As much as I like Linux, tides won’t be shifting for desktop to Linux. It will be Microsoft Windows for years to come
I've maintained an in-house distro for a couple years so I know the ins and outs of systemd, dbus, polkit, xorg and whatever crap is needed to run a desktop session, and how to track down what's broken if the system misbehaves in some way. So switching every machine I use to Linux wasn't really an extra burden. Ironically it made me switch to i3 as my WM and ditching a file manager, gvfs and other moving parts. I'm doing a lot of things in the terminal. I loathe complicated setups - less moving parts, less things that can break. But I'm fully aware that I'm a complete oddball here, and I don't think nor care whether the day of the Linux desktop will ever come. Unless maybe we're at a point where really absolutely everything runs in the cloud and people only need a browser. But at that point just get a Chromebook?
I think an easily discoverable UI for non-technical people is not a problem that many technical communities have. Anyone who does try to start that project is signing themselves up for a lot of complaints from outside the project, almost by definition. I don’t really see why anyone would do it.
The Chromebook is probably the right way to go. I’d recommend them to my non-technical friends if they weren’t designed by an ad company. As it is, I have no idea, there legitimately doesn’t seem to be a good desktop OS for non-technical users anymore.
The final few nails of Microsoft's coffin are being nailed as we speak. Not only because they are just fundamentally bad at innovation, but because they also sold out the United States to China. Billy boy is scared, and he should be.
But it seems that convincing the network guys at work is harder than convincing a retiree. Apparently it's easier to administer a Windows network than a Linux one.
Not really. I suspect that there's a fallacy similar to the one in <https://thedailywtf.com/articles/an-obvious-requirement> going on. (The most relevant comment: 'Ah, so the user is using "obvious" to mean "familiar."').
I think the big middle of the population that's the problem, people who are tech literate enough to do some things, but not willing to relearn the wheel. They can use microsoft office, but don't want to have to relearn a new file structure. Those are the people who probably will have the biggest issue, and there's a lot of them. That's office workers, computer gamers, all those people. Even the pretty tech literate people who know how to do things in Windows but don't care to relearn it all in Linux.
I think I fall in the case of tech literate people who know how to do things in Linux but don't care to relearn it all in Windows.
So I guess it's true for the opposite too ahah
Most other open source projects have people behind them who don't put UX first, and who are suspicious, jealous, or plain disagree when people want to help with UX.
This shouldn't be too surprising in a world led by people who value technical excellence most.
I mean there is even a playstore-like "app" to install softwares
I really don’t get this. All modern desktop environment (OSX, Windows, KDE, Gnome) looks like very similar in terms of user experience quality to me. All are different, true, which is why I can understand will exists. But I will very hard pressed to justify "actually, x is better than y" (yet alone "light years away"), for any pair (x, y).
Can you name just three deal-breakers, things so huge that they deserve that "light years away" judgement ?
I find Windows to be an unholy confusing mess these days. Want to set the microphone sound level; go to sound settings - nope, not there. Probably in some other legacy control panel I guess.
By contrast, most things I need to configure in Linux are in a single place. File copying is much faster than Windows. Updates don't prevent me from working and require multiple reboots. It crashes less often.
Anyway, a lot is probably just what you're used to. I'm sure I excuse many Linux failings because it doesn't bother me and I know how to work around it.
Also managed to get hold of one of the last Asus netbooks (1215 B), that after all these years has finally given the ghost.
Netbooks are now replaced by Chromebooks/Android systems that care about a full stack developer experience where the underlying Linux is a kind of implementation detail, Windows ships WSL (no need for VMWare/Virtual Box), and those that want UNIX proper have macOS.
If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness... Too bad Google's product managers are just busy trying to advance their own careers, plus it's not like they respect users...
Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system (not one that's given away for free) that isn't Windows or MacOS again in the next 30 years?
Because Linux is free, and Windows is ubiquitous, and because you need a lot of hardware support and support for existing applications to be see usage, it seems hard for any new company to break into the market with something genuinely new.
It seems like the way things are now are how they'll be for a long time. We'll just always use Linux, MacOS, or Windows, with superficial changes, I suppose. Or a BSD.
Nope, no one is willing to put up the money for a long term investment.
If I had the billions, I'd fund an easily installable OS that can accept Windows hardware drivers (easier said than done...). Or the cheaper way would probably to fund a slick Linux distro that an average user isn't scared away, but I guess they already are slick enough nowadays?
I installed a Manjaro KDE distro on a secondary PC a while ago, and on login it had the option of X11 or Wayland, but Wayland wouldn't work on my setup... Sigh, the average user doesn't care to learn about windowing system options, they just want to do their work.