This has been discussed many times before. Personally, I think that there is an inherent contridiction between the FOSS ethos and mass appeal.
The way things get adopted en masse is by having limited options and limited changes.
This is why most extremely popular software grows stagnant. The company/group that puts it out doesn’t want to alienate its user base. Think Ebay, Facebook, ios, etc.
Users get pissed off if their software changes in any significant way. Most people don’t care about choice or freedom. They just want to grab a device and have it turn on and do what they tell it.
Look at cell phones. Back in the early 00’s when they started to become common for everybody, think about all the weird and wacky designs you saw. Neon, chrome, bizzare form factors, gimmicks, etc. The paradise of consumer choice. So many brands and styles to choose from. I remember going to high school and seeing all the different kinds of phones that everybody had.
Now days, every phone is a black/grey glass slab. The most drastic differences between them are what shape the bezels are and how the camera lenses are oriented on the back.
Consumers in general don’t care about choice. They are fine choosing between an Apple glass slab or an Android glass slab. This point is proven even more strongly by gen Z, who apparently don’t even care about the few “choices” that Android provides, over 80% of US teens use iphones. Of iphone users, over 30% are gen z, of Android, barely over 10%, three times less
Linux and FOSS in general is all about choice, options, rejecting vendor lock, forking projects and carving out niches for sub-groups of users. A fork for devs, a fork for security concerned folks, a fork for people that liked the way the software looked 10 years ago, a fork for people that don’t agree with the political views of the original devs, etc etc.
I don’t have a problem with that, personally I love it. The extreme consumer freedom and ability to customize is a huge reasons I love FOSS software. But I also recognize that it means we won’t ever be mainstream. Or at the least, if we become mainstream, it will likely be at the cost of much of that freedom.
I am happy with a few percent market share. I don’t need more than that to feel like we are successful. As long as Capitalism is the default system in this world, it will always reward products that generate the most profit, and that will never reward freedom or consumer rights long term.
We ought to inform others as much as we can on an individual basis, friends, family etc. Use FOSS, contribute money, code, documentation, tutorials, and user support. Fight the power and stand against the corpos. Our fight should not be based in the goal of becoming “mainstream,” it should be based in the principles of freedom, empowerment, and inclusion.
I think people also grossly underestimate how much of an affect million dollar advertising budgets have. Apple spends a mint on their advertising, appealing to younger folk and making their products seem cool and fashionable.
A lot of people won't care about choice when there's a very limited choice of products being advertised as "must-have".
Linux does not have a million dollar advertising budget, it doesn't have huge advertising companies creating slick ad campaigns, it doesn't have restricted choice and railroading people into false ideas of what's necessary. And it doesn't come preinstalled on a majority of devices.
Noone is using windows because it is cool and hip and i doubt microsoft advertises windows. People use windows because they work and do what they want. Maybe they could use ubuntu, but why would they do that? What does ubuntu offer that windows dont?
I'll tell you why they(including me) dont use linux, because maybe their wifi wont work(or they will have to compile the universe to make it work) or their favourite app or game wont work. And even if you could make a piece of hardware or software work in linux, the performance might be inferior because it will be using generic drivers, instead of the proprietary windows only drivers that the manufacturer has made.
Ultimately, people dont care about open source or privacy enough, to sacrifice their convenience.
Linux isn't for everyone. I still dual boot for damn Adobe products. But as someone who's used Linux as my daily driver for over a decade and installed many different distros on both my own and other people's laptops and PC's, most of what you say happens isn't the case for most people.
It also doesn't acknowledge the fact that many things on Windows don't "just work" and require extra apps, drivers, reg edit or any other number of things that need fiddling with. For example, the Audio Interface for my electric guitar just works in Linux. The kernel already has the driver. This is the case for the majority of the hardware I have connected over the years. On Windows, I have to search out, download and then install the driver.
I talk about people not caring about anything other than what they're advertised, what's convenient or what's easiest for them to use, in another one of my replies in this thread. .
First of all, this guy is correct that this is a significant reason that Linux is not more popular on the desktop. Desktop Linux is a community of things, not just one thing that people can experience and recommend.
That said, XKCD has a nice explanation about why that will never be solved:
From time to time though, a distro will dominate and. Linux will grow. For a while, that was Red Hat. Then, it was Ubuntu. Both of those moved things forward but were too early to reach mass adoption. There really is no front-runner right now but perhaps one will emerge again and “that” will be Linux for the masses.
In the meantime, things like Flatpak are addressing a lot of the problem. It is becoming realistic for a dev to target “Linux” ( Flatpak ) and have their application run predictably regardless of what distro any given individual has chosen. Freedesktop.org helps as well.
Really though, this problem will exist until most of us ( not all ) agree that one Linux Desktop distro is simply better than the rest and most of us begin to use it. We can then onboard new users onto that.
It’s immutable, so you probably consider it unusable, but I think it’s necessary for mass adoption. Developers know exactly how the OS is built and can ensure their applications and games operate well on Steam OS. I think it will become a de facto standard, if it’s not already.
Even for someone like me who prefers linux I still end up using windows most of the time. Even with 90% of games working on linux, theres that 10% I still need to boot up windows for.
yesterday i woke up and didnt found the settings icon in the menu. i had to sudo apt the thing (ubuntu, maybe this is a garbage distro. would fedora or deb be more stable ? ) also why would i have to look up arch documentation for a problem i had with ubuntu ? people using windows just worry about… windows, not 90 flavours of the thing. nonetheless, windows has become bloated trash beyond win 7.
why would i have to look up arch documentation for a problem i had with ubuntu?
Because they’re all built on the same software for the most part.
I don’t really know what kind of issue you had, so I can’t say if the following would really work better for you, anyway my personal recommendation is Silverblue for (usually) fewer headaches
Ah I get it, it’s really solid so I don’t think you’d have regrets, plus you get up to date software!
Ubuntu is really just meh these days, it is still pretty reliable, but it doesn’t look like they’re really caring a lot about their users, just my outsider opinion, as I left it a few years ago now
older versions of software, especially for development, I used to try out new features a lot for things like PHP and other stuff (but it’s kind of a moot point now with things like Distrobox or Nix)
upgrades to the latest major version often breaking because I first moved to the latest non-LTS and then, when it came out, to the newest LTS, contributed by the fact that the PPAs would break, since the devs behind them needed to push a new version for the last Ubuntu release
Today I still wouldn’t use it for their push of Snap, I just don’t dig it, I much prefer Flatpak for my apps
i am no dev but also i dont like when other stuff break when i install new stuff and have to spend hours looking up guides to troubleshoot. so at least we share a common middle ground
That’s Fedora, though. If they prefer debian distros, Fedora may not be for them. As a (very limited) frame of reference, I prefer debian distros and I love silverblue. It is now my daily driver. I both dislike and very much like the containerization of it all.
I hope you’ll overcome your love hate relationship and settle your differences. sends hug
If they prefer debian distros
I want to suggest Vanilla OS, but until the new Orchid is released I’ll hold off from it, I thought it would be coming sooner by now, but I guess they still have a lot of work to do
I had gotten a used laptop with Win10Pro, and I only use Windows for work. I’ve always wanted to try Fedora, so I took this opportunity (I grabbed the Win10Pro key off of it beforehand, of course), and I’m very glad I did. Gentoo will be next, I think.
Vanilla looks very interesting! It looks like a very real prospect that I may be able to recommend to new users. Ubuntu’s Unity has caused several people to whom I’ve recommend it, to revert back to Windows. Maybe Vanilla will keep them on Linux. I actually stopped recommending Ubuntu because of Unity, and started recommending Mint to Windows users or Budgie to Mac users. I know it’s somewhat configurable, but the side app bar of Unity and the Windows 8 style app menu were among some of the reasons they disliked Ubuntu. They said that it felt “ancient”.
Oh that’s possible? I had no idea, well, not like I felt the need after discovering MAS on GitHub 👀
Good call on the change of recommendations imo, although I worry that those DEs might receive the Wayland treatment too late, that’s a pretty important aspect to me.
The “ancient” thing was just funny tho
I use HBCD, grab the keys, and reboot into the Linux installation ISO.
I forgot about MAS!! Man, those scripts were so important when Vista just started losing its registration for kicks and giggles. I haven’t really gotten into Wayland, so I’m not familiar with it’s benefits yet, but know (just from reading comments) that’s they’re plentiful.
In my experience the only improvement I actually noticed on Wayland was finally being able to screenshare correctly distinct monitors and app windows, there’s definitely a whole lot of smaller things that got better with it though, as you say, so I think (if your hardware plays well with it) it is worth moving to
… and by implication, it guarantees that Linux will (almost definitely) never be the world’s desktop. Mainly because there’s no one single company to blackmail.
Astra Linux will be Russia’s main desktop if this war continues for another 4 or 5 years. China UOS (Deepin) will be China’s main desktop by 2030 or so if the USA keeps up with the trade war. Lots of countries will adopt Deepin if it’s cheaper and just as stable. Linux will never be the main desktop in the West but we’ll see non US allied countries become Linux countries in the next 20 years.
Highly probable. But considering Microsoft has been subsidized by the US government indirectly for decades I don’t see it being much different except that the GPL license hopefully will allow for the OS to become a common good.
I think the reason is that 1. Linux is still too hard for the average person and 2. The average person just doesn’t care
Yes, you don’t have to write bash scripts or compile the kernel yourself, but still, Linux is different in many ways from Windows. This is on top of the fact that most people don’t know much about tech in general and often have problems with (imo) very basic stuff. I honestly can’t imagine them downloading an ISO file, flashing it onto an USB stick and then booting from it. Most people probably don’t even know that Windows != PC
Then there’s also the fact that the average person just doesn’t care. They just want to get things done
(sidenote: I might sound elitist but I’m not. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect everyone to be interested in tech, just like it’s not reasonable to, for example, expect everyone to be interested in cars. It just so happens that the tech industry is tightly connected to freedom, privacy, etc. while the car industry is not)
I kinda want to softly disagree with this point (and i’m sure others will disagree with my disagreement), because the average user pretty much does everything they do in a web browser. A few of them might have to use thunderbird for email, instead of their web browser, and thats about it.
And to be perfectly honest, Theres no significant functional difference, for those average users, between linux and windows. Just got to put the browser and email icons somewhere on the desktop where its visible and thats basically that.
I speak of personal experience (so take it with a grain of salt and skepticism), because I have pretty much my entire family on linux, though to be fair I got them on linux by basically saying “Listen, your computers old, and the OS is no longer supported. Either you can pay me a lot of money to get you a new computer and new version of windows, or I can install linux on what you have for free and you can keep going without any investment”. Being cheap, they always chose linux.
in my experience, almost all the terror that rises from the deep with regards to linux, comes the second you try to do anything more intensive than web browsing/email… Cause they you are running into installing things, tweaking things, problem finding, etc etc.
Yeah, but when I tried to get my mom to use Linux, she kept asking me how to do some things like moving a file, printing a PDF, saving a document in Libreoffice (even though she had no trouble doing it on Windows also with Libreoffice) etc. I’ve set up everything to be as seamless and close to Windows as possible but she still always had trouble doing something so I gave up, and reinstalled Windows. Ig my mom is just less tech savy than your family ¯_(ツ)_/¯
But for what you have said, the only problem is that Windows comes already installed, if all computers were only Linux, and they needed to install the Windows with custom Live ISO and that, then no one would use Windows. So the only problem is the monopoly that Microsoft have.
The issue isn’t an official Linux distribution, per se (and note: Canonical have wanted to be that for years with their Ubuntu).
The issue is that laptop and desktop retail machines come with Windows. And until that changes, Linux on the desktop will never see more traction.
There is probably only one real way this comes to fruition: a company, like Apple, that engineers their own hardware with full stack integration to their own Linux distribution — and the hardware has to be aesthetically pleasing, reasonably priced (unlike Apple), and with in-person support (a la Apple Store).
The closest to that we have, at least in the United States, is System76. But they do not engineer their systems. They basically cobble together all the parts that are known to work with the Linux kernel, toss them into an outsourced chassis, and sell them at what I would consider somewhat bloated prices.
That being said, I love what System 76 is doing with Pop!_OS, but the name sucks, the software versions will always be lagging behind unless using snap and/or flatpak, gaming on Linux is still an uphill battle despite Proton’s strides, and at the end of the day, the user will actually have to do something at some point on the command line.
What Linux desktop users need to embrace is that it is okay to not be the primary desktop operating system of the world. It is okay that it is relegated to geek enthusiasts, developers, and the like.
Linux needs more companies like steam that develop certain things into Linux that enable more software support. I feel like the steam deck and proton greatly increased the number of people using linux primarily or at least dipping their toes in. Having popular mainstream creative suites, office suites, and a greater userbase is probably what would allow Linux to actually absorb windows users.
I don’t think it’s completely fine, because, as we see time and time again, Windows being the default, and so the largest player, allows developers, especially in the enterprise and education sectors, to be lazy and support only Windows for their applications. The expectation has been created that everyone has to own a Windows computer and that damages us, since it restricts our choices, for some people it can nullify entirely the effort they put into switching to Linux.
For example, in my country, to do the admission exam to university you need to install the SEB browser, which amounts to pretty much a Windows-only rootkit, now I wouldn’t enjoy putting that on my Linux system, but the laziness here is clear, they could have made a a live single-purpose Linux distro that boots up a locked down browser and checks that it hasn’t been tampered with when it runs, it didn’t have to be the only option, it could have been an additional option for privacy concious users, but why won’t they do it? Because it’s not trivial to build and the Linux market share is too small to care about and if you use it you are weird.
To a certain extent it’s the fault of our institutions that don’t allow choice of OS most of the time, let alone forcing the use of Linux, if more would do the latter (because, let’s be honest, if they only let us choose they’d treat all other OSes as second class citizens), we might see companies developing more for Linux in turn.
That said, it’s not in such a bad situation and it can already be used without issue in many occasions.
If you buy a brand new computer, virtually all of them come with Windows or Mac pre installed. For the overwhelming majority of users, they are satisfied with either of these options, and can do everything that they want to do with a computer on these operating systems. The overwhelming majority of users aren’t willing to go through the effort of mounting a Linux distro onto a USB, navigating through the BIOS to launch the OS’ installer, partitioning their drive to avoid deleting all of their data accidentally, reinstalling and setting up all of their programs again, and learning how to use an entirely new operating system just because “Linux is free, FOSS, and gives you more freedom”. The only times Linux has seen widespread adoption is when it comes bundled with specific hardware already, such as with the Steam Deck or Chromebooks
Homoginizing Linux would be destroying so much of what makes Linux special. And besides, as many have pointed out, that’s not the source of the problem anyway in that most people don’t care what OS is installed or even comprehend what an OS is.
I also don’t think Linux needs mass adoption. It’d be great if it did, but it being a tool for those who care about what tools they use is fine too.
When someone comes to me asking how to get into Linux, they do not need to hear a laundry list of distributions to choose from.
Only techies ask anyone how they “get into Linux”. Say it with me now. “People don’t buy, buy into, get into, install, or use operating systems” They buy fuckin computers. It is perceptibly to virtually all non-techies a feature of the device.
There are a million types of cars but people manage to pick one and buy it same with breakfast cereals or shampoo because they are obligated to make a decision or go hungry, dirty, or walk everywhere.
People don’t particularly like making decisions and they decided what OS they were going to use when they bought the computer and they have no intention of downloading an iso, write it to a USB, figure out how they boot from it, figure out the bios options they need to disable and what works differently than what they are familiar with.
You lost them around step 2 and lost all hope of moving forward unless the prize at the end is something much better than “does everything I used to do but differently”
The success of Chromebooks, android phones, and the steam deck is that it was driven by devices people wanted to use not an OS people wanted to use. If you want to see more Linux use that is the story you need to focus on.
If Lenovo or HP or whatever started selling their notebooks for way cheaper without the windows license on the machine linux would probably get a lot more usage. But they would probably have to put big warnings on that to avoid a big return wave, which would hamper the whole deal.
Actually OEMS get money for including Windows because they include shovelware trials of crap like Norton that is of greater value than the reduced cost of Windows to the big players. If sold at difference in cost the decrapified Linux version would be more expensive not less.
It wouldn’t really matter, does everyone wonder if the Android ROM they’re running is the best and if they should install a different one?
People do notice how good or bad they are, but that’s it, at most they’ll switch to a different vendor next time they buy a product
This is one that we can’t just solve by putting computers on the shelf.
Some people have tools that don’t work on Linux natively. If somebody is using and is familiar with Microsoft Excel, there isn’t a straightforward way to install it and FOSS options aren’t the same. The same can be said of Adobe.
Linux as a desktop environment will have to be for enthusiasts for a while longer. Hopefully, somebody gets more feature parity with the existing suites and the transition can just work out of the box.
But Linux when compared to Windows and Mac is a case study of capitalism vs FOSS. We (Linux users) generally think Linux is better and maybe it is, but Microsoft and Apple spent tons of money to make theirs what they are today and we didn’t.
The open source ecosystem by virtue of being free software just doesn’t have those billions of dollars to invest. For office software google docs are sufficient for a whole lot of use cases and easily shareable whereas more complex usage is easily handled by libre office.
Photoshop is legitimately better than alternatives but popular as it is only a tiny fraction of PC users use or need Adobe.
26M vs 2B is approx 1.3% of PCs
I also don’t need to select my car based on its ability to haul thousands of pounds of cargo or its performance on a racetrack either.
If we want photoshop for Linux we need to collectively bankroll it. If not there is plenty of space in the market for computers without photoshop because that is by far the majority of computers.
Alternatively coming soon to a web browser near you
Microsoft and Apple spent tons of money to make theirs what they are today and we didn’t
Not personally, but there’s loads of companies that work and contribute to the kernel and all the surrounding software, they give funds, obviously not as huge as Microsoft’s paycheck, but with less I’d say we have achieved way way more in several aspects, application support is entirely on the devs, be it Microsoft (again) or Adobe or what have you, yet we’re able to run alternative suites that are at least an 80% of what those proprietary options offer, for the office suite in particular I think we’re pretty well off with Onlyoffice.
Money, though important, is clearly not a measure of quality in software
Marketing is a big portion of it. There’s also less obvious versions. Microsoft was busy making deals behind the scenes with OEMs for a long while with the intention of getting Windows to be the default OS in stores. Early OEMs didn’t just wake up and start building for Windows. Bill Gates showed up at there office and convinced them to.
Apple donated a bunch of computers to schools. Many people just believed that it was because they cared about education but really it is an attempt to get kids hooked into the Apple ecosystem early.
Building brand loyalty isn’t just about advertising and it’s not even about making the best product. Early and repetitive access is more important. Advertising and product placement are more about awareness than loyalty. Loyalty is generally exploiting people’s fear of change.
I literally don’t think the plethora of choices has anything to do with why Linux is not installed by the masses. The only reason is that Microsoft and Apple are huge market forces with the ability to advertise, make deals with other business partners, pre-install their operating systems onto hardware that’s sold, operate technical support services, and so on. They have completely flooded the market with their stuff.
Linux has these things, too, but nowhere in scale or scope, and with relative industry latecomers to sell it. If Linux were created 10-12 years sooner and companies like Suse, RH, Canonical, System76 were all formed earlier than they were I think we’d see a healthy amount of Linux out in the world, with maybe a few percent higher market share (which would be extremely massive).
Keep in mind that Apple, as a company, rebuilt itself truly not on the technical excellence of Macintosh, but by driving sales of iPods then iPhones.
Even if all of the operating systems were playing on a fair & ideal field, I do not think Linux would come out as the clear winner.
The Linux ecosystem is stakeholder owned. That is to say that design decisions are made by experienced users for experienced users. Whenever an ergonomic tradeoff exists between ease of use and expressiveness, ease of use loses. New users sense this and feel implicitly unwelcome. It’s the original sin of open source software as a whole, really.
I don’t necessarily take this state of affairs as a bad thing, but it does lead me to think that the dominant OS software will always be a commercial product of some variety. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a proprietary greed-fest like Windows, but at the very least the top-level stakeholders of that specific project need to be directly motivated by user adoption. AOSP (aka: Android) would be a decent example of something like this working in the wild for an open source project (Google attempting to claw back control notwithstanding).
I have a theory that I haven’t explored yet. My mom is not a computer user. She barely knows how to use one, so she doesn’t have knowledge of the MS Windows or MacOS approach of using computers. I suspect if I gave her a laptop with Ubuntu on it and showed her the ropes of how to use it she’d get along very fine. I think she would be able to navigate the UI and never need more technical knowledge than remembering her computer’s password.
Now, before anyone goes and accuses me of being a bad son for leaving my mom in the technological dark, I just want to say she gets by pretty happily with the iPad I got for her, which has an even more foolproof interface than any traditional desktop OS.
I thought about this before, and mostly agree. My mom knows nothing about computers and could probably use Ubuntu if I stick it on a machine and gave it to her. The thing preventing me from doing it is that when things go wrong in Linux, it often requires extensive terminal usage to fix. And my mother can often find new and creative ways to break a computer. If something went wrong with it, I would have to fix it. There is literally no one else she knows who would even know where to start. At least if she's on windows, she can find someone to help her.
Apple’s success came from Microsoft’s negligence. Too many people had Windows XP computers at home wrecked with toolbars and spyware and garbage.
And people gladly left for a walled garden platform that locked down everything and didn’t require them to administer their own systems.
The biggest success in the Linux world has been Chromebooks and Android, where Google administers the system for the user.
Most people don’t choose linux because they can’t administer their own system. A system that lets them administer however they want has no appeal to them. They instinctively know they can’t handle that responsibility. They need their hands held.
Most people view computers as an appliance to get what they want, like a toaster. They never think to install a different OS, if they even know how to do so or that Linux exists in the first place. Windows comes installed out of the box for every computer not made by Apple for the most part. My boomers aren’t dependent on any Windows-specific software as their use-case is just a Facebook machine, so I put them on Fedora with GNOME and there hasn’t been a single problem in years. They can even handle installing and updating software with the software center that GNOME provides. They were actually interested in trying something else because even the tech illiterate can see that Windows sucks now. All I had to do was pick the distro and DE and then install it for them. The distro could just as easily be Debian, or Ubuntu, or possibly even Arch. The DE just needs to be absolutely braindead so they can’t hurt themselves by accident. Yeah, some use-cases require that people use Windows-specific software, but there’s also a lot of Facebook machines that could just as easily be running Linux if the computers at the store shipped with it; Chromebooks are an example of this. And honestly, even the OS-specific software thing is becoming less of a problem as more stuff moves to the browser.
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