And Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.
…
That’s why I’d love to see more developers take another look at Linux. Such that they may develop better proficiency in the basic katas of the internet. Such that they aren’t scared to connect a computer to the internet without the cover of a cloud.
Related: Omakub
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.
I don’t know if Microsoft still using restrictions in their license agreement,that only one system can be installed for OEM when deliverying devices to shops.
iirc due to some anti trust lawsuits, they cannot do that anymore.
But it’s still easy to coerce OEMs to run Windows because they offer stuff like quick support and standardized IT support.
If an OEM ships Linux, they don’t want to have to make an entire department to help troubleshoot the OS for users who will inevitably call for help. Ignoring them would only result in returns and loss of sales.
I think some thinkpads actually do ship with some distro like redhat or opensuse as an option, but that’s because thinkpads are very popular in the business space which means lots of CS people use them, so it helps save some cost from a windows license that won’t get used.
Like I said though, if windows really dives into the deep end, I think a potential market would open and some OEM will take a chance on it.
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 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.
Yeah it’d be nice if there was a really standardized Linux distro that gave developers a baseline to aim for, and then those of us who use the nerdier distros could just figure out our own stuff from there. I think Ubuntu was on track for that for a while, but they tend to go off on these tangents (Unity, Mir, Snaps etc.) which sometimes work against them, and now distros like Pop!OS and Mint are starting to fill that space a bit more.
Basically it’s this lol
i think flatpak has done a lot to make this easier, but at the same time… i’ll admit i’m not a fan of it (mostly due to random issues).
the way i see it, more distros need something like arch linux’ AUR. if an application is reasonably easy to build, it really does not take much to get it into the AUR, from where there’s also a path towards inclusion in the official repos.
i don’t know too much about other distros, but arch really makes it amazingly easy to package software and publish everything needed for others to use it. i feel like linux needs more of this, not less - there’s a great writeup that puts why linux maintainers are important way better than i ever could:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230525163337/https://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/
- 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)
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, :)
Ok but why my graphics driver act up?
If talking about non proprietary kernels’ drivers, such as linux, then again, profit is what regulates it. No wonder why now nvidia finally cares about linux, being the most used kernels behind the cloud, behind servers of whatever. Meaning, it’s not profitable not to support linux now a days for Nvidia.
The other fundamental factor is lock-in, which is abused by some big corps, such as MS.
But the profit idea es even wrong, but it’s what we have been educated with. For an OEM, providing FOSS drivers or FOSS FW doesn’t mean to have less profit, but somehow it’s interpreted as such. And there’s also our culture, backed by corps again, that tends to make us believe that everything profitable enough has to be corporate secret, and if not, others would take advantage of you business. That way of thinking really prevents for more FOSS adoption at the OEMs level. I don’t agree with it. It might be the presence or lack of some HW features might be inferred by the drivers/FW, but it doesn’t mean your competitors will know how exactly you provide such feature, and even less how to make it with the performance you do. And usually once released, you really want to show off your features, your innovation and so on, not keep it secret. So in general, really see no issue for OEMs not to offer drivers and FW as FOSS, even as free/libre SW.
I can imagine OEMs offering FOSS drivers and FW, but that not being as convenient for the major players in the market, since that would risk their position in the market. Just a thought…
Remember the lock-in mechanisms by the corps that feel being threatened if open sourcing dirvers… Some of which no longer say it out loud, but still think GPLed licences are a cancer…
Hey just so you know in many people’s minds SW doesn’t stand for software.
Sorry about that. I was not aware of other meanings. I’ll try to remember to use the complete “software” word instead of its acronym I was used to since the 90s… Hopefully under the context what I wrote doesn’t get misinterpreted. Thanks !
There’s some really high quality GNU software, like LibreOffice. Though, recently, when searching for a git client, I found it funny that some of the most frequently recommended git clients for Linux are proprietary, (GitKraken, Sublime) and that I couldn’t find a GNU version that works as well as it’s Windows counterpart.
I’m also not convinced the GNU license held up fully to it’s promises, Android is also open source but took 50% of the mobile market. (And companies like Amazon [outside of Google] have used it for their own devices, like the Kindle)
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.
At the same time I think most people don’t think about how much prior knowledge you need to just be able to use Windows or Mac. And for someone without ANY prior knowledge all of them are the same.
Story time, my MiL is a zero when it gets to computer literacy, to the point that every week I had to solve something for her. Eventually I gave her a laptop with Linux in it to make it easier for me to do support, and to my surprise she had lots of problems the first months when setting things up and until learning the ropes, but afterwards there were almost no problems.
The thing is that people have a lot of Windows knowledge, so when they try Linux they expect it to be Windows and get frustrated when it’s not.
When we started, none of us had any prior knowledge and quite frankly, if it broke all the time none of us would have stuck with it. It’s the same for people when they started with Windows or Mac OS
DHH saying something not ridiculous? What is today, April Fools Day!?!?
Why don’t more distro use LibreSSL? Why don’t more distro use mandoc? Why don’t more distro use clang?
Why don’t more people use Linux?
Because Linux breaks randomly, in many cases without user interaction. New driver update - external monitor stops working, games break, etc. Official desktop widgets - tend to break without any reason. Apps don’t follow desktop theme.
I’m a software engineer and I work a lot and I want to spend my free time using OS, not fixing it. After my recent issues with graphic drivers I decided to buy a Windows PC just for gaming. I will stick with Linux for my home server and work.
For gaming, I honestly agree. Things are better with Lutris but running programs in their native OS is always going to be a better experience. Still, I think it’s very cool that you can run any of that in Linux. Valve is making some awesome progress with that…
