I guess because the majority of Linux folks don't really care about making it a solid user experience for normies, and those that do so might have strong opinions on things that might not roll with everyone, especially coming from Windows (read: gnome).
I've maintained an in-house distro for a couple years so I know the ins and outs of systemd, dbus, polkit, xorg and whatever crap is needed to run a desktop session, and how to track down what's broken if the system misbehaves in some way. So switching every machine I use to Linux wasn't really an extra burden. Ironically it made me switch to i3 as my WM and ditching a file manager, gvfs and other moving parts. I'm doing a lot of things in the terminal. I loathe complicated setups - less moving parts, less things that can break. But I'm fully aware that I'm a complete oddball here, and I don't think nor care whether the day of the Linux desktop will ever come. Unless maybe we're at a point where really absolutely everything runs in the cloud and people only need a browser. But at that point just get a Chromebook?
The Free Software and Open Source ecosystems are, at their best, about communities putting together projects to serve their own needs and then generously sharing those solutions out.
I think an easily discoverable UI for non-technical people is not a problem that many technical communities have. Anyone who does try to start that project is signing themselves up for a lot of complaints from outside the project, almost by definition. I don’t really see why anyone would do it.
The Chromebook is probably the right way to go. I’d recommend them to my non-technical friends if they weren’t designed by an ad company. As it is, I have no idea, there legitimately doesn’t seem to be a good desktop OS for non-technical users anymore.
I think the end result is less people using the desktop overall (ie, just relying on tablets and phones), which in my opinion is a catastrophe since phones and tablets are generally consumption devices rather than creative devices (sorry, I'm not counting selfies or tiktoks), and we're slowly dumbing down the next generation.
I've converted a handful of some of the least computer tech heavy people to Linux. This was years ago.
The final few nails of Microsoft's coffin are being nailed as we speak. Not only because they are just fundamentally bad at innovation, but because they also sold out the United States to China. Billy boy is scared, and he should be.
Is converting the least tech literate an issue? I assume some of the easier distros are pretty much plug and play now, and if your only goal is to browse Facebook and print off recipes from an already set up printer pretty much anything can do that easily. But these people would probably be happy with an iPad if their iPhone wasn't cutting it.
I think the big middle of the population that's the problem, people who are tech literate enough to do some things, but not willing to relearn the wheel. They can use microsoft office, but don't want to have to relearn a new file structure. Those are the people who probably will have the biggest issue, and there's a lot of them. That's office workers, computer gamers, all those people. Even the pretty tech literate people who know how to do things in Windows but don't care to relearn it all in Linux.
I managed to convince my mother-in-law to use Linux and drop Windows.
But it seems that convincing the network guys at work is harder than convincing a retiree. Apparently it's easier to administer a Windows network than a Linux one.
> Apparently it's easier to administer a Windows network than a Linux one.
Not really. I suspect that there's a fallacy similar to the one in <https://thedailywtf.com/articles/an-obvious-requirement> going on. (The most relevant comment: 'Ah, so the user is using "obvious" to mean "familiar."').
While I do agree that nowadays users with a basic computer usage would be much better served by a modern Linux distribution compared to Windows, it won't happen due to the power of defaults. Windows is preinstalled and that will be enough, no matter how badly it degrades.
Yes agree. I started using Linux (Gentoo) as student 20 years ago to learn LKMs programming, and with my main Desktop being Windows currently, I give a new try to linux distros every year. I see Linux distros improve year after year, but they are still light years away from providing a good user experience. And even if I don't agree with many Windows 11 updates (like the cumulating number of services required to run user interfaces, the taskbar which can't be moved anymore, the bloatware by default and so on...), Windows still provides a better & smoother user experience overall. Even Desktop multitasking experience feels better engineered in Windows, probably because of a better Desktop processes timing.
It's interesting hearing such diametrically opposed experiences. I've been using Linux as my main desktop for over 20 years.
I find Windows to be an unholy confusing mess these days. Want to set the microphone sound level; go to sound settings - nope, not there. Probably in some other legacy control panel I guess.
By contrast, most things I need to configure in Linux are in a single place. File copying is much faster than Windows. Updates don't prevent me from working and require multiple reboots. It crashes less often.
Anyway, a lot is probably just what you're used to. I'm sure I excuse many Linux failings because it doesn't bother me and I know how to work around it.
I understand your perspective and appreciate the flexibility of Linux, however achieving my desired setup on Linux does involve more effort and is sometimes impossible, as I explain in my post below.
How has had the entirety of the open source developer community not managed to make even a mediocre step forward in UI/UX of even the biggest Linux distro?l in 20 years? Hell, even Blender has made big strides and I thought that'd be impossible.
Blender is unique in having a big set of users who are actually good at aesthetics professionally. A subset of that group wanted to contribute, and the technically minded were actually willing to let them.
Most other open source projects have people behind them who don't put UX first, and who are suspicious, jealous, or plain disagree when people want to help with UX.
This shouldn't be too surprising in a world led by people who value technical excellence most.
The bottleneck regarding UI/UX was (and is still) X11 / Xorg, with the obsolete client/server architecture inherited from a time when computers had no graphic card. Wayland has been in progress for some time now to replace X11 / Xorg, but it is still bugged to some extend, and driver support needs to be improved.
> they are still light years away from providing a good user experience
I really don’t get this. All modern desktop environment (OSX, Windows, KDE, Gnome) looks like very similar in terms of user experience quality to me. All are different, true, which is why I can understand will exists. But I will very hard pressed to justify "actually, x is better than y" (yet alone "light years away"), for any pair (x, y).
Can you name just three deal-breakers, things so huge that they deserve that "light years away" judgement ?
Well, as you say, desktop environments look the same. But they don't feel the same. When we talk about UI/UX we talk about look and feel. I've installed Ubuntu & MX Linux to reply to your question, here are random issues I get with the default setup: why do I get no sound when I play a youtube video (it works on one distro, broken on the other one) ? why do I have no option to change the refresh rate of my monitor to more than 60Hz ? Therefore where is the 120hz smooth scrolling ? Why is my keyboard layout set to english by default while I am located in Europe ? How am I supposed to configure my WIFI password if my keyboard layout is incorrect by default ? Why does my CPU fan runs at full speed while I am just writing this text currently with no other user task in background ? If I use a laptop with a second keyboard (bluetooth), why aren't my keystrokes taken into account when the system asks me to confirm the reboot by pressing "enter" (I need to reach the laptop keyboard since the bluetooth one is not taken into account) ? Why does my browser need to reload its cache & configuration from my drive each time I boot my computer; why isn't it loaded in RAM by default ? Why do I still have the first mouse wheel scrolling event ignored in the Chrome/Chromium web browsers in most distros I try, while this bug has been driving users nuts for years while the solution is already known ? I use a dual monitor setup, why does the system displays some glitches at first boot ? Why doesn't it doesn't remember my primary screen when I log off the session, and shows the login prompt on the other screen ? Why does the system hangs when I run a game like counter strike 2 and I try to switch back to the desktop ? Why does the system get super slow while it tries to recompile shaders, making it impossible to open a web browser ? and I'm not even mentioning the issues installing/uninstalling proprietary video drivers which is still a huge mess. For my usage, the Linux Desktop feel experience is still pure hell currently... although I really wish it were good.
Fully agree, around 2010 I made my peace with it never happening, and switched fully into Windows, using GNU/Linux either from a VM (VMWare/Virtual Box), or some server.
Also managed to get hold of one of the last Asus netbooks (1215 B), that after all these years has finally given the ghost.
Netbooks are now replaced by Chromebooks/Android systems that care about a full stack developer experience where the underlying Linux is a kind of implementation detail, Windows ships WSL (no need for VMWare/Virtual Box), and those that want UNIX proper have macOS.
Yeah, Microsoft's got a huge majority of users captive and now they can do as they please, "Oh you don't like this obnoxious new 'feature'? Well what are you going to do about it?", like an abusive partner.
If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness... Too bad Google's product managers are just busy trying to advance their own careers, plus it's not like they respect users...
> If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness...
Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system (not one that's given away for free) that isn't Windows or MacOS again in the next 30 years?
Because Linux is free, and Windows is ubiquitous, and because you need a lot of hardware support and support for existing applications to be see usage, it seems hard for any new company to break into the market with something genuinely new.
It seems like the way things are now are how they'll be for a long time. We'll just always use Linux, MacOS, or Windows, with superficial changes, I suppose. Or a BSD.
> Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system...
Nope, no one is willing to put up the money for a long term investment.
If I had the billions, I'd fund an easily installable OS that can accept Windows hardware drivers (easier said than done...). Or the cheaper way would probably to fund a slick Linux distro that an average user isn't scared away, but I guess they already are slick enough nowadays?
I installed a Manjaro KDE distro on a secondary PC a while ago, and on login it had the option of X11 or Wayland, but Wayland wouldn't work on my setup... Sigh, the average user doesn't care to learn about windowing system options, they just want to do their work.
I honestly think that Gnome is a big part of this. A lot of people very obviously and loudly like it, but since I've been giving developers the option to use KDE they've been a lot happier with it all.
