Hacker News Reader

Comment by vectorpush | Hacker News Reader

Nothing killed the Linux desktop. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the fact that the masses only have two options: Windows or Mac. People become set in their ways using a particular system either at home or work and there is basically no reason that they will ever be exposed to a Linux desktop, and if they are, they will find it just as impossible to use as any other OS that isn't the one they've used exclusively for 10 years.

Anecdotally, prior to the ubiquity of tablets, I've observed several computer illiterate relatives thrive on Ubuntu systems (gnome 2 and unity) because they needed a PC and I passed on an older machine with a fresh copy of Ubuntu. My uncle who had never used a PC more than 30 minutes at a time before I gave him an Ubuntu laptop half a decade ago barely uses his 2015 MacBook that my aunt bought him for his 62nd birthday because he is so comfortable with his Ubuntu machine.

View on HN

I always have a laugh when I see these types of articles. Most of the time it's because the author had some sort of driver problem that was not fixed in 2 minutes or such or that a gui item is not exactly how they want.

I've been running linux on the desktop since around 95, and it's certainly not dead for me. Like you I have also installed ubuntu on my mothers and a few computer illiterate friends computers and it works just fine.

The gui might change a bit from time to time, but I'm not too young to learn new things yet :)

But it's DEAD! Dead I say!!

Not really, CS students have usually been exposed to Linux at the university and very few of them still choose it as an operating system.

To start with, CS students are not the masses.

In addition to that, some CS students at some schools are exposed to the linux command line, and even less are exposed to linux desktop environments because most CS students have grown up using Windows or Mac and the curriculum is nearly always structured in such a way that it is unnecessary for the student to install a linux DE in order to do their work.

Finally, I'm not willing to blindly accept your claim that "very few of them still choose it", if you have some way to substantiate that claim I'd be interested in the details, but my experience says quite a few of them do choose it, though I'd certainly be willing to yield my anecdotes to some actual data.

For what it's worth, I have a counter anecdote. I go to a university where for some computer science courses, your labs are on computers with a Linux desktop environment. Other students seem to do fine in these labs. Even so, when I look around the classroom during lectures, almost all the open laptops are Windows or Mac. Perhaps these students don't get enough exposure over the couple of courses or don't get shown enough of the reasons to switch to Linux.

When I went to the university we had UNIX everywhere, not GNU/Linux, that started to be common around my 2nd - 3rd year.

We were using DG/UX and Aix before the department started adopting GNU/Linux on their recently build new department building.

Windows systems were only used for graphics programming classes and for the first year students introductory courses.

Back then our degrees were 5 years long, of daily using UNIX for project assignments, everyone had some form of fvwm, afterstep, windowmaker, enlightment, blackbox, GNOME, KDE, CDE configured as their environment of choice.

The majority of us, a few decades later, are mostly coding on Windows and Mac OS X systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com