I’m curious to hear thoughts on this. I agree for the most part, I just wish people would see the benefit of choice and be brave enough to try it out.

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

    First of all, this guy is correct that this is a significant reason that Linux is not more popular on the desktop. Desktop Linux is a community of things, not just one thing that people can experience and recommend.

    That said, XKCD has a nice explanation about why that will never be solved:

    https://xkcd.com/927/

    From time to time though, a distro will dominate and. Linux will grow. For a while, that was Red Hat. Then, it was Ubuntu. Both of those moved things forward but were too early to reach mass adoption. There really is no front-runner right now but perhaps one will emerge again and “that” will be Linux for the masses.

    In the meantime, things like Flatpak are addressing a lot of the problem. It is becoming realistic for a dev to target “Linux” ( Flatpak ) and have their application run predictably regardless of what distro any given individual has chosen. Freedesktop.org helps as well.

    Really though, this problem will exist until most of us ( not all ) agree that one Linux Desktop distro is simply better than the rest and most of us begin to use it. We can then onboard new users onto that.