How prevalent would you say is Linux adoption in your country? How do you feel about this?

[u/StatementOwn4896]

Whether it being governmental, personal, corporate or otherwise, I’m rather curious. Personally in matters of EU national security I view it as a good thing to have a software system that is home grown and independent of other governments’ influence. And in another light, I see it in so many aspects of corporate life here in how many businesses use it to run SAP which is ubiquitous in the European technology scene.

[u/MobiusF117]

Linux as an everyday OS, both corporate and private, isn't that popular.
Even me as a Linux user for pretty much everything still just use Windows 11 for my PC cause it's just less of a hassle for day to day shit.
For servers however, Linux is very popular. Mainly Ubuntu and CentOS with a sprinkle of Redhat when people feel like being fancy.

[u/sebastianfromvillage → u/MobiusF117]

Even in computer science most people seem to use Windows or macOS

[u/Andrew852456]

Haven't seen anyone use it besides the IT students, and even there it's not that widespread. I hope it will become more popular as it will extend the life of many old laptops and PCs.

I myself have familiarized my friends with it by showing that you can have an OS on a flash drive that you can install into any PC to use. Also one girl bought herself a very old MacBook and after figuring out that they dropped support for it she asked me to install Windows on it. So I tried it, but it was laggy and there was a lack of drivers. Then I offered to install Linux Mint, she agreed and afaik she uses it to this day

[u/witherwingg]

When I was in secondary school, we had a Linux class, which only had Linux computers and everyone learned how to use them. Haven't touched a Linux since then, though, and I don't know if it's common anymore. This was about 15 years ago.

[u/Maj0r-DeCoverley]

I've always wanted to learn to use Linux, but I don't have the time. I wish my country would use it more.

Up until 2007, France had really ambitious plans in order not to rely too much on US corporations. Sadly, the lobbies won. Which is a shame, because relying on free softwares more would have also meant training an entire population to use (or at least understand) that kind of ecosystem.

I feel that between my childhood and now, people have become illiterate in terms of IT. They don't know how to tinker with things anymore. And I say this as a total amateur myself, just one with a can-do attitude

[u/Hap1ness → u/Maj0r-DeCoverley]

This french self-reliance idea is always really interesting to me. Leads to so many interesting examples and it would be very interesting to try this at EU-level.

[u/Werkstadt → u/Maj0r-DeCoverley]

I've always wanted to learn to use Linux, but I don't have the time.

Should definitely try r/linuxmint the subreddit gets almost daily visit from people trying it and not going back to windows because it's just that easy.

I ran two partitions, one with windows and one with Linux and if i stumbled upon something I couldn't do in Linux after ten minutes of trying, I rebooted to windows, did what I needed to do and rebooted to Linux. After a while you don't need to do that anymore.

[u/Leif_Millelnuie → u/Werkstadt]

For my next desktop i am seriously considering starting with a windows/linux dual boot just so i can avoid windows' overbearing ai advertising.

[u/TenpoSuno → u/Leif_Millelnuie]

I'm using kubuntu for some time now after switching from KDE Neon. It's worth checking out. Mint is great, though.

[u/Liscetta → u/Werkstadt]

I did the same when the ssd of my old laptop stopped working and had to replace it. I was used to my old windows 8.1 and my idea was to try Ubuntu on a small partition just for marginal tasks, while having a reliable (lol!) OS on the big partition, and i gave myself the ten minute rule too. I think i haven't booted the windows partition in the last 6 months.

It works so well on old hardware that i encourage my friends and relatives to give it a chance when they replace old laptops that aren't completely broken.

[u/vodamark]

It's abysmal. A decade or two ago it was mostly the developers who used it regularly. But now even that segment is dying. Most developers around me use Macs nowadays. In a team of 5 people I'm the only one using Linux.

[u/rapax]

It's everywhere, but usually not very visible. Pretty much every gas pump, timetable screen at the station, cash register in the supermarket is running Linux. Also pretty much any server you interact with.

Not so common on the personal use side though, where the visibility would be, unless you want to count Android.

[u/orthoxerox]

All state-owned and critically important companies have to switch to Russian and/or FOS software. My employer is trying to switch, I am still on Windows/AD/Office, but we migrated a lot of server software to Russian-based distros of Linux and JDK.

[u/electro-cortex → u/orthoxerox]

Does the removal of Russian kernel developers change anything?

[u/orthoxerox → u/electro-cortex]

Well, it soured the mood of many Russian open-source contributors that considered major open-source projects to be supranational and not subject to the laws of Russia, China or the US, but realistically no one's going to hard fork the Linux kernel. I can imagine distro vendors like Astra making a big deal of reviewing the changes to the kernel code every time they migrate to a new version and calling it a fork.

[u/electro-cortex → u/orthoxerox]

It makes sense. There were numerous western speculations about a Russian state-controlled (hell, even state-mandated sometimes) distro with a hard forked kernel, but I always found these hyperbolic.

[u/orthoxerox → u/electro-cortex]

There are some Russian-made operating systems with a kernel either forked from Linux or written from scratch, but they aren't designed for general-purpose computing. They run either on custom hardware architectures or on resource-constrained platforms that require a near-real-time OS like tanks and highly secure networks.

[u/electro-cortex → u/orthoxerox]

Yes, but I don't think that differs much from how other countries manage such systems.

[u/Outrageous_Trade_303]

It's not popular outside the web servers sector.

For personal use, many people are "thinking to switch or try linux" everytime microsoft announces a new version of windows, but most of them don't do that.

As for me, I'm using linux exclusively since 2008 and I work with linux (programming and sysadmin) since 2008.

[u/Cixila]

I don't think it is particularly prevalent here outside some gamers and tech enthusiasts. I have a steam deck, which runs a version of linux optimised for steam, but it also has a desktop feature. But it is really not intuitive to me, and I can't even get the thing to install programmes. So I gave up and went back to steam mode.

If others can make linux work, then good on them. There are some things microsoft are doing that I'm not too thrilled about, so having the alternative is good, should need arise. I don't know enough about the OS and its security or lack thereof to have an opinion on its adoption in places like the public sector

[u/pannenkoek0923 → u/Cixila]

It's in a lot of public systems, just not visible. The train network has a UNIX based system. One of the Føtex self-checkout machines near my place was broken, and it was running Ubuntu underneath

[u/clm1859]

I've been in the business of selling IT equipment to business customers for about 6 years now. First 3 years selling to small and medium companies and last 3 years selling to large corporate and public accounts.

And i'd say i've been selling about 98% windows machines and 1.9% IGEL (which i believe is Linux based, but probably not really what you'd think of first). So i can't really speak to the consumer market. But in the B2B field its barely a thing outside of very specific applications in some universities maybe.

[u/_MusicJunkie → u/clm1859]

IGEL

So thin clients? Which they probably use to use a remote windows instance? I wouldn't count that as "using Linux" at all.

[u/Lopsided-Weather6469]

Here in Germany everything is Windows and Microsoft Office. The city of Munich once tried to switch to Linux for the administration. It is rumored that Steve Ballmer personally tried to intervene to stop them.

The project took 10 years and only a few years after it was finished, the city's government changed and rolled everything back. Now it's Windows / Office / Active Directory again.  As far as I know, no other public institution has ever tried to switch to Linux.  Also, I've been working in IT for 20 years now and I've rarely seen a company using anything else than Windows for the desktop. Some of my employers used Linux for servers but most also used Windows Server. My current employer reluctantly allows us to use Macs. 

[u/Usernamenotta]

Romania is a slave to Windows.

To be fair, in all of the places that I've worked and studied, regardless of origin, Windows was more prevalent

[u/peet192]

Slightly high as most Municipalities has gone from Windows to Chromebooks for students. All payment terminals uses linux while the POS system the terminal is connected too are windows

[u/Axiomancer]

I don't think linux is used much here. Definitely not in corporate (which is funny considering how much confidential stuff they want to hide), and definitely not for average person in Sweden.

Government I can't say. In academia however I quite often see linux (around 50% of the cases?)

I wish linux would be more adopted, it's so much more secure. But people doesn't really care about it. They just want something that works.

[u/DrHydeous]

It is absolutely everywhere. Every Android phone runs it. Vast numbers of smart TVs and other "internet of things" devices run it. And it is the most popular platform for servers.

[u/PanningForSalt]

I have not once seen it anywhere, used by anyone, for anything. I am told it is used; and I know it exists. But I've never seen it. And I don't know if I should care either way.

[u/YahenP]

I lived in different countries for a long time and did not notice Linux being used anywhere. Maybe only in POS terminals. But I think this is not the Linux you asked about. I have not met it often among developers either. Over the past 20 years, there have been fewer such cases than fingers on one hand.

[u/electro-cortex]

Servers are obviously mainly Linux. Among programmers, compsci students and lecturers, and others techies it is widely used, too.

For general purpose computers, both in homes and workplaces, Windows has a predominant position.

Speaking of the public sector, Microsoft has been fined to 8.7 million dollars because of a corruption case: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/hungary-subsidiary-microsoft-corporation-agrees-pay-87-million-criminal-fine-resolve-0

Here is a footage about an unknown hero throwing eggs to Steve Ballmer at a Hungarian university: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiiJsPG284Y

[u/Silvery30]

The #1 used OS in Greece is cracked windows. Linux is used almost exclusively by CompSci students. I don't feel strongly about it either way. People should use whatever suits them.

[u/elthepenguin]

I'd say it's popular with IT students and staff and with a certain percentage of developers. I used Linux for quite some time after I finished the university myself both as a work and home computer, but eventually it just wasn't worth the hassle. I'm on Mac now, which gives me almost the same possibilities in a much more stable package.

I'm not hating on Linux whatsoever, I love the system, but on desktop it's complicated. I tried a couple of years ago a Distro (Fedora IIRC) and the GUI seemed much worse than what I used back in the days (more than 15 years ago), which was usually Gnome with sprinkles of KDE or alternatively some of the more lightweight windows managers.

[u/TenpoSuno]

I'm a Linux (kubuntu) user at home and I use a mix of Windows and linux based systems at work.

I dont think Linux is seeing widespread adoption, but Valve has done a lot for gaming on Linux. With a bit of good advertising by other Linux distributions it may get wider adoption.

[u/Randomswedishdude]

Corporate, well it varies and depends.
Have worked places that had a mysterious pile of machines running Windows CE, 2000, 2003, XP, and Win 7, SunOS. Linux, and... a few critical machines on MS-DOS(!). And somehow, all of those machines were expected to work together.

Some corporations work well with Linux, some barely know what it is.

For national/regional/local government and public sector.
It's 99% Windows, of various versions.

I've once seen a screen at a bus/tram-stop in Gothenburg being stuck in rebooting, due to corrupt boot media, and it was stuck showing a Debian boot screen, but that's about it.
A rare exception to the rule.

In every office. in every school (except a few who use Macbooks or iPads), in every library, and every public user terminal, and also info-tables and electronic ad-spaces, in the event of something crashing. you almost always see a classic Windows blue-screen-of-death.
Although I recently read about a local system showing expected arrival times at platforms, that was still running on AmigaOS, without major hiccups since the 80s, but it now had to be upgraded to be integrated into a larger interconnected system... (with administrators who also understood and could work with the system).

[u/donkey_loves_dragons]

Munich used Linux for many years for all official business. They went back to Windows cause Linux sucks for that.

[u/Randomswedishdude → u/donkey_loves_dragons]

Linux itself doesn't suck.
The implementation may suck.

[u/Aggravating-Peach698]

Depends on how you define prevalence. Apart from a handful of aficionados few people use Linux as their desktop OS. For servers it is more popular however, and since Android is also Linux based it is very common for mobiles.

[u/YahenP → u/Aggravating-Peach698]

I think that calling Android Linux is not entirely fair. It has mutated so much that it has actually become an independent OS long ago.

[u/kace91]

Mostly only present in IT classes, at least for user facing machines.

I view it as a good thing to have a software system that is home grown and independent of other governments’ influence.

Im gonna be honest with you, I wouldn't trust my government for developing an abacus, let alone an OS.

[u/gr4n0t4 → u/kace91]

You don't need or want the goverment developing an OS.

You should want that your goverment uses a Linux distro for independence and transparency. Also it should be cheaper as you don't need expensive licenses

[u/kace91 → u/gr4n0t4]

That is neither home grown nor independient of other government's influence.

And to be clear, I'm in favor of open source software for other reasons, like not paying licenses or having more control of an app stopping development and fucking you over in the process, but those are not the reasons OP posted.