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> The year of the Linux desktop keeps not really happening partly because hackers have very different interests and priorities from consumers. There is no year
by MrVandemar 3y ago
> The year of the Linux desktop keeps not really happening partly because hackers have very different interests and priorities from consumers.
There is no year of the Linux desktop, and never will be. Consumers won't use it, because they have been trained to use other things that are widely available and that 98% satisfies their requirements.
If Linux was the only operating system, or the only choice between that and something very expensive, then you would see consumers starting to use it and companies showing up to sell them things that run on it.
As it happens, Linux approximates enough of the desktop experience to meet a certain baseline of usability, and that's all some people need.
That's mostly a side effect. Importantly it enables hackerly people to have most of the affordances of a desktop, as well as their cool esoteric software that enables them to do their niche wierd thing that they're super interested in and then publish a book about it using LaTeX or some convolution of MarkDown and tooling.
(and if that sounds critical in any way I do apologise: I love that linux exists and use it almost exclusively).
- eternityforest 3y agoI use Linux almost exclusively too(Except for things I can use an Android tablet instead for, I really only use actual PCs for programming and media creation). But I often strongly consider switching to Windows, although cost and inertia stop me from actually trying it out. I think there could be a year of the Linux desktop, and I would love it, but the current Linux community would hate it(As is, they hate most of the stuff I like about Linux, like DBus, The Init System We Only Name to start Flamewars, NetworkManager, etc. FOSS in general just has way too high of a tolerance for problems. Users seem to see them as a normal part of the experience, rather than as things that are not supposed to happen on a modern system. There's kind of a culture of "It's free, if you don't like it, fork it and fix it", but you can't actually do that yourself unless you've got years to spend to try to make something resemble commercial software, and there's not much interest. I'm not sure how to solve the issue of FOSS being unappealing to most..