A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking: “If Linux is so good, why aren’t more people using it?” And it’s a fair question! It intuitively rings true until you give it a moment’s consideration. Linux is even free, so what’s stopping mass adoption, if it’s actually better? My response:
If exercising is so healthy, why don’t more people do it?
If reading is so educational, why don’t more people do it?
If junk food is so bad for you, why do so many people eat it?
I’ve said for a long time – if you want to become a better Embedded Linux developer, the first step is to run Linux as your main OS, preferably Arch Linux.
I think, people take whats easy, a little ease of use, a little convenience and you can have the valuable attention. I think if someone was to take a look at linux and try to make it easy to use for common non-tech savvy person, it will spread like fire there are so many options to choose from,
Once I read Barry Schwatz’s Paradox of choice which says choice is not easy
and loses value quickly when its too many to choose from
True about too many choices, but in the world of consumer computers there really are only 3 choices: MAC OS, Windoze, and Linux. MAC OS probably takes the least amount of thinking power to use and is the most expensive choice. Windows exists only because of the plethora of applications available for it and has been the choice of businesses for 40 years. While I have used Linux since the 0.99 days back in the early 90’s someone new to Linux and computing in general has a pretty steep learning curve ahead. It’s analogous to having learned a language as a native speaker from T=0 to learning a new language as an adult. Us native Linux speakers are comfortable with it because it’s what we’ve always known and loved. We don’t realize just how much we’ve learned about it along the way, and how much there is to know because we already know it.
Now that’s not to say that Windows or MAC OS has less to learn about it, but what someone needs to know to use those effectively is considerably less than that required to use Linux. My dear wife uses Linux as her daily driver, but without continual IT support from me she would be stuffed. I think it is reasonably possible that mere mortals could learn how to effectively use Linux if the focus is purely on applications. Just don’t ask ordinary users to maintain a Linux system. MAC OS and Windoze try to hide the maintenance issues from users (except for those despicable constant Windows updates) so it’s possible for those systems to run longer without expert intervention. Bringing up the choice issue again, there really are more than 3 choices. There’s MAC OS, Windows, Fedora Linux, Ubuntu Linux (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, etc. etc), Arch Linux, Gentoo Linux, SUSE Linux…
I will put hats of app developer and ordinary computer user.
Apps are driving adoption in modern world, pretty much, how much browser is in use as platform, and to be true Linux as desktop has gained more traction after the webapps using electron came along and we have more power apps available on linux.
The app ecosystem is fragmented, which puts a lot of load on app developers. flatpak or appimage or snaps or rpm, dpkg, apt, dnf, pacman … its an endless list, every distro has their own package manager. as a app developers tell me one way of doing it for linux.
UIs are fragmented, XFCE, Gnome, KDE, Budgie, i3, fwvm, hypland … again another endless list.
How can an average user have consistent experience.
As a result userbase is small and people don’t have enough help to get onboarded.
UX story is not upto mark sadly and that matters with humans.
Applications drive adoption. Which is why the killer app for Linux has always been servers. There is the steep learning curve for the new user, but the UI and package management fragmentation you pointed out are what’s keeping application developers mostly wedded to Windows and is the real impediment to wider adoption of Linux on the desktop.
there are so many options to choose from,