Why don't more people use Linux?

My brother, the least technical person ever, got tired of windows patches breaking his drivers, which he had to reinstall every time. So, he switched over to Linux by buying a Dell desktop with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed and supported by them.

After some questions about which apps to do the usual things, like mail, managing photos etc, I haven't had a query on this for years.

I would argue that Ubuntu is almost there on par (and in my view superior) experience with Windows. Windows just comes preinstalled on most PCs sold and most people don't know/want to install an OS on their new machines.

Linux is great, but it's FOSS.

Windows and MacOS are developed with the broadest spectrum of users in mind, trying to cater to the biggest group.

FOSS is developed by random people and companies, adding features and fixes that scratch their particular itch. If that change makes someone else itch, that's someone else's problem. It only caters to the particular individual who develops it.

Linux can be made excellent (thinking about it, I'm about to become a linux greybeard myself in a day or two...), but it takes blood, sweat, and tears.

I've used Linux for many years in my work environment but rarely at home. I recently installed Mint on a 15+ year old Dell. It is our only device with a DVD and this week my wife asked if I could rip an old home movie DVD. I googled a DVD ripper for Linux. I found Handbrake and with the Minute software manager application it installed seamlessly. I ran the software, stuck the DVD and within 30 minutes, the 2 hour movie had been saved to an mp4 file. Very impressed!!

But they do without realizing it. Android and Chromebooks are Linux under the hood. Virtually everything you access on the internet is powered by Linux.

My primary reason for using Unix at home was my aspiration to a career in IT. (Secondary reasons: I was a stone cold rebel, loathed Microsoft and Windows, and I idolized figures such as Dennis Ritchie and Richard Stallman.) From my college days and first few jobs, I could see that any employer I'd be interested in, would care about my Unix skills, particularly on workstations such as Sun, HP, DEC, etc.

To that end, I strove to run Unix of all kinds at home. I began with Minix--yes, on a 286-based IBM PS/2! It was little more than a toy and it barely did anything. Definitely there was no graphical interface, or any networking. But, I could definitely say that my PC did not run DOS or Windows, and there was my "homelab" beginning.

I migrated to various types of BSD, and I experimented with some vintage hardware. I expanded the home lab with heterogenous machines running various synergistic network services. I documented everything and it was all humming along nicely in 1998, even when I only had 256Kbps DSL to the Internet.

Fast-forward to 2020, I was hired in the education industry, and I'm certified in Linux and other IT skills, and I got to exercise a lot of those chops in the classroom. So guess what I've done? I no longer run Linux or Unix on anything at home. I run 100% consumer devices with stock Windows, Android, ChromeOS. There's simply no reason for me to run Unix here. There is no home lab goal. I tinkered with AWS and other cloud services, but there was also no real advancement there.

What I need now at home is devices that are dependable, reliable, and diagnosable. I don't need to call my ISP or app support and go "well, I'm running Haiku and BeOS and Plan 9..." but I just need some production systems that will run my household.

Because I do run a household on my devices. I do banking and health care and taxes, and I need bills to be paid on time, and paperwork to fill out. Using Linux simply complicates those things and makes me into a snowflake.

Linux is fine for the enterprise, it's fine for my employers, but for me personally, it was getting in the way.

Like a lot of people, I got fed up of the tech calls from relatives.

I put mother on Mint years ago. An old Toshiba laptop which she uses to read papers and play mahjongg. It ended up developing a hardware fault so I donated an iMac my SO no longer had a use for. Putting Mint on it was just a small mess around. Copied her home directory over, installed a short list of forced installed programs, and she was happy again.

Same story with my uncle. Tried to get my sister on Linux but her rotten employer insists on Windows software, and she is so untechnical that she stamps her feet at trying to use alternatives. She got a ThinkPad and a warning that "I do not use Windows, so you're on your own".

I had the honour of attending my (ex) step son's graduation a few years ago. Computer related degree, with honours and colours, very sharp young man. He thanked me for building him his first computer and attributed the degree to me putting Windows on it for his Lego games, but also dual boot Linux. I never pressured him to boot into Linux, but that horse wandered over and drunk deeply at some point. I told him it wasn't me; I just gave him a tool, and he decided to learn how to use it.

Linux has been my primary OS for a very long time. Every story on here or Slashdot where something terrible happens to it, or they try to put adverts in, program shops, take away more advanced functionality, make it harder to use, lock off settings people use; I just silently thank Linus for devoting his life and stress levels to giving us a very viable alternative.

That's not to say I haven't pulled my hair out at times. Kernel patches, out of tree modules, scripting, compatibility with MSFT formats, forks of major projects, drivers which all of a sudden require a version downgrade to carry on working (currently wpa_supplicant on Arch is in my IgnorePkg section on a MacBook Pro) and other annoyances are the reasons I sympathise with the people who say it's too hard to use and takes too long to make work on their setup.

Canonical did the world a favour I didn't think would turn out so well; it got a lot of noobs asking questions (obvious or otherwise) to fill the Interwebs with answers which make it a lot easier than the old days to fix an issue you find.

The year of Linux on the desktop is maybe going to happen, maybe not. But the number of people who have tried it, or even heard of it is growing. Working with the public for decades I've had the opportunity to ask random people about it and more than ever they don't see it as an esoteric and eldritch hacker OS, just an alternative.

I use vanilla Ubuntu 24.4 on my work laptop (thinkpad) after a decade of macos exclusivity. After a month or two its easy to understand why more people do not use Linux. Its improved a lot in recent years in its desktop environment, but vanilla ubuntu is still not even close to the polish of macos, even older versions, at least in my experience using it.