What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.

I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.

And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.

I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.

What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.

I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.

I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.

In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.

As an American, I’d happily adopt the Euro and join the Schengen zone.

Apparently, that’s not an option for us, though ;)

Youtube’s margins are 38%, much lower than most of its competitors (that are in the 80% range). The primary reason for the margin being so low is that they give a far higher percent of their revenue to the content creators.

Just a reminder… 38% margins are kinda low for the type of product Youtube is.