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Comment by figassis | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store?

Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?

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That well funded company already happened 20 years ago. Canonical. Their distribution is called Ubuntu, you might have heard of it.

Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.

You're going to have that problem with any kind of change.

What kind of issue would you expect that the OS she currently uses does not have?

Anything she buys won’t have specific drivers, e.g. Webcams or mice or keyboards or etc.

First, is that so? My neighbors just got their 80-year old parents a Thinkpad. All works. They bought a mouse the week after. Worked right away.

Second, they don't buy this kind of thing every week.

My 73yo mom actually runs RHEL 10 on her laptop, uses one of my 16 free developer licenses.

But it would never work without my help. On the other hand, Windows wasn't working too well either and I just couldn't help with that.

RHEL was the most stable alternative I could think of when her Windows computer stopped being reliable.

I have setup rustdesk on it for remote support.

It's actually not really that bad. If you have to split your job likev you said, then you have to do it when she's using Windows too.

Linux has made a lot of progress since 2010.

If low tech ppl in family get phones, I want them to be apple, less work for me (not an Apple user). If they get a PC, I want them to use Ubuntu. Less work for me.

And if there's some work, I'd rather ssh into their PC and fix it using a shell with bash, then get annoyed with Windows and it's quirks.

Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience.

Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features).

I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.

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