Linux has made significant strides, and in 2023, it’s better than ever. However, there are still individuals perpetuating a delusion: that desktop Linux is as user-friendly and productive as its mainstream counterparts. After a few discussions on Lemmy, I believe it’s important to provide a clear review of where Linux falls short as a daily driver for average users.
EDIT: can I just make it clear I don’t agree with this article one bit and think it’s an unhinged polemic?
I said it before and I will said it again: removed off with the constant “Linux is not ready to go mainstream”. Who cares? There will always be some software that doesn’t support Linux and there will always be people who will prefer Windows. The goal was never to move everyone to Linux or create a OS perfect for everyone. The goal was to for Linux not to die because of shady MS practices, lack of HW support, DRM and proprietary standards. Guess what? Linux is not going anywhere now. We won. We can talk about something else now.
Generally speaking, Linux is already mainstream on most things except for the desktop. And I’d agree, perhaps we don’t want to be mainstream anyways.
I wouldn’t say that we don’t want to, just that it was never the true objective. 20 years ago to goal was to make Linux just popular enough so that big corporations would stop ignoring or directly fighting it. There was a real danger that MS will convince PC manufactures to lock the bootloaders, most websites will run only on IE and Linux will not have drivers for most devices. I could end up just like all the opensource phone OSes: few supported devices, few contributors and few users. But we managed. Most big corporations now actively support Linux and Linux has support for most devices. I would like to see more articles acknowledging this win and less articles saying that “still non everyone loves Linux”.