Everything is just "it's just like Windows and Mac OS, except it's not" and not always equates to "free, open source, no cost, no licence fees, customizable, faster, etc..." but never anything that was a true blue selling point.
To the users that have the know how to switch to Linux, all it sounds like is a slight upgrade over their existing setup with less software support.
I think Chrome OS is slowly getting attention because it gets out of your way completely. No setup, no worries about losing files, extremely low risk of viruses or malware, you already understand it, and it's the easiest to leave in case you don't like it.
EDIT: I have trouble explaining to them that the "slight upgrade" is probably an unbelievable improvement in many aspects. (But a significant downgrade in many others.)
The lack of a real winner takes all windowing solution on Linux means everyone has their different flavor of desktop, all of which are slightly different everywhere. And not like Android different, far worse as far as fragmentation goes, especially sound (if you feel like pointing out sound isn't part of the user interface, I'm going to point out you're not the person who feels undeserved by Linux as is).
I predict Android on the desktop before Linux on the desktop, and if Linux comes to the desktop, it will come mostly from the work of VALVe saying "This is in" and "This is out" and pick the winners and merge them together into a cohesive whole.
Why on God's earth would someone want Android on a desktop machine?
Why does there need to be one dominant DE anyway? The day that happens is the day the core base of Linux users ditches Linux. It flatly will never happen. You think KDE is going to one day just say "okay GNOME, we quit"?
Because, if a company is going to write software to run on lots of machines and be closed sourced like most commercial software, it is going to require a pretty stable target to run on.
When there are 25 different popular Linux configurations, it is prohibitively expensive to test them all for the number of individual users for each configurations.
> You think KDE is going to one day just say "okay GNOME, we quit"?
No, I think game/software vendors are going to ignore one or the other, following the lead of someone like valve. Then that one will become very niche, like the BSDs
Android and ChromeOS and TiVo and your embedded-Linux toaster don't have this problem. They don't need to run legacy X applications and have monolithic GUI's built from the ground up.
Funny that people applaud these "simple" interfaces but whine and moan about gnome-shell embracing a simple, full-screen app, full-screen launcher model...
The fact that you use a windowing system that was designed for remoting but not displaying wigets for not-remoting but displaying widgets does not make you (or me) smarter.
Chromebook and android each present relatively fewer targets to shoot at.
What do you mean?
Dumbification does imply simplification though so I think it's generally a right direction and may be one factor that makes ChromeOS appealing (the problem there though is that it lacks a few fundamental features right now, but that's more easily fixable).
Huh? Unity, especially with auto-hide is literally more out-of-your-way than any other Desktop Environment in any Operating System I can think of. (And I don't even like Unity, I like Cinnamon and Elementary which are very similar to the Windows XP/7 and OS X style desktop environments.)
I'm just really exhausted of non-specific "it's hard to use". (Keep in mind I was specifically talking about pre-installed, though the Windows/Ubuntu installers are nearly the same). If I asked someone to install iTunes in Windows versus install Rhythmbox in Ubuntu, I know which would be easier for someone who had never used either before. Go to a website, download an EXE, bypass the scary security prompt, walk through a six step installer asking about location, menu entries and more. Or open Software Center, type "music player", pick one and click "Install".
If "it's hard to use" because people are used to Windows, I throw my hands up, there's no way to reply to that.
That's basically the answer. That and it's hard to use because most of the software in a windows power users toolkit is windows only. So using Linux for them is like using windows and wishing for bash.
A very eye-opening analogy and one that I can obviously more than sympathize with. (Although Git kindly installs Git Bash now which is appreciated.)
Yea, I did make the point above that Windows is not easy to use either (heck imo it's worse that Linux now), but people are just used to it, so it's perceived to be easier to use. For your example on Mac though, you simply just drag and drop which is by far the simplest.
More hand-waving. Don't know what to tell you, I've been using Ubuntu for years and I've never had anything break, certainly not magically on it's own as you seem to be implying. This stinks of FUD.
>For your example on Mac though, you simplyt just drag and drop which is by far the simplest.
Oh come on. The newest version of OS X requires that you ignore a huge security prompt, manually disable GateKeeper!!!, download a DMG, double click the DMG, know that you need to drag that App.app to your /Applications/ folder and then run it... clicking through yet another a security prompt telling you that you downloaded it from the Internet.
The "app store" model that Ubuntu deployed years ago via USC is so popular that it's the model that iOS, Android, WP7, Windows 8, and now even OS X push as their primary app distribution and installation route...
Windows in failsafe is a lot more user friendly (safe mode, startup repair, etc.) than Linux's "dump you into a terminal" approach.
DKMS should prevent kernel updates from borking anything, and so far I've handled all kernel updates from 10.04->now with no issues and that includes several custom built and installed kernels too.
Also, I'll even grant that getting the initial setup is hard, (but then again, so is the nightmare of downloading drivers for a laptop that has no ethernet port in Windows).
Do you see what you're saying here? It means that the proven setup you describe here needs to be attained by the user. This is not something an average user will be able to do and even the tech crowd has many difficulties with it as shown in the other postz here.
And I disagree that it's the same as a clean windows install. See, for a clean install in windows I have a relatively well working to do list: the device manager. Yes I have to download the drivers manually, but IMO the package approach has one fatal flaw when it comes to built-in devices: which one will work for my hardware? If I just try, will removal still work afterwards? Usually it comes down to finding a community tutorial (which are often quite good, I admit). Of course, this difference comes from the fact, that most hardware vendors don't fully support linux. Ubuntu has made lots of progress here in that it tries to install the correct packages itself, but for bleeding edge hardware you're often out of luck.
Here's an idea: How about a webfrontend for that hardware auto configuration, Ubuntu uses? It would map some kind of hardware signature to package name, has some community mode built in as well as the vendor approved configurations (e.g. if distro+vendor mode fails, activate community. which configuration is pulled is being determined by 'votes' (does your sound work now? yes/no).
This is based on my anecdotal experience so can be specific to my software/hardware setups.
You also talked about OSX's new security features. You don't need to do any of that if the App is signed, it's just double click install (though most are drag and drop). For Apps that are less popular, yes you'd have to disable gatekeeper, but that's not much worse than having to add custom PPA's on Linux (those cause a lot of issues too oftentimes).
I'm all for Ubuntu becoming an awesome viable desktop replacement, and it's come a long way, but (for me) there's far too many annoyances for now so I'm sticking to OSX for my main machine. I do think it's probably better than Windows now though.
I had Windows giving me more breaking problems than Linux, by far. All my windows machines broke after months of intense work and had to re install them, even win7. The most stable has been my macs through.
"Maybe you're a genius and can fix these problems right away, but not everybody is like you."
Well, I'm not a genius but I have a secret. When I buy a machine I look for good compatibility with Linux inside. It works great. You save lots of work in the future with such simple things. Now it is even simpler to choose hardware that works great with Linux.
Either way, Linux installations don't rot in the same way that Windows installations do - mostly because the Gnome people did not manage to infect the Linux crowd with the "registry" mentality. And partly because NTFS is so much worse than ext3.
Interesting times indeed. Gonna get harder for MS/Apple to make money off this turf it seems.
The same college goers tend to buy MacBooks, so I think Apple will be just fine.
This is the picture I have seen so far. En masse? Well only time would tell.