Let’s say just like for example like MacOS. It’s awesome we have so many tools but at the same time lack of some kind of standardization can seem like nothing works and you get overwhelmed. I’m asking for people that want to support Linux or not so tech-savy people.
More GUI front ends for stuff. This takes away the need to understand command line tools and syntax, and makes the out-of-the-box experience feel more like it just works.
Exactly. That’s Windows’ secret. Give us a control center where it’s easy to control NetworkManager, Pipewire, systemd, and other parts of the OS, and give them not-so-technical names. That’s one of the keys to Windows’ success. Others involve EEE and anticompetitive practices but we don’t want Linux going that way now, do we?
It’s not that Windows isn’t complicated, it’s just that there’s a GUI for everything.
SUSE / OpenSUSE has this. You can open Yast2 GUI utilities and access all the GUI utils like Windows old Command Center. Hardware, package and driver installs, add hardware and configure, network, enable services and tweak parameter, printer tools, mess with boot options or kernel parameters, etc. The average user would never need to touch CLI
Automatic updates are essential. and unfortunately, it should not be an option to keep an old version of something, because through shared libraries it will hold back the entire system. fatpaks should be used for those programs.
Fortunately it’s getting there, like KDE is working on it too, but it’s still got a long way.
Linux is a tool that big corporate entities have profited greatly from for many years, and will continue to. Same with BSD, Apache, Docker, MySQL, Postgres, SSH…
Valve, Sys76, Framework, etc. Are proving that using Linux to serve an end user market is also profitable, and are capable of supporting enterprise use-cases.
I understand that there may be specific problems to solve wrt improving adoptability, usability, compatibility, etc., but Linux is doing more than ok within the context of the FOSS ecosystem (and increasingly without).
Your thinking is slightly skewed, IMHO. Linux doesn’t have an inherent incentive to compete with MacOS or MS, and if it did, it would be subject to the same pressures that encourage bad behavior like spying on users, creating walled gardens, and so forth.
But Linux is open source? So if hypothetically so distro adopted spying al la windows couldn’t people just change distros? tbh I also think the question is slightly confusing as I don’t understand why OP thinks Mac OS is not standardized but I digress.
Yeah sure, a distro could start spying on users. How easy it would be would depend on their distribution model, and how willing they are to violate the GPL.
The way to get Linux more appealing is to get proprietary software makers, like Adobe, Microsoft (Office), you know the actual things people need to do their job, to make software for Linux. Steam Deck is a good example of this, it works because Steam ported the games to Linux…
Looks at the current state of Microsoft and Adobe
I’m good.
Anyway you can’t really do much about a company not supporting Linux. Either find an alternative or don’t use Linux.
In some ways this is true. However, I feel like in the case of Adobe, someone needs to take another shot at a good FOSS image editor. Adobe is really starting to mess itself with generative AI; knowing many artists, they hate generative AI image tech as a threat to their job, so I find it weird that Adobe is alienating one of their largest user bases. I find it weird how Inkscape is really good and has evolved (I actually switched to it from Adobe Illustrator and don´t regret it), while GIMP has barely changed in 10 years.
I get that some parts of an image editor are complex, but at some point, it’s just a chain of mathematical operations. Maybe I’m wrong, but when I get the time, it’s almost tempting to take a stab at the issue.
While I don’t disagree with you about the potential of those alternatives they won’t cut it for the average graphic designer… usually not due to the lack of features but most likely because of the network effects / dominant position that Adobe holds over their field. People who need to collaborate with others and are pressured to get stuff done can’t afford the slightest compatibility issue.
True. Industry entrenchment would be a big issue. I can think of two ways to try to fight it. The less viable option would be trying for PSD support, which would be a lot of work. The other option would be to write a Photoshop plugin to allow working with the new file format in Photoshop. This might be annoying to end users having to deal with the format, but also easier developer-wise because you could make sure Photoshop handles rendering right; you’d just need a way to warn about operations in Photoshop that can’t be converted to the new FOSS program’s native format.
The problem is, that no operating system “just works”. It also highly depend on what the person wants to achieve, and if there are any pre experience with computers or even relying on existing software or specific hardware. My recommendation is not to tell people the illusion of “just works” and be honest upfront. People should learn how it works, what to expect and if tradeoffs, time and resources are worth it.
Same is true for the other way too. Does Windows “just works”? Especially if someone switches from Linux to Windows.
Rather, we should teach the reasons to switch and encourage that decision. In example why it matters to have control over your system, rather than the company has control over it (MacOS and Windows) or why spying on you is bad (Windows). And encourage giving up something you are used to (and maybe paid). Sometimes its okay to use a program that is not as good as Photoshop. Sometimes its okay to give up playing a videogame you like (and maybe associated with friends playing that game with you). But most people are not ready to do it, because that is associated with lowering quality of life.
I switched in 2008 from Windows XP to Ubuntu. I know these struggles. And they are not over yet. This is an ongoing task between my brother and me too, and he was using the Steam Deck, but decided to go with Windows 11 with the recent build. It was almost there, but there is always a butt. I say, don’t tell people that “Linux just works”. No operating system “just works”.
I hate to say this, but windows rarely breaks itself from updates. basic things like the desktop, audio and the lock screen is essentially never broken after an update.
yeah it may reset the audio settings and other such things, and I don’t know how do they manage to do that, but that’s relatively simple to revert.
probably it’s just thanks to old, battle tested code though. can’t wait for Linux desktop systems to reach that point
Most common Linux distributions focused on stability do not randomly break with updates. That’s usually not an issue. Basic things like Desktop and audio or lock screen are also never broken after an update. But it depends on the Linux operating system you are using (there are thousands of Linux operating systems and they can vastly differ) and what hardware and habits you have. Windows biggest strength is that it gets the most support from developers and being basically only one distribution to target.
But calling Windows “battle tested code” is a bit of stretch. Windows is full of problems and I had my own issues due to updates of Windows (when I was using it in dual boot). Also in Linux I can update and do not boot until I want to boot. I can decide not to update. Overall I have more trust in Linux updates (even using on Archlinux) than Windows updates. Microsoft constantly fucks up updates. And they even introduce and install stuff you don’t know or want to.
An old story of mine buying Civilization 6 at launch on Windows was unplayable. After days and contacting support, turned out it was a Skype installer that was installed with a Windows update without my knowledge. And it was just an installer to install Skype, not even running. Removing it made my game Civilization 6 playable. I never had such an issue on Linux.
I tried switching to Linux many years ago (forgot what distro). It was hell.
I don’t remember the specifics anymore, but I remember encountering issues almost every step of the way. Driver support, not being able to find the right buttons, etc. Searching for fixes usually led me down a rabbit hole of “oh cool this user on this forum said in another thread that I just need to install Gobbledegook… But what is it and how do I install it?” and of course a bunch of things require CLI which I’m not fantastic at. Unfortunately I gave up after a week.
Compared to that, Windows really “just works”. I have had my share of frustrations, but it’s usually with stuff that’s comparatively an edge case when compared to the problems I had with Linux. I don’t like that I’m giving money/data to a megacorp, but the price of that is convenience. I don’t churn my own butter, I don’t build my own car, I don’t want to think too much about how my OS works under the hood.
Also, Linux does not auto-update itself, and that’s bad mostly when looking at the programs (like the web browser) that did that automatically, and here it can’t anymore.
I understand that most users don’t update their system and the utils they downloaded, but that’s essential for a web browser.
I was considering that I should just install Firefox as the fatpak for everyone, instead of the core package manager, for this and other reasons, but my users have so little memory in their old machines that it’s already barely necessary.
you can’t because it’s explicitly against the whole point of having endless choices. when everyone works on something different, the quality spreads out to where it’s mostly just mediocre stuff across the board.
hardware compatibility is also a huge problem. for everyone that says “it works fine for me” there are a thousand others for whom it does not.
Yeah but you can have default choices that are guarantee to work.
And yeah preinstalled checked hardware would be ideal.
I get downvoted to oblivion when I point out “just works” isn’t true.
You make a great point about endless choices.
No single UI, no single set of tools, those are massive barriers. And it’s why Windows became the de facto standard: single UI, consistent toolset.
And it’s why Windows became the de facto standard: single UI, consistent toolset.
No so true after win 7, there’s a bunch of legacy menu.
It’s at least the same inconsistent toolset as everyone else. Windows 10? Ok go through this multi step process. 11? Ok this other slightly different process.
VS Linux you have 700 consistent toolsets, and 70000000 inconsistent toolsets.
I feel like there’s also the point that on Mac OS a lot of stuff “just works” because everything else just doesn’t work at all. I have a number of things that just aren’t going to work at all on Mac. Linux is obviously much more permissive, which leads to a lot more kinda working stuff that just wouldn’t work at all on Mac.
when everyone works on something different, the quality spreads out to where it’s mostly just mediocre stuff across the board.
I wouldn’t say that’s the only problem. We have pretty high quality stuff on Linux. The other problem is that choice always means differences between options which makes perfect integration hard or even impossible.
To make Linux more appealing to the average person, you’d have to be able to buy a Linux PC at your local computer store. Most people can’t be bothered to install a new OS.
That’s also true but also impossible. Linux isn’t a for profit company.
What are you even talking about? Anyone can sell a PC with pre-installed Linux. There are already several companies today so just that.
Let me clarify myself
*It’s impossible to get big corporate guys attention so they ship Linux by default and it’s clearly tested. For now the Valve, System76, Framework and Tuxedo are exception.
Edit: Also I was keeping in mind corporatr entity behind OS.
- Apple - MacOS
- Microsoft - Windows
- ? - Linux
Dell have at times sold laptops with Linux pre installed.
Can you buy a Dell laptop with Linux at a retail store?
Dell sells PC’s with Linux installed.
Not in retail stores though AFAIK
Correct. I was just touching on the big corporations point since they listed some online only retailers.
It would be a real leap forward, if Linux PCs were sold in big box stores. Which is why Microsoft will do anything they can to prevent that.
The big guys won’t sell Linux to consumers because of Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices. That’s the main thing that’s holding back Linux acceptance right now. But if some big player (e.g. Valve) would take the leap, things might get interesting.
“It’s impossible. Let me list 4 exceptions though”
Hahaha true 😆
But the scale is too small for now. :/
I’ve seen this type of question elsewhere. Why is it an issue?
Standardisation? Corporate Linux? Just like the big boys? Big fish eat little fish.
Careful what you ask for . .
lol wtf are you talking about? You can literally take $100 off the price of a computer just because it’s not bundled with a Winderps license - the price is straight up lower because the license cost is $0. You can order some models like this straight from Dell or Lenovo or whatever.
OEMs aren’t paying $100 per license. They’re also taking deals with McAfee/Norton/whatever to package a bunch of extra crap on your windows laptop to lower the price further.
I don’t see it as impossible. Like various brands are distributed with windows, various brands can be distributed with various Linux distros, customizable by distro and features, pre-order. These brands can work out a donation contract with distros.
If you sell a Linux machine to consumers, Microsoft will screw you over on Windows licencing. No current OEM will risk that.
Yes, but also companies say that Linux support is not worthit (gaining money and spending on the support) compared to - slapping barely working Windows port and call it a day.
For now Linux support is more like pleasant surprise than a official respected thing.
I bet when demand crosses a certain threshold, support supply will quickly follow, gatekeepers bedamned.
Perhaps someone could make a business of it then.
Chromebooks sold well enough. Google made $30 billion on that in 2023.
Anyone willing to put together a physical Linux machine, market and support it could take a chunk of that.
No major OEM will do a consumer Linux PC because MS will punish them with Windows licence pricing. You’d have to be a newcomer that’s not beholden to MS. At the same time, you’d need a shitload of cash to start a hardware business with enough volume to get into big box stores. That’s why it hasn’t happened yet
For me it was always a niche that wasn’t taken full advantage of.
Chromebooks never really made sense outside of schools and old people.
The OS is hyper limited to essentially just a web browser, and android apps (so just a web browser). Nobody wants to buy premium hardware to use with just Chrome. But at the same time it’s Chrome, so you really need at least a good chunk of RAM. So it really just limits you to the super light use cases, but those could realistically be replaced by a tablet.
The other day we saw an extremely odd device at malwart. They had a $270 laptop/tablet hybrid thing with a fairly nice OLED display, and a snapdragon CPU that should have been more that sufficient. But 128gb of EMMC storage, and 4 gigs of ram. Such wasted potential. It would make a nice RDP machine I guess.
Whether any OS could ever just work isn’t even going to solve the issue.
Getting OEMs to sell laptops and desktops in Best Buy (or the like) that have Linux installed and is properly supported — that is what will help solve the issue.
having it just work is a necessary step to gett there
When there exists an operating system that can satisfy that qualification, I’ll concede the point. Until then, OEM and retail support is what matters.
It’s current year, I should never have to touch the terminal for anything. I don’t care that it’s powerful, my brain is already full of windows knowledge and I don’t want to have to google what command I need to perform basic functions. Everything needs guis. If there’s a gui, I can figure it out and also discover tools I didn’t know about along the way, which allows me to solve future problems without going insane.
That’s popular sentiment though, so how about one that I don’t see often: Add options to allow windows like behavior. For example, middle click paste is the bane of my existence. I should be able to change it to middle click scroll os wide, not just in firefox. I know that there’s a hacky workaround to kinda make it work, but it sucks.
“Do not let has been burden what could be.” /s
I agree though, other common UX replication options would help user meet the OS where they are more. I also agree that most common system administration and user UX should be doable in a full GUI, they are just so nice for when you don’t know what you are wanting but will once you see it.
I also think VUI (voice user interfaces) would bridge the gap for a lot people and NLP would cover most of the worlds population.
Honestly people keep working on and it ebs and flows in progress. Its just a lot fing work to do it well. One day we will get to doing most functions with multimodal interface support (GUI/CLI/API/VUI/NLP/BCI?).
Good S0ix support. At the moment, Linux mostly fails to sleep correctly on modern S0ix laptops, which happens to be most modern laptops.
This means the battery drains incredibly fast, and S0ix features aren’t being used, which is unfortunate as it has potential for quick wake, lid closed actions and limiting battery drain while asleep (since S0ix can eventually hibernate automatically from a sleep state)
Also the boot loader could be improved, systemd-boot needs to support secure boot natively so we can be rid of the slow, ancient and scary-looking GRUB.
Fedora Kinote just works.
From a non techy perspective, having what is used and installed being secure is a big one. I am new to Linux Mint. Mostly user friendly until something gets corrupted or suddenly can not be verified.
Looking for why is not always simple, and there are some explanations/instructions easier to understand than others.
I preface most of my searches with Linux mint (whatever I am searching for) for dummies. This helps some.
I think it should be: “Software that is yours”
Overall, I think more focus should be put on consolidating similar projects.
Do we really need 6 different window managers that follow the same design logic?
Do we really need each major distro to have its own package manager?
How many image and PDF viewers do we need? How many music players?
Can we convince Ubuntu that no one wants snaps and they are wasting developer resources.
The freed up capacity should be focused on better windows app compatibility. Something akin to Valve’s push in gaming.
While I understand the sentiment, we have to understand that Open Source developers work on projects that motivate them.
So, we can have a single example of each of these but they do necessarily get any more devs. In fact, if you take economic theory ( competition for example ), it is likely they attract less attention individually than they do competing as part of an ecosystem.
It would certainly help on the user acceptance and commercial software side where choice is an impediment. But, if we are just talking resources, limiting the number of projects only works if you pay people to work on them.
Why was each of these projects started ( eg. window managers )? The answer is simple. It is because the founding developer did not like any of the existing options.
It is very hard, time consuming and boring to iron out those finishing issues in any software product. You need team of people being paid for that.
When doing it for fun, I just go until it works and until it is fun. As soon as I come to those last 20% I never touch it anymore.
So ai doubt it will happen until more companies start paying decelopera to do it. But I don’t see the business model in that, so I doubt it will get better fast.
After getting used to KDE I still need to use windows for work. People think big companies iron out all the bugs but they really don’t. We’re just so used to our default OS that we don’t notice the bugs we deal with every single session.
Windows has tons of buggy base functionality but users just work around it. KDE’s base functionality is actually quite solid by comparison. You only run into issues with more technical compositor stuff that an average user would probably not interact with.
I’m a very casual Linux user and in my experience, I’ve NEVER had a problem with a documented solution that didn’t require going down a rabbit hole of other references.
Something like this: “To get the trackpad to work with Ubuntu, make sure you’ve installed the hergelbergelXX package.” (No link, find it on your own!)
Visit the HergelBergelXX page. To install Hergelbergel on Ubuntu, you must install the framisPortistan Package Manager. (No link!)
On the FramisPortistan GitHub readme, we discover it requires the JUJU3 database system to be installed. “JUJU3 may cause conflicts with installed USB devices under Ubuntu” JUJU2, which shipped with Ubuntu, is no longer supported. Also we recommend Archie&Jughead Linux over other distributions.
And this essentially never stops.
All of this is comparatively a happy result—I actually DID post a question on linuxnoobs about getting my trackpad to work with Ubuntu… and have not had a single reply. I have no idea how to find out how to make it work.
Hat a problem with WLAN on a laptop when I tried to install fedora. The solution was to install Linux mint with LAN\internet and let the driver manager figure it all out.
Maybe that helps.
I had similar stories getting Wireless Networking to work on some devices before. Good thing is, there are drivers for most, if not all, default hardware interfaces directly in the kernel nowadays and if a device has any sort of popularity it will be supported before long if it isn’t out of the box.
I’m not talking about a long-ago problem. I’m talking about a current install of Ubuntu.
Yes, presumably on hardware that’s just a bit too old or rare. Might be unlucky as Linux compatibility isn’t high up on OEMs lists
