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Why Desktop Linux Hasn't Taken Off
alphadogg writes "It's free, easier to use than ever, IT staffers know it and love it, and it has fewer viruses and Trojans than Windows. So, why hasn't Linux on the desktop taken off? When it comes to desktop Linux, the cost savings turn out to be problematic, there are management issues, and compatibility remains an issue. 'We get a lot more questions about switching to Macs than switching to Linux at this point, even though Macs are more expensive,' one Gartner analyst says."
How I am even supposed to begin to recommend Linux for the average user when there are 100 different distros, each with its own quirks and issues? Hell, even I don't have any clue where to begin on which one to recommend. And I sure wouldn't know how to support each one if they had problems.
At least with Windows, I can say "Use Home Premium at home, Professional at work." Even simpler with Macs. With Linux, I guess I would recommend Ubuntu, but a lot of Linux fans are even starting to bitch about that.
If you want simple users, make it simple to use. Linux is way too fractured right now for the average user. Get a consensus down to a single home distro, a single business distro, and a few specialized distros and then start from there.
It would probably also help if you could get Linux users to stop fighting amongst themselves over every little goddamn thing. Outsiders are really turned off by what looks like a bunch of squabbling geeks fighting over their favorite Star Trek series (which we all know is DS9, anyway). Average consumers *do not* like stepping into the middle of a fight which they don't even understand. That's one of the reasons they like Windows and OS X (all the fighting over those is kept behind the scenes, for the most part).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Very powerful, virtually nonexistant for Linux on the desktop.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Microsoft Office
Maybe it has taken off and all this talk of it not taking off is just evidence of it having taken off?
Do you inspect a roller coaster everytime you ride it?
Why do we keep getting these posts that are deliberately chosen to incite flamewars between pro- and anti-Linux people?
Do we need to have more unhelpful arguments like the one yesterday when Samzenpus posted a dupe of a response to a dupe from back at the start of the year?
....confusing, non-intuitive, and not compatible with most all games and apps.
Most people do not know there is an alternative to windows or that it's as good as windows. Other issues confusion and people trying to fix things that are not broken such as completely redoing gnome in gnome 3 or brain dead things like Unity in Ubuntu which cause Mint to over take it as the most downloaded distro. Android is a good example of what can happen when people are exposed to an alternative OS. It's now the number 1 smart phone OS and Windows phone is more or less a flop.
Games are still a huge pull on the PC (and a lot of people are sick of the vendor lock-in crap forced on them with consoles). Valve announced that they will be supporting Linux with their Steam Game Service.
IMHO, it's because Ubuntu was really the only distro that had a fighting chance at "mass" adoption (that number is relative, but considering how MacOX was sitting at 9% for an eternity...) with their tri-force of:
A pretty, and relatively user friendly interface,
A centralized software update suites that didn't requiring googling what to sudo apt-get for in a console
And pretty good brand recognition and media attention.
UNTIL they decided to completely over-indulge their own sense of relevance by forcing the mandatory Unity interface on users with some absolutely retarded idea that they would to do this for the huge wave of tablet adoption they were now going to see, since I'm assuming Desktop users are already totes in the Ubuntu bandwagon?
I think the real issue isn't that (consumer) Desktop Linux hasn't taken off, but that the people behind the main distro that actually had a fighting chance decided to chop some of the more useful limbs off of it to make it more...fingerable.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/102599-ubuntu-14-04-will-be-a-smartphone-and-tablet-os-so-what
But something is. For me, it's games and, to a lesser extent, Netflix. For a lot of office workers, it's Office (no, OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not equivalent when the whole infrastructure and training has been MS Office). For some people it'll be Netflix instead. Windows has a lot of killer apps and, unfortunately, the consumers have no say on whether they get ported to Linux.
All of the +ve praise for the Linux desktop comes from... the linux community!
Try asking non-Linux people what they think of it, and maybe you'll get realistic feedback.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Almost everyone has their own "Photoshop" - a program that is only available under Windows or a Mac. Witness how many people are still dual-booting. If dual-booting and VMs were rendered impossible, the number of linux installs would plummet.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
You just don't get the idea behind open-source software so all your arguments are quite silly!
For me the power is the multiple choices:
- I don't like the de/wm I switch
- I don't like the OS I switch
- I would like to add a feature to some program, I do my best to actually add it myself
For the average user Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora are the OS'es I would recommend and I really don't get the whole compatability argument because the average user doesn't need to deal with the underlying "mechanics" of the system and if for example some workplace would be Linux-only with different distros they would most definetely have a Linux-admin of some sorts and for a Linux guy it's not a problem that the workplace has multiple OS'es. I've actually managed a small computer-lab (15 computers with Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Debian, Arch and a CentOS server) for the past year and I've never had any problems and I wouldn't consider myself an intermediate Linux-user in comparison to a few guys I know.
Of course for the business-side of things there is RHEL whom I consider to be a business distro and many companies use that because of the "vendor-support".
My parents have been using Ubuntu for two years now without any hiccups and although they were a bit unsure at the time it's paid off.
A similar story of my grandpa which uses Ubuntu and my in laws that use Mint.
So if you want OS'es for the average user you pick Ubuntu or Mint (haven't tested Fedora on relatives or friends). If you want a business distro you use and pay for RHEL. If employees want different distros chances are that one of them really knows his stuff, if not you hire a Linux-admin like you would hire a Windows-admin for day to day tasks or to solve problems the average user can't.
In a world without fences and walls, who needs gates and windows?
I think his point was that everyone has some application that they want or need that Linux isn't compatible with. For him it might be Photoshop. For me it might be my library of games. For someone else it might be their account management software.
Basically users don't care about the OS, they just care about the things they want to do without changing all of their hardware and software to do it. For most people this means not switching to Linux.
It's the year 2012, fix sound.
Sound doesn't work out of the box. They have the abomination (IMHO) that is PulseAudio so I do an apt-get purge. Suddenly sound works.
So I go and try to play 2 things at once. [Unless you have ALSA setup a specific way with mixers it won't do it because only one PID gets to talk to hardware at once.] Wow it works. Maybe they started shipping a working ALSA config. I go check /etc/asound.conf. Everything is still set to pulse.
So I check task manager. Sure enough the pulse server is still cranking away. But by purging all the files it somehow magically started to work. So I re-install it.
I repeat the test. Somehow mplayer decides it wants to grab ALSA instead of pulse but ALSA then grabs the hardware, so pulse dies and can't communicate to ALSA (which is actually doing the hardware interfacing if I read my workflow correctly). So now I have no sound, again.
So I try it straight from mplayer specifying the hardware device and it works. Except only in mplayer. So now I'm going to spend another few hours dicking with either the dmix plugin or deciding to give Pulse a 5th chance.
Fork something or start something from scratch. Something like MATE/GNOME2. And make it 'just work'.
Linux works great for Grandma,
Linux works great for IT folks.
Linux sucks in the middle. That is why Linux is Strong in the Server area and in the Mobile Phone area. However lacking in the desktop area.
The key features for the Middle, that isn't really all that easy in Linux.
Adding new hardware. Some stuff just works, other stuff is a real big pain. Mac and Windows (due to its popularity mostly) has the hardware vendors supply them with drivers, or when you get the hardware you have an easy to use install for the drivers. Linux you may be able to find the drivers, but you have many versions and you need to do a lot of research to see which one is going to do what you need it to do.
For example my Wifes Dell Inspiron 9 mini (Netbook) with Ubuntu display 800x600 while the screen native resolution is 1024x600... I cannot use the normal GUI to fix that. The instruction on how to do so, are cryptic and sometimes don't work. while the 800x600 stretched bugs the heck out of me. My Wife doesn't care, so I wont do much to fix it. That is after I spent time to get sound working on it, after an upgrade.
I am sorry but compared to Windows and OS X, Linux is a Free Desktop OS and it shows. Put it in a server great, put it in a phone just as good. The desktop is the troubled area.
Part of the issue I think, is they are spending too much time copying what Microsoft does or what Apple does, and the Open Source democratic structure doesn't have a few good people to say it sucks or it is good.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Overall the Linux desktop experience is a shitty experience, it's really as easy as that. And no, I don't mean the lack of games or commercial software, I just mean problems within the Free Software world itself. The complete lack of quality control, inconsistencies, stuff not working properly and so on. It simply looks and feels like what it is: A product cobbled together by thousands of people with little or no agreement on any consistency. It doesn't help that the Free Software world likes to hit the reset button every five years to switch to a new, yet completely incompatible and still completly unfinished desktop expierence.
Wanna improve things? Get together and define one distribution independed packaging format. And while at it, make it flexible so that it doesn't require root rights to install software, make it easy to share software with it, make it easy to get access to the source and modify it. Then start working on having apps cooperate with each other, give me flexible data import/export everywhere, so that I don't have to manually transfer my podcast subscriptions item by item when I want to switch players. Cleanup /home/ so that everything is in ~/.config/. Enhance the documentation system so that it's trivial to find out what files an application uses and where it stores your data (yeah, strace is great, it's not a replacement for documentation). And so on.
At this point I don't expet Linux to ever succeed on the desktop. It was a mess 10 years ago and it's still a mess, with very little improvements in the mean time, instead a lot of useless reinvention of the wheel.
I think it was 2007. Linux was taking off all over the place. Governments were talking about adopting open standards. Schools and municipalities were deploying Linux. You could see it really starting to take hold.
Microsoft's no stupider than everybody else. They could see it, too. And I seem to remember they dropped the price on Windows to $3. (That was on whichever version was old, but still dominant at the time. XP?) Not in the US, but elsewhere, where the danger was highest. Then they also really, really, really pushed to prevent adoption of open standards and, if that wasn't possible, to water those standards down to something that interfered less with their business model.
And, as far as I can see, they've successfully held back the tide that time.
Which isn't to say that the problems with Linux people have identified upthread aren't right. They are. Linux does have problems with lack of advertising and sudden holes where important stuff ceases to work. That is very important and something we really need to get our act together about. But the real problems shouldn't blind us to the equally real problems that have nothing to do with Linux itself.
I think he said it best. Linux on the Desktop will never happen because Mac came along.
Before OS X, many many people were dying for a Desktop OS that looked beautiful but still gave them their beloved UNIX-style command line and familiar tools (emacs, vi, gcc, etc.). They wanted a UNIX-style OS which had drivers that actually worked instead of requiring wastage of huge amount of time googling this and compiling that.
OS X came along and fulfilled the wish of many. The only people left were those who wanted a UNIX-style OS that was libre; that was a vanishingly small number compared to the first group, whose desires were more than adequately fulfilled by OS X.
http://slashdot.org/story/07/10/11/1527219/rob-malda-answers-your-questions
I know somewhere that had similar issues.
So one guy got smart. He started mentioning how old our version of office was etc. The techies followed with the same mutterings.
After that circulated around, it was announced that we were going to bring in a newer version of Office (nobody said MS Office). By making it sound like an update/upgrade, rather than a newer version, acceptance was greater and everyone actually seemed to like it.
for all the people that claim to NEED Photoshop, i have only met one that had a licensed copy of it.. (I have met others that where Mac users)..
Of all the people I know that NEED Photoshop, all of them could produce the same quality of work they were capable of in PS with Gimp after Gimpshop plugin was installed. An amateur relies on the tools; a professional understands how the tools work in the first place.
Sadly almost all of them continued to pirate Photoshop.
Sucks you are anonymous, you could learn something here.
This is the mindset that needs to die. You dont get it. Most businesses arent in the business of making software. The GPL makes complete sense, you want to enhance a software package, and contribute back to the community, of which you know will also contribute back making everyone have better software so you can get on with YOUR BUSINESS. Think of it as a global software pool that just gets better.
Dont think that can work? Here is a case study for you from real life: Business needs to get its information out to a website, the content is important, Apache, Postgres are simply tools. They pay 50,000 a year for support to a vendor. The vendor provides patches and fixes. At the end of the year, if they have support hours left over, they add "nice to haves", which enhances Apache and Postgres for everyone. There are businesses doing this today, right now, and they are more productive and have better support. Why? Because there is no lock in, they could choose a different support team next year if they weren't satisfied, and the enhancements and bugfixes are coming from everywhere on the planet.
In my work, the number of features of an application I use regularly has increased exponentially, because different business interests are paying to enhance the suite, something we couldn't afford individually.