I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now. I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
I've also used Linux exclusively (in my case 25 years), but I also realize that with a few niche exceptions, there are few mass marketed products that feature the traditional Linux desktop as their primary UI.
Desktop OS UI is hard. It takes investment in technology, product, and marketing all focused on a target market. Even with all of those most upstarts have failed to gain traction. Also consider that most people buy laptops for 2 reasons: 1) browsing the web and if they can afford it 2) as a fashion accessory. People will put up with a lot of BS from a product if they feel like the product gives them social status and acceptance.
No Linux laptop really hits (2). Arguably only a few Windows laptops do either.
Stupid analogy, the Linux version of that would be whatever french press you want to use. Buy your coffee ground or as beans and grind yourself, depending on preference. And for my girlfriend there's always the Starbucks equivalent (Debian stable with Gnome).
Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
I use a french press myself, and never heard of Aeropress. My machines all run Debian with DWM and I never have any problems. My non-technical girlfriend is fine on Debian and doesn't really know the difference. She did mention how fast her laptop boots though.
/s
The exploitation of labor in developing countries in the electronics supply chain is a serious issue, and worth discussing, but it's not the dimension of the subject my comment was addressing.
Ditto. I can't stand other OSs; they are constantly in my way for just the basic tasks.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents. They're capable enough to maintain their own Windows computers, and switching them to Linux would mean that I'd have to take over all of those tasks -- because they've got other, more important things to do than to learn a new OS.
I'd agree with you if you could buy rando PC with Linux installed and working with no stupid hardware issues. People who can live in Google Docs/Office 365 web and don't have industry specific use cases will almost always be fine. But once you break out of that subset of people, tossing them a Linux machine can be kind of mean.
I don't know about your parents but most people (including my parents) just use a browser and some applications that are identical to their Windows versions or sufficiently similar. There isn't really anything new to learn.
One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.
To add an anecdote I let a friend print on my HP LaserJet from his Windows laptop today. It detected the printer over Wi-Fi but it could not print anything because it was missing the driver. After a 100 MB download from HP's site the installer wanted an USB connection to the printer. That friend of mine is young so he never saw a USB cable with the small squarish plug that connects to a printer (or scanner, or USB2 disk) but that's another story. The installer run for minutes and failed with an error. I told him not to trust the error and attempt to print anyway. It did print. However after a few pages a pop-up complained about a non original toner (probably true) and it stopped printing. However he managed to find the printer from his Android phone and print from there. Then he was able to print from Windows too.
All of that took about an hour. I installed Debian 13 on my laptop last week and I could detect the printer instantly and print without any problem. No driver to download. I know that I can apt install hplip to get more specific drivers but it was not necessary.
Printers are their own slice of misery that seem to transcend brand, OS, platform, etc.
Most people just use an OS to start applications. There is nothing they need to learn other than maybe the start button has a different logo on it.
But during my brief period on Windows I would get issues like my colour settings changing or the behaviour of certain meta keys being switched out when I woke a sleeping laptop.
Fine but that attitude isn't going to increase Linux adoption. Arch does work in this regard today but it does require some BIOS tweaks to get it to work flawlessly. Compare this to a MacBook where closing the lid always does the right thing and seems to use basically no power at all in this state. For me, I'll accept the trade-off as I don't want to use macOS (makes no sense for development imo) but some aspects of the experience are clearly superior.
However, most people do not know what an OS is. They do not understand its software rather than hardware.
At work, I got a fancy MacBook, and as much as I admire the hardware, I despise the MacOS window management. IMHO, it is broken by design, and I wonder how anybody at Apple considers this a good system. There is still a small chance that I didn't understand a crucial concept, but until now, nobody was able to explain to me, how it is supposed to work.
I have reached the point where I believe that it must be something historical, like Steve wrote it himself, or else, and now nobody dares to reform it.