I’m curious to hear thoughts on this. I agree for the most part, I just wish people would see the benefit of choice and be brave enough to try it out.
“Why dont more people use the linux desktop” its because they don’t care about computers. To most people computers are a tool and they are not interested in what the underlying software is doing as long as they can run a web browser.
Or because Windows comes pre-installed on almost all machines. Many people don’t even know what “operating system” is. It’s just a part of the computer for them.
steam deck proves this. If everyone loved windows so much they would install it on the deck but they don’t. Microsoft pays the PC makers in the states a lot of money to keep Windows Pre-Installed. Even then Hp put our a dev Linux Laptop because Dev’s want a Unix like OS ether Linux or Mac.
Man this is so wrong, I don’t even know where to start.
If everyone loved windows so much they would install it on the deck
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Valve has dedicated millions of dollars to making shit work on Linux so that MS cannot control them.
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Specifically on handhelds, Windows is ass. Because it’s not designed for them. That’s why Valve developed a version of Linux specifically intended for this single device.
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Windows is still installed on like 95% of gaming PCs because “everyone loves it so much”.
Microsoft pays the PC makers in the states a lot of money to keep Windows Pre-Installed.
What? No. MS charges the PC makers to install Windows, not the other way around… Why would they pay them?
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Valve made games “just work” on the Steam Deck. No tweaks, CLI, hacks, or major performance issues. They took away the friction. I hope that in time all games will just work on Linux. When that happens and I can use my gaming peripherals like wheels and pedals I’ll be giving up Windows on my gaming PC.
On the same token - anyone who also knows what an OS is shouldn’t care either. Use the best OS for your job and needs. Reap the benefits of all of the OSs that you can run and switch between them like an army knife. It is the best when all of them complement each other.
For me I dont agree with “Use the best OS for your job and needs” sometimes I am willing to use a less functional product because I believe that the future would be better with more FOSS software. Morally I cant dual boot windows to play the games that dont support linux because then im supporting microsoft and games that support mircosoft.
I’ve always said this to people. I use Windows, Linux, and MacOS. I use whatever best suits what I’m doing and I like that idea. It may end up being 20/70/10, but so what. Why battle a shitty Linux app If you have a good MacOS app. Or maybe your liking that windows app for a certain task.
In reality this is really only something a dev or power user would really do though.
The author is an idiot.
When someone comes to me asking how to get into Linux, they do not need to hear a laundry list of distributions to choose from.
Only techies ask anyone how they “get into Linux”. Say it with me now. “People don’t buy, buy into, get into, install, or use operating systems” They buy fuckin computers. It is perceptibly to virtually all non-techies a feature of the device.
There are a million types of cars but people manage to pick one and buy it same with breakfast cereals or shampoo because they are obligated to make a decision or go hungry, dirty, or walk everywhere.
People don’t particularly like making decisions and they decided what OS they were going to use when they bought the computer and they have no intention of downloading an iso, write it to a USB, figure out how they boot from it, figure out the bios options they need to disable and what works differently than what they are familiar with.
You lost them around step 2 and lost all hope of moving forward unless the prize at the end is something much better than “does everything I used to do but differently”
The success of Chromebooks, android phones, and the steam deck is that it was driven by devices people wanted to use not an OS people wanted to use. If you want to see more Linux use that is the story you need to focus on.
This is one that we can’t just solve by putting computers on the shelf.
Some people have tools that don’t work on Linux natively. If somebody is using and is familiar with Microsoft Excel, there isn’t a straightforward way to install it and FOSS options aren’t the same. The same can be said of Adobe.
Linux as a desktop environment will have to be for enthusiasts for a while longer. Hopefully, somebody gets more feature parity with the existing suites and the transition can just work out of the box.
But Linux when compared to Windows and Mac is a case study of capitalism vs FOSS. We (Linux users) generally think Linux is better and maybe it is, but Microsoft and Apple spent tons of money to make theirs what they are today and we didn’t.
The open source ecosystem by virtue of being free software just doesn’t have those billions of dollars to invest. For office software google docs are sufficient for a whole lot of use cases and easily shareable whereas more complex usage is easily handled by libre office.
Photoshop is legitimately better than alternatives but popular as it is only a tiny fraction of PC users use or need Adobe.
26M vs 2B is approx 1.3% of PCs
I also don’t need to select my car based on its ability to haul thousands of pounds of cargo or its performance on a racetrack either.
If we want photoshop for Linux we need to collectively bankroll it. If not there is plenty of space in the market for computers without photoshop because that is by far the majority of computers.
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Microsoft and Apple spent tons of money to make theirs what they are today and we didn’t
Not personally, but there’s loads of companies that work and contribute to the kernel and all the surrounding software, they give funds, obviously not as huge as Microsoft’s paycheck, but with less I’d say we have achieved way way more in several aspects, application support is entirely on the devs, be it Microsoft (again) or Adobe or what have you, yet we’re able to run alternative suites that are at least an 80% of what those proprietary options offer, for the office suite in particular I think we’re pretty well off with Onlyoffice.
Money, though important, is clearly not a measure of quality in software
My point wasn’t that they spend money on quality. Much of what they spend on is perception and awareness.
Ah then I misunderstood, but what do you mean with that exactly, advertising?
Marketing is a big portion of it. There’s also less obvious versions. Microsoft was busy making deals behind the scenes with OEMs for a long while with the intention of getting Windows to be the default OS in stores. Early OEMs didn’t just wake up and start building for Windows. Bill Gates showed up at there office and convinced them to.
Apple donated a bunch of computers to schools. Many people just believed that it was because they cared about education but really it is an attempt to get kids hooked into the Apple ecosystem early.
Building brand loyalty isn’t just about advertising and it’s not even about making the best product. Early and repetitive access is more important. Advertising and product placement are more about awareness than loyalty. Loyalty is generally exploiting people’s fear of change.
If Lenovo or HP or whatever started selling their notebooks for way cheaper without the windows license on the machine linux would probably get a lot more usage. But they would probably have to put big warnings on that to avoid a big return wave, which would hamper the whole deal.
Actually OEMS get money for including Windows because they include shovelware trials of crap like Norton that is of greater value than the reduced cost of Windows to the big players. If sold at difference in cost the decrapified Linux version would be more expensive not less.
Most people don’t know how to install operating system, even if it’s just pressing next in the installer mostly. The reason Linux is not primary system is that it’s not preinstalled. It has a bit of chicken and egg problem with some support missing due to low user base, and base lowered by that soft missing but that would change in the instant if everybody suddenly bought PC with linux preinstalled.
Even the win mentioned with linux in gaming is basically just that. Linux preinstalled on steam deck.
They’re scared of installing a new operating system. It’s just so weird.
Because Windows or iOS is already loaded when they buy the machine.
This is the only answer, and anybody who doesn’t agree just doesn’t understand users. They just use whatever you give them.
… and by implication, it guarantees that Linux will (almost definitely) never be the world’s desktop. Mainly because there’s no one single company to blackmail.
Android managed it, so can desktop Linux. We just need manufacturers who will ship it as default.
Astra Linux will be Russia’s main desktop if this war continues for another 4 or 5 years. China UOS (Deepin) will be China’s main desktop by 2030 or so if the USA keeps up with the trade war. Lots of countries will adopt Deepin if it’s cheaper and just as stable. Linux will never be the main desktop in the West but we’ll see non US allied countries become Linux countries in the next 20 years.
Imagine a state driven open source distro like deepin in some years.
Highly probable. But considering Microsoft has been subsidized by the US government indirectly for decades I don’t see it being much different except that the GPL license hopefully will allow for the OS to become a common good.
Uhm how is chinese state looking to make profit of Deepin?
What do you mean by make profit of?
I literally don’t think the plethora of choices has anything to do with why Linux is not installed by the masses. The only reason is that Microsoft and Apple are huge market forces with the ability to advertise, make deals with other business partners, pre-install their operating systems onto hardware that’s sold, operate technical support services, and so on. They have completely flooded the market with their stuff.
Linux has these things, too, but nowhere in scale or scope, and with relative industry latecomers to sell it. If Linux were created 10-12 years sooner and companies like Suse, RH, Canonical, System76 were all formed earlier than they were I think we’d see a healthy amount of Linux out in the world, with maybe a few percent higher market share (which would be extremely massive).
Keep in mind that Apple, as a company, rebuilt itself truly not on the technical excellence of Macintosh, but by driving sales of iPods then iPhones.
Apple’s success came from Microsoft’s negligence. Too many people had Windows XP computers at home wrecked with toolbars and spyware and garbage.
And people gladly left for a walled garden platform that locked down everything and didn’t require them to administer their own systems.
The biggest success in the Linux world has been Chromebooks and Android, where Google administers the system for the user.
Most people don’t choose linux because they can’t administer their own system. A system that lets them administer however they want has no appeal to them. They instinctively know they can’t handle that responsibility. They need their hands held.
Because windows is preinstalled on the computer they buy. That is literally it
Yeah. Windows isn’t a choice. It’s what you get if you never question what OS you use.
Yeah no, that’s literally not it. It’s because Windows is the only user-friendly OS that they can install.
The bigger problem is that there’s often no one willing to show you how to use it. I had a friend who managed to picked it up himself, and when I asked him to show me the ropes all I got out of him was “just Google it”. Now, of course that’s how you figure all sorts of things out and an essential skill in itself, but first you need to know what to search for, and if you’re just starting out you’re probably not going to know what that is - or you’ll have more abstract but simple problems like figuring out issues with syntax in the terminal. That kind of thing is really easy for another person who knows to say “no, it’s like this, because of that” but can be very difficult for a person to figure out on their own.
Quite often it seems like people have gone through these trials themselves, but then rather than making it easier for other people and helping them they leave them to face the same challenges all over again from scratch. This is very frustrating, when you know there’s an answer that someone could just give you but it’s not apparent to you, which leads to people throwing in the towel.
The issue isn’t an official Linux distribution, per se (and note: Canonical have wanted to be that for years with their Ubuntu).
The issue is that laptop and desktop retail machines come with Windows. And until that changes, Linux on the desktop will never see more traction.
There is probably only one real way this comes to fruition: a company, like Apple, that engineers their own hardware with full stack integration to their own Linux distribution — and the hardware has to be aesthetically pleasing, reasonably priced (unlike Apple), and with in-person support (a la Apple Store).
The closest to that we have, at least in the United States, is System76. But they do not engineer their systems. They basically cobble together all the parts that are known to work with the Linux kernel, toss them into an outsourced chassis, and sell them at what I would consider somewhat bloated prices.
That being said, I love what System 76 is doing with Pop!_OS, but the name sucks, the software versions will always be lagging behind unless using snap and/or flatpak, gaming on Linux is still an uphill battle despite Proton’s strides, and at the end of the day, the user will actually have to do something at some point on the command line.
What Linux desktop users need to embrace is that it is okay to not be the primary desktop operating system of the world. It is okay that it is relegated to geek enthusiasts, developers, and the like.
There really is nothing wrong with that.
Can we please stop this nonsense already? With Linux on desktop we had two goals:
- hardware support
- software support
We achieved both goals. Since probably 20 years ago I’ve been using Linux exclusively both at work and at home. All my hardware works, all my software works. Why would I care if Linux gets to 20%, 80% or 100% market share? At this point if some companies or game developers don’t support Linux it’s their loss, I will find an alternative. And if some users is still using Windows it’s also their loss. I feel sorry for them but I stopped encouraging people to use Linux years ago. We’re good, our feature is secured, we don’t need to push for more users anymore.
I disagree. I think it’s mostly a combination of baby duck syndrome and the perceived difficulty of gaming (unless you’re a kid who “needs” to play the flavor of the month over-monetized multiplayer trash)
This ignores a bunch of stuff. Also when a lot of non Linux people think Linux the first distro that comes to mind is Ubuntu so there you go, you have your pr distro. Linux in my experience is not easy at all to use. There people that have been on the platform exclusively for 10+ years really don’t understand the modern windows experience. In the 15 years I’ve been using windows I’ve only had to use the command line for rather niche things. Winget is a nice curiosity not a necessity like apt or pacman. In windows shit just works. And 99 percent of the time it doesn’t it’s as easy as right clicking and selecting windows 7 as a compatibility option, and non tech users call you a wizard for knowing how to do that. They get scared when they see a command prompt and I understand it I was like that at one point.
Also everyone is used to using windows. We use it on our schools, we use it on our works, we use it in our libraries. It’s what people know and people are reluctant to swap because why learn something new that’s considerably harder, when what you already have just works. Almost every computer comes with windows pre-installed. For people it’s just plug and play no need to worry about anything. And I belive this is the greatest problem. If there were more devices with Linux out of the box, if school and colleges used Linux instead of windows we would see a dramatic increase in the number of users. But this is going to piss off Microsoft the moment that feel it might injure their bottom line. They want Linux in a leash, a project they can steal from for their own platform, just like github. That’s why they donate so much money to the project and the moment they feel threatened they will stop donations, pay politicians to stop any change and sue people for whatever bullshit reason they come up with
I fully left Windows because things didn’t just work and in my experience they did on Linux.
I don’t find CLI more necessary in Linux than Windows, if I used my package manager GUI then I’d use CLI more in Windows than in Linux
I feel that Linux is better for the average person because their use case is opening a web browser. Viruses and tech support scammers will be less likely to hit them
To the question it’s clickbaiting you to see:
The problem is the lack of a representative version of Linux.
And the response is that Linux is not Windows or OSX. It doesn’t work the same way. The point of 80 gazillion different flavors is that it can be made to be what is wanted or needed. ChromeOS and Android are Linux and I’d argue they both qualify as “desktop” even if Android rocks many phones in mobile mode. If you don’t like sysv init for whatever reason you can find a bunch that don’t use it. Want to install a modern version on a 486? You can with lightweight 32-bit distros, though it’ll be terrible and it means you’re a masochist.
Possibly because OSX is pretty similar under the hood by its nature as a *BSD derivative, and Windows has WSL which has become pretty good from what I’m told. A casual user may simply not encounter the need to install a whole different operating system on bare metal anymore.
But I think the reason, special cases aside, is that they haven’t given it an honest try. It’s not the Duplo of operating systems, to get what you’re after out of it you have to actually try, to learn how. It’s easier to give up and go back to what seems to work based on it being the first thing they saw.
Win wsl is awful.
He’s wrong.
I use Windows because I have Windows software I need to use, whether for work or gaming, and I just want that shit to work with zero effort on my part.
As others have said, most people don’t install operating systems. They just buy a system, likely a laptop and run whatever OS is on it. Hardly any laptops come with Linux preinstalled unless you look pretty hard, or are searching specifically for one.
“When someone comes to me asking how to get into Linux, they do not need to hear a laundry list of distributions to choose from. When they ask, I don’t want to have to say, something akin to, “You could try Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary OS, Zorin OS, or Ubuntu Budgie.””
Ok, so what if I need a car? People will give me a laundry list of car brands to choose from, so I don’t really see that as a valid point. What if I want to buy a pair of shoes? Is there another laundry list? Yes there is.
Just pick something popular, and try it out. If you don’t like it, you’ll have a better idea of the features you want or don’t want in the future.
Well, it’s all about expectations and alternatives. People don’t expect to be overloaded with choices before the OS even boots.
Linux is the only OS on any platform where they have (to make) this choice.
Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, all of these Systems don’t give you a choice between wildly different versions.
Also, the issue extends to after the installation as well. If someone asks me about a Windows issue of medium intensity, I can tell them on the phone how to fix it without having a PC nearby.
Say they ask me how to do something as simple as to install a program from the repository.
Depending on the Linux they are using, they will (or will not) have any one of a few dozen package manager GUIs, which will work wildly different. Even if they don’t use the GUI, they might be using apt, yum, pacman, snap or any other of a few dozen CLI package managers.
And depending on their distro, the package in question can have one of a few dozen different names, or might not be in the repo at all, so that I need to add a ppa or some other form of external repository.
That is a massive issue in everyday use. The only viable thing is for the local family/friend group admin to decide which distro to use and then everyone needs to use that distro or get educated themselves.
For example, I got a lot of experience (~10 years) on Debian-based OSes. Put me on Arch and I have no clue.
The same is not true for e.g. Windows, where I have used every single version extensively (except of Win11).
That description sounds a lot like fixing a car or trying to operate it.
How do I turn on the windshield wipers? Oh that depends on the brand. You need to find that thing that’s usually on the right, but in some cars it’s on the left. Then you need to press, pull, turn or twist it clockwise or counterclockwise depending on stuff…
How do I replace the left headlight? Could be easy, could be a nightmare. Depends on so many things.
