It certainly doesn’t have the weird and hard-to-understand web of random rules that r/showerthoughts has.

It’s got a reckognizable name and first party support from an actual company.

This.

The one step that would really push a lot would be if you can go to your local electronics store and buy a PC there with Linux preinstalled and completely setup, just like you can with Windows, Mac and ChromeOS.

That’s why the Steam Deck actually pushed the Linux market share quite a bit.

I mean, there is a thing like that and it’s called Chromebooks, but we, the tech people, deemed ChromeOS not Linux enough and told everyone not to buy chromebooks.

But still ChromeOS is by far the most popular Linux distro with about 5x the market share of the next most popular Linux distro (which is Arch, thanks to the Steam Deck).

Really difficult to actually get good numbers here since there’s a ton of sampling bias and user agent strings (which are used for most of these market share detectors) don’t capture Linux distros apart from ChromeOS.

But we can combine sources to get somewhere.

The Steam Hardware and Software Survey doesn’t include any data on ChromeOS, because there’s no Steam on ChromeOS, but it says that there’s a total market share for Linux of 3.2% with the most common Linux Distro being Arch with a market share of 0.32% (probably due to the Steam Deck), followed by Mint with 0.24%.

So double the maket share to get roughly to the 6.3% total Linux maket share from PH, and we get Arch with 0.64% and Mint with 0.48%, which is both much much lower than the 2.4% of ChromeOS on PH.

Germany used to be a collection of tribes and depending on which of these tribes the countries around them had contact with that’s the name that stuck in that language.

• Germans call themselves Deutsche (from diutisc meaning “the people” in Old German)
• In French they are called Allemagne after the Alamanni tribe
• In Italian it’s Germania, same as the English Germany, from the ancient latin Germania with unknown origins
• In Finnish it’s Saksa, after the Saxon tribes
• Most slavic countries use some variant of Niemcy, which means “speechless”, because slavic and germanic languages have hardly anything in common and are thus unintelligible to each other.

Yeah, it was a political decision, not one based on how well the Linux transition worked.

They used Linux for quite some time productively. It wasn’t a failed transition at all.

Well, all Linux distros combined are more than ChromeOS. If you split up by distro, ChromeOS is still the top Linux distro by far.

Successful compared to what? I don’t have data, but I’d venture to say that it’s the most popular desktop Linux distro.

It’s a bit past its peak, but in 2023 it had 7% market share in the quite lucrative North American market. That’s not nothing. In North America, all other Linux distros combined just overtook ChromeOS this year. World-wide it was last year.

There’s also no other Linux distro that comes pre-installed on devices from different manufacturers (at least none that I know of).

If you look at the commercially successful variants of Linux (ChromeOS and Android), you’ll see that taking away freedom/choice was the first thing they did.

And ultimately, if you are targeting the mass market, that’s almost required.

BSD, Haiku and pretty much anything that hides or manipulates the user agent string.

Tbh, it’s not entirely wrong, which is the reason why it works so well as rage bait.

It’s really not about Linux, but it is about supporting anything and everything out there with a single app. Use Electron and you can have the same app running on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, your car, your game console, your smart fridge and in a website.

Of course the result sucks, but if you can cut development effort into a fraction while also supporting systems that you would have never supported otherwise, that’s not a bad deal for businesses.

From the title I expected the opposite result.

They used Cloud Computation and AI (“Actually Interns”) way before it was cool.

That’s a ton of money for an useless toy.

LOOOOLOLOL. I think there are some initial investors who, in the beginning, legitimately thought it would be a good deal. At this point, the investments are driven by hype, and investors know they are, but they’re gambling that they can ride it to the top without being caught holding the bag. That’s why it will collapse violently. Because the moment it starts going down, everyone is going to dump it.

This is it. Bubbles happen BECAUSE investors know what they are doing. They ride the bubble hard, hoping to get out just before it pops. The later you jump, the more you gain. Unless you jump too late.

All this, including the popping of the bubble, is done on purpose.

High-level capitalism is certainly the place where you should never mistake mallice with incompetence.

What’s dishonest or fraudulent about a capitalist doing capitalist things?

If you think there’s some honest, genuine and honorable capitalists out there, you must be really credulous.

Pretty much, with the difference that corruption can only happen if it takes something off it’s path, so to say.

If the path itself is bad, being bad is not corruption.

If steel rusts, it’s being corrupted. Rust itself cannot be corrupted, because it is what it is.

And yes, I very much think that capitalism sucks.

ChatGPT is a fronted for specialized modules.

If you e.g. ask it to do maths, it will not do it via LLM but run it through a maths module.

I don’t know for a fact whether it has a photo analysis module, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t.

To be corrupt, you need to have another purpose than personal enrichment that you are corrupting in favour of personal enrichment.

The whole goal of capitalism is personal enrichment. There is no other purpose that could be corrupted.

It’s like saying that you make water wet or that you burn a fire.

Read it again, slowly, without anger, and I’m sure you will be able to understand it.