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Desktop Linux revisited

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Anthony Wang 2021-05-17 09:57:12 -05:00
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---
layout: post
title: "Desktop Linux Revisited"
author: Ta180m
tags: ["Linux", "Society"]
---
Linux enthusiasts have some kind of weird obsession with Linux market share. Compound this with the fact that it's almost impossible to determine accurately, with estimates ranging from lows of 0.5% to sky-high predictions like 5%. That's a whole order of magnitude of estimates! Each end of the spectrum posits a completely different future of Linux, so let's get started digging into this!
The first thing to remember is that 90% of the things written on the Internet were written by people who completely didn't understand what they were saying. (And that's a low estimate!) So naturally, on the Internet, there's no shortage of fake news, false news, and absolutely wrong information about Linux and its market share problem. Let's smash a few misconceptions first:
### Linux is just the sum product of thousands of hobbyist projects
Also blatantly false. This completely ignores all the companies that put millions into developing Linux. Who contributes the most to the Linux kernel? [Intel, Huawei, SUSE, AMD, NVIDIA, Google, IBM, Samsung, and Red Hat](https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/). Linux is not something that some random developer in their parent's basement, or even random communities, are making. There are dozens and dozens of companies supporting Linux in every way. You can always pay to get support!
And communities have their own strengths too. Look at Debian or Arch or KDE. All of these communities have done amazing things. One threat with Linux on the desktop right now is that many companies, like Canonical of Ubuntu fame, have been lured in by the profits of the cloud that they are no longer investing as much in the desktop, as you can see with the stagnation of GNOME. Fortunately, KDE has taken up the challenge and no one would call KDE Plasma a hobbyist project! After all, it's arguably better than any other desktop environment out there, including Windows and macOS.
### No one uses Linux
Anyone who says this knows absolutely nothing Linux. What OS powers the majority of smartphones? What OS powers the vast majority of servers? All top 500 supercomputers? Most of the VMs on Microsoft Azure? The North Korea government? Chromebooks? The ISS? Your router? [Yep, all powered by Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters).
### Gaming on Linux sucks
Well, I guess this is half true. There are quite a lot of games that simply do not work with Linux unless you whack it with the heavy hammer of a Windows VM with full GPU passthrough, which is something out of scope for even 99% of power users. But with Steam, Proton, Wine, console emulators, and more, there's no shortage of games. You could probably satisfy yourself on open-source games alone.
### The Linux community is toxic
Sure, some members are, but the vast majority are perfectly nice people who have nothing against noobs asking noob questions. I guess it's the most annoying people that also happen to be the most annoying. Places like Reddit, AskUbuntu, and IRC, Matrix, or Discord rooms are all great places to get help, with only rare encounters with annoying idiots.
### Linux is hard to use
Nope. Give a random person a functioning Ubuntu or Linux Mint laptop, and they'll feel right at home since they just use their browser the whole time anyways.
The real difficulty comes from installing Linux. While it's pretty much as simple as it can be, think about how it feels to be a rando trying to go through the installation procedure. What the heck is a bootable USB? The Linux enthusiasts have the pitchforks ready, but to a rando, it's just as mumbo-jumbo as something like "substrate-level phosphorylation". All the Linux geeks are screaming it's a USB you can boot from, just like the biology geeks are screaming it's phosphorylation that happens at substrates, but for the ordinary rando, does that really help? No rando should ever need to install an operating system. You're simply asking to much. *Installing Linux* is hard.
And to make matters worse, for most people, Windows is good enough to not merit the difficult process of installing Linux manually. Even if you educated everyone about all the benefits of Linux, it's not like Windows breaks every day. Sure, Windows 10 quality is going down the drain today, but it's not unbearable. With our current situation, no rando is going to go out of their comfort zone and learn the alien process of installing Linux.
So what's the solution to this? Two words: preinstalled Linux. I'm not talking about System76 and Pine64, I'm talking about Lenovo and Dell announcing that they are going to be preinstalling Linux on some of the developer laptops. That's real progress. And for the critics of this who say it's never going to do anything, just look at Chromebooks. Google's been selling people *Gentoo* through OEMs, and look at Chromebook market share now. If the big companies are behind these preinstallion efforts, good things happen. And you can even save $50 from the [Windows tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#The_%22Windows_tax%22)!
And hardware compatibility, an issue that has long plagued Linux, will naturally clear up once OEMs start preinstalling it. No company is going to ship a broken computer anymore! This could be an end to the endless post-install tweaks you need for some computers to make them work smoothly for Linux. (Thankfully my ThinkPad works perfectly, sans hybrid graphics)
So there you have it. Linux isn't hard to use, really, once you get rolling, and OEM preinstalls will fill in that initial gap. I know what OS my next laptop will be preinstalled with!
## The future
So what's the future of the market share problem? I'm convinced that OEM preinstalls will be a significant contributor. Never before has Linux been so mainstream for OEMs, and when your market share is approximately 3%, I can only see it going it from here. Google's been doing something quite interesting with Chromebooks, and desktop Linux is ready to follow the lead.