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Why Linux Can't 'Sell' On the Desktop
New submitter VoyagerRadio writes "Recently I found myself struggling with a question I should easily have been able to answer: Why would anyone want to use Linux as their everyday desktop (or laptop) operating system? It's a fair question, and asked often of Linux, but I'm finding it to be a question I can no longer answer with the conviction necessary to 'sell' the platform. In fact, I kind of feel like a car salesman who realizes he no longer believes in the product he's been pitching. It's not that I don't find Linux worthy; I simply don't understand how it's ever going to succeed on the desktop with voluntary marketing efforts. What do Linux users need to do to replicate the marketing efforts of Apple and Microsoft and other corporate operating system vendors? To me, it seems you don't sell Linux at all because there isn't supposed to be one dominant distribution that stands out from the rest. Without a specific product to put on the shelf to sell, what in the world do you focus your efforts on selling? An idea?"
Why would anyone want to use Linux as their everyday desktop (or laptop) operating system?
Why not? It simply works, I can do whatever I want.
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
ask not what OS is for you, ask what your OS can do. After the shine wears off it's about what you use a computer for. I play 1 on-line game, read the news, and catch up with a few people on FB. And I have have a diffrent machine for eMail. If Linux does what you want, use it, you don't have to sell it to anyone.
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Really, why? If you can't think of a good reason for someone to use it - it's probably not for them. I've been a Linux desktop user for ages, and I'd find Windows horrible to go back to now, but I get that it's not the same for everyone.
Look, I'm not saying you shouldn't let people know Linux exists and show them how it could help them, but don't get obsessive about it.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
I don't think the answer here is about Linux, I think it's about Windows. Simply put, there isn't enough "wrong" with Windows these days.
There was, I felt, a moment where Linux had a chance to make a breakthrough onto the mainstream desktop. It was around the point where Windows ME was failing horribly and Windows 2000 had yet to get much public acceptance. At that point, there was a lot wrong with Windows. The technology underpinning 95/98/ME was creaking horribly. It's hard to believe now, but if you were a heavy PC user (particularly a gamer) back then, your Win98 machine would need daily reboots just to maintain basic performance and stability. Over on 2000, until it got a service pack or two, there were horrible compatibility issues with many applications, particularly those that required directx.
And then the moment passed. Windows 2000 got patched up and then Windows XP went on, after a rocky start, to become a stable, pleasant to use OS. Even the debacle of the Vista launch couldn't undermine the general dominance of Windows - because the major competition to Vista was coming from XP, not from Linux.
If you want to unseat the dominant market player, you have to not just be better than them, but be a lot better. It's not just that you have to have a few killer features; you have to be able to at least match the dominant player in every other significant respect as well. Linux is nowhere near that kind of position in respect of Windows these days (take gaming support as a case in point, but there are plenty of other examples).
I make my living on Linux I spend and for the last 12 years I've been using it on desktop. I am very happy with Linux - I spend better part of my day in Linux consoles on various servers. However, 6 months ago I switched to Mac OS X for my desktop needs and I'm not going back. Why?
Firstly, now I have a sane desktop environment which doesn't change often. It took some time to adjust to it's workflow, but with 27'' screen it wasn't that hard (just keep everything open).
Secondly, I get access to all applications I need - ranging from Adobe products to MS Office to various ingenious applications from independent developers. I can still access all console utilities that I had under linux, so nothing is lost but a lot is gained.
Finally, I get a better software selection than I had with any distribution I tried. The foundation is solid, I don't have to worry kernel upgrade will break binary graphic drivers (which I also get from e.g. Debian Stable), but I can keep Firefox, Virtualbox, etc. up-to-date with a click of a button (which I would get from a rolling release distribution).
Simply put: Linux is great, and there are many excellent distributions out there. But until they settle on a DE (including broken DE's like early versions of Gnome 3 or KDE 4 is just not acceptable) and until Adobe, Microsoft et al. start selling their software for Linux, many people will simply not be satisfied with Linux desktop - which has very little to do with Linux itself.
No, it's not the same. Until Windows Vista, the vast majority of users were logged in on accounts with full Administrator priveleges on their local computers. That made it much easier for small security loopholes to escalate into big security loopholes when a user ran a program or visited a web site they shouldn't have. Even on Windows Vista, users tended to turn off the security features because they were badly designed and too cumbersome. And remember that the decade-old Windows XP is still the most widely used Microsoft OS (unless it's been overtaken in the last year).
Also, until around the turn of the millenium, Microsoft didn't believe in the Internet. It may sound ludicrous today, but Microsoft claimed the Internet's popularity wouldn't last, and instead pushed their own proprietary online service, Microsoft Network, which, back then, was similar to America Online. Microsoft products were adapted to a LAN environment, not an Internet environment, so their security was seriously lagging behind, and it took many years for them to catch up.
Internet Explorer has also historically had much more security problems than the most popular browsers on competing operating systems (Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc).
Saying that Windows OSes get more viruses because they're more widely used is only part of the answer.
OS/2 has gone away; Linux hasn't. But, even today, Windows 7 is no particular match for Linux. Does Windows run on Z-series mainframes? Sparc? Anything other than x86? Big-endian? Embedded? With how much compatibility?
The discussion is about desktops so pretty much none of that is relevant... Or maybe there is relevance that you didn't elaborate enough and I'm just not getting? I don't think that anyone here denies that Linux is superior to Windows in that kind of specialized systems but that's just not important in this context.
In a recent interview with an Iranian Linux publication, RMS had this to say about the very issue addressed here - it's an opinion I share.
"LR: What's the best way to advocate Free Software? Some Free Software users engage in technical debates with Microsoft and Apple fans, trying to convince them GNU/Linux is more powerful. Another group focus on philosophical and cultural aspects of Free Software and try to make people care about their freedom. Which of the two mentioned approaches are more effective?
RMS: They are both "effective" but they lead to different results.
If you convince people that some free software is technically superior, they might run some free software, but they will remain ready to use nonfree software in the areas where that is technically superior. They will continue to judge an important question based on superficial issues. This is just a partial success.
However, if you convince people that they deserve freedom, they will start rejecting nonfree software whether it is technically inferior or technically superior, because they will see that free software is ethically superior. They will understand the important question and judge it right. This is a full, deep success.
Another weakness of technical arguments is that nontechnical people probably won't care about them at all. But they can understand ethical arguments. Ethical arguments are the only way we can convince nontechnical people to become free software supporters.
I figure that users can judge for themselves whether program A is more convenient than program B. So I don't try to convince them about that sort of question, except when someone has preconceptions about free software and has not tried it. I focus on talking about freedom. "
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
What Linux needs isn't marketing, what it needs is to become the better product. Back in the Windows98 days one could make some good arguments for Linux in terms of stability, security and such, but those days are long gone and Microsoft and Apples OS offerings are just as stable as your Linux box these days, if not even more so. Which doesn't leave much arguments for Linux on the desktop. In terms of usability it's a complete clusterfuck, the user interfaces are an inconsistent non-backward compatible mess (we used to complain about QT looking different then GTK, now GTK3 apps don't even look like GTK2 apps), the packaging formats are all incompatible (even if everything uses .deb, it's still all incompatible) and there still isn't a standard way to ship third party applications on Linux. The fact that it is all Free Software is essentially irrelevant as it rarely povides the user with any pratical benefits over a proprietary alternative (data formats from one app can't be handled by another, etc.). Security is also rather terrible for a desktop OS, as it provides little to no sandboxing for applications, thus making it risky to try third party applications.
In essence, stop complaining about lack of games, hardware suport or third party support. While those are holding Linux back, they are in large part simply the result of the underlying framework being rather shit. If it would be trivial to build and distribute Linux software, a lot more people might actually do so, but it's not, so the support overhead is rarely worth the effort.
> If you get all panty-bunched about they have to be open ...
Haven't checked further down in the thread, but I confidently predict that I'll hit a flame war over this very thing, once I scroll down far enough. Call me a prophet. :)
Free Software purists require that Linux must Make A Statement(tm) and Prove A Point(sm). If it also happens to work just as well, hey, that's a bonus. But to some of us, that's actually kinda-sorta important.
Related topic: when I switched to Linux (c. 2000), I always installed Acrobat because most of my equipment manuals are in PDF form. The folks in Linux fora online would scold me, but at the time, all free alternatives STUNK. They were AWFUL. They could display a page and, if you held your mouth just right, they might even print them correctly. But only Acrobat would allow me to zoom, search, print the zoomed portion, bookmark sections and do the other things I needed to do.
So ... I used Acrobat. The Bearded Priests of the Free Software Revolution(tm) hated me for it, and accused me of "enabling" continued bad behavior from closed source companies. I tuned them out as background noise. Hey, I was using Linux -- on purpose -- and whenever I could reasonably do so, I chose FOSS alternatives -- on purpose. If I didn't meet their standards of ideological purity, well, too bad.
Now, thank the Lord, there are alternatives that work well enough (I use Okular). But for years, that wasn't the case.
Go ask the software and hardware vendors why they don't target Linux and they'll give you plenty of reasons. Hint: it's NOT market share. There are small software shops that LOVE writing apps for niche markets. But one of the biggest reasons they don't target Linux is that it's a moving target.
They'll release a package, only to have the next update kill it, and they'll get a flood of support calls (which cost them money). The answer from the Free Software Purists(tm) will inevitably be, "well, if you'd release everything and let us build from source, you wouldn't have that problem."
They're not going to do that. Whether it's right or wrong, that's just a fact and it's time to accept it. They're NOT GOING TO DO THAT. Instead, they'll just continue to target Windows or Mac or (nowadays) Android.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I've said it above - but more directly to your point about Linux being difficult - we could argue that all day. I have had a real bear trying to do some rather straightforward things on MS and Apple. The fact that so many friends are calling on me to help fix their problems on such a regular basis (and none of them are running Linux) proves to me that they are not so easy.
So I think it goes well beyond that - to marketing and business practices.
But in my mind, this discussion about if Linux is as 'easy' as MS and Apple is a waste of time as we'll be throwing around anecdotes and such without really settling anything. So I'd rather avoid that and ask, "Is Windows the dominant OS based purely on usability?" If you really believe that, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
This.
I have my parents on Linux. They used to use Windows, but I got them on Firefox and Thunderbird, and then switching them over was easy. Now when we come over for dinner, I'm not spending half an hour or more cleaning out malware and untangling registry cruft and so on. If they have a problem when I'm not around, I can SSH in and tweak it.
In the real world, most people don't know how to administer a computer, be it Windows or Linux or even Mac. So they get their brother or sister or kids or their friend who's "good with computers" to support them. (My wife got me a t-shirt to wear to family reunions that says, "No, I will not fix your computer.") So if you're going to be supporting someone's computer, shouldn't it be a system that's easier to support?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Linux us NOT missing features. This is the same B.S. we heard constantly with MacOS in the days before OS X came out. There wasn't features (or software) missing then and there isn't now for either MacOS or Linux.
What it is missing is simply the user base to get past the tipping point where the even the worst and laziest developers and companies have to take notice because enough people squeal when you do something idiotic like put PHP code in your web page that blocks a non-Windows browser. As a Linux desktop user I still have to deal with this (though not nearly as much as I used to) when all that has to be done is to make the site work with WebKit and/or Firefox. Simple.
The second biggest category are just companies that are haters, and I have to believe Adobe falls into this area. They have the expertise in house to port the Adobe suite to Linux and Unix but they just won't do it. You can see by their other offerings that they have the ability to do it but they just won't, whether it is because of bean counting or because of OS religious hate. I also think MS probably bends their ear about it because there are plenty of developers that would leave MS behind forever (those that can't afford to go the Macintosh already) if Adobe ported their various tools to Linux.
Having said that there is a legitimate OS alternative for just about every Adobe tool now except for the super-high-end items (and yes, if you get off your butt and learn it Gimp will do just about everything PS will do save some of the newest of the new items Adobe has come up with. PS is in its place because it made itself the standard and that is what people learned. It's a great application, but 99% of the users won't use the power embedded in it).
No SSH support;
PuTTY seems to work fine. It's not bundled, but it is free.
no support for filesystems other than NTFS and FAT;
Except exFAT, UDF and ISO9660. You know, the filesystems that people are actually likely to find on removable media. I love ZFS as much as the next FreeBSD user and cheap snapshots do make a huge difference, but most of the time people only care about filesystems when they come across a disk or flash card with that filesystem. Here, the most likely ones are the ones I listed and of these Windows and OS X are the only ones that support exFAT, which is the standard format for SDHC cards (even though it's patented and not publicly documented), although there is a vaguely-working FUSE exFAT implementation.
no low level disk tools (dd);
How often do you actually need to use dd as a typical user?
poor NFS support;
But great CIFS support, and I've seen a lot more CIFS deployments than NFS.
doesn't come with a decent text editor
Gvim works fine on Windows, and there's a port of EMACS too - both are free. Most users, however, are more likely to care about MS Word, which does run on Windows.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ten years ago, applications might have mattered. However, OpenOffice (or whatever it is called today) is IMHO superior to Microsoft Office. Gimp and Inkscape are great drawing programs. Casual games tend to be cross-platform while hard-core games don't universally work on Windows anyway - this is what a game platform is for. The printer "just works" without any need for the user to fuss with drivers. The good tax programs are all web-based now. Sharepoint - seriously? - does anyone use that pile of crap? Most importantly, videos and music plays without a fuss. NFS networking actually works all the time, unlike tempermental CIFS. There are no virus worries. And Linux is so much simpler to use than Windows.
We have 5 computers in the house. My household was purged of Windows about 3 years ago and it was the best move I've made. Maintenance is low. No one is complaining, except the Windows users I know that want me to fix their computers.
Windows is still dominant because Microsoft uses its monopoly to force manufacturers to charge for it and preinstall it. End of story.
You just demonstrated why almost nobody wants Linux: linux advocates are assholes like you who tell everyone not using Linux that they are "clueless." Or "too stupid to own a computer." Or some other sort of put-down.
The reality is that to get people to switch to Linux, most of the common arguments of the Linux crowd are fucking retarded themselves. Such as the first two:
#1 - " Free yourself from the Microsoft Tax!!! Build your own Machine!!! " - Most of the the buying public DOES NOT WANT to "build their own machine. They see the computer (inaccurately, but it's how they see it) as a fucking appliance. They think of computers as "I plug it in and it just runs and I get my stuff." This is why Apple's "it just works" campaign was so successful and Microsoft's ads tout "ease of use" as well.
#2 - " But Linux can do so much more... " - Actually, the problem is that out of the initial install it does so much less of what your average user wants it to do. Sure, there's plenty of "free software" out there, but someone a few comments above pointed out a list of software that Linux simply does not have a port for. The list of software not ported to Linux is pretty fucking long, and trying to get Wine/Cedega running and then run the software under that is just as much a pain in the ass. "Setting up Linux and getting comfy in it" takes a new user a hell of a long while. Which leads into my final point...
#3 - You don't understand the actual cost of switching. You say "hey we are giving away this thing and it's all FREE YAY." Fine and dandy. You dismiss the "total cost" idea as FUD. I dismiss your accusations of FUD as Fucking Retarded because I can quantify all the things involved in actually convincing someone to switch. Here is what you are convincing someone to do in order to switch:
1 - Learn how to interact with a new OS. And let's be honest here, most of the programmers in the Linux world are NOT professional GUI designers. Linux desktops, KDE/Gnome, are NOT nice on the eyes and they are not very happy to play around in. Here's one area I have to give Apple some props in: their OSX interface puts some damn pretty and friendly makeup on the pig that was the old FreeBSD interface.
2 - Learn how to interact with all the new programs they will have to use to "replace" the ones from their old Windows environment. This includes figuring out what the fuck they are called, in which of many disparate distribution groups or online package managers they're held with incredibly poorly written Engrish package descriptions, and then learning the interface for each of them because the last thing Linux programmers ever want to do is use a standard, consistent interface experience.
3 - Learn how to navigate an entirely new file structure. This is not trivial by any means. Windows and OSX both at least treat logical drives in a sane manner and clearly delineate what is housed where; /dev/sda1/sdb2/ and so on and so forth are a fucking travesty and confuse the ever-loving fuck out of new Linux users.
4 - Accept that a lot of old, favorite programs just don't exist and don't have substitutes on Linux. Ouch.
5 - Find out what of their hardware is "supported but not really" under Linux. Such as a perfectly good, perfectly working HDTV tuner card that I had in a windows-based HTPC a few years back. Had a friend who's a linux-head insist I should switch it over to Mythbuntu because it "works so much better" and "supports everything" and "uses so much less resources." Whoops. No support for my HDTV tuner card, no support for my stock ATi graphics board in the unit. Now imagine that for the non-techie you are trying to convince to switch that it's their sound card that won't work, or their joystick, or their printer. They're not going to buy new hardware, they're going to say "fuck you" and go back to Windows or OSX.
None of this is a trivial issue or a non-cost. And that's the real "cost of switching" you have to overcome to convince people to switch to Linux.
We could use that exact logic to attract the hipster crowd.
"OSX? Windows? Nah, those are too mainstream for me. Oh, what do I use? Linux. You've probably never heard of it before, though. It's really underground."
And thus, by hitting the hipster buzz word trifecta ("mainstream", "you've never heard of it", and "underground"), we will get millions of trendy Starbucks loiterers to use it out of spite.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
but everything is so heavily versioned that writing apps that 'just work' is nearly impossible across any significant range of versions.
So, you should do what the other operating systems do.
If the library isn't exceptionally stable (e.g. libc, libm), then you ship all the .so dependencies with your program, or statically link.
It's not hard. It's why you can download firefox or chrome or opera or libreoffice or a whole bunch of other OSS and commercial software for generic linux and have them work with no dependency issues.
You have to do exactly the same on Windows and OSX, but since those systems are rather sparse in terms of having anything of any use installed, you have no expectation that useful things will be installed on the target machines, so you already know that you have to carry round all dependencies with you.
It's only an exercise in frustration on Linux because the normal case is so easy compared to the other systems (oh hey, everything I want is already installed! woohoo!). On the other systems, you have already have to put up with the pain and suffering so you don't think about it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm sure I'll get cursed for pointing out the emperor's winkie is flapping in the breeze but I'll be happy to answer that, its the "busted shitters" that frankly ruin Linux. oh Linux is a nice IDEA, kinda like how communism with everyone taking care of everyone else for the betterment of all is a nice idea, it just doesn't really work in practice.
For examples there is the docs that are at best an arcane list of CLI commands with fuck all explanation of what they are or at worst a "to do" placeholder, there is Pulseaudio which even the strongest Linux advocate will get the shivers just thinking about, there is the broken driver model which causes things that don't SEEM to be connected to seriously fuck each other up, which seems to hit pulse worse than most but wireless gets shat on frequently as well, there is the insane release schedule which obviously gives the developers ZERO time for regression testing or QA, not that they are gonna do that shit for free anyway, there are the bugs that have been around for years and will obviously NEVER be fixed, please see any distro bug trackers for quite a few, there is the badly inconsistent UI which I would argue is caused by developers just being itch scratchers since they aren't getting paid and therefor don't have to give a fuck what you think, therefor some programs behave like Windows, with Win hotkeys and Win layouts, many rip off Mac horribly which is fucking sad because OSX is a APPLICATION BASED NOT WINDOWS BASED therefor ripping it off for an OS based on Windows (the document format not the OS) makes no fucking sense, and finally there is the old school Unix conventions just to throw the occasional curveball, and finally there is the leaning on CLI as a crutch, whereas in OSX or Win 7 one could remove the CLI completely and have a 100% functional OS that I would argue more than 95% of the population would never even notice CLI was removed with Linux thanks to its actually being a server OS and NOT a desktop OS at heart if you remove CLI you've completely destroyed the OS and many distros won't even boot.
Now cue the nutjobs who will swear I'm secretly a M$ Ninja robot built by Cyberdyne and plugged into a computer under Redmond, coming off as nothing more than total losers when the simple fact is you can't change reality and numbers don't lie. To get Linux up to the same level as OSX and Windows will require north of 100 million dollars because NOBODY and I do mean NOBODY is gonna take on the above problems i named, because it will take years of boring as fuck lousy shitty work that nobody willl do for free which is the essence of the busted shitter dilemma. You see you can get humans to create for free, because we like to do this, what you can NOT get humans to do is come fix that turd filled busted overflowing crapper stinking up the joint for nothing and for every creative job that needs doing you have 100 that are the equivalent of the guy that cleans up the puke at the Chuck E Cheese.
Apple and MSFT have to pay millions upon millions of dollars to get their own busted shitters fixed, which is why you can take a bog standard desktop, install XP/Vista/7 RTM, update it through all those patches and service packs and have ALL the drivers 100% functional. Its not magic, its millions of dollars spent on regression testing and working with OEMs and first party drivers and a shitload of hard nasty thankless work that ends up with something people take for granted. With Linux because of all those busted shitters the support costs will bankrupt you which is why we retailers won't carry your product. I have several XP machines that have been in the field for over 8 years bug free, in fact the machine I'm typing this on is a circa 2004 AMD Sempron still running the default XP install that I kept when a customer traded it in because it was so low powered and quiet it made for a great nettop. Compare this to Linux where I've tried LTS to LTS, LTS to regular, and regular to regular and have YET to
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.