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Comment by liljimmytables | Hacker News Reader

It's more of an unnecessarily substandard user experience than anything else. The virtualised system is necessarily more complex than the bare system (it is the bare system + another OS + the virtual machine) so when something goes wrong there is that much more of a problem surface. If you intend to use the linux desktop, you are booting into one operating system purely to get through to the next one. That means additional waiting, keypress captures, device sharing, and things you don't really need to worry about.

These things aren't killer issues, sure, but if there exists a product that doesn't involve doing things the hard way then I'm going to avoid doing things the hard way.

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At the point one insists on Linux the desktop for an average user, the complexity argument has left the barn. This isn't meant as snark.

Linux lacks a grandmother friendly user support interface. When something goes wrong, a person of average familiarity with Linux is fucked. Arguments about how often operating systems present such problems are for another debate.

The issue of hardware, is just that, an issue of hardware. A lack of systems upon which it is easy to boot Linux is due to the fit between hardware manufacturer's and the market. At least the situation is better than Android on an iPhone.

> At the point one insists on Linux the desktop for an average user, the complexity argument has left the barn. This isn't meant as snark.

Agree, but I'm not sure what you're driving at. I was talking about existing users that want to run Linux as their primary desktop, as they're going to be the market that is affected by this.

I'm saying that people who want to run Linux as their primary desktop are not a market of interest to hardware manufacturer's.

Indeed, I am going so far as to suggest that it may be a market in which hardware manufacturer's are explicitly disinterested due to the potential support costs.

Furthermore, the wide spread expectation that a Linux machine should be less expensive than one with Windows due to the elimination of license fees might make the market even more unattractive to manufacturers.

Supporting Linux is expensive to the point that Red Hat has made a business out of it.

I agree with what you're saying. Still, my point remains that virtualisation is a poor cousin of native OS.

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