Its not ... The problem is that people do not realize that devices like Steam Deck are also considered Linux desktop devices in those numbers. Chrome tends to also inflate those numbers. Yes, they are Linux desktops but not in the way people are comparing Windows to Linux.

The real number is closer to 2.5% somewhere. What is still growth but nowhere the "year of the Linux desktop".

You tend to see a rather vocal minority that makes you feel like there is some major switch but looking here in the comments, people that switched 8 years, 12 year, 20 years ago are people that are part of the old statistics. There are some new converts but not what you expect to see despite Linux now also being more gaming compatible.

It still has minor issues (beyond anti-cheat), that involve people fixing things, less then the past. But its still not the often click and play, works under every resolution, has no graphic issue etc etc. That is the part people often do not tell you, because a lot of people are more thinkers, so a issue pops up, they fix it and forget about it.

Ironically, MacOS just dominates as the real alternative to Windows in so many aspects. If Apple actually got their act together about gaming, it can trigger a actual strong contender to Windows.

>The problem is that people do not realize that devices like Steam Deck are also considered Linux desktop devices in those numbers.

Are people even browsing on Steam Decks? Because everybody in this thread seems to be referring to stats published by a rather obscure web tracking solutions company. "High-traffic sites using Statcounter include khabarban.com, codelist.cc, and download.it"

The Steam Deck is not a Desktop ... That is like saying that every Android smartphone is a desktop. Sure, you can use it as a desktop but 99.99% of the people are using it as a handheld console.

And nice downvotes... Typical in Linux Desktop topics.

I didn't downvote, but it might have to do with the fact that you appear to be just inventing numbers like 2.5%. If Steam Decks are only used for gaming, why would they make up for 1.38% of the Statcounter numbers?

> The problem is that a paid operating system ships with ads in the first place.

You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often full of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but add-on by the OEM.

Now i agree that Ads in your OS that you paid for, is a big nono. I never understood why Microsoft threats Home and Pro as almost the exact same. Sell Home for cheaper and with Ads, but keep the more expensive Pro clean. Microsoft can do that easily because Windows Server is just that ...

But on the Linux front, i have never been happy with the desktop experience. Often a lot of small details are missing, if the DE itself not outright crashes (KDE, master in Plasma/Widget crashes!). And so many other desktop feel like they have been made in the 90s (probably are) and never gotten updated.

And i do not run W11, still on old and very stable W10. There is no reason to upgrade that i see. Did the same with W7, for years after support ended (and by that time W10 was well polished and less buggy).

The problem is, what does Linux Desktop offer me more, then a few annoyances that i can remove after a fresh install? Often a lot more trouble with the need to use the terminal for things, that are ancient in Windows. That is the problem ... With Apple, you can get insane good M-CPU hardware (yes, mem/storage is insane), for the os/desktop switch.

I noticed that often the people who switch to Linux, are more likely to send more time into finetuning their OS, tinkering around, etc... aka people with more time on their hands. But when you get a bit older, you simply want something that works and gives you no trouble. I can literally upgrade my PC here from a NVidia to AMD or visa versa, and it will simply work with the correct full performance drivers. Its that convenience that is the draw to keep using (even ifs a older) Windows.

For now 25 years every few years, i look at upgrading to Linux permanently, install a few distro's and go back. Linus Desktop does not feel like you gain a massive benefit, if that makes sense? Especially not if your like me, who simply rides out Microsoft their bad OS releases. What is the killer features that you say, hey, Linux Desktop is insane good, it has X, Y, Z that Microsoft does not have, its ... That is the issue in my book. Yes, it has no adds but that is like 5 min work on a fresh install, a 2 min job of copy/past a cleanup script to remove the spyware and other crap and your good for year. So again, killer features?

Often a lot of programs that are less developed or stripped down compared to Windows, let alone way too often 90 style feels programs. You can tell its made by developers often, with no GUI / Graphical developers involved lol

I said it a 1000 times but Linux Desktop suffers from a lot of distro redoing the same time over and over again. Resulting in this lag ...

That is my yearly Linux rant hahaha. And yes, i know, W11 is a disaster but i simply wait it out on W10, and see what the future brings when the whole AI hype dies down and Microsoft loses too much customers. I am betting that somebody is going to get scared at MS and we then get a better W12 again.

I've been pretty happy with Pop in general, I did upgrade to COSMIC pre-release about 6 months ago, and although there have been rough edges, less than some of my Win11 experiences. I don't really fiddle that much in practice, I did spend a year with Budgie, but only the first week fiddling. Pop's out of the box is about 90% of what I want, which is better than most.

I do use a Macbook M1 Air for my personal laptop and have used them for work off and on over the years... I'm currently using a very locked down windows laptop assigned from work. Not having WSL and Docker have held me back a lot though.

In the end, I do most of my work in Linux anyway... it's where what I work on tends to get deployed and I don't really do much that doesn't work on Linux without issue at this point. Windows, specifically since Win11 has continued to piss me off and I jumped when I saw something that was just too much for me to consider dealing with. I ran insiders for years to get the latest WSL integrations and features. This bit me a few times, but was largely worth it, until it wasn't anymore.

C# work is paying the bills... would I rather work on Rust or TS, sure... but I am where I am. I'm similar to you in that I looked at Linux every few years, kicked the tires, ran it for a month or a couple weeks and always went back. This time a couple years ago... it stuck. Ironically, my grandmother used Linux much longer than I ever did on her computer that I maintained for her. For her, it just worked, and she didn't need much beyond the browser.

> You never buy a laptop or pre-build? They are often full of ads that are not Microsoft Windows build in but add-on by the OEM.

This was never acceptable, but we tolerated it because it subsidised the cost of the laptop, OEMs decided the trade-off and you could vote with your wallet for cleaner experiences (often with the same manufacturer).

Show me the ThinkPad T or X series (or EliteBook, or Precision/Latitude) that shipped with ads and I'll take it as a valid point. Otherwise, it's not valid.

Switching OSes is a major undertaking for power users, which I assume you are. Less so for someone who uses the browser, email, and plays some games.

As a power user, there's no point trying out OSes occasionally, unless that's your hobby. Think of it as switching between flying Boeings or Airbuses as a pilot; there's going to be a learning curve that you're going to have to commit to if you want the full benefits. I use the analogy to illustrate the point; OSes as users are definitely not nearly as complex to drive.

That said, the unstable experiences you're describing are odd. Maybe you're running into some odd edge case because that unstable experience hasn't been the case for mainstream Linux users for a couple of decades.

Neither is there a need to tinker with the big mainstream distros either. Most are install-and-forget these days and have been so for a while.

> if the DE itself not outright crashes (KDE, master in Plasma/Widget crashes!). And so many other desktop feel like they have been made in the 90s (probably are) and never gotten updated.

All modern Linux desktops feel more advanced than the corresponding windows version, IMO. I just installed standard Raspbian on a bunch of Raspi5s, and it feels snappier and more advanced than Windows already.

> I noticed that often the people who switch to Linux, are more likely to send more time into finetuning their OS, tinkering around, etc... aka people with more time on their hands. But when you get a bit older, you simply want something that works and gives you no trouble.

> Yes, it has no adds but that is like 5 min work on a fresh install, a 2 min job of copy/past a cleanup script to remove the spyware and other crap and your good for year. So again, killer features?

First thing you do after you install windows is fine tune it lol. For what it's worth, I just installed the latest debian on a Minisforum mini PC and it was clean and easy. Everything works out of the box, including bluetooth and gaming (surprisingly well given only has an integrated GPU). Same experience with two of my wifes laptops.

Now I did have issues with my desktop due to running bleeding edge hardware, but those all got resolved within months on its own and a clean install is now no hassle at all.

In short, I'm now older and don't have time to tinker with my PCs. That includes reverting whatever bullshit Microsoft decided to foist upon me, so now I run base debian and won't be buying bleeding edge hardware anymore.

> More of a issue that power goes to their heads.

I'm sure this exists too, but isn't the mundane rationale more likely? That gruffness is inevitable because the work sucks?

Overworked, understaffed, the days blur together because it is boring, mostly sedentary work. They are ground down from dealing with the juxtaposition of their role; internally TSA are told they are important because their vigilance is heroic and prevents catastrophe, yet the general public views them with annoyance if not disdain. _Everyone_ they interact with is impatient, and at the that scale of human interaction nobody is really a person anymore, just a complication to throughput.

Probably a issue with PFAS contamination. Stuff was used in firefighting water, and has contaminated just about every airport and the surrounding area's groundwater, all over the world. So while microbiologically safe, it has PFAS issues.

Either that or hydrocarbons from leaks over several decades or deicing fluid easily infiltrating their wells, or all!

Or they don’t test it and therefore can’t certify it but I did take a swig and immediately spat it out.

Companies will simply give some kind of standard answer, that is legally "cover our butts" and be done with it.

Its like that cookie wall stuff, how much dark patterns are implemented. They followed the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.

To be honest, i can also see the point from the company side. Giving a honest answer can just anger people, to the point they sue. People are often not as rational as we all like our fellow humans to be.

Even if the ex-client lose in court, that is how much time you wasted on issue clients... Its one thing if your a big corporation with tons of lawyers but small companies are often not in the position to deal with that drama. And it can take years to resolve. Every letter, every phone call to a lawyer, it stacks up fast! Do you get your money back? Maybe, depends on the country, but your time?

I am not pro companies but its often simply better to have the attitude "you do not want me as your client, let me advocate for your competitor and go there".

>Giving a honest answer can just anger people, to the point they sue.

Again, I'm kind of on a 'suck it dear company' attitude. The reason they ban you must align with the terms of service and must be backed up with data that is kept X amount of time.

Simply put, we've seen no shortage of individuals here on HN or other sites like Twitter that need to use social media to resolve whatever occurred because said company randomly banned an account under false pretenses.

This really matters when we are talking about giants like Google, or any other service in a near monopoly position.

You mean actually enforce contracts? What sort of mad communist ideology is this?!

(/sarcasm)

I think companies shouldn't ban people for reasons that would lead to successful lawsuits against the company.

> AI is pretty bad at Python and Go as well.

It great in Golang IF its one shot tasks. LLMs seem to degrade a lot when they are forced to work on existing code bases (even their own). What seems to be more a issue with context sizes growing out of control way too fast (and this is what degrades LLMs the most).

So far Opus 4.5 has been the one LLM that keeps mostly coding in a, how to say, predictable way even with a existing code base. It requires scaffolding and being very clear with your coding requests. But not like the older models where they go off script way too much or rewrite code in their own style.

For me Opus 4.5 has reached that sweet spot of productivity and not just playing around with LLMs and undoing mistakes.

The problem with LLMs is a lot of times a mix of LLM issues, people giving different requests, context overload, different models doing better with different languages, the amount of data it needs to alter etc... This makes the results very mixed from one person to another, and harder to quantify.

Even the different in a task makes the difference between a person one day glorifying a LLM and a few weeks later complaining it was nerfed, when it was not. Just people doing different work / different prompts and ...

> So far Opus 4.5 has been the one LLM that keeps mostly coding in a, how to say, predictable way even with a existing code base.

I find this to be true only if you have very explicit rules in CLAUDE.md and even then it still messes up.

I have "you will use the shared code <here>" twice in my CLAUDE.md as it will constantly write duplicate code.

Something that is also annoying is that if it moves some code somewhere with the intent to slightly modify it I've seen it delete the code, then implement from scratch, and then modify it to what it has been specified to do. This completely breaks tests. I then have to say "look at this earlier commit - you've caused a complete regression."

This is a workflow boundary problem showing up as a tool problem. When changes aren’t constrained by explicit inputs and checkpoints, models optimise locally and regress globally. Predictability comes from the workflow, not the model.

> This comment reminds me of when I talked to a few Chinese friends about their thoughts on Mao.

There has been a push under Xi's leadership to whitewash a lot of the past, especially involving Mao. As Xi has been positioning himself as a somewhat father figure of the nation. This has resulted in a revival of Mao policies, like the little red book.

So do not be surprised about uncle figure statement...

The problem is that people are horrible narrators about their own issues/past. They like to leave out critical information.

The idea of a company in the 80's going around that they are promoting Asians to positions over white people, sounds as far fetched as finding oil in my backyard. The reverse is way more likely in that time periode.

More then likely, he was not qualified for the job. But people often have a hard time accepting this, and feel entitled for position. Often by virtue of working somewhere longer. When passed over for promotion, then they create narratives its not themselves who is the issue, but it must be somebody else their fault.

So when you 20, 30, 40 years later tell the story, are you going to say "well, i was not qualified" or are you going to double down that you got passed over for a promotion, because "somebody had it out for me", or as "DEI hire" as that was the trending topic in conservative circles. What is a little lie to make yourself feel better, and have the world perceive you as the victim of horrible DEI hiring practices ... in the 80s!!!

If people think racism is rampaging today, they really did not live in the 80's... So yea, if it smell funny, you know there is bull.... involved.

There are many well-documented cases of this sort of thing happening in the 1980s and even earlier.

https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...

Note that here, Philip Morris explicitly said they used race-norming to hire minorities at the expense of people who performed better, but belong to the wrong race.

In some cases, it was court ordered: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-07-mn-22054-...

In this case, a test acknowledged as meritocratic caused too many minorities to be excluded, as nearly all the top performers were white. The fire department was sued, and ordered by a judge to hire at least 40% minorities -well above the applicant rate. They hired 55% minorities. Eventually SCOTUS ruled there was nothing wrong with the test - meaning for years, white applicants were discriminated against.

Here's another example, which obviously not only shows political and legal pressure to promote minorities specifically (even mentioning specific quotas!), but documents specific instances of policies that succeeded in doing so anti-meritocratically: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-GGD-95-85/pdf...

If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account. I’ve listened to him for years and find it credible. Also, for a long time there was a strong taboo against white men complaining about discrimination, which makes it easy to imagine it never happened—regardless of whether it did.

Adams was insanely narcissistic. Inventing reverse racism to avoid confronting his own short comings is completely on brand.

> Adams was insanely narcissistic.

A claim based on what?

That time he showed up on metafilter with a sock puppet and talked about himself in the third person.

https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Educatio...

"As far as Adams' ego goes, maybe you don't understand what a writer does for a living. No one writes unless he believes that what he writes will be interesting to someone. Everyone on this page is talking about him, researching him, and obsessing about him. His job is to be interesting, not loved. As someone mentioned, he has a certified genius I.Q., and that's hard to hide." - Scott Adams, as plannedchaos

Using a sockpuppet account is hardly the crime of the century. If that's your worst criticism of him then he's doing very well.

> The idea that a manager will go ‘hey, we are DEI hiring Asians’ in the 80s

No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking. The terminology has changed; the existence of compliance-driven hiring and promotion pressures has not.

> You only have one source of this ‘truth’.

When the question is what someone believes happened to them, their own account is inevitably the primary source. You can argue he was mistaken or self-serving, but dismissing the account outright because it doesn’t fit your expectations isn’t evidence.

> I am betting you’re a white male

And that assumption rather neatly illustrates why, for a long time, it was socially risky for white men to even claim discrimination without having their motives or identity used to invalidate the argument.

No one has claimed a blanket anything.

> That was an era when lip srvice was given to affirmative action and literal token hires were made as window dressing .. but the fundementals scarcely changed and extremely rarely at board room and actual upper management levels for jobs that included keys to levers of power.

This is a pipeline fact. But that doesn't mean individuals didn't try to redress the balance themselves. Just as some schoolteachers will give kids of colour higher marks to make up for the bad things that they were told happened to all of them.

> No one has claimed a blanket anything.

Scroll up:

> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.

@sanity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46607980 3 hours ago

While he may have been told that (or more likely "remembered" things that way), it simply wasn't something that was commonplace in the 1980s.

Where exactly was he working that had a "no white men at the top" policy in the 1980s?

Death Row Records was founded in 1991, Bad Boy Records was founded 1993(?) and in that industry sub domain it should have been intuitively obvious to the meanest intellect that no white men would reach the top well before they (if any) joined as lowly office clerks.

Camera's are not the issue, they are dirt cheap. Its the amount of progressing power to combine that output. You can put 360 degree camera's on your car like BYD does, and have Lidar. But you simply use the lidar for the heavy lifting, and use a more lighter model for basic image recognition like: lines on the road/speed plates/etc ...

The problem with Tesla is, that they need to combine the outputs of those camera's into a 3d view, what takes a LOT more processing power to judge distances. As in needing more heavy models > more GPU power, more memory needed etc. And still has issues like a low handing sun + white truck = lets ram into that because we do not see it.

And the more edge cases you try to filter out with cameras only setups, the more your GPU power needs increase! As a programmer, you can make something darn efficient but its those edge cases that can really hurt your programs efficiency. And its not uncommon to get 5 to 10x performance drops, ... Now imagine that with LLM image recognition models.

Tesla's camera only approach works great ... under ideal situations. The issue is those edge cases and not ideal situations. Lidar deals with a ton of edge cases and removes a lot of the progressing needed for ideal situations.

Ah we found the expert here, well armchair one at least. So you have your idea of what's possible vs people doing it.

Ignoring that Tailwind requires that same discipline... Pay close attention how often you end up in a situation where a different color was used, or how dark theme tags have been missing, and so much more.

What if you need to copy a element with tailwind, this later gets altered to include a slightly different style, but wait, now you have a original somewhere else in your code base, that is missing those updates. So you require the discipline just like CSS to keep things up to date.

Tailwind is great if you use it sporadically ... but have you looked at the source code of so many websites that use tailwind? Often their entire html file is a horrible mess million miles long tags.

I am amazed how often people do not even realizes that CSS supports nested Selectors? With nested Selectors, you get the benefit of creating actual component level structures, that can be isolated and shareable. Yet almost nobody uses them. I noticed that most people lack a lot of CSS knowledge, and they find it hard because they never stepped beyond the basics. Nor do they keep up to date.

> What if you need to copy a element with tailwind, this later gets altered to include a slightly different style, but wait, now you have a original somewhere else in your code base, that is missing those updates. So you require the discipline just like CSS to keep things up to date.

You solve these problems by creating abstractions in JavaScript (most likely react components), exactly the same way you'd solve any other sort of code duplication.

By using tailwind (or inline styles), you go from two system of abstraction (CSS, JavaScript) to one (just JavaScript).

If you're using JS for any kind of "components", you can use JS for scoped CSS too.

The situation you describe is one of the most maddening things about tailwind, and what leads to most of it being write only code, in my opinion