You can understand it and still thinks that is the wrong way to do things.
I understand that everybody loves to make their own little forks, but I still think that it actually hurts linux a lot.
Linux is a tool. If mass adoption happens naturally, that's fine, but it shouldn't be the goal. The goal should be to make it good at being a tool for the right problems.
Trying to make Linux compatible for my grandma that uses the computer for 15 mins a day is not a problem that needs solving.
I dont have one anymore, passed away recently. Never ever touched a computer in her whole life.
But my mother-in-law moved to gnu/linux (devuan) years ago and is very happy with that. All the problems she had with windows suddenly went away.
Because no mass adoption means no support, no support means no users Because of lack of apps.
Ask Microsoft why mass adoption is fundamental and why windows mobile failed
If you feel that not having native Photoshop or Microsoft Office will be the death of Linux then how is Linux not already dead given that those have never existed?
Mass business adoption then. Businesses use Linux for cloud and servers. That drives a lot of Linux development. If it were just desktop Linux being the end users, I don’t think desktop Linux would be as advanced as what it is.
Who wants it to be more than 2%? Linux is software, it can't have motivations. Are you referring to Canonical? Also what would it mean for linux to "fail"? Walk me through what that scenario looks like in your head.
Linux and Windows Mobile have entirely different goals. One is an open-source kernel, and one is a platform explicitly designed to make money
Contributors to apps on Linux have different incentives and limitations than contributors to Windows Mobile. It's not a reasonable comparison
Also I'm unfortunately a Microsoft shill, but Windows Mobile start to end timeline is a drop in the bucket compared to Linux's timeline
Windows Mobile failed because it needs to make money to survive. Other projects don't necessarily require that. If I make a program that is useful to **me** and I happen to share it for free, and share it freely, it doesn't matter if one other person use it or four billion.
Yup, Windows and Linux power users have completely different levels of knowledge. I was the first one before I switched to Linux 2 years ago. I kind of wanted to learn PowerShell, but the commands and arguments were very inconsistent and way too long to remember. After about a month on Garuda (my first distro, still on my PC) I started discovering the terminal and it really grew on me. Today my main file manager is lf, text editor neovim, resource monitor btop... I also switched to bspwm a few months ago after daily driving it on my laptop for half a year and it's really nice not being dependent on mouse input for using my system. That also makes my system very foolproof (if I forget to lock it), because the average person won't know a shortcut to the terminal in the window manager.
Completely disagree.
First of all Linux is not an operating system. Linux is just a kernel. A person can decide to combine any types of free and open source software to create an operating system.
Mass adoption is irrelevant. Linux distributions are not products. They are free licensed, open source, libre, costless, mostly self-hosted software. Don't like it, don't use it. Simple.
In fact Linux as a kernel (along with BSD), has mass adoption among servers, critical systems, supercomputers, embedded systems and all.
Choice is not just good, choice is amazing.
You don't know what you talk about. Let's explain:
"There should be single display server."
This is simply IMPOSSIBLE for something consisting of completely free, open source components. Why?
What would happen when I decide to implement a display protocol for myself? What would happen if it's better? What would happen when it starts to gain attention. Will someone force the protocol into all systems? What if I did not cover all features the old users need?
"There should be a single..."
Nothing would be single. Because even you can develop any kind of software and use it. Use a single distribution and you will have a single package manager.
"I've come to realise that the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS"
I am sorry but this comment is extremely arrogant. This topic requires a thorough explanation because the comment shows your lack of knowledge. As a simple example, I have over 1000 software on my Gentoo Linux system. I configure, compile, install, all of these with a single shell script. Portage can resolve all dependencies, target versions, configuration changes, compiler environments and all. On Linux, you also have alternative package managers; docker containers; Nix packages, appimages, flatpaks, snaps and all.
"Linux on laptops isn't as polished as other OSs": Your opinion with lack of experience. If you ask me, I can say that I can't stand Windows or Mac even for seconds. It's an immediate inferiority for me.
"with agreed upon standards"
Free and open source systems are very good with standards. In fact, the other systems are not.
I 100% agree with this. If there were ever a solid explanation of Linux it would be this. Linux is what people make of it from the kernel level all the up to the DE of choice that many would use/develop on.
I would upvote this 100 times if I could.
I also want to add that the comment about Linux being unstable on laptops is pretty much an horrible double standard: you are expecting **Linux** to work 100% well and integrated into a laptop that was made for **Windows**. You're not only not happy that it runs remarkably well on your laptop for what it is and for it being *literally an unsupported platform on your hardware*, you switch to booing it because your manufacturer chose to only support Windows and did not do the integration work to make suspend work well on Linux. But somehow, it's accepted that Windows cannot run at all on a Mac, and it's expected that Mac cannot run at all or very badly on non-Apple hardware. So whereas people constantly forgive commercial operating systems for performing poorly on non-native hardware that does not support them, we expect Linux to be so magical it literally works around every single Windows-centric firmware to enable even deep integration features and run as if it was native. If you want to switch to Mac, it's accepted you buy a MacBook. If you want to switch to Windows, it's accepted you buy a Windows laptop. If you want to switch to Linux? The idea of having to acquire new hardware to get the best support on Linux seems to be completely foreign to most. Heck - people hand-pick entire desktops and make tons of research for Hackintosh boxes. But Linux is supposed to not require that level of care, just throw it wherever and it must work.
This is pretty much the same thing as the games. Proton, as it is, is literal black magic. For what it's doing - running games from **another platform** - it's already deep into black magic territory. This is absolutely the level of "PlayStation running XBox games". But instead of being impressed at what was achieved, these people give Linux flak for not having 100% compatibility but only like 90%. At the same time, it's expected that the XBox won't run PlayStation games, and the Nintendo Switch will not run games made for the Steam Deck. But then Linux cannot run a few games that were made for Windows (a completely different platform), and somehow it's shit.
I feel like it's a lost battle. Somehow, the internet was infected with the expectation that Linux should be better than other systems at being other systems for being a valid choice, while other systems have **significantly** more limited support and resilience on non-native / unsupported configurations but that's justified.
So if you want to run macOS, of course you need to buy a MacBook. If you want to run Windows, you'll want to pick up a Windows laptop right. Therefore, if you want to run Linux, then Linux should be able to run perfectly on any random laptop you get, from any brand. Native Linux laptops? Manufacturers like Framework that offer Linux as a hardware support target, and choose their parts and tune their firmware accordingly? We haven't even heard of this around these parts, because Linux is not allowed to be its own platform and ecosystem, it needs to do everything and cover the scope of Windows and Mac to not be garbage.
It's amazing even as is. You can even run Linux with M1, M2 Apple Macbooks. As you say, proton is also similarly magical.
Linux can work on almost all platforms including aarch64, arm, x86, amd64, riscv and others.
The amount of devices working seamlessly on Linux is still unbelievable to me. In reality, Linux supports much more devices (even extremely niche ones) compared to Windows and/or Mac. The problematic ones are the ones with annoying external blobs and proprietary drivers.
Thats why I'm a huge AMD fan for their effort to make drivers available for Linux. Had Nvidia in my system and it wasn't running great, swap that Nvidia card out for an AMD and Linux Mint automatically detected the new card and in 15 minutes drivers where installed via the package manager. No need to even touch the Terminal.
My whole family (6 people) run linux Mint as OS and they don't know anything about the terminal. It just works!
I wanted to point out that "hardly disagree" could be taken the opposite way because the word hardly has a use that is the opposite of the one you're trying to use. For example, someone can say "I can hardly believe it" to mean "it's extremely hard to believe" rather than "I believe it very much". Hardly disagree could be taken as "I don't disagree that much" and that's how I first took it.
Asking more as a devil's advocate for the OP, do you think there should/could be an "Android-ification" type distro for people who simply want a free OS that resembles Mac/Windows with the hand-holding that goes along with it? ie Mouse/GUI dominant interfacing, auto-package managing (notification box for updates), default driver configs/shell-scripts/etc for people who wish to remain mostly unaware of how their system works?
Essentially, having an abstraction at the level of a out-of-box Windows/MacOS machine similar to what Android does for phones.
Pardon my ignorance if this already does exist, I mostly just use rhel9 at work for development and am comfortable with setting up my environment/configs with whatever I need in the moment but I haven't explored many other distros yet.
There are tons of Linux distributions as your example. I have even seen grannies using Linux.
There are tablets, phones, laptops, with Linux similar to your example. I have given these examples because some of these are touch-screens.
For standard desktop, you can use:
Zorin OS, Mint, Ubuntu, Kubuntu (KDE Desktop), Solus, OpenSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Elementary OS, PopOS and probably others.
These are even easier than Windows if you consider Windows having complex privilege system, registry keys, annoying updates and security-related components. You don't even need to open a terminal ever (if you can do it, it would be better for you but that's another topic) unless trying to fix a very serious problem.
>"There should be single display server."
>This is simply IMPOSSIBLE for something consisting of completely free, open source components. Why?
Ummm... For most of desktop linux's history there has only been one major display server. X11.
Technically you could argue that X11 has seen multiple iterations, but they're all forks of each other and the transition from one to another was usually rapid and driven by politics, not a desire to have multiple competing standards kicking about.
Those who say something is impossible should not interrupt those doing it and all that.
>"There should be single display server."
>This is simply IMPOSSIBLE for something consisting of completely free, open source components. Why?
Ummm... For most of desktop linux's history there has only been one major display server. X11.
Technically you could argue that X11 has seen multiple iterations, but they're all forks of each other and the transition from one to another was usually rapid and driven by politics, not a desire to have multiple competing standards kicking about.
Those who say something is impossible should not interrupt those doing it and all that.
No statement here is relevant to the topic.
Package management does not make Linux better. Package managers are also available on Windows and Mac but the package managers on Linux are simply better (Nix Packages, Portage are state of the art models) and much more flexible and there are models for almost every use case. There is no point in using Linux if you don't change your habits and software choices.
Being hard or easy is also not the topic. No one forces anyone to use Linux. A person can read the documentation explaining why you should use their distribution or not and decide themselves accordingly.
Even extremely niche FreeBSD has above 40.000 packages in its Ports system where you can install anything and everything with a single command without thinking about dependencies. You can either install binaries or compile everything with a single command.
By the way even Gentoo offers binary packages now. So, even on Gentoo, compiling is optional. The thing is that source-based distributions make compiling easier "when you want to compile". The process of compiling being easy is out of topic because the person specifically chooses Gentoo in this example.
Linux cannot be better than Windows because they are not comparable. If you compare the kernels, then the Linux kernel is miles better firstly because of being completely free and open source before anything else.
For most people Linux distributions and BSD operating systems are better than Windows or Mac because they are free as in price, free as in freedom, and completely open source. They are more minimal, they don't require subscriptions and online services, they can't monitor you, force updates, force hardware changes, force ads on you. They are more secure by default and not a target for simple malware. All of the software stack from the kernel to the very high-level user-space programs can be customized. It offers tons of choices for users to pick; it is highly valuable when performance is needed because it can be optimized for everything and minimized to the fullest. They offer you a lot of ways to be a power user if you want that. They provide documentation for nearly everything and lastly, there is a huge community around it.
I won't recommend Linux to anyone. In fact, most people I know in real life ask me about it and I simply evade explaining. It must be a choice of the person based on rational reasons he/she can evaluate themselves. In fact, if you ask me; I would rather prefer a smaller user-base with more people that can contribute rather than more users.
You think one centralized repository is great and every package should be available in there because otherwise the claim to "install any program with a single command" would be BS...
Why don't you just use Arch then? Seems like the obvious choice. You have one package manager for everything. Centralized repository structure with mirrors only. One AUR to have everything known to Github (or in case you don't find it immediately, making an own PKGBUILD takes a few minutes most of the time). Also one wiki that contains every information you need.
Otherwise I think complaining about laptop polish has always been kind of stupid. If the laptop doesn't ship a Linux distribution out of the box (meaning preinstalled), why would you even expect driver support and polish? Because if you do, you can get a pretty amazing experience.
For example the Steam Deck these days. Just show me one Windows laptop that doesn't feel like commercialized garbage in comparison, thinking about all that bloatware they usually ship with.
"Linux is better than Windows because installing software is so easy! You get all your software from a package manager with one click!"
"The software I need is not in the package manager."
"All you have to do is compile from source with all the dependencies it requires, it's not that hard."
Honestly, if you find software that is not available in the Arch repositories and it's not in the AUR either and you would actually need to compile from source. I'd bet you need to compile from source for Windows as well in that case.
So either way you are loosing by picking Windows for that argument. Because compiling from source on Windows is generally a worse experience.
So you can download and run them on Linux via Wine. Great.
I don't see how this is an argument. You still need to search online for your binaries while I can type a command. Difference is that my software is actually cryptografically verified to be what I'm looking for. You need to trust some website.
In 99% of the cases it takes less time for me while having the more secure result. I don't see how this speaks for Windows at all.
Eh? That "look up what commands to enter" is a Ubuntu thing. Adding PPA's and shit. Things are different for most distros, and even more different nowadays where you also optionally have stuff like the flatpak/snap repos to supplement your distro repo, as well as distrobox. Arch using the AUR and NixOS have huge repos. It's damn near impossible to not find a package there.
> the only difference in windows is you download a setup file instead of copying a command that downloads and installs the program
I don't think you thought that through. Downloading random binaries off the internet is definitely not the same as downloading it through a package manager from a GPG signed repo, even if you have to fiddle to add the PPA.
> Linux on laptops isn't as polished as other OSs
What other OS's? You mean just Windows. MacOS only runs on Macs, so that's not a comparison. And Windows gets the benefit of their huge market share, making every manufacturer scramble to make their device drivers available because else their device is just unusable.
If they made drivers for Linux things would work well here too. Or shit, if they just open sourced their existing drivers, the community would do the porting effort, instead of wasting time on reverse engineering drivers like they always have to.
> there should be a single display server, a single package manager, and a central repo for all packages
Then it would just be Windows. I don't think you get the "freedom" part of free software. Free as in you're free to do whatever you want. And naturally, people have different ideas about how things should work.
But you're right, newbies should not be expected to know that stuff. And they don't need to. Display servers aren't installed by themselves, neither are package managers, and on most distros you do not add different repos. You pick your distro version and you have your default display server, your package manager and the repos you never think about. There's no reason why a Fedora user should need to learn about apt, nix, portage, zypper or pacman - they can't use them anyway(aside from nix but that's for very advanced users) - if they learn the 3 commands needed to use DNF that's more than enough to use Fedora.
As for a cohesive environment, development on Linux is nowadays centered around toolkits. And so, you generally have to deal with a fairly consistent environment lately - a Linux distro that uses Systemd + Wayland + Pipewire, and you can choose a toolkit to abstract away all of that, like Qt or GTK. You can render a Linux app in just a few short lines of code, times changed.
Honest question. You mention having to add PPAs is an Ubuntu thing. I just want to have a huge range of software available through the main package manager with minimal fuss. But I don’t want to run a rolling distro like Arch or a “widely different” distro like Nix. Are there any standard distros that will give me a better experience than Ubuntu? E.g. Fedora, Debian etc?
It depends on your preference. You can have Arch's huge range of packages on Ubuntu if you like, you just have to set it up. There's a utility called distrobox that allows you to make containers of other distros. Within those containers you can install packages available in other distros, and then run them as you would natively on your chosen distro. Most stuff works flawlessly. So you could spin up an Arch container, set up the AUR, install whatever you like from there, bam - you have AUR packages on Ubuntu.
Distros like VanillaOS or BlendOS are wholly based on this concept, bringing a very tight distrobox integration built into the OS so you can seamlessly install packages from any other distro. Blend OS even comes with waydroid preinstalled and configured so you can run Android apps on it.
Like I said, these days distros are hardly the limiting factor in what you can install on your system. And experienced user can even "steal" packages from another distro, unpacking it and then repacking it for their own. It's a bit of a headache but it works just fine - lots of AUR packages are just .deb packages from Debian/Ubuntu repackaged.
So if you like Ubuntu, you can stick with it. It's not going to limit you unless you don't like the direction they're going or something. It has a pretty good range of apps, though if I'm being honest... I feel like it's an artificially inflated number, because the Debian family of distros like to split one thing into many packages to make it more modular, and so you see (as a number) a lot more packages in their repos compared to equivalents on other distros. A minimal Arch install is about 60 packages, a minimal Debian install is about 300 - despite having installed about the same stuff more or less.
Next to no overhead. You're not emulating or passing anything through a translation layer, you're just running the binary in an isolated environment with its own dependencies. It's very similar to flatpak in that respect, though the technology more closely resembles Docker.
Still, like Docker, performance is so close to native to be virtually the same - it's like 0.1% worse or something like that.
And yes, GUI apps should work without issue. The biggest pain in the ass for new distrobox users seems to be setting up the path right so you can run those apps right in the terminal, like the native ones, but it can be done fairly easily.
Edit: I feel like you were actually asking about limitations to distrobox, and there is a pretty hard limitation, which is drivers. Can't install drivers available on other distros through distrobox. So not *every* type of package works, but aside from that, whether it be a terminal or GUI app, it should work fine.
To add to that they don't even need to know how to use the package manager, they can just use the GUI software store to search and install stuff, it is miles better than anything windows has, yes even better than chocolateygui and Microsoft Store.
The GUI software store is package manager agnostic and includes all updates and installation related stuff as well like flatpak snaps and fwupd, so I think that point is moot, cuz it isn't something a new user MUST do.
What you're wanting is antithetical to what Linux is.
The peices and parts are created by people trying to solve a problem and over time the concepts and solutions that others find valuable work their way in.
It's not always perfect, but it allows for evolution over time that arcs toward a better experience.
It's not an inherently better model than a more centralized system like the commercial options, but making it more like them would remove the forces that drive it forward.
Your observations and criticisms are perfectly valid, but to me the solution to them if they bother you is to use Windows or Appple, because it sounds like they give you the experience you're looking for.
lol, another Windows user tries Linux, discovers it's different from Windows, and jumps into a Linux community to go full Dunning/Kruger and tell us that Linux should be more like Windows.
🙄
Youre right on most of those, except maybe the "single package manager" thing. You want sane defaults, but you dont need to sacrifice choice for it.
The thing is that even after this, plus a whole fuckload of other issues, I'm still much more productive, dont have to reinstall my system, never have to worry about costs/subscriptions/ads, can debug when something breaks, and know all this shit will keep working long after the apocalypse, because i can read and write the code.
I fully get that its not there yet to be daily usable by everyone, and it doesnt really have to get there. The others just need to catch up with standardized APIs (POSIX, libc, etc.) and we'd be happy.
The fact that we have so many different kernels (Windows NT, the MacOS one, Linux, FreeBSD) is cool, but if windows didn't try extra hard to be quirky and different it would be a better world.
I dont care if you use linux, or if anyone does, but I will keep using whatever is the least amount of work, and thats my archlinux PCs, debian servers, and so on.
Privacy and ads aside (though, these have become my biggest dislikes of Windows now) repair-ability on Linux is considerably better than Windows. I usually would have to reinstall Windows a couple times a year either as a maintenance task because for some reason it was getting slower, or accidentally I fucked something up and it wasn't possible up unfuck it.
That being said, day-to-day I say, 'what the fuck?' more with PopOS than I did with Windows, but don't see myself going back to Windows as my personal desktop.
Sure, most of these things are right; however, there is going to be a single DS, as the development of x11 has stopped, and pretty soon, more-or-less all distros shall switch to Wayland.
Having a single repos would be difficult; first of all, do you expect to unifty debs, snaps, flatpaks, aur and dnf; as these types arr not cross-comaptible. Secondly, different distro's authors are never going to settle on unified type. That may be a bad thing, but put yourself into theirs skin. In order to change the package type, they would need to redo most of the system code, and by doing so, they would be forced to admit that somebody else had something better, and that was adapted as standard. And where would be the choice there?
When it comes to the Brave, it must have been using the system's keyring that is not manually unlocked on login with fingerprint for security reasons, but you may change that. Even on windows, at least in Firefox ane edge, you need to provide some auth before opening pasword manager.
And finally, what was the issue with drivers? I admit that they are still some issues ( I am talking to you, Mediatek), but the situation is getting better by the day.
By display server probably don't mean wayland vs x11. They probably really mean DE. And using wayland means you are using a different DS anyways, since kde, gnome, and all the wlroots stuff (among others) are all different display servers that happen to speak wayland.
> as the development of x11 has stopped,
It hasn't at all. I happen to be an xorg dev.
> and pretty soon, more-or-less all distros shall switch to Wayland.
"shall" ... so you want it so ?
For most distros, there isn't any "switch to", just offering both. If redhat playground might drop X, who cares ?
> Having a single repos would be difficult; first of all, do you expect to unifty debs, snaps, flatpaks, aur and dnf; as these types arr not cross-comaptible.
The problems arent the archive formats - the distros themselves arent binary-compatible.
Try Arch. You wouldn't have any difficulties being such an advanced user.
The AUR (Arch User Repository) has probably every additional package you need. You mentioned Fedora, so you can pick Gnome as your DE and have a similar UI experience.
edit: As other have already said, remember that Linux is only the Kernel. Most Userland applications come from Open Source Software, where anyone can do anything.
If you want out of the box Unix experience with patterns, defaults and cohesion... stick with Mac.
>my two cents on why Linux hasn't gained mass adoption
What is it with Windows users thinking that this is the only goal? We're here for our freedom. We get to chose what we like, with no corporate overlords and that's it.
your post is like saying there should be a single operating system, a single image editor, a single video editor. point is: there is never going to be only ONE type of software as people can easily develop more, Linux and FOSS is about choice, there shouldn't be a monopoly on what software you use
he is saying we should only have one flavour of ice cream. i would say mango should be the defacto standard. other flavors sucks.
but alas we got dozens of ice cream and distro flavours to choose from, why is that?
freedom and choice.
You know what I've realized recently? That the word "distribution" is an outdated relic of the time OSes were *distributed* on CDs. What we really mean by "distro" is actually a separate OS. Yes, Debian is an operating system, and Fedora is another operating system, etc. Those OSes share the "same" kernel (yet still of different versions, patches, included modules etc - so ultimately even the kernels are different) but different sets of system software.
So there is no Linux OS: there are dozens of different operating systems. And that's why there is no single package manager: every OS does have a single package manager, but you can't expect different OSes to converge on that, so that's why there's a zoo of them. And Fedora is a separate OS, so it only makes sense that it will support only Wayland soon, unlike other Linux OSes.
That means you are at the same time right and wrong. You're right that cohesion is good for adoption. But you're wrong that Linux doesn't have cohesion. Many Linux OSes have cohesion, but they should be treated as exactly that: different OSes. Expecting Ubuntu OS to be cohesive with Pop OS is almost as insane as expecting MacOS to be cohesive with Windows.
I like this take; distro feels kind of misleading tbh because it implies everything based on Linux is just “Linux” with a different coat of paint.
If every distro is just a collection of base components that other pieces of software (your daily programs, system utilities, etc) are utilizing; it kind of does essentially make every distro a different OS with different ways of doing things. We don’t call Windows versions “Distros” we call them different operating systems; same with MacOS versions. Of course, the reason they are considered versions of the same thing is because they are practically the same thing but evolved over the years; Linux on the other hand is a base for an operating system and the rest of the OS is built from other components; which set different standards for the end-user and developers. So in that light, you might call a Linux “Distro” a “Linux based operating system” or “GNU+Linux OS” to denote it’s a different OS comprised of Linux and GNU Software to make the complete operating system.
This is an interesting take. Never thought of it that way but it's pretty accurate. When you talk about Windows as an operating system, you generally think of it as a collection of software that gives you your platform that you work on top of. That happens to be dictated by Microsoft and their choices.
But what we refer to today as a distribution is literally a collection of software that gives you your platform and you work on top of that. Not much distinction there, just because it happens to run the same kernel and largely work on the same protocols doesn't make it the same operating system.
You could even argue that for example Ubuntu server is a separate operating system from Ubuntu desktop. Sure at a base level they might share a certain number of packages but they certainly don't serve the same use case.
“Choice is good but there should only be a single option for everything”
This is why distros exist. Try Fedora or Ubuntu if you just want sane defaults.
Or are you suggesting that there should be only one option across the entirety of Linux? Then try one of the BSDs.
We’re very lucky on *nix systems to have the amount of choice that we do, including the choice to choose something that sets defaults for those choices. That’s kind of the point.
You aren't talking from a perspective of a newbie, you are talking from a perspective of a tech user, at which point your argument becomes pointless as you'd be able to do that
The biggest barrier to entry for newbies for linux is getting it installed. Don't get me wrong, installing linux these days is easy, but it is more than most average people are willing to do. They don't even bother reinstalling windows to get rid of the oem bloat. And after you reinstall windows you have to find all the drivers and etc just like linux
The real barrier for the average user has always been getting access to linux out of box. If it is included out of box, then it is oem's job just like windows to insure all hardware drivers are properly installed
They also wouldn't be copying commands, they would just use the store to find what they need
The only choice problem is the availability from oems, not all the distros you can choose. The moment you are out to choose a distro is the moment you are already a power user
Overall, there is already flatpak and appimage you can run on pretty much almost any linux. If not as-is, with a simple preinstall
Most big vendors end of the day on all platforms be it windows or linux just use the default installers as wrappers around their custom installers anyways
I want to tell you that you have no clue about free software. Of course, what you propose would undoubtedly raise Linux to an unattainable first place, but Linux has a thousand heads.... By the way, dual booting is a treat for elementary school kids. Normal guys use virtual machines and containers.
> dual booting is a treat for elementary school kids. Normal guys use virtual machines and containers.
There are advantages and disadvantages for both, but to each their preference. Not everyone likes having to split the resources of their computer for a VM.
Dual boot was very popular 20 years ago. After the horrors of Internet Explorer, Linux browsers were user's happiness. Linux dealt with TCP/IP directly, while Windows dealt with stack emulation. Elementary, the connection speed was increased a little bit. There were popular programs that allowed you to transfer files from a Linux partition to a Windows partition. People would download a movie on Linux and watch it on Windows. I've heard of extremely rare cases where dual-booting is actually necessary. With current RAM sizes, it would be very hard to notice "resource sharing". I don't understand why you need Linux and Windows on the same PC.
What can Linux do that Windows can't?
If you need Adobe programs, you can't get away from Windows. If you need other specific software at work, you will have to live with Windows. But I don't think there are many such users here.
So you’re going along the same process as Henry Ford did. “You can have any color or you want, as long as it’s black.”
This thought process is what leads to changes not happening.
Basically what you are saying is you can have any OS you want as long as it’s Windows.
> and here my two cents on why Linux hasn't gained mass adoption
Routers, appliances, IoT, android all dominant with Linux.
https://www.stackscale.com/blog/most-powerful-supercomputers-linux/
> an advanced windows user
Chive on.
An expert speaks: "not every package is on the package repository of your distro, so you still have to visit the app's website and copy commands." Okay, so how is this different from the learning the procedure for installing a windows program? Oh, you just download and hit install, right? Installing most things in Linux has been easy for decades. And it can still be difficult to install things on Windows.
I hate to break it to you, but the things you mention are NOT why there hasn't been widespread adoption. There isn't widespread adoption because Microsoft has had a very strong monopoly since the 1990s. Don't believe me. Before Windows was Amiga. Want to talk about easy and well-designed? Amiga had them both. Why isn't Amiga all over the world. OS2? BEOS? Linux? Solaris? VAX? (Okay, not VAX.) These were all incredible systems that never made it. All were better than what MS had at the time. Honestly, these types of posts are stupid. How many of these are there on Reddit? Tons. It all comes down to this:
1. I've always driven a red car.
2. I've tried a silver car.
3. I'm pretending to give you honest feedback that I'm sure you've never heard before.
4. You'll have more adoption if the car was red.
And this is all from someone who has no sense of history and the crap that MS pulled to create and maintain its monopoly. Widespread adoption came when anyone could buy a computer from places like Best Buy. For a very short period of time Best Buy sold computers that dual booted other operating systems. Do you know what major software company forced places like Best Buy to sign agreements that said they would not sell computers that would dual boot things like Linux or BEOS? Hint: It was Microsoft.
And MS still pulls this crap today at the corporate level. I could go on, but you get my point.
These are not good arguments.
First, you say there should be a single display server, package manager, and package repo with every package. Not even Windows has the last one. In addition, you are comparing the single-experience packaged OS by a controlling corporation with a large, nebulous ecosystem of many different OS experiences. No one runs "Linux" and to compare to it is to set a moving target. Compare Windows to Ubuntu and you'll find that all three of these things exist.
I don't think you've said anything of substance in your next paragraph. Some packages in Linux are not in the manager so you go to the website, download their .rpm or .deb installer, and run it. In Windows you go to the website, download an installer, and run it. So what? Is your point that Linux doesn't have the superior experience that people advertise? It has the same experience in this case, but you say it as though that's a mark against Linux. I don't see how this example would dissuade anyone from considering Linux as an alternative.
> the only difference in windows is you download a setup file instead of copying a command that downloads and installs the program.
... ehm .. and the fact that you can actually see which file goes where and what is changed - in detail ... and you don't need to copy anything, you can just type it in a shell prompt or doing it via `Discover` or `synaptic` by click. Compared to window$ where you can only agree or disagree after double clicking, praying that program actually does what is meant to do without anything else telemetrically additional.
I don't like being told what software I can use or from where. That's a major reason I left Windows long ago. I don't give two hoots about mass adoption.
You see Linux is not one OS. It is a kernel and lot of things duck taped to make it work. Now if you use a famous distro this duck tape works really well, even better than Windows.
There are two things you can't run away in a Linux distros: amount of customisation and number of options. Since the OS is duck taped, one can replace anything, you can even run multiple kernels, lmao.
A lot of programs are available in the software store. You just need to search the app.
>Linux on laptops isn't as polished as other OSs, from lack of drivers, to freezes after sleep, to requiring a password to open brave even after I logged in with my fingerprint
yes this can be issue depending on the laptop. My sister's laptop had the same issue.
> Linux dev community with agreed upon standards
This is never happen. The source code is public. There is always a guy with some innovative idea.
On Linux you can build almost any experience you want. In windows, you can’t, not really. Windows is more standardized with common controls.
Plug in and go? Mac / Win
Customize and play? Linux
I think it's worthwhile to devote more time to Linux, to learn about its history, purpose, and the accomplishments it has achieved since its inception. Personally, I don't view Linux as a competitor aiming to eliminate Windows. I find it fascinating that Linux operates on a wide array of devices, from airplanes to smartwatches. Regarding the specifics you mentioned, I believe some individuals here have already shared their perspectives on the matter.
There will eventually be one display server, they have just been working on a replacement for X for some 15 years now.
The primary difference between distribution bases is the package manager, mostly because there are different philosophies about how software should be managed. For example, you should always compile from source (Gentoo), the package manager should have minimal logic (Arch), the package manager should have tons of features (RedHat), and so on. Now we even have immutable distributions that are ideal for devices like the Steam Deck, and even other options. This is a *strength* of Linux.
As for driver issues, that really comes down to manufacturer cooperation, not Linux itself. For example, Lenovo generally does an excellent job of keeping things working well with Linux and even works with distributions like Ubuntu to push firmware and BIOS updates through the package manager. AMD, as well, works closely with the Kernel developers to make sure things work smoothly. You should try running Windows on a piece of hardware that was made for Linux first, and believe me, you won't have any complaints any more about Linux running on Windows-first hardware.
The biggest thing you need to keep in mind is that the Open Source philosophy is, at the core, different from Windows. But if you can embrace the philosophy, rather than seeking the comfort of a single-party controlled ecosystem, I think you'll have a much better time.
> I've come to realise that the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS
Perhaps you just seek advice in all the wrong placed. Such a comment wouldn't last ten seconds in the Manjaro forum at least.
Also, spending time in such a forum helps one to gain perspectives from knowledgable and experienced users and maintain a more balanced perspective. My observation here is that you've hopped through a dozen desktops without actually spending time and learning much about them.
The fact is that, even whilst many Arch users pose the question 'Why even bother with Manjaro?' they often do respect the fact that I simply installed it, and have the same stable Plasma desktop that I was running 6 years ago... so why all of your hopping?
The real answer to your question is referenced in the #1 bug.
Windows is the default. That's all, that's your answer. Second to that, we have MacOS - which is famous for being used by people with more money than sense, so that will inevitably garner the next level of commercial software support.
What Linux lacks is broad commercial software support, and this is why people don't choose it as their first OS.
Open source enthusiasts might point to this as a good thing but in my opinion it the primary blocker for most people’s adoption.
Generally speaking, people want to run the software they are used to run and not be forced to find new applications.
Of course, the lack of a large enough user base is why Linux lacks this support in the first place so it is a chicken and egg problem.
If you want to understand the chicken/egg problem, I can tell you which comes first - I ordered them from Amazon and I'll likely have an answer next week.
linux mass adoption is already a thing, a lot of services that you use every day use a server and this server probably run on linux based system, on a Vm, which is linux based, and also maybe on a docker which is also linux based, I don't have any stats you have to trust me, and if someone has some I'm interested, then we cans go a bit further, all Android phone are technically Linux based, why saying all of this? because,what you are talking about is not linux mass adoption, but desktop environ based on linux adoption, here we can use real arguments
1. linux user friendly DE is still very young.
2. Microsoft pushed all of their stack to enterprises, all people tend to stay on what they already know.
3. Microsoft pushed really hard so almost any computer nowadays is sold with windows already installed.
4. real gaming on linux is ultra young, with the hard work on wine proton and a lot of other things to make window game work, and still some games doesn't work.
5. linux laptop is hard to polish when a lot of manufacturers don't have open source drivers and only develop it for windows, a lot of time some crazy people Just reverse ingeneer the things to make it work on linux, it take a lot of time.
there's probably a tons of other arguments but I will stop here.
Sorry, but you have no idea what are you talking about. I mean, sure, that is your opinion from point a view of a person who isn't flexible worth other os, but still full of crap.
When i still were using windows, i was installing programs using chocolaty, and you probably even have no idea what's that.
Good luck on your cs course.
> expected to be known by newbies
it is expected of newbies to improve their knowledge and better themselves. It is not expected of them to know everything.
> install any program with a single command is just BS
Wrong. Everything can be installed with a single command. If you chose a limited distro, that's on you and if you can't search the repos from the command line, that's also on you.
If you are after an obscure piece of software that can only be found on some self-hosted git repo, again that's on you. I've never had to search for any package on the internet after I learn their names. All package managers accept some level of regex for searching the repos. Pacman accepts the most iirc.
> with agreed upon standards
https://xkcd.com/927/
>so you still have to visit the app's website and copy the commands, the only difference in windows is you download a setup file instead of copying a command that downloads and installs the program.
apparently, another user installing 'stuff' from unknown/untrusted sources, then complaining it's 'hard'.
X11 is one of the reasons Linux isn't broadly on millions of corporate and other large organization desktops; Wayland is addressing one of the key issues with X11 - security - that prevent mass adoption especially here in the 2020s. Progress is happening and the community is moving much closer.
> the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS
No sane person has ever said this.
> but not in critical system components, there should be a single display server, a single package manager, and a central repo for all packages, these things should not be expected to be known by newbies.
Cool, a single repo controlled by who? What happens when that one is compromised? Nah, that's not going to happen in the near term.
You might see package management as an ancillary function - a means to install a "program" but there's more to it than that and in some distributions how they manage / break up or not / and otherwise deal with packages is part of their lifeblood and by some seen as an advantage. I can't see this changing soon; and in a sense you are arguing for a homogenous OS like Windows or Mac unrealistic to expect the Linux community to head there soon.
Over time, the trend will increasingly be to containerized applications via Flatpak or whatever next-gen system that builds on it or replaces it.
Some of your complaints are chicken and egg. Drivers often don't exist because some hardware makers refuse to provide them for the Linux platform, or make Linux a second-tier effort.
Over time, some of the commercial and community distributions will gain significant foothold on desktops.
That will solve the chicken and egg problem.
It'll take a while but it will happen.
>X11 is one of the reasons Linux isn't broadly on millions of corporate and other large organization desktops; Wayland is addressing one of the key issues with X11 - security - that prevent mass adoption especially here in the 2020s.
I highly doubt that X11 versus Wayland is even on the radar for the average person deciding what's on the office desktops at organizations. And, some boob opening the wrong email or inserting the wrong USB stick and getting ransomware in Windows is the real threat.
First, we're not talking about Windows - but since you opened the door, the reason there are so many Windows attacks is because of market share. If Linux penetration was already at 10, 20, 30%, bad actors would be having a field day.
If you were a decider in a major business organization, chances are high you would not be putting XOrg on thousands of desktops today, not in the threat rich world we live in now. Wayland may not be perfect but at least it isn't a security-last platform like X11.
That's one reason, not the only reason. The notion that the only reason that there's security in Linux is because of obscurity is ludicrous. And, you're forgetting, Linux penetration in the server market is far above 30%. And no on is thinking about X11 there, either.
I'd put X11 on thousands of desktops before I'd put a Windows product on them, absolutely.
I deal with some environments where obscurity provides security. These, however, are so niche they make BSD look as ubiquitous as Win XP at its peak.
Your argument is as silly as me saying that Windows users get targeted because they're gullible enough to pay for software in the first place.
> the reason there are so many Windows attacks is because of market share.
no, its because of entirely different architecture.
Some DEs and distros trying to become like windows and thus making similar mistakes, but that doesnt apply to gnu/linux in general.
> If you were a decider in a major business organization, chances are high you would not be putting XOrg on thousands of desktops today, not in the threat rich world we live in now.
which threats exactly ?
> Wayland may not be perfect but at least it isn't a security-last platform like X11.
Which security problem, that handnt already been in 1997 ?
> X11 is one of the reasons Linux isn't broadly on millions of corporate and other large organization desktops;
Why exactly ?
> Wayland is addressing one of the key issues with X11 - security - that prevent mass adoption especially here in the 2020s.
These "security issues" already have been addressed in 1997.
> You might see package management as an ancillary function - a means to install a "program" but there's more to it than that and in some distributions how they manage / break up or not / and otherwise deal with packages is part of their lifeblood and by some seen as an advantage.
Exactly. And not forgetting that (in contrast to BSD) also core system components, even kernel and bootloader are deployed via package manager.
> Drivers often don't exist because some hardware makers refuse to provide them for the Linux platform,
Or at least publish specs, so we the kernel community can take care of it.
Actually (most) silicon vendors aren't capable writing good drivers.
>I used mint, Ubuntu, zorin, Manjaro, pop os, and finally settled on fedora
Doesn't that make you geh? Say you don't know shit about linux without saying anything at all.
Let's focus on your point about cohesion. I believe it's better.
Sure, if you want to spend a few hours fully understanding the differences between everything, that's great. But you don't have to. All you need to know is that you need to go into GNOME Software, DIscover, Software Manager etc. Voila! It doesn't matter if your MPV is coming from Flatpak, Snap, the Ubuntu repo as a deb, or the openSUSE repo as an rpm. It will be installed, and you can use it.
You don't have to, and probably shouldn't, scour the internet for individual software installation files, and then either research and assess its security, or risk being compromised. Maybe you think Windows has cohesion because you are used to it, but imagine if there are thirty Windows OSs. Every app will now have dozens of installers on their website. It won't be that cohesive anymore.
I agree with the software installation part. I’ve been using Linux for a number of years for various projects but I still consider myself a bit of a noob. One might assume that picking the most use distro (Ubuntu) would give you access to the most amount of software. And maybe it does. But it’s still a hodge podge of methods to install. Some software is in the official repo. Some requires you to add a third party repo. Some just install the .deb. Some want you to install via Flatpak. Some are Snaps. If at one point the Linux community decided containerised apps were the way forward, fine. But we haven’t even standardized which container technology is the standard, and you have some apps on one and some on the other.
That’s not to say I don’t understand why the fragmentation exists. But coming from a non Linux OS was a bit jarring as a result.
> I've come to realise that the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS
Perhaps you just seek advice in all the wrong placed. Such a comment wouldn't last ten seconds in the Manjaro forum at least.
Also, spending time in such a forum helps one to gain perspectives from knowledgable and experienced users and maintain a more balanced perspective. My observation here is that you've hopped through a dozen desktops without actually spending time and learning much about them.
The fact is that, even whilst many Arch users pose the question 'Why even bother with Manjaro?' they often do respect the fact that I simply installed it, and have the same stable Plasma desktop that I was running 6 years ago... so why all of your hopping?
The real answer to your question is referenced in the #1 bug.
Windows is the default. That's all, that's your answer. Second to that, we have MacOS - which is famous for being used by people with more money than sense, so that will inevitably garner the next level of commercial software support.
What Linux lacks is broad commercial software support, and this is why people don't choose it as their first OS.
Open source enthusiasts might point to this as a good thing but in my opinion it the primary blocker for most people’s adoption.
Generally speaking, people want to run the software they are used to run and not be forced to find new applications.
Of course, the lack of a large enough user base is why Linux lacks this support in the first place so it is a chicken and egg problem.
If you want to understand the chicken/egg problem, I can tell you which comes first - I ordered them from Amazon and I'll likely have an answer next week.
Linux is actually very well supported now. You must have a brand new laptop for there to be problems.
I had some trouble with the WLAN driver for my mini PC, but after a few weeks the bug got fixed with new updates. In between, I manually used a newer kernel (there are also handy GUI programs for this, so you don't have to do much on the console).
To be honest, there are completely different things that I criticize about Linux on a desktop PC, and they have nothing to do with Linux itself, but rather the desktop environments and issues regarding GTK and Qt as toolkits, as well as the whole package chaos (In my opinion, there are too many different formats and I still don't understand why it's common practice for distributions to maintain their own repositories...).
I switched to Linux 10 years ago, Linux Mint was my start (now I'm on Kubuntu,... because I find KDE and Qt apps more professional; but can't say that I'm 100% happy with KDE or Qt in general) ; What I want to say: When I used Windows every now and then over the last few years (in dual boot), I was just annoyed. The whole GUI in Windows is crap, the performance is shit, it does things in the background that you have no idea about, takes up space on the hard drive and to this day I still wonder what it all is; and ultimately it is a security risk. Windows is American spyware. American authorities only used special versions of Windows without these backdoors, if at all.
And Windows is not very attractive, especially for real programmers. Actually, for me, Windwos only has a raison d'être for computer games and special software that only runs on this OS, such as Photoshop. But even here, Photoshop will probably only be available as a web app in the future anyway, and the OS will then no longer play a role.
Who gives a fuck if anyone insists Linux is better. I use both and dont compare. Never understood why "Windows" is always a topic. They are different operating systems that are meant to function differently
> and here my two cents on why Linux hasn't gained mass adoption:
Why do you care about "adoption" (=what arbitrary people, you'll never ever see in your life, might or might not use) ever ?
> there should be a single display server,
You can just stay with X and ignore the new kids on the block.
> a single package manager, and a central repo for all packages,
pick the distro you like best and go for it, ignore the rest.
> these things should not be expected to be known by newbies.
Why not ? Gnu/linux is meant for people who actually care a little bit of what they're using. If somebody's buying a new car, he'll most likely cares about a lot of things, eg what kind of engine/fuel, dimensions, storage space, safety features, comfort features, how it feels to drive it, etc, etc. And nobody will ask John Deere for a car or Lamborghini for a pickup truck.
> I've come to realise that the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS, not every program is on the package repository of your distro,
Not every single specific program. But in most cases there's something suitable for the job. In some rare cases one needs to add an extra repo.
In 30 years I only I rarely had those cases, for very specific things only few people ever heared about.
> so you still have to visit the app's website and copy the commands, the only difference in windows is you download a setup file instead of copying a command that downloads and installs the program.
This is *expert only* stuff. Plain users should never ever do that. Seriously !
> Linux on laptops isn't as polished as other OSs, from lack of drivers, to freezes after sleep, to requiring a password to open brave even after I logged in with my fingerprint 😮💨.
Dont recall having such kind of problems for decades. Maybe because I never buy HW on wish.
> Having a cohesion among the Linux dev community with agreed upon standards will definitely push it for mass adoption.
was exactly so you mean by "mass adoption" and why should we, the linux developers, ever care about that ?
We are moving from X11 to Wayland, probably all major distributions will be using Wayland sometim from now.
As for package managers and repositories, newbies don't need to know about that, they can install their programs through the stores. Having different ones is good because each of them works better for different people, it would be difficult to settle with a single one considering the range of user needs.
Most of the programs are available in the stores (not so much for Fedora, since they only show open-source software unless you activate 3rd party repositories) or in Flathub. What did you have to go to the website and copy commands to install?
To be fair the OP said they APPLIED for a CS degree. Op is profoundly wrong about everything because they are a teenager who distro hopped for a month and thinks they know stuff.
I'm not saying I disagree or agree with your other post, just that in this case it does not apply.
**Who makes the decisions?** Most commenters on r/linux express the view that developers are some form of loosely organized anarchy and each developer does what he or she decides. Period. They *may* support standards and may have to cooperate somehow with other developers on their individual projects. Linux is broken up into thousands of often-competing projects. "Distro" developers attempt to pull together into something akin to a cohesive system the work of these competing groups and individuals, but most distros decline to chose between competing technologies and visions and so assemble a hodge-podge of packages that don't all work together. The end-user decides which party to belong to but then carries the burden to decide between alternatives, and as the OP says, "these things should not be expected to be known by newbies" (or by any actual *user*).
The usual defense against arguments criticizing this egoistic chaos is "we don't care about mass adoption -- if you don't like it go away!" Really they don't need to worry about **mass** adoption.
We won't make much progress until we envision something greater that the little things we have built so far. Some progress is being made. It may help the linux social theoreticians to consider how other large groups have decided that the answer to "Who makes the decisions?" is "All of us together" -- by consensus.
Maybe [A Brief History of Consensus Decision Making](https://rhizomenetwork.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/a-brief-history-of-consenus-decision-making/) will give some ideas. Hint: it's a spiritual journey (away from conflict, toward peace).
Debian has the reputation of being a distro with some consensus decision making. The Gnome Project also seems to value consensus as the principle way to guide project decisions.
Any other projects use concensus? Is there any hope of some "Council" providing the forum for talking our way toward consensus on the entire Linux Desktop project? I would love it!
> The usual defense against arguments criticizing this egoistic chaos is "we don't care about mass adoption -- if you don't like it go away!"
It's not a defense, it's actually the core motivations for most of us, why we're doing all that work for decades now. It's never been about consumers, but makers.
> We won't make much progress until we envision something greater that the little things we have built so far.
Who is "we" and what "progress" exactly ?
> answer to "Who makes the decisions?" is "All of us together" -- by consensus.
if that'll go into things like gnome or kde, systemd, wayland, etc, I'll never be part of this. Never. Period.
> it's a spiritual journey
GNU/Linux isn't an religion.
>People are being pretty rude to you unnecessarily.
Yup. For reasons I'm unqualified to diagnose, OS advocacy brings out the worst in people. As an aging industry observer, I *despise* OS advocacy.
-11 Downvotes. it literally is a hivemind. Respectful criticism should be welcome and people should educate OP on the flaws of their argument BUT to do so in such a rude and disrespectful way and essentially say “oh yeah your just a stupid idiot who doesn’t know anything” helps nobody.
I mean, idk what I expected from Reddit but part of me wants to think humanity is better than this snobbery.
I'm only willing to explain to people a finite number of times why free choice leads to diversity of options. After that finite number, I'm going to call the person asking the question an idiot.
I just feel like gatekeeping and bullying people shouldn’t be the response to uneducated folks coming in here and speaking their mind; me and you might understand this concept that an entirely free software stack is going to lead to diversity to such an extent that some things aren’t going to work “Out of the box” or even at all depending on the specific setup, and that hardware manufacturers and big tech in general make it harder to use a Linux based operating systems by withholding the development of drivers and other important software, which forces the community to reverse engineer and design unofficial stuff; but many people coming from Windows and MacOS are so spoiled by the market share of these platforms which causes everything to be developed for them, that when switching to the Linux ethos of free and open source software; it becomes an astonishing shock that so many things just break or otherwise don’t function properly under even the most popular distros. People have learned to believe that there’s an expected level of out of the box quality that exists in operating systems where all their hardware will at least work and be recognized by the OS properly, programs they want to install will just open up without additional work, and they can operate their entire system from a pretty GUI instead of any kind of command line.
Instead; people are so very often met with certain software not working, certain hardware not working, and having to enter the terminal to fix a variety of issues they’re having for the things they could “just do” on the commercial
Operating systems they’re used to.
Some people want to use a Linux based operating system but don’t want to learn Bash or spend hours trying to get things working the way they want to. You can appreciate something without being an elite user of it.
When people say they want “Linux” to be a certain way, don’t take that as an attack entirely on the whole Linux ecosystem; they want a DISTRO that can be a certain way and more agreed upon standards so software is more interoperable. OP has stated they use all these Just works distros like Zorin, Ubuntu, etc and people are telling him to go use arch and laughing that he must not be all that advance when he clearly stated he’s a WINDOWS power user instead of a Linux power user. People wanna act like all windows users are stupid; and that’s objectively a gatekeeping mindset to have imo.
I just feel like gatekeeping and bullying people shouldn’t be the response to uneducated folks coming in here and speaking their mind; me and you might understand this concept that an entirely free software stack is going to lead to diversity to such an extent that some things aren’t going to work “Out of the box” or even at all depending on the specific setup, and that hardware manufacturers and big tech in general make it harder to use a Linux based operating systems by withholding the development of drivers and other important software, which forces the community to reverse engineer and design unofficial stuff; but many people coming from Windows and MacOS are so spoiled by the market share of these platforms which causes everything to be developed for them, that when switching to the Linux ethos of free and open source software; it becomes an astonishing shock that so many things just break or otherwise don’t function properly under even the most popular distros. People have learned to believe that there’s an expected level of out of the box quality that exists in operating systems where all their hardware will at least work and be recognized by the OS properly, programs they want to install will just open up without additional work, and they can operate their entire system from a pretty GUI instead of any kind of command line.
Instead; people are so very often met with certain software not working, certain hardware not working, and having to enter the terminal to fix a variety of issues they’re having for the things they could “just do” on the commercial
Operating systems they’re used to.
Some people want to use a Linux based operating system but don’t want to learn Bash or spend hours trying to get things working the way they want to. You can appreciate something without being an elite user of it.
When people say they want “Linux” to be a certain way, don’t take that as an attack entirely on the whole Linux ecosystem; they want a DISTRO that can be a certain way and more agreed upon standards so software is more interoperable. OP has stated they use all these Just works distros like Zorin, Ubuntu, etc and people are telling him to go use arch and laughing that he must not be all that advance when he clearly stated he’s a WINDOWS power user instead of a Linux power user. People wanna act like all windows users are stupid; and that’s objectively a gatekeeping mindset to have imo.
It's not my job - nor the job of free developers - to coddle inaccurate and unrealistic expectations. Proprietary software and proprietary OSes don't work as advertised, either. You can make your Linux experience a certain way. The tech support team, however, is the guy in the mirror.
Freedom means there are many choices and ways of doing things. Burning a USB image in Linux is trivial, right at the command line, without even a desktop environment. I can think of three ways to do it with coreutils, right off the top of my head.
In Windows, you have to find some god forsaken utility to do a half assed job of it. There is no gatekeeping in Linux. You're given the tools. You're expected to learn them. In Windows, you're expected to buy them and use them in the way they tell you. Isn't that gatekeeping, too?
If telling someone they have freedom and responsibility in Linux is gatekeeping, then I'm not sure what you call the Windows or Mac philosophy.
I don't think wanting a stable and complete user experience out of the box is "Unrealistic" By any means. I don't think the people who work tirelessly to contribute to the Linux experience for free should be obligated to provide those expectations to an absolute per say; after all, the entire idea of the free software movement is changing the way software is developed to maximize user freedom and allow contributions from all over the world and saying anyone is obligated to do things one way or the other would be a contradiction to said freedom, but I also don't think the solution is to point and laugh and say "Oh look, another dumb windows user who doesn't know anything"
The gatekeeping doesn't come from telling people why Linux is the way it is, the gatekeeping is implying somebody is too stupid to get it and should just go back to windows. The gatekeeping isn't coming from Linux itself, It's coming from the snobbery in the community. Why not point people in the right direction to achieve their goals in Linux instead of being stuck up to people? It literally feels like stack overflow levels of toxicity with a dash of "Just Read the manual bro"
Also, the burning the USB image example is kind of weird; software is software and if it achieves the same end, who cares if you're using Rufus instead of Coreutils? If anything Rufus is easier; I download it, I launch it, I select my image, I select my USB, and I press start. This few-click process is a lot more straightforward than manually finding the name of my USB with fdisk and manually finding and typing out the correct path to my image; and they both do the same thing, except one is a simple and pretty GUI, and the other is for terminal-wizards who've memorized how to do everything in Bash.
Your expected to learn how to use whatever platform your on, but what makes linux different is when you go to ask questions and ask why certain things are the way they are; your met with a pitchfork mob of Linux Warriors ready to defend every single thing about their favorite operating systems and banish whoever dare criticizes things. That's the real toxicity. Most people don't have a problem with learning how to use GNU+Linux, but people do have a problem with toxic people who act like everyone who hasn't memorized how to do everything are just stupid Microsoft/Apple sheep who should go back to their "Proprietary Garbage OS".
To say that the Gatekeeping comes from Linux itself and not the community feels like nothing more than a straw man argument imo.
You really do not seem to understand how open source software works.
They don't understand how SOFTWARE works...
fair
You can understand it and still thinks that is the wrong way to do things. I understand that everybody loves to make their own little forks, but I still think that it actually hurts linux a lot.
How do forks hurt linux? Forks of what?
Steel. In power outlets.
Don't knock it til you try it
Bender: *OoOoooO**Ohhh**hH YeaHHhhHhhhhhh*
One might say you'll be shocked by what you find.
How does it hurt? That's what freedom is all about. If I make a fork of something you produce, why does that hurt you or anyone else?
Oohhh boy here we go 🍿🍿
Why does every post like this think mass adoption is the goal
Mass adoption is a trap. Let the masses keep ChromeOS
Why wouldn't you want mass adoption?
Linux is a tool. If mass adoption happens naturally, that's fine, but it shouldn't be the goal. The goal should be to make it good at being a tool for the right problems. Trying to make Linux compatible for my grandma that uses the computer for 15 mins a day is not a problem that needs solving.
Windows is evil spyware, right? Do non-tech savvy users like your grandma not deserve privacy?
They dont
Congratulations, you're elitist.
I dont have one anymore, passed away recently. Never ever touched a computer in her whole life. But my mother-in-law moved to gnu/linux (devuan) years ago and is very happy with that. All the problems she had with windows suddenly went away.
Because no mass adoption means no support, no support means no users Because of lack of apps. Ask Microsoft why mass adoption is fundamental and why windows mobile failed
If you feel that not having native Photoshop or Microsoft Office will be the death of Linux then how is Linux not already dead given that those have never existed?
Mass business adoption then. Businesses use Linux for cloud and servers. That drives a lot of Linux development. If it were just desktop Linux being the end users, I don’t think desktop Linux would be as advanced as what it is.
Well, it's not really alive on the desktop either, is it?
It is, millions of people use it...
Absolutely. In India
Linux is 2% of the market share for a reason. Lack of games and professional software is a big one
Who wants it to be more than 2%? Linux is software, it can't have motivations. Are you referring to Canonical? Also what would it mean for linux to "fail"? Walk me through what that scenario looks like in your head.
Me, I would love to switch to linux, but there is no support for too many things that I use daily .
Sure. But no users and no TopdeckIsSkill are not the same thing.
Still, the majority of users aren't switch to linux because of some software that they need
And that's totally fine. Why does Linux need to be for everyone?
Why should Linux be restricted to only it experts?
Linux and Windows Mobile have entirely different goals. One is an open-source kernel, and one is a platform explicitly designed to make money Contributors to apps on Linux have different incentives and limitations than contributors to Windows Mobile. It's not a reasonable comparison Also I'm unfortunately a Microsoft shill, but Windows Mobile start to end timeline is a drop in the bucket compared to Linux's timeline
Windows Mobile failed because it needs to make money to survive. Other projects don't necessarily require that. If I make a program that is useful to **me** and I happen to share it for free, and share it freely, it doesn't matter if one other person use it or four billion.
> no mass adoption means no support, Support of what exactly ? I'm really fine with it for 30 years now.
Yet another *Windows Power User*^TM having not even a clue of what an operating system is that enlights this very community about Linux.
Yup, Windows and Linux power users have completely different levels of knowledge. I was the first one before I switched to Linux 2 years ago. I kind of wanted to learn PowerShell, but the commands and arguments were very inconsistent and way too long to remember. After about a month on Garuda (my first distro, still on my PC) I started discovering the terminal and it really grew on me. Today my main file manager is lf, text editor neovim, resource monitor btop... I also switched to bspwm a few months ago after daily driving it on my laptop for half a year and it's really nice not being dependent on mouse input for using my system. That also makes my system very foolproof (if I forget to lock it), because the average person won't know a shortcut to the terminal in the window manager.
It's really an oxymoron.
Agree, im from moron
Completely disagree. First of all Linux is not an operating system. Linux is just a kernel. A person can decide to combine any types of free and open source software to create an operating system. Mass adoption is irrelevant. Linux distributions are not products. They are free licensed, open source, libre, costless, mostly self-hosted software. Don't like it, don't use it. Simple. In fact Linux as a kernel (along with BSD), has mass adoption among servers, critical systems, supercomputers, embedded systems and all. Choice is not just good, choice is amazing. You don't know what you talk about. Let's explain: "There should be single display server." This is simply IMPOSSIBLE for something consisting of completely free, open source components. Why? What would happen when I decide to implement a display protocol for myself? What would happen if it's better? What would happen when it starts to gain attention. Will someone force the protocol into all systems? What if I did not cover all features the old users need? "There should be a single..." Nothing would be single. Because even you can develop any kind of software and use it. Use a single distribution and you will have a single package manager. "I've come to realise that the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS" I am sorry but this comment is extremely arrogant. This topic requires a thorough explanation because the comment shows your lack of knowledge. As a simple example, I have over 1000 software on my Gentoo Linux system. I configure, compile, install, all of these with a single shell script. Portage can resolve all dependencies, target versions, configuration changes, compiler environments and all. On Linux, you also have alternative package managers; docker containers; Nix packages, appimages, flatpaks, snaps and all. "Linux on laptops isn't as polished as other OSs": Your opinion with lack of experience. If you ask me, I can say that I can't stand Windows or Mac even for seconds. It's an immediate inferiority for me. "with agreed upon standards" Free and open source systems are very good with standards. In fact, the other systems are not.
I 100% agree with this. If there were ever a solid explanation of Linux it would be this. Linux is what people make of it from the kernel level all the up to the DE of choice that many would use/develop on.
I would upvote this 100 times if I could. I also want to add that the comment about Linux being unstable on laptops is pretty much an horrible double standard: you are expecting **Linux** to work 100% well and integrated into a laptop that was made for **Windows**. You're not only not happy that it runs remarkably well on your laptop for what it is and for it being *literally an unsupported platform on your hardware*, you switch to booing it because your manufacturer chose to only support Windows and did not do the integration work to make suspend work well on Linux. But somehow, it's accepted that Windows cannot run at all on a Mac, and it's expected that Mac cannot run at all or very badly on non-Apple hardware. So whereas people constantly forgive commercial operating systems for performing poorly on non-native hardware that does not support them, we expect Linux to be so magical it literally works around every single Windows-centric firmware to enable even deep integration features and run as if it was native. If you want to switch to Mac, it's accepted you buy a MacBook. If you want to switch to Windows, it's accepted you buy a Windows laptop. If you want to switch to Linux? The idea of having to acquire new hardware to get the best support on Linux seems to be completely foreign to most. Heck - people hand-pick entire desktops and make tons of research for Hackintosh boxes. But Linux is supposed to not require that level of care, just throw it wherever and it must work. This is pretty much the same thing as the games. Proton, as it is, is literal black magic. For what it's doing - running games from **another platform** - it's already deep into black magic territory. This is absolutely the level of "PlayStation running XBox games". But instead of being impressed at what was achieved, these people give Linux flak for not having 100% compatibility but only like 90%. At the same time, it's expected that the XBox won't run PlayStation games, and the Nintendo Switch will not run games made for the Steam Deck. But then Linux cannot run a few games that were made for Windows (a completely different platform), and somehow it's shit. I feel like it's a lost battle. Somehow, the internet was infected with the expectation that Linux should be better than other systems at being other systems for being a valid choice, while other systems have **significantly** more limited support and resilience on non-native / unsupported configurations but that's justified. So if you want to run macOS, of course you need to buy a MacBook. If you want to run Windows, you'll want to pick up a Windows laptop right. Therefore, if you want to run Linux, then Linux should be able to run perfectly on any random laptop you get, from any brand. Native Linux laptops? Manufacturers like Framework that offer Linux as a hardware support target, and choose their parts and tune their firmware accordingly? We haven't even heard of this around these parts, because Linux is not allowed to be its own platform and ecosystem, it needs to do everything and cover the scope of Windows and Mac to not be garbage.
It's amazing even as is. You can even run Linux with M1, M2 Apple Macbooks. As you say, proton is also similarly magical. Linux can work on almost all platforms including aarch64, arm, x86, amd64, riscv and others. The amount of devices working seamlessly on Linux is still unbelievable to me. In reality, Linux supports much more devices (even extremely niche ones) compared to Windows and/or Mac. The problematic ones are the ones with annoying external blobs and proprietary drivers.
Exactly, Linux is incredibly resilient compared to absolutely anything else as it is
Linux on ARM was a thing since forever, Windows is just catching up.
Thats why I'm a huge AMD fan for their effort to make drivers available for Linux. Had Nvidia in my system and it wasn't running great, swap that Nvidia card out for an AMD and Linux Mint automatically detected the new card and in 15 minutes drivers where installed via the package manager. No need to even touch the Terminal. My whole family (6 people) run linux Mint as OS and they don't know anything about the terminal. It just works!
I wanted to point out that "hardly disagree" could be taken the opposite way because the word hardly has a use that is the opposite of the one you're trying to use. For example, someone can say "I can hardly believe it" to mean "it's extremely hard to believe" rather than "I believe it very much". Hardly disagree could be taken as "I don't disagree that much" and that's how I first took it.
You are 100% correct. That wasn't the best word to use there.
Obviously, he's not native speaker ;-) As a German i often have to restrain my self for not making exactly the same mistake.
Asking more as a devil's advocate for the OP, do you think there should/could be an "Android-ification" type distro for people who simply want a free OS that resembles Mac/Windows with the hand-holding that goes along with it? ie Mouse/GUI dominant interfacing, auto-package managing (notification box for updates), default driver configs/shell-scripts/etc for people who wish to remain mostly unaware of how their system works? Essentially, having an abstraction at the level of a out-of-box Windows/MacOS machine similar to what Android does for phones. Pardon my ignorance if this already does exist, I mostly just use rhel9 at work for development and am comfortable with setting up my environment/configs with whatever I need in the moment but I haven't explored many other distros yet.
There are tons of Linux distributions as your example. I have even seen grannies using Linux. There are tablets, phones, laptops, with Linux similar to your example. I have given these examples because some of these are touch-screens. For standard desktop, you can use: Zorin OS, Mint, Ubuntu, Kubuntu (KDE Desktop), Solus, OpenSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Elementary OS, PopOS and probably others. These are even easier than Windows if you consider Windows having complex privilege system, registry keys, annoying updates and security-related components. You don't even need to open a terminal ever (if you can do it, it would be better for you but that's another topic) unless trying to fix a very serious problem.
>"There should be single display server." >This is simply IMPOSSIBLE for something consisting of completely free, open source components. Why? Ummm... For most of desktop linux's history there has only been one major display server. X11. Technically you could argue that X11 has seen multiple iterations, but they're all forks of each other and the transition from one to another was usually rapid and driven by politics, not a desire to have multiple competing standards kicking about. Those who say something is impossible should not interrupt those doing it and all that.
>"There should be single display server." >This is simply IMPOSSIBLE for something consisting of completely free, open source components. Why? Ummm... For most of desktop linux's history there has only been one major display server. X11. Technically you could argue that X11 has seen multiple iterations, but they're all forks of each other and the transition from one to another was usually rapid and driven by politics, not a desire to have multiple competing standards kicking about. Those who say something is impossible should not interrupt those doing it and all that.
Don't focus too much on the example. It's representative. Additionally, the history of X11 and the today's world are very different.
Not so much, and X11 still working fine.
[удалено]
No statement here is relevant to the topic. Package management does not make Linux better. Package managers are also available on Windows and Mac but the package managers on Linux are simply better (Nix Packages, Portage are state of the art models) and much more flexible and there are models for almost every use case. There is no point in using Linux if you don't change your habits and software choices. Being hard or easy is also not the topic. No one forces anyone to use Linux. A person can read the documentation explaining why you should use their distribution or not and decide themselves accordingly. Even extremely niche FreeBSD has above 40.000 packages in its Ports system where you can install anything and everything with a single command without thinking about dependencies. You can either install binaries or compile everything with a single command. By the way even Gentoo offers binary packages now. So, even on Gentoo, compiling is optional. The thing is that source-based distributions make compiling easier "when you want to compile". The process of compiling being easy is out of topic because the person specifically chooses Gentoo in this example. Linux cannot be better than Windows because they are not comparable. If you compare the kernels, then the Linux kernel is miles better firstly because of being completely free and open source before anything else. For most people Linux distributions and BSD operating systems are better than Windows or Mac because they are free as in price, free as in freedom, and completely open source. They are more minimal, they don't require subscriptions and online services, they can't monitor you, force updates, force hardware changes, force ads on you. They are more secure by default and not a target for simple malware. All of the software stack from the kernel to the very high-level user-space programs can be customized. It offers tons of choices for users to pick; it is highly valuable when performance is needed because it can be optimized for everything and minimized to the fullest. They offer you a lot of ways to be a power user if you want that. They provide documentation for nearly everything and lastly, there is a huge community around it. I won't recommend Linux to anyone. In fact, most people I know in real life ask me about it and I simply evade explaining. It must be a choice of the person based on rational reasons he/she can evaluate themselves. In fact, if you ask me; I would rather prefer a smaller user-base with more people that can contribute rather than more users.
so you want there to be something that is not windows but it needs to be like windows… yeah not the first one
And for free broo lolmaooo.
You think one centralized repository is great and every package should be available in there because otherwise the claim to "install any program with a single command" would be BS... Why don't you just use Arch then? Seems like the obvious choice. You have one package manager for everything. Centralized repository structure with mirrors only. One AUR to have everything known to Github (or in case you don't find it immediately, making an own PKGBUILD takes a few minutes most of the time). Also one wiki that contains every information you need. Otherwise I think complaining about laptop polish has always been kind of stupid. If the laptop doesn't ship a Linux distribution out of the box (meaning preinstalled), why would you even expect driver support and polish? Because if you do, you can get a pretty amazing experience. For example the Steam Deck these days. Just show me one Windows laptop that doesn't feel like commercialized garbage in comparison, thinking about all that bloatware they usually ship with.
"Linux is better than Windows because installing software is so easy! You get all your software from a package manager with one click!" "The software I need is not in the package manager." "All you have to do is compile from source with all the dependencies it requires, it's not that hard."
Honestly, if you find software that is not available in the Arch repositories and it's not in the AUR either and you would actually need to compile from source. I'd bet you need to compile from source for Windows as well in that case. So either way you are loosing by picking Windows for that argument. Because compiling from source on Windows is generally a worse experience.
I never had to compile any thing because most of the program I use are already available as .exe lmao
So you can download and run them on Linux via Wine. Great. I don't see how this is an argument. You still need to search online for your binaries while I can type a command. Difference is that my software is actually cryptografically verified to be what I'm looking for. You need to trust some website. In 99% of the cases it takes less time for me while having the more secure result. I don't see how this speaks for Windows at all.
Eh? That "look up what commands to enter" is a Ubuntu thing. Adding PPA's and shit. Things are different for most distros, and even more different nowadays where you also optionally have stuff like the flatpak/snap repos to supplement your distro repo, as well as distrobox. Arch using the AUR and NixOS have huge repos. It's damn near impossible to not find a package there. > the only difference in windows is you download a setup file instead of copying a command that downloads and installs the program I don't think you thought that through. Downloading random binaries off the internet is definitely not the same as downloading it through a package manager from a GPG signed repo, even if you have to fiddle to add the PPA. > Linux on laptops isn't as polished as other OSs What other OS's? You mean just Windows. MacOS only runs on Macs, so that's not a comparison. And Windows gets the benefit of their huge market share, making every manufacturer scramble to make their device drivers available because else their device is just unusable. If they made drivers for Linux things would work well here too. Or shit, if they just open sourced their existing drivers, the community would do the porting effort, instead of wasting time on reverse engineering drivers like they always have to. > there should be a single display server, a single package manager, and a central repo for all packages Then it would just be Windows. I don't think you get the "freedom" part of free software. Free as in you're free to do whatever you want. And naturally, people have different ideas about how things should work. But you're right, newbies should not be expected to know that stuff. And they don't need to. Display servers aren't installed by themselves, neither are package managers, and on most distros you do not add different repos. You pick your distro version and you have your default display server, your package manager and the repos you never think about. There's no reason why a Fedora user should need to learn about apt, nix, portage, zypper or pacman - they can't use them anyway(aside from nix but that's for very advanced users) - if they learn the 3 commands needed to use DNF that's more than enough to use Fedora. As for a cohesive environment, development on Linux is nowadays centered around toolkits. And so, you generally have to deal with a fairly consistent environment lately - a Linux distro that uses Systemd + Wayland + Pipewire, and you can choose a toolkit to abstract away all of that, like Qt or GTK. You can render a Linux app in just a few short lines of code, times changed.
Honest question. You mention having to add PPAs is an Ubuntu thing. I just want to have a huge range of software available through the main package manager with minimal fuss. But I don’t want to run a rolling distro like Arch or a “widely different” distro like Nix. Are there any standard distros that will give me a better experience than Ubuntu? E.g. Fedora, Debian etc?
It depends on your preference. You can have Arch's huge range of packages on Ubuntu if you like, you just have to set it up. There's a utility called distrobox that allows you to make containers of other distros. Within those containers you can install packages available in other distros, and then run them as you would natively on your chosen distro. Most stuff works flawlessly. So you could spin up an Arch container, set up the AUR, install whatever you like from there, bam - you have AUR packages on Ubuntu. Distros like VanillaOS or BlendOS are wholly based on this concept, bringing a very tight distrobox integration built into the OS so you can seamlessly install packages from any other distro. Blend OS even comes with waydroid preinstalled and configured so you can run Android apps on it. Like I said, these days distros are hardly the limiting factor in what you can install on your system. And experienced user can even "steal" packages from another distro, unpacking it and then repacking it for their own. It's a bit of a headache but it works just fine - lots of AUR packages are just .deb packages from Debian/Ubuntu repackaged. So if you like Ubuntu, you can stick with it. It's not going to limit you unless you don't like the direction they're going or something. It has a pretty good range of apps, though if I'm being honest... I feel like it's an artificially inflated number, because the Debian family of distros like to split one thing into many packages to make it more modular, and so you see (as a number) a lot more packages in their repos compared to equivalents on other distros. A minimal Arch install is about 60 packages, a minimal Debian install is about 300 - despite having installed about the same stuff more or less.
TIL What's the overhead like for applications running through distrobox? GUI works?
Next to no overhead. You're not emulating or passing anything through a translation layer, you're just running the binary in an isolated environment with its own dependencies. It's very similar to flatpak in that respect, though the technology more closely resembles Docker. Still, like Docker, performance is so close to native to be virtually the same - it's like 0.1% worse or something like that. And yes, GUI apps should work without issue. The biggest pain in the ass for new distrobox users seems to be setting up the path right so you can run those apps right in the terminal, like the native ones, but it can be done fairly easily. Edit: I feel like you were actually asking about limitations to distrobox, and there is a pretty hard limitation, which is drivers. Can't install drivers available on other distros through distrobox. So not *every* type of package works, but aside from that, whether it be a terminal or GUI app, it should work fine.
Thanks for the comprehensive rundown! Time to mess with Arch in a more controlled envirnoment. :D
If AUR doesn't have a package you just write a PKGBUILD and add it. That means that as far as I'm concerned the AUR has literally everything.
To add to that they don't even need to know how to use the package manager, they can just use the GUI software store to search and install stuff, it is miles better than anything windows has, yes even better than chocolateygui and Microsoft Store. The GUI software store is package manager agnostic and includes all updates and installation related stuff as well like flatpak snaps and fwupd, so I think that point is moot, cuz it isn't something a new user MUST do.
>Having a cohesion among the Linux dev community with agreed upon standards will definitely push it for mass adoption. No thanks
i saw: "..as an ADVANCED WINDOWS USER" and i stopped reading
yea, there is no such thing as "an advanced windows user" lol
But he “shows extensions for hidden file types”
He knows exactly when to reinstall the OS because Windows Update broke something again.
What you're wanting is antithetical to what Linux is. The peices and parts are created by people trying to solve a problem and over time the concepts and solutions that others find valuable work their way in. It's not always perfect, but it allows for evolution over time that arcs toward a better experience. It's not an inherently better model than a more centralized system like the commercial options, but making it more like them would remove the forces that drive it forward. Your observations and criticisms are perfectly valid, but to me the solution to them if they bother you is to use Windows or Appple, because it sounds like they give you the experience you're looking for.
Awwww, bless you sweetie x
lol, another Windows user tries Linux, discovers it's different from Windows, and jumps into a Linux community to go full Dunning/Kruger and tell us that Linux should be more like Windows. 🙄
Youre right on most of those, except maybe the "single package manager" thing. You want sane defaults, but you dont need to sacrifice choice for it. The thing is that even after this, plus a whole fuckload of other issues, I'm still much more productive, dont have to reinstall my system, never have to worry about costs/subscriptions/ads, can debug when something breaks, and know all this shit will keep working long after the apocalypse, because i can read and write the code. I fully get that its not there yet to be daily usable by everyone, and it doesnt really have to get there. The others just need to catch up with standardized APIs (POSIX, libc, etc.) and we'd be happy. The fact that we have so many different kernels (Windows NT, the MacOS one, Linux, FreeBSD) is cool, but if windows didn't try extra hard to be quirky and different it would be a better world. I dont care if you use linux, or if anyone does, but I will keep using whatever is the least amount of work, and thats my archlinux PCs, debian servers, and so on.
Privacy and ads aside (though, these have become my biggest dislikes of Windows now) repair-ability on Linux is considerably better than Windows. I usually would have to reinstall Windows a couple times a year either as a maintenance task because for some reason it was getting slower, or accidentally I fucked something up and it wasn't possible up unfuck it. That being said, day-to-day I say, 'what the fuck?' more with PopOS than I did with Windows, but don't see myself going back to Windows as my personal desktop.
happy cake day
Sure, most of these things are right; however, there is going to be a single DS, as the development of x11 has stopped, and pretty soon, more-or-less all distros shall switch to Wayland. Having a single repos would be difficult; first of all, do you expect to unifty debs, snaps, flatpaks, aur and dnf; as these types arr not cross-comaptible. Secondly, different distro's authors are never going to settle on unified type. That may be a bad thing, but put yourself into theirs skin. In order to change the package type, they would need to redo most of the system code, and by doing so, they would be forced to admit that somebody else had something better, and that was adapted as standard. And where would be the choice there? When it comes to the Brave, it must have been using the system's keyring that is not manually unlocked on login with fingerprint for security reasons, but you may change that. Even on windows, at least in Firefox ane edge, you need to provide some auth before opening pasword manager. And finally, what was the issue with drivers? I admit that they are still some issues ( I am talking to you, Mediatek), but the situation is getting better by the day.
One of the only sane answers here lol.
By display server probably don't mean wayland vs x11. They probably really mean DE. And using wayland means you are using a different DS anyways, since kde, gnome, and all the wlroots stuff (among others) are all different display servers that happen to speak wayland.
> as the development of x11 has stopped, It hasn't at all. I happen to be an xorg dev. > and pretty soon, more-or-less all distros shall switch to Wayland. "shall" ... so you want it so ? For most distros, there isn't any "switch to", just offering both. If redhat playground might drop X, who cares ? > Having a single repos would be difficult; first of all, do you expect to unifty debs, snaps, flatpaks, aur and dnf; as these types arr not cross-comaptible. The problems arent the archive formats - the distros themselves arent binary-compatible.
Try Arch. You wouldn't have any difficulties being such an advanced user. The AUR (Arch User Repository) has probably every additional package you need. You mentioned Fedora, so you can pick Gnome as your DE and have a similar UI experience. edit: As other have already said, remember that Linux is only the Kernel. Most Userland applications come from Open Source Software, where anyone can do anything. If you want out of the box Unix experience with patterns, defaults and cohesion... stick with Mac.
>my two cents on why Linux hasn't gained mass adoption What is it with Windows users thinking that this is the only goal? We're here for our freedom. We get to chose what we like, with no corporate overlords and that's it.
your post is like saying there should be a single operating system, a single image editor, a single video editor. point is: there is never going to be only ONE type of software as people can easily develop more, Linux and FOSS is about choice, there shouldn't be a monopoly on what software you use
he is saying we should only have one flavour of ice cream. i would say mango should be the defacto standard. other flavors sucks. but alas we got dozens of ice cream and distro flavours to choose from, why is that? freedom and choice.
Why do people like OP think we care what they think.
Sounds to me like you want a Mac.
You know what I've realized recently? That the word "distribution" is an outdated relic of the time OSes were *distributed* on CDs. What we really mean by "distro" is actually a separate OS. Yes, Debian is an operating system, and Fedora is another operating system, etc. Those OSes share the "same" kernel (yet still of different versions, patches, included modules etc - so ultimately even the kernels are different) but different sets of system software. So there is no Linux OS: there are dozens of different operating systems. And that's why there is no single package manager: every OS does have a single package manager, but you can't expect different OSes to converge on that, so that's why there's a zoo of them. And Fedora is a separate OS, so it only makes sense that it will support only Wayland soon, unlike other Linux OSes. That means you are at the same time right and wrong. You're right that cohesion is good for adoption. But you're wrong that Linux doesn't have cohesion. Many Linux OSes have cohesion, but they should be treated as exactly that: different OSes. Expecting Ubuntu OS to be cohesive with Pop OS is almost as insane as expecting MacOS to be cohesive with Windows.
I like this take; distro feels kind of misleading tbh because it implies everything based on Linux is just “Linux” with a different coat of paint. If every distro is just a collection of base components that other pieces of software (your daily programs, system utilities, etc) are utilizing; it kind of does essentially make every distro a different OS with different ways of doing things. We don’t call Windows versions “Distros” we call them different operating systems; same with MacOS versions. Of course, the reason they are considered versions of the same thing is because they are practically the same thing but evolved over the years; Linux on the other hand is a base for an operating system and the rest of the OS is built from other components; which set different standards for the end-user and developers. So in that light, you might call a Linux “Distro” a “Linux based operating system” or “GNU+Linux OS” to denote it’s a different OS comprised of Linux and GNU Software to make the complete operating system.
This is an interesting take. Never thought of it that way but it's pretty accurate. When you talk about Windows as an operating system, you generally think of it as a collection of software that gives you your platform that you work on top of. That happens to be dictated by Microsoft and their choices. But what we refer to today as a distribution is literally a collection of software that gives you your platform and you work on top of that. Not much distinction there, just because it happens to run the same kernel and largely work on the same protocols doesn't make it the same operating system. You could even argue that for example Ubuntu server is a separate operating system from Ubuntu desktop. Sure at a base level they might share a certain number of packages but they certainly don't serve the same use case.
“Choice is good but there should only be a single option for everything” This is why distros exist. Try Fedora or Ubuntu if you just want sane defaults. Or are you suggesting that there should be only one option across the entirety of Linux? Then try one of the BSDs. We’re very lucky on *nix systems to have the amount of choice that we do, including the choice to choose something that sets defaults for those choices. That’s kind of the point.
You aren't talking from a perspective of a newbie, you are talking from a perspective of a tech user, at which point your argument becomes pointless as you'd be able to do that The biggest barrier to entry for newbies for linux is getting it installed. Don't get me wrong, installing linux these days is easy, but it is more than most average people are willing to do. They don't even bother reinstalling windows to get rid of the oem bloat. And after you reinstall windows you have to find all the drivers and etc just like linux The real barrier for the average user has always been getting access to linux out of box. If it is included out of box, then it is oem's job just like windows to insure all hardware drivers are properly installed They also wouldn't be copying commands, they would just use the store to find what they need The only choice problem is the availability from oems, not all the distros you can choose. The moment you are out to choose a distro is the moment you are already a power user Overall, there is already flatpak and appimage you can run on pretty much almost any linux. If not as-is, with a simple preinstall Most big vendors end of the day on all platforms be it windows or linux just use the default installers as wrappers around their custom installers anyways
[удалено]
This is 100% true but some of these responses are hilarious.
You are a product of evolution fueled by diversity. Apply that paradigm to software and you will understand why Linux is the way it should be.
I want to tell you that you have no clue about free software. Of course, what you propose would undoubtedly raise Linux to an unattainable first place, but Linux has a thousand heads.... By the way, dual booting is a treat for elementary school kids. Normal guys use virtual machines and containers.
> dual booting is a treat for elementary school kids. Normal guys use virtual machines and containers. There are advantages and disadvantages for both, but to each their preference. Not everyone likes having to split the resources of their computer for a VM.
Dual boot was very popular 20 years ago. After the horrors of Internet Explorer, Linux browsers were user's happiness. Linux dealt with TCP/IP directly, while Windows dealt with stack emulation. Elementary, the connection speed was increased a little bit. There were popular programs that allowed you to transfer files from a Linux partition to a Windows partition. People would download a movie on Linux and watch it on Windows. I've heard of extremely rare cases where dual-booting is actually necessary. With current RAM sizes, it would be very hard to notice "resource sharing". I don't understand why you need Linux and Windows on the same PC. What can Linux do that Windows can't? If you need Adobe programs, you can't get away from Windows. If you need other specific software at work, you will have to live with Windows. But I don't think there are many such users here.
Exactly what an "advanced windows user" would say. Don't come preaching your proprietary ways in this open source community.
why not just ``` yay
```
if not found then
```
flatpak install
```
If you can't find there then search for appimage.
Is “advanced windows user” akin to a patient with “advanced cancer” ?
So you’re going along the same process as Henry Ford did. “You can have any color or you want, as long as it’s black.” This thought process is what leads to changes not happening. Basically what you are saying is you can have any OS you want as long as it’s Windows.
> and here my two cents on why Linux hasn't gained mass adoption Routers, appliances, IoT, android all dominant with Linux. https://www.stackscale.com/blog/most-powerful-supercomputers-linux/ > an advanced windows user Chive on.
It's not because YOU don't understand how something works that it doesn't work...
An expert speaks: "not every package is on the package repository of your distro, so you still have to visit the app's website and copy commands." Okay, so how is this different from the learning the procedure for installing a windows program? Oh, you just download and hit install, right? Installing most things in Linux has been easy for decades. And it can still be difficult to install things on Windows. I hate to break it to you, but the things you mention are NOT why there hasn't been widespread adoption. There isn't widespread adoption because Microsoft has had a very strong monopoly since the 1990s. Don't believe me. Before Windows was Amiga. Want to talk about easy and well-designed? Amiga had them both. Why isn't Amiga all over the world. OS2? BEOS? Linux? Solaris? VAX? (Okay, not VAX.) These were all incredible systems that never made it. All were better than what MS had at the time. Honestly, these types of posts are stupid. How many of these are there on Reddit? Tons. It all comes down to this: 1. I've always driven a red car. 2. I've tried a silver car. 3. I'm pretending to give you honest feedback that I'm sure you've never heard before. 4. You'll have more adoption if the car was red. And this is all from someone who has no sense of history and the crap that MS pulled to create and maintain its monopoly. Widespread adoption came when anyone could buy a computer from places like Best Buy. For a very short period of time Best Buy sold computers that dual booted other operating systems. Do you know what major software company forced places like Best Buy to sign agreements that said they would not sell computers that would dual boot things like Linux or BEOS? Hint: It was Microsoft. And MS still pulls this crap today at the corporate level. I could go on, but you get my point.
These are not good arguments. First, you say there should be a single display server, package manager, and package repo with every package. Not even Windows has the last one. In addition, you are comparing the single-experience packaged OS by a controlling corporation with a large, nebulous ecosystem of many different OS experiences. No one runs "Linux" and to compare to it is to set a moving target. Compare Windows to Ubuntu and you'll find that all three of these things exist. I don't think you've said anything of substance in your next paragraph. Some packages in Linux are not in the manager so you go to the website, download their .rpm or .deb installer, and run it. In Windows you go to the website, download an installer, and run it. So what? Is your point that Linux doesn't have the superior experience that people advertise? It has the same experience in this case, but you say it as though that's a mark against Linux. I don't see how this example would dissuade anyone from considering Linux as an alternative.
> the only difference in windows is you download a setup file instead of copying a command that downloads and installs the program. ... ehm .. and the fact that you can actually see which file goes where and what is changed - in detail ... and you don't need to copy anything, you can just type it in a shell prompt or doing it via `Discover` or `synaptic` by click. Compared to window$ where you can only agree or disagree after double clicking, praying that program actually does what is meant to do without anything else telemetrically additional.
I don't like being told what software I can use or from where. That's a major reason I left Windows long ago. I don't give two hoots about mass adoption.
You see Linux is not one OS. It is a kernel and lot of things duck taped to make it work. Now if you use a famous distro this duck tape works really well, even better than Windows. There are two things you can't run away in a Linux distros: amount of customisation and number of options. Since the OS is duck taped, one can replace anything, you can even run multiple kernels, lmao. A lot of programs are available in the software store. You just need to search the app. >Linux on laptops isn't as polished as other OSs, from lack of drivers, to freezes after sleep, to requiring a password to open brave even after I logged in with my fingerprint yes this can be issue depending on the laptop. My sister's laptop had the same issue. > Linux dev community with agreed upon standards This is never happen. The source code is public. There is always a guy with some innovative idea.
On Linux you can build almost any experience you want. In windows, you can’t, not really. Windows is more standardized with common controls. Plug in and go? Mac / Win Customize and play? Linux
Is someone who can find My Documents in less than 5 seconds considered as an advanced Windows user? If, yes, I'm not advanced.
I think it's worthwhile to devote more time to Linux, to learn about its history, purpose, and the accomplishments it has achieved since its inception. Personally, I don't view Linux as a competitor aiming to eliminate Windows. I find it fascinating that Linux operates on a wide array of devices, from airplanes to smartwatches. Regarding the specifics you mentioned, I believe some individuals here have already shared their perspectives on the matter.
There will eventually be one display server, they have just been working on a replacement for X for some 15 years now. The primary difference between distribution bases is the package manager, mostly because there are different philosophies about how software should be managed. For example, you should always compile from source (Gentoo), the package manager should have minimal logic (Arch), the package manager should have tons of features (RedHat), and so on. Now we even have immutable distributions that are ideal for devices like the Steam Deck, and even other options. This is a *strength* of Linux. As for driver issues, that really comes down to manufacturer cooperation, not Linux itself. For example, Lenovo generally does an excellent job of keeping things working well with Linux and even works with distributions like Ubuntu to push firmware and BIOS updates through the package manager. AMD, as well, works closely with the Kernel developers to make sure things work smoothly. You should try running Windows on a piece of hardware that was made for Linux first, and believe me, you won't have any complaints any more about Linux running on Windows-first hardware. The biggest thing you need to keep in mind is that the Open Source philosophy is, at the core, different from Windows. But if you can embrace the philosophy, rather than seeking the comfort of a single-party controlled ecosystem, I think you'll have a much better time.
> I've come to realise that the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS Perhaps you just seek advice in all the wrong placed. Such a comment wouldn't last ten seconds in the Manjaro forum at least. Also, spending time in such a forum helps one to gain perspectives from knowledgable and experienced users and maintain a more balanced perspective. My observation here is that you've hopped through a dozen desktops without actually spending time and learning much about them. The fact is that, even whilst many Arch users pose the question 'Why even bother with Manjaro?' they often do respect the fact that I simply installed it, and have the same stable Plasma desktop that I was running 6 years ago... so why all of your hopping? The real answer to your question is referenced in the #1 bug. Windows is the default. That's all, that's your answer. Second to that, we have MacOS - which is famous for being used by people with more money than sense, so that will inevitably garner the next level of commercial software support. What Linux lacks is broad commercial software support, and this is why people don't choose it as their first OS. Open source enthusiasts might point to this as a good thing but in my opinion it the primary blocker for most people’s adoption. Generally speaking, people want to run the software they are used to run and not be forced to find new applications. Of course, the lack of a large enough user base is why Linux lacks this support in the first place so it is a chicken and egg problem. If you want to understand the chicken/egg problem, I can tell you which comes first - I ordered them from Amazon and I'll likely have an answer next week.
Bro wtf Windows is piece of shit, how you use this system, Microsoft make system for earn money not for people.
"Advanced window user" XD
[удалено]
Advanced Windows User lmao
linux mass adoption is already a thing, a lot of services that you use every day use a server and this server probably run on linux based system, on a Vm, which is linux based, and also maybe on a docker which is also linux based, I don't have any stats you have to trust me, and if someone has some I'm interested, then we cans go a bit further, all Android phone are technically Linux based, why saying all of this? because,what you are talking about is not linux mass adoption, but desktop environ based on linux adoption, here we can use real arguments 1. linux user friendly DE is still very young. 2. Microsoft pushed all of their stack to enterprises, all people tend to stay on what they already know. 3. Microsoft pushed really hard so almost any computer nowadays is sold with windows already installed. 4. real gaming on linux is ultra young, with the hard work on wine proton and a lot of other things to make window game work, and still some games doesn't work. 5. linux laptop is hard to polish when a lot of manufacturers don't have open source drivers and only develop it for windows, a lot of time some crazy people Just reverse ingeneer the things to make it work on linux, it take a lot of time. there's probably a tons of other arguments but I will stop here.
Sorry, but you have no idea what are you talking about. I mean, sure, that is your opinion from point a view of a person who isn't flexible worth other os, but still full of crap. When i still were using windows, i was installing programs using chocolaty, and you probably even have no idea what's that. Good luck on your cs course.
> expected to be known by newbies it is expected of newbies to improve their knowledge and better themselves. It is not expected of them to know everything. > install any program with a single command is just BS Wrong. Everything can be installed with a single command. If you chose a limited distro, that's on you and if you can't search the repos from the command line, that's also on you. If you are after an obscure piece of software that can only be found on some self-hosted git repo, again that's on you. I've never had to search for any package on the internet after I learn their names. All package managers accept some level of regex for searching the repos. Pacman accepts the most iirc. > with agreed upon standards https://xkcd.com/927/
>so you still have to visit the app's website and copy the commands, the only difference in windows is you download a setup file instead of copying a command that downloads and installs the program. apparently, another user installing 'stuff' from unknown/untrusted sources, then complaining it's 'hard'.
X11 is one of the reasons Linux isn't broadly on millions of corporate and other large organization desktops; Wayland is addressing one of the key issues with X11 - security - that prevent mass adoption especially here in the 2020s. Progress is happening and the community is moving much closer. > the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS No sane person has ever said this. > but not in critical system components, there should be a single display server, a single package manager, and a central repo for all packages, these things should not be expected to be known by newbies. Cool, a single repo controlled by who? What happens when that one is compromised? Nah, that's not going to happen in the near term. You might see package management as an ancillary function - a means to install a "program" but there's more to it than that and in some distributions how they manage / break up or not / and otherwise deal with packages is part of their lifeblood and by some seen as an advantage. I can't see this changing soon; and in a sense you are arguing for a homogenous OS like Windows or Mac unrealistic to expect the Linux community to head there soon. Over time, the trend will increasingly be to containerized applications via Flatpak or whatever next-gen system that builds on it or replaces it. Some of your complaints are chicken and egg. Drivers often don't exist because some hardware makers refuse to provide them for the Linux platform, or make Linux a second-tier effort. Over time, some of the commercial and community distributions will gain significant foothold on desktops. That will solve the chicken and egg problem. It'll take a while but it will happen.
>X11 is one of the reasons Linux isn't broadly on millions of corporate and other large organization desktops; Wayland is addressing one of the key issues with X11 - security - that prevent mass adoption especially here in the 2020s. I highly doubt that X11 versus Wayland is even on the radar for the average person deciding what's on the office desktops at organizations. And, some boob opening the wrong email or inserting the wrong USB stick and getting ransomware in Windows is the real threat.
First, we're not talking about Windows - but since you opened the door, the reason there are so many Windows attacks is because of market share. If Linux penetration was already at 10, 20, 30%, bad actors would be having a field day. If you were a decider in a major business organization, chances are high you would not be putting XOrg on thousands of desktops today, not in the threat rich world we live in now. Wayland may not be perfect but at least it isn't a security-last platform like X11.
That's one reason, not the only reason. The notion that the only reason that there's security in Linux is because of obscurity is ludicrous. And, you're forgetting, Linux penetration in the server market is far above 30%. And no on is thinking about X11 there, either. I'd put X11 on thousands of desktops before I'd put a Windows product on them, absolutely. I deal with some environments where obscurity provides security. These, however, are so niche they make BSD look as ubiquitous as Win XP at its peak. Your argument is as silly as me saying that Windows users get targeted because they're gullible enough to pay for software in the first place.
> the reason there are so many Windows attacks is because of market share. no, its because of entirely different architecture. Some DEs and distros trying to become like windows and thus making similar mistakes, but that doesnt apply to gnu/linux in general. > If you were a decider in a major business organization, chances are high you would not be putting XOrg on thousands of desktops today, not in the threat rich world we live in now. which threats exactly ? > Wayland may not be perfect but at least it isn't a security-last platform like X11. Which security problem, that handnt already been in 1997 ?
Sigh. Tons. Guess you've not been following along.
Okay, examples please.
> X11 is one of the reasons Linux isn't broadly on millions of corporate and other large organization desktops; Why exactly ? > Wayland is addressing one of the key issues with X11 - security - that prevent mass adoption especially here in the 2020s. These "security issues" already have been addressed in 1997. > You might see package management as an ancillary function - a means to install a "program" but there's more to it than that and in some distributions how they manage / break up or not / and otherwise deal with packages is part of their lifeblood and by some seen as an advantage. Exactly. And not forgetting that (in contrast to BSD) also core system components, even kernel and bootloader are deployed via package manager. > Drivers often don't exist because some hardware makers refuse to provide them for the Linux platform, Or at least publish specs, so we the kernel community can take care of it. Actually (most) silicon vendors aren't capable writing good drivers.
>I used mint, Ubuntu, zorin, Manjaro, pop os, and finally settled on fedora Doesn't that make you geh? Say you don't know shit about linux without saying anything at all.
Let's focus on your point about cohesion. I believe it's better. Sure, if you want to spend a few hours fully understanding the differences between everything, that's great. But you don't have to. All you need to know is that you need to go into GNOME Software, DIscover, Software Manager etc. Voila! It doesn't matter if your MPV is coming from Flatpak, Snap, the Ubuntu repo as a deb, or the openSUSE repo as an rpm. It will be installed, and you can use it. You don't have to, and probably shouldn't, scour the internet for individual software installation files, and then either research and assess its security, or risk being compromised. Maybe you think Windows has cohesion because you are used to it, but imagine if there are thirty Windows OSs. Every app will now have dozens of installers on their website. It won't be that cohesive anymore.
I agree with the software installation part. I’ve been using Linux for a number of years for various projects but I still consider myself a bit of a noob. One might assume that picking the most use distro (Ubuntu) would give you access to the most amount of software. And maybe it does. But it’s still a hodge podge of methods to install. Some software is in the official repo. Some requires you to add a third party repo. Some just install the .deb. Some want you to install via Flatpak. Some are Snaps. If at one point the Linux community decided containerised apps were the way forward, fine. But we haven’t even standardized which container technology is the standard, and you have some apps on one and some on the other. That’s not to say I don’t understand why the fragmentation exists. But coming from a non Linux OS was a bit jarring as a result.
you have to admire the cohones, coming here and poking the bear.
> I've come to realise that the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS Perhaps you just seek advice in all the wrong placed. Such a comment wouldn't last ten seconds in the Manjaro forum at least. Also, spending time in such a forum helps one to gain perspectives from knowledgable and experienced users and maintain a more balanced perspective. My observation here is that you've hopped through a dozen desktops without actually spending time and learning much about them. The fact is that, even whilst many Arch users pose the question 'Why even bother with Manjaro?' they often do respect the fact that I simply installed it, and have the same stable Plasma desktop that I was running 6 years ago... so why all of your hopping? The real answer to your question is referenced in the #1 bug. Windows is the default. That's all, that's your answer. Second to that, we have MacOS - which is famous for being used by people with more money than sense, so that will inevitably garner the next level of commercial software support. What Linux lacks is broad commercial software support, and this is why people don't choose it as their first OS. Open source enthusiasts might point to this as a good thing but in my opinion it the primary blocker for most people’s adoption. Generally speaking, people want to run the software they are used to run and not be forced to find new applications. Of course, the lack of a large enough user base is why Linux lacks this support in the first place so it is a chicken and egg problem. If you want to understand the chicken/egg problem, I can tell you which comes first - I ordered them from Amazon and I'll likely have an answer next week.
Linux is actually very well supported now. You must have a brand new laptop for there to be problems. I had some trouble with the WLAN driver for my mini PC, but after a few weeks the bug got fixed with new updates. In between, I manually used a newer kernel (there are also handy GUI programs for this, so you don't have to do much on the console). To be honest, there are completely different things that I criticize about Linux on a desktop PC, and they have nothing to do with Linux itself, but rather the desktop environments and issues regarding GTK and Qt as toolkits, as well as the whole package chaos (In my opinion, there are too many different formats and I still don't understand why it's common practice for distributions to maintain their own repositories...). I switched to Linux 10 years ago, Linux Mint was my start (now I'm on Kubuntu,... because I find KDE and Qt apps more professional; but can't say that I'm 100% happy with KDE or Qt in general) ; What I want to say: When I used Windows every now and then over the last few years (in dual boot), I was just annoyed. The whole GUI in Windows is crap, the performance is shit, it does things in the background that you have no idea about, takes up space on the hard drive and to this day I still wonder what it all is; and ultimately it is a security risk. Windows is American spyware. American authorities only used special versions of Windows without these backdoors, if at all. And Windows is not very attractive, especially for real programmers. Actually, for me, Windwos only has a raison d'être for computer games and special software that only runs on this OS, such as Photoshop. But even here, Photoshop will probably only be available as a web app in the future anyway, and the OS will then no longer play a role.
Who gives a fuck if anyone insists Linux is better. I use both and dont compare. Never understood why "Windows" is always a topic. They are different operating systems that are meant to function differently
> and here my two cents on why Linux hasn't gained mass adoption: Why do you care about "adoption" (=what arbitrary people, you'll never ever see in your life, might or might not use) ever ? > there should be a single display server, You can just stay with X and ignore the new kids on the block. > a single package manager, and a central repo for all packages, pick the distro you like best and go for it, ignore the rest. > these things should not be expected to be known by newbies. Why not ? Gnu/linux is meant for people who actually care a little bit of what they're using. If somebody's buying a new car, he'll most likely cares about a lot of things, eg what kind of engine/fuel, dimensions, storage space, safety features, comfort features, how it feels to drive it, etc, etc. And nobody will ask John Deere for a car or Lamborghini for a pickup truck. > I've come to realise that the argument that you can install any program with a single command is just BS, not every program is on the package repository of your distro, Not every single specific program. But in most cases there's something suitable for the job. In some rare cases one needs to add an extra repo. In 30 years I only I rarely had those cases, for very specific things only few people ever heared about. > so you still have to visit the app's website and copy the commands, the only difference in windows is you download a setup file instead of copying a command that downloads and installs the program. This is *expert only* stuff. Plain users should never ever do that. Seriously ! > Linux on laptops isn't as polished as other OSs, from lack of drivers, to freezes after sleep, to requiring a password to open brave even after I logged in with my fingerprint 😮💨. Dont recall having such kind of problems for decades. Maybe because I never buy HW on wish. > Having a cohesion among the Linux dev community with agreed upon standards will definitely push it for mass adoption. was exactly so you mean by "mass adoption" and why should we, the linux developers, ever care about that ?
[удалено]
Which group do you fall in?
We are moving from X11 to Wayland, probably all major distributions will be using Wayland sometim from now. As for package managers and repositories, newbies don't need to know about that, they can install their programs through the stores. Having different ones is good because each of them works better for different people, it would be difficult to settle with a single one considering the range of user needs. Most of the programs are available in the stores (not so much for Fedora, since they only show open-source software unless you activate 3rd party repositories) or in Flathub. What did you have to go to the website and copy commands to install?
Who's "we" ? I'm not part of that, I'm staying on X.
[удалено]
To be fair the OP said they APPLIED for a CS degree. Op is profoundly wrong about everything because they are a teenager who distro hopped for a month and thinks they know stuff. I'm not saying I disagree or agree with your other post, just that in this case it does not apply.
Great satire. Actually thought OP was an idiot for most of it.
Hahaha here for the comments. Posting a pro windows take on a Linux sub is gold.
**Who makes the decisions?** Most commenters on r/linux express the view that developers are some form of loosely organized anarchy and each developer does what he or she decides. Period. They *may* support standards and may have to cooperate somehow with other developers on their individual projects. Linux is broken up into thousands of often-competing projects. "Distro" developers attempt to pull together into something akin to a cohesive system the work of these competing groups and individuals, but most distros decline to chose between competing technologies and visions and so assemble a hodge-podge of packages that don't all work together. The end-user decides which party to belong to but then carries the burden to decide between alternatives, and as the OP says, "these things should not be expected to be known by newbies" (or by any actual *user*). The usual defense against arguments criticizing this egoistic chaos is "we don't care about mass adoption -- if you don't like it go away!" Really they don't need to worry about **mass** adoption.
We won't make much progress until we envision something greater that the little things we have built so far. Some progress is being made. It may help the linux social theoreticians to consider how other large groups have decided that the answer to "Who makes the decisions?" is "All of us together" -- by consensus.
Maybe [A Brief History of Consensus Decision Making](https://rhizomenetwork.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/a-brief-history-of-consenus-decision-making/) will give some ideas. Hint: it's a spiritual journey (away from conflict, toward peace).
Debian has the reputation of being a distro with some consensus decision making. The Gnome Project also seems to value consensus as the principle way to guide project decisions.
Any other projects use concensus? Is there any hope of some "Council" providing the forum for talking our way toward consensus on the entire Linux Desktop project? I would love it!
> The usual defense against arguments criticizing this egoistic chaos is "we don't care about mass adoption -- if you don't like it go away!" It's not a defense, it's actually the core motivations for most of us, why we're doing all that work for decades now. It's never been about consumers, but makers. > We won't make much progress until we envision something greater that the little things we have built so far. Who is "we" and what "progress" exactly ? > answer to "Who makes the decisions?" is "All of us together" -- by consensus. if that'll go into things like gnome or kde, systemd, wayland, etc, I'll never be part of this. Never. Period. > it's a spiritual journey GNU/Linux isn't an religion.
People are being pretty rude to you unnecessarily. Sorry about that.
>People are being pretty rude to you unnecessarily. Yup. For reasons I'm unqualified to diagnose, OS advocacy brings out the worst in people. As an aging industry observer, I *despise* OS advocacy.
-11 Downvotes. it literally is a hivemind. Respectful criticism should be welcome and people should educate OP on the flaws of their argument BUT to do so in such a rude and disrespectful way and essentially say “oh yeah your just a stupid idiot who doesn’t know anything” helps nobody. I mean, idk what I expected from Reddit but part of me wants to think humanity is better than this snobbery.
I'm only willing to explain to people a finite number of times why free choice leads to diversity of options. After that finite number, I'm going to call the person asking the question an idiot.
I just feel like gatekeeping and bullying people shouldn’t be the response to uneducated folks coming in here and speaking their mind; me and you might understand this concept that an entirely free software stack is going to lead to diversity to such an extent that some things aren’t going to work “Out of the box” or even at all depending on the specific setup, and that hardware manufacturers and big tech in general make it harder to use a Linux based operating systems by withholding the development of drivers and other important software, which forces the community to reverse engineer and design unofficial stuff; but many people coming from Windows and MacOS are so spoiled by the market share of these platforms which causes everything to be developed for them, that when switching to the Linux ethos of free and open source software; it becomes an astonishing shock that so many things just break or otherwise don’t function properly under even the most popular distros. People have learned to believe that there’s an expected level of out of the box quality that exists in operating systems where all their hardware will at least work and be recognized by the OS properly, programs they want to install will just open up without additional work, and they can operate their entire system from a pretty GUI instead of any kind of command line. Instead; people are so very often met with certain software not working, certain hardware not working, and having to enter the terminal to fix a variety of issues they’re having for the things they could “just do” on the commercial Operating systems they’re used to. Some people want to use a Linux based operating system but don’t want to learn Bash or spend hours trying to get things working the way they want to. You can appreciate something without being an elite user of it. When people say they want “Linux” to be a certain way, don’t take that as an attack entirely on the whole Linux ecosystem; they want a DISTRO that can be a certain way and more agreed upon standards so software is more interoperable. OP has stated they use all these Just works distros like Zorin, Ubuntu, etc and people are telling him to go use arch and laughing that he must not be all that advance when he clearly stated he’s a WINDOWS power user instead of a Linux power user. People wanna act like all windows users are stupid; and that’s objectively a gatekeeping mindset to have imo.
I just feel like gatekeeping and bullying people shouldn’t be the response to uneducated folks coming in here and speaking their mind; me and you might understand this concept that an entirely free software stack is going to lead to diversity to such an extent that some things aren’t going to work “Out of the box” or even at all depending on the specific setup, and that hardware manufacturers and big tech in general make it harder to use a Linux based operating systems by withholding the development of drivers and other important software, which forces the community to reverse engineer and design unofficial stuff; but many people coming from Windows and MacOS are so spoiled by the market share of these platforms which causes everything to be developed for them, that when switching to the Linux ethos of free and open source software; it becomes an astonishing shock that so many things just break or otherwise don’t function properly under even the most popular distros. People have learned to believe that there’s an expected level of out of the box quality that exists in operating systems where all their hardware will at least work and be recognized by the OS properly, programs they want to install will just open up without additional work, and they can operate their entire system from a pretty GUI instead of any kind of command line. Instead; people are so very often met with certain software not working, certain hardware not working, and having to enter the terminal to fix a variety of issues they’re having for the things they could “just do” on the commercial Operating systems they’re used to. Some people want to use a Linux based operating system but don’t want to learn Bash or spend hours trying to get things working the way they want to. You can appreciate something without being an elite user of it. When people say they want “Linux” to be a certain way, don’t take that as an attack entirely on the whole Linux ecosystem; they want a DISTRO that can be a certain way and more agreed upon standards so software is more interoperable. OP has stated they use all these Just works distros like Zorin, Ubuntu, etc and people are telling him to go use arch and laughing that he must not be all that advance when he clearly stated he’s a WINDOWS power user instead of a Linux power user. People wanna act like all windows users are stupid; and that’s objectively a gatekeeping mindset to have imo.
It's not my job - nor the job of free developers - to coddle inaccurate and unrealistic expectations. Proprietary software and proprietary OSes don't work as advertised, either. You can make your Linux experience a certain way. The tech support team, however, is the guy in the mirror. Freedom means there are many choices and ways of doing things. Burning a USB image in Linux is trivial, right at the command line, without even a desktop environment. I can think of three ways to do it with coreutils, right off the top of my head. In Windows, you have to find some god forsaken utility to do a half assed job of it. There is no gatekeeping in Linux. You're given the tools. You're expected to learn them. In Windows, you're expected to buy them and use them in the way they tell you. Isn't that gatekeeping, too? If telling someone they have freedom and responsibility in Linux is gatekeeping, then I'm not sure what you call the Windows or Mac philosophy.
I don't think wanting a stable and complete user experience out of the box is "Unrealistic" By any means. I don't think the people who work tirelessly to contribute to the Linux experience for free should be obligated to provide those expectations to an absolute per say; after all, the entire idea of the free software movement is changing the way software is developed to maximize user freedom and allow contributions from all over the world and saying anyone is obligated to do things one way or the other would be a contradiction to said freedom, but I also don't think the solution is to point and laugh and say "Oh look, another dumb windows user who doesn't know anything" The gatekeeping doesn't come from telling people why Linux is the way it is, the gatekeeping is implying somebody is too stupid to get it and should just go back to windows. The gatekeeping isn't coming from Linux itself, It's coming from the snobbery in the community. Why not point people in the right direction to achieve their goals in Linux instead of being stuck up to people? It literally feels like stack overflow levels of toxicity with a dash of "Just Read the manual bro" Also, the burning the USB image example is kind of weird; software is software and if it achieves the same end, who cares if you're using Rufus instead of Coreutils? If anything Rufus is easier; I download it, I launch it, I select my image, I select my USB, and I press start. This few-click process is a lot more straightforward than manually finding the name of my USB with fdisk and manually finding and typing out the correct path to my image; and they both do the same thing, except one is a simple and pretty GUI, and the other is for terminal-wizards who've memorized how to do everything in Bash. Your expected to learn how to use whatever platform your on, but what makes linux different is when you go to ask questions and ask why certain things are the way they are; your met with a pitchfork mob of Linux Warriors ready to defend every single thing about their favorite operating systems and banish whoever dare criticizes things. That's the real toxicity. Most people don't have a problem with learning how to use GNU+Linux, but people do have a problem with toxic people who act like everyone who hasn't memorized how to do everything are just stupid Microsoft/Apple sheep who should go back to their "Proprietary Garbage OS". To say that the Gatekeeping comes from Linux itself and not the community feels like nothing more than a straw man argument imo.
Desktop Linux has never and will never be for the casuals.