Oh Dell, Windows and Qualcomm. I’d rather cut my hands off and shove the bloody stumps in a bag of salt. Have had nothing but trouble with all of them over the years.
What did Qualcomm think when they signed a monopoly deal with Microsoft? That they will benefit from this legally questionable action? Microsoft exploited hardware manufactures to spread their bad software in the 90ies and only Microsoft did win.
Ship it with Linux and target an initial a small but welcoming market. If you want just a cheap device with ARM for browsing only, Chromebook (next monopoly by Google…).
instead of the OS with majority of market share and giant userbase
90s are over, it is time to move on and stop EEEing everywhere
The manufacturers are always the key. What ships pre-installed and/or runs well after setup matters. Thats why ThinkPads run so well with Linux. ThinkPads are certified for Linux or even ship readily with Fedora or Ubuntu.
That I’m using Arch and using mostly the TTY isn’t an issue. It doesn’t matter that the next user prefers GNOME and Fedora. Because we’ve settled for compatibility and not incompatibility through Windows or MacOS. The rest is just our personal choice. How cares if we run SysVInit or Systemd? Only the user.
PS: Applies also to Dells Developer Edition Laptops.
...I have no faith.
You don't need faith, you just need to look around: It's already shining!
Support for Linux in consumer software applications and devices has improved a huge amount over just the past few years. Using a Linux desktop in 2024 is not a second class experience at all anymore.
Sure the userbase is still quite small relative to Windows and MacOS, but in absolute numbers it's still a huge population of users, and it's also growing very fast. That combined with the fact that supporting Linux is typically quite easy means that more and more vendors are supporting it, which is creating a positive feedback loop by enticing more users.
No need for pessimism here.
I'm avoiding Wayland and whatever rewrite of gnome/kde is underway. Not to mention snaps are noxious and counterintuitive to user applications. At least flatpaks are easily jail broken / repermissioned with flat seal easily.
Upgrading breaks way too often. At least the 32/64 bit migration has occurred. About 80% of the time I've simply needed to reinstall the OS on major upgrades.
The killer app of Linux desktop migration, WINE, is still a crap shoot, although I use it for a lot of retro gaming, but even WinRAR or other common utils are hit and miss.
Hardware support (amd integrated graphics especially) drags.
Portables still are worse at powermgmt last I checked.
A lot of this is only marginally better (or for the rewrites, actually worse, and snaps are worse) over the last decade as ms shot itself in the foot.
[1] https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/54920/Dell-320LX/
Second only on the chart of “companies to never buy from” to HP.
There's no reasonable explanation aside from planned obsolescence.