I’m curious to hear thoughts on this. I agree for the most part, I just wish people would see the benefit of choice and be brave enough to try it out.
I have a solution to this I use. If asked I just tell people to use Kubuntu. You might pick a different distribution, I choose Kubuntu for a variety of reasons.
“What linux should I use?”
“Kubuntu”.
No other options given or discussed.
It’s my “official linux” even though I no longer use it personally.
Now you just have to do the same. Pick your own official linux that’s going to be the only one you tell people to use in real life.
Maybe in a few years they’ll decide to distro hop once they understand more, but right here and now they want one answer.
This is also the distro I tell others to use, it’s what I started on and I enjoy Linux now.
Lazy theory. Think about cars. If the diversity of alternatives was putting off people, I guess we would still all be driving black Ford cars.
I have been using Linux since 1996 and what is putting off people is:
- First and foremost: habits and lack of will to learn new ways.
- Proprietary apps that have no exact equivalent. See 1.
- A closed proprietary system that limits interoperability. Even if it has improved, certain fenced software perimeters remain an occasional issue.
Also, MS pays computer makers to preinstall Windows.
This. Exactly this.
If the diversity of alternatives was putting off people, I guess we would still all be driving black Ford cars.
It’s very different considering your car only needs to run the software it comes with from the factory (for now).
If we had a thousand different types of fuel, and 95% of people used fuel 1 or 2, and then 5% used one of a thousand other lesser-know fuels, you’d probably just buy a car that uses 1 or 2, because they’re the easiest and most popular.
Today’s Linux is not yesterday’s Linux. Now, the platform is incredibly easy to use. There’s no more need to use the command line.
It still blows my mind when people say this. Linux is incredibly NOT user friendly, and you’re constantly sent into the CLI for basic debugging or even just installation of software.
The reliance on CLI is exactly why it will never be more popular, and I think Linux users/developers like it that way.
As for an “official” Linux distribution, that’s a neat idea but simply never going to happen. No one will ever agree to that.
This is an inherent limitation of “free as in freedom” software. The simple option of choice complicates things, and always will.
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people are ok with using the command line but they get scared about the potential complexity
God you people are so blind. No one gets “scared”. They just don’t want to dedicate the time to memorize a thousand different commands across a hundred different OSes.
If a gui is equally complex, it would turn away users too
But they arent.
You can put a myriad of setup and administration options into the GUI and most people still have no interest in them. These people just have no interest in using a computer like that. They “just want it to work”. It’s not a CLI v. GUI problem, it’s one of assumed responsibility.
This is an inherent limitation of “free as in freedom” software.
“Free as in freedom” really only refers to developers. The non-developers are beholden to whoever packages and distributes their software for them. We Linux users who aren’t system developers let the “distro maintainers” do the developer work for us. That’s why a distro’s website is full of mission statements and declarations of philosophy–it’s how we decide who to trust.
And it’s the same for the “non-nerds” with system administration. Businesses hire admins to handle their internal software and networks, and at home people let Apple, Microsoft or Google take increasingly more control over their devices so that they aren’t responsible for getting it all working.
These people just have no interest in using a computer like that. They “just want it to work”.
Yes these are the people I’m referring to also. We’re not talking about network engineering or developing software. We’re talking about installing a program or virtually any kind of debugging.
“Why dont more people use the linux desktop” its because they don’t care about computers. To most people computers are a tool and they are not interested in what the underlying software is doing as long as they can run a web browser.
Or because Windows comes pre-installed on almost all machines. Many people don’t even know what “operating system” is. It’s just a part of the computer for them.
Bingo.
Despite what the clickbait headline says, the main barrier to entry is not just knowing what an operating system is but the know-how to go about replacing the one that came with the computer in the first place. The decision over which distro to choose is relatively easy once you’ve got past that initial stage.
steam deck proves this. If everyone loved windows so much they would install it on the deck but they don’t. Microsoft pays the PC makers in the states a lot of money to keep Windows Pre-Installed. Even then Hp put our a dev Linux Laptop because Dev’s want a Unix like OS ether Linux or Mac.
Valve made games “just work” on the Steam Deck. No tweaks, CLI, hacks, or major performance issues. They took away the friction. I hope that in time all games will just work on Linux. When that happens and I can use my gaming peripherals like wheels and pedals I’ll be giving up Windows on my gaming PC.
Man this is so wrong, I don’t even know where to start.
If everyone loved windows so much they would install it on the deck
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Valve has dedicated millions of dollars to making shit work on Linux so that MS cannot control them.
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Specifically on handhelds, Windows is ass. Because it’s not designed for them. That’s why Valve developed a version of Linux specifically intended for this single device.
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Windows is still installed on like 95% of gaming PCs because “everyone loves it so much”.
Microsoft pays the PC makers in the states a lot of money to keep Windows Pre-Installed.
What? No. MS charges the PC makers to install Windows, not the other way around… Why would they pay them?
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Or MacOS. They’ve made it seem like those are the only two options besides chromebooks which are just for those who don’t want to spend money.
Somewhere between 2000 and 2015 pretty much everyone had a computer, because you needed it for doing all the computer stuff. Nowadays you can do so much on a mobile device that there’s no urgent need to even own a proper computer any more unless you need to do something very specific.
Professionals and hobbyists will continue to need computers in the future, but Joe Average won’t. You can pay your bills using a phone and watch movies on a tablet. Joe doesn’t have a 3D printer, write ISO images on USB sticks, try to recover data from old hard disks, flash LineageOS on an old Android phone, or SSH into a raspberry pi. If he still has an old laptgop tucked away in a drawer, it’s probably been sitting there for years because he hasn’t really needed it for anything.
So true, outside of work I haven’t used a pc/laptop in over 4 years.
I have an android phone and tablet and they serve the majority of my needs perfectly.
That said I’m about to get one of my daughter’s old MacBook airs which is beyond OS updates and am going to put Linux on it to tinker with some things I can’t do on android. Still not sure which OS to go with but am fifty fifty between Ubuntu and Pop_OS.
Flip a coin and pick one of them. If you face some strange problems and later find out it’s because of the distro, it’s time to do some distrihopping. Before that, it’s important to get started with something.
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I have friends who pc game a lot and their desktop background is the default Microsoft logo. Everytime I see it i say “don’t you want to customize your computer even just a bit” and they reply “what would I even do?”
On the same token - anyone who also knows what an OS is shouldn’t care either. Use the best OS for your job and needs. Reap the benefits of all of the OSs that you can run and switch between them like an army knife. It is the best when all of them complement each other.
i will agree with this when Linux has 5 to 10% market share just enough to where manufacturers can’t ignore us anymore. The problem will come cause the stuff they ignore us with. Is full featured but garbage drivers with Spyware like crap print drivers with pop-up ads or games with rootkits for drm.
For me I dont agree with “Use the best OS for your job and needs” sometimes I am willing to use a less functional product because I believe that the future would be better with more FOSS software. Morally I cant dual boot windows to play the games that dont support linux because then im supporting microsoft and games that support mircosoft.
I feel the same way. I’ve been riding the Linux daily driver train for over a decade now. Back when I first made the switch, Proton wasn’t a thing. I could dual boot to play the games that wouldn’t run on Wine but I instead made the decision to only buy new games that were Linux native and if existing games didn’t run on Wine then it was tough bikkies.
But the issue is that most people sadly don’t give a shit. They don’t give any thought at all about sending money to Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. despite the fact that those companies are playing a part in actively degrading the user experience (amongst other things). They don’t think about how they’re screwing over themselves in the long run as well as the younger generations. Most people don’t think much beyond what the advertising tells them to buy, convenience and ease of use.
I wish people made more ethical consumer choices but they just don’t. And that habit won’t change while big business has collectively billion dollar advertising budgets, gets away with monopolising and centralising and has government and regulators in their back pockets.
Not only do people generally not do ethical consumerism, but also often ridicule those who do. Quite infuriating, and would be astonishing if it wasn’t so predictably human nature. Presumably it is painful to be reminded that one did not go through the effort to make a conscientious decision but someone else did, and so one belittles the decision and the person willing to make it.
That’s ok if you look at it that way. But at the end of the day, it’s just a tool like any other. Personally I find it really silly to put any moral questions into it because I don’t believe it’s worth my time to think about it, lose time on silly things and/or sacrifice the quality of my work. I’m not trying to imply anything about Linux, btw, it’s the same for the other ways around. It just feels stupid because it ends up like a political discussion, when it really shouldn’t be. You have the option to use basically anything and choosing to limit yourself over that is just plain stupid imo. You could make the arguments for how they process data, which is a whole other discussion, but then again, there are plenty of workarounds to all of those problems (which is exactly what some people are doing with virtualization, different machines entirely, OS tweaks, etc., which is fine, because they’re benefiting from it). Nothing against FOSS or otherwise, btw, I do agree about the need to support, but there are so many other ways to do it. Just using it isn’t enough, sadly. As the point of this OP is - it’s also market adoption, marketing itself, etc. None of this changes the fact that using certain tool(s) (e.g. gdb) is best done on a certain OS (e.g. a Linux distro) at a given time.
I’ve always said this to people. I use Windows, Linux, and MacOS. I use whatever best suits what I’m doing and I like that idea. It may end up being 20/70/10, but so what. Why battle a shitty Linux app If you have a good MacOS app. Or maybe your liking that windows app for a certain task.
In reality this is really only something a dev or power user would really do though.
Exactly. That’s what matters. That’s why SteamOS is on Steam Deck, or Linux distros on POS machines, or Windows on ATMs (which is kinda depressing ngl), etc.
It’s a tool, nothing more, nothing less. An OS is just a gateway to other apps at the end of the day.
For me, the biggest reason not to use linux are windows-only apps like CAD software. That software was a must have on my university, and now Im stuck with it lol. I switched to linux anyway, but still struggling to find best workflow between dual boot and windows in VM.
But linux today is so available and friendly. I have POP! OS on my desktop and partner can use it with no problem (windows user). Its so freaking intuitive, much easier to install and use compared to windows IMO. I believe people are not afraid as much as they dont care and microsoft is pushing their OS much more than any other alternative
FreeCAD isn’t the worst and has the ability to output several file formats. But it’s definitely wonky and probably not up to the task if that’s like your actual job or whatever. I don’t know your scenario, but you might check it out if you’re still using CAD. It is free.
But yeah, in general, required software is the big hiccup.
Thx, I did try it. FreeCAD is great, but cant compare with software like Solidworks. Feels like 30 years difference unfortunately. Im afraid Im too old for that, but Im sure future generations will have proper FOSS alternative on Linux. I just try not to use it because I hate dual boot hehe.
There are fow more programs I need, but I can run them easy in VM/vine
Time for me to mourn autodesks killoff of eagle again
I dont want to learn their fusion 360 shite and it doesnt run on linux anyway.
I’ve settled on using wsl2 on a windows machine. I run Ubuntu and kali in wsl as virtual machines on my main windows computer. I was an early user of linux and bsd but have found it’s just plain easier to run day to day on windows.
I run both Ubuntu and kali simply because I haven’t been able to make sound work correctly with Ubuntu on wsl but it works great in kali, plus kali has all the pentesting stuff so I can play around with that in my free time.
“There are 14 competing standards!”
“We should make a new one that has all the benefits of the others, and everyone can use that.”
“There are now 15 competing standards!”
Rinse and repeat.
He’s wrong.
I use Windows because I have Windows software I need to use, whether for work or gaming, and I just want that shit to work with zero effort on my part.
This guy:
There are 100 competing distributions:
“Let’s add one more, one that’s standardized and designed to make it easy for users to start using Linux.”
There are now 101 competing distributions.
“To get around this, I would suggest basing the official Linux distribution on Debian but with a few queues from other distros”
“Now there are 15 competing standards”
tl;dr FrAgMeNtAtIon
There, saved you a click.
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)
Linux is different in many ways from Windows
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)_/¯it takes literally no tech savy to open a browser.
Yeah, my mom didn’t have issues with that, but she did have issues with other almost as basic stuff
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.
Mostly yeah
To the question it’s clickbaiting you to see:
The problem is the lack of a representative version of Linux.
And the response is that Linux is not Windows or OSX. It doesn’t work the same way. The point of 80 gazillion different flavors is that it can be made to be what is wanted or needed. ChromeOS and Android are Linux and I’d argue they both qualify as “desktop” even if Android rocks many phones in mobile mode. If you don’t like sysv init for whatever reason you can find a bunch that don’t use it. Want to install a modern version on a 486? You can with lightweight 32-bit distros, though it’ll be terrible and it means you’re a masochist.
Possibly because OSX is pretty similar under the hood by its nature as a *BSD derivative, and Windows has WSL which has become pretty good from what I’m told. A casual user may simply not encounter the need to install a whole different operating system on bare metal anymore.
But I think the reason, special cases aside, is that they haven’t given it an honest try. It’s not the Duplo of operating systems, to get what you’re after out of it you have to actually try, to learn how. It’s easier to give up and go back to what seems to work based on it being the first thing they saw.
you only view those as positives because you are not the average user. for the average user those are actually negatives. The average user’s answer to “do you prefer systemd or sysvinit?” would be “why the fuck should I care? I just want something that works. And I want that something to work the same whether it’s on my personal machine or my work machine, or my mom’s.”
If you force the user to have to choose, most times they just won’t. So they choose something that does not offer the choice at all. Other operating systems do not require them to give an honest try at being able to try them.
Your hypothetical user could throw a dart at a list of distros and just install the one it hits.
but how does one ensure that their dart lands in the same spot as their employer’s and their mom’s? consistency is very important for the average user, at odds with us enthusiasts’ joy at being able to change anything.
I am not against linux, (I use arch btw) but I accept the fact that most people don’t find computers as exciting as I do.
Their employer is probably using Windows because they’re locked in so that’s a red herring. Their mom, if not using Windows for similar reasons, is probably using some variant of Ubuntu.
it’s a hypothetical scenario. And you still failed to even acknowledge my point, let alone get it.
What is your point? That you’re more enlightened than us plebs or something?
you keep saying that the average user can do this or that. when the point isn’t whether they could, but whether they want to. The average user does not want to choose. Look up the paradox of choice.
It’s hard for a system to become mainstream when techy people keep boasting to them that its biggest feature is the one they specifically do not want
Win wsl is awful.
This has been discussed many times before. Personally, I think that there is an inherent contridiction between the FOSS ethos and mass appeal.
The way things get adopted en masse is by having limited options and limited changes.
This is why most extremely popular software grows stagnant. The company/group that puts it out doesn’t want to alienate its user base. Think Ebay, Facebook, ios, etc.
Users get pissed off if their software changes in any significant way. Most people don’t care about choice or freedom. They just want to grab a device and have it turn on and do what they tell it.
Look at cell phones. Back in the early 00’s when they started to become common for everybody, think about all the weird and wacky designs you saw. Neon, chrome, bizzare form factors, gimmicks, etc. The paradise of consumer choice. So many brands and styles to choose from. I remember going to high school and seeing all the different kinds of phones that everybody had.
Now days, every phone is a black/grey glass slab. The most drastic differences between them are what shape the bezels are and how the camera lenses are oriented on the back.
Consumers in general don’t care about choice. They are fine choosing between an Apple glass slab or an Android glass slab. This point is proven even more strongly by gen Z, who apparently don’t even care about the few “choices” that Android provides, over 80% of US teens use iphones. Of iphone users, over 30% are gen z, of Android, barely over 10%, three times less
Linux and FOSS in general is all about choice, options, rejecting vendor lock, forking projects and carving out niches for sub-groups of users. A fork for devs, a fork for security concerned folks, a fork for people that liked the way the software looked 10 years ago, a fork for people that don’t agree with the political views of the original devs, etc etc.
I don’t have a problem with that, personally I love it. The extreme consumer freedom and ability to customize is a huge reasons I love FOSS software. But I also recognize that it means we won’t ever be mainstream. Or at the least, if we become mainstream, it will likely be at the cost of much of that freedom.
I am happy with a few percent market share. I don’t need more than that to feel like we are successful. As long as Capitalism is the default system in this world, it will always reward products that generate the most profit, and that will never reward freedom or consumer rights long term.
We ought to inform others as much as we can on an individual basis, friends, family etc. Use FOSS, contribute money, code, documentation, tutorials, and user support. Fight the power and stand against the corpos. Our fight should not be based in the goal of becoming “mainstream,” it should be based in the principles of freedom, empowerment, and inclusion.
I think people also grossly underestimate how much of an affect million dollar advertising budgets have. Apple spends a mint on their advertising, appealing to younger folk and making their products seem cool and fashionable.
A lot of people won’t care about choice when there’s a very limited choice of products being advertised as “must-have”.
Linux does not have a million dollar advertising budget, it doesn’t have huge advertising companies creating slick ad campaigns, it doesn’t have restricted choice and railroading people into false ideas of what’s necessary. And it doesn’t come preinstalled on a majority of devices.
Noone is using windows because it is cool and hip and i doubt microsoft advertises windows. People use windows because they work and do what they want. Maybe they could use ubuntu, but why would they do that? What does ubuntu offer that windows dont?
I’ll tell you why they(including me) dont use linux, because maybe their wifi wont work(or they will have to compile the universe to make it work) or their favourite app or game wont work. And even if you could make a piece of hardware or software work in linux, the performance might be inferior because it will be using generic drivers, instead of the proprietary windows only drivers that the manufacturer has made.
Ultimately, people dont care about open source or privacy enough, to sacrifice their convenience.
No, but the PC’s it comes reinstalled on are.
Linux isn’t for everyone. I still dual boot for damn Adobe products. But as someone who’s used Linux as my daily driver for over a decade and installed many different distros on both my own and other people’s laptops and PC’s, most of what you say happens isn’t the case for most people.
It also doesn’t acknowledge the fact that many things on Windows don’t “just work” and require extra apps, drivers, reg edit or any other number of things that need fiddling with. For example, the Audio Interface for my electric guitar just works in Linux. The kernel already has the driver. This is the case for the majority of the hardware I have connected over the years. On Windows, I have to search out, download and then install the driver.
I talk about people not caring about anything other than what they’re advertised, what’s convenient or what’s easiest for them to use, in another one of my replies in this thread. .
If that were true… Ubuntu used to be the default distro for quite some time.
The bigger problem is that there’s often no one willing to show you how to use it. I had a friend who managed to picked it up himself, and when I asked him to show me the ropes all I got out of him was “just Google it”. Now, of course that’s how you figure all sorts of things out and an essential skill in itself, but first you need to know what to search for, and if you’re just starting out you’re probably not going to know what that is - or you’ll have more abstract but simple problems like figuring out issues with syntax in the terminal. That kind of thing is really easy for another person who knows to say “no, it’s like this, because of that” but can be very difficult for a person to figure out on their own.
Quite often it seems like people have gone through these trials themselves, but then rather than making it easier for other people and helping them they leave them to face the same challenges all over again from scratch. This is very frustrating, when you know there’s an answer that someone could just give you but it’s not apparent to you, which leads to people throwing in the towel.
When you’re saying it, it’s actually striking how many Linux users are self taught.
Then again, all my friends the last ten years have known there’s a standing offer for me to install Linux for them and teach them how to use it. Some have in occasionally, especially when their windows computers grew unusable, but generally they’ll use it and be happy with it and then revert back to windows when they eventually buy a new computer and it comes preinstalled.
The exception is my dad, who now actively asks me to install Ubuntu for him whenever he has a new computer. He never asked me to install it on the first place though - I just accidentally broke Windows while trying to set up a dual boot on the home computer back in my early teenage years.
Your dad asks you because he likes Ubuntu and loves you. This is a good thing, thanks for sharing.
