Its the way Windows is developing that is driving this change. GNOME might be hardly usable but Microsoft managed to top that.
Edit: I retract the last sentence. I'm currently trying GNOME and its less usable than Windows.
I've gone to the extreme of writing my own OS because I got fed up with how corporate Linux has gotten
It can't just be a means to an end; that's what happened to Android. You make it an expectation that everything on a given box be FLOSS.
It shipped with WordPerfect Office, which was still neck and neck with Microsoft Office at the time, including WordPerfect, Quattro, Corel Presentations, Corel Draw, all there.
It had migration tools to move Internet Explorer, Netscape, Outlook, mIRC, and ICQ settings, and Windows registry settings to Corel Linux.
It shipped with a Wine-based Windows application compatibility layer out of the box.
It lasted less than a year.
For desktop Linux to be successful, it needs to be the cool different OS -- not the boring Windows that the accountants use, and not the MacOS that the art snobs and marketing hipsters use, but something appealing on its own merits.
And, arguably, that's about where it is now: 70% boring, 15% commercial hipster, 15% indie.
GNOME is nice, KDE is nice, and we have other options for people that don't like the two previous one. The issue we have now is walled garden, when some proprietary software won't support standards and even their own file format.
I disagree that this is an issue. The main advantage of Linux for me is that I have choice (including using various desktop environments that the author is annoyed by; I used GNOME for years and eventually had too many problems with it so I switched to KDE), and those choices are not controlled by one entity which, in the case of Apple and Microsoft, view me only as a customer to extract money from.
There will always be more “Linuxy” out in the weeds desktops for people who want them. Most people who want that built their own setup anyway, making whatever the big DEs do more or less moot.
The biggest battle desktop Linux is losing is the one where a minority of devs are dictating their preferred compute paradigm to a majority of users that don’t agree it’s a good solution.
I can “fix” Gnome in about 2m with extensions, but that doesn’t help when a new user loads it up for the first time and is hit with the unintuitive ideology of some nerds.
But your use case is why GNOME have extensions. To alter the defaults and add stuff that they don't care about, but you do. In macOS, you have to basically reverse engineer and use private APIs.
Absolutely. A commercial product can succeed while maintaining an auteur's vision, so long as that vision largely aligns with users' needs. In contrast, open-source projects are often not viewed through a "product" lens, to their detriment.
When this happens in open source, we get clunky and idiosyncratic (though sometimes lovable) software like GNOME and GIMP. When it happens in the commercial world, we get projects like Megalopolis.
For example, how am i supposed to discover how to maximize a window?
I'm not sure that means anything. Every time I have to help my kids or wife with a Windows problem, I'm perpetually plagued by how weird it is.
The only people who find Windows easy or obvious are already Windows users. And yes, the same can be said of Linux environments.
Time for a Cathedral and the Bazaar refresher?
https://web.archive.org/web/20250307173133/https://www.catb....
Where is the translation layer that lets me seamlessly run x64 apps on Linux on Arm?
apt install qemu binfmt-support qemu-user-static
sudo dpkg --add-architecture amd64-no ads
-no tracking
-no vendor lock in
-no preinstalled or unremovable crapware
That's enough for me. Yes, it's not perfect, but you're simply allowed to say no.
Every distro except arch is full of preinstalled crapware. Some like OpenSuse even have preinstalled crapware bundles where stuff you uninstall comes back after update
Never underestimate the identity association in enthusiast communities.
I don't care at all for the SystemD/whatever else flame wars. Sure if you work on these systems you probably care deeply about the differences but please realize that most of your end users do not give a shit. The same goes for the various packaging systems, I prefer to still use DEB's when I can but at the end of the day it really just comes down to how easily can I get the apps setup on my computer to get my work done, myself and most other users also don't really care.
What I care about are things like: why is multi monitor support still half assed? why does full screening my chrome window crash my monitor? why is it that half my installed apps don't conform to my theme? why is it that when I switch on X window manager instead of Wayland my wallpaper goes away?
But it seems that the folks that actually work on Linux don't care about these issues because when I ask why VSCode crashes my monitor, all I get is answers telling me to use vim or emacs, or when I complain why the themes look all janky all I get is: "well this wouldn't be an issue if you used <insert obscure window manager that requires a week's worth of configuration to get running and a steep learning curve>.
The vibe I get around these issues is that it's below most Linux developers as they are too busy arguing about some flag in the kernel or whether to use systemd or not. But those same people bitch and moan why "Year of the Linux Desktop" hasn't come yet. Figure out that these issues are not below you, they are the issues that people care about. Fix those issues and I'm positive that adoption will go up.
Sorry for the rant.
I see this issue as well. A CLI setup with Emacs/VIM doing C/C++ development is very stable, because that's how the majority of linux devs interact with Linux.
What puts a bad taste in my mouth is when you mention issues outside of that setup, the usual response isn't "oh this is an issue we need to fix", it's "well your setup sucks, stop using VSCode/Gnome/Chrome/etc"
If you want to know why VSCode is buggy, you will probably have to get into contact with Microsoft, I guess. I know this looks like some kind of smarmy sarcastic response, but it really is the truth; the rest of us really don’t know why they put bugs in there.
The main reason for Linux not taking off on the desktop is because most users don't care about what OS they run, they just want a computer that works. If the PC they buy comes with Windows out of the box, they're going to stick with that. Until you get manufacturers shipping PCs with Linux as the default OS, you're mainly going to see desktop Linux as an enthusiast-only option. It's no accident that one of the devices helping to spread Linux (the Steam Deck) comes with Linux as the default option.
It is a massive moral failure though. It shows that after two decades of work, the Linux community has been unable to build a simple sane functional stable development environment better than Win32.
Even Apple’s famously fast deprecation is like rock by comparison.
It literally means Windows will always exist - as the preferred IDE and Reference Spec for the Linux desktop. It also means all evolution of Linux will be ironically constrained by Win32 compatibility requirements.
Surely WSL is not a moral failure for Microsoft.
Competition can definitely improve things, but it's not universally positive. In particular, endless competition in parts of the operating system makes it hard to build anything on top of them. E.g. if you want to distribute an application for Linux, do you build a Flatpak, or a Snap? Or take a more traditionalist approach and make RPMs, DEBs, etc.? You either pick your favourite and leave out a large fraction of Linux users who disagree, or you have to do more than one of these. This is definitely a drag on the ecosystem.
I agree that most users don't care about the OS, though.
.appimage
They usually do not need to know - they just see a software centre which is app store like.
> they care that their favorite apps will work
That depends on app developers.
> that updates won't break anything (which Windows does all the time)
Already done
> and that they don't have to learn a list of text commands to make basic changes to their computers.
Already done.
She's 58 and a book keeper.
She even went so far and got some windows apps running with wine. All just with the help of a forum posts she found via a web search engine.
The real issue is that these kinds of "grandma" users maybe just don't use computers anymore. And the folks that do are joined at the hip to proprietary software like Photoshop or CAD programs or whatever else they care a lot about and don't want to relearn, and also make enough money that the costs are invisible. Or they're business computers and not using what's familiar (Windows) is a support cost.
From this perspective, gaming and specific hobbyists are basically the only feasible audiences for the Linux desktop unless people are very much pressured by software costs, or annoyed by proprietary software (DRM, lockdowns, upgrades, etc.) enough to switch their major activity to an open source option. In which case they awkward situation of "software works better on Linux, but won't try Linux until confirmed they like the not-totally-integrated-and-nice-on-windows-or-mac software running not on Linux."
I do think there ought to be more of a business case for Linux as a business OS as you should get reduced hardware and software and support costs, but there aren't actually a lot of people with the right experience and expertise to run a business off Linux as a desktop OS to begin with and so those savings can't be realized effectively.
That said, as computers get more locked down, I think there will be a bigger drive for power users who influence friends and family to switch.
Any case, my house has had year of the Linux Desktop ongoing since circa 2006.
But MacOS always gets it right: in any browser, the websites look “juicy” for the lack of a better word, and pleasant to look at.
Why can’t Linux fix this and render closer to MacOS?
Hopefully, without all the other “value added” stuff.
It first complains that the Linux wins, such as running more games, etc are the wrong wins because they make Linux more like Windows.
And yet, later, it says the reason Windows for ARM failed is the apps users wanted not running for it, and what users really want is their stuff to just work. But that’s literally the stuff the author called the wrong kind of win at the beginning.
Further, the author complains about the multiple DEs, init systems, etc and considers this fragmentation to be the cause of LOTD’s failure. And yet, getting rid of this would actually make Linux like Windows/Mac unlike adding compatibility for more games.
Finally, I think this is substantially wrong as well. The variety in Linux is what made it possible for Valve, for example, to put together the steam deck. They were able to choose the combination of different options in different areas they worked best for the Steam Deck’s use case. Further, Linux’s tremendous success on the server is also likely due to fragmentation. The fragmentation meant that several different companies could survive and flourish, such as SUSE, Ubuntu, RH, etc and each one of them could contribute different improvements that either helped the entire ecosystem or initially provided an advantage on their ecosystem which the competitors would need to come up with an answer for.
Then you have walled gardens like the Apple ecosystem where interoperability is superior among Apple products which cross sell each other. If you got an iPhone, now get the Apple Watch and a Macbook and all integrate well.
Then you have games, where consoles will give you a decent experience for less money.
Then you have professional users where the most common use case is office documents. This remains contentious but there are more alternatives now like web apps, MS Office clones like Libreoffice, Softmaker Office/FreeOffice, WPS Office.
Then you have specific desktop apps for specific OSes and there you are tied to an OS. This is one of the few legitimate uses for Windows I can think of.
Otherwise Linux is king.
> Meanwhile, the Linux community spends enormous energy on debates that rarely affect mainstream adoption. Consider the “init wars,” where systemd sparked endless flame wars (and memes) about the proper way to boot a Linux system.
This is almost in anything. We had play ground arguments over whether SEGA or Nintendo were better. Then Playstation vs N64 vs Saturn. There was Amiga vs Atari. BSD vs Linux. Vim vs Emacs. Ford vs Chevy.
What is X11, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, d-bus, application ids, portals, etc.
Then once you have a working application, users request having it distributed as .tar.gz, snap, flatpak, you name it. Then dependencies are missing on some Linux distribution or there are random bugs with Nvidia graphics cards.
Compare that to developing for Windows, where most things "just work"
The "desktop" itself, the underlying OS, is irrelevant to most users who are not hardcore pros, like, well, software developers.
jrm4•1h ago
For example, count me in with those folks who think the "new" GNOME sucks. Now, maybe you disagree and that's fine -- but so often those discussions start and end with "Well it's open source and so because you're not making anything better you can't even talk."
No. Some big players put their thumb on the scale and had a vision and a direction for GNOME and what role it would or should play; someone thought it was a good idea to try to out Steve Jobs Steve Jobs.
THOSE moves need more discussion and transparency in order to REALLY talk about "the Linux Desktop."
pengwinhayden•1h ago
Shuttleworth did so much for desktop Linux by mailing us all free install CDs, but then users everywhere began to expect Linux to be free as in beer.
But until users are willing to pay for desktop Linux again, like some of us may remember, enterprise will always win out.
bluGill•1h ago
donmcronald•53m ago