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Nicbudd @beehaw.org

Why don't more people use desktop Linux? I have a theory you might not 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.

189 comments

  • Because Windows or iOS is already loaded when they buy the machine.

    • This is the only answer, and anybody who doesn't agree just doesn't understand users. They just use whatever you give them.

      • .. and by implication, it guarantees that Linux will (almost definitely) never be the world's desktop. Mainly because there's no one single company to blackmail.

  • This has been discussed many times before. Personally, I think that there is an inherent contridiction between the FOSS ethos and mass appeal.

    The way things get adopted en masse is by having limited options and limited changes.

    This is why most extremely popular software grows stagnant. The company/group that puts it out doesn't want to alienate its user base. Think Ebay, Facebook, ios, etc.

    Users get pissed off if their software changes in any significant way. Most people don't care about choice or freedom. They just want to grab a device and have it turn on and do what they tell it.

    Look at cell phones. Back in the early 00's when they started to become common for everybody, think about all the weird and wacky designs you saw. Neon, chrome, bizzare form factors, gimmicks, etc. The paradise of consumer choice. So many brands and styles to choose from. I remember going to high school and seeing all the different kinds of phones that everybody had.

    Now days, every phone is a black/grey glass slab. The most drastic differences between them are what shape the bezels are and how the camera lenses are oriented on the back.

    Consumers in general don't care about choice. They are fine choosing between an Apple glass slab or an Android glass slab. This point is proven even more strongly by gen Z, who apparently don't even care about the few "choices" that Android provides, over 80% of US teens use iphones. Of iphone users, over 30% are gen z, of Android, barely over 10%, three times less

    Linux and FOSS in general is all about choice, options, rejecting vendor lock, forking projects and carving out niches for sub-groups of users. A fork for devs, a fork for security concerned folks, a fork for people that liked the way the software looked 10 years ago, a fork for people that don't agree with the political views of the original devs, etc etc.

    I don't have a problem with that, personally I love it. The extreme consumer freedom and ability to customize is a huge reasons I love FOSS software. But I also recognize that it means we won't ever be mainstream. Or at the least, if we become mainstream, it will likely be at the cost of much of that freedom.

    I am happy with a few percent market share. I don't need more than that to feel like we are successful. As long as Capitalism is the default system in this world, it will always reward products that generate the most profit, and that will never reward freedom or consumer rights long term.

    We ought to inform others as much as we can on an individual basis, friends, family etc. Use FOSS, contribute money, code, documentation, tutorials, and user support. Fight the power and stand against the corpos. Our fight should not be based in the goal of becoming "mainstream," it should be based in the principles of freedom, empowerment, and inclusion.

    • I think people also grossly underestimate how much of an affect million dollar advertising budgets have. Apple spends a mint on their advertising, appealing to younger folk and making their products seem cool and fashionable.

      A lot of people won't care about choice when there's a very limited choice of products being advertised as "must-have".

      Linux does not have a million dollar advertising budget, it doesn't have huge advertising companies creating slick ad campaigns, it doesn't have restricted choice and railroading people into false ideas of what's necessary. And it doesn't come preinstalled on a majority of devices.

  • I think the reason is that 1. Linux is still too hard for the average person and 2. The average person just doesn't care

    Yes, you don't have to write bash scripts or compile the kernel yourself, but still, Linux is different in many ways from Windows. This is on top of the fact that most people don't know much about tech in general and often have problems with (imo) very basic stuff. I honestly can't imagine them downloading an ISO file, flashing it onto an USB stick and then booting from it. Most people probably don't even know that Windows != PC

    Then there's also the fact that the average person just doesn't care. They just want to get things done

    (sidenote: I might sound elitist but I'm not. I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to be interested in tech, just like it's not reasonable to, for example, expect everyone to be interested in cars. It just so happens that the tech industry is tightly connected to freedom, privacy, etc. while the car industry is not)

  • “When someone comes to me asking how to get into Linux, they do not need to hear a laundry list of distributions to choose from. When they ask, I don't want to have to say, something akin to, "You could try Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary OS, Zorin OS, or Ubuntu Budgie."”

    Ok, so what if I need a car? People will give me a laundry list of car brands to choose from, so I don’t really see that as a valid point. What if I want to buy a pair of shoes? Is there another laundry list? Yes there is.

    Just pick something popular, and try it out. If you don’t like it, you’ll have a better idea of the features you want or don’t want in the future.

  • I literally don't think the plethora of choices has anything to do with why Linux is not installed by the masses. The only reason is that Microsoft and Apple are huge market forces with the ability to advertise, make deals with other business partners, pre-install their operating systems onto hardware that's sold, operate technical support services, and so on. They have completely flooded the market with their stuff.

    Linux has these things, too, but nowhere in scale or scope, and with relative industry latecomers to sell it. If Linux were created 10-12 years sooner and companies like Suse, RH, Canonical, System76 were all formed earlier than they were I think we'd see a healthy amount of Linux out in the world, with maybe a few percent higher market share (which would be extremely massive).

    Keep in mind that Apple, as a company, rebuilt itself truly not on the technical excellence of Macintosh, but by driving sales of iPods then iPhones.

    • Apple's success came from Microsoft's negligence. Too many people had Windows XP computers at home wrecked with toolbars and spyware and garbage.

      And people gladly left for a walled garden platform that locked down everything and didn't require them to administer their own systems.

      The biggest success in the Linux world has been Chromebooks and Android, where Google administers the system for the user.

      Most people don't choose linux because they can't administer their own system. A system that lets them administer however they want has no appeal to them. They instinctively know they can't handle that responsibility. They need their hands held.

    • Even if all of the operating systems were playing on a fair & ideal field, I do not think Linux would come out as the clear winner.

      The Linux ecosystem is stakeholder owned. That is to say that design decisions are made by experienced users for experienced users. Whenever an ergonomic tradeoff exists between ease of use and expressiveness, ease of use loses. New users sense this and feel implicitly unwelcome. It's the original sin of open source software as a whole, really.

      I don't necessarily take this state of affairs as a bad thing, but it does lead me to think that the dominant OS software will always be a commercial product of some variety. It doesn't necessarily need to be a proprietary greed-fest like Windows, but at the very least the top-level stakeholders of that specific project need to be directly motivated by user adoption. AOSP (aka: Android) would be a decent example of something like this working in the wild for an open source project (Google attempting to claw back control notwithstanding).

      • I have a theory that I haven't explored yet. My mom is not a computer user. She barely knows how to use one, so she doesn't have knowledge of the MS Windows or MacOS approach of using computers. I suspect if I gave her a laptop with Ubuntu on it and showed her the ropes of how to use it she'd get along very fine. I think she would be able to navigate the UI and never need more technical knowledge than remembering her computer's password.

        Now, before anyone goes and accuses me of being a bad son for leaving my mom in the technological dark, I just want to say she gets by pretty happily with the iPad I got for her, which has an even more foolproof interface than any traditional desktop OS.

  • The issue isn’t an official Linux distribution, per se (and note: Canonical have wanted to be that for years with their Ubuntu).

    The issue is that laptop and desktop retail machines come with Windows. And until that changes, Linux on the desktop will never see more traction.

    There is probably only one real way this comes to fruition: a company, like Apple, that engineers their own hardware with full stack integration to their own Linux distribution — and the hardware has to be aesthetically pleasing, reasonably priced (unlike Apple), and with in-person support (a la Apple Store).

    The closest to that we have, at least in the United States, is System76. But they do not engineer their systems. They basically cobble together all the parts that are known to work with the Linux kernel, toss them into an outsourced chassis, and sell them at what I would consider somewhat bloated prices.

    That being said, I love what System 76 is doing with Pop!_OS, but the name sucks, the software versions will always be lagging behind unless using snap and/or flatpak, gaming on Linux is still an uphill battle despite Proton’s strides, and at the end of the day, the user will actually have to do something at some point on the command line.

    What Linux desktop users need to embrace is that it is okay to not be the primary desktop operating system of the world. It is okay that it is relegated to geek enthusiasts, developers, and the like.

    There really is nothing wrong with that.

  • As others have said, most people don't install operating systems. They just buy a system, likely a laptop and run whatever OS is on it. Hardly any laptops come with Linux preinstalled unless you look pretty hard, or are searching specifically for one.

  • I am going to bring it up a level. I don’t really agree with the surface level analysis of ZDNET.

    It’s all a bit janky. The jank is really reduced BUT it is there. There are two flavors: distro jank and app jank. And the reason it’s janky is because the maintainers want it that way.

    We should applaud the dedication of companies and people to relentlessly improve. Things are as great as they have ever been. This stuff is hard and Linux does make some things really really simple.

    But
go to any distro support site, and you will see the usual things. Why does the secondary monitor not turn on. Why did audio stop working, laptop won’t wake. Etc etc. the solutions are better and better, but unique hw cfgs causing distros jank is one hill to climb.

    The other are the apps. Again, I am glad they are there. And they are better than ever.

    However, sometimes app workflow causes a great app to feel janky. It’s like “good enough” is all the love they get.

    Finally, the open source community can be a removed to work with. Anyone who has ever submitted a patch knows that some projects and tools are 
 interesting.

    It’s like
thank you for your time, but your patch to eliminate jank is rejected because 
 ego.

    Not all open source repos are like this. But more are than you’d think. Different ideas are not always welcome, even if end users would appreciate those very same ideas.

    And the repos with a more open mind? No surprise that their results are more usable.

  • Most people view computers as an appliance to get what they want, like a toaster. They never think to install a different OS, if they even know how to do so or that Linux exists in the first place. Windows comes installed out of the box for every computer not made by Apple for the most part. My boomers aren't dependent on any Windows-specific software as their use-case is just a Facebook machine, so I put them on Fedora with GNOME and there hasn't been a single problem in years. They can even handle installing and updating software with the software center that GNOME provides. They were actually interested in trying something else because even the tech illiterate can see that Windows sucks now. All I had to do was pick the distro and DE and then install it for them. The distro could just as easily be Debian, or Ubuntu, or possibly even Arch. The DE just needs to be absolutely braindead so they can't hurt themselves by accident. Yeah, some use-cases require that people use Windows-specific software, but there's also a lot of Facebook machines that could just as easily be running Linux if the computers at the store shipped with it; Chromebooks are an example of this. And honestly, even the OS-specific software thing is becoming less of a problem as more stuff moves to the browser.

  • He's wrong.

    I use Windows because I have Windows software I need to use, whether for work or gaming, and I just want that shit to work with zero effort on my part.

  • The bigger problem is that there's often no one willing to show you how to use it. I had a friend who managed to picked it up himself, and when I asked him to show me the ropes all I got out of him was "just Google it". Now, of course that's how you figure all sorts of things out and an essential skill in itself, but first you need to know what to search for, and if you're just starting out you're probably not going to know what that is - or you'll have more abstract but simple problems like figuring out issues with syntax in the terminal. That kind of thing is really easy for another person who knows to say "no, it's like this, because of that" but can be very difficult for a person to figure out on their own.

    Quite often it seems like people have gone through these trials themselves, but then rather than making it easier for other people and helping them they leave them to face the same challenges all over again from scratch. This is very frustrating, when you know there's an answer that someone could just give you but it's not apparent to you, which leads to people throwing in the towel.

    • When you're saying it, it's actually striking how many Linux users are self taught.

      Then again, all my friends the last ten years have known there's a standing offer for me to install Linux for them and teach them how to use it. Some have in occasionally, especially when their windows computers grew unusable, but generally they'll use it and be happy with it and then revert back to windows when they eventually buy a new computer and it comes preinstalled.

      The exception is my dad, who now actively asks me to install Ubuntu for him whenever he has a new computer. He never asked me to install it on the first place though - I just accidentally broke Windows while trying to set up a dual boot on the home computer back in my early teenage years.

      • Your dad asks you because he likes Ubuntu and loves you. This is a good thing, thanks for sharing.

  • If I could only count the number of articles that have made this argument before. Ugh. Nothing new to see here.

  • I don't even think the CLI stuff and so on is an issue. The main reason people don't use Linux is because it's simply not pre-installed everywhere as Windows is. The same reason many people use Edge on Windows and don't install Firefox etc. The average user just uses it as it is and doesn't tinker around.

    Installed Linux on my grandmother's computer some years ago and she was working with it fine because it was the first time of her using a computer and she learned it that way. For she Linux was was for other people Windows is. She didn't had any issues installing software via apt etc. after getting it explained and teached a few times.

    But a user who just uses a system as it is and who is used to Windows will always dislike Linux. I dislike Windows because I find it complicated in many parts. I used Linux and sometimes MacOS for my whole life besides Windows Vista as a child.

  • Mostly because not all games work on Linux. Also so far I haven't found one with a good update policy. It's either bleeding edge or an update a year.

  • Argument: lack of a representative Linux distribution on Desktop setups.

    " Also: Want to save your aging computer? Try these 5 Linux distributions "

  • If you buy a brand new computer, virtually all of them come with Windows or Mac pre installed. For the overwhelming majority of users, they are satisfied with either of these options, and can do everything that they want to do with a computer on these operating systems. The overwhelming majority of users aren't willing to go through the effort of mounting a Linux distro onto a USB, navigating through the BIOS to launch the OS' installer, partitioning their drive to avoid deleting all of their data accidentally, reinstalling and setting up all of their programs again, and learning how to use an entirely new operating system just because "Linux is free, FOSS, and gives you more freedom". The only times Linux has seen widespread adoption is when it comes bundled with specific hardware already, such as with the Steam Deck or Chromebooks

  • Even for someone like me who prefers linux I still end up using windows most of the time. Even with 90% of games working on linux, theres that 10% I still need to boot up windows for.

189 comments