You can make some kind of argument from this that Linux has won; certainly the Linux syscall API is now perhaps the most ubiquitous application API.
Needing two of the most famous non-Linux operating systems for the layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems is not particularly a victory if you look at it from that perspective. Just highlights the piss-poor state of Linux desktop even after all these years. For the average person, it's still terrible on every front and something I still have a hard time recommending when things so often go belly up.
Before you jump on me, every year, I install the latest Fedora/Ubuntu (supposedly the noob-friendly recommendations) on a relatively modern PC/Laptop and not once have I stopped and thought "huh, this is actually pretty usable and stable".
Everybody has been making fun of Blender forever but they consistently made things better step by step and suddenly few UX enhancements the wind started shift. It completely flipped and now everybody is using it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if desktop Linux days are still ahead. It’s not only Valve and gaming. Many things seems start to work in tandem. Wayland, Pipewire, Flatpack, atomic distros… hey even Gnome is starting to look pretty.
- there's not one desktop Linux that everyone uses (or even uses by default), and it's not resolving any time soon
- I use Ubuntu+Gnome by default, and I wouldn't say it looks great at all, other than the nice Ubuntu desktop background, and the large pretty sidebar icons
- open source needs UX people to make their stuff look professional. I'm looking at you, LibreOffice
The standard Ubuntu+Gnome desktop crashes far too often.
Now I have no idea whose fault that is ( graphics driver, window system, or desktop code - or all three ) - but it's been a persistent problem for linux 'desktops' over many many years.
I suspect a lot of the problem is in the graphics drivers - they just don't get the love and attention that happens for Windows, and definitely not the Mac ( where they intentionally keep the number of things they need to support low ).
I’ve not been waiting 20 years for linux. But looking at it right now seems pretty positive to me.
For Windows and MacOS you can throw a few quick bucks over the wall and tick a whole bunch of ISO checkboxes. For Linux, you need more bespoke software customized to your specific needs, and that requires more work. Sure, the mindless checkboxes add nothing to whatever compliance you're actually trying to achieve, but in the end the auditor is coming over with a list of checkboxes that determine whether you pass or not.
I haven't had a Linux system collapse on me for years now thanks to Flatpak and all the other tools that remove the need for scarcely maintained external repositories in my package manager. I find Windows to be an incredible drag to install compared to any other operating system, though. Setup takes forever, updates take even longer, there's a pretty much mandatory cloud login now, and the desktop looks like a KDE distro tweaked to hell (in a bad way).
Gnome's "who needs a start button when there's one on the keyboard" approach may take some getting used to, but Valve's SteamOS shows that if you prevent users from mucking about with the system internals because gary0x136 on Arch Forums said you need to remove all editors but vi, you end up with a pretty stable system.
Yes, a lot of MDM feature are just there to check ISOwhatever boxes. Some are legitimately great, though. And yes, even though I’m personally totally comfortable running a Linux laptop, come SOC2 audit time it’s way harder to prove that a bunch of Linux boxes meet required controls when you can’t just screenshot the Jamf admin page and call it good.
One day I asked our CFO something, and watched him log into his laptop with like 4 keypresses. And that’s how we got more complex password requirements deployed everywhere.
Having spent a few years as a CISO, I’m now understand much more about why we have all those pain in the neck controls. There’s a saying about OSHA regulations that each rule is written in blood. I don’t know what the SOC2 version of that is, but there should be one.
The desktop marketshare stats back me up on the earlier point and last I checked, no distro got anywhere close?
Sure, Android is the exception (if we agree to consider) but until we get serious dev going there and until Android morphs into a full-fledged desktop OS, my point stands.
And yes, that's bought by the 'average person'.
On the contrary, our devs generally clamor for expanded Linux support from company IT.
There's just no other OS that's anywhere near as useful for real software engineering that isn't on a web stack.
MacOS is a quirky almost-Linux where you have to fiddle with Homebrew to get useful tools. On Windows you end up installing three copies of half of Linux userspace via WSL, Cygwin and chocolatey to get things done. All real tools are generally the open source ones that run better on native Linux, with Windows equivalents often proprietary and dead/abandoned.
Let me give you a basic embedded SW example: Proxying a serial connection over a TCP or UDP socket. This is super trivial on Linux with standard tools you get in every distro. You can get similar tools for Windows (virtual COM port drivers, etc.), but they're harder to trust (pre-compiled binaries with no source), often half-abandoned (last release 2011 or something) and unreliable. And the Linux tools are fiddly to build on MacOS because it's just not the standard. This pattern replicates across many different problems. It's simply less headache to run the OS where things just work and are one package manager invocation away.
There's simply significant swaths of software development where Linux and Linux-friendly Open Source tools/projects have hands-down won, are the ubiquitous and well-maintained option, and on the other systems to have to jump through hoops and take extra steps to set up a pseudo-Linux to get things done.
Honestly, there's also the fact that MacOS and Windows users are equally used to their systems as Linux users are to theirs, and are equally blind to all the bugs, hoops and steps they have to take. If you're a regular, happy Linux user and attempt to switch (and I have done this just recently, actually, porting a library and GUI app to control/test/debug servo motors to Window), the amount of headache to endure on the other operating systems just to get set up with a productive environment is staggering, not to mention the amount of crap you have to click away. Granted, MacOS is a fair bit less annoying than Windows in the latter regard, though.
I'll happily claim that Linux today is the professional option for professional developers, anyhow. And you web folks would likely be surprised how much of the code of the browser engines your ecosystem relies on was written and continues to be written on Linux desktops (I was there :-), and ditto for a lot of the backend stuff you're building your apps on, and a fair amount of the high-end VFX/graphics and audio SW used to make the movies you're watching, and so on and so forth.
Are there more web devs churning out CRUD apps and their mobile wrappers on MacOS in the absolute? For sure, by orders of magnitude. But the real stuff happens on Linux, and my advice to young devs who want to get good and do stuff that matters (as someone who hires them) is to get familiar with that environment.
Funnily enough that's how I feel every time I use Windows or Mac. Yet I'm not bold enough to call them "piss poor". I'm pretty sure I - mostly - feel like that because they are different from what I'm used to.
Transitioning from Windows to Mac was much more of an adjustment than Linux Desktop. It's just that Linux has too many rough edges. While it's possible I've simply been unlucky, everytime I've tried Linux it's been small niggling issue after small niggling issue that I have to work around and it feels like a death of a thousand paper cuts. (BTW I first tried Linux desktop back in the late 90s and most recently used it as my main work laptop for 9 months this past year.)
Note, I'm more than happy to use Linux as a server. I run Linux servers at home and have for decades. But the desktop environments I've tried have all been irksome.
Note that I'm not mentioning particular distros or desktop environments because I've tried various over the years.
After all there are plenty of people - including me - who do not share that experience at all.
I had other issues that were not hardware related though. The desktop environment was missing some basic features for things like mouse settings that I had to install community extensions for, which were buggy.
I also had issues with printers, HDMI output, keyboard settings, and more. The list goes on and on. Each was something I spent time on that I haven't had to spend time on with MacOS (it's been a decade and a half since I've used Windows, but I remember it having fewer issues).
BTW, I also dread OS updates on Linux, and that includes server-side. Definitely another pain point that feels more severe than on MacOS.
Anyway, I'm glad that Linux works for some people's usecases, but it feels like it's been in this limbo of quasi-usable for quite a while from my perspective.
What exactly is wrong with it? I prefer KDE to either Windows or MacOS. Obviously a Linux desktop is not going to be identical to whatever you use so there is a learning curve, but the same is true, and to a much greater extent, for moving from Windows to MacOS.
> layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems
> or the average person
The "layman" or "average person" does not develop software.
The average person has plenty of problems dealing with Windows. They are just used to putting up with being unable to get things to work. Ran into that (a multi-function printer/scanner not working fully) with someone just yesterday.
If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software (at any rate not developing software that matters to anyone).
I have switched a lot of people to Linux (my late dad, my ex-wife, my daughter's primary school principal) who preferred it to Windows and my kids grew up using it. No problems.
KDE is my choice as well (Xfce #2) if I have to be stuck with a Linux distro for a long period but I'd rather not put myself in that position because it's still going to be a nightmare. My most recent install from this year of Kubuntu/KDE Fedora had strange bugs where applications froze and quitting them were more painful than macOS/Windows, or that software updates through their app store thingy end up in some weird state that won't reset no matter how many times I reboot, hard crashes and so on on a relatively modern PC (5900X, RTX 3080, 32G RAM). I had to figure out the commands to force reset/clean up things surrounding the package management in order to continue to install/update packages. This is the kind of thing I never face with Silicon macs or even Windows 10/11.
This is a dealbreaker for the vast majority of people but let's come to your more interesting take:
> If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software
And that sums up the vast majority of Linux users who still think every other year is the year of "Linux desktop". It's that deeply ignorant attitude instead of acknowledging all these years of clusterfuck after clusterfuck of GUIs, desktop envs, underlying tech changes (Xorg, Wayland) and myriads of confusing package distribution choices (debs, rpms, snaps, flatpaks, appimages and so on), that no sane person is ever going to embrace a Linux distro as their daily driver.
You need a reality reset if you think getting used to Linux is a qualifier to making great software.
A matter of your experience. Its not something that happens to me or anyone I know personally. Even using a less newbie friendly distro (I use Manjaro) its very rare.
I have not tried Fedora for many years, but the last time I did it was not a particularly easy distro to use. It is also a test distro for RHEL and Centos so should be expected to be a bit unstable.
> It's that deeply ignorant attitude instead of acknowledging all these years of clusterfuck after clusterfuck of GUIs, desktop envs, underlying tech changes (Xorg, Wayland) and myriads of confusing package distribution choices (debs, rpms, snaps, flatpaks, appimages and so on)
Most of which is hidden from the user behind appstores. The only thing non-geek users need to know is which DE they prefer (or they can let someone else pick it for them, or use the distro default).
Even a user who wants to tinker only needs to know one of the distribution formats, one desktop environment. You are free to learn about more, but there is absolutely no need to. You also need to learn these if you use WSL or some other container.
> You need a reality reset if you think getting used to Linux is a qualifier to making great software.
What I said is that the ability to cope with the tiny learning curve to adjust to a different desktop look and feel is a disqualifier for for being a developer.
Every non-technical user who switches from Windows to MacOS does it, so its very odd it is a barrier for a developer.
On the other hand do people care that much about DEs? Most people just want to start their web browser or whatever.
For most it’s not a case of whether you can do it, it’s whether it’s worth doing it. For me Linux lacks the killer feature that makes any of that adjustment worth my (frankly, valuable) time. That’s doubly so for any of us that develop user facing software: our users aren’t going to be on Linux so we need to have a more mainstream OS to hand for testing anyway.
The objection is really I do not want to use anything different, which is fine. After many years of using Linux I feel the same about using Windows or MacOS
> For me Linux lacks the killer feature that makes any of that adjustment worth my (frankly, valuable) time
It lacks all the irritants in Windows 11 every Windows user seems to complain of?
> That’s doubly so for any of us that develop user facing software: our users aren’t going to be on Linux so we need to have a more mainstream OS to hand for testing anyway.
SO for desktop software, that is not cross platform, yes. If you are developing Windows software you need Windows.
If you are developing server software it will probably be deployed to Linux, if you are developing web apps the platform is the browser and the OS is irrelevant, and if you are developing cross platform desktop apps then you need to test on all of them so you need all.
That said, counterpoint to my own, Android is Linux and has billions of installations, and SteamOS is Linux. I think the next logical step for SteamOS is desktop PCs, since (anecdotally) gaming PCs only really play games and use a browser or web-tech-based software like Discord. If that does happen, it'll be a huge boost to Linux on the consumer desktop.
I think we need to have a specific audience in mind when saying whether or not it's stable. My Arch desktop (user: me) is actually really stable, despite the reputation. I have something that goes sideways maybe once a year or so, and it's a fairly easy fix for me when that does happen. But despite that, I would never give my non-techy parents an Arch desktop. Different users can have different ideas of stable.
This is when I gave up and switched to Apple. I am now moving back to Linux but Arch still seems like it’s too hacky and too little structured organizationally to be considered trustworthy. So, Ubuntu or Debian it is, but fully haven’t decided yet.
Still, I would be happy to be convinced otherwise. I’m particularly surprised Steam uses it for their OS.
I've crapped my system on install, or when trying to reconfigure core features.
Updates? 0 issues. Like genuinely, none.
I've used Ubuntu and Mint before and Arch "just works" more then either of them in my experience.
That’s not to say it can’t or doesn’t work for some people in the middle, but for this group it’s much more likely that there’s some kind of fly in the soup that’s preventing them from switching.
It’s where I’m at. I keep secondary/tertiary Linux boxes around and stay roughly apprised of the state of the Linux desktop but I don’t think I could ever use it as my “daily driver” unless I wrote my own desktop environment because nothing out there checks all of the right boxes.
> That’s not to say it can’t or doesn’t work for some people in the middle, but for this group it’s much more likely that there’s some kind of fly in the soup that’s preventing them from switching.
Generally agree with these points with some caveats when it comes to "extremes".
I think for middle to power users, as long as their apps and workflows have a happy path on Linux, their needs are served. That happy path necessarily has to exist either by default or provisioned by employers/OEMs, and excludes anything that requires more than a button push like the terminal.
This is just based on my own experience, I know several people ranging from paralegals working on RHEL without even knowing they're running Linux, to people in VFX who are technically skilled in their niche, but certainly aren't sys admins or tiling window manager users.
Then there are the ~dozen casual gamers with Steam Decks who are served well by KDE on their handhelds, a couple moved over to Linux to play games seemingly without issue.
When you are a DE that’s embedded in FOSS no one has an appetite to fund user experience the same way as corporate OS can.
We do have examples where this can work, like with the steam deck/steamOS but it’s almost counter to market incentives because of how slow dev can become.
I see the same problem with chat and protocol adoption. IRC as a protocol is too slow for companies who want to move fast and provide excellent UX, so they ditch cross collaboration in order to move fast.
Plus, one could argue they've actually just established dominance through market lockin by ensuring the culture never had a chance and making operating system moves hard for the normal person.
But more importantly if we instead consider the context that this is largely a collection of small utilities made by volunteers vs huge companies with paid engineering teams, one should be amazed at how comparable they are at all.
If Gnome implemented that as well as macOS does I’d happily switch permanently.
I've worked in jobs that only used Linux as the day to day desktop operating system. I currently work on macOS.
What features do you think are missing?
However on embedded, and desktop, the market belongs to others, like Zehyr, NutXX, Arduino, VxWorks, INTEGRITY,... and naturally Apple, Google and Microsoft offerings.
Also Linux is an implementation detail on serverless/lambda deployments, only relevant to infrastructure teams.
And it’s in incredible numbers - hundreds of millions of units - of game consoles.
The BSD family isn’t taking a bow in public, that’s all.
And outside NetFlix, there aren't many big shots talking about it nowadays.
It’s a BSD.
I think what slows down market share of Linux on desktop is Linux on desktop itself.
I use Linux, and I understand that it's a very hard job to take it to the level of Windows or macOS, but it is what it is.
More software gets developed for that base Linux platform API, which makes releasing Linux-native software easier/practically free, which in turn makes desktop Linux an even more viable daily driver platform because you can run the same apps you use on macOS or Windows.
Eventually I got practical and fed up with ways of Linux Desktop.
Like, suspend-wake is honestly 100% reliable compared to whatever my Windows 11 laptop does, random freezes, updates are still a decade behind what something like NixOS has (I can just start an update and since the system is immutable it won't disturb me in any shape or form).
I was in the same boat and used macOS for a decade since it was practical for my needs.
These days I find it easier to do my work on Linux, ironically cross-platform development & audio. At least in my experience, desktop Linux is stable, works with my commercial apps, and things like collaboration over Zoom/Meet/etc with screen sharing actually work out of the box, so it ticks all of my boxes. This certainly wasn't the case several years ago, where Linux incompatibility and instability could be an issue when it comes to collaboration and just getting work done.
I have spent several months trying to make it work, across a couple of distros and partition layouts, only managing to boot them, if placed on external storage.
Until I can get into Media Market kind of store and get a PC, of whatever shape, with something like Ubuntu pre-installed, and everything single hardware feature works without "yes but", I am not caring.
IMO, just like with macOS, one should buy hardware based on whether their OS supports it. There are plenty of mini PCs with Linux pre-installed or with support if you just Google the model + Linux. There's entire sites like this where you can look up computers and components by model and check whether there is support: https://linux-hardware.org/?view=computers
You can even sort mini PCs on Amazon based on whether they come with Linux: https://www.amazon.com/Mini-Computers-Linux-Desktop/s?keywor...
The kernel already has workarounds for poorly implemented firmware, ACPI, etc. There's only so much that can be done to support bespoke platforms when manufacturers don't put in the work to be compatible, so buy from the ones that do.
> Until I can get into Media Market kind of store and get a PC, of whatever shape, with something like Ubuntu pre-installed, and everything single hardware feature works without "yes but", I am not caring.
You can go to Dell right now and buy laptops pre-installed with Ubuntu instead of Windows: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/scr/laptops/app...
Notice how quickly this has turned into the usual Linux forums kind of discussion that we have been having for the last 30 years regarding hardware support?
I don't think I'll make my 2030 date at this point but there might be some version of Windows like this at some point.
I also recognize that Windows' need to remain backwards compatible might prevent this, unless there's a Rosetta-style emulation layer to handle all the Win32 APIs etc..
The average end user will be using some sort of Tivoized device, which will be running a closed-source fork of an open-source kernel, with state-of-the-art trusted computing modules making sure nobody can run any binaries that weren't digitally signed and distributed through an "app store" owned by the device vendor and from which they get something like a 25% cut of all sales.
In other words, everything will be a PlayStation, and Microsoft will be selling their SaaS services to enterprise users through those. That is my prediction.
Hell, Samsung is delivering Linux to the masses in the form of Wayland + PulseAudio under the brand name "Tizen". Unlike desktop land, Tizen has been all-in on Wayland since 2013 and it's been doing fine.
Likewise with ChromeOS.
They are Pyrrhic victories.
As for Tizen, interesting that Samsung hasn't yet completely lost interest on it.
Except neither will support even a fraction of the originals' capabilities, at much worse performance and millions of incompatibilities at every corner.
The OS is a mix of Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, NDK APIs and the standard ISO C and ISO C++ libraries.
This would be better phrased If Google could replace Linux kernel with something else noone would notice,
Google have spent a decade trying to replace the Linux with something else (Fuschia), and don't seem to have gotten anywhere
Also don't forget Fuchsia has been mostly a way to keep valuable engineers at Google as retention project.
They haven't been trying to replace anything as such, and Linux kernel on Android even has userspace drivers with stable ABI for Java and C++, Rust on the kernel, all features upstream will never get.
Or on Rust's case, Google didn't bother with the drama, they decided to include it, and that was it.
I do pro audio on Linux, my commercial DAWs, VSTs, etc are all Linux-native these days. I don't have to think about anything sound-wise because Pipewire handles it all automatically. IMO, Linux has arrived when it comes to this niche recently, five years ago I'd have to fuck around with JACK, install/compile a realtime kernel and wouldn't have as many DAWs & VSTs available.
Similarly, I have a friend in video production and VFX whose studio uses Linux everywhere. Blender, DaVinci Resolve, etc make that easy.
There is a lack of options when it comes to pro illustration and raster graphics. The Adobe suite reigns supreme there.
I am more amateur/hobbyist than pro, but this is the primary reason I’m on macOS and I wouldn’t mind reasons to try Linux again (Ubuntu Studio ~8 years ago was my last foray).
This minus live sound, and I stick exclusively to MIDI controllers.
> and the distro and applications you use?
I'm on EndeavourOS, which is just Arch with a GUI installer + some default niceties.
I came from using Reaper on macOS, which is native on Linux, but was really impressed with Bitwig Studio[1] so I use that for most of everything.
I really like u-he & TAL's commercial offerings, Vital, and I got mileage out of pages like this[2] that list plugins that are Linux compatible. I'm insane so I also sometimes use paid Windows plugins over Yabridge, which works surprisingly well, but my needs have been suited well by what's available for Linux.
There's also some great open source plugins like Surge XT, Dexed & Vaporizer2, and unique plugins ChowMatrix.
> I wouldn’t mind reasons to try Linux again (Ubuntu Studio ~8 years ago was my last foray).
IMO the state of things is pretty nice now, assuming your hardware and software needs can be met. If you give it a try, I think a rolling release would be best, as you really want the latest Pipewire/Wireplumber support you can get.
Brag about this to an average Windows or Mac user and they will go "huh?" and "what is Linux?"
Depending on what you mean with "the game", I'd say even more so.
MS/Apple used to villify or ridicule Linux, now they need to distribute it to make their own product whole, because it turns out having an Open Source general purpose OS is so convenient and useful it's been utilized in lots of interesting ways - containers, for example - that the proprietary OS implementations simply weren't available for. I'd say it's a remarkable development.
I personally don't know a dev worth his salt who'd prefer windows