original’s goals that they no longer count for it even though they’re technically a match.
It’s merely an oddity that ChromeOS is based on Linux; it could be based on anything else and it wouldn’t change anything. It doesn’t work like Linux does and you can’t use it for most of the things that make Linux worth using.
Even Windows (via WSL) is more Linux at this point than ChromeOS is. Let that sink in for a moment and you’ll see why we don’t count ChromeOS.
But nobody considers MacOS a BSD.
Yup - and that’s the point of the comparison. They share a lot of important code (mostly in the userland IIRC), and yet people don’t consider MacOS a BSD, since both drifted away so much that lumping them together is simply not useful. And yet it’s what the author is doing with ChromeOS and Linux, that are in the exact same situation. (Another way to say this is how you did it - they don’t work the same and you can’t use one to do the things that makes the other worth using.)
I thought the author’s point was pretty well-made.
The author’s point boils down to “actually you got 7% Linux, not 3%”. I don’t think that it was well-made; it relies on disregarding why people don’t call ChromeOS “Linux”.
MacOS is not a BSD specifically because its kernel is not BSD (although it has some bits of it), so the comparison isn’t really sound. What makes it “a BSD” (or Linux) shouldn’t be the graphical environment.
Immutable distros are making accepted “Linux distributions” even more like ChromeOS, while ChromeOS has gotten more like those immutable distros.
The difference is that nobody in the FOSS world would celebrate if Chrome OS had 50+% market share. That would be a terrible time for FOSS.
But a good news for software compatibility on GNU/Linux, right?
