Mass-Adoption of Alternative OS

is getting people more to break away from the virtual monopoly of Microsoft/Windows even possible? how do you create a genuine competitor?

a genuine competitor probably isn't going to happen. Several companies are trying google ( chromebooks ) and Apple has been trying for awhile. The Linux desktop has never really took off for a new destop OS to really take off it would have to be able to reeducate on how the system works pretty quickly and be better and cheaper than windows. Which is already installed on most computer's by default.

>>32222 >how do you create a genuine competitor? Make computers easy to use by default, advertise alternatives. For me it was just curiosity - I wanted to see something different than Windows in action. Problems that make GNU/Linux less widely adopted than alternatives are mostly: the lack of standardization in the sphere of desktop use, many packaging formats, different tools installed by default, the lack of GUI for some programs, the lack of consistency in UX/UI. Objectively speaking, it would be beneficial for the community, if a half of the distributions were purged - less forking, more cooperation, this is what an alternative OS need. Also it would be good, if the OS was managed by a single team/project - this is what the GNU Project should be responsible for, but it never gained enough authority to do anything and they let to many competitive packages to exist (e.g. several Lisp dialects: Guile Scheme, MIT/GNU Scheme, Kawa Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Clisp; a two desktop environments, GUI Toolkits: GNOME, GTK+, GNU Step). If you want to have a successful OS, you must avoid splitting your community like this. A good Windows replacement also needs compatibility - software has to be compatible with existing tools on Windows, or the alternative has to be good enough to replace existing tools. Also interesting thread, just put some more effort next time.

>>32224 >Problems that make GNU/Linux less widely adopted than alternatives are mostly: the lack of standardization in the sphere of desktop use, many packaging formats, different tools installed by default, the lack of GUI for some programs, the lack of consistency in UX/UI. Objectively speaking, it would be beneficial for the community, if a half of the distributions were purged - less forking, more cooperation, this is what an alternative OS need. >If you want to have a successful OS, you must avoid splitting your community like this. IMO Alice, this is completely wrong. Linux is hugely successful it runs on smart phones, most servers, and almost all embedded computers. Had Linux been a monolithic "our way" project, some of the most successful use cases like smart phones and servers would have never occured. Linux started out as a PC Hackers Desktop port of Unix, and has replaced the big iron of Unix Servers, and yet been modular enough for google to build android on top of. Even the desktop is too valuable to lock into "the one true way". Imagine the rage of all linux desktop users trying to agree on KDE vs GNOME. When KDE 4 came out , I saw the future and used it. When Gnome 3 came out, I was similiarly enchanted again, and left KDE. As GNOME 3 has oversimplified to replicate that "easy apple" user experience, I moved to i3. Linux has a huge ecosystem that is as flexible as you want it to be. I would hate to let GNOME removed right click for all Linux Desktop users at once when they bork it. The reason Linux doesn't have commercial adoption as a Desktop platform probably have more to do with no Corporate profitability or General User interest in learning a new ecosystem. Our best hope is addicting users to BS free FOSS desktop apps on Windows like Libreoffice (Free vs MS Office Monthly Subscription) and then hoping we can develop a user friendly browser before Web Apps own everything.

There are two alternative OSes that have seen massive adoption in the past ten years. They're called iOS and Android. Why were they successful? Because they were a package deal with a whole new type of mobile computing. The Linux desktop is never going to be that. The only way I see Linux getting mainstream adoption is if Microsoft not only goes full walled garden but does so in a way that locks out Steam. I don't think that will happen though.

>>32225 >Linux is hugely successful it runs on smart phones, most servers, and almost all embedded computers. I think you shouldn't put all systems using the Linux kernel into one bag. Classic GNU/Linux distributions are totally distinct ecosystem from Android and shouldn't be treated as one. Even Linux-based systems, not using GNU, like Artix or Alpine (if I recall correctly) are much closer to classic GNU/Linux distributions like Debian than to Android. GNU/Linux, Linux and BSD systems are mostly community-driven, whereas systems like Android, RouterOS are mostly proprietary and locked down. GNU/Linux, etc. are competitive platforms to Android, because in most cases users and developers don't interface kernel directly, but use userland applications and API's to interface their systems. >The reason Linux doesn't have commercial adoption as a Desktop platform probably have more to do with no Corporate profitability or General User interest in learning a new ecosystem. I think this is a minor issue, compared to years of Microsoft's dirty practices, EEE, monopolization, and polluting education. Windows is bloated, incompatible and therefore hard to replace. By making their products bloated and complicated, they prevent the users from learning alternatives. Also "commercial adoption" is a bit vague. Could you explain? Do you mean the system is not financially self-sustaining, or what exactly?

Only a matter of time. Already irrelevant.

linux gameing is on the rise. Proprietary firmware will continue to be an issue and the spying stuff on normal person tech isn’t going away anytime soon. All this sounds trite but the only place you’re gonna find privacy advocates is in tiny niche corners. The general public will never care about this stuff as long as the earths still rotating. Just try to convince your friends to ditch discord.

>>32234 True but the catch is, it's being replaced by fuarrrking *mobile*. You all talking about linux but it's still at the bottom and declining over time. Actual computers are going to become a rare niche thing, we will live in a world where most people don't even own one.

Being able to reuse components developed for other kernels, like Rumpkernels allow for is good. Because there is no way you can catch up to the driver accumulation on your own as a small project. Basically, take any and all available resources from other systems and make it so they can work on yours reasonably-well, when they matter. Now, for mass adoption? Adopt the same UI everyone else has, be faster, cheaper and less buggy. Get a better PR/marketing department. For actually interesting things? Shake up assumptions of OS design. Most current systems are *NIX or NT. Those aren't the only paradigms possible. The LispOS documents talk of some, while Plan 9 instead considered: What if we pushed UNIX further?

I don't really think Linux is unpopular because it lacks features, Linux is perfectly usable for almost everything at this point and easy to install if you have basic computer skills. I think the issue is simply that Linux has been tainted as the nerd OS which always breaks and is incredibly complicated when it is in fact the opposite often times. The lack of a real standard distro isn't such a huge issue in my opinion, over half of the Linux market runs Debian-based distros and another good portion uses rpm-based package managers.

>>32223 >linux preinstalled Unity was pretty ok for the average user but they killed it. We're left with uncustomizable gnome with giant padding or crashy kde (restart plasmashell/kwin all the time). >competitor You don't do that, big companies hate it when their userbase is being stolen off so they'll likely acquire such projects with embrace extinguish style or do it violently. Anyway the soykaf is in the software right now. Processing power gets better and better and hardware can last you a few more years so it's all on the software now. This is why most companies are now focusing on software/payment processing/services.

>>32243 It wasn't really Linux's fault for being the nerd OS (although some 10 years ago it was impossible to just install Linux and start working on it right away), the reason why it was never popular is that people want to do 3 things on their computer and Windows gave them those 3 things in a familiar and easy package THAT THEY ARE STILL TOO LAZY TO USE. People care nothing for your completely personalized Linux installation running all sorts of scripts doing exactly what you want exactly when you want. This is the same reason why people vote politicians they know are lying to them: they don't care about taking things in their own hands.

>>32222 I don't think it's possible to do that without a huge corporation backing your OS. Android and ChromeOS are both a success because Google backed it.

Getting normal people to use Linux would be nearly impossible due to how normal people are like. They do not want to learn. If one of them does use Linux, they would probably end up using Linux with big corporation bullshit. It is an ok starting point, better than Windows 10, but they could do better.

Once we overcome that idea that you don't need to know anything about a computer to use it, and confronting the user with white text on a black background is the worst that can happen, maybe we can also overcome windows. It's the American consumerist mentality of "the customer is always right" that is pulling down the quality of the industry, dumbing down everything, until Microsoft literally has to remote-control your device for it to operate. >>32225 > Objectively speaking, it would be beneficial for the community, if a half of the distributions were purged - less forking, more cooperation, this is what an alternative OS need. I think this is a common misconception. Most distro forks don't split up the available effort, they just increase it over all. If you were to somehow reduce the number of distributions, you would indirectly decrease the absolute number of contributors, as the only reason they contribute is that the distro exists in the first place.

>>32225 >Objectively speaking, it would be beneficial for the community, if a half of the distributions were purged I would not use Linux if I had to settle on what would be a flavor of the same distro that is totally not infiltrated by Google sockpuppets, asks me my genders and pronouns of the day every morning and doesn't allow me to sudo because I'm already privileged. Even if forks are mostly useless, centralizing the environment is begging to give it wholesale to Microsoft/Google and their rainbow army. It's happening anyway but at a slower pace right now.

>>32222 There are already more Android devices than Windows devices. Alexa devices, Google Home, etc. are non-Windows computers that probably run Linux inside but are even more botnet than Windows. There are 100s of millions of these. Even true Linux desktop has never been better and has experienced solid growth the past few years. But it isn't because of muh freedom, it's because of Google and Amazon sponsoring stuff for cloud desktop virtualization. To me focusing on the OS these days is missing a lot. You can run Linux but spend all day running corporate botnet software in your browser.

>>32285 >There are 100s of millions of these. what the fugg why? why would you ever buy a thing like that when your phone does everything it can do?

>>32285 >To me focusing on the OS these days is missing a lot. You can run Linux but spend all day running corporate botnet software in your browser. This is what Google does for their chromebook laptops. It's a custom distro based on debian (formerly gentoo) with proprietary software built for it (UI, chrome, etc.). Everything runs in the chrome browser, and interacts with proprietary webpages. It's still GNU/Linux when you strip it down.

I doubt so. Most apps are made for Windows an easy to use OS*, and more tasks are moving onto the cloud. >OSX? The price alone is too expensive for under-preforming hardware, not many apps support it. >Linux? Too many problems: http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html The only thing I can see to fight back is to use older Windows releases (XP, Vista, 7) and refuse to "upgrade".

>>32294 "Your computer" used to be one physical object. In that case, the OS running on it mattered a lot. Now that you do "your computing" on the internet through 100 different applications, many delivered through the browser, the points of control have changed quite a bit. Don't get me wrong, Windows 10 can suck it. Literally spying on you putting ads all over your home screen. Disgusting.

At this point, any MATE distro with AppImages is technically superior to any windows version. Devuan or Mint has much higher compatibility, stability and performance, and it only increases with every new update of windows. Turns out botnet rapes performance and stability.

>>32239 >Actual computers are going to become a rare niche thing, we will live in a world where most people don't even own one. They'll certainly be used for workstations, editing rigs and game enthusiasts, unless people start inventing and using 'plug it into your brain' computers or extremely advanced VR sets. I don't see that happening for at least 20 years, nor do I want it to happen and I say that as a VR dev. I doubt anything high-performance or that requires a large screen and intuitive interface (even accounting soykaf) to use efficiently won't be obsoleted by mobile phones.

i'm sure a lot of people would be using user-friendly distros like Ubuntu if you could actually go to a shop and buy a computer with Ubuntu on it. I don't know about other countries, but here the only desktop/laptop you can buy are ALL windows 10. No alternative unless you get a Mac or a Chromebook. And I understand why people are too lazy to install Linux. I'm pretty sure some computers have weird obscure shields to prevent you from using dual-boot. I tried to install manjaro on dual-boot on my last laptop, and it literally broke it because I kept getting errors on install, having to force shutdown my computer everytime. Even now, i'm too afraid to try that again so I just work on a wsl2.

>>34230 I say the culprit is the damned UEFI. A lot of recent laptops and OEM devices who signed a secret contract somehow made it impossible to install linux. You'd need to follow a lot of soykaf to just make it work. >turn off secureboot But this happen to be impossible on some devices when the UEFI BIOS itself auto turns-on the secureboot >dualboot When secureboot is being an arse, you'll have to use legacy-mode but in turn would fail to load your retail windows that only works in uefi-mode. >installing linux efi out of the box There were only a handful of distributions able to successfully install efi and dualboot out of the box back in 2015 and a lot of migratory windows users had given up because it even requires technical MIS skill to even make a successful install. Ubuntu could at least when they bought or uefi keys from the companies who made uefi but it was too late, a lot of potential linux enthusiast had quit and when it worked, there was a systemd migration on ubuntu further giving the average new enthusiast more reasons to quit. Even making a UEFI installer DVD or USB is somewhat hard to do since the available tools sometimes glitch for some reason (rufus when UEFI support was alpha phase). Even the UEFI USB wouldn't boot because apparently you will need to be fast enough to bypass fastboot and press Enter or any key to make the UEFI USB boot up because your BIOS simply doesn't want you to sideload anything ever since secureboot happened. Oh, and another major problem was you couldn't even use the keyboard since secureboot or a glitchy turned-off secureboot would disable your keyboard upon boot since your glitchy motherboard thought of it as a registered USB device! (though you could still use F10 or something but after that, your keyboard turns off) >C:/ is hard to shrink Since the dawn of fastboot, hiberboot, hybridboot, and a lot more windows 8 goodies, shrinking the C:/ to make way for linux distros became harder. You'll need to turn off: - hibernation+fastboot in powershell and delete hiberfil.sys - disable swap, restart and delete swapfil.sys - remove and disable system restore which may take a few or not few restarts and manually delete system restore files because apparently they don't do that even when told to do so, you will need to sideload linux distro and delete them in r/w NTFS mount. - force defragment the C:/ to the front parts of drive so to not leave any trace on the end parts so you can shrink the end/rear parts properly otherwise shrinking is a problem and will potentially destroy your C:/. And the last one, nuking your C:/ before installing a distro of choice locks you out of your own UEFI BIOS settings. Apparently you will need a shift+restart on windows to access BIOS settings because fastboot (when not turned off beforehand inside a windows retail OS) would prevent you from getting into the BIOS settings, so you can't turn off secureboot and you can't boot any USB device aside from a goldenkey maser UEFI key that the agents have. Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA!

I never understood "market share", who gives a kaffeinated soybean drink? Who cares if everyone uses it, no one uses it, if it can compete in international markets, etc. etc.? This individual benefits from using gnu+linux, end of story.

>>32253 Talking to family members and other people very remote from our mindset here, the absolute hatred people have for Windows 10 is significant and maybe more widespread than you think, especially since they can't just go back to Windows 7 now. There must be a way to tap into this anger, make some converts. 'cept they usually convert to OSX, there's that....

>>34251 Your target audience should then be the poorer malcontents who couldn't ever afford any Appleshit anyway.

>>34264 There's such a grey area with that demographic though, people who know Apple is overpriced but will sacrifice for it anyway. I know a guy, lives on a farm actually, who chooses Apple over the competitors because he knows he can use it without snags, period. The extra cost is worth it even though he struggles to pay his bills every month.

>>34251 >cept they usually convert to OSX, there's that I was surprised to learn that MacOS has the highest percentage of installs vs windows that it ever has. I thought people were dropping it because the hardware has gotten even more expensive and Apple has been making it harder (deliberately?) to port things to mac. I think 2014ish was the high water mark for software compatibility. It was basically a Unix that actually got first party support for the kind of proprietary software that rarely ports to linux (adobe and whatnot). In some ways it was the best of both worlds between windows and linux. Since then they've been chipping away at that because it seems like Apple wants to go with the Chromebook model where its an uphill battle to install anything that isn't from their app store (which is objectively soykaf. 90% of it is paid proprietary reimplementations of soykaf like 7zip or ffmpeg-like format conversion).

>>34269 The fact he can afford it at all means he's in one of the countries where it's still an option at all. I'm very skeptical of the perception of Appleshit as reliable though. It seems like it has been getting worse in a rather pronounced manner in the last few years.

>>34282 >I'm very skeptical of the perception of Appleshit as reliable though. It seems like it has been getting worse in a rather pronounced manner in the last few years. Oh yeah. Can vouch for this. My last place of employment was owned by a huge Apple fan. Everyone used imacs despite everyone basically just needing MS Office, and in the case of us accounting folks, a small-to-mid-size-business class accounting package. (I apologize to anyone here who's used AccountEdge for bringing up the painful memories upon mentioning it. That fuarrrking program, man...) It was a small industrial manufacturer, not some design studio or movie house. So the prior generation of imacs were ok. Nothing special, basically just decent PC hardware and a non-MS OS. But in 2015 we had a good year and the boss decided that everyone was going to get brand new top-of-the-line fully-loaded retina imacs. Several dozen of them, brand new from Apple. Not refurbs, not grey-market, not "discounted" models. The real thing, factory-new. And guess what happened to every last one of these extremely expensive machines. https://www.crn.com/news/mobility/apple-accused-of-display-defect-on-imac-and-notebooks-in-new-lawsuit

>>34288 That's why I would build a hackintosh before buying an Apple device if for some reason I could afford one of those things. At least the pain of trying to get one of those to work is less expensive than buying something so expensive and having a defect.

>>34234 >Apparently you will need a shift+restart on windows to access BIOS settings because fastboot (when not turned off beforehand inside a windows retail OS) would prevent you from getting into the BIOS settings There's soykafty solution solution right now very recently and there's a new option on KDE. Assuming you have a live EFI Kubuntu or Kde neon with assumingly the working EFI keys purchased by Canonical from Microsoft et.al., you will be able to bypass and boot an OS into secureboot since it is "allowed" by the very secure UEFI motherboard. To be able to access the BIOS, you need to go into KDE's System Settings > Startup and Shutdown > ... Desktop Sessions > and there will be a checkbox to Enter UEFI setup on next restart. Some distros offer a GRUB option to boot into UEFI firmware settings but even that sometimes don't work. Last problem is if you accidentally clear the UEFI keys on your motherboard you're fuarrrked.

>>34282 If the goal of the device is to signal wealth and class, poor functionality is actually a plus, it helps signal that you don't have to care about those things or can get a different computer to do it if you had to.

>>34312 >That's why I would build a hackintosh before buying an Apple device if for some reason I could afford one of those things. At least the pain of trying to get one of those to work is less expensive than buying something so expensive and having a defect. I still vividly remember the sad pained look on the face of the boss's friend/IT-guy when I said "Too bad we can't just swap the monitors, like a regular PC." Personally I just don't see the appeal of a hackintosh unless one desperately needs an OSX-specific program. It's a lot easier to pick out some Linux-friendly hardware and rice out KDE Plasma instead.

SPOILER: it breaks https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&pto=aue&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=pl&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://teamquest.pl/blog/1411_windows-rynek-konsumencki&usg=ALkJrhhsvwAPs2KuwIN2css0-lbdE32b5w

>>32259 >Once we overcome that idea that you don't need to know anything about a computer to use it, and confronting the user with white text on a black background is the worst that can happen, maybe we can also overcome windows. It's the American consumerist mentality of "the customer is always right" that is pulling down the quality of the industry, dumbing down everything, until Microsoft literally has to remote-control your device for it to operate. See I think part of the problem is the legacy of Windows95. They made choices in 95 that were actually pretty good for most people and bad for "us". Most of the users had no idea how to use a computer so it hid everything about how it worked or made it dumb clear. A start menu, a single button on your screen and not much else. Then a narrow list of options a mile long. A pain in the ass to use but one that had a very low learning curve. A "Desktop" that does it's best to provide the illusion that it's the root of the file system. Hidden extensions because what the hell is that. Not what I named my homework. An important folder named "Program \Files"... with a fuarrrking space that would annoy people for decades to come. Problem is that average people hit a point where they knew better and yet their workflows were built on this garbage so Microsoft could only change so much. The start menu in win10 with it's search and tiles is much better but Microsoft being Microsoft has to soykaf up something new for each thing they fix. We'll be undoing the legacy of Cortana and telemetry services for years. The UI changes had become a clusterfuck. I never know if I'm going to get a Win10, Win7, or Win2000 themed dialog box... from the motherfucking OS itself. All because these fuarrrkers tried to make a phone 10 years ago and it failed. They could fix all this soykaf and build a Win95/OSX style prerelease hype machine and users will deal with the changes no matter how dramatic but fixing what they've done to consumer computing is extremely low on their list of priorities.

>>34358 >The UI changes had become a clusterfuck. I never know if I'm going to get a Win10, Win7, or Win2000 themed dialog box... from the motherfucking OS itself. All because these fuarrrkers tried to make a phone 10 years ago and it failed. All of MS's recent moves have put a seed of suspicion in my mind that they're prepping for abandonment of the legacy Windows codebase and a move to a new Linux foundation for their desktop OS. They know that Win10 is an unsalvageable tech-debt-incarnate clusterfuck. I think they want to jettison it ASAP, and make it as modular as possible to slow down the growth of future tech-debt. Now, crazy as it sounds, hear me out: - Azure and Office 365 are money factories. Neither needs Windows. Windows makes a comparative pittance in licensing fees. - Management of legacy Windows was split up into multiple subgroups underneath more profitable departments, all of which are focused on making money from the cloud. - With WSL2, MS employs the world's leading experts in real-time W32/Linux system call translation using a genuine Linux kernel. Why go to that effort? So that a handful of people can run Ubuntu on their Win10 machines? There's nothing to be gained in that. But the reverse, a thoroughly tested Win32 compatibility layer that runs on top of Linux, would make "desktop MS Linux" very palatable to business customers who need to keep running some Win32 legacy programs. - Microsoft is already shipping home-grown Linux distros on Azure. They're clearly comfortable with the licensing. - VSCode on Linux is a first-class citizen in the VSCode compatibility list. It's not the usual "try if you want, it's unsupported, you're on your own" type of thing that other major tech companies do with desktop Linux. Sure, it's Electron. But it still works. - Edge will soon run natively on Linux. Again, why? What's the overlap in the Venn diagram of Linux users and people who trust MS with their browsing history? Why pay developer salaries for this project, unless they'll have need of a well-tested Linux-native browser? I think there's two things to watch out for: - Linux-native Visual Studio (not Code, but their big commercial product). - Linux-native Xamarin (not Mono, but again their homegrown official one).

>>34365 >"I wish linux were the most popular desktop OS" >finger curls on the monkey's paw

>>34346 It is a lot easier. There really is no OSX application that I've seen as being good enough to really want to build a hackintosh.

>>34367 I had a mac mini from around 2014 to 2018. For a decade prior I'd heard from friends about how OSX was this magical "just works" OS. The reality is that it's a "just works" OS up until the moment when it's not, at which point you basically need to wipe and reinstall. And the available programs for OSX are basically what you get in a decent Linux distro, except that the authors nickel and dime you to the point where you're frequently spending $10-20 a pop for utilities that fix OSX customization issues. (Good luck using a non-Apple mouse and not going insane with the bonkers acceleration curve unless you spend US$20 on USB Overdrive to fix it!)

Is this about getting more people or most people? Getting computer enthusiasts over? Not too hard. Getting normal users over? That's a different game altogether. In 2020, I see the biggest issues as apathy and familiarity. Empathize with the following: >be office worker normal user >every corporate workstation experience for you was Windows XP, 7 and now Windows 10 at work. Your home computer also has Windows 10 >buy laptop >Mac or Windows, since here you can't get them off-the-shelf with Linux distros installed >choose Windows because you understand Windows Why should they switch to Linux? Most normal users are apathetic and would stick with the familiar or default. Why go through the trouble of having someone change the operating system to something you don't understand at all where Microsoft Word doesn't even work? They don't want to learn how to fix computer problems or maintain their OS, the computer should just work. Do the normal-tier OSs even have automatic updates? The point is, you need to have an effective motivator to leave Windows if that's the default. What does Linux do for them that Windows doesn't? Data stalking is an invisible issue, they rarely care. I see the hurdles as follows: 1) Windows is the 'default OS', the first one most people learn and the one most have to learn if their workplace needs them to use a computer. Therefore they are likely to stick with what they 'know'. Teach Linux in schools or use Linux in the workplace (hahaha good luck) 2) Make moving to Linux not a downgrade or alternative. Make it an upgrade. Have equal-or-better replacements for all the main programs they need (Office... anything else??? What do normal users use apart from browsers, email and Word/Excel? I forget). Somewhat possible. 3) Make beginner OSs that are more familiar and have all the features Windows does. Make it seem like they went to Windows 11, not Zxxzjrd 3. (somewhat possible)

>>34365 Maybe. But the worst part of windows isn't the kernel. It's the creaking stack of soykaf built on top of it. The kernel was actually quite good last time I was learning about it which is admittedly ages ago. I think microsoft might choose linux because it's popular but they also have a history of cribbing from BSD because of the mit license. That's a lot of windows drivers to give up. I also have a hard time imagining microsoft giving their customers a way out of their ecosystem. I could definitely see them adopting an open source kernel and then forcing people to use a windows API layer. Sure people will probably figure out how to unlock it but that's not the kind of thing I'm going to be doing at work.

It's too late. Linux had a shot at gaining mainstream popularity in the early 00s, during the Windows ME/XP days. Windows was such a gross pile of garbage at the time that there was a genuine need for an alternative. All that was needed was a polished, well-supported, sane, user-friendly distribution and Linux on the desktop would've taken off like just Firefox did. Obviously that did not happen, the community was not able to unite and deliver a good product so here we are. Now it's too late - smartphones have taken over casual computing and Windows 10 is actually good enough. It just works.

>>34370 >how OSX was this magical "just works" OS. The reality is that it's a "just works" OS up until the moment when it's not Yeah I have no idea where this perception of macos comes from. I grew up with windows, had a macbook for several years, then went to 90% linux only, with a win10 disk in my desktop if I ever need it for some adobe bullshit or games. I tend to have a mild preference for macos (like if I have to pick mac or windows for a work computer I'll take the mac), but Windows is definitely more of an "it just works" OS than mac. Hell, Ubuntu or Fedora "just works" about as well as a macbook. In any of these options, if you just use the software it ships with you aren't going to hit any major issues. But when you get to, for example, third party USB peripherals there's a better chance it's going to work on windows than mac. The inverse argumument is also totally backwards. For whatever reason people think that macos is this baby walled garden OS that doesn't let you do anything on your own while windows is for real tech bro power users who need to customize their computer. In reality, Apple makes advanced features much more readily available and doesn't hide them in the "professional" version. Once you do the mac equivalent of editing a registry key that says "I know what I'm doing Apple, please just let me use sudo" the wide world of actual linux software ports is open to you. Want to run openvpn? Brew install openvpn. Edit the config just like on linux. Want an SSH server? It's already there, actual openssh, just enable it. On windows this kind of thing is usually involves a lot of fuarrrking around in the group policy editor for a (typically outdated) afterthought of an implementation Microsoft only supports at all because their corporate customers need it. Making advanced things hard to do isn't a hallmark of an advanced "power user" friendly OS, it's an indication that the OS is designed under the assumption that its users will never do these things. The Apple store can be almost entirely ignored. The only reason I had an Apple account at all was so I could download xcode (which is admittedly one of the worst parts of macos). Not that I like macos, and certainly these roles seem to be reversing in recent years, but overall Windows still tends to be the one holding your hand and telling you "you really don't want to do that, just use office365/activedirectory/ms remote desktop like a regular person. What the fuarrrk is a tar file? Windows can make archives you know. Mount something that's not an NTFS disk? Windows disks are NTFS, what could you possibly want to mount that's not a windows filesystem?". The cottage industry of windows freemium shovelware that does nothing more complicated than take some file format and convert it to something windows can make sense of is a testiment to this. I think the opposite perception is based solely on the fact that if you don't know you can run linux ports on mac and think you have to use the Apple store, windows has more (and better) third party software.

>>34382 >Obviously that did not happen, the community was not able to unite and deliver a good product Not quite. What actually happened was that Microsoft threatened PC OEMs with revocation of bulk Windows license discounts if they shipped non-Windows systems in addition to Windows ones - PC OEMs would have to pay retail prices for Windows licenses. Most PC OEMs backed down and ended their experiments with shipping Linux systems rather than face the massive increased cost.

My best guess for this is to push Linux as a competitive mobile OS. Smartphones have taken over casual computing as another lain has said here. It would be a lost cause to get casual people to go back to desktop/laptop computing. Unfortunately the already existing companies like Pine64 and Purin that have Ubuntu mobile phones are way too expensive and there is not enough companies that ship smartphones with Ubuntu preinstalled. No casual person is going to take the time to learn how to root and install Ubuntu onto their smartphones. In my opinion this is the most viable yet least likely solution to this problem.

>>34393 >Unfortunately the already existing companies like Pine64 and Purin that have Ubuntu mobile phones are way too expensive Purism: yes. A normal Librem 5 is ~$750 Pine64: I disagree. A normal Pinephone is ~$150. That's a reasonable cost for a phone. I remember being unironically excited for the Librem 5

>>34402 I agree with this Lainon. The pricing of a Pinephone is within lower-medium range prices and its specs are better than those phones'. The Librem 5 is completely overpriced and non-competitive though.

>>34402 >Pine64: I disagree. A normal Pinephone is ~$150. That's a reasonable cost for a phone. Oh, I didn't realize that. My bad.

>>34391 What you're talking about happened during the nettop/Eee Pc era in the late 00s when after numerous service packs Windows was mostly usable anyway. I'm talking about the early 00s, 2000 to 2005. That was when I personally first tried using Linux (I bought one of those Linux tutorial magazines with an install CD - remember those?) because Windows XP was so awful but desktop Linux just wasn't ready back then for everyday use. It mostly is now but it just doesn't matter anymore.

>>34393 Historically (i.e. before this year) the problem was as you say, that flashing a linux phone os onto a regular phone was difficult and error prone, and you were likely to be missing some features unless you used a defacto standard dev phone like a google pixel or certain oneplus phones (and even then compatibility wasn't perfect). The real benefit of the pine phone is that it offers a single reasonably priced device for devs to target, which will hopefully serve as a base for future more powerful "flagship" linux phones. It's crearing some much needed standardization. The main difficulty with custom android roms comes from how android works as a business model. OEMs are expected to port android to their phones themselves, implementing whatever device specific features they want. If you want to make an alternative to android, you have to target every phone yourself, not just the one phone you sell. FOSS devs have exceeded any reasonable expectation here but its an uphill battle that will only become more challenging as phones add more useless hardware features to disguise the fact that they're all just glass rectangles with snapdragon processors. Pine 64 is giving the linux phone its first "OEM" in some sense. "If you want to be sure you can run linux, buy this $150 phone" is a much more compelling proposition than "well the main dev uses an old nexus, and its tested on pixel phones... maybe it'll work on one of those for a while?" Btw Ubuntu touch isn't the only game in town any more, or even necessarily the best (idk if you've been keeping up with the news, but canonical dropped it a while ago and it got picked up as a community project, which is good and bad in various ways). PostmarketOS has come a long way over the past year. As for mass adoption the problem is apps... sort of. Linux phones have the benefit of being able to run native linux software so its not starting from nothing. On the other hand linux software isn't usually designed with touch, let alone tiny phone screens, in mind so there will have to be some work there. Perhaps the bigger problem for people that aren't us is that you don't get botnet apps from the play store. On one hand this is less of an issue than it might initially seem, since most apps are just electron soykaf, and even if nobody writes e.g. a twitter client for linux phones you can still just use the web browser. On the other hand there are apps that aren't like this and will never be supported.

>>34452 >As for mass adoption the problem is apps... sort of. Linux phones have the benefit of being able to run native linux software so its not starting from nothing. On the other hand linux software isn't usually designed with touch, let alone tiny phone screens, in mind so there will have to be some work there. Perhaps the bigger problem for people that aren't us is that you don't get botnet apps from the play store. On one hand this is less of an issue than it might initially seem, since most apps are just electron soykaf, and even if nobody writes e.g. a twitter client for linux phones you can still just use the web browser. On the other hand there are apps that aren't like this and will never be supported. The biggest issue is that installing and using apps needs to be easy enough that anyone can do it. For the less technically inclined people if they need to think for more than a minute to figure it out then they don't want anything to do with it and find something that is easier. Since Linux is open source and mostly for tech hobbyists and people in IT businesses I can't see this getting resolved anytime soon.

> genuine competitor? Get it to be installed by default.

>>34381 >BSD because of the mit license. wut

>>34452 >>34462 >The biggest issue is that installing and using apps needs to be easy enough that anyone can do it. Package managers. The main problem is apps or games as there's only a handful of reverse-engineered GPU, even proprietary drivers are incompatible if we're dealing with linux phone. The solution then would be if x86 GPU and CPU catches up to the mobile handheld market. This would mean all linux-playable games would run on handheld mobile devices, maybe we'll even see a Windows phone again, and this would finally end the corporate cancerware that is AOSP.

>>34465 >package managers I assume by package managers you mean some sort of app store that downloads and installs right from the software. >The solution then would be if x86 GPU and CPU catches up to the mobile handheld market. I don't really see that happening anytime soon since from what I have seen the small portable computers outside of smartphones run on ARM. But I could be wrong. >maybe we'll even see a Windows phone again I really hope not. Windows Phone is soykaf mostly because Microsoft doesn't understand how not to over complicate a UI that is meant to be simple.

>>34476 Etnaviv, Panfrost, Freedreno are Free Software drivers for embedded GPUs, and AMDGPU, Radeon and Nouveau are for desktop GPUs. Literally the only GPU without a Free driver is PowerVR. Radeon and AMDGPU are fullspeed, the rest are slower than the nonfree driver, but have the same feature set.

>>34555 Most firmware is nonfree trash though.

>>34493 Meant to respond to >>34476

>>34557 Etnaviv, Freedreno, Panfrost and Nouveau have full 3D acceleration with no blobs. Librem 5 and Reform use Etnaviv for this reason.

The current impression most people have of GNU/Linux and other alternative Operating Systems (barring OSX) is that they are for 1337 Haxxors, and seeing a terminal makes them soykaf their pants. If you want to popularize them you need to make a baby-safe GUI only modern looking consoomer distro with all kinds of botnet installed

>>34668 >If you want to popularize them you need to make a baby-safe GUI only modern looking consoomer distro with all kinds of botnet installed Like Android and ChromeOS.

>>34669 Exactly. Android is pretty successful, and ChromeOS is enjoying a good userbase for such a heavily handicapped OS

>>34668 >>34677 Unironically I think Kiddix was a good project and something like that needs to be revived and modernized. Get kids on board and excited about Linux, make it easy/colorful/educational/safe, and you'll pave the way for an entire generation of new users.

>>34358 >We'll be undoing the legacy of Cortana and telemetry services for years. Gates started his career at Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) so I think, working as intended + always has been

>>34681 I agree. You can influence the mind of a child with no opinion but it's alot harder to influence a person with their own set of ideas and opinions. I never heard of Kiddix but it does seem like a good idea.

>>32222 just improving quality alone would make your OS more popular than any current tripe for example instead of duct taping a bunch of GUIs together (aka command line tools), make programs that use libraries properly. for example instead of screen scraping the output of GNUPG, use real libraries (make them if they don't exist). this would already remove so many bugs that windows and linux would be considered unusable compared to it

>>34493 There had been intel x86 phones/tablets released out there which used android x86 but it wasn't able to compete with the chink market. Those were actually good since the ones with postmarket theoretically would be able to support most linux software and even make use of efi to boot multiple distros aside from the android5+windows rt it came with.

>>34452 i think the problem of needing to port roms over each model could be solved by basically recreating bios, something very simple that could be ported easier than android and wouldnt need to be updated as often so a small team of people could maintain a smartphone's compatability with basically every rom.

Make a KDE or XFCE theme that looks exactly like Win7/10, and make a soykaf that installs Manjaro with this theme preconfigured on the PC

Android is based on Linux. If there was some way to have Apple like interoperability between your Android phone and your Linux desktop/laptop, I would imagine with a small push that would get a lot of people. I'm talking about doing something on your phone and it appearing on your laptop.

>>34668 >If you want to popularize them you need to make a baby-safe GUI only modern looking consoomer distro with all kinds of botnet installed There are already plenty of distros like that though (arguably minus the botnet). Pretty much any Ubuntu-based distro is perfectly usable without ever touching the command line (or at least, not touching it any more than you would in Windows). It's not a matter of creating it, it's a matter of getting people to realize it's there, and getting them to stop believing in old outdated information. The reason Android and ChromeOS don't have this problem is that people don't think of them as being "Linux." People think of them as entirely new OSs, so they don't have those stigmas attached to them (and they come preinstalled on popular hardware, which is absolutely the biggest way to popularize an OS). >>34833 Manjaro's defaults for KDE and XFCE already look pretty much exactly like Win10, so the Manjaro installer is already "a soykaf that installs Manjaro with this theme preconfigured on the PC."

>>34833 UKUI

>>34834 >I'm talking about doing something on your phone and it appearing on your laptop. Windows tries to do what with Android somewhat already.

>>34834 KDE Connect! I use it everyday. Particularly for syncing notifications between the two and sending files over the network, but it does quite a bit more.

>>34989 Beware of using the clipboard sync feature. I turn it off even if it's one of my favorite feature. Android apps can use the "read clipboard" while running in background >>32596 vid related. It means every time you copy text on your PC, the clipboard is synced into your phone and (with you unaware) the clipboard also gets synced into the offending app. This doesn't mean KDE connect is the culprit, the problem is android having a gaping hole called "open for all Clipboard Manager" which the maintainers of AOSP (big G) might not have plan fixing anytime since Ice cream sandwich. If you've copied passwords and wallets before and have an offending app sitting around (video related), you're fuarrrked.

>>32226 If anything recent Microsoft behaviour indicates they'll do the opposite. They've taken a step back from the microsoft store walled garden and started selling their products on platforms like Steam again. The full walled garden approach would be absolute suicide for windows too, theres a lot of people and businesses that rely on software that is either legacy or unlikely to ever be added to a walled garden store.

>>35020 Maybe package managers were allowed inside their walled gardens? People panicked and started making third party package managers when they heard about the anti-feature. *Containers happened too. At least windows is leagues better than the google ecosystem which is literally shoving soykaf down your throat.