As a former gnu/linux user, I see no point to have it on a desktop. Gnu is happy to live under c:/MSYS2, and ‘linux’ part was never good at desktop-home hardware anyway. These 1.77% are barely justified as an option, imo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656533 and marked it off-topic.
As for 1.77% (excluding ChromeOS and Android based desktop apps, of course), I'm going to guess those people are more significant in terms of software development and user advocacy, on their own and in networks, than the bulk of users. Certainly constantly compromising and taking the enclosed garden path has its drawbacks for the larger community.
My story is freebsd 4.x-7.0, then debian (codenames I forgot), then OSX 10.5-10.9, then unbuntu/mint since ~ 2014-2016 maybe (when gpu and os updates broke it again). I also supervised an entire office of debian/ubuntu + printers & scanners for few years. I’m not what you would call a regular linux hater, and it has it’s own unquestioned throne at the server side.
But struggling with the drivers, laptop battery health, suspend issues, lack of business software, configuration, etc etc etc is too much for a regular user who wants things to be done. I was trying to create a scalable solution of win->linux transition for small offices at our company, and it failed. I was converting simple (non-gaming) home users to linux, and it failed most of the times.
I’m not even going into partition and breaking changes in DE teams here, which are de-facto your walled garden version of corp, inc.
>constantly compromising and taking the enclosed garden path has its drawbacks for the larger community
This I am not doing though. I’m using all the software you’re using, including bash, ls, soffice, gcc, etc. I’m all gnu, all unixway, but just not linux kernel & DE and that only on a desktop.
>those people are more significant in terms of software development and user advocacy
But I am one of them, except probably 20x of average experience and real advocacy attempts.
I want to switch but every time I kick the tires I'm baffled at how quickly it blows up.
One couldn't launch any games because one day out of the blue Windows installed a second graphics driver alongside their first one for no discernible reason. One out of the box couldn't connect any external monitors or get any signal from its HDMI port. One had its audio stop working, and I never found out what the problem was -- for all I know, it still doesn't work. Just the other day I was updating a laptop at work and discovered that every 3 minutes the mouse drivers would just stop working for 1 minute. When I upgraded a Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10, I ended up with 2 OneDrive folders and half of my documents permanently deleted. Then I had to download a 3rd-party firmware driver that was only rated for Windows 8 and wasn't linked anywhere from Microsoft's site to do touchscreen calibration again on the Surface device that Microsoft built.
Which, OK, I'm not going to pretend I haven't seen weird stuff happen on Linux. But these are officially supported devices that only have one job -- to work with Windows. And people run into these problems, go on to 4 year old abandoned Microsoft forums that tell them to start messing with their registries or randomly installing drivers, and then turn around and tell me that they can't use Linux because AskUbuntu isn't "real" support.
All of this is anecdote of course, but at the end of the day I make decisions based on which platforms by my experience cause me the most trouble. Linux causes me less trouble than Windows.
That doesn't mean everything is perfect, or even good. I'll complain about HDPI scaling, touchscreen support, and security all day. There's some real stuff to improve.
But, I also take that criticism with a bit of perspective, and the truth is that Desktop Linux overall is really good, and it makes me more productive, and it makes my life better, and the overall direction that the desktop is moving is positive. There are things that Linux does better than any other modern OS, and I find that using it as a daily drive is un-complicatedly, un-idoiologically, purely-practically nice.
It wasn't nice in the past. When I was growing up, using Linux required pretty substantial sacrifices. I don't have the same reservations recommending something Ubuntu or Manjaro now that I used to have.
Even on the nontechnical side, if I'm going to provide computer support for someone, I usually stick them on Linux, because I have more control to simplify their environment and it's easier for me to quickly solve their problems. It's really good, I appreciate all the hard work that's gone into getting it here, and I'm optimistic about its future.
It's actually 25.6% for developers (Firefox Replay is a developer tool after all) according to the StackOverflow survey: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...
Except, of course, software freedom.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...
Windows 47.5%
MacOS 26.8%
Linux-based 25.6%
BSD 0.1%
2% of yahoos and nobodies run Linux on the desktop 1 in 4 developers do.
Linux like Mac has never had and will never have perfect support for all hardware. Much like you can buy a Mac from the store you can buy a well supported system that comes with Linux.
Unlike Mac you can install it on a lot of systems and go.