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Here's why Linux market share isn't going to skyrocket anytime soon (thelibre.news)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by Pro@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

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You've heard the "prophecy": next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right? Linux is no longer the niche hobby of bearded sysadmins and free software evangelists that it was a decade ago! Modern distributions like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint are sleek, accessible, and — dare I say it — mainstream-adjacent.

Linux is ready for professional work, including video editing, and it even manages to maintain a slight market share advantage over macOS among gamers, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey.

However, it's not ready to dethrone Windows. At least, not yet!

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[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 3 weeks ago (17 children)

These are probably the biggest reasons, but I think even after literally decades of development the actual desktop is still far behind Windows XP in many respects.

For example today I wanted to add a "start menu" shortcut to a program I had downloaded. The most popular answer is to *manually create a .desktop file and copy it to some obscure dot directory! Hilarious. Even Windows 3.1 had a built-in GUI for this.

Ok so there is a GUI to do it, but it isn't actually integrated into desktops and isn't installed by default. You have to install it separately.

It's the same for things like WiFi settings! There are some settings in GNOME but most are hidden in the third party nm-connection-editor (from memory) and of course GNOME doesn't have an "advanced settings" button to open that.

There are so many of these paper cuts I think Linux would be quite a frustrating experience for many people even if if had Windows-level hardware support.

I also can't see this changing any time soon. Not that many Linux devs actually care about this sort of thing and many of them don't even understand that it is a problem in the first place. Cue replies.

[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

For example today I wanted to add a “start menu” shortcut to a program I had downloaded.

I get what you're saying, but this is like "I tried to use Linux like it was Windows, and it was hard." It's a different OS. Go on, move the taskbar of Windows 11 to the left or right edges of the screen. I can do that on Linux, why can't I do that on Windows? It's not even hard, it's just plain impossible. If you try to do things manually in Linux, it's not going to be intuitive. It will feel like editing the Registry in Windows. Unintuitive and like arcane magic.

[–] joshcodes@programming.dev 4 points 2 weeks ago

Fuck yes. I switched to Linux after Windows got all control freaky over my task bar. On Linux I can have 30 task bars if I want, 100 task bars. I can setup a mouse-task bar that opens radially around my cursor. On mac I can put that shit left, right, bottom, which is something, and i can resize it which is the bare fucking minimum.

On Windows? Bottom. Full width. Don't like it? Fuck you. Shut up and cope.

Oh but there's a registry hack to... nope. Not dealing with that shit again after I tried to make the fucking icons smaller AND IT BROKE THE TASK BAR.

Love that proprietary feeling, those crisp millions of dollars of development being used to innovate and develop a robust and perfected operating system.

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