I’m curious to hear thoughts on this. I agree for the most part, I just wish people would see the benefit of choice and be brave enough to try it out.
I’m curious to hear thoughts on this. I agree for the most part, I just wish people would see the benefit of choice and be brave enough to try it out.
First of all, this guy is correct that this is a significant reason that Linux is not more popular on the desktop. Desktop Linux is a community of things, not just one thing that people can experience and recommend.
That said, XKCD has a nice explanation about why that will never be solved:
https://xkcd.com/927/
From time to time though, a distro will dominate and. Linux will grow. For a while, that was Red Hat. Then, it was Ubuntu. Both of those moved things forward but were too early to reach mass adoption. There really is no front-runner right now but perhaps one will emerge again and “that” will be Linux for the masses.
In the meantime, things like Flatpak are addressing a lot of the problem. It is becoming realistic for a dev to target “Linux” ( Flatpak ) and have their application run predictably regardless of what distro any given individual has chosen. Freedesktop.org helps as well.
Really though, this problem will exist until most of us ( not all ) agree that one Linux Desktop distro is simply better than the rest and most of us begin to use it. We can then onboard new users onto that.
Linus Torvalds had a great rant about this situation. He believes that it might require Valve to fix this by becoming the de facto standard.
Does Valve ship a usable desktop distro?
It’s immutable, so you probably consider it unusable, but I think it’s necessary for mass adoption. Developers know exactly how the OS is built and can ensure their applications and games operate well on Steam OS. I think it will become a de facto standard, if it’s not already.