As Torvalds pointed out in 2019, is that while some major hardware vendors do sell Linux PCs – Dell, for example, with Ubuntu – none of them make it easy. There are also great specialist Linux PC vendors, such as System76, Germany’s TUXEDO Computers, and the UK-based Star Labs, but they tend to market to people who are already into Linux, not disgruntled Windows users. No, one big reason why Linux hasn’t taken off is that there are no major PC OEMs strongly backing it. To Torvalds, Chromebooks “are the path toward the desktop.”
Preface: I am a Linux user
The Linux desktop needs to not require users to dig through config files to enable features that both windows and Mac have working by default. Fingerprint sensors, audio interfaces, broken bootloaders that you have to fix yourself. Requiring people to ever use a command line even once will keep people on Windows as the dominant platform.
Every time I have to look at a Linux forum to figure out why something isn’t working and the answers are run these commands I am instantly reminded that this is the exact thing keeping Windows mainstream.
Driver support still isn’t perfect. Software support as well. Linux needs to ship out of the box running exe files in compatibility layers. Linux needs to adopt executable installers for software packages that can be downloaded on the web. If Linux wants to be the way people use computers, Linux needs to fit the mould that windows has built for the people who have used it for the last 40 years.
Doing anything differently is enough of a deterrent for 90% of computer users. And of those 90%, 75% of them will give up immediately trying to fix anything that doesn’t work and either call someone else or decide it’s broken and do nothing.
Linux is incredibly powerful and I believe it should be the way we run computers, but I get exactly why it isn’t.
This one always gets me. There’s rarely an explanation of what the commands do, and “man $command” is often so obtuse that it takes 10 minutes to figure out what the list of switches and options are doing to make sure it’s not going to download some malware in the background.
Then, you run the commands, and the output is six pages of warnings, debug, and test scripts. You might even notice that some of the tests fail (if you can even follow along), but was it important? Who knows? I guess as long as it works, who cares?
You are completely right.
I do also get why the run these commands is a thing, because it’s usually faster and also is distro / desktop environment agnostic.
Why would someone want to write separate guides for Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon etc. when one or two commands will suffice? But on the flip side, my family and friends will see a scary looking command and immediately be put off.
I feel it’s getting a lot better since more apps are just in the browser or electron apps, there’s way way less to actually configure for most end users. The type of people put off by commands generally won’t go digging through the settings anyway.
I do wish there were a proper GUI for configuring GRUB though. Any that I’ve ever found seemed to fall out of date very quickly.
“But on the flip side, my family and friends will see a scary looking command and immediately be put off.”
More to that… these are exactly the people we have all been telling “If you see someone on the internet telling you ‘type this!’ DON’T DO IT!”
ALT-F4 being the benign one.
rm -rf / --no-preserve-root - not so benign.
I remember a story of someone getting the recursive tag wrong on the chmod command and managed to chmod 000 themselves out of everything on the system… including chmod.