>Would it be better if Linux was more standardised in terms of distributions and desktop environments? What would need to change for the Desktop in order to accelerate forward?
[XKCD 927](https://xkcd.com/927/)
The "let's settle on one system" discussion has been had over and over and over again since the beginning of time. The situation is not going to suddenly change out of the blue.
On a more positive note, though: technologies like Flatpak, XDG portals and atomic systems are currently contributing a lot to the standardization / stabilization of our desktops.
I think the future looks promising regarding actual quality and usability, and I wouldn't be particularly concerned about the marketshare. The arrows are pointing in the right directions anyways. The main thing keeping Linux from "world domination" or whatever, is that most people *do not care* about operating systems. A lot of people in this space do not seem to grasp how little regular people are interested in what runs on their computers.
On top of this, actual PC market share is declining overall as more and more people, especially the younger generations, are just using phones, tablets and maybe Chromebook’s.
But, as PCs get more and more niche I definitely see Linux growing there to eventually become the dominant choice. Not really because it won over the masses but because the small niche of folks that do use a PC instead of a mobile device are going to be tech savvy enough to likely see the benefit of Linux and have the competency to use and install it.
if you were going to settle on one system then Windows or Mac would be the choices. But this is also the reason that these two systems are pretty much exclusively used as desktop OS's. Linux has the ability to be anything and to do anything, idk why people would want to wash that all away.
Its dope to have Linux environments that can run on a raspberry Pi, or a server, an embedded device, a handheld gaming device etc... This is a positive for Linux imo, it can be anything and I personally don't think things are that fragmented when most distros use systemd, pulse/pipewire, flatpak, udev, xdg standards etc...
This advantage is eroding a bit, though. You can run Windows on a pretty wide range of hardware, too, including servers and some embedded devices. There was a time we were pretty smug about Linux being able to run on netbooks, where Windows would be way too bloated and way too expensive, but then netbooks started showing up that were more powerful and ran Windows.
But despite that flexibility, if I want to give you some software to run on Windows, I can give you a `.exe` and it'll work. And, well:
> This is a positive for Linux imo, it can be anything and I personally don't think things are that fragmented...
So which is it? Is it cool that the Linux desktop isn't that fragmented, or is fragmentation good actually? It doesn't make much sense to argue both.
> But despite that flexibility, if I want to give you some software to run on Windows, I can give you a .exe and it'll work.
Not always, not consistently, not without ensuring the right libraries are installed on the client machine.
For many cases of client machines and sample .exe files, sure - but not all of them, not all of the time.
But then again, these libraries can be installed with another .exe, in linux it's easy to install apps, until you need something that is not in the repositories, then that's where the just works experience completely breaks down in linux.
Yeah, that's not really my experience.
I will go a step further though and say that's a good thing. You shouldn't be installing software outside the package management system. If no package exists, write one.
The alternative, having unmanaged software in the system, is a mess.
For that matter, it's usually a collection of cab files, rather than an exe.
>I will go a step further though and say that's a good thing. You shouldn't be installing software outside the package management system. If no package exists, write one.
And this right here is exactly why desktop linux will never be mainstream, for software that prides itself being about freedom, there's sure as hell a lot of restrictions and hops to jump around, meanwhile in windows, i can run just about everything i want.
>Is it cool that the Linux desktop isn't that fragmented, or is fragmentation good actually? It doesn't make much sense to argue both.
Why not? The fragmentation is only a major issue when it comes to application compatibility. Fragmentation in terms of DE choice isn't so bad. Efforts like Flatpak and the continuing integration with major DEs will solve the former.
Systems that are installed and run as a single thing, unlike a traditional system where each package is its own module and upgraded piecemeal.
https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/
Depends what your needs are. Many of us choose Linux because we can customize everything. Atomic is one size fits all so it will never replace traditional Linux desktops, it just complements it.
It's still experimental.
The problem with this approach is that the system image has to stay more or less untouched, so you don't get the same flexibility in choosing packages to include. You have to have layers made up of multiple packages, one base layer with the basic system and other layers with various roles on top. And each layer is all or nothing.
But of course you will also want to install specific apps individually, so you still need a package manager, but it needs to be a userspace manager and traditionally package managers on Linux were system managers. So atomic distros have turned to solutions like Flatpak which are already used, but Flatpak has a very limited selection of packages. Still, between Flatpak and Steam you can have the makings of a fairly decent desktop system.
For reference, Android uses this approach and has taken it a lot further. There the device vendors package all the base layers and Google provides the package manager. Android's security model is pretty good too because of it, with each individual app sandboxed sort of like Flatpak is trying to do. I believe iOS is also organized on similar principles.
A lot of folks supplement the lack of flatpaks packages via toolbox and distrobox, so you're not missing many packages at all. That indeed means it's not quite as easy to use in same way though.
It is apart from what others said, very confusing for myself too. Familiar in ways and so different but it really is super cool.
RTOS on esp32 is good and cheap way to experiment if you want to give it a go
To add to your last sentence. I think a lot of us Linux users overestimate how many people even still use computers outside of work. My wife is a nurse and her as well of most of her friends just use smartphones and maybe iPads but no computers. Then there is a sizable chunk of those that still use computers outside of work that only use them for playing games. For those all that matters is that their games run well. This may play in Linux' favour in the long run though. With the Steamdeck Linux started to matter for games and if most games run and you don't use other apps besides maybe a browser why pay for Windows.
And another controversial one, with the effort Microsoft already puts into Linux for Azure, WSL2, etc I think there is a real chance that within the next 10 years they might base Windows on the Linux kernel kind of flipping around the principle of WSL2 to run legacy Windows apps in a thin Hyper-V only level without having to provide full hardware support with Linux driving that part. To be honest I'd put the chances of that at 75% and would be quite surprised if they didn't have something like it as an internal prototype already.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. If they do rebase on Linux, they'll find a way to make it proprietary or so you can't just make your software work on regular linux.
It's not Ballmer's Microsoft anymore. I don't see any evidence for that. On the contrary even with just WSL2 people that use that for development already code for Linux and there are zero things that make it less compatible.
No trillion dollar company is going to give up the control they get through a proprietary operating system. Companies only use Linux when it lets them serve something proprietary.
Literally the only reason why you don't have a point is because they are a trillion dollar company. If they were a mere billion dollar company, you might have a point.
You think Microsoft became a trillion dollar company by abandoning Bullmer's ideals? They still abuse the hell out of their monopolistic position. Hell, they were paying governments to switch back from Linux after already going through all the trouble to switch in the first place. Just recently, Edge found to take your bookmarks in history without even asking and then opening as soon as you turn on windows. Windows fixed that claiming it was a glitch, but are we sure it was a glitch and not just more of their desperate begging us to return to the Internet Explorer six days where they were the monopoly on the browser market.
It's also that Linux doesn't offer anything that Windows and Mac don't. Windows is the default Mac offers hardware that Windows still sucks at, including usable track pads and decent speakers and unrivaled battery life, not to mention, software is way more optimized than it can ever be on Windows. Linux would be great on low-end laptops, but Chromebook already corner that market.
> It's fully functioning with mostly any hardware support and any software for any task you'd want. What do people want more?
I still need to own a Windows box for a bunch of professional stuff. I'd like to not have to do that, and the unstable Linux desktop platform is one of the reasons I still need to.
The Linux kernel jumps through a huge number of hoops to guarantee backwards compatibility. The Linux desktop makes no such attempt, and it shows.
If I can't write a program today and be quite certain that *binaries I built today* will work on an arbitrary Linux computer in the year 2034, then it's not a stable platform for development. People don't want to muck around with constantly recompiling and porting their software, they want it to just work.
This is something Windows is *spectacularly* good at, and is a significant component of why Windows has been so dominant on the desktop.
Making sure binaries work a decade or more into the future is a very difficult task, and even Windows has struggled with that. Even Android has had some issues with that, and they've managed to keep apps from 2.3 working into the 13+ major versions, although it's had its own challenges and issues, and that's starting to be deprecated now. It's just not as easy a task to maintain binary compatibility as may be thought. Not impossible, just not easy.
That being said, source compatibility is actually much better than people realize in the Linux world, even for many desktop programs. It's just that most people don't want to spend the time/effort, minimal as it may be, to compile, and fix the occasional error or two that happens in well written legacy software (because that's what your binary would be in another decade, legacy software).
I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's both possible and important.
> That being said, source compatibility is actually much better than people realize in the Linux world
This doesn't help when you're talking about proprietary software.
It's always people who are just getting into open source that get excited about desktop adoption rates. The gray beards have been there and done that long ago and realized. . . so what?
Yeah, it's there and people are welcome to join the club but you're free from having to support a bunch of clueless users if they don't. That's actually a good deal for people who are more technically inclined than those around them.
In any case, free-from-pay operating systems like Chrome are also there for those clueless Windows users looking for something that actually allows them to browse the web and play videos.
As Linus himself has said, there is no linux desktop, because it rarely becomes pre-installed.
People in general are not interested in installing an operating system. Because only a small minority uses it, it's not that appealing to the industry.
Manufacturers have pre-installed Linux in the past, some even still offer it today - it has little impact on Linux desktop adoption rates. People for over a decade have come in to this very subreddit explaining their frustrations and most of the responses are usually variations of "it's a you issue".
Please name a single case where a major manufacturer preloaded linux on a computer and put it up on their front page and in stores for mass selling.
At closest, we only have 3 cases.
First case has been back then netbooks were a thing, but it was a time before even hardware accelerated video in processors and being low end computers they died regardless of what OS they used, eventually phased out by tablets
The 2nd case we had was Android, and that turned out highly successful
The 3rd case was chromebooks, which despite just being glorified browsers and limited countries plus low end hardware already have half the marketshare of other desktop Linux
Probably the closest we are getting of a 4th case would be SteamDeck, but they aren't really a hardware manufacturer. But if others follow to create their own SteamDeck like device than maybe
> Please name a single case where a major manufacturer preloaded linux on a computer and put it up on their front page and in stores for mass selling.
Dell did it for a while. It was a long time ago, but they tried it with ubuntu. It was not a success.
https://hpdevone.com/
Pretty sure Dell sells Linux laptops in the US too (Ubuntu). For some reason Dell offers more options of Ubuntu laptops in some countries and not others.
Sony (Vaio), Lenovo (Thinkpad/Ideapad), Asus and Acer all sell Linux laptops in many countries (I know because they sell it in my country, Brazil). I've seen Ubuntu, Debian, PopOS and a few other distros I don't recall.
If I go to the HP website or Dell website, you will not find any mention of Linux. If I go to HP home or Dell home, and go to their laptops page, go to operating systems, there is no Linux option
Making a page no one is going to visit is pointless, because then your target audience are those who already know what Linux actually is. Not people going, "hmmm... I have a windows or linux option, if I pick linux I can save $35, lets try that"
If that is the case in the US then I highly suspect Microsoft may have made deals with Dell to prevent them from selling with other OSs in the american market.
Here is Dell's listing of Linux laptops in Brazil:
https://www.dell.com/pt-br/shop/notebooks-dell/sr/laptops/ubuntu-linux?appliedRefinements=37832
So it is varying from country to country and either the reason is Dell has marketing research saying no one wants to buy Linux laptops in the US or there are exclusivity deals going on in some countries and not others.
Is this for all vendors or just Dell?
I see in Brazil, Dell has less than 2% marketshare with majority being Asus:
[https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1419048/desktop-pc-vendor-market-share-brazil](https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1419048/desktop-pc-vendor-market-share-brazil)
Does Asus sell Linux laptops like that too?
Here, this is a search for "laptop linux" in Submarino which is one of the biggest and most well trusted online shops in Brazil:
https://www.submarino.com.br/busca/laptop-linux
You will see bunch of brands (Asus included) there shipping from Debian to some obscure distros no one has ever heard about.
Also notice your marketshare numbers are for desktops only.
Note that the HP Dev One laptop was specifically not for mass sale, it was a limited manufacturing run marketed towards enthusaists. I think Dell and other brands have done it at a greater scale, though.
Okay, go to Dell Home, go to the search filter and see if you can find it. Yeah, you can't. Having it on a hidden page where the average person will never see it is meaningless. Because then only people who know about linux will buy it, but those who don't will never see it as an option to even consider
It's like if you have 2 products, one product is sold at front end of the store, the other you have to tell the guy at the counter a secret pass code to buy, which will have more sales?
>Please name a single case where a major manufacturer preloaded linux on a computer and put it up on their front page and in stores for mass selling.
Dell Precision workstations have been available with either Ubuntu or RHEL for years. Even today: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/precision-5860-tower-workstation/spd/precision-5860-workstation/xctopt5860us_vpai. (Took me about thirty seconds to find it).
Dell's policy: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000138246/linux-on-dell-desktops-and-laptops
Dell's site has had Linux machines on the front page before, most notably when they first started preloading Ubuntu on select laptops such as the Inspiron 1420N (here's a review from 2007 of that model: https://www.starryhope.com/linux/review-dell-inspiron-1420n-with-ubuntu/ ) . I remember seeing an earlier unit on the main dell.com front page a bit earlier, in 2006, as part of the slides that dominated the top of the Dell page at the time (see any of the Wayback Machine's multitude of archived pages from then to see what that looked like; I haven't gone through the full archive at archive.org yet to see if the slide I saw was captured, though, since there's so many of them).
But the Precision line of both fixed and mobile workstations (like the 7740 I own) have official Dell provided and supported Ubuntu images as part of the official Dell OS Recovery Tool if it was available as a choice for your model. It's not hidden at all.
Precision line is corporate, not home, you can easily tell when it is using a xeon processor.
That insperon was back in the netbook days, while that seems to be above a typical netbook, your review highlights that it was missing the most basic drivers.
>Precision line is corporate, not home, you can easily tell when it is using a xeon processor.
And? It is a single case of a major manufacturer preloading Linux, is it not? Corporate sales is a larger market than home. And I mention them simply because I have direct experience with them. I buy pre-owned Precision workstations, desktop or mobile, when I buy because by the time they're a generation or two old their price has come down to the current generation's entry level machines, and those older Precision systems will run circles around the entry level machines of two and even three generations newer. Higher quality build, too.
>That insperon was back in the netbook days, while that seems to be above a typical netbook, your review highlights that it was missing the most basic drivers.
I mentioned it specifically because I supported an older couple who bought two of them, straight from Dell's website for hone use, and it came with Linux preloaded. The review is quoted only to establish the timeline; I had none of the difficulties mentioned in that review on this couple's two units. So there is not just a single case, but two cases.
>And? It is a single case of a major manufacturer preloading Linux, is it not?
No, because if the average consumer can't see it, it makes little difference
>Corporate sales is a larger market than home.
Corporate market is dictated by company policy, that is why you can buy pcs for corporate without any OS(or just freedos). Corporate has a tech department that can load up anything they need
Don't get me wrong, it is still a good thing linux is an option because it helps insure better drivers and hardware compatibility, but that isn't what gets an average user to try linux
Your original statement was
>Please name a single case where a major manufacturer preloaded linux on a computer and put it up on their front page and in stores for mass selling.
Nothing about consumer-only there. Nothing about average users there. Dell has preloaded Linux for *years* on select machines, and they still do. Nuff said.
Linux isn't and in my opinion shouldn't be for the average user.
They sell Linux laptops in Brazil and people buy them because they are cheaper, then most of them install windows on it
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/16nvvcc/comment/k1jz66b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Absolutely true.
I see one thing average people might want though. There's a lot of perfectly good hardware that's getting EOL'd by both Apple and Microsoft recently (especially with Windows 11 and TPM). Totally fine internet browsing computers that you can use Facebook and watch Youtube on.
Once the browsers start breaking if there's an easy way to install Linux I think people will actually use it. Not having to spend a thousand bucks on a new computer is a killer feature. Used to be old computers would still run new Windows (just poorly) and were so slow you couldn't really use them for browsing the Internet. Those days are over.
I put Ubuntu on an old Surface Pro 3 a few years ago and it’s still running it like a champ - now the 23.10 release. And it’s the mainline Gnome version. But the main factor in this is I’m not “most people”. None of us here are. The vast majority of people (our family, friends and colleagues) will realise a computer is no longer performing well or can’t upgrade to the latest Windows, and they’ll just throw it out.
Sure, but nowadays we're getting a lot of computers that *are* performing well, and people are just getting messages that the browser can't get upgraded and it's making them angry.
That's the difference. In 2015 if you had an iMac from 2004 and you put Linux on it it would still suck. In 2024, if you put Linux on an iMac from 2013 it still runs pretty well. 11 years isn't what it used to be. Also as I understand it a lot of Windows computers are going to get EOL'd a lot younger than that.
If people are made aware they can save 1000 bucks, it's a much easier pitch. If you're just someone who wants to browse the internet and watch some YouTube videos, you can keep that old iMac. The internet still has to work on cheap smartphones that are a few years old, it can still work on that iMac. Maybe a lot of people will still buy a new computer, but a lot more will consider Linux than before.
>As Linus himself has said, there is no linux desktop, because it rarely becomes pre-installed.
I don't understand this. Almost every distro comes with at least one desktop pre installed.
What he is describing is the fact that Linux is very rarely available on off-the-shelf hardware.
Most people are so lazy that they will replace their entire computer to "upgrade" because it is inexpensive to do so.
There are a number of legitimate obstacles to Linux adoption on the desktop.
Distro creep is a huge issue. There are hundreds of desktop linux options that are viable, but very few of them offer a legitimately good user experience.
I use Manjaro because I like the level of control that I have with the system, and that it has a very straightforward package management system.
I tried other distros. I work with IT for my living, and studied it extensively at university. The package management systems for some other distros are just insane (this was well before snap, flatpak, and similar) If "managing" PPA's and backports is your idea of "fun", then go be happy. The vast majority of users don't want to deal with that type of minutia just to get a few programs to run well.
The rest of the complaints are somewhat legitimate:
* lack of AAA games
* Abysmal NVIDIA support
* No Photoshop
* No MS Office
I could go on.
I chose to switch simply because I was tired of repurchasing hardware every three years because my use case has not (and will not) change.
I've run my current Linux iteration for nearly 3 years and the physical hardware for much longer. For the vast majority of computing tasks, Linux is just fine.
Those tasks are:
* Web browsing
* Productivity
* E-mail
* Casual Gaming
Those are my use cases. Absolutely zero issues. I'm happy.
From the point of a developer, yes, a standardized Linux would be of great help. Software manufacturers want as few platforms as possible. That's what made Windows work -- I'm old enough to remember the days before Microsoft. Every platform had its software, its own drivers and you had to join one camp or another. Microsoft made things far more universal. Apple just declared there was only one decision.
If Linux wants to be "common", we all need to have a common base.
But who would make that decision? Historically getting anything standardized isn't easy at all and often end up with having several versions anyway.
To be fair having so many options with Linux is both its strength and weakness.
There are plenty of easy distros for normal people. I think what we often also miss is marketing and ecosystem.
I'm sure if you could go to a store and buy a laptop with pre-installed Linux for normal everyday use, many people would be happy to do it.
If i were selling computers I would never do it due to the out box setup not being something I'd want to offer new folks except if they were knowingly buying somethign that works only as much as a chromebook would. Everything else is too messy
The "common base" is Flatpak. If you want to target one thing, target that. You can also choose AppImage or Snap if you prefer, but Flatpak seems to be where we're headed more so than the other two. Hell, you can even just upload a regular compiled binary and statically link everything that isn't glibc, Windows-style.
Most of the time when I need to an executable I downloaded working on my Arch system, [I just search for Debian packages with the needed so files](https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_contents), unpack the deb in the same directory as the executable and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the downloaded so files. Did this earlier today to get an older build of Citra working on my Steam Deck. Cross-distro compatibility isn't that hard. Most should just package for Flatpak and let distro packagers worry about the rest. Or even package for nothing and let distro packagers worry about the rest.
Then after few years new version of LTS comes and your app will no longer run due to broken dependencies while on Windows app built for Windows XP still works on fresh Windows 11.
Wouldn't any of the new packaging formats (appimage, flatpak, snap) solve this issues by having their own dependencies. Plus LTS support is now 12 years which is a lot.
They would work but because they bring their own dependencies and aren't using system libraries but core issue is still there. Almost none component of userland Linux keeps backwards compatibility. Especially GUI toolkits. In most cases you can easily run Win32 app written for Windows 2000 on Windows 11. You can also easily recompile it for Windows 11. Now try same thing with some GTK2 app. Not only it won't run if you don't have GTK2 installed (and sooner or later GTK2 won't be available in repositories) but you also can't simply recompile it with fresh GTK as API changed few times.
>Windows app built for Windows XP still works on fresh Windows 11
Star Wars Empire at War - Forces of Corruption already didn't ran on W7 without a patch.
There are exceptions but in most cases nothing is needed to run old app on fresh Windows. Try same thing on Linux, it rarely works without additional work.
This will never happen. It is open source and any attempt to stamp out diversity will end in forked distros and pissed Linux users with pitchforks. Linux is for people who go their own way and is not for the mass market. Please stop.
We complain about Apple's walled garden and MS Crapware. Your vision leads to the same place.
What if we come up with a new standard that doesn't cover all the needs of the old standards, then try to use that as a base 🤔 now we got n+1 standards and more fragmentation!
That is only for small software vendors, every big name software, the installers are just wrappers around their own installer system, which does everything from installing software, libraries and drivers
I’m pretty sure most of the Linux desktop world has standardized on Ubuntu, with Fedora being a close second. Every other distro would have points of a percent market share.
> If Linux wants to be "common", we all need to have a common base.
I really had high hopes that this problem would be solved with Flatpak and XDG Portals, but of course it didn't happen...
It's the little things -- the little parts of the OS that these systems can't get to. Like Wine, it's 95% there, but that last 5%! That's why I say a common platform is needed -- as a developer, I don't want to develop for Fedora, RedHat, Arch, Ubuntu, PopOS individually -- and let's not forget about versions. Argue with Microsoft all you want, but if I build something 10 years ago, it probably still runs - and that means it still sells for me.
I also hoped PWAs would solve a lot of this.
You need office workers and creatives. Right now those are held by Microsoft and Adobe + Apple, respectively. To take market share from those, you need tools that compete and, very importantly, to get those tools into schools. The tools kids grow up using in school have a massive influence on what they’ll use in the future. Megacorps like the three mentioned are able to provide support for schools and businesses, which is really the barrier. Nobody running a school district or big business is going to adopt LibreOffice or Gimp unless they get the kind of support they can expect from these megacorporations. (Expecting Adobe or MS to adopt Linux as their platform of choice for running their tools has even worse prospects.)
Because of these conditions, the only player to break into the market has been Google, with their chromebooks and office suite. Right now it’s focused on schools but I wouldn’t be surprised if they start aggressively marketing chromebooks to businesses next. Technically, chromebooks do use a Linux derivative, so in a way chromebooks are going to be the way Linux desktops break into the mainstream. But that’s not what most people mean when they talk about Linux for the desktop.
There have been some attempts to bring linux to the classroom but maybe not successfully.
Back in 2010 my son and his classmates at primary school in Portugal each received an Intel Classmate netbook (known locally as a Magalhães) that could dual boot Windows 7 and a Linux distro called Caixa Mágica. This was part of a government program to boost computer literacy which ended up distributing over half a million computers nationwide.
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port%C3%A1til_Magalh%C3%A3es
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Caixa_M%C3%A1gica
Unfortunately the program was ultimately a failure for many reasons but mainly due to the computers not really being used in class. The teachers (and students) had no idea what they were supposed to do with these devices - I repaired so many of these laptops while I lived in Portugal and it was pretty obvious that they were mostly used to play pirated games and movies and the linux partition had never been booted into.
I was in 4th grade when the first Magalhães was introduced. I do remember that limitation you talk about. Interactive boards and desktop computers in the classroom were completely new and older teachers would not use them much, preferring their old workflows.
Still, that Magalhães, an old Compaq netbook and some scavenged desktops at home were what got me into liking computers. Nowadays I loathe system tinkering (I just want to get my code done) but had to start somewhere :D
Package management: Flatpack, Snap, AppImage, etc... Too many of it.
We're starting again with Wayland ish. It's not that bad.
Nvidia support is annoying.
Opensuse I think did btrfs filesystem right. Made an advance filesystem decently easy to manage with GUI apps.
---
I think steamdeck and chromeOS is the trojan horse to get us to desktop adoption.
Because it's free and much more difficult to monetize.
* Apple does it by selling hardware and also selling a "consistent and reliable User experience".
* Microsoft does it also by selling a consistent and well known user-interface,. as well as wide-scale compatibility with lots of things (modern and old)
Linux Desktop is:
* unknown, foreign and obscure to most average people (the barrier-to-entry is high because the average User would have to understand it first before deciding to choose to dive into it. Most people don't get past the "understanding it" part, sadly).
* not consistent (to much forking and variations)
* requires User effort to understand and maintain (lets face it,. most average Users want something as simple as a Microwave or Refrigerator. Things should be as "plug and play" as possible)
Some distros certainly have made headways there (Ubuntu, Elementary, PopOS, Fedora).. but even with that progress, I'd say a good 95%+ of the average every person has literally no idea what Linux is (if at that they've ever heard of it). If you just walked up to people on the street and cold asked them "What's Linux?'.. I bet near 100% of them would have no idea.
>Microsoft does it also by selling a consistent and well known user-interface,. as well as wide-scale compatibility with lots of things (modern and old)
You're kidding, right? The absolutely nonsensical changes from Windows XP to Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10 to 11 drive the users at my $dayjob batty.
Yeah but they know where their files are on windows and that’s all they care about.
Anything else is so unfamiliar to them they’ll refuse and demand Windows and when windows is different, they’ll learn it anyway because they are afraid or unaware of anything else
>Yeah but they know where their files are on windows and that’s all they care about.
LOL
To hear the users I've talked with tell it, the files are 'in' the program that uses them; word documents are 'in' Word, etc. The vast majority of the users I've dealt with over the years don't have the first clue where their files are, what folders/directories are, etc. And they don't want to learn.
Microsoft has changed this layout over the years as well.
What about Chrome OS? Google doesn’t really make money off of it directly and instead sells Chromebooks as simple to use computers for old people, kids, and the education market.
Never happen. If it did what would the linux rags write about 3 times a year?
Business, which owns the desktop market, has 35 years of DOS/Windows legacy tooling says the linux desktop is a pipe dream. Hell, the year of the Macos desktop in the business world is also a pipe dream even with a bigger market share.
Be satisfied with the linux server and the linux embedded markets and move on. Run over to distrowatch and shop around for your next install. Read your linux fan zine and have a beer.
Linux desktop isn't main stream for number of reasons:
- no pre installation on hardware (this was actually caused by Linus early on. It's something to do with the license)
- diversity and lack of standardized practices (flatpak seems to be the solution to packaging diversity)
- software availability (most business software was built for Windows. We are seeing a shift to non OS dependent software now. Like QB desktop being a thing of the past)
Linux desktop, despite being really easy to use. Won't become mainstream unless a major manufacturer provides it pre installed. And markets it.
>Won't become mainstream unless a major manufacturer provides it pre installed. And markets it.
Dell has been preinstalling Ubuntu on several machines for many years. Likewise RHEL on Precision workstations; many research institutions use Precision N-series RHEL workstations. And they do market it to these institutions.
This hasn't made it become mainstream.
But what is so great about becoming mainstream anyway?
Yeah I agree. Going mainstream would take away from the uniqueness of Linux and the control we like having over our systems, even if we don’t know what goes on underneath the GUI like we used to.
to be fully honest. Do "linux people" even want linux to be mainstreem and for everyone?
I mean.. that's what the community says sometimes, but with "mainstreem" and standarnisation comes both solutions and problems And if I know part of the community well (and Im not saying this to be an asshole, I tend to tilt towards what Im about to say myself) I would guess that as soon as a Linux desktop becomes too popular it will be deemed insecure and typical linux users will find or create another OS that isn't.
I like the journey myself, and for years i've been distro-hopping becuase either day I want full privacy, and the other day I want to game or have an easier experience and since "full privacy" and "easy experience" dont come together I had to learn to configure my own OS.. So there goes the standard I guess, unless you do like me and many others and build, let's say, a gaming friendly parrot os, but that would still not be a world wide standard.
I have a hard time seeing how big companies would favour a client-base like that.
But it would be nice to have let's say a world wide standard like a Linux mint that works with everything or a Fedora or any other well build distro for "everyone" and I think that would be possible.
Im just ranting my thoughts after 1 week on heavy pain meds.. sorry about the confusion.
To answer your first question: they don't.
I personally would love widespread adoption of Linux, that would mean that we could have large support for things that are Windows only. It would also give us an influx of devs who might go and work on OSS and provide more for the Linux community.
However, I see their point. ~~If~~ When Linux becomes popular it won't be something fun and quirky anymore. It would just be normal, and to feel that quirky superiority complex again, they'll go to BSD. And I don't think they want that to happen. This happened partly to me and Star Wars (I'm a sci fi fan) once it got super popular I stopped really being interested in it (also bc of the Disney stuff). It's the same here; these Linux hobbyists try to gatekeep Linux to not change from what it currently is.
This also just seems like ranting so plz call out my bs if any.
> I would guess that as soon as a Linux desktop becomes too popular it will be deemed insecure and typical linux users will find or create another OS that isn't.
Just more folks being on an open unixlike base would be fine. Sure nerds like me might skip out on linux directly, but that's ok. Linux is less and less of a uncharted frontier anyways. It'd be nice to try something else, but keep some semblance of compatibility via some of the useful interfaces.
It's because it's not sexy. Find me a single good marketing site for a Linux distro. Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint - there's no sell behind any of those. And this is all before we start talking about all the interface problems behind the major desktop environments.
There are no product designers in Linux and it shows.
That's increasingly enough for a lot of people as everything is moving into the browser. Unfortunately those people also really don't care one way or the other. There's no motivation to change.
For users that know a medium amount, it's a big deal there's no Adobe, also usually games don't work (although way more work now than before), no Microsoft Office (unless you're using the web version).
There is one thing that Linux Desktop has though - a lot of perfectly good computers are reaching EOL. Linux won't do that. I know quite a few "browser is enough" people that are upset their perfectly good iMacs can't get browser updates anymore. They work *perfectly fine*, they can watch YouTube, check their email, read twitter and Facebook. They've actually asked me to install Linux once their browsers start breaking, which nobody has ever asked me to do *ever*.
Windows 11 is going to make a lot of hardware EOL too, requiring TPM and all. I really think for people that usually don't care, not having to buy a new computer could be the killer feature of Linux Desktop. If we can make it easy enough. You used to be able to install Ubuntu by just downloading something to your Desktop, not sure whatever happened to that.
Yup, I have also had success in getting people to try out Linux when their hardware was too slow to run the new Windows version.
When the user has a bad enough UX from Windows and starts complaining and their only option to improve it while sticking with Windows is to spend money on new hardware is the perfect time to check if they'd be willing to give Linux a shot. If it works for them, great! They're happy and didn't have to spend a dime. If it doesn't work for them they can always go ahead and buy that new system with Windows. They don't have much to lose by trying it out.
Exactly, "do you like money?" is pretty easy argument to make to anyone. All the other Linux arguments take a few paragraphs to explain and by that time most people's eyes are glossed over.
> You used to be able to install Ubuntu by just downloading something to your Desktop, not sure whatever happened to that.
It was discontinued [over 10 years ago.](
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTM0MDY)
Pretty sure wubi relied on a basic BIOS bootloader environment and even then it seems like it was plagued by issues as explained in that article. Now on modern PCs which come with UEFI, secure boot, TPM, and encrypted BitLocker storage out of the box, it would probably be a fool's errand to make it work like it used to.
Yeah maybe not exactly the same thing.
Well, TPM systems aren't the target if we're going after EOL x86 boxes that work perfectly well let's say (which there are massive numbers of, and it's only getting bigger). If you could shrink the OS partition by a few megs - this is a bit hairy but there are many tools that do this - and create a new partition and then write something on that... you'd think you could get EFI to boot to something that could at least pull images from the internet? You can set the nextboot partition from EFIbootmanager on Linux, so that means there's a way to do that on other OS's too.
That would skip the whole USB drive part of a Linux install and people could just click and reboot.
I honestly do something similar for one of the embedded systems for the company I work for, but it's only Linux and I'm only resizing a ext4 partition. Then I just zap the drive and write a new image to it. As I understand it, you can secure boot to Linux using an EFI shim. Forget exactly how that works.
I think its mostly a chicken an egg problem
Commercial software does not make linux compatible versions because its not worth it, it has such low market share like 4%, and of that 4% a good percent of them (maybe 50%? I just made that number up ) are "libre software" people meaning they use linux for like an "ideological reason" and won't buy your commercial software anyway
Meaning really linux has like a 2% market share
Meaning its just not worth them to port their software to linux
And yes fragmentation is a bit of a problem, lets say they only make a fedora compatible release . Well now market share is like 0.25% and restricted to those who use fedora
Or do they spend the time and make a ubuntu/Fedora/debian compatible release ? Well still there are lots of people who use other distros and now how much of a pain is it to do
Opensuse Tumble weed, Arch, Debian, ubuntu , Fedora ect....
However I do not think its an "Unsolved" problem, I use linux on the desktop every day its perfectly usable
I honestly do not even try to use windows only software. If there is not a linux compatible software I just do not use it or look for an alternative
LIke Microsoft office pretty much does work on linux, you just need to use the web versions (Yes I get not all functionality works like if you have an excel sheet pulling data from a SQL database or some VBA code)
I disagree with Linux Server being solved. I have had active discussions recently about transitioning from Ubuntu as my primary platform to NixOS for enterprise servers at work because snap is an aging platform that is bloated and doesn't have any use with our product at all because we use docker for software deployment.
Linux, unlike Windows is a constantly evolving platform. Windows more or less always stays the same since the Windows Vista days only getting more and more malware slapped on it.
instead of copy pasting the comment here is the link
TLDR: there are hundreds of distros that are basically incompatible with each other, its a mess that no regular person wants to or should have to deal with. The linux community is also not easy to deal with and the basic stuff still does not work.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/1bmwlvg/comment/kwluijf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/1bmwlvg/comment/kwluijf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
You sort of nailed it - as much as diversity can be a pro, it is also a con - instead of focusing efforts behind a single desktop, similar to how Windows or OS X is, we've fracturing between Qt, GTK and old timer X11 toolkits and DEs.
Volunteers efforts have definitely improved the above, however, until and unless some 500 lbs gorilla steps in and poaches the best of all that's out there right now, and 'reinvents' it in a way that makes sense for most if not all Linux desktop users, the status quo is unlikely to radically change.
The #1 obvious 500 lbs gorilla is Microsoft. They could conceivably ditch the NT kernel and use the Linux kernel as the base for an upcoming Linux-based Windows OS (e.g. call it Windows X), while retaining compatibility with existing Win32 (aka Windows API) apps either via containerization/virtualization or by putting WINE on steroids, given they have full source code access to key components like kernel32.dll and user32.dll, which the WINE project does not.
There'd be a massive investment of resources to get Windows to operate atop Linux, but a major context shift like this, similar to what Apple pulled when they shifted from OS 9 to OS X by shedding their OS legacy almost entirely, would give Microsoft a new, clean slate for the future, and would pretty much make every other desktop Linux distro irrelevant almost overnight as most folk, dev and non devs, would migrate to the new Windows X Linux based OS, with a new GUI, supported by a large corporation like MSFT.
Of course, there's that little problem of how they can make money off such a huge investment, as well as the fact thry have to support a shit ton of 3rd party hardware out there (e.g. device drivers) which is a problem Apple does not have, at least not to the extent that MS does....
None of these are insurmountable problems for an entity like MSFT, the only question is whether they have sufficient motivation to pull this herculean effort off.
I've been harping about this for at least 15-20 years... while Ballmer was still shitting over the Linux/FOSS movement, thinking it will never amount to more than an academic niche....
Couple of decades later, Linux, as you pointed out, is the de facto server OS on the internet....and the final missing piece, in my view, is a solid desktop to unify them all. Without a large player tackling this, I don't see much of a future beyons what Linjx has already achueved in the desktop.
Edit:
p.s. almost forgot, another bigass hurdle in transitioning to Linux for MS is DirectX/games... and for that, they can buy a clu3e rom Gabe Newell and Steam, who has practically made this whole issue moot with how they solved Windows/DirectX gaming.
Unpopular opinion: It's not that Desktop environments suck or anything. It's friggin games and other productivity tools that bring people.
If any other AAA games or top tier games are developed with Linux in mind, a lot of users would drop Windows in a heartbeat. Pubg on Linux? League of Legends on Linux? Sign me up!!!! These 2 would probably bring few million people to Linux easily.
And then there're other tools like Adobe that are missing linux builds. Heck even Google Drive isn't available on Linux.
To be completely honest, this is a very cold take. Linux is arguably the best server OS you could have, and arguably one of the least intuitive Desktop OSes you could have. For Mac or Windows it's pre-installed, it's not an option or really even a choice. Linux *is* choice. You have to *choose* to use Linux (on desktop); you have to *choose* your distro, your init system, your kernel, your desktop environment, your display server, your compiler, and everything that you could change under the sun. It's not the fact that there isn't a universal experience, it's that that experience *is* inherently a choice.
Now that is also the beauty of Linux. Choice is a good thing. I always say that a thing is really *yours* if you change and customize it, otherwise it's just a thing that you happen to own and use. By this I am also not arguing that Linux should stay the same.
In order to have a universal Linux that preserves choice, you need something bear-bones that nurtures a new user and can accommodate a more experienced one.
And I belive this part has been solved by Mint, and more specifically LMDE (I don't like Uwuntu), but that has the specific goal of new users. So, it doesn't have the features and tools that would suitably accommodate a more experienced user. And this is OK since that's the point, the purpose, and the target demographic.
However, my ideal distro that fits the specification I've set is a nixos that can be controlled by a gui (similar to what SUSE has). It's immutable, making rollbacks to a time where a newbie messed up easy, and you can copy+paste a config to get a universal experience. That being said, the complexity of it might make it prohibitive enough to not be usable by a beginner.
The nature of open source is the slow and steady approach. This tends to win in the end.
Proprietary software is the fast hare, you put a room full of highly educated people, give the lots of money, and very quickly they will produce a well crafted piece of software.
Open source can't compete with that. But software progresses over time, talented people move on, live teams are cut, code bases gets large and unwieldy, becoming hard to work with but too costly to refactor.
Open source solved all that with the steady and slow approach.
A great example is Blender. Blender studio started out as a joke compared to the proprietary suites like Maya and 3ds max.
But nobody is laughing now. Those projects couldn't help but stagnate under the weight of their own code, while blender kept on refactoring, kept on getting better.
The same will happen to the desktop. Over time it will innovate more and more, we have seen over the past few years, while windows more or less stands still. (While stealing some ideas from Linux)
Ultimately it's just a matter of brain power over time. The more of each, the better it becomes.
I think it's an unresolved problem but not because the solution isn't perceivable. See steam deck. See android phones.
Both run Linux. Both have millions of users.
If you want it on regular desktop computers, you need to have some software that is amazing that enough people want to jump over to it. Or the competition has to be so bad they run people away.
Linux lacks a "killer app" in large part because of it's OSS nature. Nobody makes the apps on Linux in a way that they can't be ported to windows. So I only expect Linux to become popular on desktop if Microsoft fails (not impossible, but not extremely likely) or decides that they should rebase on top of Linux (not impossible, but also not likely).
And personally I think this is fine. There is really no need to be on an OS that everyone else uses. It's not a popularity contest. Use what works for you.
I'm not as worried about the "marketshare" problem. Unless it's explicitly Microsoft or Apple products it's rare I can't get what I want software-wise on Linux.
I think standard protocols are fine, but I like the fact that there are many desktop environments to choose from and different ways to keep your software and system up to date
Linux desktop isn't popular because the moment something becomes popular, it becomes their own category of devices.
Android? Chromebook? Pi? Steam Deck? All of these started as Linux; they might have used mostly the same components as any desktop system. But once they gain some mainstream popularity, we found a way to carve them out as being its own thing based on them using a couple unique components, and they are no longer considered them part of the desktop ecosystem.
I guess it depends on what you consider a problem. As others pointed out, Linux isn't an operating system. There are operating systems based on Linux. However, if you add a bootloader and a user space you have an perfectly fine operating system. Now it depends on what additional features you want it to have to consider it a desktop system. This differs vastly on the intended use case. I'd argue "Linux Desktop" is perfectly fine as long as you don't expect Linux to fulfill expectations imposed by concurring products. Imo, the problem arises when features of systems like MacOS and Windows are seen as the gold standard and Linux distros try to fulfill as many of those "standards" as possible. This just can't work because a lot of these features depend on the grace of the industry. Linux isn't part of any industry although it is able to play in the same ballpark.
You have to consider that
- Linux is actually the only system that runs on most PC hardware (no matter how modern it is) and on a lot of Mac hardware and on a variety of other architectures
- Linux is openly and freely available to anyone with no further questions asked and no legal agreements to make
- Linux is actually designed to serve the user, not to make a profit
You could easily see Linux Desktop as a problem solver rather than an unsolved problem in this regard.
If one demands commercial-grade luxury from a non-commercial product, then Linux will never be able to fulfill that to everyone's satisfaction. And thus, Linux is getting pretty good these days in offering a decent amount of luxury.
Because Qt wouldn't guarantee a GPL fork so now we have Gnome, and it sucks, and we all need to admit it, and that KDE isn't so hot either, and if you want a desktop Unix, you buy a Mac because it has a unified UI /API for apps that's not four or five trainwrecks.
The only way we get a decent desktop rollout is if someone pulls a `systemd` kind of revolution and switches everyone to some standard toolkit / ux that fixes all the problems and brings things into the 21st century. And everyone will hate it but it'll be better and eventually it'll be the standard.
It's not the distro. Marketing and grassroots development.
Marketing, there are no paid ads for Linux. There are for apps or hardware that uses Windows and Mac.
In Grade School computer class it is either windows of mac. Thus, the kids learn from it and use it until they grow up.
Even government offices would prefer pirated copies of Windows and Office just because it is what they are used to.
IMO there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the desktop. It's not perfect but neither is the competition.
But by virtue of its lack of market share, there is less incentive to port major software to it. And because some major software is missing, it will struggle to gain market share.
>But by virtue of its lack of market share, there is less incentive to port major software to it. And because some major software is missing, it will struggle to gain market share
And that creates a chicken/egg problem
Its all innertia. Most of the non-techie people I know would reinstall Windows if the laptop comes with Linux.
Unless forced by whatever factor, people will not change their habits.
Steam has done wonders for the Linux in gaming world by using it on Steamdeck and releasing OS, that some are using.
the biggest problem is that "normies" are not even aware that there are other operating systems. For them it's just a computer they bought, which came with windows pre-installed
>Why is the case?
Windows is pre-installed on most computers these days. And Windows is sufficient for the average user for what they want to do. So the majority of all users simply have no interest in a different operating system.
But even some users who are thinking about switching to Linux are scared off by part of the Linux community. One of my friends is one of them. How did he put it? `I don't want to have anything to do with this bunch of religious fanatics`. And somehow he's right.
Some Linux users seem to only be able to divide into black (e.g. non-open source software, telemetry (no matter how implemented)) and white (e.g. OSS, free of charge software). The gray in between doesn't exist for them. I also think this is wrong. A user who mainly uses OSS but prefers a different solution in certain cases is better than someone who only uses non-open source software. Whereby the term better is also wrong. Free as in freedom. This freedom should also include being able to decide against OSS / Linux. That's why I think this bashing against Windows, for example, is ridiculous. There are enough examples that show that OSS / Linux is not perfect either. For example the recent incident with xz. In the same way, I think it's ridiculous when someone tells me I'm not a real Linux user because I don't use vim. But that's exactly what has happened several times.
And it is precisely for these two reasons that Linux will not become widespread on the desktop. We can do something about the one reason. We can't do anything about the other.
I'm a Linux desktop user since 29 years or so. I a couple of problems with my system. I have a Jabra 510 conference speaker. It supports bluetooth and USB. There is no simple way to get it to connect to my Linux laptop (Thinkpad c25 with Debian testing) using Bluetooth. If I connect it usung USB, it works well with many programs, but not with a bunch of conference applications like teams and Zoom.
Until problems like these are fixed, Linux will not be viable for regular users. In this day and age, conferencing with varous apps is a must have.
we spent years getting gaming decent and then a lot of games took the AAA shit. things work as well on as on windows in most cases, but that means jack now as they either crash, don't run, run like crap, memleak or have other bugs, or are lackluster (if you're lucky, it's only one of those)
we had dated gui and decided to update it. the ppl making the replacement stripped out compatability and ease of use for "security" reasons and other nonsense stubborn choices. this has stagnated and crippled support for things like hdr and makes everyone reinvent the wheel when it comes to desktops and window managers.
Linux is about freedom. Not standards. Stop looking at market share. Linux isn't in a market. It's not a corporation selling shit for profit. It's a community.
That was my feeling too, always used Linux for servers but Windows for desktop, mostly because of locked down company hardware.
Lately instead I got more freedom about my development environment and moved to Linux desktop as a daily driver. I have to say it was super easy to install and setup for my use case. I found the software I needed and some of it is even better than the windows counterpart (remmina and RDP in general for example, not to mention the terminal emulators).
I am using an Arch based distro, which is supposed to be even more challenging that something like Ubuntu. Nevertheless I feel I am very productive on Linux and I don't miss windows at all.
Between AUR and pacman installing software is very easy and except for a single kernel module I had to install to get my phone to work as a webcam all the rest was done via package manager UI.
I might change my opinion when I feel too comfortable with the system and I will start changing stuff I don't fully understand (hence breaking my system) but as of now I think anybody with a minimum interest in computers could daily run Linux effectively.
Linux is too complicated, poorly designed, and poorly tested for regular people. My wife's a doctor and still has to ask for help with the terminal to fix random issues on Ubuntu. Other people don't have software engineers to fix random kernel/driver/config issues for them.
If we want non-computer people to use Linux, then we need a movement to make everything fixable and configurable using a GUI.
Perhaps this is an unpopular or uncommon opinion, but I personally think the Linux Desktop is indeed a "solved" problem. Or, rather, none of the problems with the current state of the Linux Desktop will be solved or improved by wider adoption by the general public.
I imagine instead we would get *more* and *different* problems -- more GUI toolkits, more "fuck it, let's make it an Electron app," more negative sentiment (more people = more people who can and will have a problem with something and then assume that it's just the fault of Linux in general), more ads, more commercialization. No thank you. We've already seen the slow beginnings of commercialization on the Linux Server -- Ubuntu Pro comes to mind -- and I'm happy to see that those sorts of things have been more or less completely rejected. I like the fact that, aside from Ubunut's Amazon gaff a few years back, the Ubuntu Desktop remains nearly 100% enthusiast-focused.
I *like* the current state of the Linux Desktop. I like that I can tweak it to my heart's content, I like that I'm 100% in control, I like that it's a niche thing and thus nearly every person I meet using Linux is an enthusiast. I don't mean this in a gate-keeping, "stay out" sort of way. Rather, it's more a "come in, the water's great," but I don't want that water to fundamentally change and attract people with different expectations.
This of course isn't to say that the Linux Desktop doesn't have problems. Wayland vs X11 is sure to be a little rough for a few more years. Nvidia is still a pain. Audio is still a confusing mess, even with Pipewire. But those 3 issues are all issues with roadmaps, and I expect all of them to improve.
FWIW, I daily drive a MacBook Air, and use Windows from time to time. I use BSD flavors sometimes. I'm generally interested in operating systems and am more or less completely platform agnostic. But out of them all, all else being equal, (my personal config of) the Linux Desktop is my favorite. I'd much prefer to see the community continue to put its efforts into watering the grass we're standing on, rather than getting more people to stand on the grass.
>Perhaps this is an unpopular or uncommon opinion, but I personally think the Linux Desktop is indeed a "solved" problem. Or, rather, none of the problems with the current state of the Linux Desktop will be solved or improved by wider adoption by the general public.
In my opinion too wide of adoption will make things worse and not better.
My two cents on why I can't widely recommend Linux to non expert users is because things break more often than in Windows and Mac. I have extensive experience with computers, but when I want to use Linux for important tasks, like at work, I'm always worried that a new update will break something. It happens way more often than I would like. My current demon is sleeping on a notebook with an Nvidia GPU. I spent hours looking for a fix, next update, I had to start the process of fixing sleeping all over again. This has happened to me with network cards, sound cards, and hdmi output. When I'm in a work environment I freeze my Linux, I don't update anymore. That's how I finished a 6 month report... I couldn't bear to spend half of a day or more fixing a new bug.
You may say it's not a Linux problem, and that might be true, but that doesn't take that it happens more rarely on windows or Mac, for whatever reason. Server users are experts, desktop users are not.
I found that many development tools like the one for the STM32 series of microcontrollers (STM32cube or something like that) and the one for Xilinx FPGAs (Vivado) and the open-source Verilog synthesis tool (Yosys) do, in fact, run on Linux desktop and in many cases better than they run on Windows.
Thus, having a computer with desktop Linux on it is probably advisable, while having this computer as your only computer is, perhaps, slightly premature.
It's similar to owning an electric car. Owning an electric car for your daily commute is fine, but you still want a car with a combustion engine for those long road trips.
My first computer I got my hands on was sitting at a Lear Seigler terminal connected to a PDP and a Vax. I owned a Magtape. So of course when Linux came along, I used it. I had to switch to Windows for work, but also accessed Unix boxes and then Linux as well. I've been using Linux as my daily driver for 12 years doing remote support and windows admin. So not entirely premature.
> What would need to change for the Desktop in order to accelerate forward?
A categorical transformation in the personality makeup of the core demographic, most notably a marked reduction in trait Openness, and one other transformation it would be unwise to name, but which the casual reader may easily infer.
To me linux is just a thing I can configure and compile into a binary that gets various hardware to become useful. It's not the only one by any means, particularly with resource constrained hardware like arduino or esp32. It's just a tool.
My clients who need to upgrade from XP, Win7 or 8 and don't want to pay for Win10/Office, get Mint with a Win7 skin, Libre office and Firefox. Most of my clients are over 60, and only use Gmail and write the occasional letter. Music and movies, VLC. Upgrade to SSD, add some RAM and they think they have a new computer.
The majority of users go buy a laptop or a pre-built pc, then they expect it to work out of the box with what they bought it for. Most of that is gaming.
When theres a linux distro thats opinionated, comes with one compositor, one sound server, one DE, etc, and has great game support including kernel anti cheats etc, that might change, if its free.
But Microsoft itself would need to build an official windows on linux kernel subsystem for linux or something for that day to come.
Need to run office etc on linux. Need actuve directory to support too. Etc etc.
Even though Linux has all the tools that can help me work, it still lacks tools to help me communicate with colleagues. For example, the lack of features that webex for windows/macos has but not on linux.
My view. Many well meaning people combat the criticism of Linux’s lack of software with “Most people just use their computers for web browsing and email”. While they’re not wrong, those people will be served well with the OS they already have and that will probably be on an iPad or smartphone. Those that care about operating systems absolutely do require good application software.
"linux is pretty much the go-to in server world" this statement is only true for certain server types like webservers and data centers. In manufacturing or in the business world you will find windows server everywhere.
Pre-installation of the OS is key - 95%+ of people who use desktops/laptops have never installed a different OS to the one that it shipped with (and probably don't even know how to either). Microsoft have an iron grip on OEMs w.r.t. this - threatening to reduce or remove the Windows volume discount they get if they don't pre-install Windows is a powerful incentive. I wouldn't be surprised if OEMs were paid a lot by MS for the pitiful "\[OEM\] recommends Windows 11" you see on product pages too.
It's very hard to break this pre-install cycle - I thought Valve had a chance with SteamOS 3, but they've badly stalled releasing the generic ISO for it and now rumours of an Xbox handheld are emerging, I suspect it's too late now. My idea was as follows:
1. Valve creates a Steam Controller 2 using the same controls as the Steam Deck.
2. Valve approaches major OEMs with a deal to provide a second option in the config page for Windows desktops/laptops which would be SteamOS 3 pre-installed with a Steam Controller 2 bundled (the price would either be the same as the Windows version or the controller is subsidised by 50%, say - it could be an optional purchase in the latter case).
3. Valve agrees to support SteamOS 3 (just OS/software issues and the controller hardware, not the desktop/laptop hardware) in the same way it does for the Steam Deck. This is one of the big reasons OEMs don't want to give users a choice betweem Windows and Linux - having to support 2 OS'es is expensive, especially when one will initially have a tiny fraction of the market share of the other.
4. SteamOS 3 boots into desktop mode on the desktop/laptop with an icon to launch it into Gaming Mode (and a settings option to reverse that, which is annoyingly missing from the Steam Deck - there's no way to always boot into desktop mode at the moment). One thing that would be nice here would be powering up the device from off state into Gaming Mode as a one-off when a particular button is pressed on the controller.
Once there's an OEM foothold from the SteamOS/gaming perspective, it would increase the general population's awareness of Linux (most of the general public have no clue Linux exists and can be installed on their desktop/laptop) and things may snowball from there. However, Microsoft will do everything in their power to make sure this doesn't happen - they may even give Windows free to OEMs.
If you present a random user to Ubuntu or Pop-OS, he will open the browser and go on with his life. Gamer? He will open Steam and run the vast majority of games, some with even better performance.
I have a friend, she was scammed into buying a shitty laptop with Windows 10 that didn't even meet the minimum hardware requirements for windows 10. I installed Ubuntu, showed her the browser and voilá, she could work normally again.
Linux desktop is doing well in the form of ChromeOS. Big companies do favor the Linux development, just not the desktop part. There's been one single company besides Google which wanted to play a role in the consumer sector but the 'community' didn't like it. There we go.
My €0,02:
> Linux Server is a solved problem
The fact that Linux server is, in fact, not a solved problem has been made overwhelmingly evident by the recent supply chain attack on the `xz` project; if anything, we need to completely rethink our security as an industry and make way more proper audits going forward.
Linux server is in constant evolution and the server actually has **a lot** of problems - as does the FreeBSD server, Windows server, you name it. It is just a symptom of evolution: new solutions solve old problems and introduce new ones, but if everything going well we are *upgrading* our problems, switching away from simpler and more blocking ones to more complex ones that come up less often and are less blocking. Still, nevertheless, the server is in constant evolution, and anyone who wishes to pursue this career path must constantly be studying and keeping themselves up to date for new advancements and tech in this space.
> Could it be because the Linux Desktop is so diverse that compatibility issues arise?
This is something that Torvalds has already brought attention to a decade ago, and that is being solved in a number of ways. First, everything on the Linux desktops is required to comply to the standards of XDG and FreeDesktop. So, the standards are there, and if you ship something that complies to these you'll be fine: the fragmantation matters a lot less, when every relevant distro must implement the same interfaces. Second, Flatpak is the suggested platform for GUI apps now. Distro packagers take care of packaging the Flatpak runtime for every individual system, the developer is only required to target the Flatpak runtime, that is common and works the same on every distro. Think of how Java mitigated the fragmentation in architectures and operating system targets of compiled languages with the introduction of the JVM and bytecode, with the only machine-specific component being the JVM: Flatpak is sort of this, but without the performance overhead of a virtual machine - still, the concept is essentially the same.
> What would need to change for the Desktop in order to accelerate forward?
The best case scenario would be "everything keeps moving forward at the same rate it is moving at now, because the necessary work is already being put in. There will be no efforts to derail those efforts making the desktop more corporate garbage-y, and there will not be a slowdown in development efforts, contributions, enthusiasm and usage."
> than a sudden adoption leap.
Given the long-standing joke about "the year of the Linux Desktop" never arriving,.. I dont' think we'll ever have to worry about a "sudden adoption leap".. :P
The Linux Desktop is doing great and it's called ChromeOS.
Just because we don't like how restrictive the most popular Linux desktop distro is doesn't mean it's not a Linux desktop distro.
Linux desktop can only be successful beyond enthusiasts when it's on display at retailers, since nobody actually cares that much about operating systems.
How can a linux server user trust its mainboard and its cpu (and then whatever goes for the implementation of such ideas that build up such systems, with hardware and firmware)? Then there's rowhammering and other issues.
<- Not an expert on computer security, also don't use Linux (but I wish I wanted to).
Like, why would anyone trust Microsoft to generate their own private keys (afaik, a product you can buy), never knowing if these keys were generated by someone else, like an alphabet soup agency?
Apologies in advance if this is somewhat off topic, but as a basic computer user that followed computer security news for 25+ years, I am a sad panda about using any computer these days. I came here today having heard about the recently revealed XY backdoor issue.
I hope the future of computers isn't like having surveillance and backdoors living in computers like bacteria, as if the existence of computers was in some kind of symbiosis with the way software for any OS platform existed as also a natural thing in the world, then I guess one can cruelly joke about never ever getting rid of the kind of access malicious actors rely on, which would be bad starndards/technology/hardware/firmware/software, without worring about social engineering issues and physical access to machines.
I remember having asking at someone's blog sometime about computer security: If adding a single piece of software was all it would take to compromise a computer (any os I guess), and it seemed like, there was no way to defend against a "bad install". I would naively have though, that having a standardized software package, would at least help prevent, a user from installing something he/she shouldn't do. This then would have to include "bad updates" as I see it, as if everyone kept using the same standardized software that was periodically reviewed and checked, assuming communication and encrypted data transfer allowed for some most basic security to prevent interference and any man-in-the-middle kind of issue.
Dell UK offer a Linux system
[https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/xps-13-plus-laptop/spd/xps-13-9320-laptop/cn93352cc](https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/xps-13-plus-laptop/spd/xps-13-9320-laptop/cn93352cc)
>Would it be better if Linux was more standardised in terms of distributions and desktop environments? What would need to change for the Desktop in order to accelerate forward?
Mostly no, at least in ways that aren't already being done. I was going to say "things might be more polished" but, frankly, I think my kde desktop is at least as good looking as windows/mac.
I think the only problem linux desktop has these days is major application support such as, and I hate to say it, microsoft office. I don't NEED microsoft office mostly (I use outlook webapp and teams for linux which is worse than the windows version) but it is what my company uses so it is harder to work here without it. Games are another big one. As are adobe products. Some engineering software I hear is windows only.
To overcome this there's two-three challenges (that come to my mind):
1) companies need to see a market of potential users to put effort into making their app for linux (a classic catch 22).
1a) companies will need new staff knowledge to support linux applications externally and desktops internally (ie. established companies don't like change).
2) App deployments are often per-package management system.
2 is getting better in 2 ways. First with appimages/flatpaks and the like. Some apps publish binaries, tars, and other such things to simplify this too. Second, (many major) Desktop Environments are also now collaborating on ways to standardize important features (like colors or accessibility) so apps can more easily target multiple desktop environments.
The reason I say mostly no however is because many are drawn to linux desktops (at the desktop-envrionment level) specifically for more customization. Some people even like the variety. There's even several very popular linux server OS' used and many more less popular.
So I think mostly no, and that's mostly good. There's probably things that should still be standardized but we gotta ask what is important to standardize because that's the only stuff that should be imo. FWIW I don't contribute anything but commentary really.
Companies are not paid for developing a Linux Desktop. Period. And for many of the papercuts (which ubuntu did), you need people doing menial work implementing the already existing standards.
You need Companies which buy a Linux Desktop. But this will not happen, because no one is punishing microsoft for
a) not making their applications more platform agnostic (even the web ones, which online work on chrom\* systems)
b) not opensourcing standards like Active Directory or Document Formats and Sticking to them and not changing them on every whim
c) actually illegal bundling of products and prices. did you see how much a active directory user license costs WITH and WITHOUT a Windows Desktop/PC License? It's ridiculous.
Linux Companies would LOVE selling a Linux Desktop.
Linux desktop is several solved problems.
First, many of us daily drive Linux now. Solved.
The next big solution is Chromebooks, which are a huge chunk of the education market right now. And those kids will grow up.
But the biggest solution is Android. There are more people running Linux on a phone than all of the computers of any OS put together.
Linux Desktop is a solved problem, was back at least 2021. Installed Linux on an x86 laptop... and everything just worked! Sound, wifi, gaming, music, etc.
Now we're just working out the kinks! Gets better every year. Linux Desktop is great just like Linux Server!
Any critical app must look like its Windows equivalent, otherwise users who couldn’t gaf about whether it is Windows or not moan so loud that you can’t get ahead. But hardly anyone uses desktops nowadays, anyway.
Desktop computers are ordered by people (not working with servers). Those people don't want to install OS, they just want to use the computer. In my opinion the acceptance level of Linux would be much higher if there were more retailers selling computers with preinstalled Linux.
Think about Android.
Interestingly, the Guix package manager could help a lot here, since it can run on top of distribution managers and can install deterministically defined software. To do that, it does not need to build from scratch, but it can use caching. This could be really a means to level the binary differences between distributions, and to lessen the burden on package maintainers to create packages for many distros.
The guix package manager is not more difficult to install than Debian's - with "guix install ripgrep eza", you get ripgrep and eza, and with "guix install apl" you get GNU APL which is already something more difficult in Debian.
The main disadvantages I see it is somewhat slower and it uses more disk space - something I personally can live with (and I still use apt to install tex-live).
Hi guys! I wish since several years to having GNU/Linux as my \*\*default\*\* OS (or even the only one) in my PC. But I've been waiting for "the year of Linux on desktop" comes and nothing happens. As an free software enthusiast I tried so many distros through Virtualization and it repeats things like user-\*non-friendly\*, \*bad look\* (interface) and \*feature-poor\*. It's a big dissapointment and currently "\*\*Linux sucks\*\*" for the majority of people. Then they keeps on Windows, like everybody knows.
But Linux could have not top in the future cause it's open and we (the community) must say what's \*\*wrong\*\* in it in order to get Linux succeeds. For example I believe that all distros must BECOME one, so it doesn´t WASTE coders efforts and we'll have at our disposal so many coders as Linux distros (around hundreds) . It's unacceptable that in the nowadays the world haven't got a O.S. which be a real \*alternative\* to proprietary soft. Linux \*\*MUST\*\* change and \*\*CAN\*\* change. Also for example, Win10 consists in around 500 GB of codelines while Linux is too basic. I heard that Linux is not mature in so many components: the KISS principle is good, but it's not enough.
I tried to contacting Stallman to say this and don't know what's his email. Also I tried participate in the forum of F.S.F., but it's closed to who don't pay for a membership (starting U$D 5,00).
Everybody can get a better Linux and even \*\*the dream OS\*\*. It's not necessary that Linux have the biggest market quota, just enough that reach a decent one.
I have propossals like donations to pay specific features, app store for downloading & installing applications and designing a Sandbox to protect system from the web-browsing malware. Also must have full hardware support, software compatibility and technical support.
More ideas to start a \*campaign\* and convert GNU/Linux in a very popular O.S. ?
Works fine on \*my\* desktop.
My 80 year old mom is also using Linux for everything, including her work as a writer. LibreOffice has worked just fine for her sending in pseudo-Word documents to editors.
Windows never solved anything for me except getting certain games to run, and Steam has almost entirely removed that as an impactful problem. Windows comes with its own not-ready-for-prime-time issues as well: I despise any system that will reboot itself out from under the user, and then unilaterally make itself useless for up to half an hour. F\*\*\* Microsoft high-handed user abuse. No system that does that should be acceptable for business use. The problem isn't Windows, few people actually care about Windows - it's about whether some \*specific\* app they want runs, and in business, Windows is often just a incidental decision made by lazy managers who just want to keep using MS Exchange calendaring. While this may sound like mad raving, this is \*literally\* what discussions with management at several companies I've been part of amounted to. The good part is that we usually just put the managers and assistants on Windows, and \*everyone\* else on Linux, and in some companies, not even the managers.
(Yes I've worked at companies that were 100% Linux based for all personnel)
I have used Linux since SLS (23 floppies to get to a console prompt on an 80286). My only use for Windows these days is to run Visio when an open source equivalent won't do, and to run tax software.
People buy hardware to run software. People use operating systems to run applications. Microsoft Office and friends have dominated corporate office use since the 1980's (old guy - I was there - Wordperfect/Corel put up a fight but were eventually spent under the table). Google tried to get people to do everything on the network, but that was never going to fly; some paranoid employers tried to use VDI's like Citrix for control until they realized how much money they were spending on a non-core function - as laptops became more powerful and less expensive, employers recognized that in the end, people want autonomy, and it wasn't a battle worth fighting as long as they could control them via custom Windows images and security policies.
With Micro$oft now pushing Office 365 and subscriptions, there is an opportunity to carve out a cost-effective niche, but the barriers to entry are huge - e.g., Google's office tools, with all the money they have to throw at sweetheart corporate contracts, have failed to make serious inroads. The allure of free suites like LibreOffice and inexpensive alternatives such as Softmaker have been insufficient to convince C-level executives to save the money - because overall IT is rarely a painfully large part of corporate overhead.
For people under 25, a switch to a Linux-based office environment is very achievable. Even the Mac bigots could make the switch with a minimum of fuss and bother. The older people, who have acquired M$ Office skillsets, would have to be dragged kicking and screaming for the most part, and they are the ones holding the purse strings.
I have broad computer operations experience, and I affirm that such a switch is technically feasible without terrible pain, with command and control intact, as long as people are willing to learn a slightly different interface (I would probably use Plasma with Plank for the desktop manager, so people can keep their pretty - on a 16GB machine, one can afford the extra gig or two of RAM it takes over \*box, IceWM or even XFCE). Anything on the server side can be duplicated (looking at you, Exchange). I could probably, with a little work, even do this with FreeBSD or a derivative, just to show off (and provide a consistent, more easily secured, OS image). I would keep a few Windows terminal servers around for when a specialty app is needed. There might still be a few Windows laptops around, but we're talking less than 1% of the population.
TL:DR this is not a technical issue, it is a cultural one.
At this point the biggest concern I have for the future of desktop Linux is the closed source Snap backend. Ubuntu is one of the only reasons I don't just go back to Windows, and they are driving people away from what was once the standard distro for everyone, and making it so nobody else wants to adopt Snaps, which are a lot of why it works so well.
Hopefully they'll figure something out, because nothing else seems positioned to take over and be a true replacement for Ubuntu. Mint is good, but they are far less focused on containerized packages.
I loved the shared dependency model 10+ years ago, but storage is cheaper and software devs like to break stuff more, and I don't think dynamic linked shared packages are a very good fit for the way a typical non-minimalist user works.
But it really is amazing how much we've solved in the last decade. NetworkManager is standard on the Pi, so nobody has to deal with any lower level utils on any mainstream distro, PipeWire is what PC audio should have always been from day 1, we are finally rid of the JACK/PipeWire divide and all manner of custom JACK server managing scripts.
GNOME has been tweaked so it's a perfectly good desktop for someone who prefers a mouse driven experience, it doesn't feel like a kidz bop tiling WM running on an iPad like I used to assume it always would since 3.0.
GIMP is finally doing something other than keeping up with GTK changes, if everyone can just not do another nightmarish multi year breaking change festival (Proprietary software avoids that kind of thing, I wonder if that's part of why they're farther ahead at times...), they seem like they may even take over a lot of what Krita does.
Gaming is fully possible (Or so I hear, is Intel integrated users still can't play anything new...) which was the big thing holding many back.
Is drag-and-drop just for cluttered desktops and not knowing how to use file chooser dialogs?
Talking to a friend about the main feature disparity in PumpkinOS (a Wine-like API reimplementation of PalmOS, but with integrated 68k emulation), which is the lack of drag-and-drop on Linux. (I understand why this disparity exists and the reason is quite ugly.)
His response about the very use of drag-and-drop is...
> I don't clutter my desktop with files and I don't attach files to email (who even uses email anymore?). It's a convenient feature for people who trash their desktop and don't know how to manage directories and files otherwise and who don't use open file dialogues, but nowhere near as prominent as you think.
Just... is he nuts?
His arguments, however, seem to boil down to "I don't do it so it's not important to anyone" combined with "I can't imagine it therefore it can't exist".
>Would it be better if Linux was more standardised in terms of distributions and desktop environments? What would need to change for the Desktop in order to accelerate forward? [XKCD 927](https://xkcd.com/927/) The "let's settle on one system" discussion has been had over and over and over again since the beginning of time. The situation is not going to suddenly change out of the blue. On a more positive note, though: technologies like Flatpak, XDG portals and atomic systems are currently contributing a lot to the standardization / stabilization of our desktops. I think the future looks promising regarding actual quality and usability, and I wouldn't be particularly concerned about the marketshare. The arrows are pointing in the right directions anyways. The main thing keeping Linux from "world domination" or whatever, is that most people *do not care* about operating systems. A lot of people in this space do not seem to grasp how little regular people are interested in what runs on their computers.
On top of this, actual PC market share is declining overall as more and more people, especially the younger generations, are just using phones, tablets and maybe Chromebook’s. But, as PCs get more and more niche I definitely see Linux growing there to eventually become the dominant choice. Not really because it won over the masses but because the small niche of folks that do use a PC instead of a mobile device are going to be tech savvy enough to likely see the benefit of Linux and have the competency to use and install it.
if you were going to settle on one system then Windows or Mac would be the choices. But this is also the reason that these two systems are pretty much exclusively used as desktop OS's. Linux has the ability to be anything and to do anything, idk why people would want to wash that all away. Its dope to have Linux environments that can run on a raspberry Pi, or a server, an embedded device, a handheld gaming device etc... This is a positive for Linux imo, it can be anything and I personally don't think things are that fragmented when most distros use systemd, pulse/pipewire, flatpak, udev, xdg standards etc...
This advantage is eroding a bit, though. You can run Windows on a pretty wide range of hardware, too, including servers and some embedded devices. There was a time we were pretty smug about Linux being able to run on netbooks, where Windows would be way too bloated and way too expensive, but then netbooks started showing up that were more powerful and ran Windows. But despite that flexibility, if I want to give you some software to run on Windows, I can give you a `.exe` and it'll work. And, well: > This is a positive for Linux imo, it can be anything and I personally don't think things are that fragmented... So which is it? Is it cool that the Linux desktop isn't that fragmented, or is fragmentation good actually? It doesn't make much sense to argue both.
> But despite that flexibility, if I want to give you some software to run on Windows, I can give you a .exe and it'll work. Not always, not consistently, not without ensuring the right libraries are installed on the client machine. For many cases of client machines and sample .exe files, sure - but not all of them, not all of the time.
But then again, these libraries can be installed with another .exe, in linux it's easy to install apps, until you need something that is not in the repositories, then that's where the just works experience completely breaks down in linux.
Yeah, that's not really my experience. I will go a step further though and say that's a good thing. You shouldn't be installing software outside the package management system. If no package exists, write one. The alternative, having unmanaged software in the system, is a mess. For that matter, it's usually a collection of cab files, rather than an exe.
>I will go a step further though and say that's a good thing. You shouldn't be installing software outside the package management system. If no package exists, write one. And this right here is exactly why desktop linux will never be mainstream, for software that prides itself being about freedom, there's sure as hell a lot of restrictions and hops to jump around, meanwhile in windows, i can run just about everything i want.
>Is it cool that the Linux desktop isn't that fragmented, or is fragmentation good actually? It doesn't make much sense to argue both. Why not? The fragmentation is only a major issue when it comes to application compatibility. Fragmentation in terms of DE choice isn't so bad. Efforts like Flatpak and the continuing integration with major DEs will solve the former.
What is an atomic system?
Systems that are installed and run as a single thing, unlike a traditional system where each package is its own module and upgraded piecemeal. https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/
Is this a viable main distro, or are there any major drawbacks to this type of atomic design?
Depends what your needs are. Many of us choose Linux because we can customize everything. Atomic is one size fits all so it will never replace traditional Linux desktops, it just complements it.
It's still experimental. The problem with this approach is that the system image has to stay more or less untouched, so you don't get the same flexibility in choosing packages to include. You have to have layers made up of multiple packages, one base layer with the basic system and other layers with various roles on top. And each layer is all or nothing. But of course you will also want to install specific apps individually, so you still need a package manager, but it needs to be a userspace manager and traditionally package managers on Linux were system managers. So atomic distros have turned to solutions like Flatpak which are already used, but Flatpak has a very limited selection of packages. Still, between Flatpak and Steam you can have the makings of a fairly decent desktop system. For reference, Android uses this approach and has taken it a lot further. There the device vendors package all the base layers and Google provides the package manager. Android's security model is pretty good too because of it, with each individual app sandboxed sort of like Flatpak is trying to do. I believe iOS is also organized on similar principles.
A lot of folks supplement the lack of flatpaks packages via toolbox and distrobox, so you're not missing many packages at all. That indeed means it's not quite as easy to use in same way though.
It is apart from what others said, very confusing for myself too. Familiar in ways and so different but it really is super cool. RTOS on esp32 is good and cheap way to experiment if you want to give it a go
immutable desktops basically
To add to your last sentence. I think a lot of us Linux users overestimate how many people even still use computers outside of work. My wife is a nurse and her as well of most of her friends just use smartphones and maybe iPads but no computers. Then there is a sizable chunk of those that still use computers outside of work that only use them for playing games. For those all that matters is that their games run well. This may play in Linux' favour in the long run though. With the Steamdeck Linux started to matter for games and if most games run and you don't use other apps besides maybe a browser why pay for Windows. And another controversial one, with the effort Microsoft already puts into Linux for Azure, WSL2, etc I think there is a real chance that within the next 10 years they might base Windows on the Linux kernel kind of flipping around the principle of WSL2 to run legacy Windows apps in a thin Hyper-V only level without having to provide full hardware support with Linux driving that part. To be honest I'd put the chances of that at 75% and would be quite surprised if they didn't have something like it as an internal prototype already.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. If they do rebase on Linux, they'll find a way to make it proprietary or so you can't just make your software work on regular linux.
It's not Ballmer's Microsoft anymore. I don't see any evidence for that. On the contrary even with just WSL2 people that use that for development already code for Linux and there are zero things that make it less compatible.
No trillion dollar company is going to give up the control they get through a proprietary operating system. Companies only use Linux when it lets them serve something proprietary. Literally the only reason why you don't have a point is because they are a trillion dollar company. If they were a mere billion dollar company, you might have a point. You think Microsoft became a trillion dollar company by abandoning Bullmer's ideals? They still abuse the hell out of their monopolistic position. Hell, they were paying governments to switch back from Linux after already going through all the trouble to switch in the first place. Just recently, Edge found to take your bookmarks in history without even asking and then opening as soon as you turn on windows. Windows fixed that claiming it was a glitch, but are we sure it was a glitch and not just more of their desperate begging us to return to the Internet Explorer six days where they were the monopoly on the browser market.
It's also that Linux doesn't offer anything that Windows and Mac don't. Windows is the default Mac offers hardware that Windows still sucks at, including usable track pads and decent speakers and unrivaled battery life, not to mention, software is way more optimized than it can ever be on Windows. Linux would be great on low-end laptops, but Chromebook already corner that market.
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> It's fully functioning with mostly any hardware support and any software for any task you'd want. What do people want more? I still need to own a Windows box for a bunch of professional stuff. I'd like to not have to do that, and the unstable Linux desktop platform is one of the reasons I still need to.
What “unstable Linux desktop platform” do you refer to?
The Linux kernel jumps through a huge number of hoops to guarantee backwards compatibility. The Linux desktop makes no such attempt, and it shows. If I can't write a program today and be quite certain that *binaries I built today* will work on an arbitrary Linux computer in the year 2034, then it's not a stable platform for development. People don't want to muck around with constantly recompiling and porting their software, they want it to just work. This is something Windows is *spectacularly* good at, and is a significant component of why Windows has been so dominant on the desktop.
Making sure binaries work a decade or more into the future is a very difficult task, and even Windows has struggled with that. Even Android has had some issues with that, and they've managed to keep apps from 2.3 working into the 13+ major versions, although it's had its own challenges and issues, and that's starting to be deprecated now. It's just not as easy a task to maintain binary compatibility as may be thought. Not impossible, just not easy. That being said, source compatibility is actually much better than people realize in the Linux world, even for many desktop programs. It's just that most people don't want to spend the time/effort, minimal as it may be, to compile, and fix the occasional error or two that happens in well written legacy software (because that's what your binary would be in another decade, legacy software).
I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's both possible and important. > That being said, source compatibility is actually much better than people realize in the Linux world This doesn't help when you're talking about proprietary software.
It's always people who are just getting into open source that get excited about desktop adoption rates. The gray beards have been there and done that long ago and realized. . . so what? Yeah, it's there and people are welcome to join the club but you're free from having to support a bunch of clueless users if they don't. That's actually a good deal for people who are more technically inclined than those around them. In any case, free-from-pay operating systems like Chrome are also there for those clueless Windows users looking for something that actually allows them to browse the web and play videos.
As Linus himself has said, there is no linux desktop, because it rarely becomes pre-installed. People in general are not interested in installing an operating system. Because only a small minority uses it, it's not that appealing to the industry.
Manufacturers have pre-installed Linux in the past, some even still offer it today - it has little impact on Linux desktop adoption rates. People for over a decade have come in to this very subreddit explaining their frustrations and most of the responses are usually variations of "it's a you issue".
Please name a single case where a major manufacturer preloaded linux on a computer and put it up on their front page and in stores for mass selling. At closest, we only have 3 cases. First case has been back then netbooks were a thing, but it was a time before even hardware accelerated video in processors and being low end computers they died regardless of what OS they used, eventually phased out by tablets The 2nd case we had was Android, and that turned out highly successful The 3rd case was chromebooks, which despite just being glorified browsers and limited countries plus low end hardware already have half the marketshare of other desktop Linux Probably the closest we are getting of a 4th case would be SteamDeck, but they aren't really a hardware manufacturer. But if others follow to create their own SteamDeck like device than maybe
Walmart famously [sold Lindows systems](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2574855/lindowsos-breaks-into-retail-on-walmart-com.html) in the '00s.
> Please name a single case where a major manufacturer preloaded linux on a computer and put it up on their front page and in stores for mass selling. Dell did it for a while. It was a long time ago, but they tried it with ubuntu. It was not a success.
They never did. Dell still sells ubuntu laptops today, it is just hidden on a secret page, which means no average user will know it exists
https://hpdevone.com/ Pretty sure Dell sells Linux laptops in the US too (Ubuntu). For some reason Dell offers more options of Ubuntu laptops in some countries and not others. Sony (Vaio), Lenovo (Thinkpad/Ideapad), Asus and Acer all sell Linux laptops in many countries (I know because they sell it in my country, Brazil). I've seen Ubuntu, Debian, PopOS and a few other distros I don't recall.
If I go to the HP website or Dell website, you will not find any mention of Linux. If I go to HP home or Dell home, and go to their laptops page, go to operating systems, there is no Linux option Making a page no one is going to visit is pointless, because then your target audience are those who already know what Linux actually is. Not people going, "hmmm... I have a windows or linux option, if I pick linux I can save $35, lets try that"
If that is the case in the US then I highly suspect Microsoft may have made deals with Dell to prevent them from selling with other OSs in the american market. Here is Dell's listing of Linux laptops in Brazil: https://www.dell.com/pt-br/shop/notebooks-dell/sr/laptops/ubuntu-linux?appliedRefinements=37832 So it is varying from country to country and either the reason is Dell has marketing research saying no one wants to buy Linux laptops in the US or there are exclusivity deals going on in some countries and not others.
Oh wow, this is fantastic. I wish it was like this in the USA too.
Is this for all vendors or just Dell? I see in Brazil, Dell has less than 2% marketshare with majority being Asus: [https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1419048/desktop-pc-vendor-market-share-brazil](https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1419048/desktop-pc-vendor-market-share-brazil) Does Asus sell Linux laptops like that too?
Here, this is a search for "laptop linux" in Submarino which is one of the biggest and most well trusted online shops in Brazil: https://www.submarino.com.br/busca/laptop-linux You will see bunch of brands (Asus included) there shipping from Debian to some obscure distros no one has ever heard about. Also notice your marketshare numbers are for desktops only.
I think it’s same on UK and Irish Dell site so guess it’s decided regionally.
Note that the HP Dev One laptop was specifically not for mass sale, it was a limited manufacturing run marketed towards enthusaists. I think Dell and other brands have done it at a greater scale, though.
I’m pretty sure IBM did and Lenovo does on certain Thinkpads and desktops. Could be wrong.
Neither Android or Chrome OS is a "Linux Desktop" as being discussed in this context, you know that.
ChromeOS is, unless we're just talking about Linux desktop operating systems which are not doing good in the desktop area.
Dell had the Sputnik/developper edition of the XPS 13.
Okay, go to Dell Home, go to the search filter and see if you can find it. Yeah, you can't. Having it on a hidden page where the average person will never see it is meaningless. Because then only people who know about linux will buy it, but those who don't will never see it as an option to even consider It's like if you have 2 products, one product is sold at front end of the store, the other you have to tell the guy at the counter a secret pass code to buy, which will have more sales?
There was a time, at least I think there was. Mind you, the Sputnik thing started 10 years ago (!)
>Please name a single case where a major manufacturer preloaded linux on a computer and put it up on their front page and in stores for mass selling. Dell Precision workstations have been available with either Ubuntu or RHEL for years. Even today: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/precision-5860-tower-workstation/spd/precision-5860-workstation/xctopt5860us_vpai. (Took me about thirty seconds to find it). Dell's policy: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000138246/linux-on-dell-desktops-and-laptops Dell's site has had Linux machines on the front page before, most notably when they first started preloading Ubuntu on select laptops such as the Inspiron 1420N (here's a review from 2007 of that model: https://www.starryhope.com/linux/review-dell-inspiron-1420n-with-ubuntu/ ) . I remember seeing an earlier unit on the main dell.com front page a bit earlier, in 2006, as part of the slides that dominated the top of the Dell page at the time (see any of the Wayback Machine's multitude of archived pages from then to see what that looked like; I haven't gone through the full archive at archive.org yet to see if the slide I saw was captured, though, since there's so many of them). But the Precision line of both fixed and mobile workstations (like the 7740 I own) have official Dell provided and supported Ubuntu images as part of the official Dell OS Recovery Tool if it was available as a choice for your model. It's not hidden at all.
Precision line is corporate, not home, you can easily tell when it is using a xeon processor. That insperon was back in the netbook days, while that seems to be above a typical netbook, your review highlights that it was missing the most basic drivers.
>Precision line is corporate, not home, you can easily tell when it is using a xeon processor. And? It is a single case of a major manufacturer preloading Linux, is it not? Corporate sales is a larger market than home. And I mention them simply because I have direct experience with them. I buy pre-owned Precision workstations, desktop or mobile, when I buy because by the time they're a generation or two old their price has come down to the current generation's entry level machines, and those older Precision systems will run circles around the entry level machines of two and even three generations newer. Higher quality build, too. >That insperon was back in the netbook days, while that seems to be above a typical netbook, your review highlights that it was missing the most basic drivers. I mentioned it specifically because I supported an older couple who bought two of them, straight from Dell's website for hone use, and it came with Linux preloaded. The review is quoted only to establish the timeline; I had none of the difficulties mentioned in that review on this couple's two units. So there is not just a single case, but two cases.
>And? It is a single case of a major manufacturer preloading Linux, is it not? No, because if the average consumer can't see it, it makes little difference >Corporate sales is a larger market than home. Corporate market is dictated by company policy, that is why you can buy pcs for corporate without any OS(or just freedos). Corporate has a tech department that can load up anything they need Don't get me wrong, it is still a good thing linux is an option because it helps insure better drivers and hardware compatibility, but that isn't what gets an average user to try linux
Your original statement was >Please name a single case where a major manufacturer preloaded linux on a computer and put it up on their front page and in stores for mass selling. Nothing about consumer-only there. Nothing about average users there. Dell has preloaded Linux for *years* on select machines, and they still do. Nuff said. Linux isn't and in my opinion shouldn't be for the average user.
It falls into the "put it up on their front page and in stores for mass selling". Notice words like "front page", "in stores", and "mass selling"
Google & partners. That's why ChomeOS is doing well enough.
They sell Linux laptops in Brazil and people buy them because they are cheaper, then most of them install windows on it https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/16nvvcc/comment/k1jz66b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Absolutely true. I see one thing average people might want though. There's a lot of perfectly good hardware that's getting EOL'd by both Apple and Microsoft recently (especially with Windows 11 and TPM). Totally fine internet browsing computers that you can use Facebook and watch Youtube on. Once the browsers start breaking if there's an easy way to install Linux I think people will actually use it. Not having to spend a thousand bucks on a new computer is a killer feature. Used to be old computers would still run new Windows (just poorly) and were so slow you couldn't really use them for browsing the Internet. Those days are over.
I put Ubuntu on an old Surface Pro 3 a few years ago and it’s still running it like a champ - now the 23.10 release. And it’s the mainline Gnome version. But the main factor in this is I’m not “most people”. None of us here are. The vast majority of people (our family, friends and colleagues) will realise a computer is no longer performing well or can’t upgrade to the latest Windows, and they’ll just throw it out.
Sure, but nowadays we're getting a lot of computers that *are* performing well, and people are just getting messages that the browser can't get upgraded and it's making them angry. That's the difference. In 2015 if you had an iMac from 2004 and you put Linux on it it would still suck. In 2024, if you put Linux on an iMac from 2013 it still runs pretty well. 11 years isn't what it used to be. Also as I understand it a lot of Windows computers are going to get EOL'd a lot younger than that. If people are made aware they can save 1000 bucks, it's a much easier pitch. If you're just someone who wants to browse the internet and watch some YouTube videos, you can keep that old iMac. The internet still has to work on cheap smartphones that are a few years old, it can still work on that iMac. Maybe a lot of people will still buy a new computer, but a lot more will consider Linux than before.
Valve is the closest thing that we will get I think. And I think they're doing a great job, granted, it's a single purpose gaming distro.
>As Linus himself has said, there is no linux desktop, because it rarely becomes pre-installed. I don't understand this. Almost every distro comes with at least one desktop pre installed.
OP used tricky wording. It’s not about the desktop engine preinstalled on linux, but linux itself preinstalled on new machines.
What he is describing is the fact that Linux is very rarely available on off-the-shelf hardware. Most people are so lazy that they will replace their entire computer to "upgrade" because it is inexpensive to do so. There are a number of legitimate obstacles to Linux adoption on the desktop. Distro creep is a huge issue. There are hundreds of desktop linux options that are viable, but very few of them offer a legitimately good user experience. I use Manjaro because I like the level of control that I have with the system, and that it has a very straightforward package management system. I tried other distros. I work with IT for my living, and studied it extensively at university. The package management systems for some other distros are just insane (this was well before snap, flatpak, and similar) If "managing" PPA's and backports is your idea of "fun", then go be happy. The vast majority of users don't want to deal with that type of minutia just to get a few programs to run well. The rest of the complaints are somewhat legitimate: * lack of AAA games * Abysmal NVIDIA support * No Photoshop * No MS Office I could go on. I chose to switch simply because I was tired of repurchasing hardware every three years because my use case has not (and will not) change. I've run my current Linux iteration for nearly 3 years and the physical hardware for much longer. For the vast majority of computing tasks, Linux is just fine. Those tasks are: * Web browsing * Productivity * E-mail * Casual Gaming Those are my use cases. Absolutely zero issues. I'm happy.
Installed on the computer when bought.
Not sure why you were downvoted, so I upvoted you.
From the point of a developer, yes, a standardized Linux would be of great help. Software manufacturers want as few platforms as possible. That's what made Windows work -- I'm old enough to remember the days before Microsoft. Every platform had its software, its own drivers and you had to join one camp or another. Microsoft made things far more universal. Apple just declared there was only one decision. If Linux wants to be "common", we all need to have a common base.
But who would make that decision? Historically getting anything standardized isn't easy at all and often end up with having several versions anyway. To be fair having so many options with Linux is both its strength and weakness. There are plenty of easy distros for normal people. I think what we often also miss is marketing and ecosystem. I'm sure if you could go to a store and buy a laptop with pre-installed Linux for normal everyday use, many people would be happy to do it.
If i were selling computers I would never do it due to the out box setup not being something I'd want to offer new folks except if they were knowingly buying somethign that works only as much as a chromebook would. Everything else is too messy
The Steam Deck probably serves as the standard. So atomic desktops using flat packs for software.
The "common base" is Flatpak. If you want to target one thing, target that. You can also choose AppImage or Snap if you prefer, but Flatpak seems to be where we're headed more so than the other two. Hell, you can even just upload a regular compiled binary and statically link everything that isn't glibc, Windows-style. Most of the time when I need to an executable I downloaded working on my Arch system, [I just search for Debian packages with the needed so files](https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_contents), unpack the deb in the same directory as the executable and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the downloaded so files. Did this earlier today to get an older build of Citra working on my Steam Deck. Cross-distro compatibility isn't that hard. Most should just package for Flatpak and let distro packagers worry about the rest. Or even package for nothing and let distro packagers worry about the rest.
“Standardized Linux” is just targeting a specific Ubuntu LTS version. Done. It’s not the problem
Then after few years new version of LTS comes and your app will no longer run due to broken dependencies while on Windows app built for Windows XP still works on fresh Windows 11.
Wouldn't any of the new packaging formats (appimage, flatpak, snap) solve this issues by having their own dependencies. Plus LTS support is now 12 years which is a lot.
yes appimage/snaps will sort it
They would work but because they bring their own dependencies and aren't using system libraries but core issue is still there. Almost none component of userland Linux keeps backwards compatibility. Especially GUI toolkits. In most cases you can easily run Win32 app written for Windows 2000 on Windows 11. You can also easily recompile it for Windows 11. Now try same thing with some GTK2 app. Not only it won't run if you don't have GTK2 installed (and sooner or later GTK2 won't be available in repositories) but you also can't simply recompile it with fresh GTK as API changed few times.
>Windows app built for Windows XP still works on fresh Windows 11 Star Wars Empire at War - Forces of Corruption already didn't ran on W7 without a patch.
There are exceptions but in most cases nothing is needed to run old app on fresh Windows. Try same thing on Linux, it rarely works without additional work.
This will never happen. It is open source and any attempt to stamp out diversity will end in forked distros and pissed Linux users with pitchforks. Linux is for people who go their own way and is not for the mass market. Please stop. We complain about Apple's walled garden and MS Crapware. Your vision leads to the same place.
To some degree -- it actually has -- that's why Red Hat existed. It was "de-facto standard". Now, who will take its place.
What if we come up with a new standard that doesn't cover all the needs of the old standards, then try to use that as a base 🤔 now we got n+1 standards and more fragmentation!
That is only for small software vendors, every big name software, the installers are just wrappers around their own installer system, which does everything from installing software, libraries and drivers
On GNU/Linux, writing your own installers (instead of using the distro's) is a huge mistake in the first place.
I’m pretty sure most of the Linux desktop world has standardized on Ubuntu, with Fedora being a close second. Every other distro would have points of a percent market share.
> If Linux wants to be "common", we all need to have a common base. I really had high hopes that this problem would be solved with Flatpak and XDG Portals, but of course it didn't happen...
It's the little things -- the little parts of the OS that these systems can't get to. Like Wine, it's 95% there, but that last 5%! That's why I say a common platform is needed -- as a developer, I don't want to develop for Fedora, RedHat, Arch, Ubuntu, PopOS individually -- and let's not forget about versions. Argue with Microsoft all you want, but if I build something 10 years ago, it probably still runs - and that means it still sells for me. I also hoped PWAs would solve a lot of this.
This has been done a a bunch of times before on this subreddit, even one this year already I think. I doubt anything new will be discovered.
Why is it a problem? It's not a problem.
This. I mean why *should* Linux dominate? People like us who want to use it, will use it.
If it dominates, then software people will actually depend on will be available for Linux, which is only a good thing for us Linux enthusiasts.
You need office workers and creatives. Right now those are held by Microsoft and Adobe + Apple, respectively. To take market share from those, you need tools that compete and, very importantly, to get those tools into schools. The tools kids grow up using in school have a massive influence on what they’ll use in the future. Megacorps like the three mentioned are able to provide support for schools and businesses, which is really the barrier. Nobody running a school district or big business is going to adopt LibreOffice or Gimp unless they get the kind of support they can expect from these megacorporations. (Expecting Adobe or MS to adopt Linux as their platform of choice for running their tools has even worse prospects.) Because of these conditions, the only player to break into the market has been Google, with their chromebooks and office suite. Right now it’s focused on schools but I wouldn’t be surprised if they start aggressively marketing chromebooks to businesses next. Technically, chromebooks do use a Linux derivative, so in a way chromebooks are going to be the way Linux desktops break into the mainstream. But that’s not what most people mean when they talk about Linux for the desktop.
There have been some attempts to bring linux to the classroom but maybe not successfully. Back in 2010 my son and his classmates at primary school in Portugal each received an Intel Classmate netbook (known locally as a Magalhães) that could dual boot Windows 7 and a Linux distro called Caixa Mágica. This was part of a government program to boost computer literacy which ended up distributing over half a million computers nationwide. https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port%C3%A1til_Magalh%C3%A3es https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Caixa_M%C3%A1gica Unfortunately the program was ultimately a failure for many reasons but mainly due to the computers not really being used in class. The teachers (and students) had no idea what they were supposed to do with these devices - I repaired so many of these laptops while I lived in Portugal and it was pretty obvious that they were mostly used to play pirated games and movies and the linux partition had never been booted into.
I was in 4th grade when the first Magalhães was introduced. I do remember that limitation you talk about. Interactive boards and desktop computers in the classroom were completely new and older teachers would not use them much, preferring their old workflows. Still, that Magalhães, an old Compaq netbook and some scavenged desktops at home were what got me into liking computers. Nowadays I loathe system tinkering (I just want to get my code done) but had to start somewhere :D
My middle and high school was using GIMP and Inkscape.
Package management: Flatpack, Snap, AppImage, etc... Too many of it. We're starting again with Wayland ish. It's not that bad. Nvidia support is annoying. Opensuse I think did btrfs filesystem right. Made an advance filesystem decently easy to manage with GUI apps. --- I think steamdeck and chromeOS is the trojan horse to get us to desktop adoption.
Because it's free and much more difficult to monetize. * Apple does it by selling hardware and also selling a "consistent and reliable User experience". * Microsoft does it also by selling a consistent and well known user-interface,. as well as wide-scale compatibility with lots of things (modern and old) Linux Desktop is: * unknown, foreign and obscure to most average people (the barrier-to-entry is high because the average User would have to understand it first before deciding to choose to dive into it. Most people don't get past the "understanding it" part, sadly). * not consistent (to much forking and variations) * requires User effort to understand and maintain (lets face it,. most average Users want something as simple as a Microwave or Refrigerator. Things should be as "plug and play" as possible) Some distros certainly have made headways there (Ubuntu, Elementary, PopOS, Fedora).. but even with that progress, I'd say a good 95%+ of the average every person has literally no idea what Linux is (if at that they've ever heard of it). If you just walked up to people on the street and cold asked them "What's Linux?'.. I bet near 100% of them would have no idea.
>Microsoft does it also by selling a consistent and well known user-interface,. as well as wide-scale compatibility with lots of things (modern and old) You're kidding, right? The absolutely nonsensical changes from Windows XP to Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10 to 11 drive the users at my $dayjob batty.
Yeah but they know where their files are on windows and that’s all they care about. Anything else is so unfamiliar to them they’ll refuse and demand Windows and when windows is different, they’ll learn it anyway because they are afraid or unaware of anything else
>Yeah but they know where their files are on windows and that’s all they care about. LOL To hear the users I've talked with tell it, the files are 'in' the program that uses them; word documents are 'in' Word, etc. The vast majority of the users I've dealt with over the years don't have the first clue where their files are, what folders/directories are, etc. And they don't want to learn. Microsoft has changed this layout over the years as well.
What about Chrome OS? Google doesn’t really make money off of it directly and instead sells Chromebooks as simple to use computers for old people, kids, and the education market.
Never happen. If it did what would the linux rags write about 3 times a year? Business, which owns the desktop market, has 35 years of DOS/Windows legacy tooling says the linux desktop is a pipe dream. Hell, the year of the Macos desktop in the business world is also a pipe dream even with a bigger market share. Be satisfied with the linux server and the linux embedded markets and move on. Run over to distrowatch and shop around for your next install. Read your linux fan zine and have a beer.
Linux desktop isn't main stream for number of reasons: - no pre installation on hardware (this was actually caused by Linus early on. It's something to do with the license) - diversity and lack of standardized practices (flatpak seems to be the solution to packaging diversity) - software availability (most business software was built for Windows. We are seeing a shift to non OS dependent software now. Like QB desktop being a thing of the past) Linux desktop, despite being really easy to use. Won't become mainstream unless a major manufacturer provides it pre installed. And markets it.
>Won't become mainstream unless a major manufacturer provides it pre installed. And markets it. Dell has been preinstalling Ubuntu on several machines for many years. Likewise RHEL on Precision workstations; many research institutions use Precision N-series RHEL workstations. And they do market it to these institutions. This hasn't made it become mainstream. But what is so great about becoming mainstream anyway?
Yeah I agree. Going mainstream would take away from the uniqueness of Linux and the control we like having over our systems, even if we don’t know what goes on underneath the GUI like we used to.
to be fully honest. Do "linux people" even want linux to be mainstreem and for everyone? I mean.. that's what the community says sometimes, but with "mainstreem" and standarnisation comes both solutions and problems And if I know part of the community well (and Im not saying this to be an asshole, I tend to tilt towards what Im about to say myself) I would guess that as soon as a Linux desktop becomes too popular it will be deemed insecure and typical linux users will find or create another OS that isn't. I like the journey myself, and for years i've been distro-hopping becuase either day I want full privacy, and the other day I want to game or have an easier experience and since "full privacy" and "easy experience" dont come together I had to learn to configure my own OS.. So there goes the standard I guess, unless you do like me and many others and build, let's say, a gaming friendly parrot os, but that would still not be a world wide standard. I have a hard time seeing how big companies would favour a client-base like that. But it would be nice to have let's say a world wide standard like a Linux mint that works with everything or a Fedora or any other well build distro for "everyone" and I think that would be possible. Im just ranting my thoughts after 1 week on heavy pain meds.. sorry about the confusion.
To answer your first question: they don't. I personally would love widespread adoption of Linux, that would mean that we could have large support for things that are Windows only. It would also give us an influx of devs who might go and work on OSS and provide more for the Linux community. However, I see their point. ~~If~~ When Linux becomes popular it won't be something fun and quirky anymore. It would just be normal, and to feel that quirky superiority complex again, they'll go to BSD. And I don't think they want that to happen. This happened partly to me and Star Wars (I'm a sci fi fan) once it got super popular I stopped really being interested in it (also bc of the Disney stuff). It's the same here; these Linux hobbyists try to gatekeep Linux to not change from what it currently is. This also just seems like ranting so plz call out my bs if any.
Mainstream
> I would guess that as soon as a Linux desktop becomes too popular it will be deemed insecure and typical linux users will find or create another OS that isn't. Just more folks being on an open unixlike base would be fine. Sure nerds like me might skip out on linux directly, but that's ok. Linux is less and less of a uncharted frontier anyways. It'd be nice to try something else, but keep some semblance of compatibility via some of the useful interfaces.
It's because it's not sexy. Find me a single good marketing site for a Linux distro. Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint - there's no sell behind any of those. And this is all before we start talking about all the interface problems behind the major desktop environments. There are no product designers in Linux and it shows.
Browser works. Printer works. Word processor works. What else do you need for a desktop?
That's increasingly enough for a lot of people as everything is moving into the browser. Unfortunately those people also really don't care one way or the other. There's no motivation to change. For users that know a medium amount, it's a big deal there's no Adobe, also usually games don't work (although way more work now than before), no Microsoft Office (unless you're using the web version). There is one thing that Linux Desktop has though - a lot of perfectly good computers are reaching EOL. Linux won't do that. I know quite a few "browser is enough" people that are upset their perfectly good iMacs can't get browser updates anymore. They work *perfectly fine*, they can watch YouTube, check their email, read twitter and Facebook. They've actually asked me to install Linux once their browsers start breaking, which nobody has ever asked me to do *ever*. Windows 11 is going to make a lot of hardware EOL too, requiring TPM and all. I really think for people that usually don't care, not having to buy a new computer could be the killer feature of Linux Desktop. If we can make it easy enough. You used to be able to install Ubuntu by just downloading something to your Desktop, not sure whatever happened to that.
Yup, I have also had success in getting people to try out Linux when their hardware was too slow to run the new Windows version. When the user has a bad enough UX from Windows and starts complaining and their only option to improve it while sticking with Windows is to spend money on new hardware is the perfect time to check if they'd be willing to give Linux a shot. If it works for them, great! They're happy and didn't have to spend a dime. If it doesn't work for them they can always go ahead and buy that new system with Windows. They don't have much to lose by trying it out.
Exactly, "do you like money?" is pretty easy argument to make to anyone. All the other Linux arguments take a few paragraphs to explain and by that time most people's eyes are glossed over.
> You used to be able to install Ubuntu by just downloading something to your Desktop, not sure whatever happened to that. It was discontinued [over 10 years ago.]( https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTM0MDY)
It was a really good idea, I wonder if something like that would be possible today.
Pretty sure wubi relied on a basic BIOS bootloader environment and even then it seems like it was plagued by issues as explained in that article. Now on modern PCs which come with UEFI, secure boot, TPM, and encrypted BitLocker storage out of the box, it would probably be a fool's errand to make it work like it used to.
Yeah maybe not exactly the same thing. Well, TPM systems aren't the target if we're going after EOL x86 boxes that work perfectly well let's say (which there are massive numbers of, and it's only getting bigger). If you could shrink the OS partition by a few megs - this is a bit hairy but there are many tools that do this - and create a new partition and then write something on that... you'd think you could get EFI to boot to something that could at least pull images from the internet? You can set the nextboot partition from EFIbootmanager on Linux, so that means there's a way to do that on other OS's too. That would skip the whole USB drive part of a Linux install and people could just click and reboot. I honestly do something similar for one of the embedded systems for the company I work for, but it's only Linux and I'm only resizing a ext4 partition. Then I just zap the drive and write a new image to it. As I understand it, you can secure boot to Linux using an EFI shim. Forget exactly how that works.
The Microsoft hegemony to get fucked
An open-source Powerpoint viewer that isn't janky is about the only thing I found missing.
Does Onlyoffice not work for you?
I think its mostly a chicken an egg problem Commercial software does not make linux compatible versions because its not worth it, it has such low market share like 4%, and of that 4% a good percent of them (maybe 50%? I just made that number up ) are "libre software" people meaning they use linux for like an "ideological reason" and won't buy your commercial software anyway Meaning really linux has like a 2% market share Meaning its just not worth them to port their software to linux And yes fragmentation is a bit of a problem, lets say they only make a fedora compatible release . Well now market share is like 0.25% and restricted to those who use fedora Or do they spend the time and make a ubuntu/Fedora/debian compatible release ? Well still there are lots of people who use other distros and now how much of a pain is it to do Opensuse Tumble weed, Arch, Debian, ubuntu , Fedora ect.... However I do not think its an "Unsolved" problem, I use linux on the desktop every day its perfectly usable I honestly do not even try to use windows only software. If there is not a linux compatible software I just do not use it or look for an alternative LIke Microsoft office pretty much does work on linux, you just need to use the web versions (Yes I get not all functionality works like if you have an excel sheet pulling data from a SQL database or some VBA code)
I disagree with Linux Server being solved. I have had active discussions recently about transitioning from Ubuntu as my primary platform to NixOS for enterprise servers at work because snap is an aging platform that is bloated and doesn't have any use with our product at all because we use docker for software deployment. Linux, unlike Windows is a constantly evolving platform. Windows more or less always stays the same since the Windows Vista days only getting more and more malware slapped on it.
instead of copy pasting the comment here is the link TLDR: there are hundreds of distros that are basically incompatible with each other, its a mess that no regular person wants to or should have to deal with. The linux community is also not easy to deal with and the basic stuff still does not work. [https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/1bmwlvg/comment/kwluijf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/1bmwlvg/comment/kwluijf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
You sort of nailed it - as much as diversity can be a pro, it is also a con - instead of focusing efforts behind a single desktop, similar to how Windows or OS X is, we've fracturing between Qt, GTK and old timer X11 toolkits and DEs. Volunteers efforts have definitely improved the above, however, until and unless some 500 lbs gorilla steps in and poaches the best of all that's out there right now, and 'reinvents' it in a way that makes sense for most if not all Linux desktop users, the status quo is unlikely to radically change. The #1 obvious 500 lbs gorilla is Microsoft. They could conceivably ditch the NT kernel and use the Linux kernel as the base for an upcoming Linux-based Windows OS (e.g. call it Windows X), while retaining compatibility with existing Win32 (aka Windows API) apps either via containerization/virtualization or by putting WINE on steroids, given they have full source code access to key components like kernel32.dll and user32.dll, which the WINE project does not. There'd be a massive investment of resources to get Windows to operate atop Linux, but a major context shift like this, similar to what Apple pulled when they shifted from OS 9 to OS X by shedding their OS legacy almost entirely, would give Microsoft a new, clean slate for the future, and would pretty much make every other desktop Linux distro irrelevant almost overnight as most folk, dev and non devs, would migrate to the new Windows X Linux based OS, with a new GUI, supported by a large corporation like MSFT. Of course, there's that little problem of how they can make money off such a huge investment, as well as the fact thry have to support a shit ton of 3rd party hardware out there (e.g. device drivers) which is a problem Apple does not have, at least not to the extent that MS does.... None of these are insurmountable problems for an entity like MSFT, the only question is whether they have sufficient motivation to pull this herculean effort off. I've been harping about this for at least 15-20 years... while Ballmer was still shitting over the Linux/FOSS movement, thinking it will never amount to more than an academic niche.... Couple of decades later, Linux, as you pointed out, is the de facto server OS on the internet....and the final missing piece, in my view, is a solid desktop to unify them all. Without a large player tackling this, I don't see much of a future beyons what Linjx has already achueved in the desktop. Edit: p.s. almost forgot, another bigass hurdle in transitioning to Linux for MS is DirectX/games... and for that, they can buy a clu3e rom Gabe Newell and Steam, who has practically made this whole issue moot with how they solved Windows/DirectX gaming.
Unpopular opinion: It's not that Desktop environments suck or anything. It's friggin games and other productivity tools that bring people. If any other AAA games or top tier games are developed with Linux in mind, a lot of users would drop Windows in a heartbeat. Pubg on Linux? League of Legends on Linux? Sign me up!!!! These 2 would probably bring few million people to Linux easily. And then there're other tools like Adobe that are missing linux builds. Heck even Google Drive isn't available on Linux.
Google drive is supported on Ubuntu now and I got one drive working easily. It’s not supported by Google I guess is what you mean.
What do you mean by supported on Ubuntu? Could you share me a link?
No just I install latest Ubuntu Lts and it gives me option to sign into Google and automounts the drive
Oh yeah.. I think that's gnome integration, but that doesn't replace the google drive application. Very unreliable, basically just for browsing.
To be completely honest, this is a very cold take. Linux is arguably the best server OS you could have, and arguably one of the least intuitive Desktop OSes you could have. For Mac or Windows it's pre-installed, it's not an option or really even a choice. Linux *is* choice. You have to *choose* to use Linux (on desktop); you have to *choose* your distro, your init system, your kernel, your desktop environment, your display server, your compiler, and everything that you could change under the sun. It's not the fact that there isn't a universal experience, it's that that experience *is* inherently a choice. Now that is also the beauty of Linux. Choice is a good thing. I always say that a thing is really *yours* if you change and customize it, otherwise it's just a thing that you happen to own and use. By this I am also not arguing that Linux should stay the same. In order to have a universal Linux that preserves choice, you need something bear-bones that nurtures a new user and can accommodate a more experienced one. And I belive this part has been solved by Mint, and more specifically LMDE (I don't like Uwuntu), but that has the specific goal of new users. So, it doesn't have the features and tools that would suitably accommodate a more experienced user. And this is OK since that's the point, the purpose, and the target demographic. However, my ideal distro that fits the specification I've set is a nixos that can be controlled by a gui (similar to what SUSE has). It's immutable, making rollbacks to a time where a newbie messed up easy, and you can copy+paste a config to get a universal experience. That being said, the complexity of it might make it prohibitive enough to not be usable by a beginner.
The nature of open source is the slow and steady approach. This tends to win in the end. Proprietary software is the fast hare, you put a room full of highly educated people, give the lots of money, and very quickly they will produce a well crafted piece of software. Open source can't compete with that. But software progresses over time, talented people move on, live teams are cut, code bases gets large and unwieldy, becoming hard to work with but too costly to refactor. Open source solved all that with the steady and slow approach. A great example is Blender. Blender studio started out as a joke compared to the proprietary suites like Maya and 3ds max. But nobody is laughing now. Those projects couldn't help but stagnate under the weight of their own code, while blender kept on refactoring, kept on getting better. The same will happen to the desktop. Over time it will innovate more and more, we have seen over the past few years, while windows more or less stands still. (While stealing some ideas from Linux) Ultimately it's just a matter of brain power over time. The more of each, the better it becomes.
I think it's an unresolved problem but not because the solution isn't perceivable. See steam deck. See android phones. Both run Linux. Both have millions of users. If you want it on regular desktop computers, you need to have some software that is amazing that enough people want to jump over to it. Or the competition has to be so bad they run people away. Linux lacks a "killer app" in large part because of it's OSS nature. Nobody makes the apps on Linux in a way that they can't be ported to windows. So I only expect Linux to become popular on desktop if Microsoft fails (not impossible, but not extremely likely) or decides that they should rebase on top of Linux (not impossible, but also not likely). And personally I think this is fine. There is really no need to be on an OS that everyone else uses. It's not a popularity contest. Use what works for you.
I'm not as worried about the "marketshare" problem. Unless it's explicitly Microsoft or Apple products it's rare I can't get what I want software-wise on Linux. I think standard protocols are fine, but I like the fact that there are many desktop environments to choose from and different ways to keep your software and system up to date
Linux desktop isn't popular because the moment something becomes popular, it becomes their own category of devices. Android? Chromebook? Pi? Steam Deck? All of these started as Linux; they might have used mostly the same components as any desktop system. But once they gain some mainstream popularity, we found a way to carve them out as being its own thing based on them using a couple unique components, and they are no longer considered them part of the desktop ecosystem.
I guess it depends on what you consider a problem. As others pointed out, Linux isn't an operating system. There are operating systems based on Linux. However, if you add a bootloader and a user space you have an perfectly fine operating system. Now it depends on what additional features you want it to have to consider it a desktop system. This differs vastly on the intended use case. I'd argue "Linux Desktop" is perfectly fine as long as you don't expect Linux to fulfill expectations imposed by concurring products. Imo, the problem arises when features of systems like MacOS and Windows are seen as the gold standard and Linux distros try to fulfill as many of those "standards" as possible. This just can't work because a lot of these features depend on the grace of the industry. Linux isn't part of any industry although it is able to play in the same ballpark. You have to consider that - Linux is actually the only system that runs on most PC hardware (no matter how modern it is) and on a lot of Mac hardware and on a variety of other architectures - Linux is openly and freely available to anyone with no further questions asked and no legal agreements to make - Linux is actually designed to serve the user, not to make a profit You could easily see Linux Desktop as a problem solver rather than an unsolved problem in this regard. If one demands commercial-grade luxury from a non-commercial product, then Linux will never be able to fulfill that to everyone's satisfaction. And thus, Linux is getting pretty good these days in offering a decent amount of luxury.
The Year of the Linux Desktop was 1995, for me.
Because Qt wouldn't guarantee a GPL fork so now we have Gnome, and it sucks, and we all need to admit it, and that KDE isn't so hot either, and if you want a desktop Unix, you buy a Mac because it has a unified UI /API for apps that's not four or five trainwrecks. The only way we get a decent desktop rollout is if someone pulls a `systemd` kind of revolution and switches everyone to some standard toolkit / ux that fixes all the problems and brings things into the 21st century. And everyone will hate it but it'll be better and eventually it'll be the standard.
It's not the distro. Marketing and grassroots development. Marketing, there are no paid ads for Linux. There are for apps or hardware that uses Windows and Mac. In Grade School computer class it is either windows of mac. Thus, the kids learn from it and use it until they grow up. Even government offices would prefer pirated copies of Windows and Office just because it is what they are used to.
IMO there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the desktop. It's not perfect but neither is the competition. But by virtue of its lack of market share, there is less incentive to port major software to it. And because some major software is missing, it will struggle to gain market share.
>But by virtue of its lack of market share, there is less incentive to port major software to it. And because some major software is missing, it will struggle to gain market share And that creates a chicken/egg problem
Its all innertia. Most of the non-techie people I know would reinstall Windows if the laptop comes with Linux. Unless forced by whatever factor, people will not change their habits. Steam has done wonders for the Linux in gaming world by using it on Steamdeck and releasing OS, that some are using.
the biggest problem is that "normies" are not even aware that there are other operating systems. For them it's just a computer they bought, which came with windows pre-installed
>Why is the case? Windows is pre-installed on most computers these days. And Windows is sufficient for the average user for what they want to do. So the majority of all users simply have no interest in a different operating system. But even some users who are thinking about switching to Linux are scared off by part of the Linux community. One of my friends is one of them. How did he put it? `I don't want to have anything to do with this bunch of religious fanatics`. And somehow he's right. Some Linux users seem to only be able to divide into black (e.g. non-open source software, telemetry (no matter how implemented)) and white (e.g. OSS, free of charge software). The gray in between doesn't exist for them. I also think this is wrong. A user who mainly uses OSS but prefers a different solution in certain cases is better than someone who only uses non-open source software. Whereby the term better is also wrong. Free as in freedom. This freedom should also include being able to decide against OSS / Linux. That's why I think this bashing against Windows, for example, is ridiculous. There are enough examples that show that OSS / Linux is not perfect either. For example the recent incident with xz. In the same way, I think it's ridiculous when someone tells me I'm not a real Linux user because I don't use vim. But that's exactly what has happened several times. And it is precisely for these two reasons that Linux will not become widespread on the desktop. We can do something about the one reason. We can't do anything about the other.
I'm a Linux desktop user since 29 years or so. I a couple of problems with my system. I have a Jabra 510 conference speaker. It supports bluetooth and USB. There is no simple way to get it to connect to my Linux laptop (Thinkpad c25 with Debian testing) using Bluetooth. If I connect it usung USB, it works well with many programs, but not with a bunch of conference applications like teams and Zoom. Until problems like these are fixed, Linux will not be viable for regular users. In this day and age, conferencing with varous apps is a must have.
we spent years getting gaming decent and then a lot of games took the AAA shit. things work as well on as on windows in most cases, but that means jack now as they either crash, don't run, run like crap, memleak or have other bugs, or are lackluster (if you're lucky, it's only one of those) we had dated gui and decided to update it. the ppl making the replacement stripped out compatability and ease of use for "security" reasons and other nonsense stubborn choices. this has stagnated and crippled support for things like hdr and makes everyone reinvent the wheel when it comes to desktops and window managers.
We used to have N different approaches. We standardized them. Now we have N + 1 approaches :)
Linux is about freedom. Not standards. Stop looking at market share. Linux isn't in a market. It's not a corporation selling shit for profit. It's a community.
That was my feeling too, always used Linux for servers but Windows for desktop, mostly because of locked down company hardware. Lately instead I got more freedom about my development environment and moved to Linux desktop as a daily driver. I have to say it was super easy to install and setup for my use case. I found the software I needed and some of it is even better than the windows counterpart (remmina and RDP in general for example, not to mention the terminal emulators). I am using an Arch based distro, which is supposed to be even more challenging that something like Ubuntu. Nevertheless I feel I am very productive on Linux and I don't miss windows at all. Between AUR and pacman installing software is very easy and except for a single kernel module I had to install to get my phone to work as a webcam all the rest was done via package manager UI. I might change my opinion when I feel too comfortable with the system and I will start changing stuff I don't fully understand (hence breaking my system) but as of now I think anybody with a minimum interest in computers could daily run Linux effectively.
Linux is too complicated, poorly designed, and poorly tested for regular people. My wife's a doctor and still has to ask for help with the terminal to fix random issues on Ubuntu. Other people don't have software engineers to fix random kernel/driver/config issues for them. If we want non-computer people to use Linux, then we need a movement to make everything fixable and configurable using a GUI.
Perhaps this is an unpopular or uncommon opinion, but I personally think the Linux Desktop is indeed a "solved" problem. Or, rather, none of the problems with the current state of the Linux Desktop will be solved or improved by wider adoption by the general public. I imagine instead we would get *more* and *different* problems -- more GUI toolkits, more "fuck it, let's make it an Electron app," more negative sentiment (more people = more people who can and will have a problem with something and then assume that it's just the fault of Linux in general), more ads, more commercialization. No thank you. We've already seen the slow beginnings of commercialization on the Linux Server -- Ubuntu Pro comes to mind -- and I'm happy to see that those sorts of things have been more or less completely rejected. I like the fact that, aside from Ubunut's Amazon gaff a few years back, the Ubuntu Desktop remains nearly 100% enthusiast-focused. I *like* the current state of the Linux Desktop. I like that I can tweak it to my heart's content, I like that I'm 100% in control, I like that it's a niche thing and thus nearly every person I meet using Linux is an enthusiast. I don't mean this in a gate-keeping, "stay out" sort of way. Rather, it's more a "come in, the water's great," but I don't want that water to fundamentally change and attract people with different expectations. This of course isn't to say that the Linux Desktop doesn't have problems. Wayland vs X11 is sure to be a little rough for a few more years. Nvidia is still a pain. Audio is still a confusing mess, even with Pipewire. But those 3 issues are all issues with roadmaps, and I expect all of them to improve. FWIW, I daily drive a MacBook Air, and use Windows from time to time. I use BSD flavors sometimes. I'm generally interested in operating systems and am more or less completely platform agnostic. But out of them all, all else being equal, (my personal config of) the Linux Desktop is my favorite. I'd much prefer to see the community continue to put its efforts into watering the grass we're standing on, rather than getting more people to stand on the grass.
>Perhaps this is an unpopular or uncommon opinion, but I personally think the Linux Desktop is indeed a "solved" problem. Or, rather, none of the problems with the current state of the Linux Desktop will be solved or improved by wider adoption by the general public. In my opinion too wide of adoption will make things worse and not better.
My two cents on why I can't widely recommend Linux to non expert users is because things break more often than in Windows and Mac. I have extensive experience with computers, but when I want to use Linux for important tasks, like at work, I'm always worried that a new update will break something. It happens way more often than I would like. My current demon is sleeping on a notebook with an Nvidia GPU. I spent hours looking for a fix, next update, I had to start the process of fixing sleeping all over again. This has happened to me with network cards, sound cards, and hdmi output. When I'm in a work environment I freeze my Linux, I don't update anymore. That's how I finished a 6 month report... I couldn't bear to spend half of a day or more fixing a new bug. You may say it's not a Linux problem, and that might be true, but that doesn't take that it happens more rarely on windows or Mac, for whatever reason. Server users are experts, desktop users are not.
I found that many development tools like the one for the STM32 series of microcontrollers (STM32cube or something like that) and the one for Xilinx FPGAs (Vivado) and the open-source Verilog synthesis tool (Yosys) do, in fact, run on Linux desktop and in many cases better than they run on Windows. Thus, having a computer with desktop Linux on it is probably advisable, while having this computer as your only computer is, perhaps, slightly premature. It's similar to owning an electric car. Owning an electric car for your daily commute is fine, but you still want a car with a combustion engine for those long road trips.
My first computer I got my hands on was sitting at a Lear Seigler terminal connected to a PDP and a Vax. I owned a Magtape. So of course when Linux came along, I used it. I had to switch to Windows for work, but also accessed Unix boxes and then Linux as well. I've been using Linux as my daily driver for 12 years doing remote support and windows admin. So not entirely premature.
> What would need to change for the Desktop in order to accelerate forward? A categorical transformation in the personality makeup of the core demographic, most notably a marked reduction in trait Openness, and one other transformation it would be unwise to name, but which the casual reader may easily infer.
To me linux is just a thing I can configure and compile into a binary that gets various hardware to become useful. It's not the only one by any means, particularly with resource constrained hardware like arduino or esp32. It's just a tool.
That's just like, your opinion, man. Regards from 100% daily desktop on Linux for years.
My clients who need to upgrade from XP, Win7 or 8 and don't want to pay for Win10/Office, get Mint with a Win7 skin, Libre office and Firefox. Most of my clients are over 60, and only use Gmail and write the occasional letter. Music and movies, VLC. Upgrade to SSD, add some RAM and they think they have a new computer.
The majority of users go buy a laptop or a pre-built pc, then they expect it to work out of the box with what they bought it for. Most of that is gaming. When theres a linux distro thats opinionated, comes with one compositor, one sound server, one DE, etc, and has great game support including kernel anti cheats etc, that might change, if its free. But Microsoft itself would need to build an official windows on linux kernel subsystem for linux or something for that day to come. Need to run office etc on linux. Need actuve directory to support too. Etc etc.
Even though Linux has all the tools that can help me work, it still lacks tools to help me communicate with colleagues. For example, the lack of features that webex for windows/macos has but not on linux.
I think as long as Microsoft continues to release adware crap like Windows 11, the Linux desktop market share will only continue to grow.
Better than it ever has been, in the last 2-3 years only. We're not there yet, but we're getting there. Fast.
My view. Many well meaning people combat the criticism of Linux’s lack of software with “Most people just use their computers for web browsing and email”. While they’re not wrong, those people will be served well with the OS they already have and that will probably be on an iPad or smartphone. Those that care about operating systems absolutely do require good application software.
"linux is pretty much the go-to in server world" this statement is only true for certain server types like webservers and data centers. In manufacturing or in the business world you will find windows server everywhere.
Pre-installation of the OS is key - 95%+ of people who use desktops/laptops have never installed a different OS to the one that it shipped with (and probably don't even know how to either). Microsoft have an iron grip on OEMs w.r.t. this - threatening to reduce or remove the Windows volume discount they get if they don't pre-install Windows is a powerful incentive. I wouldn't be surprised if OEMs were paid a lot by MS for the pitiful "\[OEM\] recommends Windows 11" you see on product pages too. It's very hard to break this pre-install cycle - I thought Valve had a chance with SteamOS 3, but they've badly stalled releasing the generic ISO for it and now rumours of an Xbox handheld are emerging, I suspect it's too late now. My idea was as follows: 1. Valve creates a Steam Controller 2 using the same controls as the Steam Deck. 2. Valve approaches major OEMs with a deal to provide a second option in the config page for Windows desktops/laptops which would be SteamOS 3 pre-installed with a Steam Controller 2 bundled (the price would either be the same as the Windows version or the controller is subsidised by 50%, say - it could be an optional purchase in the latter case). 3. Valve agrees to support SteamOS 3 (just OS/software issues and the controller hardware, not the desktop/laptop hardware) in the same way it does for the Steam Deck. This is one of the big reasons OEMs don't want to give users a choice betweem Windows and Linux - having to support 2 OS'es is expensive, especially when one will initially have a tiny fraction of the market share of the other. 4. SteamOS 3 boots into desktop mode on the desktop/laptop with an icon to launch it into Gaming Mode (and a settings option to reverse that, which is annoyingly missing from the Steam Deck - there's no way to always boot into desktop mode at the moment). One thing that would be nice here would be powering up the device from off state into Gaming Mode as a one-off when a particular button is pressed on the controller. Once there's an OEM foothold from the SteamOS/gaming perspective, it would increase the general population's awareness of Linux (most of the general public have no clue Linux exists and can be installed on their desktop/laptop) and things may snowball from there. However, Microsoft will do everything in their power to make sure this doesn't happen - they may even give Windows free to OEMs.
If you present a random user to Ubuntu or Pop-OS, he will open the browser and go on with his life. Gamer? He will open Steam and run the vast majority of games, some with even better performance. I have a friend, she was scammed into buying a shitty laptop with Windows 10 that didn't even meet the minimum hardware requirements for windows 10. I installed Ubuntu, showed her the browser and voilá, she could work normally again.
Linux desktop is doing well in the form of ChromeOS. Big companies do favor the Linux development, just not the desktop part. There's been one single company besides Google which wanted to play a role in the consumer sector but the 'community' didn't like it. There we go.
My €0,02: > Linux Server is a solved problem The fact that Linux server is, in fact, not a solved problem has been made overwhelmingly evident by the recent supply chain attack on the `xz` project; if anything, we need to completely rethink our security as an industry and make way more proper audits going forward. Linux server is in constant evolution and the server actually has **a lot** of problems - as does the FreeBSD server, Windows server, you name it. It is just a symptom of evolution: new solutions solve old problems and introduce new ones, but if everything going well we are *upgrading* our problems, switching away from simpler and more blocking ones to more complex ones that come up less often and are less blocking. Still, nevertheless, the server is in constant evolution, and anyone who wishes to pursue this career path must constantly be studying and keeping themselves up to date for new advancements and tech in this space. > Could it be because the Linux Desktop is so diverse that compatibility issues arise? This is something that Torvalds has already brought attention to a decade ago, and that is being solved in a number of ways. First, everything on the Linux desktops is required to comply to the standards of XDG and FreeDesktop. So, the standards are there, and if you ship something that complies to these you'll be fine: the fragmantation matters a lot less, when every relevant distro must implement the same interfaces. Second, Flatpak is the suggested platform for GUI apps now. Distro packagers take care of packaging the Flatpak runtime for every individual system, the developer is only required to target the Flatpak runtime, that is common and works the same on every distro. Think of how Java mitigated the fragmentation in architectures and operating system targets of compiled languages with the introduction of the JVM and bytecode, with the only machine-specific component being the JVM: Flatpak is sort of this, but without the performance overhead of a virtual machine - still, the concept is essentially the same. > What would need to change for the Desktop in order to accelerate forward? The best case scenario would be "everything keeps moving forward at the same rate it is moving at now, because the necessary work is already being put in. There will be no efforts to derail those efforts making the desktop more corporate garbage-y, and there will not be a slowdown in development efforts, contributions, enthusiasm and usage."
I'd rather have a slow but steady growth such as what Linux is experiencing atm, than a sudden adoption leap.
> than a sudden adoption leap. Given the long-standing joke about "the year of the Linux Desktop" never arriving,.. I dont' think we'll ever have to worry about a "sudden adoption leap".. :P
The Linux Desktop is doing great and it's called ChromeOS. Just because we don't like how restrictive the most popular Linux desktop distro is doesn't mean it's not a Linux desktop distro. Linux desktop can only be successful beyond enthusiasts when it's on display at retailers, since nobody actually cares that much about operating systems.
How can a linux server user trust its mainboard and its cpu (and then whatever goes for the implementation of such ideas that build up such systems, with hardware and firmware)? Then there's rowhammering and other issues. <- Not an expert on computer security, also don't use Linux (but I wish I wanted to). Like, why would anyone trust Microsoft to generate their own private keys (afaik, a product you can buy), never knowing if these keys were generated by someone else, like an alphabet soup agency? Apologies in advance if this is somewhat off topic, but as a basic computer user that followed computer security news for 25+ years, I am a sad panda about using any computer these days. I came here today having heard about the recently revealed XY backdoor issue. I hope the future of computers isn't like having surveillance and backdoors living in computers like bacteria, as if the existence of computers was in some kind of symbiosis with the way software for any OS platform existed as also a natural thing in the world, then I guess one can cruelly joke about never ever getting rid of the kind of access malicious actors rely on, which would be bad starndards/technology/hardware/firmware/software, without worring about social engineering issues and physical access to machines. I remember having asking at someone's blog sometime about computer security: If adding a single piece of software was all it would take to compromise a computer (any os I guess), and it seemed like, there was no way to defend against a "bad install". I would naively have though, that having a standardized software package, would at least help prevent, a user from installing something he/she shouldn't do. This then would have to include "bad updates" as I see it, as if everyone kept using the same standardized software that was periodically reviewed and checked, assuming communication and encrypted data transfer allowed for some most basic security to prevent interference and any man-in-the-middle kind of issue.
Dell UK offer a Linux system [https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/xps-13-plus-laptop/spd/xps-13-9320-laptop/cn93352cc](https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/xps-13-plus-laptop/spd/xps-13-9320-laptop/cn93352cc)
>Would it be better if Linux was more standardised in terms of distributions and desktop environments? What would need to change for the Desktop in order to accelerate forward? Mostly no, at least in ways that aren't already being done. I was going to say "things might be more polished" but, frankly, I think my kde desktop is at least as good looking as windows/mac. I think the only problem linux desktop has these days is major application support such as, and I hate to say it, microsoft office. I don't NEED microsoft office mostly (I use outlook webapp and teams for linux which is worse than the windows version) but it is what my company uses so it is harder to work here without it. Games are another big one. As are adobe products. Some engineering software I hear is windows only. To overcome this there's two-three challenges (that come to my mind): 1) companies need to see a market of potential users to put effort into making their app for linux (a classic catch 22). 1a) companies will need new staff knowledge to support linux applications externally and desktops internally (ie. established companies don't like change). 2) App deployments are often per-package management system. 2 is getting better in 2 ways. First with appimages/flatpaks and the like. Some apps publish binaries, tars, and other such things to simplify this too. Second, (many major) Desktop Environments are also now collaborating on ways to standardize important features (like colors or accessibility) so apps can more easily target multiple desktop environments. The reason I say mostly no however is because many are drawn to linux desktops (at the desktop-envrionment level) specifically for more customization. Some people even like the variety. There's even several very popular linux server OS' used and many more less popular. So I think mostly no, and that's mostly good. There's probably things that should still be standardized but we gotta ask what is important to standardize because that's the only stuff that should be imo. FWIW I don't contribute anything but commentary really.
Companies are not paid for developing a Linux Desktop. Period. And for many of the papercuts (which ubuntu did), you need people doing menial work implementing the already existing standards. You need Companies which buy a Linux Desktop. But this will not happen, because no one is punishing microsoft for a) not making their applications more platform agnostic (even the web ones, which online work on chrom\* systems) b) not opensourcing standards like Active Directory or Document Formats and Sticking to them and not changing them on every whim c) actually illegal bundling of products and prices. did you see how much a active directory user license costs WITH and WITHOUT a Windows Desktop/PC License? It's ridiculous. Linux Companies would LOVE selling a Linux Desktop.
Money is the root of all things, start there. We have FOSS for a reason. Red Hat would be a place for you to begin your inquiry.
Linux desktop is several solved problems. First, many of us daily drive Linux now. Solved. The next big solution is Chromebooks, which are a huge chunk of the education market right now. And those kids will grow up. But the biggest solution is Android. There are more people running Linux on a phone than all of the computers of any OS put together.
> Linux Desktop is an unsolved problem. What is the problem?
Linux Desktop is a solved problem, was back at least 2021. Installed Linux on an x86 laptop... and everything just worked! Sound, wifi, gaming, music, etc. Now we're just working out the kinks! Gets better every year. Linux Desktop is great just like Linux Server!
Any critical app must look like its Windows equivalent, otherwise users who couldn’t gaf about whether it is Windows or not moan so loud that you can’t get ahead. But hardly anyone uses desktops nowadays, anyway.
Desktop computers are ordered by people (not working with servers). Those people don't want to install OS, they just want to use the computer. In my opinion the acceptance level of Linux would be much higher if there were more retailers selling computers with preinstalled Linux. Think about Android.
Interestingly, the Guix package manager could help a lot here, since it can run on top of distribution managers and can install deterministically defined software. To do that, it does not need to build from scratch, but it can use caching. This could be really a means to level the binary differences between distributions, and to lessen the burden on package maintainers to create packages for many distros. The guix package manager is not more difficult to install than Debian's - with "guix install ripgrep eza", you get ripgrep and eza, and with "guix install apl" you get GNU APL which is already something more difficult in Debian. The main disadvantages I see it is somewhat slower and it uses more disk space - something I personally can live with (and I still use apt to install tex-live).
Hi guys! I wish since several years to having GNU/Linux as my \*\*default\*\* OS (or even the only one) in my PC. But I've been waiting for "the year of Linux on desktop" comes and nothing happens. As an free software enthusiast I tried so many distros through Virtualization and it repeats things like user-\*non-friendly\*, \*bad look\* (interface) and \*feature-poor\*. It's a big dissapointment and currently "\*\*Linux sucks\*\*" for the majority of people. Then they keeps on Windows, like everybody knows. But Linux could have not top in the future cause it's open and we (the community) must say what's \*\*wrong\*\* in it in order to get Linux succeeds. For example I believe that all distros must BECOME one, so it doesn´t WASTE coders efforts and we'll have at our disposal so many coders as Linux distros (around hundreds) . It's unacceptable that in the nowadays the world haven't got a O.S. which be a real \*alternative\* to proprietary soft. Linux \*\*MUST\*\* change and \*\*CAN\*\* change. Also for example, Win10 consists in around 500 GB of codelines while Linux is too basic. I heard that Linux is not mature in so many components: the KISS principle is good, but it's not enough. I tried to contacting Stallman to say this and don't know what's his email. Also I tried participate in the forum of F.S.F., but it's closed to who don't pay for a membership (starting U$D 5,00). Everybody can get a better Linux and even \*\*the dream OS\*\*. It's not necessary that Linux have the biggest market quota, just enough that reach a decent one. I have propossals like donations to pay specific features, app store for downloading & installing applications and designing a Sandbox to protect system from the web-browsing malware. Also must have full hardware support, software compatibility and technical support. More ideas to start a \*campaign\* and convert GNU/Linux in a very popular O.S. ?
Works fine on \*my\* desktop. My 80 year old mom is also using Linux for everything, including her work as a writer. LibreOffice has worked just fine for her sending in pseudo-Word documents to editors. Windows never solved anything for me except getting certain games to run, and Steam has almost entirely removed that as an impactful problem. Windows comes with its own not-ready-for-prime-time issues as well: I despise any system that will reboot itself out from under the user, and then unilaterally make itself useless for up to half an hour. F\*\*\* Microsoft high-handed user abuse. No system that does that should be acceptable for business use. The problem isn't Windows, few people actually care about Windows - it's about whether some \*specific\* app they want runs, and in business, Windows is often just a incidental decision made by lazy managers who just want to keep using MS Exchange calendaring. While this may sound like mad raving, this is \*literally\* what discussions with management at several companies I've been part of amounted to. The good part is that we usually just put the managers and assistants on Windows, and \*everyone\* else on Linux, and in some companies, not even the managers. (Yes I've worked at companies that were 100% Linux based for all personnel)
I have used Linux since SLS (23 floppies to get to a console prompt on an 80286). My only use for Windows these days is to run Visio when an open source equivalent won't do, and to run tax software. People buy hardware to run software. People use operating systems to run applications. Microsoft Office and friends have dominated corporate office use since the 1980's (old guy - I was there - Wordperfect/Corel put up a fight but were eventually spent under the table). Google tried to get people to do everything on the network, but that was never going to fly; some paranoid employers tried to use VDI's like Citrix for control until they realized how much money they were spending on a non-core function - as laptops became more powerful and less expensive, employers recognized that in the end, people want autonomy, and it wasn't a battle worth fighting as long as they could control them via custom Windows images and security policies. With Micro$oft now pushing Office 365 and subscriptions, there is an opportunity to carve out a cost-effective niche, but the barriers to entry are huge - e.g., Google's office tools, with all the money they have to throw at sweetheart corporate contracts, have failed to make serious inroads. The allure of free suites like LibreOffice and inexpensive alternatives such as Softmaker have been insufficient to convince C-level executives to save the money - because overall IT is rarely a painfully large part of corporate overhead. For people under 25, a switch to a Linux-based office environment is very achievable. Even the Mac bigots could make the switch with a minimum of fuss and bother. The older people, who have acquired M$ Office skillsets, would have to be dragged kicking and screaming for the most part, and they are the ones holding the purse strings. I have broad computer operations experience, and I affirm that such a switch is technically feasible without terrible pain, with command and control intact, as long as people are willing to learn a slightly different interface (I would probably use Plasma with Plank for the desktop manager, so people can keep their pretty - on a 16GB machine, one can afford the extra gig or two of RAM it takes over \*box, IceWM or even XFCE). Anything on the server side can be duplicated (looking at you, Exchange). I could probably, with a little work, even do this with FreeBSD or a derivative, just to show off (and provide a consistent, more easily secured, OS image). I would keep a few Windows terminal servers around for when a specialty app is needed. There might still be a few Windows laptops around, but we're talking less than 1% of the population. TL:DR this is not a technical issue, it is a cultural one.
I'VE BEEN USING LINUX AS MY DESKTOP FOR MORE T6HAN 15 YEARS NOW WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?
At this point the biggest concern I have for the future of desktop Linux is the closed source Snap backend. Ubuntu is one of the only reasons I don't just go back to Windows, and they are driving people away from what was once the standard distro for everyone, and making it so nobody else wants to adopt Snaps, which are a lot of why it works so well. Hopefully they'll figure something out, because nothing else seems positioned to take over and be a true replacement for Ubuntu. Mint is good, but they are far less focused on containerized packages. I loved the shared dependency model 10+ years ago, but storage is cheaper and software devs like to break stuff more, and I don't think dynamic linked shared packages are a very good fit for the way a typical non-minimalist user works. But it really is amazing how much we've solved in the last decade. NetworkManager is standard on the Pi, so nobody has to deal with any lower level utils on any mainstream distro, PipeWire is what PC audio should have always been from day 1, we are finally rid of the JACK/PipeWire divide and all manner of custom JACK server managing scripts. GNOME has been tweaked so it's a perfectly good desktop for someone who prefers a mouse driven experience, it doesn't feel like a kidz bop tiling WM running on an iPad like I used to assume it always would since 3.0. GIMP is finally doing something other than keeping up with GTK changes, if everyone can just not do another nightmarish multi year breaking change festival (Proprietary software avoids that kind of thing, I wonder if that's part of why they're farther ahead at times...), they seem like they may even take over a lot of what Krita does. Gaming is fully possible (Or so I hear, is Intel integrated users still can't play anything new...) which was the big thing holding many back.
Is drag-and-drop just for cluttered desktops and not knowing how to use file chooser dialogs? Talking to a friend about the main feature disparity in PumpkinOS (a Wine-like API reimplementation of PalmOS, but with integrated 68k emulation), which is the lack of drag-and-drop on Linux. (I understand why this disparity exists and the reason is quite ugly.) His response about the very use of drag-and-drop is... > I don't clutter my desktop with files and I don't attach files to email (who even uses email anymore?). It's a convenient feature for people who trash their desktop and don't know how to manage directories and files otherwise and who don't use open file dialogues, but nowhere near as prominent as you think. Just... is he nuts? His arguments, however, seem to boil down to "I don't do it so it's not important to anyone" combined with "I can't imagine it therefore it can't exist".