10 ms·

We shouldn’t blame ourselves for the Linux desktop’s microscopic market share

46 points by Liriel 7y ago

wmf 7y ago
The Microsoft antitrust case was a long time ago and AFAIK they stopped the licensing shenanigans. Since then macOS has increased share significantly and Linux has gained almost nothing.
- JeremySecond 7y ago
  Yet I was unable to buy the laptop I wanted without Windows 10 in 2019. And if you think that antitrust case is the full extent of Microsoft's shenanigans, you are beyond naive. One example: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240214747/Microsoft-rallies-partners-in-government-open-standards-debate https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240214747/Microsoft-ral...
- goalieca 7y ago
  You sure about that? Chromebooks are everywhere.
  - wmf 7y ago
    ChromeOS also has lower market share than macOS (despite running on far cheaper hardware) and I don't consider ChromeOS to be desktop Linux.
    - freedomben 7y ago
      More and more I think you should. I would have totally agreed a year ago, but it's now very easy for the average user to install any Linux app they want from distro repos. Chrome OS is totally Linux now.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  I mean it's more obscured but if you buy an Apple computer you are paying the MacOS tax, right? They can call the OS free all they like, but clearly the OS adds value to their hardware. If, say, RedHat wanted to sell an OS to a person who uses an Apple computer are they not also asking that potential customer to pay the same kind of "double tax" referenced? It seems like it to me, Apple just sells the hardware too so they can play pricing games and pretend the OS is valueless while the hardware is what you're paying for. Sure, it's different in that they're probably not doing anything illegal -- they're not leveraging their monopoly to force other vendors to give them money for nothing because they are the vendor, but it is awfully parallel if the question you're asking is "why isn't Linux desktop marketshare increasing?" Does it not do just as much harm to their customer if they can't buy the hardware minus a real reasonable price for the OS because they're going to use Linux on it? Again, I'm not suggesting they're illegally leveraging a monopoly because they are also the vendor of the hardware and one company bundling their hardware with their software is common. But I am suggesting that they're not a counterpoint to the idea that this kind of "double tax" is holding back Linux use. If anything, it's a small point in favor of the idea that the author might be on to something... I'd personally argue more that for profit companies leveraging free software without paying for its development is the root cause of project decay and poorly funded free software projects. Granted this is by design, but it's pretty embarrassing for our style of capitalism that there's not any kind of recognition among MBAs that they might have an ethical obligation to donate to people who are doing work their entire business requires to operate.
- zrm 7y ago
  Mac market share cratered around the turn of the century as result of a stagnating operating system (MacOS 9) and then use of uncompetitive PowerPC processors. Since OS X and the switch to x64 processors they've been slowly crawling their way back, but they still don't even have the market share they did in the mid 90s. And the OEM licensing never much affected Apple to begin with since they make their own hardware.
Artistry121 7y ago
How did he do this? “ So, to make things painfully clear: Bill Gates made it so that his company would tax every computer sold no matter whether it ran Windows or not. If a manufacturer wanted to sell computers running Windows, all the computers it sold were taxed by Microsoft. He would get paid for the work a Linux distribution was doing, and the Linux distribution would not get that money.”
- umeshunni 7y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows and https://www.cnet.com/news/microsofts-1994-consent-decree-boon-or-bust/ https://www.cnet.com/news/microsofts-1994-consent-decree-boo... Till 1994, Microsoft charged OEMs based on the total number of computers they sold, not based on how many of them had Windows. Now, whether Linux's low desktop market share in 2019 is because of a practice that happened from 1983-1994 is a different question.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  Contracts. You, as Microsoft, tell Dell and HP they can either pay for a license for Windows for every computer they sell regardless of whether or not they install Windows, or they cannot have a single license for Windows. Dell and HP then choose: Hope people accept linux/BSD/Other and stop selling windows, or sell windows and pay some extra. Nothing illegal about it unless you are exploiting a monopoly (which Microsoft did according to the author of the post).
  - tenebrisalietum 7y ago
    It would have been very interesting if things could have worked out where OEMs refused to pay that MS tax and instead provided instructions on how to purchase and install your own operating system separately.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      I remember that some OEMs (including one or two major ones) had started to go this direction, offering "naked" PCs without an OS at all. Microsoft's response was to demonize the practice as encouraging piracy. Their argument was that obviously nobody wants a computer without Windows, so people buying them that way were clearly intending to install a pirated copy.
grzte 7y ago
The Linux desktop is still a clusterfuck today. Bill Gates doing bad stuff 20 years ago has nothing to do with it.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  I recently had to set up Ubuntu 19.10 on a friend's laptop with a dead keyboard so had to use the on-screen keyboard. For some reason the keyboard wouldn't show up in the installer's text fields so no way to enter username, password, etc. It works everywhere else, but not in the installer, presumably because it's using the wrong toolkit out of the dozens of GUI toolkits available and the rest of the desktop doesn't recognise its text fields properly. So unfortunately I still have to agree - how come the built-in installer program not play ball with the built-in accessibility features, and why wasn't this tested? Logging in with the OSK also had a quirk - if you request the OSK on the login screen, common sense would suggest that you also want the OSK to persist once you're logged in... but no - once logged in you have to manually go in settings and enable it again. This is not a big deal, but just having someone think about the UX would've taken care of this. Finally getting Netflix to work was annoying; Firefox is actually nice enough to let me know that the page requires DRM content and offered to enable it in one click without arguing about licenses or non-free software, but it still didn't work... after searching around it seems like I had to enable the non-free repo and install an extra "libavcodec" package. I figured it out, but I wouldn't blame a casual user if they gave up and said "Linux sucks".
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    > after searching around it seems like I had to enable the non-free repo and install an extra "libavcodec" package. Isn't ffmpeg a basic dependency of Firefox? Can an Ubuntu user explain how it's possible to install Firefox without its dependencies?
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      It was libavcodec-extra which I presume isn't a dependency, or otherwise the stock Ubuntu ships with broken dependencies out of the box but I'd find this extremely unlikely.
adnzzzzZ 7y ago
I'm glad Bill Gates won on desktop. Clearly he knew what was best for the world given that his operating system simply works, while all Linux distros do an extremely poor job at simply working and therefore haven't managed to reach normal non-technical people at all, and likely never will because the community seems filled with people who have a similar "it's not our fault" mentality. I've seen this post upvoted in multiple Linux communities now and it's just sad to see that the community mostly seems to agree with this kind of trash. >However, what it is about, is the question: why is Bill Gates not in jail for life with all his wealth stripped off? He’s a criminal, and his crime has directly harmed us, the people working on free software, on the Linux Desktop. How about this, under the Capitalist Manifesto I hereby declare that all open source developers be jailed for their crimes against humanity. If you sell your labor for free you're a menace to society as you're distorting labor markets and you should be stopped for causing all this harm.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Your points are about a decade or so out of date.
- mnm1 7y ago
  Should we throw all mothers (and fathers) in jail that take care of their own kids for free? Should we jail everyone who does things for free? We could put something like 99% of Americans in jail. Some presidents and politicians would love a solution like that. Good thing you came up with the a brilliant way of justifying this. What incredible insight into macroeconomics!
- microcolonel 7y ago
  I think I sense a bit of sarcasm, but doing things you care about for free is an essential part of the free market, something the cronyists, the trade unionists, and the communists never respect, it seems.
- crispinb 7y ago
  > his operating system simply works, while all Linux distros do an extremely poor job at simply working Irrelevant. Regular consumers didn't install Windows - indeed before Apple's rise they didn't even know there was an alternative. They bought computers with it preinstalled because Microsoft stitched up corrupt deals worldwide to ensure this was all people had access to. If Linux had been preinstalled, it would have 'just worked' to pretty much the same extent Windows does. > How about this, under the Capitalist Manifesto I hereby declare that all open source developers be jailed for their crimes against humanity. If you sell your labor for free you're a menace to society as you're distorting labor markets and you should be stopped for causing all this harm. There are millions of poor people in all the developed countries in prison today for having committed 'crimes' miniscule in scale compared to those of Microsoft. Marijuana use, non payment of parking fines - you name it, if you're poor, you end up in prison. If you're rich, you get a pitiful fine at best. Even the exact same crimes are treated entirely differently for different classes -- here in Australia, if you're poor & don't pay your taxes, the ATO will hound you to prison if necessary. If you're rich, or (better still) a huge multinational, they 'negotiate'!
mlacks 7y ago
I think a big part of the lack of Linux (desktop) adoption is the DIY/ hobbyist vibe that it continues to put off. The consensus among the Linux community is that for the regular non-techie consumer, all they need is a web browser and an office suite. That’s missing a key part of the equation: Linux desktops simply aren’t available in regular stores for people to see. Sony has a similar issue with their smartphone division. For whatever reason, they are no longer displaying their products in cell phone carrier stores in the US. The consumer doesn’t even have the chance to think about a Sony product before making the commitment to a competitor, forming a good relationship with that manufacturer, and repeating the cycle to avoid change. Why aren’t Linux laptops in best buy or the military department stores?
- tapland 7y ago
  Every now and then a system with Ubuntu installed makes it to retail shelves. I dubt they sell well since you need something really special (like the very nice build quality on the old aluminium MacBook, with most consumers knowing or seeing someine able to use them) to consider the jump.
  - type0 7y ago
    Yeah, and if they do sell any amount, someone inevitably complains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qj8p-PEwbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qj8p-PEwbI
- sansnomme 7y ago
  It worked out pretty well for Chromebooks. Or perhaps that's because of the sales and brand power of its parent company.
- abathur 7y ago
  (for context, long time windows user--but not for the past ~22 months. Started using macos in 2013. When my desktop died in early 2018, I rebuilt with nixos.) Maybe this shades into what you mean by diy, but I don't think finding one is the biggest issue--it's the papercuts. More precisely, I don't think many of us using it daily can in good conscience recommend it to anyone we suspect can't handle the papercuts without our help.
ridiculous_fish 7y ago
Right conclusion but wrong timeline and wrong OS! The big loser here was not Linux, it was Be, makers of BeOS. BeOS was ahead of its time. It had a modern GUI, where each window had a dedicated thread. It had a fantastic filesystem, with journaling and database-like searching. Very advanced. Be tried very hard to get OEMs to ship BeOS. But Microsoft's "per-processor" licensing meant that OEMs were charged for Windows on every computer they sold, even those without Windows. At the end, Be was offering to license BeOS for free to any OEM that would ship it as the default OS (even allowing dual boot), and still had no takers. Then they tried to license BeOS to Apple, but they misplayed their hand and Apple went with NeXT. That was that. By the time Linux became plausible on the desktop, the per-processor licenses were gone.
- shantly 7y ago
  Man, BeOS was amazing. I don't really have anything else to add, but damn did it crush Windows and Linux desktops of the time. Performance and general UX pleasantness, both. And it was at least as stable as they were (yes, the Linux kernel rarely crashed—but xfree86 crashing was almost as bad as the whole system going down, if you were using it as a desktop). BeOS felt so good to use.
- xiii1408 7y ago
  BeOS is one of those weird "parallel universe" products, where the history of tech could have gone in a very different direction. The old BeOS videos [1] are some of my favorites. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4A0Lc6DI7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4A0Lc6DI7A
- type0 7y ago
  For those interested in continuation of Be spirit, check out Haiku OS https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
  - rado 7y ago
    It's potentially great, and I would like it to succeed, but it lacks crucial features like GPU acceleration (?)
JohnFen 7y ago
From my own selfish point of view, I'm actually happy that Linux has a small consumer marketshare, as long as it's large enough to support serious development (which it is). I've been noticing that as various applications, operating systems, and platforms have worked to become more focused on the common person, they've been increasingly becoming less useful (and more of a pain to use) to me. I fear that if Linux actually broke into the mainstream, the same fate would befall it.
- fortran77 7y ago
  I feel the same way about my favorite programming languages. I'm glad there aren't giant Haskell conferences that are more concerned with making the language "friendly" and "accessible" than making it useful. This is what happened to Python, etc, and I don't think it's a good thing.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Yes, I've noticed this. It's led me to avoid using a lot of newer languages for anything but toy and learning projects (outside of work, where I use what is required, which includes some of these languages). For my own serious work, language stability over time is a core need.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    What's wrong with trying to bring people in? Why be elitist with tooling?
    - antepodius 7y ago
      It guarantees the userbase is elite.
      - pnako 7y ago
        What has the elite userbase of Haskell produced? Almost nothing.
      - 7y ago
1hackaday 7y ago
It would be very easy for Linux to increase its market share: make it easy to run Android apps.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Make it easy to run applications period. Adopt something like AppImage, standardize on a base set of libraries that all applications can depend on. It isn't rocket science... which is exactly why the Linux Desktop complexity fetishists hate it. Come on y'all, let's invent a new package manager, maybe using ML and a blockchain!
twotwotwo 7y ago
I'm not hugely disappointed with Linux's marketshare per se, because that doesn't affect a Linux user's life as much as you might think. It does what I need it to, stably, and I rarely run into old annoyances like hardware compatibility or incompatibility with specific tools I need for work. It's encouraging that Mac OS and now Windows (with WSL) have made some effort to become more reasonable Unix dev environments too. The dollar cost of the OS on new machines doesn't seem intolerable; you can do a lot with a cheap Chrome OS or Windows device. There are problems today that might not exist in a more Linux-y world, especially the remarkable power of a few huge companies to shape users' computing experiences. On the other hand, if Linux had had some huge commercial backer, whatever popular distribution won could have ended up with similar issues. In any case, my preferred desktop "winning" is not the only or best solution to those problems; users get some support from market forces (which I think we can partly credit for useful cheap devices and Microsoft's transformation) and where they don't help, well, regulation, including antitrust regulation, is always out there.
esotericn 7y ago
I believe this is tautological. Mass market products compromise. They simplify. They market, advertise, etcetera. A truly mass market GNU/Linux distro with the clout of a Microsoft or an Apple would inevitably, I believe, end up forking off into its' own barely compatible universe. If we're lucky, the 'old' universe sticks around. If we're unlucky, it fragments the ecosystem too much and the proper power user OS falls apart. Android is an example of precisely that. I've been using Linux for my entire adult life. All of the reasons that people give for not using it are reasons I use it. "It's too much tinkering", "I had to look at a config file", "I wanted to compile something to change it", etc.
- enobrev 7y ago
  To be fair, those reasons aren't as pertinent as they once were. I have a linux-only household and rarely tinker (besides my server, but that's a different category of system). Sure the occasional config file and maybe a compilation if I need the very latest of something, but otherwise, linux is pretty damned solid without digging in too deep these days - which includes a triple-monitor custom desktop.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    > maybe a compilation if I need the very latest of something It boggles my mind that it is 2019 and some people find it acceptable that you have to compile from source to install up to date software. Or to install software to a different location. Or to have two versions of the same software installed. This is a ludicrous regression from the state of personal computing in 1985.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      What's the big deal with compiling? Rust's package manager for example compiles everything. 'cargo install bat'. There, you compiled it. Python programs, JS are essentially being compiled on the fly. The Arch AUR is a oneshot 'makepkg' command even without a helper. It's only this big scary thing if the build tools are crap and you need a bunch of manual interventions. Again, I find it strange that developers shy away from this. I can see that the man on the clapham omnibus may not be impressed.
microcolonel 7y ago
Why should I care? The community (both drive-by and commercial members) is extremely productive, and together we make it useful at work and at home, and that's good enough.
jrockway 7y ago
I am not necessarily sure that only monopoly powers got Microsoft to where they are today. Microsoft did a lot to cultivate their platform. They invested heavily in developer tools and APIs. Why do games use DirectX and not OpenGL? Better tools and better hardware support. Why do games only run on Windows? Because they use DirectX. Therefore, people buy Windows computers so that they can play games. Microsoft's investment in tooling paid for itself in sales right there. I imagine people also enjoyed Visual Studio (probably more in the past than now), good optimizing C/C++ compilers, and tools like that, as well. They had a platform, and they made it easy for you to use their platform. All that was engineering investment, not evil business practices. Though I'm sure that taking over the world was on their minds. What mattered was getting other people to help them, and that is something they succeeded at. The other crucial thing that Windows did was allowing drivers to be shitty binary blobs. That is the best you can get out of most hardware companies. They make a million different products a year, and they don't have time to update their drivers when some kernel API changes. And, they stole a lot of IP from their competitors, so they can't release the source code and let the community do it for them. And, their customers probably never update to the latest version, so they'd have to maintain 100 different forks. But with Windows, you just make binary blob and it works for decades. Microsoft gives you an API, you program to that API, and Microsoft does the dirty work of keeping it working as they change Windows. (Linux doesn't have this, and that's why your Android phone only gets updates for like a month after it comes out.) The Linux community says "drivers must be free", "only the highest quality is allowed", "software freedom is more important than having the latest features", and "we're sorry that you can't use patented algorithms without getting caught, join our fight against software patents!" The hardware manufacturers said NOPE to that. They don't make software, they don't invest in software engineering, and they'll do the bare minimum to sell their chips. Microsoft recognized this and made something that would work for them. The result is where we are today. None of this is to discount Microsoft's questionable business practices. They certainly engaged in them. But I don't think they were as crucial to the success of Windows as the engineering investments they made. They had a stranglehold on the browser market for years and were even investigated by the government for it. Then someone came along and wrote a better web browser, and now nobody even knows what Internet Explorer is. Bundling it with Windows didn't matter; people use the built-in browser to download Chrome the instant the Windows installer exits.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
This is a comforting lie Linux Desktop evangelists tell themselves because they can't accept that they've failed to build a good product for over 20 years now. Here's just one example: to this day, it is still difficult to install software that wasn't specifically compiled and carefully packaged for your distro. Software compiled just 2 years ago often won't work on the same distro today. It's insane. And the OS is full of things like that.
- type0 7y ago
  > Software compiled just 2 years ago often won't work on the same distro today. It's insane. And the OS is full of things like that. That's equally true for Windows, and there is no OS called Linux, you don't have to be an evangelist to know that
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    > That's equally true for Windows No it isn't. People routinely run software that was compiled decades ago on Windows. > and there is no OS called Linux Maybe that's part of why it's so shit? You have a problem with it, and someone pops up and says to use a different distro (with it's own set of different problems) or condescendingly explains how "Linux is just a kernel" like anyone gives a fuck.
StreamBright 7y ago
Linux is not a desktop operating system as it lacks the integration that made both MacOS and Windows excellent desktop OSes. The LUG guys think whatever they want, but for a p50 user Linux is not even an option.
myrandomcomment 7y ago
Absolute drivel not worth reading. All politics and pontificating. Linux desktop lost because the market did not want it. That is the system we live in. Rants about Bill Gates needs to be in jail are nonsense (and I used OS/2 until 99!). I had a BeOS desktop also. They lost. Gates for whatever issue you have with his hard nose legal business practices is doing a ton of good work via his foundation. Linux desktop lost the battle, get over it. Be happy it won the war as it is in most embedded systems and almost all the servers in the world. By this logic I should be mad about that because Solaris was so much better as a server.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  One can do bad things and also donate a lot of money later. See also Family, Sackler
new_realist 7y ago
You can blame yourselves; the Mac was similarly disadvantaged, and yet clawed its way back and is 10x more popular than desktop Linux.

46 points by Liriel 7y ago

wmf 7y ago

The Microsoft antitrust case was a long time ago and AFAIK they stopped the licensing shenanigans. Since then macOS has increased share significantly and Linux has gained almost nothing.

JeremySecond 7y ago
Yet I was unable to buy the laptop I wanted without Windows 10 in 2019. And if you think that antitrust case is the full extent of Microsoft's shenanigans, you are beyond naive. One example: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240214747/Microsoft-rallies-partners-in-government-open-standards-debate https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240214747/Microsoft-ral...
goalieca 7y ago
You sure about that? Chromebooks are everywhere.
- wmf 7y ago
  ChromeOS also has lower market share than macOS (despite running on far cheaper hardware) and I don't consider ChromeOS to be desktop Linux.
  - freedomben 7y ago
    More and more I think you should. I would have totally agreed a year ago, but it's now very easy for the average user to install any Linux app they want from distro repos. Chrome OS is totally Linux now.
neltnerb 7y ago
I mean it's more obscured but if you buy an Apple computer you are paying the MacOS tax, right? They can call the OS free all they like, but clearly the OS adds value to their hardware. If, say, RedHat wanted to sell an OS to a person who uses an Apple computer are they not also asking that potential customer to pay the same kind of "double tax" referenced? It seems like it to me, Apple just sells the hardware too so they can play pricing games and pretend the OS is valueless while the hardware is what you're paying for. Sure, it's different in that they're probably not doing anything illegal -- they're not leveraging their monopoly to force other vendors to give them money for nothing because they are the vendor, but it is awfully parallel if the question you're asking is "why isn't Linux desktop marketshare increasing?" Does it not do just as much harm to their customer if they can't buy the hardware minus a real reasonable price for the OS because they're going to use Linux on it? Again, I'm not suggesting they're illegally leveraging a monopoly because they are also the vendor of the hardware and one company bundling their hardware with their software is common. But I am suggesting that they're not a counterpoint to the idea that this kind of "double tax" is holding back Linux use. If anything, it's a small point in favor of the idea that the author might be on to something... I'd personally argue more that for profit companies leveraging free software without paying for its development is the root cause of project decay and poorly funded free software projects. Granted this is by design, but it's pretty embarrassing for our style of capitalism that there's not any kind of recognition among MBAs that they might have an ethical obligation to donate to people who are doing work their entire business requires to operate.
zrm 7y ago
Mac market share cratered around the turn of the century as result of a stagnating operating system (MacOS 9) and then use of uncompetitive PowerPC processors. Since OS X and the switch to x64 processors they've been slowly crawling their way back, but they still don't even have the market share they did in the mid 90s. And the OEM licensing never much affected Apple to begin with since they make their own hardware.

Artistry121 7y ago

How did he do this? “ So, to make things painfully clear: Bill Gates made it so that his company would tax every computer sold no matter whether it ran Windows or not. If a manufacturer wanted to sell computers running Windows, all the computers it sold were taxed by Microsoft. He would get paid for the work a Linux distribution was doing, and the Linux distribution would not get that money.”

umeshunni 7y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows and https://www.cnet.com/news/microsofts-1994-consent-decree-boon-or-bust/ https://www.cnet.com/news/microsofts-1994-consent-decree-boo... Till 1994, Microsoft charged OEMs based on the total number of computers they sold, not based on how many of them had Windows. Now, whether Linux's low desktop market share in 2019 is because of a practice that happened from 1983-1994 is a different question.
henryfjordan 7y ago
Contracts. You, as Microsoft, tell Dell and HP they can either pay for a license for Windows for every computer they sell regardless of whether or not they install Windows, or they cannot have a single license for Windows. Dell and HP then choose: Hope people accept linux/BSD/Other and stop selling windows, or sell windows and pay some extra. Nothing illegal about it unless you are exploiting a monopoly (which Microsoft did according to the author of the post).
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  It would have been very interesting if things could have worked out where OEMs refused to pay that MS tax and instead provided instructions on how to purchase and install your own operating system separately.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I remember that some OEMs (including one or two major ones) had started to go this direction, offering "naked" PCs without an OS at all. Microsoft's response was to demonize the practice as encouraging piracy. Their argument was that obviously nobody wants a computer without Windows, so people buying them that way were clearly intending to install a pirated copy.

grzte 7y ago

The Linux desktop is still a clusterfuck today. Bill Gates doing bad stuff 20 years ago has nothing to do with it.

Nextgrid 7y ago
I recently had to set up Ubuntu 19.10 on a friend's laptop with a dead keyboard so had to use the on-screen keyboard. For some reason the keyboard wouldn't show up in the installer's text fields so no way to enter username, password, etc. It works everywhere else, but not in the installer, presumably because it's using the wrong toolkit out of the dozens of GUI toolkits available and the rest of the desktop doesn't recognise its text fields properly. So unfortunately I still have to agree - how come the built-in installer program not play ball with the built-in accessibility features, and why wasn't this tested? Logging in with the OSK also had a quirk - if you request the OSK on the login screen, common sense would suggest that you also want the OSK to persist once you're logged in... but no - once logged in you have to manually go in settings and enable it again. This is not a big deal, but just having someone think about the UX would've taken care of this. Finally getting Netflix to work was annoying; Firefox is actually nice enough to let me know that the page requires DRM content and offered to enable it in one click without arguing about licenses or non-free software, but it still didn't work... after searching around it seems like I had to enable the non-free repo and install an extra "libavcodec" package. I figured it out, but I wouldn't blame a casual user if they gave up and said "Linux sucks".
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > after searching around it seems like I had to enable the non-free repo and install an extra "libavcodec" package. Isn't ffmpeg a basic dependency of Firefox? Can an Ubuntu user explain how it's possible to install Firefox without its dependencies?
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    It was libavcodec-extra which I presume isn't a dependency, or otherwise the stock Ubuntu ships with broken dependencies out of the box but I'd find this extremely unlikely.

adnzzzzZ 7y ago

I'm glad Bill Gates won on desktop. Clearly he knew what was best for the world given that his operating system simply works, while all Linux distros do an extremely poor job at simply working and therefore haven't managed to reach normal non-technical people at all, and likely never will because the community seems filled with people who have a similar "it's not our fault" mentality. I've seen this post upvoted in multiple Linux communities now and it's just sad to see that the community mostly seems to agree with this kind of trash. >However, what it is about, is the question: why is Bill Gates not in jail for life with all his wealth stripped off? He’s a criminal, and his crime has directly harmed us, the people working on free software, on the Linux Desktop. How about this, under the Capitalist Manifesto I hereby declare that all open source developers be jailed for their crimes against humanity. If you sell your labor for free you're a menace to society as you're distorting labor markets and you should be stopped for causing all this harm.

yellowapple 7y ago
Your points are about a decade or so out of date.
mnm1 7y ago
Should we throw all mothers (and fathers) in jail that take care of their own kids for free? Should we jail everyone who does things for free? We could put something like 99% of Americans in jail. Some presidents and politicians would love a solution like that. Good thing you came up with the a brilliant way of justifying this. What incredible insight into macroeconomics!
microcolonel 7y ago
I think I sense a bit of sarcasm, but doing things you care about for free is an essential part of the free market, something the cronyists, the trade unionists, and the communists never respect, it seems.
crispinb 7y ago
> his operating system simply works, while all Linux distros do an extremely poor job at simply working Irrelevant. Regular consumers didn't install Windows - indeed before Apple's rise they didn't even know there was an alternative. They bought computers with it preinstalled because Microsoft stitched up corrupt deals worldwide to ensure this was all people had access to. If Linux had been preinstalled, it would have 'just worked' to pretty much the same extent Windows does. > How about this, under the Capitalist Manifesto I hereby declare that all open source developers be jailed for their crimes against humanity. If you sell your labor for free you're a menace to society as you're distorting labor markets and you should be stopped for causing all this harm. There are millions of poor people in all the developed countries in prison today for having committed 'crimes' miniscule in scale compared to those of Microsoft. Marijuana use, non payment of parking fines - you name it, if you're poor, you end up in prison. If you're rich, you get a pitiful fine at best. Even the exact same crimes are treated entirely differently for different classes -- here in Australia, if you're poor & don't pay your taxes, the ATO will hound you to prison if necessary. If you're rich, or (better still) a huge multinational, they 'negotiate'!

mlacks 7y ago

I think a big part of the lack of Linux (desktop) adoption is the DIY/ hobbyist vibe that it continues to put off. The consensus among the Linux community is that for the regular non-techie consumer, all they need is a web browser and an office suite. That’s missing a key part of the equation: Linux desktops simply aren’t available in regular stores for people to see. Sony has a similar issue with their smartphone division. For whatever reason, they are no longer displaying their products in cell phone carrier stores in the US. The consumer doesn’t even have the chance to think about a Sony product before making the commitment to a competitor, forming a good relationship with that manufacturer, and repeating the cycle to avoid change. Why aren’t Linux laptops in best buy or the military department stores?

tapland 7y ago
Every now and then a system with Ubuntu installed makes it to retail shelves. I dubt they sell well since you need something really special (like the very nice build quality on the old aluminium MacBook, with most consumers knowing or seeing someine able to use them) to consider the jump.
- type0 7y ago
  Yeah, and if they do sell any amount, someone inevitably complains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qj8p-PEwbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qj8p-PEwbI
sansnomme 7y ago
It worked out pretty well for Chromebooks. Or perhaps that's because of the sales and brand power of its parent company.
abathur 7y ago
(for context, long time windows user--but not for the past ~22 months. Started using macos in 2013. When my desktop died in early 2018, I rebuilt with nixos.) Maybe this shades into what you mean by diy, but I don't think finding one is the biggest issue--it's the papercuts. More precisely, I don't think many of us using it daily can in good conscience recommend it to anyone we suspect can't handle the papercuts without our help.

ridiculous_fish 7y ago

Right conclusion but wrong timeline and wrong OS! The big loser here was not Linux, it was Be, makers of BeOS. BeOS was ahead of its time. It had a modern GUI, where each window had a dedicated thread. It had a fantastic filesystem, with journaling and database-like searching. Very advanced. Be tried very hard to get OEMs to ship BeOS. But Microsoft's "per-processor" licensing meant that OEMs were charged for Windows on every computer they sold, even those without Windows. At the end, Be was offering to license BeOS for free to any OEM that would ship it as the default OS (even allowing dual boot), and still had no takers. Then they tried to license BeOS to Apple, but they misplayed their hand and Apple went with NeXT. That was that. By the time Linux became plausible on the desktop, the per-processor licenses were gone.

shantly 7y ago
Man, BeOS was amazing. I don't really have anything else to add, but damn did it crush Windows and Linux desktops of the time. Performance and general UX pleasantness, both. And it was at least as stable as they were (yes, the Linux kernel rarely crashed—but xfree86 crashing was almost as bad as the whole system going down, if you were using it as a desktop). BeOS felt so good to use.
xiii1408 7y ago
BeOS is one of those weird "parallel universe" products, where the history of tech could have gone in a very different direction. The old BeOS videos [1] are some of my favorites. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4A0Lc6DI7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4A0Lc6DI7A
type0 7y ago
For those interested in continuation of Be spirit, check out Haiku OS https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
- rado 7y ago
  It's potentially great, and I would like it to succeed, but it lacks crucial features like GPU acceleration (?)

JohnFen 7y ago

From my own selfish point of view, I'm actually happy that Linux has a small consumer marketshare, as long as it's large enough to support serious development (which it is). I've been noticing that as various applications, operating systems, and platforms have worked to become more focused on the common person, they've been increasingly becoming less useful (and more of a pain to use) to me. I fear that if Linux actually broke into the mainstream, the same fate would befall it.

fortran77 7y ago
I feel the same way about my favorite programming languages. I'm glad there aren't giant Haskell conferences that are more concerned with making the language "friendly" and "accessible" than making it useful. This is what happened to Python, etc, and I don't think it's a good thing.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes, I've noticed this. It's led me to avoid using a lot of newer languages for anything but toy and learning projects (outside of work, where I use what is required, which includes some of these languages). For my own serious work, language stability over time is a core need.
- azinman2 7y ago
  What's wrong with trying to bring people in? Why be elitist with tooling?
  - antepodius 7y ago
    It guarantees the userbase is elite.
    - pnako 7y ago
      What has the elite userbase of Haskell produced? Almost nothing.
    - 7y ago

1hackaday 7y ago

It would be very easy for Linux to increase its market share: make it easy to run Android apps.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Make it easy to run applications period. Adopt something like AppImage, standardize on a base set of libraries that all applications can depend on. It isn't rocket science... which is exactly why the Linux Desktop complexity fetishists hate it. Come on y'all, let's invent a new package manager, maybe using ML and a blockchain!

twotwotwo 7y ago

I'm not hugely disappointed with Linux's marketshare per se, because that doesn't affect a Linux user's life as much as you might think. It does what I need it to, stably, and I rarely run into old annoyances like hardware compatibility or incompatibility with specific tools I need for work. It's encouraging that Mac OS and now Windows (with WSL) have made some effort to become more reasonable Unix dev environments too. The dollar cost of the OS on new machines doesn't seem intolerable; you can do a lot with a cheap Chrome OS or Windows device. There are problems today that might not exist in a more Linux-y world, especially the remarkable power of a few huge companies to shape users' computing experiences. On the other hand, if Linux had had some huge commercial backer, whatever popular distribution won could have ended up with similar issues. In any case, my preferred desktop "winning" is not the only or best solution to those problems; users get some support from market forces (which I think we can partly credit for useful cheap devices and Microsoft's transformation) and where they don't help, well, regulation, including antitrust regulation, is always out there.

esotericn 7y ago

I believe this is tautological. Mass market products compromise. They simplify. They market, advertise, etcetera. A truly mass market GNU/Linux distro with the clout of a Microsoft or an Apple would inevitably, I believe, end up forking off into its' own barely compatible universe. If we're lucky, the 'old' universe sticks around. If we're unlucky, it fragments the ecosystem too much and the proper power user OS falls apart. Android is an example of precisely that. I've been using Linux for my entire adult life. All of the reasons that people give for not using it are reasons I use it. "It's too much tinkering", "I had to look at a config file", "I wanted to compile something to change it", etc.

enobrev 7y ago
To be fair, those reasons aren't as pertinent as they once were. I have a linux-only household and rarely tinker (besides my server, but that's a different category of system). Sure the occasional config file and maybe a compilation if I need the very latest of something, but otherwise, linux is pretty damned solid without digging in too deep these days - which includes a triple-monitor custom desktop.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > maybe a compilation if I need the very latest of something It boggles my mind that it is 2019 and some people find it acceptable that you have to compile from source to install up to date software. Or to install software to a different location. Or to have two versions of the same software installed. This is a ludicrous regression from the state of personal computing in 1985.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    What's the big deal with compiling? Rust's package manager for example compiles everything. 'cargo install bat'. There, you compiled it. Python programs, JS are essentially being compiled on the fly. The Arch AUR is a oneshot 'makepkg' command even without a helper. It's only this big scary thing if the build tools are crap and you need a bunch of manual interventions. Again, I find it strange that developers shy away from this. I can see that the man on the clapham omnibus may not be impressed.

microcolonel 7y ago

Why should I care? The community (both drive-by and commercial members) is extremely productive, and together we make it useful at work and at home, and that's good enough.

jrockway 7y ago

I am not necessarily sure that only monopoly powers got Microsoft to where they are today. Microsoft did a lot to cultivate their platform. They invested heavily in developer tools and APIs. Why do games use DirectX and not OpenGL? Better tools and better hardware support. Why do games only run on Windows? Because they use DirectX. Therefore, people buy Windows computers so that they can play games. Microsoft's investment in tooling paid for itself in sales right there. I imagine people also enjoyed Visual Studio (probably more in the past than now), good optimizing C/C++ compilers, and tools like that, as well. They had a platform, and they made it easy for you to use their platform. All that was engineering investment, not evil business practices. Though I'm sure that taking over the world was on their minds. What mattered was getting other people to help them, and that is something they succeeded at. The other crucial thing that Windows did was allowing drivers to be shitty binary blobs. That is the best you can get out of most hardware companies. They make a million different products a year, and they don't have time to update their drivers when some kernel API changes. And, they stole a lot of IP from their competitors, so they can't release the source code and let the community do it for them. And, their customers probably never update to the latest version, so they'd have to maintain 100 different forks. But with Windows, you just make binary blob and it works for decades. Microsoft gives you an API, you program to that API, and Microsoft does the dirty work of keeping it working as they change Windows. (Linux doesn't have this, and that's why your Android phone only gets updates for like a month after it comes out.) The Linux community says "drivers must be free", "only the highest quality is allowed", "software freedom is more important than having the latest features", and "we're sorry that you can't use patented algorithms without getting caught, join our fight against software patents!" The hardware manufacturers said NOPE to that. They don't make software, they don't invest in software engineering, and they'll do the bare minimum to sell their chips. Microsoft recognized this and made something that would work for them. The result is where we are today. None of this is to discount Microsoft's questionable business practices. They certainly engaged in them. But I don't think they were as crucial to the success of Windows as the engineering investments they made. They had a stranglehold on the browser market for years and were even investigated by the government for it. Then someone came along and wrote a better web browser, and now nobody even knows what Internet Explorer is. Bundling it with Windows didn't matter; people use the built-in browser to download Chrome the instant the Windows installer exits.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

This is a comforting lie Linux Desktop evangelists tell themselves because they can't accept that they've failed to build a good product for over 20 years now. Here's just one example: to this day, it is still difficult to install software that wasn't specifically compiled and carefully packaged for your distro. Software compiled just 2 years ago often won't work on the same distro today. It's insane. And the OS is full of things like that.

type0 7y ago
> Software compiled just 2 years ago often won't work on the same distro today. It's insane. And the OS is full of things like that. That's equally true for Windows, and there is no OS called Linux, you don't have to be an evangelist to know that
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > That's equally true for Windows No it isn't. People routinely run software that was compiled decades ago on Windows. > and there is no OS called Linux Maybe that's part of why it's so shit? You have a problem with it, and someone pops up and says to use a different distro (with it's own set of different problems) or condescendingly explains how "Linux is just a kernel" like anyone gives a fuck.

StreamBright 7y ago

Linux is not a desktop operating system as it lacks the integration that made both MacOS and Windows excellent desktop OSes. The LUG guys think whatever they want, but for a p50 user Linux is not even an option.

myrandomcomment 7y ago

Absolute drivel not worth reading. All politics and pontificating. Linux desktop lost because the market did not want it. That is the system we live in. Rants about Bill Gates needs to be in jail are nonsense (and I used OS/2 until 99!). I had a BeOS desktop also. They lost. Gates for whatever issue you have with his hard nose legal business practices is doing a ton of good work via his foundation. Linux desktop lost the battle, get over it. Be happy it won the war as it is in most embedded systems and almost all the servers in the world. By this logic I should be mad about that because Solaris was so much better as a server.

iudqnolq 7y ago
One can do bad things and also donate a lot of money later. See also Family, Sackler

new_realist 7y ago

You can blame yourselves; the Mac was similarly disadvantaged, and yet clawed its way back and is 10x more popular than desktop Linux.