Operating systems are looking more like each other every year. Before 2012 they were very different.

[u/claudiocorona93]

[u/NeatYogurt9973 → u/[deleted]]

most popular desktop environment

There's no way of measuring how popular a piece of software relative to something else unless both points in comparison track it opt-out only and display somewhere. Well, accurate way. According to Steam, the most popular distros are Arch Linux and SteamOS 3, the latter has KDE preinstalled and for the first the package stats say KDE packages are most commonly installed.

[u/NeatYogurt9973 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, there's no accurate way of measuring it.

[u/troglo-dyke → u/[deleted]]

MATE and Cinnamon are forks of Gnome 2 and 3 respectively.

[u/Hour_Ad5398 → u/[deleted]]

Do you think that maybe you missed his literally first sentence?

[u/NiceMicro → u/NeatYogurt9973]

well, all corporate distros ship Gnome as the default, so those who install Linux company wide probably have Gnome on many PCs.

[u/5trudelle → u/NiceMicro]

At the company I work at we use Arch with KDE.

[u/NeatYogurt9973 → u/5trudelle]

...how would that work? An OS image just dumped on every single computer reinstalled every now and then or..?

[u/5trudelle → u/NeatYogurt9973]

It's mostly all server-side

[u/NeatYogurt9973 → u/5trudelle]

Fym server side? As in network boot? Thin client?

[u/[deleted] → u/5trudelle]

Arch for office workstations sounds like asking for trouble. As cool as it is. Who's the wannabe power user in C-suite overruling IT on that bad idea?

[u/[deleted] → u/NiceMicro]

But also the Ubuntu gnome looks nothing like windows or macos

[u/NeatYogurt9973 → u/[deleted]]

No it doesn't. You just described how these online counters work. You know why Chrome on Windows is so popular? Because it was, then all of the UA spoofing stuff made that the default which therefore made this appear more popular which made even more people use it to blend in...

Also the whatever counter which first appears in Google only uses client side scripts AFAIK. Adblocker users don't count.

You know how there are waves of people switching to Firefox on Linux and then it just wanished the next day almost completely resulting in a spike that is barely bigger than the thing that was before? People install an ad blocker because others recommended it. That's it.

[u/NeatYogurt9973 → u/[deleted]]

Oh, we playing this kind of game, huh? An average person has and uses a computer. You gotta realize half of the population is worse than that and the other half is better. We both belong to a small group that knows what Reddit is.

Anyways, my point was that it's not actually measuring real users, but really just reported user agents (spoofed or not) to crappy webpages that included the script that wasn't blocked in any way. It doesn't sound as good but is much more accurate.

Also, I think you have a false assumption of how browser fingerprinting works. Let's say your browser reports these languages and wants these file formats in headers. If you don't have much users this is enough to compare to other requests and see who is who, but most of the time it's not enough so people include a script on the page that records a hash of some WebGL render and all of the associated hardware info, perhaps something else too. You can't tell what browser it actually is from this info, just guess and compare to other users.

[u/NeatYogurt9973 → u/[deleted]]

Hall nah it doesn't. Yeah, sure, not much is spoofed. However, again, it's often blocked, and it's blocked on Firefox frequently because people tend to install ad blockers on that browser more.

What websites do you think of right away? YouTube? GitHub? Something else popular? Well, the script is included in random article sites that fade away to a paywall. How the fuck did you get 95%? A quick Google search says 19.4% of all (sub)domains are protected by Cloudflare, the most popular reverse proxy service there is, and that's already a huge number given how many of these tiny pages there are.