this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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Okay, look, I don't want to be a hater, I promise. I have a setup with a Linux dual boot in my computer right now. But man, the crazy echo chamber around this issue is not just delusional, it's counterproductive. Being in denial about the shortcomings isn't particularly helpful in expanding reach, if that's what you all say you want.
So, in the spirit of balance, my mostly unbiased take on the listicle:
1 - Web tools get the job done: This is true when it's true. I work with Google's office suite, so yeah, many tools are indistinguishable. But not all tools are web tools. A big fallacy in this article is that just because a subset of items have embraced a solution doesn't mean that the solution is universal. If you need to work with Adobe software you're still SOL. MS Office still lacks some features on the web app. Some of the tools I use don't work, so I do still need to run those in a native Windows app. Since I'm not going to switch OSs every time I need to push a particular button, I'm going to default to Windows for work.
2 - Plenty of distros to suit your preference: This one is an active downside, and it pisses me off when it gets parroted. When I last decided to dual boot Linux I had to try five different distros to find one that sort of did everything I needed at once, which was a massive waste of time. I'm talking multiple days. Yes, there are a ton of distros. I only need to use one, though. But I need that one to work all the time. If one of the distros can get my HDR monitor to work but not my 5.1 audio and another can get my 5.1 audio setup to work, but not my monitors, then both distros are broken and neither is useful to me. This actually happened, incidentally.
3 - Steam has a decent collection of Linux games, plus Steam OS: Yes. Gaming on Linux is possible and works alright, but it's far from perfect. Features my Nvidia card runs reliably on Windows are hit-and-miss under Linux. Not all games are compatible in the first place, either. And while Heroic does a great job of running my GOG and Epic libraries, which are themselves just as big as my Steam one, it is a much bigger hassle to set up to run under the SteamOS game mode UI. Don't get me wrong, this has made huge strides but again, I'm not going to change OSs every time I hit a compatibility snag. This is the least fallacious of these points, though.
4 - Proprietary choices on Linux: Yes, there are some. Like the web app thing, the problem isn't what is there, it's what's missing. Also, as a side note, I find it extremely obnoxious when you have to enable these manually as an option in your package manager. As a user I don't care if a package is open source or not, I just want to install it.
5 - Electron makes app availability easier. Cool. Will take your word for it. Acknowledging the ideological debate behind it goes to the same argument I made in the previous point. And as above, it's not about what's there, it's about what's missing.
6 - No ads in your OS. I mean... nice? I still get ads for my selected distro on first boot, as well as on web apps and notifications for installed apps. Beyond a few direct links to first party apps in the one page of Win 11's settings app I don't find anything in Windows particularly intrusive, either. Which is not to say I don't dislike some of the overly commercial choices in Windows, they're just not a dealbreaker... yet.
7 - Docker, Homelab and self-hosting: This is... off topic, honestly. I do self host some things. Even used Docker once or twice... in my NAS, where the self-hosting happens. You don't need to switch your home desktop to Linux for that, and nobody is questioning that Linux is the OS of choice for a whole host of device ranges, from servers to the Raspberry Pi. Linux is great as a customizable underlying framework to build fast support for a niche device with a range of specific applications. We should be honest about how that breaks down if you try to use it as a widely accessible home computer alternative where the priorities are wide compatibility and ease of use.
Well, that became a huge thing, but... yeah, I guess I was annoyed enough by the delusion to rant. Look, I'd love to step away from Windows, and it's a thing you can do if you're tech savvy and willing to pretzel around the limitations in your hardware choices and your willingness to tinker... but it's not a serious mainstream alternative by a wide margin. I wish it was. Self-congratulatory praise within the tiny bubble of pre-existing fans (and why are there fans of operating systems in the first place?) is not going to help improve or widen its reach.
It works for me and has done so for almost 10 years.
Sure it won't work for everyone but to say it isn't viable isn't true either. It depends on the person.
It's not viable for the mainstream. "It depends on the person" suggests it's luck of the draw, but the Linux desktop penetration is something like 1-4%, at best, and that's inlcuding SteamOS and PiOS in the mix.
That's not, "depends on the person", that's "doesn't work for the vast majority of people". There is a reason for that.
That is not true though. The vast majority of people are people that don't do much on their systems at all. Maybe look at Facebook or a few sites, write the occasional document or email and maybe play a few simple games. The type of people that have never heard of Linux or even know what an OS is let alone able to switch to another one. Those types of people will be perfectly happy on Linux if it came pre installed.
The people switching ATM and having issues are the highly technical people that have far more complex requirements and for those it does depend on the person and what they need to do.
The low percentage of users is not a sign of of it not being ready, just the sheer marketing and effort Microsoft has put into making windows the default option.
There are more people who only browse and use cross platform apps that don’t realise they could switch easily, than there are people for whom a switch would be problematic.
Windows has more supported software, but many people use a small range of common software. Gamers are just one niche. Just like you think Linux users are an echo chamber here, you are not considering the echo chamber of gamers you’re in that dont represent most windows users.
Honestly I'm waiting for a small company to license a Linux desktop to companies with support. It would need to be desktop focused and designed to be indestructible.
Yeah I'm not going to lie that's kind of a weird take.
By that logic captain crunch cereal isn't ready for mainstream because it doesn't have enough market share.
It is not a problem of whether it works for most people or not. It is a cultural problem. People hate change. That's largely why people hate windows 11 even.
And it even leads people to spend an hour arguing with strangers about how completely unacceptable Linux is for most people when there's actually a lot of arguments against that and very few in favor of it.
Rage on. No one believes you're unbiased lol
I agree with some of your points but in this one and other comments you are referencing “data” multiple times to provide validity for your opinions, yet you either fail to understand what the data is able to measure or you are using it dishonestly to further your argument.
A usage percentage does not provide reliable data about the usability (“viability for the mainstream”). There are too many factors at play distorting it to make a reliable connection between these two.
The only way in which the percentage would be useful is, if you are implying that the other 96-99% chose to not use linux, because it doesn’t work for them, which is obviously not the case. Otherwise it is completely meaningless, as users were never exposed to linux, thus didn‘t have to make a decision, and thus didn’t deem another operating system superior.
There are a few objections along these lines in this thread, where the implication is that Linux is underused because it lacks awareness. Maybe it's a generational thing? Linux has been around for a long time now, people are aware of it. There are multiple popular device lines out there that use it, several companies even put some marketing behind it.
I don't know if you were there when Ubuntu first hit, but it was pretty widely reported. And that was twenty years ago. And of course Valve and Raspberry and Android and ChromeOs all were reported to carry flavours of Linux to the masses.
I mean, I'm sure a bigger, more coordinated marketing campaign would help, but it's not a secret tucked away on nerdy cycles. I remember being in a college classroom in what? 2006? And when a professor didn't know what Linux was the entire classroom laughed at them for reacting in disbelief at the notion that Linux was free ("so if something breaks who provides support?" I remember them asking, it was hilarious).
Look, it's been a long time since you can just pull installation media of Linux from the Internet and just give it a try. Awareness is a factor, but it's not THE reason Linux isn't more widespread.
I disagree that the implication is only about lack of awareness. Further my point wasn’t that Linux is underused because of a lack of awareness. My point is that user popularity is not a valid measurement for usability.
Awareness definitely plays a role in user numbers but there are other more important factors. For example awareness of Linux doesn’t beat what comes preinstalled, this is a much bigger factor if we are talking about all desktop users in my opinion. Linux could have the best usability out of all desktop OS, most would still not change preinstalled OS for different reasons e.g. not knowledgeable enough, indifference etc.. You might argue that if it was the OS it would come preinstalled, but then you would be ignoring the economic reasons that guide that. I still maintain that popularity of an OS is not a metric that can be used to infer usability. As long as there are different hurdles to getting to the actual using part, actual usability can‘t be determined by popularity.
On a side note about awareness:
It could very well be, or it could potentially be something geographical. Anecdotally in my friends group of university students(20-26year olds) in a non-technical-field, not a single Person (beside me) knew what Linux was, and most had never heard the term before I mentioned it in a conversation. Neither would my parents. So maybe not a generational thing. I think you might be viewing the extent of awareness from the eyes of someone broadly in the tech field?
Regarding Office, fear not! Microsoft is working hard to remove functionality from the Windows and Mac desktop apps, so soon we'll have feature parity! See: "New Outlook".
They've been pushing this shit for years already, nobody wants it, and they're forcing it next year despite still not fixing shared calendars (among other things). New Outlook is basically just the web app in a wrapper.
I must be nobody, because I like the new Mac outlook. Granted it's because I like the option to pin emails in top and I don't recall any missing feature. Why the hate?
Granted I am used to the web version from the time I used Linux at work. The windows version seemed much worse in comparison
Personally I'm a fairly basic user, so for me it's "fine". But I also work in IT so I'm aware of some the problems preventing wide adoption across the org.
Shared calendars and delegation still don't work correctly. It's a dealbreaker for a lot of the admin assistants, who are generally the most advanced users.
On the Windows side, PST support is basically gone. Microsoft will claim they support PSTs, but their idea of "support" is to use old Outlook to manually copy your PSTs into server-side folders. That would be bad enough even if it were reliable, and in practice it would take eternity for some users to migrate all their stuff. We have nearly unlimited storage in O365 but it's still a pain.
The only things I actually like about new Outlook are a couple UX changes that would have easily been applied to old Outlook if MS still gave a shit. Instead, old Outlook has been nearly frozen in time since...2016? Maybe 2019?
Operating systems are huge endeavours of engineering and design by entire teams of people over decades, which are used literally daily. Is that not enough of a reason for people to be fans of them?
Spot on. And like ants to sugar you have 20 or so ACKTUALLYs responding to you.
The only reason I have a windows laptop at home is because my employer forces me to. It's true that Adobe and MS stuff doesn't run or runs bad, same with some specific live service games. Personally I hate all of those and am more than happy to avoid em like the plague outside of work hours. They're horrible inadequate tools and horrible predatory games. Everything I actually wanted personally, has so far run just fine for years.
Edit: Remembered one specific thing that does really suck on Linux, and that's music production. That area is absolutely cluttered with proprietary shit. Even switching between windows and macos is a pain as many of the tools are just not compatible.
Have used Linux for decades. Switched over full time a few months ago and have generally been happy but all your points are extremely valid.
Plasma will occasionally freeze the taskbar/desktop when it wakes up or I switch back to my desktop from work laptop using a KVM, effectively connecting a monitor.
For me that's fine, manually open a terminal and kill the process so it'll restart. For all but a handful of my extended friends and family that means the computer is broken until you log off or restart. It's not a smooth experience.
I'm not reading all that- anyway
I switched to full-time Linux this year. One of my programmer friends, whom I never expected to embrace Linux, switched to full-time Linux and is not going back. Our libraries have switched to Linux on all user-facing computers. 2 of my e-friends have approached me about Linux. Another friend is, despite not being a computer nerd, going to switch because Windows is forcing him to- and that's my point. It's not that Linux doesn't have deep flaws inherent to its development model, it's that those flaws are now less significant than those of Windows. Nobody likes Windows 11 and it's pushing people off.
Well, that's your opinion. For others it works fine. I've been using Linux since 1995 and exclusively for both home and work for well over a decade now. And there are rarely issues these days. Teams is a piece of shit, but my coworkers on Windows agree on that. Apart from that everything works for me.
Well, yeah, I think "Teams is a piece of shit" is a very uncontroversial statement.
I think "there are rarely issues" is demonstrably wrong, though. At least if we agree on the definition of "issues". Every Linux forum I've visited looking to fix my HDR monitor support seems to agree that HDR support in Linux is tentative at best, which I'd call an "issue", or that setting up a Nvidia card in distros that don't come preinstalled with the proprietary drivers can be a mess, which I'd call an "issue".
Linux desktop is certainly functional, but having learned to work around the limitations, to live without certain features or to purchase the better supported hardware alternative is different to there being no issues for a user migrating whatever PC they have over and expecting everything to work first time.