Exactly why Linux will never dominate the Desktop environment by the average user.
You basically can't use Linux without at some time going to the cmd line to fix some dam configuration or driver problem.
You basically can't use Linux without at some time going to the cmd line to fix some dam configuration or driver problem.
My GF, who is not very computer savvy, has been using Mint for years at home and at work. Unfortunately, there were no command line configurations needed even once to set it up. What a disappointment. Ah well, I personally use Slackware so I'll get my jollies there I suppose....
Granted, I did have to go by GF's work at one point and install a printer but you know what? I've spent a lot less time there than I used to as her Windows systems (she and an assistant now both use Mint) regularly got virus or gunked up and slowed to a crawl...
Linux on the desktop has actually been much easier and reduced my honeydo workload considerably. Fact.
That aside, I have to scratch my head and wonder about people who claim to have so many of these types of problems. Tech people too. People who should be eager to embrace and learn powerful command line invocations and the control this learning brings....
Since then, my experience with Linux' driver support has been very smooth, as well, any a lot smoother than stuff I've seen on Windows. Getting a printer to work on Windows is incredibly convoluted compared to CUPS.
Chromebook and hybrid tablets are slowly eating into the "laptop" market. Many people will never buy a laptop because their tablet or phone does what they need. I know a lot of people who go weeks between opening their computer, but live on their phone and tablet. Desktop and laptop will be a thing people use at work for a long while, and it'll probably still be ruled by Windows. Creatives and developers will have beefy computers, and they'll probably still be running Windows and Mac OS X predominantly (though I use Fedora, and have never really worked on anything other than a Linux system). For now. I can't predict what will happen on that front, but phones and tablets are encroaching on so many fronts I never would have predicted (I just bought my first tablet last week, and thought they were ridiculous for years even after they'd started taking off).
Tablets and chromebooks have already been around for several years. Why do I still use a desktop for work? Why don't I just ssh everywhere from my eyepad?
Because they suck at making me productive.
Desktops and actual laptops are not going anywhere, because they run fully featured OSs that people can contribute to, not some nasty walled garden of corporate shrink-wrapped ToS turds and ignored pull requests (if you're so lucky to even come within barfing distance of a FOSS component on lobotomy-hardware).
Look, IBM started predicting the death of the desktop, what, 20 years ago? 30? It's not going to happen. Then laptops came around. They're gonna kill the desktop! O noes! Not gonna happen. Ultrabooks are gonna kill laptops! Yeah, maybe.. Depends on how much they wind up resembling good laptops.
Starts to sound pretty familiar after a while.
Please re-read my comment; I've already conceded the workplace will remain a desktop/laptop domain for some time, and that I can't predict when that will change, and for the reasons I mentioned. And, as I said, I don't know how the workplace will play out on the desktop and laptop. I bet it will gradually show declining power for Microsoft and increasing market for Apple and various Linux variants (for different reasons).
So, I don't disagree with you. Desktops and laptops will stick around for a long time in some segments, including the workplace. I don't know how long that will last, possibly decades more. But, it doesn't matter; the desktop/laptop is already less important than the phone/table...and Linux won that market. It effectively won "Desktop 2.0".
Why are they on Stack Exchange? If they are installing a Linux distro on a Windows computer, then of course you will have an unpleasant experience. If you want to use Ubuntu the right way without having to butt heads with anything, you buy a system from zareason / thinkpenguin / system76.
You can / will run into the same "searching the Internet" for problems installing Windows on your custom built gaming rig. Driver bugs, config issues, etc. Except for those you will end up digging through yahoo answers or windows help with even more misinformation and bloat.
In the end fundamentally it is not a problem with the Linux desktop. You can use a terminal on Windows as well, but you don't expect to because you bought a Windows computer and expect it to work. The same expectation should be had of prebuilt Ubuntu systems, and I think nowadays it lives up to expectation in my experience.
(unless, of course, I'm missing something)
...I'm running Ubuntu on an ASUS laptop that cost under $400, which worked almost seamlessly, and I installed Mint on my ma's laptop that cost under $400. (That incurred finding a new video driver to avoid running everything in 800x600)
I would love to have a Linux-out-of-the-box experience, but the price has to make sense.
That is not good UX for the average joe, or anyone you are just introducing to Linux. It is a UX fail and ruins impressions when people try to install Linux on arbitrary hardware and have a bad time of it. Yes, if you are a veteran and know what you are doing you can do better than the vendors, but to recommend anything else to a Linux newbie without absolute confidence in comprehensive hardware support is just ruining their first impression.
Given that it's Google, that's hardly a compelling argument. They could've made Windows NT dominant if they'd so desired.
Linux doesn't describe one OS, rather a class of OSes. Like Cancer isn't a disease but a class of disesases, or functional programming isn't one language but a class of them.
Google is dominant because they dominiated. MS didn't dominate, google does, and it's not like both companies couldn't compete in a money fight. And this comes back to Windows NT not being dominant despite MS's wishes.
And, when Google started down the Android path, they weren't the Google we know today. It was not a foregone conclusion, and had they chosen a tech which they couldn't control completely, I can't imagine how it could have worked out the way it has. Microsoft couldn't make Windows dominate on the phone/tablet, despite devoting plenty of resources to the task, I'm sure Google couldn't have (given that anybody that buys from Microsoft plays to Microsoft's tune or they don't play at all).
"Make it on the desktop" always meant "the consumer desktop". There is no consumer desktop in the future. The consumer desktop is a tablet or a phone or a TV device or all three. I don't understand it, I don't necessarily like it (I like desktops with big monitors, big hard drives, big mouse and keyboard, and a nice chair to sit in), but it's the way things are. Computing isn't something consumers do sitting at a desk any more. So, Linux won what is currently the way consumers use computers. And, that's hella fascinating, and hella cool.
This is a huge factor for its success, considering all previous efforts of coordinating distros (e.g. LSB) pretty much failed.
Most people I know who use Windows at home either call "that guy" they know who knows his way around a computer, or they just reinstall their system (which is not such a bad idea, really, just very inconvenient).
For me, though, Ubuntu's user interface is just so much more convenient for programming and the other things I do that I manage with debugging the occasional failure to boot, install etc., but that's because I have unusual priorities and good google-fu.
Honestly,I really really dislike Apple...esp the fanboy culture, mythology of Steve Jobs (and the culture which means everyone in Starbucks knows him and not Norman Borlaug), the weird shops, the overpriced products and ripoff margins, lack of choice and individually vs Android...for years I've been known as the guy who slags off Apple etc etc
BUUUUUTTTTTT - and this might be relevant to Windows survivability in the future.
Having spent nearly a week humming and thinking, comparing every type of new business laptop (powerful, reliable etc) at any price to run as my next Windows machine, I can't really find any...Thinkpad has seemed to have gone to pieces, DELL I have only ever had bad experiences with, ASUS/ACER meh etc...
I quite literally am close to swallowing my pride (awaits incoming from friends who I slagged off over the years) and buying a MacBook and putting Windows on it.
Maybe it's just me, but as Windows (except for the Win 8 bloaty crap) software has gotten better, the hardware at the moment seems to be getting worse.
Except when it does. I have a friend who got a virus that deleted the Windows bootloader / ntldr from C:, but hes not as technically literate and lives two states away.
Nothing can fix it. He does not have the technical wherewithal to remove the drive and recover files, there is no way to rewrite those specific files without reformatting the disk, and if the Windows install CD does not fix it (and it did not) you have no resources to try to resolve it.
With Linux, he would have had a live USB on hand, and if it failed to boot he could have reinstalled over his root partition and have all his personal files preserved while effectively resetting the environment.
There is no way he would have been able to boot to the Windows recovery CD command prompt and run anything. Also, I'm pretty sure the boot repair on the disk runs bootmgr repair options during its "please wait were doing stuff and not telling you what is going on" phase.
Windows is a different story altogether. Not primarily because of some technical inferiority, but because people run all kinds of not-even-broken things with admin privs just because they got it in a box.
Just last week someone pushed a mobile broadband stick in their Windows box. It purred and whirred for a while, and hasn't booted since. I've seen similar things before.
(OT: I'd be grateful if anyone had any helpers on how to remove things selectively from the Windows boot process. There is a safe mode boot, which also hangs. Can I step through it, like on DOS? Can restore the boot related registry settings to an older version? Google doesn't help me at all here, and it seems like it should be a pretty common problem.)
I agree that Windows has gotten a lot better over the years, but if you have enough machines in one place, you see some pretty strange things happening, like MS Office breaking for no apparent reason, or an update to Office 2013 breaking Autodesk Inventor, forcing me to reinstall Inventor, thereby breaking Outlook, forcing me to reinstall Office (afterwards, both Outlook and Inventor continued to work - I have no idea why).
The chance for an individual user to experience such problems is fairly low, but as an admin / help desk monkey (we have no dedicated help desk, so I am the one users call for help) I get to see all those problems.
Let me repeat, Windows has improved a lot over the years, and I honestly do not know what it would be like to manage ~100 Debian or CentOS clients. I am not saying Linux deployed on such a scale on such a variety of machines would run without problems.
But you do run into those situations where you have to invoke some arcane command or edit the registry on Windows, too. And at least in my experience, if that happens on Linux, at least you can look at the man page for the command or the config file.