How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?
Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.
Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.
Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.
Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.
Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!
It depends, a lot (I use Bluefin, so I'll grab that one as an example)
Assumming everything is setup the way I usually do when someone asks me for a new Windows PC (Setup an account, install basic utilities, Office suite, automatic updates, etc)
More or less everything
- ThunderBird + OnlyOffice is close enough for regular usage (Coming from Outlook + Office)
- Flatpaks and system updates are on the background by default and only take when you restart, so they're more or less invisible (And for someone else, I'll usually do the oldest channel available, maybe even the CentOS based LTS when that's out of beta)
- Discord, Teams, Stuff like that is electron based anyway
- Steam for games is reasonably good (Depending on your library, Everything in mine works, but not everything in my wishlist)
- Windows only utilities are on a case by case basis (Depending on the program, they'll usually call me to procure it, because god knows, no sane person wants to deal with the likes of adobe)
For the sake of transparency, I would use the CLI to setup quite a lot, but I wouldn't expect them to use it for anything
How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?
Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.
Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.
Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.
Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.
Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!