There might be a very simple explanation for why the masses have yet to adopt Linux as their desktop operating system and it's one the open-source community won't like.
I'm curious to hear thoughts on this. I agree for the most part, I just wish people would see the benefit of choice and be brave enough to try it out.
This ignores a bunch of stuff. Also when a lot of non Linux people think Linux the first distro that comes to mind is Ubuntu so there you go, you have your pr distro. Linux in my experience is not easy at all to use. There people that have been on the platform exclusively for 10+ years really don't understand the modern windows experience. In the 15 years I've been using windows I've only had to use the command line for rather niche things. Winget is a nice curiosity not a necessity like apt or pacman. In windows shit just works. And 99 percent of the time it doesn't it's as easy as right clicking and selecting windows 7 as a compatibility option, and non tech users call you a wizard for knowing how to do that. They get scared when they see a command prompt and I understand it I was like that at one point.
Also everyone is used to using windows. We use it on our schools, we use it on our works, we use it in our libraries. It's what people know and people are reluctant to swap because why learn something new that's considerably harder, when what you already have just works. Almost every computer comes with windows pre-installed. For people it's just plug and play no need to worry about anything. And I belive this is the greatest problem. If there were more devices with Linux out of the box, if school and colleges used Linux instead of windows we would see a dramatic increase in the number of users. But this is going to piss off Microsoft the moment that feel it might injure their bottom line. They want Linux in a leash, a project they can steal from for their own platform, just like github. That's why they donate so much money to the project and the moment they feel threatened they will stop donations, pay politicians to stop any change and sue people for whatever bullshit reason they come up with
I'm interested by the fact that we have very different experiences with Linux. I switched from Windows to Kubuntu when I was starting out and I found it pretty easy to learn, aside from a few new concepts that were just different. Aside from programs that just didn't work because they didn't have Linux versions, I had vastly less problems running Linux than Windows on my PC.
I fully left Windows because things didn’t just work and in my experience they did on Linux.
I don’t find CLI more necessary in Linux than Windows, if I used my package manager GUI then I’d use CLI more in Windows than in Linux
I feel that Linux is better for the average person because their use case is opening a web browser. Viruses and tech support scammers will be less likely to hit them