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Why are Free-Desktop Developers Wedded to Linux?
An anonymous reader wonders: "We have been hearing promising predictions like 'This year will be the year of Linux on the desktop' for the last decade. However, the Linux of today seems to be as far away as ever from realizing the expectations of mass adoption we once had for it, without significant growth in home usage since the late 90s. Clearly, if Linux is unable to reproduce a third of Firefox's end user uptake over a much longer time-frame, there are deficiencies with the direction the GNU/Linux/X/Gnome/KDE system has taken. Of course, almost all free software and desktop efforts and development remain unquestioningly oriented around Linux.
Other free-desktop operating system projects which take different and innovative approaches like ReactOS, AROS, Mona and Syllable remain comparatively starved of developers and interest. An often cited reason for using a non-Microsoft OS is to avoid a monoculture, but free-desktop efforts have created a total monoculture around developing and promoting Linux, despite a decade of failure in supplanting Microsoft's proprietorial OSes with it. Why are free-desktop developers neglecting to consider an alternative to the penguin?"
Don't forget Haiku, the free BeOS reimplementation. What's been done so far is impressive for the number of developers working on it; if a few more developers joined the progress, I (personally, IMHO) think R1 could happen this year.
Seriously though, imagine you had to buy a Dell without Windows and just had to figure out which drivers you needed for the hardware. You will spend hours with no assurance of success, trust me. You can be damned sure that Dell makes sure that the disk they distribute with their machines comes with all the drivers for the hardware they sell you and they will only sell hardware that they know will work with Windows.
Try one of these or these and it will be a desktop Linux that just works out of the box with the hardware that is attached to your computer, which is what matters.
Putting the bar at the point where the OS must support the same hardware that Windows XP supports is a bar too high for any OS. Just as there is no way Microsoft would allow itself to be compared by maintaining some arbitrary parity with the hardware devices that Linux supports. I imagine there are in fact some specialized peripherals that only have Linux drivers and not Windows, but you are right that isn't the point. That way of framing the question will always puts your efforts at chasing someone else's lead.
What Linux needs more of is more places, like the links above, to get fully integrated products that have you favorite distribution working with a full set of compatible hardware to meet your needs. And finally, all that Integration work can't make the product cost more than a few bucks more than a comparable Dell otherwise people are going to try and do it themselves like they have been, with mixed results.
Seriously though, imagine you had to buy a Dell without Windows and just had to figure out which drivers you needed for the hardware. You will spend hours with no assurance of success, trust me.
Hardly. Simply go to http://support.dell.com, enter the machine's service tag, select the desired OS, and get exactly the drivers you need. Sometimes there might be two different drives for a device category (e.g. two possible NICS), but hardly anything requiring hours of work. Dell is by far the best in this category - other vendors certainly do make it much harder to find all of the drivers needed for a given system.