It peaked at 4.05% in March. The last 2 months it went just below 4% as the Unknown category increased. For June the reverse happened, so 4.04% seems to be the real current share of Linux on Desktop as desktop clients were read properly/werent spoofed.
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The combined forces of microsoft reaching new heights of greed and intrusion, plus the massive dev efforts for the best ever GNU Linux and Proton 📈📈📈
Microsoft set themselves up the bomb
Microsoft: As long as Adobe, Office, Autodesk are on my side, I have nothing to worry about.
All your corporate greed are belong to us
I use Linux for personal use, and Ive been using windows for work due to necessity.
There is one app I need that does not support Linux. I contacted their support asking about a Linux version and they suggested using waysroid to run the android version of the app.
So, when I have free time I’m working on switching things over.
My main motivation is Microsoft pushing ads everywhere and being aggressive about using online accounts and stuff that like.
Whats interesting is that both income , profits and the stock have been growing well for years, maybe they are just monetizing more aggressively because they can’t compete on product quality (unlike other markets that are still evolving, AI and Cloud). not a ton of stuff to improve in operation systems it seems.
There are system dialogs that have unused space for ads, still plenty to improve!
In all seriousness, cloud (azure) and office subscriptions blew up and account for like 70% of MS profits. They know the Windows experience is lacking, but when they already capture so much of the market and it’s such a small slice of revenue, they have no incentive to improve.
dont forget soystemd and wayland
i don’t have a strong opinion on systemd, i just heard someone call it soystemd in some YouTube video once and it just stuck in my head for years
In all seriousness, I think government bodies switching to Linux (UK’s, China’s, some Indian states’) attributes the most to this.
Even if that’s the case, it’s telling of Linux’ maturity.
Oh absolutely!
No I think it’s the Steam Deck. It’s like half of all actively used Linux machines.
Source? Last I checked, the Steam Deck was very much in the minority even when narrowed down to just desktop Linux.
I confused it with Steam statistics sorry
no, the statistics are based on browser agents, very few steam deck users browse the Internet on their devices. it’s also only half the Linux devices on steam, not of all Linux desktops
But that’s not really a Desktop is it? If we’d count mobile device we’d also have to include Android and then the situation would look completely different.
Steam deck has a full fat kde desktop on the stock os
I could install a full fat kde on the entertainment system of a car - still wouldn’t call it a desktop PC.
You can plug in a keyboard, mouse, and monitor
We don’t include Android here. What I meant is that the Steam Deck does count in that statistics.
Connect the Steam Deck to a compatible dock and you can quite easily use it as a desktop. At the end of the day, it’s still an x64 based PC that’s just handheld.
I’m not sure that’s really a good argument. I can connect an android smartphone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and call it Desktop. It’s also just an arm64 or x64 based PC just handheld.
A Desktop PC IMHO is a device that is used for everyday “office” work and neither android smartphones nor steamdecks are that - but laptops for example are (IMHO)
It is. I use it as such regularly. Keyboard+mouse+screen = browsing firefox as usual. Works quite well. Libreoffice, okular, signal desktop… I’ve used worse computers in recent years, steamdeck desktop experience is better than many 4 to 5 year old cheap laptops with win10 or win11.
In Steam maybe. But this is StatCounter which is website visits. I doubt many Deck users are browsing the web.
For some reason I think a lot of them (probably even more than half) have tried browsing the web or at least using the desktop mode at least once.
Oh that is a good point, why didn’t I think of that!
I’m fairly sure it’s deficiencies in StatCounter’s measurement that’s accounting for it. Statistical noise, basically.
It’s probably even higher than that. These stats are mostly based on website visits I believe. And many Linux users are also privacy-minded and might spoof their OS in the browser. I bet a large portion of the Unknown is actually Linux too.
It’s hard to tell, as there are so many things that influence it. A huge factor is selection bias, as only a small number of website embed StatCounter, and that’s very likely to not be a representative sample. I’d bet that the influence of that is magnitudes larger than of user agent spoofing.
And a portion of the “Windows” as well. Hiding in plain sight and all.
The youtuber matt from thelinuxcast sucks.
I am regular user, i don’t code for living and my job is not tech related. I wanted to try linux and many of you guys supported and now I’m using Linux since 2 weeks its linux mint. That matt guy was so against linux mint that i thought it was shit too. But when i installed and started using it. It has been a smooth journey. Many people in linux community were helpful. But people like matt really make it for us regular guys scared to use linux. I really hope many good linux user help regular people switch to linux and increase this number.
Mint is great and is absolutely enough for most people using computers, still as of now. It comes with its limitations though:
- By default it runs pretty old kernel. This is fine if your hardware is at least 3 years old. It allows to easily switch to newer kernel with just few clicks, but I expect newbies to not be aware of this at all. Oh, and I don’t know if it offers some custom kernels like tkg etc, which some might want to squeeze best gaming perf etc.
- Cinnamon is still limited to X11. If you have multi-screen setup, VRR, mixed refresh, mixed DPI etc, it’s better to switch to Wayland. Plus, Xorg server gets less and less maintenance and development. All the innovation moved to Wayland, so the experience on X will remain pretty stale.
- The Ubuntu base makes it so that for 3rd party software you either need deb packages or PPAs. Some will argue (me included) that it’s not the best solution
All of the above can easily be irrelevant to you and Mint is just perfect for what you need. It’s important to point out limitations of that choice, but crapping on it because you don’t like it is just pointless fuss
On your last point, there’s also Flatpak which is available right from the baked in software center… That’s not without its issues too, but they’ve been an overall smooth experience for me so far
Yes, Flatpak fixed a lot of the old shenanigans we used to have when everything was either native package, or a binary to hope for the best and install libraries manually, or source code to collect everything that’s needed for building and again, hope for the best. It is however designed to provide a way to install graphical apps, but can’t handle everything native package does (like out-of-tree kernel modules, CLI utils, system services)
I believe it can do CLI, but that’s not always been the case and not a lot of CLI apps adopted it as a result
But for most of what the typical user, or even a lot of what a technical user, needs, it does a good job
Do you have an recommendation for a distro? I wanted to use mint, but i probably need wayland for a multiscreen setup with different scalings.
ubuntu
Mint should have Waylant support if you don’t use Cinnamon; I know Xfce has Wayland support (though I don’t use it, they can pry X11 from my cold dead hands)
Neither Cinnamon, XFCE or Mate have stable Wayland support. You need GNOME or Plasma for that if you want a desktop (or wait for the new Cosmic desktop and new PopOS)
atm Mint only has experimental wayland support, i tried it an got instant graphical issues on the desktop. :(
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Well, if your GPU is NVIDIA, you will also need a bleeding edge rolling release distro for now. Other than that, anything that ships recent version of KDE Plasma or GNOME (the first one handles Xwayland with DPI scaling a bit better imo and is generally more functional)
I keep hearing people say this. But I’ve got an nvidia card, and I just went with the default Mint Cinnamon install and I’ve had no problems whatsoever. I guess maybe my card isn’t new enough to run into whatever problems other people are talking about.
… Actually, there is one minor annoyance. I get lots of nvidia flatpak updates; and they are large downloads. I’d prefer not to be downloading gigabytes of graphics card updates every week. But other flatpaks demand that I have the latest nvidia stuff, so … I guess that is an nvidia annoyance that I experience. I don’t expect that to be fixed by a bleeding edge distro though!
Yeah, Flatpak installing user-space driver for itself is unfortunately not solvable until there’s open source driver that is part of the Mesa project. Every time you update the driver in your system, Flatpak must update its nvidia-utils too, because their versions must match exactly. For Mesa drivers, Flatpak also installs the drivers as Flatpak, but they’re compatible back and forth and it only updates when it ships new version.
The cleanup should be more automatic, but try
flatpak uninstall --unusedBecause it always worked on X11 and Mint Cinnamon is just that. I used NVIDIA graphics on X11 in 2007 and, apart from the extra dkms driver that could break at times, it was fine, and much better anyway than ATI/AMD with proprietary fglrx driver. Rest in piss son of a bitch.
The question was what would I recommend for Wayland. Only the brand new 555 driver combined with most recent compositors (and other packages like mesa, xwayland,…) offers decent NVIDIA experience. It’s a matter of new distro releases around this fall.
Cinnamon can run Wayland in experimental mode. It’s just an extra click during login. Mint also has direct support for flatpaks repositories, with flathub by default directly on the software center.
Any experience you can share on how complete and stable is that experimental session? I probably wouldn’t throw newbie on that
There’s a bug where flatpaks seemingly disappear from the system the first time you run Wayland. But it resolves with a reboot. It happens too if you change back from Wayland to X11. Other than some minor glitches from very old software that hasn’t seen an update in decades, it runs perfectly fine.
I get what you mean. I see a decent chunk of often more tech-proficient Linux users putting down Linux Mint, and it saddens me because even though I don’t use Mint anymore, it was still the first distro I properly daily-drove and I still consider it an amazing system for people who are new to Linux.
I’m very glad you’ve been having a good experience with Mint!
I don’t get them putting Mint down either, and I’ve built multiple Gentoo systems… I don’t need an easy distro but still use Mint and like it for what it brings (basically, it’s Green Ubuntu, what Ubuntu was supposed to be before they lost their way)
I assume the problem is hardware. Matt’s hardware didn’t work well with LM, therefore Matt thinks LM sucks… I do wish there was better hardware support but it’s the reason apple went with 1 product = 1 OS = 1 general set of hardware. Sure not every iPhone has the same hardware, but that’s why they have the model numbers, and it’s so much easier to test 200 model mixes than 2,000,000 (Android). Windows gets all the debug info sent directly to them like the others but they also have a huge stack of hardware they can use or they can buy it to test.
Did Matt try putting the regular build on a newish machine? That’s what I did with my current and was struggling until I put the latest kernel on it, should have gone with Edge, but had little trouble after)
This is an interesting post. I know the YouTuber you are talking about. I do not really like him but I would have considered him harmless. It is interesting to get your take.
Mint is great and quite popular. So, if you are going to make a YouTube video saying otherwise, I guess you have to go out of your way to come up with reasons why. I am sure that makes it sound worse than it is. Something to think about.
I have distro preferences too but most of the differences really only make a difference to those already using Linux. It is a bit like arguing about Ford vs Chevy in front of people that have never seen a car ( or truck ). In the grand scheme, they are both amazing and mostly the same thing. To listen to a fan though, one is God’s gift and the other is trash. Same with Linux distros.
I switched to librewolf so I will now show up as windows
After seeing Garuda Linux set my user agent to Windows, I set my Windows install user agent to Linux.
Seeing Twitch.tv login break after changing my user agent was hilarious
What did it say? Why does it break?
I unspoofed Librewolf back to Firefox + Linux. That way I’m not contributing to Chrome and Windows market share and perceived dominance. Plus the more people don’t spoof, the less of a need there will be to actually spoof at all as the Linux market share increases.
The problem is that websites sometimes change there behavior.
Do you have any examples of this?
Same, there must be a percent or so of Windows actually being Linux instead.
Yeah me too, safety in numbers. Maybe if Linux desktop gets bigger than Windows they’ll swap it around 👨💻
Fwiw, my blog’s statistics say Linux is around 10% and I know a lot of browsers identify themselves as running on Windows when they’re not, so I wonder how it’s measured.
What’s is the main topic of your blog?
Travel, nothing tech related
I think the venn diagram overlap of linux users, and users of adblockers or noscript users that block such tracking is quite large. Must impact the statistic significantly.
I use ad blocker but do not spoof user agent. If uBlpck does not block statcounter, I should be counted.
I would wager thats your audiences bias showing up. If you did that measurement in lemmy users, you would get likely 90% Linux users.
lol no you wouldn’t. I’d be shocked if Lemmy users were greater than 20% Linux.
You can tell from the neofetch screenshots of their VMs showing weird configurations like 3 cores and 6 GB RAM with 15 minutes uptime.
Weird configs aren’t always a tell, my daily driver is a desktop with a tigerlake mobile engineering sample cpu
Are you implying that the host OS in those situations is not Linux?
Yes. Probably VirtualBox.
We should do a poll, who uses Linux?
Windows 11: Add advertisement to the start menu, add remote Artificial intelligence to your daily live. Require new CPUs and motherboards / hardware, ignoring the market for old computers.
What will they do next?
- More advertisement.
- More features that require an always on internet connection?
- Forced restart for software updates
This is why I expect Linux share to slowly increase until the old computers die and you will not be allowed to choose to boot another operating system besides Windows on your Microsoft-Copilot+ PC that would be your only option.
Next:
-
Must always be online
-
Cost is now $9.99 per month (free with commercial breaks. For now of course.)
-
Everything is stored online (60GB free, $5.99/month to up it to 199GB, $49/m for 400GB).
-
Windows decline has nothing to do with any of the actual features.
It is declining because fewer people are buying PCs anymore. Every one is using a mobile device or tablet.
This is also the reason they are squeezing windows harder to make up for the down turn.
This is clearly a statistic about PCs, otherwise the share wouldnt be ~73% windows. So the decline of the desktop PC doesnt really matter here
The people who are more likely to retain a PC and not just use a phone, are more likely to be tech literate power users.
This selects against casual windows users, and selects for hardcore Linux users
But we’re talking about proportions of Desktop operating systems. People using the desktop less might decrease (or slow the increase) of total desktop usage; but there would need to be more reason that just that for it to impact Windows disproportionately.
My brother, who want nothing to do with computers if he can, asked me to install Linux on his domestic laptop. It’s not an everyone is doing it yet, but there’s definitely something.
Forcing everyone to stay connected will make pirating it harder, and that will drive many, many people away.
Fair enough, I am looking into buying PC only as a server, but as I am kind of migrant still trying to settle down it will be somewhere in 2025, if not 2026. And right now laptop + phone cover basically all my needs i.e. work, gaming, reading, surfing the web, interacting with the local government. Not to mention that it is much easier to get around with those compared to the headache that is moving PC :)
And from my experience most PC users now are either people who bought it 10+ years ago and they just still have it, or people really invested into AAA gaming. Everyone else has combination of smatphone and tablet/laptop.
The thing is that most Windows users don’t care and will continue to use it. People like you and I know about the benefits of Linux, but sometimes we overestimate how much regular users care about the OS they’re using.
Forced restart for software updates
If anything, they’re moving in the opposite direction. Windows Server 2025 is going to support hotpatching, which means that system updates can be applied without needing to reboot. Not sure if the technology will come to consumer Windows though.
Require new CPUs and motherboards / hardware, ignoring the market for old computers.
How long do you expect legacy hardware to be supported for?
I dunno, longer than 6 years, which is about how long it took for Skylake to go from brand new to not being supported by the new version of Windows?
And I honestly can’t think of a time that’s even happened before when you could get 10 running on 10+ year old processors as long as they were powerful enough. And the difference between a Core 2 Duo and a Skylake i7 is vastly more than between the Skylake i7 and the current generation.
The issue is not that the hardware stops getting support, either… It’s that the hardware is expressly and needlessly being blocked long before it’s no longer useful. My old Skylake is now 9 years old and more than capable of running as a moderate power machine on current workloads, other than being forcibly blocked to encourage me to put it in a landfill so I can continue the consumer march for more stuff to feed the corpos.
It’s wasteful. And for the most part, all that’s needed is for the old drivers to be allowed to function. And to make things like TPM 2 be optional, especially considering I don’t think you’re even required to actually use it for Windows 11, just have it.
Interesting… I didn’t realise Skylake isn’t supported. I agree with your comment. I thought people were talking about much older equipment.
TPM 2 has been around since 2015ish and I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows starts relying on it more heavily. A lot of businesses have already required employees to use computers with TPM 2.0 for a long time, and enterprise use is a big focus for Microsoft.
I have some Sandy Bridge systems here running strong as Linux desktops for light work. You know, these 4-core 3,3GHz processors from - hmm - 2014?
Can we commit to only posting about round number percent changes?
No, we will not stop
4.040000000000000000000001!
We could contact that person as a community
Based on a world population of 8 billion, that would be roughly 0.000000000000008% of a person. It’s also not even representable as a 64 bit float so I had to do this math in my head (Calculator just says 0)
So you’re saying that that number keeps going up as I get closer and closer to the actual weekend when I install it as my daily driver?
What’s interesting is that multiple trackers are now saying it’s above 4 percent. Last time something was posted, people questioned the data and where they got their data (which they should). Now there’s multiple sites showing a real increase.
No, we have to post these when it’s the year of the Linux desktop
I have had to do some work on my windows pc and I hate it. I have been away from desktop for a while now and changed to linux for personal one. At work it is all G suite, which does work to its credit, but the windows OS and microsoft cloud documents suck so much. The look and feel is clunky, so clunky. Constantly refreshing and just being shit.
Never forgive forcing outlook.
1980s: Hey guise, computers are now cheap and small enough that you can run an entire system and all your programs on your own machine at home instead of having to dial in to the mainframe!
2010s: No, we’re putting it all back on the servers, you get a thin client.
No technical reason btw, just because “fuck you”.
From a macro economic perspective, (and im not advocating for a conspiracy, just aggregate business interest) they’re dropping energy usage so they can pay less on their electricity bills.
So actually a double fu. get less so they can pay less rent, to provide lesser service.
Because rent seeking is the only tech bubble left.
In theory I guess it provides better security in some ways, but certainly not all over giving you hardware and a VPN. So there’s that. But yeah, it sucks.
I work in email Marketing and Outlook is the worst client, especially desktop. Everything I make has to have accommodations for this shitty inbox
And as a user do I hate it too. It is too many times while I edit an email and click delete that is deletes the email instead… It seems if I click a word and get the spell window does the focus always change to the list of emails… And it also force a spell correction if I click space… I didn’t pick one of the options I just want to edit the word myself!!! And if I scrolldown to remove some parts of the email thread or just want to copy a part won’t it let me if I don’t click twice… and it jumps around…damn I hate it so much. Sorry that I replied to you with all these anger. But I really felt it when I saw yours and ops comment. I hope we one day will at least think it is an ok client to work with
All the different versions as well. Outlook web is decent, desktop is terrible. The Mac version seems to be closer to web, some problems I have are fine in one version of outlook and only appear in another. Why can’t the app just be a container for the web version?
As a service outlook (microsoft mail) sucks, as a web service their page sucks andnisnpoorly laid out and optimised and the new desktop client is atrocious.
They made me change from hotmail outlook, created a hotmail folder for under the new outlook and now I dont get notification for that address on the outlook app. If something gets marked as spam that isnt, marking it not spam sends it to the outlook inbox regardless of intended destination. If I reply to a mail it prioritises outlook despite the mail being sent to hotmail. As a result I cant log into shared files that people gave access to one but not the other.
I wonder what’s on the ‘unknown’
likely content blockers preventing the trackers from working properly and invalid user agents. So i would expect about the same ratio of usage on there as well. Maybe very slightly more Linux since maybe the users are more likely to tinker with their browser configs and install content blockers, but even there Id say its an extremely slim minority of even linux users who do that
StatCounter also sometimes miscounts when new versions of windows or macos come out. At one point (I think at windows 11 release) there was a huge dip in windows 10 users and a huge gain in “unknown” and it was quickly fixed.
Bare Metal, they are injecting Ethernet cable directly into their bloodstream.
In essence Netrunner then?
Case on his Ono-Sendai
That 6% attributed to “unknown” is the one true OS, the only one ordained by the Almighty… Temple OS!
True Temple OS has no networking
It does have networking if you truly believe!
Heretical, you will burn in hell
Based security approach
Amiga.
Netcat, mostly
Sorry, I stopped playing factorio on my work Linux computer. I will play next month to get us back up.
Don’t worry, I’ve been playing plenty of Linux factorio for the last few weeks to make up for it.
Thank you for your service
Man i hope linux becomes more popular
I see multiple posts on reddit everyday asking for advice for migrating to linux. I think linux userbase is increasing a lot since Window’s questionable recall announcement.
And the valve steamdeck But some people install windows on it which defeats it’s linux purpose
Nevertheless, Valve’s work with proton has pretty much crushed the argument that Windows is needed for games. That use to be a major sticking point, preventing people from leaving Windows - but now not so much.
If you play games that requires anti cheat It’s gonna be harder to switch
Almost all anti-cheats work on linux or offer linux integration or builds. It’s the scummy unethical publishers who run the typical games that uses anti-cheat who refuse to pay engineers to make the minimum effort to support linux. Because it would undermine some of their bullshit claims used to manipulate their players. Fortunately for some people like myself, the typical game that requires anti-cheat is not a game they would want to play anyways.
Ohh okay I have never seen a anti cheat that supports linux
A lot of mods are also windows locked too.
Nexus mods is working on a Linux client which is really exciting! Also Steam Workshop works on Linux. This covers a ton of use cases.
Not saying everything is 100% perfection, but it’s easier than ever to switch, and only getting easier.
I imagine “Windows locked mods” would probably also benefit from just disconnecting the internet and keeping it set up just the way one likes it, since MS is gonna drop Win10 soon.
That’s the case with WMR VR headsets. Sadly don’t see those getting cracked to work on Linux any time soon. :(
I just saw the news for Nexus mods like 20 minutes after I posted that. Hopefully it can be integrated well soon.
But yes, over time, things will continue to get better. Even Nvidia finally started working on open drivers for their GPUs.
Oh
Also vr support
Halflife alyx?
There’s some other good ones too, but fair point
I feel like both “people who install windows on the steam deck” and “people asking for advice for migrating to linux on reddit” are just vocal minorities which you encounter on the internet but don’t really influence the Statcounter’s results in a meaningful way. Generally (from my view) it’s the kids who got a steamdeck for xmass and the coders who use ubuntu for work influencing the numbers.
true and the kids want to play their favorite game but they cannot on steam deck or its hard
I am still hoping it will hit 10% market share within my life time. I remember when it was predicted to hit that in 2010, obviously it didn’t happen*. Of course for me personally, the year of the Linux Desktop was 2007 when I was finally able to use it as my main OS at home, I tried it before many times since 2003.
* not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.
I am still hoping it will hit 10% market share within my life time.
Do we really want that?
We have it pretty good right now. I would actually say we’re living in a golden age of desktop Linux: there’s constant innovation, good support, you get to do pretty much everything you need, while flying under the radar.
Linux has won the majority of the industry (servers, mobile etc.) so it’s not like it has anything left to prove.
If it starts getting noticeable on the desktop I fear we’re just gonna get negative attention. Users who take and not contribute, because Windows had taught them to be entitled. Unwanted attention from Microsoft, who I bet are not going to be doing nice things once they start getting paranoid about it.
I really don’t think that large companies like Adobe will care about Linux even at 10% and even if they did, they are a super toxic company nowadays, the least we get to interact with them the better.
There are many games & software with no Linux support, not to mention AC blocked games. Increased marketshare could change a thing or two, at least.
not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.
Does that mean you don’t count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn’t use any GNU stuff.
You can also compile the kernel with LLVM instead of gcc, use musl instead of glibc, and use BSD coreutils instead of GNU coreutils.
Do they use the BSD userland instead? Interesting…
Perhaps the definition isn’t good enough or accurate. What would you call a system that perhaps uses Darwin kernel or Hurd plus GNU user land, or any combo of.
Do they use the BSD userland instead? Interesting…
I think Alpine uses Busybox, but it’s feasible for a Linux distro to use BSD coreutils. Not sure if any do that, though.
not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.Does that mean you don’t count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn’t use any GNU stuff.
not OP, but my guess is that he was referring to android
I assume the proportions of people who spoof their OS is slanted towards Linux
THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
Now you jinxed it
People have jinxed it 20 years in a row
the year of the unknown desktop!
why do we negate chromeos we are 10% at least so there we really are
For starters doesn’t it only run apps from the Google play store?
You can “sideload” apps outside the google store.
For example I’ve been using myinsta instead of IG. It was very easy to download and install.
and what kernel would you say it and android runs? relevant?
This is the format collision discussion that has no solution so far. A tablet that runs windows is counted as Windows. A laptop that runs android does not. Neither does an android cellphone. It all boils down to web browser user agent fuckery. This is why steam’s numbers are more reliable than other sources, they’re direct hardware surveys.
But the point is that a steam deck is not (but in a way it is basically just) a PC. There are tablets than run desktop interfaces and now there are laptops that can be used as tablet. Eventually the artificial mobile vs. PC/desktop/laptop schism will stop making sense.
true, but in this case you can look at the same graph that was linked and see another Linux distro clearly marked that they choose not to treat as one in their headline. seems a little silly to me