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Discussion on: Why is Linux Not More Popular on the Desktop?

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JoelBonetR 🥇 • Edited

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...