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.
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.
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?
Bingo.
Despite what the clickbait headline says, the main barrier to entry is not just knowing what an operating system is but the know-how to go about replacing the one that came with the computer in the first place. The decision over which distro to choose is relatively easy once you’ve got past that initial stage.
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 feel the same way. I’ve been riding the Linux daily driver train for over a decade now. Back when I first made the switch, Proton wasn’t a thing. I could dual boot to play the games that wouldn’t run on Wine but I instead made the decision to only buy new games that were Linux native and if existing games didn’t run on Wine then it was tough bikkies.
But the issue is that most people sadly don’t give a shit. They don’t give any thought at all about sending money to Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. despite the fact that those companies are playing a part in actively degrading the user experience (amongst other things). They don’t think about how they’re screwing over themselves in the long run as well as the younger generations. Most people don’t think much beyond what the advertising tells them to buy, convenience and ease of use.
I wish people made more ethical consumer choices but they just don’t. And that habit won’t change while big business has collectively billion dollar advertising budgets, gets away with monopolising and centralising and has government and regulators in their back pockets.
That’s ok if you look at it that way. But at the end of the day, it’s just a tool like any other. Personally I find it really silly to put any moral questions into it because I don’t believe it’s worth my time to think about it, lose time on silly things and/or sacrifice the quality of my work. I’m not trying to imply anything about Linux, btw, it’s the same for the other ways around. It just feels stupid because it ends up like a political discussion, when it really shouldn’t be. You have the option to use basically anything and choosing to limit yourself over that is just plain stupid imo. You could make the arguments for how they process data, which is a whole other discussion, but then again, there are plenty of workarounds to all of those problems (which is exactly what some people are doing with virtualization, different machines entirely, OS tweaks, etc., which is fine, because they’re benefiting from it). Nothing against FOSS or otherwise, btw, I do agree about the need to support, but there are so many other ways to do it. Just using it isn’t enough, sadly. As the point of this OP is - it’s also market adoption, marketing itself, etc. None of this changes the fact that using certain tool(s) (e.g. gdb) is best done on a certain OS (e.g. a Linux distro) at a given time.
i will agree with this when Linux has 5 to 10% market share just enough to where manufacturers can’t ignore us anymore. The problem will come cause the stuff they ignore us with. Is full featured but garbage drivers with Spyware like crap print drivers with pop-up ads or games with rootkits for drm.
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.
Somewhere between 2000 and 2015 pretty much everyone had a computer, because you needed it for doing all the computer stuff. Nowadays you can do so much on a mobile device that there’s no urgent need to even own a proper computer any more unless you need to do something very specific.
Professionals and hobbyists will continue to need computers in the future, but Joe Average won’t. You can pay your bills using a phone and watch movies on a tablet. Joe doesn’t have a 3D printer, write ISO images on USB sticks, try to recover data from old hard disks, flash LineageOS on an old Android phone, or SSH into a raspberry pi. If he still has an old laptgop tucked away in a drawer, it’s probably been sitting there for years because he hasn’t really needed it for anything.
So true, outside of work I haven’t used a pc/laptop in over 4 years.
I have an android phone and tablet and they serve the majority of my needs perfectly.
That said I’m about to get one of my daughter’s old MacBook airs which is beyond OS updates and am going to put Linux on it to tinker with some things I can’t do on android. Still not sure which OS to go with but am fifty fifty between Ubuntu and Pop_OS.
For me, the biggest reason not to use linux are windows-only apps like CAD software. That software was a must have on my university, and now Im stuck with it lol. I switched to linux anyway, but still struggling to find best workflow between dual boot and windows in VM.
But linux today is so available and friendly. I have POP! OS on my desktop and partner can use it with no problem (windows user). Its so freaking intuitive, much easier to install and use compared to windows IMO. I believe people are not afraid as much as they dont care and microsoft is pushing their OS much more than any other alternative
FreeCAD isn’t the worst and has the ability to output several file formats. But it’s definitely wonky and probably not up to the task if that’s like your actual job or whatever. I don’t know your scenario, but you might check it out if you’re still using CAD. It is free.
But yeah, in general, required software is the big hiccup.
Thx, I did try it. FreeCAD is great, but cant compare with software like Solidworks. Feels like 30 years difference unfortunately. Im afraid Im too old for that, but Im sure future generations will have proper FOSS alternative on Linux. I just try not to use it because I hate dual boot hehe.
There are fow more programs I need, but I can run them easy in VM/vine
I’ve settled on using wsl2 on a windows machine. I run Ubuntu and kali in wsl as virtual machines on my main windows computer. I was an early user of linux and bsd but have found it’s just plain easier to run day to day on windows.
I run both Ubuntu and kali simply because I haven’t been able to make sound work correctly with Ubuntu on wsl but it works great in kali, plus kali has all the pentesting stuff so I can play around with that in my free time.
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.
you only view those as positives because you are not the average user. for the average user those are actually negatives. The average user’s answer to “do you prefer systemd or sysvinit?” would be “why the fuck should I care? I just want something that works. And I want that something to work the same whether it’s on my personal machine or my work machine, or my mom’s.”
If you force the user to have to choose, most times they just won’t. So they choose something that does not offer the choice at all. Other operating systems do not require them to give an honest try at being able to try them.
Your hypothetical user could throw a dart at a list of distros and just install the one it hits.
but how does one ensure that their dart lands in the same spot as their employer’s and their mom’s? consistency is very important for the average user, at odds with us enthusiasts’ joy at being able to change anything.
I am not against linux, (I use arch btw) but I accept the fact that most people don’t find computers as exciting as I do.
This has been discussed many times before. Personally, I think that there is an inherent contridiction between the FOSS ethos and mass appeal.
The way things get adopted en masse is by having limited options and limited changes.
This is why most extremely popular software grows stagnant. The company/group that puts it out doesn’t want to alienate its user base. Think Ebay, Facebook, ios, etc.
Users get pissed off if their software changes in any significant way. Most people don’t care about choice or freedom. They just want to grab a device and have it turn on and do what they tell it.
Look at cell phones. Back in the early 00’s when they started to become common for everybody, think about all the weird and wacky designs you saw. Neon, chrome, bizzare form factors, gimmicks, etc. The paradise of consumer choice. So many brands and styles to choose from. I remember going to high school and seeing all the different kinds of phones that everybody had.
Now days, every phone is a black/grey glass slab. The most drastic differences between them are what shape the bezels are and how the camera lenses are oriented on the back.
Consumers in general don’t care about choice. They are fine choosing between an Apple glass slab or an Android glass slab. This point is proven even more strongly by gen Z, who apparently don’t even care about the few “choices” that Android provides, over 80% of US teens use iphones. Of iphone users, over 30% are gen z, of Android, barely over 10%, three times less
Linux and FOSS in general is all about choice, options, rejecting vendor lock, forking projects and carving out niches for sub-groups of users. A fork for devs, a fork for security concerned folks, a fork for people that liked the way the software looked 10 years ago, a fork for people that don’t agree with the political views of the original devs, etc etc.
I don’t have a problem with that, personally I love it. The extreme consumer freedom and ability to customize is a huge reasons I love FOSS software. But I also recognize that it means we won’t ever be mainstream. Or at the least, if we become mainstream, it will likely be at the cost of much of that freedom.
I am happy with a few percent market share. I don’t need more than that to feel like we are successful. As long as Capitalism is the default system in this world, it will always reward products that generate the most profit, and that will never reward freedom or consumer rights long term.
We ought to inform others as much as we can on an individual basis, friends, family etc. Use FOSS, contribute money, code, documentation, tutorials, and user support. Fight the power and stand against the corpos. Our fight should not be based in the goal of becoming “mainstream,” it should be based in the principles of freedom, empowerment, and inclusion.
I think people also grossly underestimate how much of an affect million dollar advertising budgets have. Apple spends a mint on their advertising, appealing to younger folk and making their products seem cool and fashionable.
A lot of people won’t care about choice when there’s a very limited choice of products being advertised as “must-have”.
Linux does not have a million dollar advertising budget, it doesn’t have huge advertising companies creating slick ad campaigns, it doesn’t have restricted choice and railroading people into false ideas of what’s necessary. And it doesn’t come preinstalled on a majority of devices.
Noone is using windows because it is cool and hip and i doubt microsoft advertises windows. People use windows because they work and do what they want. Maybe they could use ubuntu, but why would they do that? What does ubuntu offer that windows dont?
I’ll tell you why they(including me) dont use linux, because maybe their wifi wont work(or they will have to compile the universe to make it work) or their favourite app or game wont work. And even if you could make a piece of hardware or software work in linux, the performance might be inferior because it will be using generic drivers, instead of the proprietary windows only drivers that the manufacturer has made.
Ultimately, people dont care about open source or privacy enough, to sacrifice their convenience.
No, but the PC’s it comes reinstalled on are.
Linux isn’t for everyone. I still dual boot for damn Adobe products. But as someone who’s used Linux as my daily driver for over a decade and installed many different distros on both my own and other people’s laptops and PC’s, most of what you say happens isn’t the case for most people.
It also doesn’t acknowledge the fact that many things on Windows don’t “just work” and require extra apps, drivers, reg edit or any other number of things that need fiddling with. For example, the Audio Interface for my electric guitar just works in Linux. The kernel already has the driver. This is the case for the majority of the hardware I have connected over the years. On Windows, I have to search out, download and then install the driver.
I talk about people not caring about anything other than what they’re advertised, what’s convenient or what’s easiest for them to use, in another one of my replies in this thread. .
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.
When you’re saying it, it’s actually striking how many Linux users are self taught.
Then again, all my friends the last ten years have known there’s a standing offer for me to install Linux for them and teach them how to use it. Some have in occasionally, especially when their windows computers grew unusable, but generally they’ll use it and be happy with it and then revert back to windows when they eventually buy a new computer and it comes preinstalled.
The exception is my dad, who now actively asks me to install Ubuntu for him whenever he has a new computer. He never asked me to install it on the first place though - I just accidentally broke Windows while trying to set up a dual boot on the home computer back in my early teenage years.
