More evidence in favour of a Linux Shift

Just days after posting about Linux's user market share increasing 233% in two months, I came across these two ZDnet stories, linked in a single post on Slashdot. In chronological order by publication:

1. Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again:

In a notable U-turn for the city, newly elected politicians in Munich have decided that its administration needs to use open-source software, instead of proprietary products like Microsoft Office.

"Where it is technologically and financially possible, the city will put emphasis on open standards and free open-source licensed software," a new coalition agreement negotiated between the recently elected Green party and the Social Democrats says.

The agreement was finalized Sunday and the parties will be in power until 2026. "We will adhere to the principle of 'public money, public code'. That means that as long as there is no confidential or personal data involved, the source code of the city's software will also be made public," the agreement states.

That story was quickly followed by:

2. Why Hamburg is now following Munich's lead:

The trend towards open-source software on government computers is gathering pace in Germany.

In the latest development, during coalition negotiations in the city-state of Hamburg, politicians have declared they are ready to start moving its civil service software away from Microsoft and towards open-source alternatives.

The declaration comes as part of a 200-page coalition agreement between the Social Democratic and Green parties, which will define how Hamburg is run for the next five years.

[...]

"With this decision, Hamburg joins a growing number of German states and municipalities that have already embarked on this path," said Peter Ganten, chairman of the Open Source Business Alliance, or OSBA, based in Stuttgart.

He's referring to similar decisions made in Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Bremen, Dortmund, and Munich. But, he adds: "The Hamburg decision is nevertheless remarkable because the city has always been more aggressively oriented towards Microsoft."

Munich's decision to abandon open-sourced software solutions that they'd spent €100M in public funds to develop, was touted at the time by the anti-Linux crowd as evidence of Windows 10's clear dominance and superiority in the space. It defied all available evidence, as well as what was (at the time, anyway) a growing wave of Linux adoption by state organizations the world over, and may have derailed that adoption for years.

Linux Watch: June 2020 Edition

It's been a while since I last blogged about OS user market share numbers.

In large part, the absence was due to boredom. Very little was changing month to month; with Windows 10 having finally passed Windows 7 in user share, no other tech blogs were writing about the subject, either. MacOS and Linux were stealing users from Windows for a while, but that trend slowed, then stopped, and then reversed itself. Increasingly, it looked like the personal computing paradigm that we'd lived with for twenty years was about to cement itself in place for the next twenty.

But an odd thing has been happening over the last couple of months. Linux, which had retreated allthe was to 1.36% user share just a few months ago, has been gaining ground rapidly, erasing all of its user share losses of the past year and then some.

Windows lost more Steam, too

In case you were still thinking that Windows' 0.83% user market share drop in December was some sort of an error, Steam's Software Survey has corroborated the decline, putting Steam in sync with the overall OS market for a second straight month.

Click to enlarge.

Once again, MacOS (a.k.a. OS X) and Linux were the big gainers, with MacOS 10.14 and Ubuntu 18.10 both showing strong results; the newbie-friendly Linux Mint, a distro that doesn't even register among OS users in the broader marketplace, appears to have gained a significant share among Steam users. Weirdly, only Windows 7's 64-bit version lost Steam users, with Win7's 32-bit version gaining ground alongside all other Windows versions except XP; Win7 64-bit's decline was enough to put Windows in the red overall, though, with a 0.58% overall drop which is only slightly slower than the decline seen in the overall OS market.

In isolation, this sort of behaviour among Steam users could be interpreted as resulting from Valve's Steam Play/Proton initiative, but given that Windows' decline among Steam users is actually less than that seen in the larger OS market, it's difficult to describe this as anything other than just a part of the overall trend, with Windows-dependent PC gamers actually lagging slightly behind everyone else. Whether Steam Play/Proton changes those users' decision-making calculus in the coming months is, of course, anyone's guess. It does seem to be making it somewhat easier for gamers to join the shift away from Windows, though, meaning that Microsoft shouldn't be counting too hard on PC gamers to be a backstop against the overall loss of Windows users.

Windows 10 finally overtakes Windows 7... but it's not the "goods news" story that Microsoft was hoping for

Happy New Year, everybody! 2019 has dawned, and with it, at we already have at least two different posts from sites proclaiming Windows 10's belated ascendancy. Both Thurrott.com (Report: Windows 10 Takes Over Windows 7) and MSPowerUser (NetMarketShare: Windows 10 finally overtakes Windows 7) immediately noticed that Windows 10's usage share is starting the new year at 39.22%, which is finally higher than Windows 7's 36.90% share, according to NetMarketShare.com, and neither could wait to proclaim the future to be smooth sailing for Windows from here on out.

What they've apparently both missed, however, is that Windows has, once again, lost overall market share, with MacOS and Linux gaining at Windows' expense:

Window's share of the market dropped by nearly a full percent in the last month. At that pace, they'll be below 80% by June.

Yes, Windows 10 finally passed Windows 7, and this time WX managed to actually be moving forwards in the process, unlike last month, but Windows overall is still losing users to MacOS, and to Linux. Interestingly, while the Unix-like OSes gained as a group, both BSD and "Unknown" actually lost ground last month; only Linux actually gained, growing by 0.70%.

The other Unix-likes aren't doing as well as Linux is.

Even more interestingly, Ubuntu alone moved from 0.57% to 0.71%, accounting for 0.14% of the Linux's change by itself, and giving this one Linux distro a greater share of the market than Google's ChromeOS... meaning that Linux is not only growing at the expense of Windows, but that most of Linux's gains are coming in the form of a rapidly-emerging leader.

This has enormous potential ramifications for the future.

Windows is losing Steam

It looks like the downward trend in Windows' overall market share is also being mirrored in Steam's software survey numbers, as reported by Phoronix:

Valve has published their latest monthly Steam survey data, which shows an increase in the Linux gaming population.

For November 2018, Steam's Survey reports a 0.80% marketshare for Linux, which is a 0.08% increase over October, which was on an upward trend following the roll-out of Steam Play late this summer for allowing Windows-only games to run more easily on Linux with their Wine-based Proton software... Earlier this year it was around just 0.5% Linux marketshare and last year there were the lows of around 0.3%.

While 0.80% may not seem like much, it's significant when factoring in the size of Steam's customer base that is reportedly at 125+ million users. 

Not only is Linux up, MacOS is also up, and Windows is down, in a rare case of Steam users actually trending in the same direction as the market overall.

There's a lot of overlap between Steam's user base and the PC gaming community overlap, and their higher Windows 10 adoption rate, and higher PC purchasing rate, were helping to drive Windows 10's numbers upwards. Windows 10 is still pushing out Windows 7 among PC gamers, but with more PC gamers shifting from Windows to Mac OS X and Linux because of Steam Play, this shift among the most active PC purchasers could be a significant driver of the overall market shift away from Linux.

Importantly, MacOS X and Steam are both consumer-driven market segments, which could mean that Microsoft is losing consumers to both Apple and FOSS. Back in July, Microsoft had talked about their desire to win back consumers with Modern Life Services. We've heard nothing about that consumer-focused initiative since, and if this trend in Windows' market share is any indication, Microsoft's time could be starting to run out. Windows has a healthy lead in PC gaming, though, with a 96.00% market share, so there's still time for Microsoft to react... if they start now.

Tick, tock, Microsoft. Your move.

Windows' incredible shrinking usage share

Most of the attention on desktop OS usage share has been the horse race between Windows 7 and Windows 10. The question to which everybody wants to know the answer is always, "When will Windows 10 finally overtake Windows 7?"

The prediction, for several Novembers running now, has been next November, and November 1st has once more arrived with W7 still holding on to a slim lead over its newer "rival" OS, as reported by Wayne Williams at Betanews:

In October, Windows 10 had edged closer to Windows 7, and I predicted that NetMarketShare would finally see Windows 10 emerge victorious in November.

It didn’t.

Again, this has now happened for at least three consecutive Novembers, and is hardly news. Williams has actually buried the lede at bit, though, because the really interesting bit is what comes next:

In fact, in November Windows 10 actually lost some usage share, dropping 0.14 percentage points. That puts it on 38.1 4 percent, down from the 38.28 percent high in October.

The gap between the two operating systems still narrowed though, as Windows 7 also lost share, going from 39.35 percent to 38.89 percent, a fall of 0.46 percentage points.

Wait, what? Both Windows versions managed to lose market share last month? I mean, yes, Microsoft has had a couple of months of bad news with update 1809's issues, but even so, how the fuck does this happen?

Well, the short answer is that Windows lost overall market share last month, dropping from 87.27% to 87.03%. But even that's not the end of the story; looking back at overall market share numbers for the last six months, we see a pattern emerge:

Has Microsoft finally stopped trying to make "fetch" happen with Cortana?

I've been posting about Cortana, and why it should be optional in Windows 10, for a while now. By turning Cortana on by default, frustrating attempts to turn it off, and forcing all searches through Cortana, including local file searches, Microsoft basically forced users to sacrifice privacy in exchange for the use of a feature that most of them didn't care about at all.

But with Javier Soltero, Microsoft's head of Cortana, departing the company, and Alexa, the rival digital assistant from Amazon, now available on the Microsoft store, it was looking more and more inevitable that Microsoft would start backing Windows 10 away from this sort of forced Cortana integration. With the market having spoken, and saying clearly that Cortana was not a selling point of Windows 10, how long would Microsoft keep forcing its use as WX's default for all search?

The answer to that question, apparently, is "until the 19H1 update," as reported by WindowsLatest:

Microsoft is making some changes to how Windows Search works in Windows 10. With Windows 10 19H1 update, Microsoft is reportedly planning to remove Windows Search from Cortana. It’s a smart move as this could eventually allow you to use the search feature flawlessly even if you don’t like Cortana.

Windows 10 19H1 will separate Cortana and Windows Search, and two different icons will be displayed on the taskbar. It’s a pretty neat change as this would allow Cortana to act more like a personal digital assistant and you can use Windows Search if you’re looking for files, pictures, music and other stuff stored in your local drive.

Screenshots show menus which seem to allow users to hide the new Cortana button -- not quite as good as allowing users to simply disable Cortana, but when combined with the separation of Cortana from search, it amounts to functionally the same thing.

This is a good move. Microsoft's insistence that users must use features and products that they had repeatedly indicated they had no interest in using was one of the most annoying things about Windows 10. Nobody cares about Cortana, or Edge, or Bing, and yet Microsoft was dead set on making them unavoidable, in a display of either monopolistic arrogance, desperation, or simple tone-deafness, which had long since convinced a large number of Windows 7 users to put off the switch indefinitely, if possible.

If nothing else, this latest move explains by Javier Soltero is leaving the company. As someone who'd internally championed Cortana, the prospect of having Cortana de-emphasized in Windows 10, and his own role and career prospects with them, probably made leaving look like a really attractive option. But if Microsoft really are finally learning to let go, to stop trying to force with issue, then maybe that's about to change.

It's not enough to convince someone like me to switch to Windows 10, #Never10, #LinuxShift, but it is, finally, a start. Whether this first baby step has happened in time, is of course, a whole 'nother discussion.

Coming along nicely

As a PC gamer, with Windows 10 looking like more of a dumpster fire with each passing month, and Linux looking more and more like the OS that I'll end up using in 2020, I've obviously been keeping an eye on the progress of Valve Software's Steam Play/Proton initiative. I'd even tried switching to Linux a few months ago, literally formatting my hard drive and installing Ubuntu... only to discover that Ubuntu came with some frustrating limitations, and that Proton itself wasn't quite ready for prime time.

Proton was very promising, but it was clearly not a polished enough consumer experience yet that the average consumer should be thinking of making the switch. That was back in August, though, and this is November. With three more months to work on their tech, how much progress have Valve made?

There was only one way to know. Armed with my list of shame (i.e. every game on my Steam account that I have yet to play), I looked them up on ProtonDB to find out how they were rated for Steam Play performance. To say that the results surprised me, would be something of an understatement.

Here's how my Steam library breaks down, using the rating definitions from ProtonDB:

Native	Platinum	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Borked	No Rating
42.5%	13.7%	11.8%	13.7%	5.2%	7.2%	5.9%

OS usage share stats for end-September (Yes, there actually is news to report.)

Okay, yes, I know, I said that I was all done following Windows 10's monthly crawl to parity with Windows 7. That declaration is looking to have been premature, however, since this appears to be the month when things actually got interesting again.

First, Windows 10 (WX) vs. Windows 7 (W7). Last month, WX looked to finally be on pace to equal W7 by November, to such an extent that even I was willing to posit that they might actually make it this time. That was then, though, and this is now, and in the now, WX has once again lost ground to its much, much older cousin. As reported by Wayne Williams at Betanews:

Usage share monitoring service StatCounter saw Windows 10 overtake Windows 7 back in February, and its latest figures put the new operating system on 50.07 percent, well ahead of Windows 7 on 37.2 percent.

Rival monitoring service NetMarketShare disagrees however. While Windows 10 gained significant share in August, at Windows 7’s expense, the latest figures, for September, show a reversal of fortune.

According to NetMarketShare, in September, Windows 10 went from 37.80 percent to 37.44 percent, a fall of 0.36 percentage points.

In the same time frame, Windows 7 gained 0.61 percentage points to sit on 40.88 percent, 3.44 percent ahead.

Based on last month’s figures, I predicted that Windows 10 would take the lead by November, or possibly as early as October, but that no longer seems to be the case. It's now more likely to be the start of next year, but we shall see.

In case you're wondering what that looks like, here's the graph from NMS:

W7/WX still leads everyone else by a large margin, but Linux now clearly leads the "everyone else" pack.

I'd previously pegged ±0.5% as the threshold for significance, which these changes just barely exceed. That said, it does mean that the "by November" prediction for WX/W7 parity will likely be missed for a third straight year, which has to be slightly embarrassing for Microsoft.

This development isn't nearly as interesting as the month's OS usage changes among Steam users, though.

Why not Windows 10?

Given that my recent foray into PC Gaming on Linux were... underwhelming, shall we say, some of my readers (yes, all three of you) may well be wondering why I don't just bite the bullet and switch to Windows 10 already. True, the "free upgrade" offer has ended, and Windows 10 will not cost money, but I was honestly always going to want more control over my PC than WX Home offered, which would always have meant a Professional license... in other words, Windows 10 was always going to cost me something up front.

So, why not just switch already?

It's a good question, and one which I've struggled a bit to answer myself this past week. Was I just being stubborn? Or did I still have concrete, valid reasons for sticking with Windows 7, while hoping that Valve and Steam Play would be able to solve the Linux gaming performance problem at some point during the upcoming year?

Today, though, I had a eureka moment, when I found my nebulous reasons for sticking with W7 suddenly crystallized into a single paragraph by Paul Thurrott. He was writing about Microsoft's decision to de-escalate some of WX's advertising bullshit. After downplaying the reversal as "not much of a win," he goes onto describe  Microsoft's approach to Windows consumers thusly:

Everything else that is still wrong about Windows 10 is still in the product and will move forward with version 1809.

In other words, the slippery slope I first warned about way back in 2012, when Microsoft quietly began its first sneaky advertising additions to Windows 10's predecessor, is still very much an issue. And has escalated over time. The ongoing and unnecessary compromises to Windows 10---rampant advertising, attempts at pushing users to Microsoft Edge, pre-bundled crapware, and more---continue unabated. There is no major software platform that is this hostile to its own users. [Emphasis added.]

"That's it!" I thought. "That's the reason!" It's not just WX's ongoing issues, which I could probably live with or work around, it's that Microsoft treats all but their largest Enterprise customers with thinly veiled contempt, most of the time, and has done so for years. Sure, maybe this latest half-hearted walk-back marks the beginning of a trend towards less bullshit in Windows... but I'm not planning to bet money on it.

Seriously, fuck Microsoft at this point. If Valve can get Steam Play working well enough to provide a moderately decent gaming experience on Linux (or, hell, SteamOS), I'll put up with some performance issues, rather than give Microsoft the satisfaction.

The Steam Play experience

The adventure continues...

Yesterday, I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu, with the intention of gaming on Linux using Steam Play + Proton. Today, having installed a couple of dozen games to use as test cases, I finally booted up Path of Exile for the first time.

PoE is not a Linux game, and Grinding Gear Games does not provide any support for Linux. This means that I have to rely entirely on Valve's new Proton addition to Steam Play to run the game (well, I could try to run it myself independently, using Wine, but since Proton is Wine, it amounts to the same thing). And so, I booted up the game for the first time.... and it crashed the OS.

On Windows, this would mean ten minutes of downtime; on Linux, however, reboots take seconds, and are just no big deal. So, I booted it up again, dove into Steam, and restarted PoE... and it crashed again.

This time, though, only the game crashed; and, afterwards, Steam asked if I'd like to try booting the game in DX9 mode, rather than DX11. And so, figuring third time lucky, I said yes, and re-restarted the game... and it worked!

In fact, the login process was working better that it had been working on Windows, lately. I'm not sure why, but PoE on Windows 7 had been failing to open instances for the first two login attempts, every time the game was started, needing at least three tries to actually start the game. On Linux, once I managed to get the game to load, it started first on the try. Excelsior!

Finally taking the plunge...

I was perusing my past posts, and realized that it was April of 2016 when I first mentioned planning to migrate to Linux. By September of last year, I had bought a 2nd hard drive, with vague plans of dual-booting. Only one thing stood in my way: my gaming habit, and the fact that most of the games I was interested in simply didn't run natively on Linux. Worse, getting to run games on Linux using Wine looked really... complicated.

I had high hopes for SteamOS, which seemed to pair well with the new Vulkan API and a growing trend in cross-platform development to make more Linux-compatible games a possibility. But Valve seemed to be letting the SteamOS initiative wither on the vine, which left me using Windows 7, facing end of service in a year and a half with an extra hard drive still in its packaging, and wondering if Linux was really the OS that a lifelong PC gamer like me needed.

All that changed last week, though, when Valve announced Proton, a Wine implementation that they'd built into the Linux Steam client, adding 1000 certified Linux-compatible games to Steam in a week -- and making all of the other games on the service Linux-installable at the same time.

Suddenly, installing any game on Linux that I wanted to play was a doddle, and the main reason for my procrastination was gone. Here I was, with two weeks' vacation ahead of me, every reason to switch operating systems, and no excuses left

More of what consumers don't want...

Oh, Microsoft. What are we supposed to do with you, when you do shit like this:

For over 30 years, we’ve thought of PCs primarily as Windows machines, which we owned and controlled. That’s about to change forever [...] Microsoft is getting ready to replace Windows 10 with the Microsoft Managed Desktop. This will be a “desktop-as-a-service” (DaaS) offering. Instead of owning Windows, you’ll “rent” it by the month.

DaaS for Windows isn’t new [but] Microsoft Managed Desktop is a new take. It avoids the latency problem of the older Windows DaaS offerings by keeping the bulk of the operating system on your PC [b]ut you’ll no longer be in charge of your Windows PC. Instead, it will be automatically provisioned and patched for you by Microsoft.

[...]

Windows patching was always chancy, but with Windows 10 you’re more likely to have trouble when you patch than you are to avoid problems. [...] So, with this track record, do you want to pay good money to let Microsoft maintain your desktops for you? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Nonetheless, DaaS Windows is coming. Microsoft has been getting away from the old-style desktop model for years now. Just look at Office. Microsoft would much rather have you rent Office via Office 365 than buy Microsoft Office and use it for years.

Do you remember the last time Microsoft tried to take users' desktops away, and how well badly that went? Or maybe you remember last week, when Microsoft said that they wanted to win back consumers?

Guess what consumers emphatically don't want? If you guessed that consumers really, really, really don't want to lease Windows from Microsoft in perpetuity, while Redmond remotely control everything about their desktops, then give yourself a no-prize, because you're exactly right.

Windows 8 flopped hard because Microsoft tried to take users' desktops away, and now, here they are, only 7 years later, plotting to do exactly the same thing all over again, all while lamenting that they can't figure out what consumers really want.

I tell you, Linux is looking better and better all the time...

Probably not a good sign

If you're Microsoft, and still hoping that the world will flock to your flagship OS (which is totes going to happen any day now, folks, just keep waiting for it), then might not be a good sign for fairly pro-Windows sites like Betanews are advocating for Linux as an alternative, in stories with headlines like this one:

Yeah.... ouch.

Quoting from the article itself:

Linux Mint is a great operating system. For those that want an alternative to Windows 10, it is a wonderful choice for two specific reasons. For one, it has a superior user interface. Whether you opt for the Cinnamon desktop environment or instead choose Mate, you will have a more intuitive experience than the insanity that is Windows 10. Secondly and more importantly, however, you don't have to worry about a billion dollar company tracking all of your activity. While telemetry sometimes has its benefits, Microsoft seems to have forgotten that their operating system is a guest on your computer. Again, it is your computer -- not the Windows-maker's.

[...]

Are you ready to take back your computer and ditch Windows 10? Use the below links to download the ISO. While both Cinnamon and Mate are solid environments, the latter is the prettier of the two. I would only recommend Mate if your computer is very under-powered. With that said, if you are already running Windows 10, your computer should handle Cinnamon perfectly fine.

[...]

• Linux Mint Cinnamon (64-bit Download) (Release notes)
• Linux Mint Mate (64-bit Download) (Release notes)

Man, the telemetry business really isn't going away, is it? And it's really not helping Microsoft at all; every time I see telemetry mentioned, it's negatively. You'd almost think that Microsoft could do themselves a huge favour by making it possible to easily opt out of data collection, or something.

But I digress. Back to Linux Mint itself, the new "Sylvia" release of which comes with some solid-sounding features, like native Flatpak support (which simplifies software installation, allowing you to "install bleeding-edge applications even if their dependencies are not compatible with Linux Mint," according to Clement Lefebvre of Linux Mint) and TimeShift (which simplifies system backups), and is available now.

Did I mention that it's free? Yeah, it's free.

Windows 7 is good until 2020, so there's no rush to switch operating systems, but if you were wondering if there were other viable options available besides Windows 10, the answer would seem to be a resounding yes... and sites like Betanews are giving them more attention and good press, something which may be only just beginning. NetMarketShare may have massaged their OS market share reports until the Linux Shift was invisible again, but that doesn't mean that a shift isn't happening, or that Windows 10's ascendancy is assured. I suspect that we're in for a couple of years of interesting developments on this front... stay tuned.

Dell launches five new Linux PCs

As reported by betanews:

Today, Canonical -- the Ubuntu-maker -- announces five new Dell computers that come pre-installed with that Linux distribution. While four of them are laptops, one is a drop-dead gorgeous all-in-on desktop. Microsoft won't like this!

Canonical explains, "We are excited to announce the availability of 5 new Dell Precision computers that come pre-installed with Ubuntu. These are systems developed by and for developers, and are available in form factors ranging from sleek ultrabooks to powerful workstations."

Well, isn't this a conundrum: #boycottDell meets #LinuxShift. Fight!

Seriously, though, I do wonder what Dell thinks they know that no other OEM knows, or if we'll see more Linux PCs, from more manufacturers, as time goes on.

In other Linux news, the free open-source OS is now totally dominant in another arena of high-performance computing: supercomputers. As reported by ZDNet:

This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list. Today, it finally happened: All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers are running Linux.

The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list.

Overall, China now leads the supercomputing race with 202 computers to the US' 144. China also leads the US in aggregate performance. China's supercomputers represent 35.4 percent of the Top500's flops, while the US trails with 29.6 percent. With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline. 

It may not impact individual users much, but still... interesting.

Samsung ups their DeX game

Back in May, Samsung released their Dex smartphone dock, potentially bridging the gap between desktop and mobile computing with Android. Engadget described it as an "impressive, unnecessary, phone-powered PC," which suffered from one major flaw:

There's a limited number of apps optimized for DeX and others don't always work properly on the big screen. [...] Ultimately, DeX blurs the line between smartphone and PC better than any other attempt we've seen -- we're just not convinced many people will find it genuinely useful.

Samsung, apparently, agreed with this assessment, and decided to do something about it. They decided that what DeX really needs is Linux.

From The Reg:

Samsung has announced it will soon become possible to run actual proper Linux on its Note8, Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones – and even Linux desktops.

Yeah, yeah, we know Android is built on Linux, but you know what we mean. Samsung said it's working on an app called “Linux on Galaxy” that will let users “run their preferred Linux distribution on their smartphones utilizing the same Linux kernel that powers the Android OS.”

“Whenever they need to use a function that is not available on the smartphone OS, users can simply switch to the app and run any program they need to in a Linux OS environment,” Samsung says. The app also allows multiple OSes to run on a device.

[...]

Samsung thinks developers are the market for Linux on Galaxy, as it means they “can now set up a fully functional development environment with all the advantages of a desktop setting that is accessible anytime, anywhere”. Samsung's announcement suggests developers will “code using their mobile on-the-go and with Samsung DeX, and can seamlessly continue the task on a larger display.”

We keep creeping closer to the day when you really can do all of your personal computing, productivity and mobile, with a single device that fits in your pocket. With Microsoft giving up on Windows 10 mobile, and HP putting a bullet in Continuum, it's looking more and more like that truly-all-in-one PC will be Linux-powered, and not Windows-powered.

Windows 10 breaches Dutch data protection law

I had a feeling that Microsoft's anti-consumer data collection bullshit wasn't done getting them into trouble with European regulators, but I'll admit that I wasn't expecting the next chapter in that story to come out of the Netherlands.

As reported by ZDNet's David Meyer:

Microsoft breaches the Dutch data protection law in the way it processes the personal data of people using the Windows 10 operating system, the country's data protection agency has said.

On Friday, Dutch data protection authority (DPA) the Autoriteir Persoonsgegevens said that Microsoft doesn't tell Windows 10 Home and Pro users which personal data it collects and why. It also said the firm makes it impossible for users to give their valid consent to their personal data being processed, due to the multiple ways in which that data might subsequently be used.

The data watchdog added that Microsoft "does not clearly inform users that it continuously collects personal data about the usage of apps and web surfing behaviour through its web browser Edge, when the default settings are used".

"It turns out that Microsoft's operating system follows about every step you take on your computer. That results in an intrusive profile of yourself," said Wilbert Tomesen, the regulator's vice-chairman. "What does that mean? Do people know about this, do they want this? Microsoft needs to give users a fair opportunity to decide about this themselves."

The issue, naturally, is telemetry.

While Microsoft offers users an overview of the categories of data that it collects through basic telemetry, it only informs people in a general way, with examples, about the categories of personal data it collects through full telemetry, the regulator said.

"The way Microsoft collects data at the full telemetry level is unpredictable. Microsoft can use the collected data for the various purposes, described in a very general way. Through this combination of purposes and the lack of transparency Microsoft cannot obtain a legal ground, such as consent, for the processing of data," it said.

It's hard to say exactly what effect this will have. When France's data watchdog had issues with Windows 10, Microsoft was able to find a bare-minimum level of compliance which resulted in a closed file, and mostly cosmetic changes to Windows' telemetry, an outcome that they're clearly hoping to replicate (ZDNet's piece quotes Microsoft Windows privacy officer Marisa Rogers as prioritizing compliance with the Dutch data protection law, while sharing "specific concerns with the Dutch DPA about the accuracy of some of its findings and conclusions"), so it could be that very little will actually change this time, either.

But with Windows 10 still struggling to win converts, and signs that Windows 7 users are leaving Windows entirely, for Linux, it's hardly good news for Microsoft that Windows 10's data collection and privacy issues are once again back in the news. They'd clearly hoped that this issue would go away, but since they haven't actually fixed the problem, that may be unlikely.

Hey, Microsoft! Do you want to know what will make this problem go away, completely, and forever? Let people turn the telemetry completely off. If telemetry is opt-in, rather than can't-really-opt-out-but-there's-a-lower-level-of-intrusiveness-available-you-pussies, people will stop complaining about the telemetry system. You might even win some converts amongst dug-in Windows 7 users (no promises, though - those folks have dug in pretty deeply).

Oh, and before I forget.... If you're reading this, then you should be running Spybot's Anti-Beacon, or something similar. Don't forget that Microsoft retconned this telemetry bullshit into Windows 7 and 8/8.1, too, so you should be taking steps to protect your own privacy, regardless of which Windows version you use. Microsoft sure as shit aren't going to.

Once could be an accident, twice could be a coincidence...

One of the more troubling recent trends in journalism is that of the pre-existing narrative frame. This occurs when reporters, who are expecting a thing to happen, and waiting to report on the thing as it happens, ignore evidence that contradicts that pre-formed narrative. They don't report what's actually happening, as it's happening; instead, they cherry-pick from the available stats and factoids, telling only the stories that they were already planning to tell.

We see this a lot in political reporting; false equivalencies, false dichotomies, and pre-conceived narratives that exclude important-but-contradictory facts are all rampant "in the beltline." It's one of the reasons why public confidence in mainstream news reporting is at historic lows; it's one of the reasons why political reporters and pundits have spent the last year constantly being blindsided by actual developments in politics. People were more comfortable getting their news from The Daily Show than from their daily newspaper because Jon Stewart didn't do this; Last Week Tonight wins Peabody awards because John Oliver doesn't do this.

The phenomenon isn't limited to political reporting, either. It happens in tech reporting, too. When MSPowerUser was reporting on this month's OS market share trends, they did it explicitly:

This month Netmarketshare’s data appears to have an error, claiming a 5% increase in Linux market share in one month, so I think it can be safely ignored.

Never mind that this was the 2nd month in which this shift was visible; never mind that Satya Nadella is already trying to get out ahead of the Shift, downplaying the importance of Windows to Microsoft. MSPowerUser's writer, like many tech media writers, had spent months waiting to tell the story in which Windows 10 finally surged in the marketplace to overtake Windows 7, and so he cherry-picked the stats which seemed to finally be telling that story, while explicitly ignoring stats that didn't fit.

ZDNet is doing it, too. Unable to completely ignore the undeniable trend in the data, they've instead taken issue with the source, NetMarketShare, in this recent piece:

There have been numerous stories that the Linux desktop has more than doubled from its usual 1.5 to 3 percent marketshare to 5 percent. These reports have been based on NetMarketShare's desktop operating system analysis, which showed Linux leaping from 2.5 percent in July, to almost 5 percent in September. But unfortunately for Linux fans, it's not true.

Neither does it appear to be Google's Chrome OS, which tends to be under-represented in NetMarketShare and StatCounter desktop operating system numbers, being counted as Linux. Mind you, that would be fair, since Chrome OS is based on Linux.

The real explanation is far more mundane. It seems to be merely a mistake. Vince Vizzaccaro, NetMarketShare's executive marketing share of marketing told me, "The Linux share being reported is not correct. We are aware of the issue and are currently looking into it."

Again: ZDNet, confronted with with data that didn't fit their existing narrative, went looking for a rationale that would let them ignore it, rather than reporting on it as it was happening... you know, the way reporters used to.

And the insidious thing is that NetMarketShare have been co-opted by this. Faced with skeptical reporters who refused to use actual facts as the jumping-off point for their reporting, NMS are hard at work, tweaking their statistical models so that their reports can more closely match reporters' expectations.

A quick note on StatCounter

Microsoft's supporters have been quick to seize on StatCounter's version of the month's numbers, which show a much rosier picture for Microsoft, choosing to ignore NetMarketShare (and the Linux Shift that stubbornly keeps showing up in their data) almost entirely. Wayne Williams at betanews made an interesting comment about this phenomenon:

Before we get into it, it's important to note that StatCounter's numbers are reported differently from NetMarketShare's, because they just break down Windows's share, whereas NetMarketShare's numbers include other operating systems, such as different flavors of macOS and Linux.

[...]

Taking an average of the last three months, StatCounter has Windows 10 overtaking Windows 7 in December, while NetMarketShare doesn’t have that happening until next September.

Neither agree with Microsoft’s figures, which claimed the big event happened 10 months ago.

We'll know in a couple of months whether StatCounter is right on the money, or completely out to lunch; it's possible that Windows 7 could lose enough users to Linux to put them at parity with Windows 10, without Windows 10 actually growing much. This shift in the market is being widely reported as Windows 10 "catching up" to Windows 7, but it might be more a case of Windows 7 running out of gas, while Linux comes up quickly from behind to catch both of them.

When people tell you that Windows 10 is making huge gains in the marketplace, though, remember that there is no evidence yet to support that conclusion. It is, in a word, hype. Never believe the hype.

Déjà vu, all over again

So, just like last month, when NetMarketShare balked at reporting what their data was clearly telling them, they've once again massaged their stats and reposted them. And, as expected, the result is a slightly smaller swing than their earlier posted stats indicated.

The old version put Windows' overall OS market share at 82.2%, and "Other" (a.k.a. Linux) at 13.04%. The new version looks like this:

This version of the numbers puts Windows at 86.21% overall, with Windows 7 declining to 46.22% (-2.21%), and Windows 10 increasing to 28.65% (+0.66%). Linux, meanwhile, gained 2.15% to finish at 9.99% overall. That 86.21% number is especially interesting; it's almost exactly what NetMarketShare had originally reported as Windows' overall market position in their first version of last month's stats.

While this new analysis of their data shows a smaller swing from Windows to Linux, it still does show a swing from Windows to Linux, and a big one. Especially in light of Satya Nadella's recent remarks, downplaying the importance of Windows to Microsoft, it seems that the Linux Shift is actually a thing. We're not left wondering whether or not it's happening, only how quickly... and, of course, why now?

I fully expect that next month's stats will show a continuation of this same trend. Windows 10's growth is still sluggish; breathless reports that it would overtake Windows 7 in a matter of months are missing the point. Yes, Windows 7's user base appears to be changing operating systems, but they're not migrating to Windows 10 -- they're migrating away from Windows altogether, and trend which Microsoft are already trying to downplay the importance of. We could be months away from a market in which Windows 7, Windows 10, and Linux split the market more-or-less evenly between them.

What impact that might have on the world of desktop computing is impossible to say. Microsoft's Windows has been so dominant on desktops for so long that it's difficult to imagine what the world of desktop PCs will look like when that dominance comes to an end. One thing is becoming increasingly clear, though; Windows' dominance on the desktop is coming to an end, and sooner than anyone ever thought possible.

Once again, I will preserve both of my posts on this topic, in order to preserve NetMarketShare's originally-posted evidence of the nascent Linux Shift as it progresses. I have the feeling that this same sequence of events will play out again in November, and in December, and in January, and at some point, the limitations of regression analysis will simply not be able to mask the evidence of the Shift anymore. How Microsoft's supporters react on that day will be interesting to see.