Some perspective on distro usage among developers
Technology | 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular-technologies-op-sys
Personal use numbers:
- Ubuntu: 27.7%
- Debian: 9.8%
- Other Linux: 8.4%
- Arch: 8%
- Red Hat: 2.3%
- Fedora: 4.8%
Makes sense. Ubuntu just works and is popular. Debian is the same, some people are just more conservative.
Can confirm. I have used one or the other exclusively for 20 years. Mostly on laptops. And these days with just a tiling window manager and terminal.
It just works.
Exactly. And here I am, after 2 days of trying to bend NixOS to my will, and I gave up. Tomorrow, I'm going back to Fedora, where everything worked perfectly, because I fell for "Shiny thing sindrome", or the "grass is greener on the other side" stuff. Should have never doubted it. After 2 years of full time Linux and a lot of distrohopping, one would think I'd have known better.
Haiku
Personal use 0.2%
Pro. use 0.1%
Some people love a challenge I guess. No disrespect to Haiku.
Top paying technologies interestingly has Go, Rust and Zig almost same medium salary, and very close (in that order). Immadiately followed by "Bash/Shell"? Yet, the most used languages such as Python and JavaScript are way down. Funny how Bash and Shell scripting is more used than Java, C#, C++ and C, while on the same time earns more money than those languages.
Can you make a living as a "Bash"/"Shell" programmer? :D
and you spend your entire tenure trying to convert it into another language while simultaneously adding to the pile.
Interesting how the numbers between "computer pros" and hobbyists (Steam Survey) diverge. Unsurprisingly for Steam gamers the Windows numbers are way higher but for Linux specifically Ubuntu is crashing hard since a few years from absolute domination to all Ubuntu versions + derivatives (Mint + pop_OS) combined barely making up 20% of the Linux user base whereas at Stack Overflow there's a clear lead of Ubuntu over the rest.
Edit:
I think for games, people need newer kernels and drivers to support the newer hardware needed to play newer games, and they're willing to put up with the bugs that come along with thay. Ubuntu and Debian (stable) aren't strong at that by definition. I always use an older GPU that supported well by the Ubuntu LTS I run. If it doesn't play something, I'll wait till a new driver lands in that LTS or the next.
Latest non-LTS Ubuntu could be high up the Steam Survey list but isn't. The strongest general purpose distribution is Arch Linux.
Probably because everybody with a Steam Desk shows up as Arch in the survey.
Had you looked up the current stats, you would have known that this is completely false. SteamOS is in massive lead and I used the phrase "general purpose distribution" for a reason.
I looked at the August 2024 results and SteamOS was not mentioned anywhere in the OS version section.
I looked at the August 2024 results and SteamOS was not mentioned anywhere in the OS version section.
Ah, I didn't expect the results to be different when looking at the overview, this is what I saw..
Any way to break down that "Other" and see what it contains? If it counts Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as different operating systems there might be some more Ubuntu versions hiding in there.
I see a crazy amount of Tumbleweed on protondb. Must be good for gaming or the users are knowledgeable.
It is. It's a rolling release so it has the latest packages. It's not bleeding edge like arch. All software goes thru an automatic testing in OpenQA before they are allowed in the repo so there's some quality control. It's also very stable.
Cygwin is an OS? (WSL maaaayyybe but I thoght Cygwin was like a kinda Linux-Terminal on Windoge. Depends on your definition of OS, I guess.)
It isn’t an OS. It’s a set of DLLs to allow Unix applications to be compiled and run on Windows.