Lol IT person here, so many developers barely know how to turn there machine on

If it came preinstalled it would overtake Windows

There’s plenty of videos on YouTube of people trying Linux for the first time, and it can be painful to watch how poorly they try to fix something or unintentionally break their system.

That’s not to say windows is any better, because they’d do the same thing there.

But people will only switch permanently if windows really falls off hard, which may or may not happen.

You have to think of it like how people first learned to use a mouse and double click back in the 90s. It’s not immediately intuitive for everyone, they often have to start over.

That being said, having a big OEM ship linux would do wonders, but Microsoft fights hard to make sure that almost never happens.

That’s why I’d love to see more developers take another look at Linux.

I’d love to see more developers taking a look at writing portable cross-platform code.

I have never bought the idea that free/libre SW in general is just not as easy, including GNU+Linux. I’ll leave out open source initially, and come back to it later, not because it doesn’t experience the same, but because corporate wide it doesn’t suffer the same fate. And linux itself is one of the most widely used kernel if not the most, it happens similarly to openssl, and so many other open source components. So I see no issue with linux adoption, I can’t think of any kernel more adopted than linux…

To me what has really affected free/libre SW is the monopolistic abuse of the corporations, plus their ambitions, and how in Today’s world, they have created the illusion that being a technologist is the same as being a technology consumer, which gets into the hearts of governments and education systems (more hurting, public education systems). Let me try some practical examples:

• Educations systems translate the need to educate students about technology into making them familiar with MS different SW, like the windows OS, MS outlook, MS office, MS project, MS visio. Even on the higher levels of education, colleges and universities prefer to use matlab over octave for example, even for just matrix operations scripting. Office covers spread sheets BTW, so people specialized on accounting know excel, but no other spread sheet.
• On public education systems, where one would be inclined to think it might get more interest on developing the expertise to not depend on proprietary SW only, it’s where corporate reach deeper offering “cheap” educational licences.
• From the prior two keep in mind that educational licenses from proprietary SW usually means future professional and people depending on proprietary SW in general. They are meant not to educate, but rather generate the future dependent population.
• Governments, whether local or nation wide, instead of adhering to open standards, for any kind of form submission, and even further to adhere to use of free and open source SW, to build the technical and competency expertise required to have a criteria about different technologies, about SW, infrastructure, DBs, and so, they prefer to require citizens to use non free or open source SW to create required forms, and prefer to pay for SW solutions which totally lock in the entire solution, usually coming from big corps, or other companies actually making use of SW and technologies coming from big corps.
• In their effort to discredit free/libre SW, the idea that the fundamental principles behind free/libre SW hurt the SW industry, or that are irrelevant to Today’s world or even worse than that, there were claims that the GPLed kernel was a great threat and GPLed SW a cancer. Now that open source usage has totally overcome free/libre SW, there are no such claims, but the damage is done. There’s nothing wrong with people wanting some compensation from corps, when developing SW, and thus not using free/libre licenses like GPL-3+ or AGPL, but in the end that eventually might hurt the users rights protected by such licenses, which such corps don’t really care that much (their profit has higher priority for sure), and experience shows that just because SW is licensed open source doesn’t guarantee any compensation for the development whatsoever, so if volunteering SW, doing so as open source is not even close to get every developer a decent income out of their contributions. Well, except for the big corps backed SW, linux included, but that’s not the majority of open source SW.
• The discredit of free/libre SW, which allowed the eventual creation of open source, is such that the banning of individuals ends up being an attack to the organizations behind it and even their principles and motivation.
• Moving away from the free/libre SW observations, even now with open source, from the big corps, which barely compensate the open source developers, complain about the open source supply chain, campaigning against not well maintained SW and such, there’s the famous image of a complex and heavy structure depending on a weak and deficient leg. Whatever truth around that figure, it of course hides the overall picture of the developer of such leg not ever being compensated (not to mention paid) for his library or SW component, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons the project got even abandoned, but now it’s easy to blame such situation when talking about FOSS in general.

Paid SW might be more intuitive to use at times, I can understand that. There are paid developers making the UIs more intuitive and attractive, in the end it needs to be bought or massively consumed to get earning through its use. But if you look deeper, perhaps it’s not just that free/libre or open alternatives are non intuitive at all, perhaps people gets used to that UI when attending basic or high school, or college/university. Perhaps even when exposed to mobile devices even when they can barely walk. Everything else, different in nature, will look alien to the future “technologists”…

On a sad (lacking hope) note, I don’t think there’s any indicator of things changing. My only hope is changes in educational systems, which are nowhere happening, and not the parents, as mentioned they are already convinced that using google, ms, apple, oracle or whatever prepare their kids for the future and will make them the technologists of the future.

On a funny note, I would answer the motivating question with: Linux is so good that it’s actually most probably the most used kernel world wide, :)

• Doesn’t have millions to market like the alternatives.
• More technical requirement (historically anyways)
• Much less likely to be the default on hardware (which is what most ppl stick to)

Because people are not willing to do more than the bare minimum for most things.

It’s because they’d have to install it to use it. I put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME over a year ago and there hasn’t been a single Linux-related issue since. Most people use their computers as Facebook and YouTube machines and Linux doesn’t make that any harder than Windows/MacOS. It’s not like it’s 2010 where you’d need to install some desktop app that doesn’t have a Linux version and you’d have to fuck around with WINE, which was a massive pain in the ass and often buggy even if it did work. Now in 2024, those apps are in the browser (barring more niche use-cases) and we have access to Firefox and Chrome like everyone else. If Linux shipped on most pre-builts, then I think the average person would be fine.

Thank you! I’m a staunch believer that most of you don’t think about how much prior knowledge you need just to be able to use Linux, let alone not break things.

totally honest, I had MUCH more trouble with windows AND Mac.

First off, Linux is so easy to install, while Macos and windows have all that unnecessary stuff, like iCloud and one drive (don’t even get me started on one drive, its awful, nobody wants to use it, and where do you disable it? and why did it enable itself again?) Then theres the thing where you can’t install anything on Mac without having to change about 500 permissions. And the main reason why I switched, customization. Windows has none of that, you can change the color and that’s it. even the cursors often get reset when you restart. Macos is even worse in this regard though.

I think the main reason, why people don’t switch is because our generation of teenagers is lazy, or they’ve always been, I don’t know.

I know from friends, that they just don’t care about privacy or functionality and think I’m a conspiracy theorist. And generally they make fun of everything I say regarding this topic and don’t take it serious AT ALL.

DHH saying something not ridiculous? What is today, April Fools Day!?!?

Hardware and software Compatibility . Which in Linux mostly relies in free collaboration work and cannot match what money can move.

Because they prefer to use something else.

After some encouragement, I’ve been making an effort to switch much of my computing over to Fedora (at least, on weekends until it’s got everything I need on it).

My (Framework) laptop fully supports the OS, and even booting it up on an external SSD has been easy, and it works fast and smooth.

But, it’s absolutely not as easy to settle into compared to windows.

With Windows, the only “tweaks” that a user might make is installing a different browser, but everything else will work as it should.

Power Windows users will spend more time removing bloat and ads, I won’t deny that!

But on Fedora, I had to scour the internet to find out how to get a minimize and maximize button on a window (had to install another utility, then an extension…). Then I had to do the same to move things down to a dock.

Annoying, but it wasn’t a huge deal. These small add-on, tweaks, and personalization options all require that you know where to look and how to actually apply these fixes. Thank god I didn’t have to fuss around with device drivers.

Then, as I happily watched the Para Olympics while multitasking, my screen just went black. No warning, no way to recover it. Hitting my laptop’s power button throws up a series of errors and !!! “FAILED TO EXECUTE SHUTDOWN BINARY”.

If this is the equivalent to a BSOD on Windows, then it would be my first BSOD in many, many years.

Now I need to figure out how to get some Windows-only software to run, if that’s even possible, which adds another layer of time and aggravation.

If I were a novice computer user, I wouldn’t even bother with any of this and just stick to Windows. Hell, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with any of it!

But I’ll see how long I can ride this out, and perhaps I’ll be a full-time Linux user some day.

I just wish we could have less ways to do things in Linux.

I get that’s one of the main benefits of the eco system, but it adds too much of a burden on developers and users. A developer can release something for Windows easily, same for Mac, but for Linux is it a flatpak, a deb, snap etc?

Also given how many shells and pluggable infrastructure there is it’s not like troubleshooting on windows or mac, where you can Google something and others will have exact same problem. On Linux some may have same problem but most of the time it’s a slight variation and there are less users in the pool to begin with.

So a lot of stuff is stacked against you, I would love for it to become more mainstream but to do so I feel it needs to be a bit more like android where we just have a singular way to build/install packages, try and get more people onto a common shell/infrastructure so there are more people in same setup to help each other. Even if it’s not technically the best possible setup, if its consistent and easy to build for its going to speed up adoption.

I don’t think it’s realistically possible but it would greatly help adoption from consumers and developers imo.