Picture taken from wikipedia.
There are issues when it comes to Linux being more broadly adopted on the desktop. What are the main issues you think and how can they be addressed?
I think that the big issue with Linux is fragmentation. This has been especially an issue when it comes to developers publishing games on Linux.
The solution to this issue are cross-distribution installers like Snap, AppImage and Flatpak. Every application has its own set of libraries, meaning they do not depend on distribution-specific packages.
Another issue I believe is momentum. There's some outdated opinion on how well Linux works on the desktop.
Defeating the momentum will require more effort on the PR front. I don't see this being something that will just fix itself with time.
Thoughts?
Latest comments (102)
Well Linux is more used in desktops those days thanks to... Microsoft and its Windows Subsystem for Linux :D
The reasons why Linux is not so popular in desktop are, in my opinion, the following:
Stability. Lack of quantity and quality hardware drivers.
Software catalogue. Most devs had dual-boot before WSL2, specially those devs that are also gamers and if you try to play something different than minecraft on a Linux you'll learn why.
Frustration. People that would use Linux usually face issues that needs to be solved with the terminal, and muggles (non-IT users, and fake IT users) have the bad practice of copy and paste each thing they find on internet on a vague try to solve it's issue and go on without ever trying to understand the issue so it quickly ends up on a mess and the need to format after typing ROOT from the beginning and executing some commands found on wherever blog about something "similar" to it's issue.
Linux is and always was an OS made by "nerds" for "nerds". If you want to push a product to the market as "consumable product" you need to push hard on usability and avoid user's silliness to end up in a mess or on a weird path. This is something Windows did nice since time ago. It may push a blue screen to your face so you know something went so wrong it had to stop, on Linux you get an error on a specific "module" so you can keep trying to solve that and you'll be able to solve that only if you know about Linux. Simply setting a "safe mode" for that and not the Linux current safemode (which is primary about disabling drivers that malfunction) would be better while showing "orange screen of death". Oh and.. you'll need to maintain all the modules that shape and form an OS version, otherwise you'll end up with issues here and there and oh this is not maintained anymore and so...
The answer has nothing to do with popularity or usability or familiarity or anything UI/UX. It is all about advertising and [semi-redact above] familiarity or comfort. Windows was so bam bam in the beginning that it dominated the market, and became what is know as the Coke syndrome where the very idea of an OS, for desktop, was to assume Windows. "...I'd like a coke please." interprets to, "...I'm buying a new desktop" and now the buyer is only assuming that it comes with Windows.
Oh well, my flavor is Mint or any Debian with smaller PCs (media centers and 3d-printer boxes) favor towards LinuxLite. distrowatch.com/table.php?distribu...
I think fragmentation is a big issue, but there is also people with closed minds that will not accept anything that is not Microsoft related. For instance, a few days ago I had a job interview and the interviewer said something like If it were for me, all the servers would be using Windows, it's simpler... after he told me he had to use Linux because his architect told him so.
For me it was app/driver support. I use Ubuntu at work and was using PopOS at home till I recently purchases a Macbook pro. I got tired of things not working at home on my laptop and the solution being pages long. As well as some apps just being buggy or not working.
I just stumbled on this older article & want to chime in.
I'm a convert from Windows desktop to Ubuntu. As a dev I'm more technical than average, but at the time I was a huge Windows fan & not super comfortable with the terminal.
Though I think I was the perfect target for Ubuntu... it was still a transition that required a high level of dedication & determination. As great as Ubuntu is, the entire Linux ecosystem lacks 2 main things: focus on user-friendliness & polish on the available applications.
The simple fact is if you want to market an OS to mainstream users, they never, ever want to run terminal commands to do anything. And even Ubuntu is only about 70% there. The gui has to be intuitive. It took me forever to first figure out how to get an app shortcut on my desktop. Fix the driver & hardware compatibility issues. Etc.
Second, I have so far found a Linux alternative to every piece of software I used to use on Windows years ago (except my accounting software, but I moved to cloud). However, without exception each one is visually uglier than the Windows alternatives. They may work as good or better - but if the GUI looks like the 1980s... people think it's old - even if it's actively updated. Microsoft makes Office & Outlook which are two of the main things people use. They keep the design polished, modern & consistent.
The public likes simple & shiny. Microsoft & Apple deliver this- even if they are bloated, vendor-locked & full of spyware, people won't care. Remember when Windows' Aero Glass theme came out? People were gaga over it.
I change it to cinnamon, is better and friendly than gnome.
Try Fedora, it works for me
Because they teach Windows and MS Office in all schools.
Forcefully and exclusively.
Also because Adobe doesn't release for linux.
I'm using GNOME on ArchLinux, at least since 2014, and I feel like I'll never look back.
The dark theme, before every other OS, looks just stunning since about ever.
The UI is buttery smooth, and the
alias open=xdg-openmakes me forget I'm not on macOS for the pretty much only command that I like about my macOS bash experience.The Random Wallpaper extension makes me forget I'm not on Window, offering me amazing wallpapers from various sites curated by people, with all details when needed.
If I miss one thing from macOS, it's the Emoji widget on ctrl+command+space, something replaced by Emoji Selector extension, but not nearly as well integrated.
If I miss one thing from Windows, is just the ability to play, from time to time, whatever game, even if most things work well via Steam and/or Proton and/or dxvk.
If I could have both previous things on top of what I have daily, I'd say my perfect OS would be already a reality: blazing fast, community driven, usable in laptops, as well as Raspberry PI (or any other SBC, really), and Desktop PCs, and it's always updated 🎉
As developer, you'll indeed have always latest stable version of any package, but you can also create your own packages and publish those in AUR, where AUR is the best thing ever for community packages creation and developers.
To anyone still associating Linux to Ubuntu, just give GNOME on ArchLinux a chance, and you'll start writing posts like this one 'cause you'll be super happy, but sad if others haven't tried this combo too.
If you wouldn't know how to, give AntergOS or archibold.io a try.
I've installed these to my family and few friends, and everyone is happy.
All packages that work in Debian/Ubuntu will eventually work on ArchLinux too, so even the fragmentation excuse is not really an issue.
Now, answering to the question: why not more users?
There are still various famous "premium" softwares that work on Windows, or macOS, only.
Adobe does that, but so does Origin, EA, and many many other Games related Software Houses.
They just don't care about Linux, and not because it's difficult to distribute anything, simply because they ignore a minority of users.
There is also outdated softwar, full of bugs, security issues, yet used by banks, public administrations, etcetera ... and until they do the switch, and there are various countries where PAs already did switch from Windows to Linux, we'll still have a minority so that selling software for Linux would mean putting some effort without a certain income.
And people also keep associating the Linux world as if everything must be free while they can sell on Windows and macOS: this is simply not true at all, yet hard to drop from many people mind.
All this could change only if people started ditching the latest game, the latest software, or the latest whatever, if it doesn't have a Linux version too.
This, although, won't probably ever happen, 'cause people don't like being in charge.
I'm a web developer, so there is obviously a lot of motivation for me to move to Linux - being the platform my code gets hosted on. The environment differences, and the generally poor Windows support for supposedly "cross-platform" languages, and so on.
I've started using Ubuntu on Windows, and it's still a somewhat prickly experience. Certainly better than waiting for a dependable Windows build of anything. And at least I get a stable, dependable UI for everything but programming languages 🤨
I'm the type of person who reluctantly picks a Linux every year or so, and have for more than a decade. It typically takes about a week of agony to make me go back to Windows.
This is just to provide some context for my experience.
What are the main issues?
The first is stability. Even the experienced Linux people I work with are constantly showing up to a presentation with a laptop that crashes just because you unplugged your monitor and went to a different monitor in the next room. Even a smaller hardware change seems to be enough to make it break down.
More systemic changes like taking out your harddrive and putting it in a new computer is almost guaranteed to either brick your system completely or at least leave you with lots of manual updates and/or things not working.
Probably the driver model is broken? Or perhaps the drivers themselves are neglected by the vendors and/or contributed by third parties? I don't know.
I never have problems like these on Windows. Drivers and hardware needs to just plug-and-play, with no intervention on my part. Having to fight the OS to achieve stability is completely out of the question for me.
For reference, I have seen Windows 10 crash precisely twice since it came out.
In the same time period, I must have seen my coworkers Linux machines crash (or just wig out) often several times daily.
The second big issue for me is software distributions.
On Windows, I download one file, double-click, and walk through an installation wizard.
On Linux, even with some of these vendor-supplied "app stores" attempting to make things more accessible, installation is usually a complete mystery.
The typical experience is something like a terminal window with thousands of lines of weird messages flying across the screen - and then, at the end of that, typically you're left completely in the dark, probably with some assumption that you know precisely what you've just installed and how to invoke it?
And for things like languages, these "app stores" aren't usually even an option, because everything they have is outdated, and, if you're installing a programming language, typically you need the latest version. The it's off to Stack Overflow to find obscure commands to manually add (often "unofficial", which feels really spooky) "repositories" to yet another mysterious tool just to be allowed to download and install the thing.
Who wants to know any of this stuff? It's the Dark Arts. I want to be a programmer and not a systems administrator.
So those are the two biggest problems from my personal point of view.
My experience with installing programming languages is the same on OSX and Linux - using version managers (pyenv, rvm, nvm). I don't recommend messing around with system-level dependencies. Its so bad that debian patches pip to prevent people from upgrading certain dependencies that are global.
I think it's just the ease of use. After switching completely to Linux ~10 years ago I was amazed by speed and the amount of tools available for software development. Then, when I switched to MacOS I was also surprised that a lot of things from Linux just worked on there too and the setup was a lot easier.
~8 months ago I switched back from MacOS to Linux Ubuntu and yet again I was surprised how much OS has changed:
I think Linux community did a great job. Current versions of Ubuntu and Fedora can be used by anyone (even your parents).
I'm surprised honestly that there's literally no talk of ChromeOs particularly with Crostini here.
We all know ChromeOs as being a super locked down linux base, on some less powerful machines. A few years ago the introduced android apps that barely worked, but they scrapped it and re-did the entire feature and now its pretty good. That also paved way for the above mentioned Crostini.
Crostini is essentially a special container running debian off the chromeOs kernel, that lets you install software with apt-get as well as .deb packages. Gui programs automatically open in ChromeOs as native windows and get launcher icons in chromeos so you don't even have to open the terminal once they are installed.
In addition, if installing from a .deb file you can double click it in the file explorer, and it will install for you without having to do anything with the terminal or another. Also in the pipeline is the ability to simply type the program(from apt-get) you're looking for into the search bar and install it with a click. Currently the main limitation is that there is no hardware acceleration for the applications in the container though that is now in alpha testing and coming down the line. Steam runs but the games barely run due to that.
So ChromeOs you can run basically every Android app, and basically anything from linux land, with none of the normal driver BS you sometimes have to deal with. I've gotten IntelliJ running, Gimp, you name it. And its so simple. It's still a bit incomplete but its still technically in "beta", that said, its basically everything I want a linux desktop to be.
I've personally never tried it, but I did recommend to some non-developers.
I think the driver issue is solved if you buy the machine for Linux specifically (buy from Dell, System76 or Purism). The problem is that you have the freedom to install Linux on any machine, which is where most of the driver problems come from. Not all vendors support Linux well.
On the driver issue, yeah but if I buy a windows machine I never would really have that issue."
Also for some reason its ALWAYS the wifi driver that fails and there's never an ethernet port. :P
Chromebooks are great for non-devs but they are quickly on the path to be a dev device as well due to the increasing native linux support. The linux support and android apps also make it really robust for non-devs too where just the browser isn't quite enough for them.
Count the steps and time needed to get the good driver for graphics or sound on Windows vs Linux and you'll see why non-technical users stay away from it. Constant bugs, experimental base versions which produce pain for users that want to get on with their lives etc...
Microsoft has a way of reaching different manufacturers and those create good enough drivers for the hardware in need (you can write down list of problems it's still stable for large number of users) then linux guys have to figure out how to catch up and cannot get all of the specs while writing drivers. It sounds stupid for Linux users but just test it and see. It's not fun to configure PC for 3 days just to get it to work when you only need system to work as fast as possible. It looks like this is currently changing but it's not. Any time I try to get back fully on Linux I have issues regardless of the distro.
It's a bit matter of business where MS has it's way to force hardware makers to do stuff for them in the personal machines part while servers are not that of intrest to them. On the other hand Apple has it's own specific hardware and they make it work :D
To install drivers all I have to do is enable it in the settings, its actually easier to setup in my experience. Intel integrated cards work out of the box. Things might be different if you're using AMD though.
and nvidia :D :D ... Not always but usually i get the bugs for graphics and sometimes I even need to edit some settings in config files which is boring me out. But sure if you get lucky all of your devices work just fine and even better sometimes than on windows. Forgot to mention network cards where ubuntu had problem with wifi and constantly dropped connections. Also I usually get high temperatures from using KDE and Gnome. As I said it's pretty common to encounter bugs as soon as you install the distro. If this gets fixed I think we could see more people using it on Desktop as non-tech users will believe it's good enough.
I'm on Linux, but it took me a couple of attempts to actually settle on it completely. First attempts were unsuccessful because I would often ran into problems and then ask myself why it has to be so hard? and then went back to windows xp. At a certain moment windows 7 appeared which I never used. Then due to perseverance or stubbornness I went back to Linux. I think after a third attempt I never went back to windows. I have never regreted it.
If I had someone around me who knew Linux perhaps I would have needed only one attempt.
// , Allow me to refer you to the Unix Haters handbook:
freecomputerbooks.com/The-UNIX-Hat...
The authors discuss the fundamental issues with the variants of Unix, including Linux, usability in depth.
Many of the issues we see today would persist even if a billionaire took up the cause.
Oh, wait, did that already happen?
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