What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows I've run Linux desktops since the big interface question was whether to use Korn or Bash for your shell. Before that, I'd used Unix desktops such as Visix Looking Glass, Sun OpenWindows, and SCO's infamous Open Deathtrap Desktop. Unless you're a fellow gray-haired computer or Unix geek, chances are you've never heard of, never …
Sure, why not. After all, what's 2-3GB of space for even a simple text editor between friends?
Oh, wait, I've got a better one: VMs! One VM for each and every program. Just the bare OS and the program. Want to browse the web? Start your FF/Chromium VM. Want to edit a file? Anothe VM and npp.
Oh, yeah, before I forget it again:
/sarcams
Considering that every single app, every single website considers that all the memory in the system is theirs and theirs alone, to thoughtlessly waste as much of as possible, setting hard limits for the insatiable memory hogs via a VM or some other means just makes sense. Few seem to be playing nice any more.
In retrospect, it was a truly dark day when 32 bit versions of browsers became specialty items. Before then, at least there was some limit to the memory use addiction...
In a US Presidential election, the memorable quote was "It's the economy stupid..."
For the 2026 Linux Desktop, I have amended that to, "It's the gaming stupid..." Get gaming working on Linux and Windows support collapses. That's the last thing I keep Windows for, everything else is already working in Linux for me.
I think you may have been asleep at the wheel?
https://store.steampowered.com/steamos (arch based)
https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/
Gaming on Linux has been working and working very well indeed for at least 5 years.
It is entirely possible if you are within the steam eco-system to dump windows.
Even if your purchased windows games aren't in steam, there's a pretty decent success rate at getting them working.
One VM for each and every program
This is something I'd LIKE to see on smartphones. That would provide the ultimate level of security. Apple already runs what is effectively a hypervisor on iOS - it manages memory protection and the iOS XNU/Mach kernel and the Secure Element's seL4 OS run underneath it at a lower privilege level. Having apps run in their own VMs would be the next logical step. Or at least put apps that take input from the outside world and have a history of being more vulnerable to security issues like Safari and Messages apps in their own VMs. And all third party apps in a separate VM from Apple's apps. And if you're forced to allow third party app stores and sideloading maybe those get their own VM separate from the App Store apps.
Careful what you wish for. You may end up with secure system but only useful to the gatekeeper that forces you into managing all your data through their walled garden (and controlling what you can and can't do). Akin to iOS. Even Android has become hostile to idea of users' freedom with both Google and handset makers taking another cut of what's left of the original concept.
Companies can screw you equally well with a perfectly secure and a wildly insecure system.
If you're gonna get screwed you're gonna get screwed, but at least if you have a secure system you can't be screwed by random criminals who have only their best interest in heart. If you are getting screwed by the company who sold you a product, they still have to take your interests into account to some degree - otherwise you won't buy their products anymore. Despite what Apple haters think, no one is "locked in" to the Apple ecosystem. If I felt they were screwing me with the walled garden there's nothing stopping me from going in a different direction on my next purchase.
I note your /sarcasm but need to point out that what you are effectively describing is containerisation, which is how sandbox app ecosystems work and is something being actively investigated/developed in almost the exact way that you describe in order to assist with security and compatible.
See Qubes OS.
One VM for each and every program.
Sadly, I know people who seriously do this. Unsurprisingly, all three of them are software architects at their companies.
One has a desktop with 192GB of ram, 32TB of NVME SSD disk space, four Ryzen processors, no less than six NICs. Everything is a Proxmox instance. Email is a 4GB Linux VM with Thunderbird. Browsing is a 32GB VM with Firefox, running an average of <cough> 300 </cough> tabs. And he considers that to be a perfectly normal desktop, not excessive at all.
What Linux needs to challenge Windows is advocates for it who realize that the average computer user isn't a computer scientist, and doesn't want to become one. They just want their computers to do what they need it to do.
When a friend's power supply blew and smoked her entire PC, these architecture astronauts were speccing out $3,000 computers for her, babbling on about Swarmkit, Kubernetes, orchestration, and how easy it is to inject a JSON stream into a Docker instance.
All of which meant nothing to her.
When someone asks you for advice on what car they should get, don't give them a 15 minute lecture on timing chains and fuel compression ratios.
I grabbed a used I5 with 8GB of ram and a 256GB SSD, for her, installed Mint on it, set up Ungoogled Chromium (she was used to using Edge), Thunderbird, KeyPassXC, and a couple of other apps, all for under Cdn$150 (about US$110).
It does what she wants, it does what she needs. And really, that's all that Linux needs to compete.
I'm working on a project where a computer can have multiple users and each user run multiple programs which will share a lot of code in libraries where you only have to have a single copy of the library on disk and in memory. There will also be security controlling which users can see which data of other users.
Just a hobby, won't be big and professional like DOS
Whilst I agree with your comments, and the conclusion, I'm not sure that's always the case. For a massive number of users, as long as they can figure out email, word processing, internet (possibly spreadsheet) that's it. However there are quite a few out there that do need to Windows only software where WINE isn't quite there yet.
As long as your "that's all that Linux needs to compete." includes the ability to run necessary Windows software then I 100% agree with you.
I'm still running W7 because upgrading my PC and development chain would have been uneconomic as a pensioner, not to mention the hours it would have taken to become familiar with the "upgraded" stuff. Same hours comment applies to switching to Linux based development. Yes there are alternatives to everything I use but I'm not sure I'll live long enough to make the transition.
Wow, that is quite the machine. I have chip editor I wrote/sell. A customer with a large stream file (120G) asked if my stuff could read it. I emailed back and said I need around .8X the size of the stream, so I kind of thought it would not work. Until they said their box had 130G. I was in disbelief. I still sort of can't believe how large memory can be in a desktop these days. I'm sure many of us remember sun boxes with 8M and thought we had something. And the drive was 80MB I think.
Would have said something similar if you hadn't got there first.
> Article: "Today, we should all be using Flatpaks [etc]"
The Linux Mint Software Manager includes both the regular "System Package" version and the Flatpak version of the Gnome Calculator app.
The system package version is 7MB.
The Flatpak version is 1.1 GB to download, 3.6 GB of disk space required. For a 7MB calculator app.
No.
Fuck, no.
I think they'd want- and expect- their apps to be up-to-date and not full of security vulnerabilities, regardless of how they were delivered.
The fact that this is impractical under the likes of Snap and Flatpak for the reason you mention simply adds another problem to the list and reinforces the arguments they were already making against them.
A lot of that was down to the fact that Microsoft decided not to implement shared library management in their Operating System.
This rapidly led to DLL hell, then Microsoft overlaid ActiveX and COM over the top of this DLL hell. Later Microsoft decided that this wasn't hell enough and .NET came along where we have hundreds of copies of exactly the same DLL files (that's what they are under it all) splattered all through the WinSXS disaster zone alongside so many file and directory links that the disk operating system is unable to work out how many files and directories there really are, let alone how much space is taken by the mess. In the end, in effect, it is very similar to a flatpack installation where the smallest of applications has oodles of duplicated component files in WinSXS and these just accumulate over time, they are never removed.
I quit Windows when Windows 8.2 came out well over a decade ago. Not missed Windows at all with one recent minor exception. For some reason Zoom is in the process of enshitification. The Zoom desktop app for Linux Mint is faulty and has been for some months now. My computer protests about high CPU usage and Zoom graphics go into slow motion making it unusable. Using Zoom in a browser was a reasonable workaround until the other day when Zoom removed the gallery view option, restricting it to speaker view only which is crap when there are a dozen people in the meeting. Reluctantly I fired up Windows 11 as the almost forgotten dual boot alternative on this PC and (spit) the Zoom desktop app works fine on it. I wish they'd fix Zoom for Linux so I don't need to boot up the dumpster fire that is Windows 11.
Which solves a few of the problems if you are the one organizing all the meetings, but if you are attending meetings from someone else, you don't get a choice of what platform they're having them on. I'm attending a lot of meetings on Google Meet, not because I like it, but because, if I don't use it, I can't be in the meeting.
And Jitsi is an option mostly for those who run their own server. There technically are public servers, but they either come with length and quantity limitations (the main one) or are run by unknown and untrusted people (everything else). That makes sense; running a meeting server isn't cheap and they're not making a big profit from that. But I've set up a Jitsi server, in my case during the pandemic when video services were congested. You need a large server if you want to have many participants, and that is not cheap.
That works, in its limited scope, for technical people with the ability to administer and pay for their own server. For everyone else, those are all reasons to use something else, and they will.
>” You need a large server if you want to have many participants, and that is not cheap.”
You will also need some decent Internet connections, which also don’t come cheap.
Lockdown was a time where cloud did enable you to do some stuff quickly because “someone else’s computer” already had large servers with big pipes available, whereas as many small companies used to serving a smaller internal LAN connected audience didn’t.
It would have made a lot of sense for UK government to have established and standardised on its own Jitsi service rather than depend upon Teams, which is practically guaranteed not to be secure from US government agencies and thus Chinese and Russian eavesdropping… [Although, it does put another angle on the idea of “open government” - open to other governments to know what is going on behind doors closed to its own population.]
I'm gonna sound like a broken record here, but there are so many use cases where Linux isn't going to be viable as someone's primary OS; using it would require too many compromises. I ditched M$ over 25 years ago, but merely traded one corporate overlord for another. Linux has made great strides within the past several years, and the drivers are generally fine, it's overall a solid gaming platform, and quality of life has greatly increased. I can even use my iPad as a drawing tablet on the Linux box without any hassle. But there are too many critical applications that either won't run, at least not reliably, or require a lot of fuss to get working and might break after a forced update.
I use Linux every day on my laptop, there are just too many tasks I can't use it for. The Affinity suite won't run under WINE, and even if I wanted to pay an Adobe sub, it's not very reliable even when fussing with WINE. Unfortunately, that means that ditching Windows means putting up with Apple. I know I'm not the only one in this boat, where there is/are critical application(s) that either won't run under Linux, or require fighting with one's computer to do it. A number of Linux admins I know, who use Linux 100% at home have to compromise and use Macbooks for their work machines, since they can run all the *nix stuff they need and also all the office stuff the bosses require. There is a hard limit of how many people can convert to Linux until what they need runs without a fuss, whether that's a native port or something like Steam and Proton for productivity and design software.[1] Getting Linux as the OS of choice into more homes and institutions is gonna be a long, slow process and any exodus from Windows right now will primarily benefit Apple for some time to come.
[1] Although, even then the latter will run against the problem of the push for Wayland and its inability to do proper colour management, which I've been informed is a baked-in limitation.
Linux does not run Teams just fine. Wayland and sharing your screen doesn't work. I'm stuck with X until this is fixed. Also MS killed off the a Linux client so you have to use the browser based one, which is ok but not perfect by any means and not as good as the native app on Windows.
I don't use Windows at all except for AD/PowerShell sysadmin tasks, which I do using Remmina and RDP to a Windows management server. RHEL desktop sucks, Ubuntu is great and MacOS is ok but I still prefer Ubuntu, though Mac hardware is superb.
A friend of mine is a bit of a Linux fanatic and it was quite strange seeing him basically turn into a rabid fanboi of the Mx Macs, even if he gets 'em just to use Asahi.
I'm pretty content with SUSE for my normal Linux distro, and an X holdout myself, but it's still a secondary machine. And I wasn't all that impressed with Fedora when I tried it, though not the hugest fan of *buntu either.[1] I think that for the foreseeable future I'll be sticking with Mac as a desktop OS[2] and a Linux laptop, since I've always hated Mac keyboards and intend to keep my Thinkpad until it dies.
[1] Even though I do respect that they really got the driver support and so many other quality of life improvements into Linux in general.
[2] I wonder if I'll be still be able to install some old version of Enlightenment on an Mx Mac by the time I finally switch over.
"and not as good as the native app on Windows"? When was Teams any good and is it really native app? Sure it's serviceable but MS has cut all the corners to minimize development costs. It's an electron (webview whatever MS wanted tol call it) app. Resource usage is is second only to antivurus software. And feature creep makes is slower with every update. Plus, I'm getting an impression that the whole backend will topple over as people load it up with never ending stream of crap. It's surprising it's lasted this far but occasional issues in chat refresh/missing chat history is just a reminder of "solid" foundations it's built upon.
On Windows it's semi-native, because instead of Electron it uses Microsoft’s own fork of Electron that has its own entirely separate set of superficial flaws on top of the fundamental flaws that come with Electron.
They did this for reasons, presumably.
Everywhere else, it's Electron.
Stange. I run Teams with Ubuntu 24.04 and Wayland with three different HiDPI monitors and can share any of my screens quite happily. The only compromise is using Teams as a PWA with Edge. Apparently Firefox has improved PWA management, but I haven't had time or inclination to get it working when the Edge solution works fine. I use FF for all other browsing.
As of yesterday (at least for me) "classic" Teams installed as its own actual separate program (~~ Electron app) from Microsoft's .deb repository flat-out refuses to do anything other than complain that it's long out of support and so won't connect.
So I had to hold my nose, install Chromium (like hell I'm installing Chrome or <shiver> Edge), and prod it into deploying the "Progressive Web App" version. Which has, at a minimum so far, lost the tray icon, and probably other functionality. Like obeying my settings for presence and content of the window title bar and window borders.
Sadly, despite umpteen abortive attempts to ditch WIndows over the last 20 years, just a handful of apps won't run, or won't run smoothly or, in one case, despite insistence from many that my one must-have game will run under Linux but half a day trying and failing to make it so all mean that Windows remains my default desktop OS.
Also a happy Mint user. Retired now, but have successfully used the Teams version for Linux (both native and browser-based versions) and Zoom, with the usual start-up issues, but quite reliably afterwards. I have a couple of options including a Windows 10 VM for the Windows programs that must be run, but 95% of my computer needs can be met with Linux.
Also have a VOIP PBX running on an old Dell Latitude laptop that used Debian and is very reliable. That connects the various members of our family who don't live in this house. Grandkids love being able to pick up the phone and call us. :-)
No one who is serious about wanting software freedom wants yet another packaging system that reduces that freedom. Snap, flatpack... none of this solves any problems that I have... apt just works to steal a phrase.Yum - although its been a while since I used the dead rat from IBM, also just works... I dont want some thing that updates when someone else likes, I dont want some giant obfuscted package that adds a wrapper and bloat around something that used to work perfectly well...I really dont want to have to wait for some snap to not snap into action and use shed loads of disk and CPU and ram just to start a bloody text editor or a web browser.....
"Snap, flatpack... none of this solves any problems that I have."
Flatpaks allows me to run the latest version of KiCad which the Devuan repository only has a very old version of. It also allows me to run PySolFC which is no longer in the repository. I'm not thrilled with the well known problems associated with flatpaks however with 64 GiB being the base SDRAM on most of my computers and with two that have 128 GiB, along with the size of modern SSDs I can easily live with them. YMMV. Wouldn't touch snap with a space elevator sized pole.
This perfectly illustrates the problem with Linux:
Kicad
Devuan
PySoIFC
Repository
Flatpaks
GiB
SDRAM
SSD
Actually users - let's take small business owners - couldn't give two short shits about Linux when people start using obfuscated jargon like that. They might know what a GB is and have heard of RAM, and it's easy with WIndows. You buy a computer and put the software on it that you know and hate. You know windows is awful, full of ads, full of Microsoft pushing you this way and that. But Linux - you see jargon like the above and KDE, MATE, Distro etc and think to yourself "no, fuck that, I'll stick with what I know, thanks".
Linux will only start to "take over the desktop" when it genuinely turns from a jargon-infused mess into an OS that just works.
I know this is an unpopular view, but seriously, it needs a PR job. And you know why people will pay for MS software when there are plenty of decent, free alternatives? Because people aren't paying for just the software: they're paying for the familiarity and convenience.
And you missed the point of the article. You want "freedom"; the next guy wants "freedom" but how own exclusive way; the girl in the other county wants "freedom" but with her own twists; the developer wants "freedom" so creates [yet another] fork with their own preferences, and finally that org wants "freedom" but with specific dependencies and creates yet another Snappack.
And you end up with 100 messes of everyone's preferences and yet not a single one that has enough userbase to warrant any real industry support at all!
The article says what I've been saying here but dowmvoted by the rabid die-hards. STOP FORKING YOUR DISTROS AND MAKE A SYSTEM GOOD ENOUGH TO GET BEHIND. Stop believing that making an OS will make the world beat a path to your door and *start* understanding it's the *ecosystem*, damnit. Stop thinking that just because it's good enough for *you* means it's good enough for everyone else, warts, unfriendly Ui's, unsupported hardware and all.
I'll get downvoted again, but (as noted) both the writer AND Toldvalds has noted ALL this, yet you choose to ignore it all. Linux desktop is always an "alternative", never a first choice in the marketplace, because of its own failures, it's own best enemy. Stop worrying about gatekeeping and keeping it a tech warrior's sanctuary and start making it a place for EVERYONE, where you don't feel you need a CS degree to master it.
I apologise that I can only give one update. Whilst I will always attempt to produce "perfect" software I have long recognised that there are two levels of perfect. One which is intended to meet the rest of the world and the other which is mine only. EG for the mine only class I'll happily cope with having to remember to enter a date in the right format (2025-12-23 vs 23/12/2025) whereas in the rest of the world class the entry field will be checked, automatically converted if possible and the user informed of problems if not.
If everyone wants freedom, then the price of that is going to be things get forked all the time.
You say I want freedom. I do. You can have freedom as well - if you watn flatpacks or snaps I'm not stopping you. But why - why oh why is it always one or the other? Why does everyone have to accept flatsnappack and cope with loss of freedom - just because you want the restrictions of your packaging method.
Can they please not both exist?
"start making it a place for EVERYONE, where you don't feel you need a CS degree to master it." - well I dont have a CS degree at all. But your approach is not making it for everyone.
Long time Reg reader, had to finally make an account to upvote this.
HELL YES!
I've been working with Win since the '90s - and playing with 'Nix almost as long.
Every time I find something that almost works in Linux, there's a 'oh, you just need to...'
-and its never a 'just'. Except in the, 'there's only a few dependencies' kinda just - and then a 'you need also to install' kinda extra - and 'Doh - it broke something else' sorta thing - and it *again* gets too hard.
Yes, if all you want is a browser/steam client/maybe-email-client, Linux is fine.
Not so great on MYOB/Quickbooks/AutoCAD/IntelliCAD/Standalone HTPC (I've built my own serial/net control interfaces and they've worked seamlessly from XP thru to Win10 thank you)
For God's sake - well, everyone's sake, actually, please <quote> 'MAKE A SYSTEM GOOD ENOUGH TO GET BEHIND'!!
Dunno if its hard or not - but it IS what us great unwashed want!
At the end of the day, I could switch 80% of my machines if there was a single OS with decent documentation (no, not a bunch of forums all arguing about the 'best' way to do something) but something that *actually* supports a decent standalone OS.
I - and all those I support - am staggered by the amount of tracking built into Win 11/~12. We want to change.
Give us a simple solution! Please!
<Que: multiple people recommending Mint/Debian/EndeavourOS/Gentoo....> and <sudo apt-get -f -install> (which broke my last rPi WOL install) - and my point is made :(
Trouble is, they're all poor copies of Apple's app package, which does "just work"(tm) - and limited stores or a multitude of them (ask gamers how many launchers they have to install). Apple's system works because it's so stupidly simple. The pkg install er is also relatively simple - no worse than an MSI(X). The Applications folder - which AFAICR has been around since the very early days - is also blindingly obvious. The way it hands app settings etc is farcical (which Library folder? Which library sub-folder?!), though still better than a registry. Reverting to package managers essentially has the same problem as stores, and for the average user it's a complex solution to a simple problem.
This, along with software availability, is always going to be the weak link in Linux on the desktops success - along with waaay too many distros/cooks in the kitchen. Blah, blah, blah, but Choice!, I hear you cry. At a given point, it becomes a hindrance and causes the end user fatigue. In theory Linux desktops are similar enough that for techies, it shouldn't be a problem, but for people who just want to get on with things, those small differences are irritating at best. Most learn to use computers by a pattern of clicks.There's also the myriad vocal asshats in the community that not only scoff at your choice of distro for {$insertGrevience}, they are prepared for all out war over a fucking text editor (no emacs is shit. It always has been;) )! It just doesn't add up to a happy path for most people. Simples.
In short, instead of blindly copying Microsoft (ctrl as modifier key on a system that uses terminal shells - which genius thought that was a good idea?!), grit your teeth, admit that Apple got something close to right and start up your photocopiers, as Redmond was once mockingly told to do.
You have highlighted in a nutshell. You need certain apps. Somebody else needs some Adobe. Somebody else needs Pro Tools or Cubase. If they need those tools to interoperate, then they won't be using Linux full stop. No doubt somebody will pipe up with 'use $somethingelse (e.g. Inkscape)'. The argument is lost on those people.
Adobe doesn't seem to agree with you. Now I probably have a similar opinion about Adobe as you do---in my case, I had no use for most of their products, and the UI on Acrobat kept getting worse and worse every year (I know because the place I worked for required Acrobat, rather than some other PDF reader/editor). But you and I aren't Adobe's target, it's people who need their capabilities and prefer not to use some other app that requires them starting over more or less from zero, and which might not give them all the capabilities they need.
I noticed a lot of pro tools e.g. ones used by Hollywood etc. does support Linux. Actually people say Linux is the platform of choice for a lot of companies. They just certify hardware configurations and a distribution like RHEL or SLES. Problem solved. I noticed a lot of them started to support Ubuntu LTS too.
A fair bit of the top end professional video stuff is only available on Linux.
I don't know how much of that is because CAD and renderfarms started out on Unix systems (eg Silicon Graphics), and how much is because Linux being free and open-source allows rapid scale-up and scale-down.
If I need to run up a few hundred extra Linux nodes, I only need to pay for the hardware. I don't need to have a long discussion with Microsoft, and I can buy any hardware I want. Once the project is over, I can sell the hardware on to another company or project and it's all done.
Amortisation and reselling of hardware is far easier to budget for than ongoing licence agreements, there's far fewer compliance issues and I never need to worry about a third party demanding to audit my renderfarm.
There's also technical reasons why an open-source OS often works better at both the largest and smallest scales - the deep parts of the stack can be changed or indeed removed entirely as required. Pixar have sent quite a few things upstream.
Linux use in VFX/Hollyworrd is a happy accident of timing. Silicon Graphics, and by extension IRIX were the default. When x86 became powerful enough, which roughly coincided with the collapse of SGI, an alternative *NIX environment was sought. Linux even then had better driver support than BSD and a few vendors who presumably has seen the writing on SGI's particular wall either started development or were coerced by the VFX industry to port software over. The OSS aspect isn't really here nor their, though it does have the benefits that you mention. In short, no idealist or doughy-eyes over software freedoms. Just pure pragmatism.
Most VFX companies contribute to OSS stuff - usually around the production stack/pipeline. A few also contribute projects. Pixar's OpenUSD and Dreamworks MoonRay are notable recent examples.
Because render farms used for VFX and 3d modelling in film/tv or game dev requires distributed computing resources, including the ability to quickly spin up VMs.
Much cheaper and easier to do with Linux than Windows (which requires licensing).
Also why open source tools like Blender can easily compete.
An engineer using CAD or a BIM designer typically just fires up their personal desktop/laptop and does everything locally. The added cost of the $100 Windows OEM licence is nothing to them.
The reason that VFX software exist for Linux is that studios were predominantly SGI/IRIX based to begin with. Windows and Macs at the time just didn't have competent or powerful enough graphics hardware. Once SCO and Microsoft started the UNIX shenanigans, and in part because cheaper hardware for graphics emerged, VFX pipelines moved toward Linux. That hasn't prevented the OSS extremists trying to footman an industry where Linux is dominant - see the whole NVIDIA drivers silliness with Binary Blobs.
"An engineer using CAD or a BIM designer typically just fires up their personal desktop/laptop and does everything locally." And *that's* where they're doing it wrong. BIM is supposed to be collaborative, and yet Autodesk - and let's be honest, Engineers and Architects have stupidly allowed Autodesk to take over here, then complained about - haven't really offered a cogent solution. Probably not int in their interest to - keep nickel and timing idiot architects.
And that's where VFX differs. They have extremely good - and often times, better - alternatives to Autodesk's offerings. So they tell Autodesk, and everyone else for that matter, what the industry minimus support requirements are. And vendors better support them, or they're dropped quickly! Architects could take a look at https://vfxplatform.com - but they're too blindly arrogant as a group to ever admit other people do thing better than them. Overpaid cretins that they are...
It was music that brought me back to Windows - I just need to be confident that my VSTs will work and most of them use stupid license authenticators that I assume have no chance of running on Linux (though I guess they must also be mac compatible) so until I can be confident they'll play nice I'm kind of stuck on Windows for that part of what I do at least.
Many VSTs will work just fine on Linux with Wine. I don’t have a lot but am successfully using a couple of cherry audio VSTi synths and goodhertz effects. The challenge is the daw software. I’ve run cubase since before it was cubase on the Atari ST but I haven’t easily got it running on Wine and if it isn’t easy it isn’t an option.
Truth be told it’s a very part time hobby and I haven’t been making music for too long (always an excuse). So I’ve decided to try using Reaper as my main daw and see how I get on. There’s an official Linux version and so far pulseaudio is so much less of a pita than ASIO.
It’s funny what the final straw is for people. For me it was Windows repeatedly updating and rebooting without permission. At the core of what I want from a desktop OS, it turns out, is the thing not to just reboot because someone else has decided that’s necessary and whatever I’m actually doing doesn’t matter.
Reaper is my DAW under Windows and it is a stunning piece of software in my opinion. The fact it manages to pack a fully-functional DAW into a 16mb download is outstanding, real old-school stuff.
I have a bunch of Native Instruments and EastWest virtual instruments, I should look into whether they can be used under Linux, though - Windows increasingly feels like it brings nothing of value to the table.
There are a couple of programs that are essential to my business, unfortunately their vendors don't offer Linux versions. I don't have the time or the inclination to set up a test machine to see if they will run in Wine or some other Windows app running setup. Perhaps when Windows 12 goes fully online or makes my kit unusable, due to even more silly hardware requirements, I'll take the plunge.
Thanks to Liam's continual praise of Linux Mint - and that of other commentards - I recently made the move to Mint as my aging but still perfectly capable PC was deemed a dinosaur by M$. And, of course, there's the privacy/AI issues with Windows 11 that are highlighted in the article.
Was it easy? It was easy-ish. As well as 30 years' Windows experience (from Windows 3.1 and Windows NT 3.51 onwards), I have AmigaOS and SunOS/Solaris and even CTOS (Unisys) experience. So perhaps that helped.
Not everything I use has a Linux equivalent and it wasn't easy to get absolutely everything working. For example, I struggled for ages with FS-UAE to get a decent configuration for my Amiga emulation until one day I sat down, took my time and selected settings logically. Within an hour or so, I had a better Amiga configuration than I had had for the previous 20+ years with WinUAE. But I now have a working system that I'm happy with and the thing that doesn't have a Linux equivalent, well, I can do without - although I still have my Windows partition if I really need this.
Of course, Mint is not Windows. I am well aware of this and the consequences that things are different. After all, if you switch from one car to another car from a different manufacturer, it will be similar, yes, but there will be differences. As an experienced "driver", I can cope with that and as a "hobbyist mechanic", I don't mind getting my hands dirty and changing aspects of the car. I mean OS.
Can Mint be used as a desktop for the average Joe in the street? Honestly? I don't see why not. What does Joe use? A browser. That's probably about it these days. And Waterfox (thanks again, Liam!) and Firefox are more or less identical in operation under both Windows and Mint - which is how they should be.
But will Joe trust Mint (or any of the alternatives)? That's the bigger problem, I don't think he will. He knows Windows, so is happy with it. He doesn't care about privacy - heck, I bet he keeps his wireless active on his phone in the shopping mall, subscribes to all sorts of marketing lists, etc. - and this AI thing? It does things for you so you don't need to - result!
I tried Mint via USB on three completely different devices and in every single case, it found all the drivers and just worked. I was so surprised at this, despite what Liam et al. advocated. But Average Joe? He's the man who has bought Ford (or GM/Vauxhall/Renault/VW/etc.) all his life. Windows just works, too, and he doesn't need to do anything to get the latest Ford, it comes direct. And if he has to get a new PC, then so what? His existing one is only four years old, that's about right, isn't it? PCs are only designed to last for 3-4 years, like cars, so it's an investment in the future.
Yes, the Linux desktop will succeed, but only for people like us who know. For Average Joe (and Josephine), stick with what you know. Take the easy option, even if it does end up costing you money and privacy.
I've used several operating systems in my career, starting with CDC's COMPASS in college, DG's AOS and Sun Solaris during the early part of my career, then Windows 3.1 through Windows 11 in the latter half of my career. I've used Linux since it first showed up in the early 90s, and it has been my full-time home desktop OS for the last 20 years, first Ubuntu, and then Mint.
Linux, like every other OS, has its quirks, but I find it just as useful and more flexible and customisable than Windows. Make of that what you will. Linux driver support seems to be much improved, and in most cases, it has simply worked (I prefer Dell Latitudes, but have installed on HP ZBook and Gigabyte I7 motherboards as well).
With respect:
I disagree with your final point. If Joe or Josephine can install Windows from a CD, then they can download a live DVD and install Mint
Windows is no longer installed from CD - Joe and Josephine just need to switch their PC on and it, uhm, well, it just, well, appears. They have no idea how it appears, it just... does, just as they would have no idea how to seek out Mint and create/burn a CD to install it.
And that's my point: Joe and Josephine have no idea how to install anything - or configure anything for that matter. Aside from the obligatory wallpaper (sorry, screensaver - they don't even know the correct terms) showing off their kid/grandkid/dog, that's about their limit when it comes to customising Windows.
And don't misunderstand me, I'm not for a minute saying that installing/customising Linux is hard, it's just that Joe and Josephine don't care about customising it. They want it there, working, with no fuss, in much the same way that their new iPhone is configured the way that their old one was (Disclaimer: I don't know if Android has a similar transfer mechanism when changing phones).
"And that's my point: Joe and Josephine have no idea how to install anything - or configure anything for that matter."
I agree with you. It's just there on the PC they bought, they don't need to install it.
But what do they do when Patch Tuesday banjaxes their Windows? The recommendation for what to do when that happens aren't pretty and my experience was that the only way out was a reinstall.
To be fair, this has never happened to me on a dozen or so different Win machnies.
Whereas my linux machines have repeatedly had updates stall, and require commandline intervention. Mail databases have been corrupted and been unrecoverable. Swapping lockups happen regularly.
It had a reliable phase around kde 3.5 time, but I now find it less reliable than ever, and far less reliable than Windows.
Unfortunately Windows is simply crossing into unusable amounts customer hostility, so I won't be moving anything past W10.
My anecdotal evidence, over the last 20 years, is that Linux has hardly ever fallen over on me in a way that a re-boot didn't solve. Literally a handful of times. Obviously YMMV.
I absolutely rely on Mint for my work desktop over the last five years—it's not caused me any grief. Neither has Ubuntu server running Nextcloud. Currently exploring Bluefin on a laptop, as a possible robust 'low maintenance' option to give to an admin assistant.
To offer an alternative opinion, I've just moved to Linux Mint. I'm not in IT, but consider myself at least a bit tech savvy (I'm an engineer). Moving to Mint was a s*$show. It didn't recognise either my graphics card or the WiFi drivers. It took me about 4 hours to get to the point where I could just log into Mint.
Since then, there have been other issues (playing DVDs still doesn't work half the time). But I've stuck with it. I am relatively happy, but mainly because the alternative of going back to Windows is worse. I still get unexplained crashes (I suspect Firefox is to blame, but haven't tracked down the issue yet), and other issues.
I can stick with it (and hopefully work out the issues in time), but there would be no chance that anyone else in my family could or would deal with these issues. And Mint Cinnamon is supposed to be the simplest and most windows-like of all.
If Linux wants to become the replacement for Windows then it needs to make the install process and the first steps easier, more consistent, and frankly more Windows like, so people can get their feet under the table, without having to get into the minutiae of the Terminal window and the various specialities of Linux.
People can always learn that stuff afterwards, but the start is where you will gain and keep people...
Windows has similar problems.
I've installed Windows across 10s of thousands of PCs, (maybe close to 100 thousand) and a certain percentage always have a problem. Even. When. They. Are Identical. PCs. Same with Chrome OS. Same with Linux.
Remote or in person, a certain percentage always have problems. It was just your lucky day.
>Same with Chrome OS
Not seen this on our thousands of clients which are either on ChromeOS (because they are ChromeBooks) or ChromeOS Flex on standard business PCs and laptops. The occasional time a ChromeOS Flex install falls over it was always because of an underlying hardware problem.
With Windows, though, even on the very same PC using the very same Windows media and erasing all storage between installs some installs work fine while others have random issues.
Incredibly unlucky, I would say. I install various Linux flavours on a vast array of (mainly modern) hardware, and I can't even remember when a driver last didn't work. Perhaps around 5 years ago, I had to manually dibble a Wi-Fi driver on a 'no name' laptop; but other than that, everything has worked 100% out of the box on every bit of hardware I've tried. Linux has the best and widest driver support of any OS these days.
> But will Joe trust Mint (or any of the alternatives)? That's the bigger problem ...
No, the bigger problem is that Joe has never heard of Linux, is unaware that he even has the option to use a different OS on his machine, and even if he did, wouldn't have a clue how to install it. Which is in any case moot, as he has no motivation to install a different OS. He may gripe about the shitification of Windows, but it's the devil he knows; he assumes that that's what computers are like.
This is because Windows came preinstalled on every machine he's ever owned or used (okay, he knows a few people who use Macs – their Macs came with MacOS preinstalled). Joe's phone came with Android or iOS preinstalled. His TV, car and fridge came with their operating systems preinstalled. Joe has never installed an OS in his life, has never had to think about installing an OS, and if he did would reasonably assume that that's a job for the hardware vendor.
Until vendors are motivated to sell PCs with (some) Linux preinstalled (and pre-configured with at least the minimum of useful software the average Joe needs – which probably means a browser and an office suite1) it ain't going to happen for desktop Linux at scale. Perhaps that motivation will, as several on here have suggested, come from the disappearance of Windows up its own cloudy, AI-ridden fundament – will have to wait and see.
1Maybe I've just described ChromeOS; if so, fine, that amplifies my point.
(Personally, I have no skin in the game – Linux has worked just fine for me for a couple of decades and counting, and I don't honestly have a huge interest in what works or not for other people.)
You are basically alluding to the real problem: how does Linux get on to the high st. So that Joe Public visiting PC World get to see and thus buy a system with “Linux” (ie. A specific distribution pre-installed).
Which was the problem Canonical was targeting with Ubuntu 20+ years back…
About 8 years or so ago my Partner bought a new Win 10 machine and didn't like it and asked me to put Mint on it. I'd been running Mint for a few years prior to that and waxed lyrical about it so duly did so.
In that time I've had pretty much no sysadmin tasks to perform and she loves its stability.
I Mint on all of my machines and servers in my home office / lab and up until last week my main office machine was on Mint 20.3. I'd been planning on updating because the OS was very old and I couldn't get support for a few devices I wanted to use (Picoscope and an SDR receiver). I was going to do it last Christmas but was expecting a lot of problems. My old Mellanox 10G card had gone titsup, had a new card on order so decided to bite the bullet. It took about an hour go go through the different previous Mint OS versions to get to 22.2 but it just worked. No pain at all. The machine had a new OS and my Win 10 VM worked, all of my comms related programmes worked, the Picoscope and the SDR worked. Really, really easy.
The machine runs from the Linux partition 99% of the time but does also have a WIndows 11 partition because I had a spare license and it is useful just in case. It took over an hour to download and install the 2H25 Win 11 "update" and it broke the Intel 1G NIC so had to use a USB to 1G board to get back on-line and download the Intel driver and then it worked again. About an hour and a half faffing about.
The 10G Intel card arrived and after swapping out the Mellanox, booted back up into Mint and got link and worked. For shits and giggles I booted into Windows and of course, it didn't work without going back to Intel to get the driver. These are Intel NICs and not some Chinese Yingong devices - Why did the update break my NICs?
I've used MS since DOS5 and seen if just get progressively worse after Win7 (slow boot got me to try Ubuntu Linux). Where is the SQA testing? I guess it's the punters that are doing it. Apparently they pushed an update out that then knew would bork 11% of users. I think it's the pain of updating Microsoft OS' that preventing me updating Mint.
In my setup I use Mint as the main daily driver with a Win10 VM for comms related Windows only s/w and a Macbook Pro for Orifice and music related things as well as a Roon endpoint and that works for me. I can easily swap between the main machine or the Mac by powering one machine down and the other up and my monitors, network, audio all work regardless of the machine in use.
I can understand why people are sick to the back teeth with Win11 - it sucks.
Sorry you lost any credibility when you say printing on linux is a shitshow - it's by FAR AND AWAY the best system to print from. Literally hook up printer to network or usb and print ... that's it. macOS / Windows struggle with drivers etc.
Audio on linux is almost on par with macOS now with pipewire - so another point you are incorrect about.
Sadly you're out of date.
Apple stopped using CUPS and made their own thing a few years ago. I don't know whether it works as I've never printed from a Mac.
They've also repeatedly broken audio - a few times in the hardware so impossible to work around. MIDI has been consistently pretty good, other than when Apple deliberately broke USB support and orphaned most of the hardware.
You best tell my inkjet that. It's happily printing from macOS 26 using CUPS. And, yep, cupsd.conf is still there in /etc. Of course, the AirPrint capable laser printer uses that protocol, but that goes through CUPS too. Have a look at https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/cups/tree/2716564fcd1f5bf4cd4082279e97625a8f98204e/cups to see that yes, it's still very much part of macOS, with reasonably regular updates for a venerable subsystem.
As for CoreAudio - I missed that is was causing some users issues in the initial release of Tahoe. Not experienced it myself mind, my 10 yer keyboard just works. Over USB no less. CoreAudio's track record over the last 21 years is still considerably better than that of the similarly aged PulseAudio, and has lower latency and better stability than PipeWire. And Linux still has less available audio software than macOS.
You also need to know that companies investing time into Linux use it mostly for servers and IoT applications. That's why Linux desktop is the way it is. If you want enterprise product, go buy rhel with highest support tier and enjoy 24/7 support. Don't expect that from free software.
Sorry you lost any credibility when you say printing on linux is a shitshow - it's by FAR AND AWAY the best system to print from.
You doubt someone’s credibility and then justify it with an outright lie?
If it’s not a very standard setup printing on Linux is dogshit. Fresh dogshit.
I am writing this on a Lenovo desktop attached to a Brother laser printer. Elsewhere I have an identical Lenovo desktop attached to an identical Brother laser printer. Both printers are connected by USB and are also on wifi. This computer will only print over USB. The other one will only print over wifi. Of my two laptops here, one sees the printer but won't print to it; the other can't even see the printer.
And thanks for confirming that yet another Linux audio project hopes to make that side of things work. My point, neatly made.
If everything is as identical as you state, I expect your printer connectivity problems are due to you originally installing one printer with the USB drivers and the other with the WiFi driver. I installed mine using the LAN driver - printers are visible to any device connected to my WiFi/LAN.
I also gave each printer a fixed IPv4 and IPv6 address and added an entry in the router, for reasons best known to the router, without the static mapping it loses visibility of the printer…
Sound on my Linux Mint Mate works JUST FINE. I had full five-speaker Dolby (plus a sub-woofer) until my home theater popped its clogs. Don't feel I can blame Mint for that. Now it's stereo through a pair of Bose Bluetooth Minis.
Every printer I've ever owned has worked JUST FINE with Mint. I presently have two:
A recent HP that runs JUST FINE under HPLIP.
A Brother, older than dirt, that runs JUST FINE under CUPS.
I guess I dodged both of your bullets.
> Printing on Linux is still a shitshow.
Why, are you saying there are no MOPRIA print drivers for Linux (MS in 2018 belatedly added MOPRIA support to W10).
Given any printer vendor wanting to sell stuff which ensure their printer will out-of-the-box support one or more of: PostScript, AirPrint, MOPRIA
Yes printing was problematic years back when printer vendors produced cheap stuff that needed proprietary drivers, which were only available for Windows and occasionally Mac.
Professionally suffering multiple Windows environments with countless printers, direct attached with USB, just by itself on the network or behind the realm of endless suffering that is the M$ PrintServer, Linux just finding a printer on the network and using it with recommended drivers is an actual joy.
I got a focusrite 18i20 and it works out the box , we even have an alsa scarlett panel that gives all internal / external routing options and levels and they are massive. jack has no trouble routing signals aat all from app to app and hardware to hardware. bit of research will come up with the answers you seek.
D'oh... audio!!!
I am writing this on a dual Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS / and Win 11 booting HP OMEN with 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-12900H
(It's a company laptop. I would never ever buy anything from HP! ... Kona files, ink cartridges, devices that will not scan if ink is low or old, etc...)
The only reason this machine has Win 11 on it (with the staggering effort it took to rid it of Copilot and other AI crap!) is because occasionallly I need to digitally sign pdf's. (Adobe, you can go to hell too...)
Audio works fine on Windows boot.
The up-to-date Linux kernel just fails to see the Intel and nvidia sound hardware. I spent hours playing with pavucontrol, (re)pulseaudio, anusmixer settings / install/reinstalls, and flashing the BIOS (with another special F..k You! to HP for that!!!)
I gave up on trying to get audio from this machine... I'd rather have muted Linux than Win11 with sound.
All my other machines, desk and laptops as well as my deGooglified Chromebooks run just fine..
PS: I gave up on Macs (last one was a IIfx) after System 7, when horror of horrors, Apple started charging ready money for the OS!!! (6.2 was peak Mac for me.)
PPS: We lost the war when we lost PEEK/POKE and get/put. My goddamn computer, my memory space, and I will write what I want where i want, never mind all the 'trusted', 'security' crap. So first thing I do in every install is rid it of snaps, flatpaks, VM's and other sandboxes!
That's the question that the article doesn't expand out into. And that question is a bit of a toughie to answer. But it helps understand why Linux hasn't taken off.
On the one hand, wouldn't it be great if there were a single desktop / mobile / server OS that we all used and liked, and one set of cloud services for us to use? Training would be easy, it'd generate the most vigorous economic activity possible as everyone's software would be accessible to the whole market, etc, etc.
On the other hand, one critical flaw impacts the entire planet. That'd be too tempting a target for bad actors, obnoxious states.
For many decades now it is clear that there's room for about 2 of everything. Apple / Mac is one, Windows / Android is the other. All are backed by corporations chasing the vast consumer market, everyone else gets forgotten about. It seems that industry is not going to grow a viable 3rd mass market alternative by itself, and it seems especially optimistic to think that any of the large companies in the Linux world (such as RedHat) will ever have any interest whatsoever in going out of their way to unify efforts on Linux/Desktop. All the myriad projects and ventures in the Linux world add up to an appalling mess for the average Joe to navigate. It's a mess for seasoned Linux users to navigate. You know you've got a mess on your hands when different suppliers of basically the same OS have to re-build everyone's software themselves and package it up for distribution independent of the software developer.
The reason why two is the magic number is because governments minded to let the market choose are generally happy enough with duopolies, and not with monopolies. If there's two of something, regulators rapidly lose interest and there's no pressure for the introduction of a third choice. It also suits governments because the industry then isn't so fragmented as to actively hinder an economy, thereby not necessitating government intervention to bring about much needed consolidation. As Apple and Microsoft were the ones with the biggest desktop dreams, they won.
Other things
<pedant mode: apologies on>
From the article:
Unix died because of endless incompatibilities between versions.
It hasn't died as such, it's simply transformed into a specification. Many OSes - including Windows (if one loads it up with WSL v1) are largely compliant with that specification. The big old Unix corps got eaten on the desktop as Windows grew in capability, and in server land by the hardware manufacturers doing x86/64 hardware that was viable for production use in data centres with Linux being just about good enough to be the OS. Linux's dominance of the data centre would not have happened if no one had manufactured an x86 server with an open specification for hardware, boot environment, etc. Much of the credit for that goes actually to Microsoft, who refined the concept of "IBM Compatible" down to an actual published standard that others could write OSes against with confidence.
Also from the article:
Just look at Android, he argued. Linux won on smartphones because, while there are different Android front ends, under their interfaces, there's a single, unified platform with a unified way to install programs.
Whilst that's true, Android is not and has not been the only Linux based mobile phone OS. Tizen, Ubuntu Phone, spring to mind. They were unsuccessful. Android's win in the Linux-based mobile phone OS market came about through big corporate backing with control brought about though forced adoption of one company's services (Google's) in an illegal way very reminiscent of the bad practices we used to accuse Microsoft of following. Despite some promising tech from various other stables (I still miss the tech perfection of BlackBerry10), we're now left with 2 of something which looks like persisting forever.
</pedant mode>
... but when that may happen and exactly what that "win" will look like? I think we know already, possibly.
That commercial entity is going to want deep pockets and is going to want a very valid reason for shipping a Linux based OS.
They will also want to be shipping the hardware.
System76? - not big enough, not a viable enough reason to scale.
We have a reasonably large company who have adopted Linux at reasonable scale and are about to ramp that up with a "gaming console" - which is to all intents and purposes, a Linux Desktop computer.
Valve.
The Steam Deck has sold about 10 million units.
Sure, it's not designed to be Desktop Linux, but you CAN exit Steam into the Arch desktop environment and use it like a Desktop computer.
Enter stage left, the Steam Machine or Game Cube as some are calling it.
Valve are a games and games distribution company and also more importantly, a hardware company.
They have become Linux specialists.
I don't think it's much of a stretch, if the Steam Machine turns out to be an absolute blinder of a gaming rig, for them to ship 20 million or more of them.
The power of Valve lies in the games distribution - there's nothing that can touch it in terms of scale, usability and user loyalty.
What is not known is whether, on the Steam Machine, Valve will have any interest at all in the Desktop behind Steam itself beyond configuring it to be performant and choosing some default apps.
But Valve are REALLY close to being the kind of company that could swing the adoption of Desktop Linux.
It may not really matter if the desktop behind Steam - the fact that a Steam Machine can be a competent desktop - is not the primary use case.
You could argue Valve are still shipping a Desktop PC with a Desktop Linux OS on it, even if when Steam starts, it's using Gamescope Compositor.
Microsoft’s real win was owning the enterprise. They achieved this with reasonably simple admin panes (or pains, if your UNIX beard is as long as mine) that average Joes who wanted to “work in IT” could actually operate**. From there, the SMB/SME and mid-market followed quickly. When it came to buying for home, people bought what they already knew.
Microsoft made its money from every PC sold — which, in a market that for most of its existence has been a race to the bottom, is no small achievement. Linux still has nothing as simple as Active Directory. Yes, you can build something equally robust (or better), but that’s precisely the problem: it needs building. In Windows, it’s a radio button.
Add the success and relative simplicity of M365, and it’s hard to see Windows losing its grip on the enterprise anytime soon. iPads and Galaxy Tabs* are the closest we’ve come to denting Microsoft’s dominance in the home.
*Yes, there are other android tablets, but in my experience, unless it's a discussion between tech nerds, it isn't iOS vs Android, it's iOS vs Galaxy, or whatever Samsung are calling their Android flavour this week.
**EDIT: With a little bit of collusion and dodgy contracts, and treating those partner engaged in the race to the bottom like shit.
"Microsoft’s real win was owning the enterprise.
...
Microsoft made its money from every PC sold"
You've got them the wrong way round. By all sorts of leverage they got OEM installs so that's what people knew and that's how they got into the enterprise. They managed to distract SCO by offering to hold their coat while they had a fight with Linux. By the time that settled they'd got an arguably inferior server OS into the enterprise.
I think the truth actually lies somewhere in the middle. Put it this way, Windows was ubiquitous in the workplace with Windows 3.x before the consumer market really went boom with the release of Windows 95, but arguably, Windows in the home was already on an upwards trajectory because it was cheap due to the aforementioned shady shenanigans. I'm not disagreeing with you, just don't down play the importance of Windows 3.x and the enterprise take up of it in the rise to the dominant position that Windows has. Of course, distracting SCO, first with BSD, then Linux didn't hurt, but even then the tools for managing Windows in a business environment made it just as much an easy choice.
It's a starting point and it depends where Valve take this.
If it becomes wildly popular - PlayStation popular - that's a game changer (excuse the pun)
There is some belief that big industry players like Sony and Microsoft are worried about Valve and their slice of the gaming pie.
There's good reason for this - look at the releases: https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
Many of these are AAA titles, many are wildly popular indie games.
Valve have pretty much single handedly made it possibly for tiny teams of game devs - even individuals - to release games on the platform.
You can be sure Valve will be aiming for a specific price point that is competitive for the Steam Machine.
The PS5 Pro is currently $650. That seems like the price point to match. I doubt Valve will be able to go lower, given the price of RAM right now.
Of course the issue, as always, is how embedded people are in a particular ecosystem.
Someone who has been a PS user for 10, 15, 20 years and has amassed a big collection of games is unlikely to want to jump ship OR have another system to support.
I hear you though, 10 million units isn't going to do much boat rocking.
30 million plus on the other hand, now we've got a Linux success story on the Desktop that may start a bit of a revolution.
Microsoft are already pissing off PC gamers by ramming features they don't want into the OS and PC gamers are generally a tech savvy bunch.
There's PLENTY of benchmarks out there showing Linux running games better than windows.
There's PLENTY of PC gamers already doing the dual boot and dabbling.
Also, Valve being a fairly open minded company will certainly be fine with hardware manufacturers creating Steam Machines and shipping them with SteamOS.
Exactly, with Proton running an excellent compatibility layer its really running stuff well. Office happily runs most jobs in a browser for general tasks. Visio is a bit of a pain but it always was felt like the forgotten child of Microsoft.
Wining the hearts and minds is a start, Steam OS set up for default desktop mode, then add in enterprise management options and that will worry Microsoft. A lot of people don't realize that Xbox is pretty much the only non Linux machine out there now, the "year of the linux" was years ago and no one noticed.
Sorry... but no they are not.
IMHO, Chromebooks are just vehicle for Google to slurp your data and you are paying them for the privilege. IMHO, they are so stripped back like the Netbook of old that they are a technological dead end
All but one of my Linux systems run a GUI. The desktop is either XFCE or Cinnamon. They do the job that I want without fuss.
I have recently installed Debian XFCE on a Dell 3180 Chromebook. It wasn't easy, but I figured it out, and it is now a vehicle for GW-BASIC and UCBLogo running on DOSBox. Going to introduce my granddaughter to programming. Total cost: $30 for the Chromebook and another $40 for a new battery.
This was an experiment on my part to determine whether there was life after Chrome for this hardware.
In this instance though the OP is talking about installing on a Chromebook, which was never built to run anything other than Chrome OS, so you're comparing apples with oranges in your reply.
Installing a mainstream Linux distro like Zorin, Mint, Ubuntu etc onto normal PC hardware is no more difficult than a Windows install. Hell, in some instances it's easier - Ubuntu happily installed onto my Lenovo Legion laptop with drivers and everything working fine.
W11 fell over almost immediately as it didn't have drivers for the built-in Intel NIC (both WiFi and ethernet didn't work), so go stuck in a loop demanding I connect to the internet and log in with a MS account. This was with a year-old bog standard bit of PC hardware that anyone would buy, nothing esoteric in the slightest.
One year I had to deal with about 200,000 Chromebooks for a school. No, that is not a typo. 200,000. (no it was not me by myself. Of course we had a team. I probably laid hands on just several thousand)
It's an OK system, but it's meant for a closed garden experience or personal light use.
But yes, by far the biggest problem is that it's Big Google Brother.
Not sure you really do understand Chromebooks (or ChromeOS). Aside from the fact that, unlike with free Gmail accounts, Google doesn't use customer data from GWS users (and it also stopped scanning the email content of free Gmail accounts almost a decade ago), ChromeOS can do pretty much anything Windows or Linux can do. Our software engineers use them to work on writing complex applications, and we run Mathlab and other applications on it. They are far more secure than Windows, and the management overheat is way lower than for the average Windows client (no BS like corporate images).
Most people only know Chromebooks from the cheap crappy plastic laptops that schools give to their students, but that's only a small slice of the ecosystem. It's like judging PC hardware from the cheap crappy laptops sold at Walmart.
The reason because no one uses Linux on desktop is Office. The lack of, I mean. I use Linux since 25 years, and I'm fine with Libreoffice. I'm a sysadmin, so apart from Office, everything else is actually much better on Linux than on Windows, so for me it's easy. But for every other worker that uses a computer, it's simply impossible because there is no Office, no Autocad, no commercial program that they have to use.
And there is no solution to this because of course MS will never produce a Linux version of Office, the one and only program that allows them to rule the world. And no other commercial software will ever be ported to Linux until it has 50% of the desktop market, which it will never have because of there is no commercial software for a Linux desktop.
Now, SAAS has made a very tiny dent in this situation, since some (but not all) SAAS products work fine on a browser (I mean, on Chrome, only Chrome, always Chrome, no other browser than Chrome, it seems) on Linux. Not all of them becauuuuse.. OFFICE. Yes, they need Excel to work.
How can anyone win against windows and office in the current situation?
Want some fun with LibreOffice under Linux Mint? Simply type a few words into a text document, set 'em to 96 point, zoom in a couple of clicks ... and log in again, because your desktop session has just crashed, losing all work from all open apps. LibreOffice devs don't care. x.org devs don't care. XFCE devs don't care. And Linux Mint devs don't care because their answer to everything is "that's an upstream issue, nothing to do with us."
I tried making a desktop shortcut on Ubuntu today. The newbie-friendly Linux.
To create a desktop shortcut, the process is you spend a while Googling, then break out the text editor and creating a file, pasting in what some old Forum post tells you. Then you make that file executable, then also make it launchable because those are apparently different attributes.
Then it works! So much easier and more intuitive than bringing up a context menu with the universal command for 'bring up context menu' and then choosing 'send to desktop (create shortcut)'. Or dragging-and-dropping (which in Ubuntu lead to the actual executable moving to the desktop, away from everything it needed to run).
Throwing an AI at the problem had it tell me how easy it was- just copy the existing .desktop file (which, of course, did not exist) to a different folder.
It's not the biggest problem in the world, but how can this sort of stupid limitation exist in a modern OS?
"To create a desktop shortcut, the process is you spend a while Googling"
That's your problem right there.
You have a GUI. Use it. How would you do something unfamiliar on Windows? My guess is that you'd experiment with clicking around. This is what you'd find on KDE desktop but I doubt others would differ in more than detail:
What did you want to create a desktop short cut for?
1. An application in the applications menu? Right click on the item in the menu. Select Add to Desktop. Done.
2. A file or directory in some directory that you have open? Select the item, drag it to the desktop and drop it. When the dialog opens to ask if you want to move, copy or create a link select create a link. Done.
3. Anything? Right click on the desktop. From the menu select link to file or directory or Link to application. Type in the name and, for the former, navigate to select the file or directory. For the latter, navigate to the executable, select that and then use the tabs to set the properties you want rather than typing them in as Google told you. You can also select an icon for it. It's a bit trickier than exporting it from the menu but you only do that if it's something that's not already installed on the menu.
But no doubt your post will be quoted by other A/Cs who'll repeat it without checking for themselves. But how come you didn't discover it for yourself? I can see why you posted A/C, after all it doesn't show up your desktop skills in a good light.
What you seem to be describing from Google is something you only need for something with very special requirements, not your average run-of-the-mill application. For instance I run an Informix server* which has a lot of environment settings etc. If I were to set up a shortcut for a terminal session to run Informix clients it I might go through that routine although, in fact, I just set it up in the system profile so that any terminal session has access. This, however, is real sysadmin stuff because it's what I used to do for a living on Unix servers. I repeat, it is not what you'd be doing to set up a typical productivity app.
* I have some genealogical data on it.
Yes, that's how desktop shortcuts work on Linux (according to freedesktop xdg standard). You have .desktop file with different fields where you specify name, comment, executable and additional options. I would recommend putting user created shortcuts into $HOME/.local/share/applications/. Installed programs have them mostly in /usr/(local/)share/applications if you want to take one as a template.
It is strange that there is no option to just make a shortcut from the desktop with gui. There is probably an app for that, just need to install it by yourself.
Clearly your problem with LibreOffice is your problem. I just did what you suggested, no problem at all. No crash.
So I'll see your anecdotal evidence and raise you mine, betting strongly that mine trumps yours in the general 'user experience'.
Time to start poking the forums to see if you can find out if your problem is anyone else's problem too, and what the cure is.
It's not Office - it's AD / domains and Group Policy, etc. Enterprise management features. That's the reason Linux desktops don't exist in corporate-land. My company is chock full of Linux gurus, developers and every other kind of techie, and all would love to have Linux desktops. But we can't, because enterprise management, innit. Until the free software world comes up with some kind of equivalent, it'll never happen in that sphere.
You obviously don't have to manage 1:1 compatibility with customers/suppliers and (in 1 case of mine) a Large Employer that requires absolute compatibility with their internal standars (A District Health Board in New Zealand).
MSOffice is not an option, its a requirement.
It's a pretty myopic view, also because your list of "critical apps" of course includes AutoCAD, which is a typical trope when discussing Linux and which is an app that is of relevance for less than 1% of business users.
As for MS Office, I'm sure you will be surprised to learn that many large and very large businesses do just fine with Google Apps instead of MS Office. They also don't need Windows because most business apps have made the jump from locally installed desktop apps to server-based apps accessed via web browser a decade ago, and those that haven't yet are most likely well on the path to get there.
You might want to broaden your horizon a little bit. Also because LibreOffice isn't the only alternative office suite which runs on Linux, and while it has its strengths it's pretty poor in many ways. If you're coming from MS Office then Only Office is usually a better alternative.
The Linux Desktop is nowadays not that much of a hassle to use, but companies continue to be slaved to Excel and other Microsoft junk.
Meanwhile Windows continues on.a downward spiral that makes it more and more shite despite users complains.
The day including Windows by Force on computers starts to get banned everywhere is the day Microsoft Empire starts to fall.
Most Windows users aren't tech-literate enough to even know about any of this stuff. This issue isn't fragmentation, it's interoperability and compatibility. They want their Windows programs to work and they want the OS tools to work without being esoteric, neither of which are solved by making one Grand Daddy desktop that only robs Linux of its differentiation from Windows and MacOS while pushing all of the fragmentation onto the user instead of the distros.
Users should not have to be tech-literate to use a computer, and more than drivers need to be tech-literate to drive a car or "Dr Who" fans need to be tech-literate to watch the telly. The days when "Newnes Practical Television, by Dictron" was essential reading for anyone with a TV are long gone, bit the Linux world still thinks there is virtue in obscurity.
Most car drivers are sufficiently travel literate to know about busses, trains, bicycles, boats and aircraft. They may not know how to read a train time table but they know the option exists.
Most Dr Who fans are sufficiently format literate to know there are Dr Who books and could probably work out how to buy and read one if they want.
Plenty of computer users are not sufficiently computer literate to know that Linux is as option. The vast majority of them could not install Windows on a freshly assembled PC. It has been a very long time since I suffered from Windows. Which OS is easier to install now?
Which OS is easier to install? On reasonably common hardware, it's Linux, by a country mile.
But as was pointed out in the threads above, most users don't install Windows. They bring the computer home, turn it on, and there's Windows prompting you to enter the slippery slide into the Microsoft embrace. If it's a work machine, someone else has already configured it.
If Windows breaks, they bring it to a shop, and the shop knows how to fix/reimagine Windows. The user knows that the shop knows how to fix Windows. They don't know if the shop knows how to fix Linux, and there's a good chance the shop doesn't.
I'm not sure if there's a fix to Linux bug #1. Lots of planets have to align, and some power players work hard behind the scenes to maintain their monopoly orbit. But the comment about Valve/Steam, and the above-the-fold Register story about Europe and data sovereignty hold some hope.
Which OS is easier to install? On reasonably common hardware, it's Linux, by a country mile.
I have only twice recently had to install Windows - Windows 10 on other people's computers. It was an absolute doddle in both cases. A Linux Mint install is significantly more complicated.
"Users should not have to be tech-literate to use a computer"
How did you learn to become expert at using Windows? My guess is that you just clicked around. Right click on this and that and see what the menus offer? Well, stand back and prepared to be flabbergasted.
That's the exact way we learned to use Linux desktops.
@werdsmith "Rubbish, users don’t become experts at Windows.
They switch on, launch their applications and some become experts at their applications."
Which is exactly what happened when I got my first EeePC in 2008 and my second one in early 2009.
After using them for a while I moved on from customising the default Linux install with IceWM through installing eeebuntu (until Ubuntu supported the hardware fully) before ending up with LinuxMint.
> Users should not have to be tech-literate to use a computer...
I struggle with this one. There are levels of literacy. Not knowing what a file is is up there with not knowing car tyre pressure is a thing - and that it's important[1], you've gotta learn _something_ about what you're using. IT is way more intricate than vehicle mechanics, it's got a much greater scope in 'RL' function. And even highly skilled motor mechanics are stuffed now with ll the black boxes in modern vehicles - ECU says it's sensor X, swap it out. Turns out to be the ECU glitching, or sensor Y sending a conflicting signal. (Been there. I don't drive, but I've spent plenty of time working on "old school" vehicles. Not saying I'm expert, but the guy I learn from is.)
But I digress...
I think there was a sweet spot with Doze-for-the-non-tech-user between Win7 and XP. Easy enough to use for those that wanted to, with just a smidge of knowledge (eg. knowing what a file is). But let's not lose sight that computers are tools. If one doesn't need to use a tool, one doesn't learn how to use it. (Me behind the wheel of a car? I suggest you remain in another county - never had a lesson.) But that sweet spot wasn't just down to the tech being easy or users inherently knowing how to use it, it was still in the realm of pro, geek or curious user (ie. "wanted to"). Now the use of tech is so ubiquitous that it's forced on those that absolutely have no interest in learning about it. $Corps and governments (including local) have forced it on the masses chasing that extra profit, data slurping and eliminating front line staff. It's skewed the use of IT and forced the tool on old biddies and retired paras that just don't want it. I miss those "sweet spot" days.
[1] I was at a petrol station with the mechanic friend I mention here. He needed a bit of air in a tyre. We waited behind a car, two young ladies, one putting air in the tyres of her car. They finished, pulled up a car length in front to let us in, and were chatting. We got to the compressor, and I noticed the reading was 12 PSI, that was what they put in! So, I walked over and asked if they were sure about that, try 30. (Safe guess.) They looked at me with that "You don't know me!" face! Fuck that!
My car has a sticker in the driver's door frame with the recommended tyre pressure numbers.
I think most cars do by now, worth pointing it out next time. People are unlikely to believe random strangers, but probably will believe the sticker on their own vehicle.
It's in the manual too of course, but hardly anyone pays enough attention to the manuals in their life.
The sticker tends to be easier to access than the manual. This is because the sticker is (or should be) specific to your particular vehicle (engine, chassis, wheel combination). [when buying, it is useful to check the tyre size on the sticker is the same as those fitted…]
The only issues I have with the sticker on my car is that to read it you need to get down on hands and knees and secondly it only gives the pressure in bars/kPa.
A valid point.
But, the more technical you are, the more you will be able to get out of your computer and OS. Perhaps not everyone can install and configure Linux (or Windows), but that doesn't mean they couldn't take advantage of a Linux PC if it was given to them (and I have a couple of examples of that among my family and friends)
Mint also supports Xfce as well as Cinnamon which is the one I use. The main reason I run Mint now is to have some hands on with systemd, followed immediately by hand sanitizer. A secondary reason is that it always has more up to date packages on just about everything from my main setup which is the sometimes annoyingly stable (/s) Devuan using Xfce. I have been thinking about looking into Mint LMDE but so far have not found a compelling reason to do so.
> ...hands on with systemd, followed immediately by hand sanitizer.
Nicely said :) I wanted to stay pure sysvinit with Devuan. But that would consign me to a cupboard. Those that are migrating to Linux are not interested in that level of tech, so espousing the init systems' pros/cons would be a very counter productive approach for me. If one's not actually uber-geek sysad level, it makes no difference. SystemD is here for the masses. <grabs hand sanitizer and keyboard wipes for having typed that>
Snap, on the other hand can FRO. So, it's Debian I recommend - although I appreciate the Minty taste others enjoy.
I have been helping my remaining aged parent (now 87) with their computing needs for the past 25 years or which the last 10 years or so has been Linux (LinuxMInt XFCE).
Their needs are relatively limited but the amount of support they need is also relatively limited.
Much less than my other parent, a former Computer Studies teacher and Windows user needed, even before dementia set in.
Besides the usual security crap – 41 zero-day CVEs so far in 2025 at the time of writing – there have been new features such as Microsoft Recall, a privacy disaster disguised as a feature. Then there's the way Microsoft is forcing AI functions down our throats.
I run Linux Mint on three desktops and three laptops at the moment. Each one has required about 2GB worth of updates this month alone. My current issue is finding a replacement for Firefox without the spectacularly enshittifying amount of AI which Mozilla think justifies their CEO's salary.
Snap? Fuck right off with that. The whole security philosophy of Linux has been to make use of libraries so that when an issue is discovered, every piece of software using that function is effectively updated in one fell swoop. Use Snap and every single package has its own version of every library and whether these get updated depend on the competence, whim and continued existence of the developers. Storage is cheap; having umpteen potentially insecure versions of libraries is potentially very, very expensive indeed.
A quick look at Waterfox suggests the Linux install is a tarball. Not ideal.
However I can't see LibreWolf drinking the AI KoolAid either and you can add it's repository and install it and get updates along with everything else in the apt world. It's a little more security conscious then FF and out of the box it has a few quirks to stop fingerprinting.
I wondered where you were getting the "suggests tarball" install idea, so I checked. Very strange that their main download page only mentions tarball for Linux. It's defo available as DEB, Flatpack, RPM etc
Edit: I'm getting hacked off with Midori, as it wants to manage its own updates (no 'off' switch in config) - apt is my ecosystem, not individual apps deciding when >:| So that trial will end soon.
I support two friends who run Linux. One, a grandmother and Italian-language teacher, bought a Dell Mini-9 with Ubuntu pre-installed. Her previous computer had been running MS-Windows.
The other, a graphic artist, spends his days running Adobe CS under MS-Windows on his employer-provided computer. His at-home laptop had a version of MS-Windows which went out-of-support, so after carefully interviewing him about what he needs/wants his laptop to do for him, I backed up his files, wiped the disc, installed Devuan, and restored his data.
Neither one is a techie by any means, yet they can figure most of the Windows/Linux differences out for themselves. They don't become confused or upset that the icons look different, or have different names, or that the right-click menus under Linux are different, or have differently-named options than under MS-Windows.
The few questions they ask me apply to any operating system.
WTF is so seemingly-wrong with other people that the superficial desktop-interface differences are A Really Big Deal™?
My fourth-generation i7-based desktop started life as a Hackintosh. When that became too bothersome, particularly with the games I wanted to play, I switched it to Devuan with Cinnamon and have been happy there for years and it hibernates perfectly almost every time.
My laptop, which came with Windoze 11, has LMDE (also using Cinnamon) on a second SSD for daily driver use. I wish it could sleep and hibernate better (it panics too easily after waking from one of those), but it's still great for my use.
I keep thinking of switching to MATE or KDE, but every time I try them, they aren't *better* than Cinnamon. Xfce is the fallback in case of trouble with Cinnamon.
Windows has not succeeded on technical merits, and it will not be defeated on technical merits. Windows succeeded because Microsoft pulled out the stops on getting it onto mainstream personal computers, collaborating (some might say colluding) with major PC manufacturers and, of course, Intel to ensure that Windows was ubiquitous. For Linux on the desktop, there's no one who has the market clout to implement a similar strategy, which means that Windows will remain the default PC operating system for the foreseeable future.
Addressing the point about the enshittification of Windows, etc., very few people actually care, from my observation. Although Windows 11 certainly has more than its fair share of annoyances, it continues to be sufficiently functional for home and business users, and it has desirable features and capabilities that Linux lacks, such as OneDrive, Active Directory support, and the ability to run familiar software. It's mainly the furry-toothed geek community, who are a tiny minority of the population, who find Windows 11's behavior problematic enough to go through the hassle of installing a new OS.
For my part, I continue to use Windows as my primary desktop OS because I can turn off the bits I don't like and because Linux has enough of its own foibles that it's not better enough to be worth the pain of migrating.
Sorry, nerds, it's not that your baby is ugly, it's just not as pretty as you think.
"The rest is an outdated screed."
Incorrect. I currently have Linux Mint as a dual-boot option on both my primary PC and my laptop. It also runs my media server. I have administered Linux servers for decades and gave it a decent shake as a desktop OS, but, for my particular use cases, I don't find it sufficiently compelling to go through the hassle of switching.
Microsoft has clearly been in cahoots with Intel for years, each telling your you PC is ‘old’ and somehow slowed down (because Windows patches were written to do that over time) to get you to buy a new one, which feeds both their profits. It’s obvious even if I can’t prove it.
"Unix died because of endless incompatibilities between versions."
Unix lived because of the different versions portability to different H/W. I wouldn't expect to be running Solaris on HP Prism or VAX. I wouldn't expect to be able to run HP-UX on Sequent, etc. but because it was all Unix it was easy to move from a gig on one platform to a gig on another. This adapability mattered less as Intel/AMD H/W trounced most of the other stuff. The feature of different versions became less of an advatage.
Unix's problem was that regulatory issues required that it be transferred away from AT&T and ended up in the hands of SCO. SCO in turn ended up in entirely the wrong hands and Microsoft egged them on to fight IBM in the courts over Linux, distracting them while Microsoft took over the server market with an arguably inferior product.
Yes. Cheap PC hardware pushed pretty much all the 90's Unix vendor's hardware into the too-expensive-to-bother category, and practically none of the Unix vendors were very interested in x86 for their software. Sun somewhat tried with Solaris-x86, though early support for it was dodgy IME. No sign of HP-UX or IRIX et al on x86.
So by the mid-90's or so, you had expensive proprietary Unix hardware and expensive (non-free, at least) proprietary Unix OS, trying to compete with cheap commodity PC hardware and free Linux OS.
Not very surprising people (and Corporate Finance and Purchasing departments) went the way they did.
> Microsoft... with an arguably inferior product.
Indeed. But marketing and business shenanigans often win out over technical superiority. Unfortunately.
"No sign of HP-UX or IRIX et al on x86"
You're forgetting UNIXWare (the direct descendant of AT&T's SVR4, rebranded "...ware" by Novell after they bought UNIX System Labs from AT&T). I used UNIXWare 1 and then 2 for several years in the 1990's on a Dell 486 and then a custom-built Pentium Pro system. It was free for non-commercial use.
I wasn't, actually. I had to help once with an old UNIXWare PC on a job which was primarily FreeBSD and Linux. It seemed to be a fine Unix as far as I recall.
But, no offense to UNIXWare or anyone who made good use of it, I don't imagine it made much of an impact in the PC market the way Linux did. And I don't think it had the kind of adoption or following before that which the 90's era Unix vendors did.
Kind of unfortunate, really. It might have been interesting times for a while had Novell (and SCO) made a successful go of it with UNIXWare (and its descendants) instead of doing ... other things.
> That's the problem that Linux solved.
Perhaps for a while, yes.
Maybe libs and apis have converged, though as a sysadmin rather than developer I can't speak to whether they've stayed that way. And other things have not been solved that way. Different startup (init and sysV/systemd/openRC et al) mechanisms, different package formats and tools, etc.
Yes and no.
Posix did provide core services APIs. But the Unix implementations varied enough to make source level compatibility problematic.
Posix compliance wasn't overnight - parts showed up at different times.
There were still quirks of usage between OSes.
OS specific services offered more functionality and better performance in some cases.
(1) Future Tense
Read the last paragraph:
"I still hope that the Linux desktop will be successful. Indeed, I think it may yet win by default. As Microsoft moves ever closer to a cloud-based computer approach, Linux may be the last "true" desktop standing. It won't be as much of a win as we first dreamed of when we came up with the "Year of the Linux desktop" tagline, but it will still be a win."
Sort of mostly FUTURE TENSE! I was reading this sort of stuff in 1999 when Windows 98 drove me away from Windows for good!
(2) Least Bad
I'm sick and tired of descriptions of "THE BEST SOLUTION". What I need (and what most people need) is THE LEAST BAD solution for what they need. In my case this is: Fedora 43/XFCE and LibreOffice and Chromium and gcc/gmp and Glade and Python3 and Harbour. Is this least bad set "the best"? No idea!!!! Is it free of minor irritations?? No!!! Does it do what I need almost all the time? Yes it does! End of!!!!
We need to stop with all this replacement software in GNU/Linux and just settle into stability. Wayland isn't ready, and will never be ready. X11 has been here forever and all we need is just some acceptance to say enough is enough, use what is here, and stop messing around with fadware and trendware. We don't need X11 replaced.
Desktop: Mate or Xfce
Graphics: X11
Audio: Pipewire or PulseAudio
Input: Libinput
Networking: NetworkManager
Sessions: sddm
What is so hard to just follow a simple roadmap for making a cohesive system for FreeBSD or GNU/Linux we can drop Firefox, Chrome, Steam, Gimp, Libreoffice, OBS, Mplayer, etc. software onto and finally have a Year Of The UNIX Desktop?
What is so hard is we have to many wishy washy developers who think stability isn't good enough and too many puppets who like to go along with anything and everything because a trend or fad is cooler than something founded.
Enough is enough. Stabilize the UNIX userland finally...
Otherwise, people are going to going back to Windows time and time again. Nobody wants broken software, half working software, or software that is just never going to last and be replaced every year.
The YOTUD is said to be every year, then it gets pushed back another year, and then never the next year.
You want to beat Microsoft, then follow a formula, and stop being wishy-washy.
Are you suggesting I should get pushed into your selection of Mate or Xfce for the desktop? That's not why I use Linux.
Having the choice is far, far more important that having Linux or some other Unix variant take over the world. Having Linux take over the world on those terms would be little better than having Windows everywhere. The whole point of having a modular, layered approach to system design is to enable the user to select their choice.
Having the choice is far, far more important that having Linux or some other Unix variant take over the world.
See also: left wing political parties and the history of the presbyterian church(es) in Scotland. The quest for ideological purity never leads to widespread success. That may be a good thing.
Choice is great for power users but standardisation is generally better for novices. Choice is all well and good until you have to support someone else and their choices over the phone when they have no idea what’s wrong or what they’re doing, you don’t know what they have chosen or are looking at, and neither of you can explain effectively to the other.
People keep pointing out that installing Linux is easier than it's ever been, so users won't have any problem installing it.
They're right that it's easier than installing Windows 95/98/2000/XP or OS/2 was, back in the day. They're wrong that it means users won't have a problem with it.
The problem isn't how difficult Linux installations are, it's that it requires installation at all.
The modal Windows user today didn't install Windows, it came pre-installed on his machine. Oh, he configured it when it first booted up, certainly. He gave his name, his location, his (now mandatory) Outlook account, and the like, but he didn't partition and format the hard disk/SSD, he doesn't know how much memory he has, and he certainly didn't look at, let alone set, jumper settings on the motherboard like "the good old days".
Linux in 2025 is unquestionably easier to install than Windows XP was in 2001. But it's not 2001 any more. Comparing ease of installation from media isn't the point, we're comparing installing Linux from media against pre-installed machines.
Sure, there's System76 and Tuxedo, but if Linux is really going to compete on the desktop, it's going to need vendors who offer PCs with Linux preinstalled, and with support.
Microsoft is continually shooting itself in the foot and driving many users away, but even the thought of installing an operating system from scratch nowadays is intimidating to many people. Sure, many will give it a shot, and many of them are surprised at how easy it was. But many more have no more interest in installing a computer operating system than they have of doing their own oil change on their car.
Finally.
What we need is Acer, or Dell, or Lenovo (or better, all three) offering a budget range, all with the same distro preinstalled and a bunch of popular apps.
What that distro would be, I have no idea (I have my own preferences but that's not important to my point). But I guess that's part of the problem. Until a single distro is targetted by multiple big PC vendors as being suitable for preinstalling and marketing, this whole discussion is moot (or possibly moo if you're a Friends fan).
Entirely true. And this brings us to...
Everyone is asking how we get Linux to be on everyone's desktop, but not everyone is asking whether this is the correct goal, or even a feasible one.
Cue Jeff Goldblum: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
And someone somewhere in this discussion said (I'm probably paraphrasing) "the market generally has room for 2 of anything". As in, Windows / macOS, Android / iOS, Labour / Conservative, Democrat / Republican, etc etc. Third options always struggle.
Me, I love Linux. I have 5 computers and 4 of them are running it. But I appreciate it's an acquired taste that may not fit every use case, much like my good self.
I agree 100%.
Back in the 1990s, OS/2 was a better OS than Windows 3.x and 9x, in terms of technical merit. But it didn't matter, because it was starved for applications and hardware driver support. And back then, Linux was great for servers, but immature on desktops. I still remember dealing with /dev/audio trying to get speakers to work late into the night, never mind non-SCSI tape systems.
Today, it's a different world. Linux may not have the market share of Windows, but unlike 20 years ago, it's easy (in many cases almost trivial) to install, it uses less resources than Windows, and while driver support lags behind Windows, it's still excellent. And most importantly, the catalogue of applications available has no real coverage gaps, not to mention that unlike 20 years ago, many applications are web-based services now.
In many ways, I liked using OS/2 more than Windows, but I couldn't use it for everything because of gaps in application software. That's not the case with Linux. There are only three things I could do in Windows that I can't do in Linux, and two of them run in Wine (the third is a hardware GPS that doesn't work under Wine or in a VM).
So what, exactly, does Linux need to do to "challenge" Windows? And why should it? Linux advocates point out that the user base size has risen from 3% to 5%, but what difference does it make? If it hits 10%, or 14%, or even 40%, nothing will change for the end user.
I'm glad it exists, I like people to know about it, especially the people who have been abandoned by Windows 10 and can't afford a new machine simply to run Windows 11, but it's not a crusade to replace every Windows or Mac desktop out there.
Back in the 1990s, OS/2 was a better OS than Windows 3.x and 9x, in terms of technical merit. But it didn't matter, because it was starved for applications and hardware driver support.
I finally jumped ship from OS/2 (by then eComStation) in 2006 because when I tried Ubuntu 6.06 it had no problem with either by graphics card (for which I had had to buy an OS/2 driver) or my audio chipset (which had never worked under OS/2).
The other piece of the puzzle for Corporations is solid, reliable, centralized management. Too many regulations/compliance frameworks require that a machine be locked down, updated, and centrally managed. Large organizations will not consider it until a single, solid, reliable, auditable and AD-integrated tool exists to manage a large deployment of Linux desktops.
Along with the centralized management and integrated mdm platforms, now provide the external auditing companies who understand them and will sign off audits on Linux desktops that you need to provide to regulators and clients.
I’ve worked at multiple companies in highly regulated industries and we had external audits every year. Some were commissioned by us, others by our clients. Where our security team accepted that I could run Linux as my primary OS, the week of audit I would be asked to work from home because it caused too many headaches with auditors when my machine showed up in the network.
Auditors I have had dealings with, barely understand Windows and Mac based desktop systems. Trying to get them to sign off Linux desktops is extra pain nobody needs or wants when audit time comes around.
"Too many Linux DEs is bad" Yawn. I don't believe it.
Linux on the desktop has failed in places where it should have succeeded: Large institutions like regional and local governments, healthcare providers, and educational institutions. Linux seems like it would be the most logical choice hands down for these types of organizations, yet it has failed massively to be adopted here. People have to study why this is the case, who is responsible for policy decisions at the highest levels and why Microsoft is predominantly chosen for these organizations.
My hair is fully gray, and I do recall my introduction to shell on the Vax, and Unix on Sun SpacStations, and I do hold out the best hopes to see the "Linux Desktop" becoming more prevalent on all computers, but history teaches us that the developers always find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 2007/8 were particularly painful as both the major desktops abandoned well developed code-bases and well liked desktop environments to follow the lead of the new group of "kids with crayons" chasing desktop "widgets" and "effects" that added nothing to the ability to use a computer, but which "threw the baby out with the bathwater" and set the Linux Desktop back at decade or more.
KDE 4.0.4a (alpha) was pushed by openSUSE 11.0 as the default desktop and blackscreened continually for years. The desktop was a hodge-podge of apps that had been ported to KDE4 and those that languished well into Plasma before finally being ported (and broken, and taking years before, e.g. konqueror --profile filemanagement could open up looking the same way it did when it was shut down). Gnome fared no better with gtk+3 breaking backwards compatibility with every new point-release for a decade or more. Icon and widget factories, etc.
This effectively relegated the Linux Desktop to hobbyists, of which I've always been one. If it takes hours to collect information, author bug reports, and then spend weeks if not months of back and forth, that part of giving back to the community which we gladly do. That is also the complete deal-killer for the Linux Desktop in a business setting. There is no way any company can retrain workers on a monthly basis to deal with issues created by fights between toolkit makers or sloppy porting of apps from one toolkit to the next.
Which brings us to the present, after a long road to finally get Plasma frameworks and gtk4 settled. And what to the good stewards of the Linux Desktop do to ensure another decade of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory? Oh, they decide to tear down X11 and follow the kids with crayons pushing wayland. They make it tribal, not based on merit or features or stability or any other metric you would look at in choosing how your computer works. That will certainly give business the warm fuzzy it needs that things have stabilized to the point of the Linux Desktop being a reliable alternative.
We may as well just go build out a bizillion data centers and burn the planet down... Why we can't learn from history is bewildering and frustrating. But I'm a hobbyist, my Linux Desktop will work fine, but I'm not sure I have another decade to give. At some point sanity must prevail.
As for Desk Tops, Windows 7 seems to be, to me, something they basically got right. Just because it is 'old' should not automatically make it obsolete. There are times when something 'old' is hard to actually improved on. The basic form and function of Windows 7 worked very well back in the day, something Microsoft has long forgotten. Shifting stuff around in the panel is an improvement? How are ads when you click on something you payed for, an improvement?
Change for change sake so they can say "NEW and Improved" too often is so they can charge more. it is so easy to make changes be shifting things around to allow the maker to say "NEW and Improved" when there is little new and the code is not new, just shuffled around.
Now about those ads on an OS you have payed good money for. Or making your computer a paper weight if the Internet isn't available, because everything you need to do is in somebody else's cloud. Not only your data, but your programs too.
I went from Windows 7 to Linux Mint. Why Mint? Because the desktop is similar to 7. It works fine for me. User interfaces matter. One shouldn't have to treasure hunt with every update. You shouldn't have to reconfigure anything after an update either because your tweaks were reset to someone else's idea how things are done.
My Data and my programs are mine right on my computers, not being mined for fun and profit in someone else's computer, located who knows where, especially when you have to pay for the privilege.
Point of order Stephen, Windows 11 does run on 8th, 9th and 10th Gen Intel chips, it's 7th gen and older that are officially barred (though I've run it quite happily on chips from as far back as 2012), I suspect you're basing this opinion on the fact that OEMS can no longer ship Intel PCs with 8/9/10th gen ships which given their age was pretty unlikely to happen anyway. FTR, I remember all those old UNIX desktop GUIs as well :-)
Few distros required with fewer bewildering options, and some of the persistent issues fixed once and for all. There’s too much variety and that makes it unappealing to the non-tech, while will need a personal techntommanage their desktop for them. And, dare I say it, it just isn’t consumer friendly. I’ll get hammered for that but we are all tech people who thrive in the challenges in tech, it’s why we do the job. Punters don’t want that, they just want things to work, and Linux desktop just isn’t friendly enough for them.
Just ran Windows update on my dual boot daily driver.
GRUB is gone and I am forced to reinstall Linux as nothing I have tried to fix the problem has worked. (...and it also killed the sleep function on the Windows system).
Luckily I run Windows in VirtualBox on my LT, so the update didn't trash anything.
Warning to the wise - keep your data on a separate partition or NAS (luckily I listened to myself for a change).
Not sure of your levels, so don't want to second guess "...nothing I have tried...", but booting from a Live Linux distro couldn't reinstall Grub?
I haven't checked it fully, but this seems about right: Windows Update Wrecked Your Dual Boot? - check other write-ups before proceeding, might match your case better. Apols if I'm in teaching-to-suck-eggs territory - might help others tho.
Simple User Experience (S·UX)
From my long experience of dealing with "simple" users the reality is that the vast majority want a static, consistent inferface—pretty much desktop icons for their email thingy, wordprocessor and spreadsheet etc thingies, browser thingy — in most cases you would be (un)lucky to get beyond six applications.
A popup menu for any other applications. Folder icons on desktop seem to be essential too.
Her indoors is definitely in this class. Currently Win 10 esu + Open Shell + Firefox + Betterbird + LibreOffice. Once Win10 finally goes Norwegian Blue, she won't notice the "upgrade" to Linux or FreeBSD environment — although an AI stripped version of Firefox would be on the cards.
Ultimately if most PCs were shipped with a zero cost standard basic Linux SUX environment with the option of a network install of Windows ($0-$Lots) I imagine the polloi in their multitude would stick with SUX. Sometimes the unchanging and boring is desirable — when was the last time you actually had to search for the controls of an electric pop-up toaster ? (Without the ultimate folly of invoking and asking Talkie.)
11% is OK but what I want to know is this, does that in include Windows Enterprise? Given that Linux desktop in the office isn't wide spread as yet - Yes some councils in the eu are moving over but thats still not a big number - if you remove Windows enterprise from the numbers to make things even what do the new numbers look like?
Man, talk about a conversation that has completely run away. :D
The real truth of why Linux hasn't taken off for the masses is that there is nothing to own for the companies that would be selling it with PCs. No deals to cut, no opportunities for ad revenue, no opportunities for lock in, no opportunities for control. Heck, they could each just spin their own distro even but there is little opportunity there as well.
Pair all of that with a community that can't even agree on most basic ideas and you have what we have.
Even in the corporate world it doesn't work. Large companies don't want to risk having someone else take accountability if they have a problem (or do something wrong). It doesn't matter that these things are really illusions. They are illusions that give them comfort.
I've switched the majority of my stuff off Windows and I'm not looking back but I get it. People aren't going to do things that require them to think. Just read the comments here.
Governments all around Europe really ought to switch to Linux wherever feasible. Even if the migration is only possible for, say, a quarter of systems and computers, it would really put the fear of God into Microsoft. Probably the annual license costs would dip to a fraction of the current ones.
Of course, I don't know just how much the US government keeps twisting the arms of European governments behind the scenes to keep them buying American when it comes to IT. It's not like they didn't do that even before 2025, though the power used was mostly of the "soft" variety.
I could very well be wrong but the US Government is not known to twist anyone's arm to buy open market items unless they stand to gain something bigger. These large companies are able to twist arms (code for offer ridiculous deals to sweeten the pot) for all governments because it means sales. They are able to do this because all governments are corrupt (all people are corrupt but that's a different conversation) and people in those governments will put personal gain ahead of public gain/benefit. Honestly, this is People 101. Everything is for sale, especially our sense of right/wrong and choice.
I do agree that they should switch to Linux wherever feasible but see People 101.
We don't want to be repeating the mistakes of the past. These universal package managers recreate the same mistakes as Windows and macOS, and due to Linux having worse resource management under high pressure in a desktop scenario, actually makes modern distros perform worse than the competition.
What we need is for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE and ArchLinux software engineers to sit together and chart out a roadmap for:
* A comprehensive LSB which includes support for properly versioned runtimes for key libraries/daemons/utilities
* System-wide packaging format which is a successor to DEBs and RPMs, with support for deltas and per-user installations
* A replacement for akmods and DKMS which satisfies modern user expectations for driver and individual kernel module installations
* Standardised, reproducible builds with digitally signed *binaries* (not the packages, the binaries themselves) which every distro can use
* Standardised documentation which applies to everything being shipped as a coherent whole (so that distros don't need to reinvent the wheel)
* Actually complete reference policies for SELinux and AppArmor so that systems can all ship secure-by-default (not just Fedora/RHEL)
It wouldn't take much to clean things up. Of course, this alone wouldn't make Linux mainstream, there's still basic things like half-broken WebRTC, poor dGPU support and audio issues to fix as well.
I do believe the (unreliable) stats say that Linux use keeps increasing quite rapidly, from the old 1%, to 2%, the more recent 3%... I think it could even reach ~10% market share in the next few years, as the rising hardware prices make it worth the effort to keep old computers for longer than before.
Why should a computer built today from standard components last for a shorter time than a new car purchased today? The PC doesn't require much maintenance beyond dusting, any faulty components are much cheaper to diagnose and replace, and it doesn't even rust (in most cases).
What I am saying is, already in 2026 there might be significantly more new-ish Linux users (as in, less than 3 years experience) than veteran Linux users (more than 3 years experience). The effect of this could be to make (some of) the popular distros relatively more popular - the rich get richer, as it were. Although the other side of the coin is that if some currently popular, frequently recommended distro gets a reputation as unreliable, unreasonably hard to use and configure, or has a public leadership meltdown, it might fall down the relative rankings surprisingly quickly.
Please stop worrying about the Linux Desktop (and the year of it). Nowadays the Desktop is OK (whichever one you choose, with few exceptions).
The key here is that Windows comes preinstalled. When Linux came/comes preinstalled like in Chrome OS or Android, people used/use it. Of course, there are people who are held hostage by some applications, but most do not have those restrictions.
The problems to solve are: 0- Establish Linux as a "brand", a good one. 1- Convince big OEMs to sell Linux machines, 2- Convince companies/governments to use Linux machines. The last one is the most difficult because Microsoft is very aggressive on that regard.
For any given value of “year”.
The fact is that almost nobody apart from a few tech heads care what operating system their computer uses. They just want to use their applications, and have compatibility with their phone and/or tablet.
I use a stable Unix-based desktop - MacOS and have for more than 20 years. Others use Windows. I don’t mind what they choose.
I also use cloud storage extensively. It is incredibly powerful to be able to create a document on my desktop computer, then continue to edit it while I am travelling and nowhere near the desktop. And I need it to “just work”.
I've been a Windows user since Win95 and every so often I dial boot with whichever Linux distro I feel might be the best replacement. I like to tinker, I can use a CMD or terminal, I've built my own PCs, and I have installed custom roms on many of my Android phones. So, I am far from the average user I guess.
Currently I have dual booted my pc with Zorin 18, the third version of this I have tried out. Dual voting is a lot easier these days and I do like the desktop and it's customisability. Why won't I shift to Linux completely?
MS Office is far superior to the Linux compatible packages,.and I have invested years in getting to understand and use the whole package well. Running office in a VM or other ways around isn't easy and convenient when I can simply boot up Windows. It is also another learning curve.
I use Lightroom daily, and again, it is so much more user friendly and capable than what is available through Linux.
I have not had any security issues with Windows 8/10/11, as I do have a reasonable level of protection, don't click/download dodgy stuff and am no longer illegally for torrential music and films. There remains a risk without a doubt, but lots of that risk is OS neutral - most scams are about fooling people into giving access to accounts,.data, addresses, etc. I also haven't had to pay for Windows separately in a long time.
I also still find the help available via forums and so on really geek oriented. Everything is about opening terminal,.sudo, etc etc. Whilst I have to some degree got my head around small amounts of this, it is simply too time consuming to bother with.
Which is why I think the main flaw of Linux is that it is designed and produced by people who love to tinker, to code, to learn how to get under the hood of an OS and play around, but most people use computers like they use the dishwasher: put stuff in and hope it comes out clean. The reason Android is so successful is that it also does this. Turn on your phone, enter very simple info and within minutes there is a very user friendly,.easy to navigate OS that lets you watch streaming services, use social media, send texts/WhatsApp, see the news, weather, sports, etc etc etc without.needo g to know anything about how it works (or even understand what an OS is). Linux has moved more towards this, but it is still not there, and that may well be because of the ridiculous duplication and geeky battles over what is used the hood. If it remains like this it will never take a large.sajre of the consumer OS market until MS decide to move to a Linux based OS.
A different perspective is that too many features still require using the shell to be a realistic Windows (or MacOS) alternative.
Ubuntu for example looks great and increasingly wraps functionality into GUI panels, but there remains an unacceptably high amount of functionality exclusively via terminal / shell. Want to set up hibernation for your Dell laptop, sorry that feature hasn't been integrated into the settings panel yet (may have been since, it wasn't in the '24 releases). Fine I can go fix it in Terminal but my fairly tech savvy mom can't, and neither can the majority of users with basic tech literacy.
I have long left the Windows ecosystem but have to grudgingly admit they have the advantage that a home user can do almost everything they would ever need to without having to drop to a shell (or even knowing it exist).
Want to set up hibernation for your Dell laptop
Hah. My other half has a Dell laptop on which I installed Linux Mint. Even when told not to suspend or hibernate it still does so if the screen is closed, and so completely that it can only be brought back to life by a hard reset. Very impressive.
Not wanting to start a flame War but , you can trace the roots of this problem back to the fact that Richard stallman started the gnu Linux free open source software movement . Well him and a bunch of others and you know what that did? Other than destroying complete segments of programmers jobs , it removed a whole bunch of third and fourth tier competing operating systems that existed back in the '80s and earlier because they could not compete with free . And the remaining two, apple and microsoft, well there's no way they're going to put their applications anywhere near a free operating system . You know what else happens when you have a free operating system ? You don't have any customers that are willing to pay money to support a graphical desktop and it's far too easy just to Fork something because you don't agree with their choice of colors or fonts and try to make one that you think is special but you don't have any paying customers which means you don't have anyone going out to find out what customers want you don't have any kind of business plan and stuff that actually gets product into hands . That's why it will never happen . Did you know that a lot of companies design their own operating systems back in the 70s and '80s? Heck even in the 90s to some extent . Yeah we had whole groups working on customized operating systems for specific purposes and all that went away once this free thing came along and businesses of course love free . So while I would love to see a good Linux desktop environment , I haven't found one and I continue to use just a command line server version which is the only penetration it really has , because it's free .
-lee
THe Desktop Linux Problem is the fragmentation of libraries for GUI development. Without an OS set of widgets, and standard APIs that ensure long-term compatibiliy - like Windows - Linux can't become a real GUI option. Not surprisingly, just like Android, many Linux GUI application choose Java to shield themselves from the underlying GUI chaos.
The anarchoid feeling that underpins Linuxtards believes chaos is freedom. Many engineering sectors adopted standards because freedom just becomes chaos. You want a stantard for screw and bolts. And so on.
But again companies like Google prefer to push what suits only their business, Google business is hoarding data and sell ads, hence Chromebooks. A good working desktop systems that doesn't hoard data is no use for them. And this is another issue of open source, when the users don't pay, those who pay decides where to go.
As the saying goes, "Opinions are like @$$h0l3s - everybody has one and they all stink."
So here's mine: most opinions are based on ignorance, and in this article SJVN proves that point. [*]
Claim: "... GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE, and on and on. They're all too likely to be as forgotten as the first three Unix interfaces I named. Why? The same reasons you don't know a thing about the Unix desktops."
No. They'll be forgotten BECAUSE THAT IS THE WHOLE BLOODY POINT! The purpose of a desktop is to facilitate user interaction and stay out of the way while doing so. A successful desktop makes you forget it's there. You pick the one you like and then you get on with your work without the desktop asserting itself or annoying the user by flouting its own corporate identity. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Windows.)
The reason why Unix desktops are being forgotten, on the other hand, is that they deserved it. They were, by and large, ugly, primitive and clunky, usually having been added as an afterthought with far too little development and GUI design having gone into them. Even in the mid-1990s most of them looked worse than DR GEM did ten years earlier.
Claim: "Unix died because of endless incompatibilities between versions."
No. Unix died because it was proprietary, because of astronomic license fees and because of ridiculous EULAs, whereas Linux did the same job for a fraction of the cost (or no cost at all to speak of) and didn't try to browbeat the user with an army of corporate lawyers. Unix was a proprietary OS for proprietary hardware that came with proprietary pricing. I've worked with various unixen on ancient NCR mini's, Sun Sparc, IBM RS/6000, a bunch of VME-bus development systems and an industrial controller or two, but it was always unix. The biggest annoyance was that BSD-derivatives had different command line switches than SVR4 offshoots for certain commands (eg. 'ps -ef' vs 'ps -aux') and shell scripts based on whatever shell they ran in, but that was it. What was universal was the cost of it and the proprietary hardware-bound nature of the beast. Linux solved all that because it didn't live in the white-knuckled grip of a proprietary hardware vendor.
Claim: "With the desktop, though, we saw, and still see, endless incompatibilities."
No. The real problem is still (and always has been) applications. If you need to run a major industry-standard application suite (take your pick) your chances are it will only be available for Windows, and if you're lucky for MacOS, but not for Linux. And even for simpler, standard office work the problem is still the same. I have always hated MS Word since it pushed the straightforward, sensibly designed Word Perfect for DOS out of the market, but I have to be honest here: I struggle even more with LibreOffice write at times. And I know I'm not the only one.
Claim: "Mint's leaders don't like Snap because its parent company, Canonical, has too much control over the Snap store..."
This one is actually partially true, but the real issue with Snap (and the reason why its absence on Mint is considered a Good Thing) is that Snap sucks harder than a black hole. It's unwieldy, it brutally forces sandboxing upon the user to a point where a Snap application can't access the files it's supposed to work with, it kills performance, it gobbles resources and is a huge PITA. Yes, on servers there are cases where its advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but not on the average desktop. On the other end of the spectrum, AppImage apps typically have to be installed and maintained by hand, which is a no-no for the average user.
Claim: "As Microsoft moves ever closer to a cloud-based computer approach, Linux may be the last "true" desktop standing."
No. Even if true, what will it matter to the average computer user? People want a computer that simply enables them to do their work without getting in the way of doing so, and what goes on under the bonnet (local desktop or cloud based or whatever) is not something they could care less about. It's only when things go wrong (e.g. cloud services being unavailable) that they even become aware of the distinction.
What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows starts and ends with the availability of mainstream applications. As long as I keep running into the brick wall that is the unavailability of certain applications on Linux (thus forcing me to run them on Windows) we'll never see the year when Linux took the desktop market away from Windows.
[*] Disclaimer: see the first line of this comment...
It's MS destroying windows is the only thing. Then the companies that produce windows only business software doing Linux versions. Linux devs & promoters can't do anything, In reality Linux has been fine to replace Windows for 10 to 15 years. The issue is companies that develop Windows only programs for businesses, not anything about Linux, which has been better than Vista, Win 7, Win8, win 10 or 11, maybe since Vista.
A bit like Scottish Independence. That depends more on Westminster really annoying people in Scotland, not anything any politician in Scotland can do.
The calls for less choice in OpenSource solution is kind of besides the point. OpenSource software is built by enthusiast and talented people who were *not* happy with existing solutions. A famous example is mr. Linux Torvalds, he made Linux, which acquired a large fan base. He did this in spite of the fact there were already BSD variants for x86 around at the time. The joy of OpenSource is that people have a choice and have the opportunity to escape the jails built by commercial companies. Using Linux for private use may have its drawbacks, but essentials like YouTube, word processing and gaming using the Steam engine work good enough. Assisted by Palentir, the NSA is currently building a worldwide data dragnet, Linux is for now the only escape from the prying eyes of Big-Brother and silent data transfer from US Tech companies to the US government. Those who want privacy and freedom should use Linux, with a tiny price to pay in terms of having to google now and then to solve issues. Hauwei developed Harmony OS, which is earmarked as the standard OS to be used in China. If successful, the world is currently experiencing peak windows anyway. In case Harmony OS succeeds, the year of the Linux desktop might never happen.
> To Torvalds, Chromebooks "are the path toward the desktop."
Just look at Android, he argued.
Linux won on smartphones because, while there are different Android front ends, under their interfaces, there's a single, unified platform with a unified way to install programs. He's right.
THIS
As someone who has been using Mac/Win/Linux for many decades, since Mandrake came free in CDs in magazines, Ubuntu and Mint have come a long way, but have their own issues.
From incompatible graphics, sound, to wifi chips, drivers are the bane of the platform.
Its far from universal.
Meanwhile, ChromeOS just works. Been using over 12y, never installed a driver, for anything, ever.
Can't even find or download any, from anyone. No need.
No antivirus.
Sandboxing.
Its funny how linux users are smug, thinking they are 'special' yet they bash any chromebook user.
Just like how vegetarians think they are high and mighty, even with vegans, flexitarians, pescatarians, etc.
your loss.
As someone who has been using Mac/Win/Linux for many decades, since Mandrake came free in CDs in magazines
Coo. That brings back memories. Mandrake was the first Linux I ever tried, and it did indeed come free with a magazine. I tried to add it to a computer which was already dual booting OS/2 and Windows (the happy days of chained bootloaders) and its installer scribbled so comprehensively over my MBR that I had to rebuild the entire system.
I posted to uk.comp.os.linux to ask for advice and was instantly told that I was clearly a lying Micro$oft shill, because there was no way Linus could possibly do what I had just seen it do. So it was a good introduction to the Linux community as well as to the OS.
I gave up on Linux then, returning to it some years later with Ubuntu 6.06. which played very nicely with my system, including sharing a JFS volume which was both D: and /home
Unix died because of endless incompatibilities between versions. Linux succeeded on servers and everywhere else because it provided a single open operating system that everyone could use.
That implies Linux succeeded on it's technical merits.
It didn't.
It was as fragmented as UNIX, especially in the early days. (I remember trying to ship a Linux version of some software I'd written about 15 years ago... I ended up just statically linking it to ensure the libraries would be available... I didn't really want to learn all the different package managers just to ship a Linux build). Things like snap and flatpack exist precisely because of this.
UNIX died because 'free' vs 'expensive and tied to expensive hardware' made a difference. If you wanted UNIX on x86 you paid SCO, or went with a BSD or Linux. You weren't running Solaris, or IRIX or True64 unless you were running their expensive hardware.
Also, in the 90s the open source UNIX derivative was marred in a copyright trial, which put lots of people off adopting it. At around the same time a skilled programmer knocked up a UNIX like kernel for the then Hurdless collection of GNU UNIX like utilities.
And the rest.... as Gambo would say... IS HISTORY!
Long time Windows user (the person you want to convert) - new Linux (Kubuntu) wanabe - currently using a dual boot machine
What is really wrong with Linux as a Desktop - the total failure to drop arcane CLI for a fully functioning GUI system
Trying to get a piece of hardware to work with endless variants of "chrubarb -x scribble -crp /something" - I mean grow up guys. I don't want widgets if you can solve this
And a much better and SIMPLER external support - No point winging that its a manufactures responsibility - if it does work I can't use it
Are there that many people fed up with Windows? I really don't think so...I am, but I don't think the rest of the world is.
In the business arena it's more about full compatibility, the server infrastructure, the default applications, in the domestic arena, apart from gamers, most people really don't care, and I'd suggest many are moving away from a PC/Desktop/laptop, so the OS isn't a consideration, their using tablets and phones.
When I first started using Ubuntu I had a dual boot on my HP desktop computer. With the help of Ubuntu forums, internet searches & OMG Ubuntu newsletter I became good enough at operating a Ubuntu computer. When that computer needed to be replaced I installed Ubuntu 16.04 and deleted the windows OS on the new one. I do not regret leaving Windows off my computer.When that computer needed to replaced I looked for a mini computer with Ubuntu 22.04 installed. I found that Cybergeek mini made one. It was a good price of $200 on Amazon. It has 2 HMDI ports & several usb ports. I had to get a USB sound card for $7 from amazon for better sound instead of using headphones. I also bought an external cd/dvd for $30 dollars which easily works with Ubuntu. So I would recommend looking at Cybergeek mini's as a replacement for a window computer.
Cloud computing is a boon to Linux adoption. The more that Windows users' applications are in the cloud, the less friction there is to migration to other OS's. This is the reason for Chromebook's relative success.
Aside from that, there is the fact that distros fall apart as soon as your hardware deviates from the extremely mundane. Just try adding a different-sized display to your Linux Mint distro. You are immediately faced with the frustration that Mint won't independently scale. Other DE's give you graphical glitches the likes of which Windows users haven't seen since the 1990's. That includes standards like Fedora and Ubuntu. The only possible exception I've found is KDE neon.
Windows being the dominant OS means both that MS becomes more aware of obscure problems, and also developers build in workarounds so their products will work within Windows' idiosyncrasies. The result--Windows users expect and usually experience their systems working no matter how they configure it. When they attempt a switch on their desktop from Windows to Linux, what they find is often a broken desktop not worth the trouble.
The problem then is having to constantly find new fixes for your minority OS to appeal to majority OS users. It is a perpetual game of catch-up that you can never win, and that the majority OS never has to worry about.
Linux should be forging its own way ahead, while pushing for open hardware and software standards in all things. Standards (like web apps) will increasingly make the Linux price point worth it. And more and more Windows users will find unnecessarily closed features (like BitLocker) a gratuitous hassle and deterrent to Windows installation.
I see many nice comments, but a majority is to find the holes in the cheese instead go for the cheese.
We do all have to take and give if we want a linux system for more than personal/semi personal use.
I think one thing is missing: fleet management. Is people is going to be switched to linux the must be offered a similat system to M$ managed system. Many do not care about OS but only care for a stable, well suited, managed system for office, school etc use. If it must be opgen source
Mpst of this is today also driven by the state of the world and all the hacking we see.
And for reaching this we all need to give and take a little.
J
> Today, we should all be using Flatpaks, Snaps, and AppImages to install programs instead of worrying about library incompatibilities and the like.
We absolutely should not. I avoid Snaps like the absolute plague because every, single Snap install is broken in some manner. Have a non-standard "/home" layout due to reasons, no Snaps for you! Want to clearly see disc usage? No Snaps for you? Want to be sure a vulnerable library has been replace? No Snaps for you! And on and on and on. They are horrific, and I am going to assume the same horror extends into Flatpacks and AppImages.
Basic DEBs are the way to go.
> one big reason why Linux hasn't taken off is that there are no major PC OEMs strongly backing it.
Valve means nothing to you? They've probably done more than anyone in the last decade to drive GNU/Linux adoption.
I'm glad someone has stuck their neck out and said this. Trouble is, for the average home user, Linux is not a great migration route away from Microsoft. Yes, theoretically Libre Office can do what Word and Excel can, but I've tried, as an experienced user, and the Libre Office offering ain't great. And the more expert you are with MS products, the quicker it's going to be to get frustrated by LO for anything more than 2+2=4. Businesses can look at a wider picture, check they can do what they need to, hire experts, and spend time re-training users. Individual users are on their own.
Another point is that outside of WP/Spreadsheet/e-mail/browser, commercial program offerings also ain't great. e.g. last time I tried Zoom on Linux it was terrible, others similarly. Windows emulators/VMs are not for the new user and need more fiddling with then J Bloggs is willing to, and sometimes still don't work.
One possible reason: I'm beta testing a commercial app (Win/Apple/Android/iPhone) at present and asked the developer were they ever going to release a Linux version. No, simply put. A point they made was that Linux tends to inhabit the same world and is seen in the same light as free software, and the chance of a developer making money out of porting their programs to Linux is pretty small. So, if you happen to need an app that works in Linux, great. Otherwise it can be a desert.
But my current count of regularly-used apps that either there is no Linux version or there's an app but it's frankly awful, is about 25. Quite a hurdle.
I just need an OS to let me run my programs and then get out of the way, and unless someone works out how to make a Linux distro that does what I need without spending more time than I have fiddling with it, then I shall (unfortunately) put up with Windows.
There is a potential contender next year which is Steam OS. Runs a great set of Windows applications via Proton, simple desktop when in desktop mode, flatpack for applications and is winning hearts and minds. I'm sure pointy haired bosses will hate it as it comes from a games background. The challenge is getting it beyond being perceived as a game console.
For the general office use, is a traditional OS even needed for the majority of users? Given Office will run in a browser, corporate server/cloud storage, many corporate applications are now browser based, Web assembly can be used for heavier weight applications. At that stage applications become web agnostic and the preference is a simple easy to manage OS that has a minimal footprint. For the heaver users you can then focus on an appropriate OS, e.g. MacOS for graphic design teams, Linux for system/database admin.
Of course it does mean the millions of windows admins, helpdesk people etc all shifting to a new OS and huge projects costing millions to switch corporations.
I have been running a Linux distro called bodhi purely because it’s one I found would work on my old i3 laptop.
However because media playbac is poor, I’ve now parked this laptop and started using another Windows 11 laptop for the tasks previously done on Linux.
My main laptop is an Apple Mac which has its own list of Apple imposed limitations
I love Unix and Linux (as a dev).... I eat my own dog food as do many here. We (Linux Users) are and always will be in the 0.1%.
If and when the 99.9% of other users get sick of Windows they will buy a MAC or use a web based app.
All this talk of the Linux desktop becoming a major player is crazy talk.
We can all dream nostalgic about how we got a PC in 1977 and ran CP/M on it but the same dynamic existed then as it does today.... only edge cases like us had the drive (no pun intended) to do geeky stuff.
Even if every Windows app anyone ever uses becomes web based/thin client (i.e. the OS is irrelevant), is Suse or Canonical etc going to invest the money to market Linux, somehow break the Wintel alliance or outspend Apple on marketing to get Linux in front of the general public...NO.
Of course the irony is IOS and Android are Unix/Linux but the 99.9% don't know that or care. They just buy a device, turn it on, go to the app store, install an app and move on. Nor do they know/care that Linux runs the backend of all the Cloud services they use (outside of Azure).
But I am happy with this because the lack of large commercial ownership/influence means Linux won't get hijacked.
Leave Linux for its rightful owners.. us geeks.
Bluck
Guess what? Consumers don't want to directly pay for things. Good luck on that footpath off the cliff with consumers. The desktop money is in corporate appliances that support the common document tools (this has been trying to go away for a while now), cloud storage and automated management systems via walled gardens for user app installation and ZTA endpoint control. Inconsistency and a plethora of tools that all do the same thing differently are the downfall, not the unifying force to bring Linux Desktop to mainstream.
Personally, I've abandoned RH because guess what? Consumer doesn't want to pay for a business product and the options such as Rocky are not doing so well for end users when support is needed which seems to be more often. So. I've migrated to Xubuntu. XFCE is a mostly usable consumer product, it needs some simple things fixed but is generally smooth sailing for a mostly static desktop. Sure, KDE is great, but it needs a KISS mode where the fancy stuff is hidden and the simple things that consumers do on desktops are the same level of ease as they are on MacOS or Windows. I will reserve my opinion on GNOME because name calling is the hallmark of small minded people, I'll keep my names for it tucked int the corner of my little mind.
"Besides the usual security crap – 41 zero-day CVEs so far in 2025 at the time of writing"
It doesn't help to keep parroting a false narrative that Linux doesn't have security issues. It's the 2025 CVE champion by quite some distance:
https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-vendors.php?year=2025
We’ve seen a few attempts by local government in parts of the EU to move away from windows desktops due to a combination of cost savings and information governance concerns. I suspect this will be somewhat accelerated as trust is continually eroded by the US government and Microsoft’s ai nonsense.
With licensing costs already increasing to cover the new ai functionality, that’s likely to get much worse as how else will M$ recoup all the cash sprayed at copilot?
This is where Linux on the desktop should be focussed, the place a vast majority of corporate users spend their time, office apps, browser, email. The management tools for these desktops, an equivalent to group policy or intune are what’s needed. May already exist, I’ve never looked, but I noted it’s something Zorin OS suggests is coming.
Maybe its just me but I don't find desktops particularly important. They're useful, some are prettier than others, but when the chips are down they're just program launchers.
My experience has been that people don't choose Windows, its either a corporate mandate (at work) or it came with their home computer and works satisfactorily for what they do there. I've found that most users work with a relatively limited subset of applications, especially at work, and don't like to change things unless there's a noticeable improvement in functionality. For me Linux now provides the stability that older Windows platforms once did, YMMV -- if you like Windows, then enjoy!
Mobile phone interfaces are a bone of contention for me because they're really a great example of taking a design limitation and turning it into a key selling point. I've always found touch screens awkward. People have forgotten just how bad they are, adapting to their limitations, but now the things have spread into products like cars. They're attractive because they're cheap but they just don't work properly which presents a physical danger rather than just an inconvenience. Like computer UIs the marketing focuses on how pretty everything looks, not how well it works in an actual user situation.
I find it amusing when people complain about containers "wastefully" bundling dependencies as if this is some unique sin of the containerization world.
Windows has been doing essentially the same thing for decades, just with extra steps and worse tooling. Instead of cleanly self-contained images, you get the same duplication scattered across C:\Program Files, C:\Program Files (x86), per-user AppData folders, and then a lovely maze of registry entries that attempt to track what goes where.
Every major application ships its own copy of Visual C++ redistributables. How many vcruntime140.dll files do you have on your system right now? And instead of a simple layer cache that containers give you, Windows tries to manage this through the SxS (side-by-side) assembly system and the WinSxS folder—which, by the way, can balloon to 10+ GB on a mature system.
The registry is basically a poorly-indexed metadata store trying to do what container manifests do, except it's mutable, globally shared, accumulates cruft forever, and provides no isolation guarantees. At least when I delete a container image, it's actually gone. Good luck cleanly uninstalling a Windows application that's scattered its tentacles across HKLM, HKCU, and three different ProgramData subfolders.
Containers made the dependency bundling explicit and manageable. Windows has always had the same duplication problem, it's just hidden behind an abstraction that pretends to be a shared system while actually being a mess of per-application islands connected by registry breadcrumbs.
There is never one standard to do anything. I understand freedom of choice and all that shit, but really, any software provider that says "we support Linux" really says that with a big block of salt. Which Linux exactly? Which distro? Which display server? Which window manager? "Your app does not work with my Debian" "Oh you'r using some old Debian and our application does not work on it? Upgrade you dawk or accept that you cannot use our application" Be like Windows users that simply accept that XP or Vista is no longer supported. This is why Linux will NEVER be the desktop of the year nor THE desktop in general. It will always be for geeks who don't want to pay a dime for anything. Ever.
People who say that what Linux needs is a single unified desktop run by a single company are missing the point.
The fact this doesn't exist is precisely WHY so many Linux users are happy to use it. If we had just a single company running everything, It would be Apple. But without the hardware.
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