As Torvalds pointed out in 2019, is that while some major hardware vendors do sell Linux PCs – Dell, for example, with Ubuntu – none of them make it easy. There are also great specialist Linux PC vendors, such as System76, Germany’s TUXEDO Computers, and the UK-based Star Labs, but they tend to market to people who are already into Linux, not disgruntled Windows users. No, one big reason why Linux hasn’t taken off is that there are no major PC OEMs strongly backing it. To Torvalds, Chromebooks “are the path toward the desktop.”
That’s why we need FreeBSD on the desktop /s
LESS CHOICE!
Choice is only exciting for us techheads. Too much of it actively harms adoption.
For years and years the barrier to entry was mom or gramma buying a clipart CD for $4.99 at the grocery store, bringing it home, and expecting it to work.
Now that’s not a thing anymore, but they still aren’t using it. So I guess the barrier to entry now is they see that ad for the casino app that “pays you real money” and they expect to download it and expect it to work.
Until mom and grandmom can load up the computer with all sorts of malware that breaks everything, they really aren’t interested.
The biggest barrier to Linux is people who don’t know that Windows and Android fucking suck. I can’t wait for PostmarketOS to take off so I can tell Google to suck it. Actually, that reminds me to make a donation.
I truly wish to see the day when any computer can easily run Linux painlessly.
I think the easiest ones I’ve seen are Linux Mint and all the vanilla installs of other mature distros, but I still see cases from time to time with friends and strangers who still somehow manage to get their setups in some issue or another, whether it’s their hardware’s fault or factory defaults / configs getting in the way or their own.
I’m just glad that these are getting much better than ever as time goes on.
I’m being pedantic but friendly would be a more accurate term than mature. An example: Gentoo (or Arch) is very mature but not friendly or “easy”.
Get all my games working and, more importantly, my video editing software. I had the video editing software working, updated the OS, and it broke. This is not something that has happened to me under Windows, as much as I dislike it. I work two jobs and have home maintenance; I don’t have time to sit and troubleshoot and manually tweak things. Solve that and I will be on linux full time.
I’m late to this party but other than the quote in the post and article, I haven’t seen anything about Star Labs. I never heard of them before or if I have, I probably confused them with Star Tech. I looked at their website and everytihng seems pretty legit to me. If anyone sees this and has had any experience with them, I’d love to hear more, good or bad. I’ve been looking into getting a new laptop as my current one is from 2008 and saw they have an AMD one which is rare in the laptop world it seems. I might need to make my own post about this.
Removed by mod
Preface: I am a Linux user
The Linux desktop needs to not require users to dig through config files to enable features that both windows and Mac have working by default. Fingerprint sensors, audio interfaces, broken bootloaders that you have to fix yourself. Requiring people to ever use a command line even once will keep people on Windows as the dominant platform.
Every time I have to look at a Linux forum to figure out why something isn’t working and the answers are run these commands I am instantly reminded that this is the exact thing keeping Windows mainstream.
Driver support still isn’t perfect. Software support as well. Linux needs to ship out of the box running exe files in compatibility layers. Linux needs to adopt executable installers for software packages that can be downloaded on the web. If Linux wants to be the way people use computers, Linux needs to fit the mould that windows has built for the people who have used it for the last 40 years.
Doing anything differently is enough of a deterrent for 90% of computer users. And of those 90%, 75% of them will give up immediately trying to fix anything that doesn’t work and either call someone else or decide it’s broken and do nothing.
Linux is incredibly powerful and I believe it should be the way we run computers, but I get exactly why it isn’t.
We already have windows for that. I know I don’t want linux to be another windows. And if it means people won’t use it, so be it.
I stopped using windows thirty fucking years ago, it’s not going to be forced upon me because some wankers can’t rtfm and think all operating systems are the same. I think those people should just use a tablet.
and the answers are run these commands
This one always gets me. There’s rarely an explanation of what the commands do, and “man $command” is often so obtuse that it takes 10 minutes to figure out what the list of switches and options are doing to make sure it’s not going to download some malware in the background.
Then, you run the commands, and the output is six pages of warnings, debug, and test scripts. You might even notice that some of the tests fail (if you can even follow along), but was it important? Who knows? I guess as long as it works, who cares?
You are completely right.
I do also get why the run these commands is a thing, because it’s usually faster and also is distro / desktop environment agnostic.
Why would someone want to write separate guides for Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon etc. when one or two commands will suffice? But on the flip side, my family and friends will see a scary looking command and immediately be put off.
I feel it’s getting a lot better since more apps are just in the browser or electron apps, there’s way way less to actually configure for most end users. The type of people put off by commands generally won’t go digging through the settings anyway.
I do wish there were a proper GUI for configuring GRUB though. Any that I’ve ever found seemed to fall out of date very quickly.
“But on the flip side, my family and friends will see a scary looking command and immediately be put off.”
More to that… these are exactly the people we have all been telling “If you see someone on the internet telling you ‘type this!’ DON’T DO IT!”
ALT-F4 being the benign one.
rm -rf / --no-preserve-root - not so benign.
I remember a story of someone getting the recursive tag wrong on the chmod command and managed to chmod 000 themselves out of everything on the system… including chmod.
Okay so step one is to take GNOME and throw it into the trash where it belongs, and replace it with KDE which is a complete DE and not a bunch of plugins disguised in a trench coat of bash scripts.
Step two is to recommend a distro that targets both user quality and latest stable kernel releases for the most updated modules (Like Fedora or OpenSUSE)
Linux needs to adopt executable installers for software packages that can be downloaded on the web
Is the wrong problem because that’s what Flatpak accomplishes without creating distro dependency hell. Regressing to .run and .appimage files for everything is why windows updates suck total ass, and it would nuke one of Linux’s most killer features.
Users are already used to an appstore on mobile, I can personally guarantee you that they have no trouble getting accustomed to a desktop app installer, especially since they find it so much easier to search and click install without opening a bunch of websites. Since it shows both package manager and flatpak apps, they don’t even have to be aware of the backend system.
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The only thing holding back linux at this current point in time is honestly just vendors using it standard in consumer hardware. The dependency hell issue was resolved years ago by both huge improvements in package repos and the widespread support of Flatpak. The leftover baggage from X11 has been replaced by Wayland, which finally became viable around end of 2023. Even stuff like pulseaudio has been replaced by pipewire to handle every edge cases scenario.
I would not have said the same thing 2 years ago. The evidence is that the linux desktop user base is growing at an increasing rate. All they need is to hit a critical share (6-7%) for bigger vendors and OEMs to follow.
The good news is, as mentioned, there are a lot of vendors that are starting to do this. Valve’s steam machine by itself could be enough to add another 10 million users if they play their cards right.
My other anecdotal evidence is that I successfully changed several of my friends and family members over to Fedora just last year because I finally found it viable to throw at any former Windows user.
The only dissatisfaction I caused was one “dependent” person who couldn’t play Fortnite (the only game in their library that didn’t work), which I audaciously told it would be possible in 2026 via waydroid/lepton (valve plz dont fail me lol).
I agree, but only until the part you mention how people should install their software. And that’s simply because I don’t think that people should install random .exes or .debs from the internet, because repositories are:
- Easier to find software within: you’ve got a one-stop-shop for all/most of your most important software
- They’re inherently more secure as the software should (emphasis on should) be checked by maintainers or the people who upload software onto them
- Software updates are much easier to enroll, as they are treated as system updates
Yeah I’d say a large percentage of users don’t even know what a repository is, have no idea what a maintainer does, and wouldn’t even refer to their ‘apps’ as software.
You’re asking a lot of of people who don’t give a fuck.
There’s another thing that frustrates me about Linux and its various philosophies. Should I be allowed to do what I want with my software? Or should the machine protect me from myself? It seems at conflict with itself to allow you to do stuff like delete system files without much more than a warning while also having protections in place as you describe. Windows tried doing this exact thing with S Mode and people get pissed about windows not allowing them to do whatever they want.
I fundamentally disagree that users should not be allowed to install whatever they want from wherever they want.
I fundamentally disagree that users should not be allowed to install whatever they want from wherever they want.
You can install whatever dodgy file from wherever you want. I (and many others) don’t think that should be the default
Basically this, it’s why it has worked from that gaming side since just installing steam and running a game is now a painless process thanks to proton.
I feel much of this, especially the installer situation right now.
I’ve setup and maintained a number of Linux servers from scratch, and I’m used to installing / updating / maintaining server software (via bash / SSH), but desktop kills me.
I didn’t think my Windows setup would be that crazy to get working, but VMWare Workstation, and Splashtop have both been killers (and good triple monitor support to some degree). Steam has been 50/50 for games for me, but I’m running an older NVidia card, so that’s probably my issue.
I started with Open Suse, and liked the OS quite well, but could never get past the errors installing and configuring VMWare (I develop in Windows inside a couple of VMWare images, and will for the next decade at least), so fast / stable VMWare support is key to moving off of Windows.
I also couldn’t get Splashtop running: I need remote access to my machine when outside of the house, and to client machines quite often, so need two different apps installed. There’s also no LogMeIn desktop app for Linux, so that becomes very painful (one of our dealers uses LMI instead of Splashtop).
After a week of that, I paved the disk and loaded Kubuntu, figuring that the better support for those packages would help. I did manage to get VMWare and Splashtop Business installed but everything feels unstable, and there have been lots of issues (third monitor is often black, had to disable 3d acceleration in VMWare, Solarr never seems to see my mouse, can’t browse shared NTFS drives), and have to re-sign VMWare modules every time the OS updates.
I’ve been using Windows for decades, largely without any issue, and would like to move, but it’s been problematic enough for me to put the entire thing on pause, knowing that I’m going to have to start all over again and burn several more days trying to get a base setup working.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. What Linux needs is a straight forward setup. Yes Mint is normally super easy to install but can also randomly just not work due to what is often a very simple issue but one obscure enough that the inexperienced (like me) will take hours or even days of trying different solutions until they find it. I love how light linux is but an extra half a gigabyte in the setup to just innately include solutions to the most common issues would pull in way more people than it would push away.
Linux, in my experience, has been way less painful to set up than Windows. It takes like 1/4 of the time, and I don’t end up with half my shit in One Drive because I misclicked.
I’d agree with that when it works. When linux setup works its great, when it doesn’t work getting it working again is obscure as hell, Windows almost always sets up correctly first time but its obscure as hell to not make it be kind of shitty.
I’ve bought several Dell laptops over the last 20 years, the Windows install on them was strangled in it’s crib every time, and it was still miles cheaper than these other vendors.
If anyone needs to have Linux preinstalled on their computer and can’t click through the 3 steps in a typical Linux install nowadays, they probably should use something like a SpeakNSpell instead of a computer.
Plugging in a flash drive and having it just work would be a start. Linux beginners don’t care about the plight with exfat support.
Also, software vendors need to be able to build and target one thing instead of 10 and many other packaging types, built types and test platforms. And people are still arguing, flatpak, appimage, snaps etc. Instead of shit just working well and reliably.
I’ve ran Linux since 10th grade. Now, at work, I use a MacBook. I can get my Dev shit done, I can get my business work done. I can get work done. I want to get my work done and move on with my life.
The way I run Linux nowadays is by having a second laptop for the love of the game.
Now, at work, I use a MacBook. I can get my Dev shit done, I can get my business work done. I can get work done. I want to get my work done and move on with my life.
Quiet, you fool! You’re not allowed to say such heresy around here. You must constantly battle uphill and insist on purity at every turn.
To Torvalds, Chromebooks “are the path toward the desktop.”
Please don’t associate Linux with a close-source proprietary neutered web browser owned by an ad company.
The average Joe doesn’t care.
Exactly. I wouldn’t touch a chromebook with a barge pole. Who wants Google to watch absolutely everything you do?
You won’t, but the average Joe will.
In which case average Joe needs people like us to push back against coercive bullshit so that it doesn’t become entrenched.
Average Joe lives in ignorance and doesnt know enough to care.
and theres also a good chance they don’t care enough to know… until shit hits the fan of course.
I’m lost for what point you’re trying to make, in relation to this topic and article.
heard lenovo has an option for linux on certain thinkpads, im not sure where the lemmy post i saw it in tho, but i know it exists.
