Plenty of companies have tried offering Linux pre-installed and almost all of them have failed for various reasons. The main reason is that people don't buy them. Either they are perceived as being too hard to use, or they don't easily run the business software or games that users typically want, or buyers are confused by Linux having 157 variants, or they are happy with Windows, or whatever.
The other reason is that manufacturers can make money selling Windows PCs but can't make money selling Linux machines, partly because of the extra costs of hardware qualification, drivers, increased stock control, accounting, book-keeping and advertising costs, and massively increased support costs... unless support is either denied or sold separately as an ongoing cost.
Of course, Linux is getting a free ride on the back of Microsoft's compatibility work. If you are using Linux then you are benefiting hugely from the cost of parts being driven down by Windows PC sales. (Apple switched to Intel partly to gain the same benefits.)
> MS use their heavy leverage of Windows pricing to prevent that.
One of the settlement terms in the anti-trust case was that Microsoft was not allowed to do deals on Windows pricing, so that all the leading OEMs were on a level playing field.
This settlement ran for roughly a decade. Did you see a huge rise in Linux PC shipments? No. The only real difference was that it pushed up the average price of Windows and made Microsoft more profitable.
If all would have been clean deals wise, there wouldn't have been such a mess of Windows tax and never ending tying problem.
I don't appear to have a record of how many OEMs that applied to (or else I can't find it), but the number I remember is 40.
This had the very amusing effect of increasing the price that IBM paid for Windows. IBM went to court to complain that Microsoft had tripled its price, but as far as I recall, that price increase was from $9 to $27.
Either way, nothing stops anybody from setting up a company to sell Linux PCs -- you could do it yourself. Is there really nobody in America who can sell Linux PCs at a profit, when the OS is free?
Since that's evidently the case, blaming Microsoft just looks like a fig-leaf for some more fundamental failure(s).
Dell sells the XPS 13 Ultrabook with Linux pre-installed pretty successfully. Tuxedo is another Linux HW vendor. At lot more devices are listed at http://linuxgizmos.com
What's the problem with that? Why should I use a different distro if the installed one works perfectly with all HW components? If I really needed another distro I could user docker or the like on that same device.
Dell UK tried offering Linux with no support, but with the option to buy third-party support from Canonical. The cost of support more or less excluded home and education buyers.
I wish it were different, but right now there's not much evidence there's a significant, existing unserved market for (GNU, not Chromebooks) Linux PCs.
https://certification.ubuntu.com/certification/make/Dell/?qu...
I do agree that it should be noted that people specifically want GNU to be big. Chromium OS and Chrome OS are fantastic operating systems that are very capable. And it's Linux. No, you cannot "apt-get install GTKapplication", but it's still very Gentoo underneath the GUI. Of course you still want a more general purpose distribution for general purpose needs.
I don't consider that a problem since Linux has always been mainly in the focus of developers. Linux is a top choice if you want a reliable work horse for your work which doesn't annoy with unwanted features.
Usual users are mostly gamers and surfers. They get along with the limitations of Windows and iOS, so they don't need Linux, and that's the actual reason for the small percentage of desktop Linux.
Which suggests to me that there are some other reasons for the failure of Linux desktop PCs, and that you really can't just blame Microsoft...
There is no "Linux" to bundle. You have to pick a distro.
On the surface all major distros look like a good choice, but for unclear reasons they're all incompatible with each other despite doing the same things in the same ways.
For techies it doesn't matter because they can get any distro to work if one works. But it matters a lot for non-techies because things like tribal knowledge and even packages are all incompatible.
I am using Linux for >25 years. The "big" problem actually turned out a big advantage since I was never forced to go with any immature mainstream.
For instance, when the KDE 4.0 and Gnome 3.0 disasters came which replaced the excellent KDE 3.x and Gnome 2.x desktops I could switch to another Linux Desktop without any hassle.
This would have been impossible with Win 8. Windows users had to endure the pain (someone called it "epic fail") until MS recognized that they made a mistake. Now they have to get used to Win10 which loves to phone home. They have no other option, except switching to OSX or Linux.
I'd be fine if I had to deal with one Linux desktop that took a wrong turn for a year or two if it meant that desktop would provide backwards compatibility to the 1990s instead of breaking API compatibility whenever it seems cool.
True for Win7, wrong since >Win7. I would have agreed if you mentioned iOS. Anyway, today Android has the greatest market share, and that's running Linux.
> I'd be fine if I had to deal with one Linux desktop that took a wrong turn for a year or two if it meant that desktop would provide backwards compatibility to the 1990s instead of breaking API compatibility whenever it seems cool.
Breaking API compatibility has always been a problem in the Windows world (first DOS, then Win16, then Win32, then .NET, now Metro).
The Linux/Unix world is much more sustainable. You can likely still use applications which were written twenty years ago.
True since Win9x to my knowledge and only wrong once during Win 8 for most users (as I said in my comment)
>Anyway, today Android has the greatest market share, and that's running Linux.
And it also has horrid fragmentation, basic UI APIs so broken across singular versions of their OS they need to ship a support library to work around device specific bugs and bring in new features. Also as a full time Android dev who works with embedded installations of Android, sure Android is Android/Linux, but it's not really productive to treat it as Linux past a few basic party tricks like chroot and such.
>Breaking API compatibility has always been a problem in the Windows world (first DOS, then Win16, then Win32, then .NET, now Metro).
What? If anything Windows is known for never being willing to break old versions of things. There's the story of Win 9x containing flags for SimCity to emulate Win 3.x behavior just to keep compatibility. And way more stories like that one: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
Not to mention your list doesn't really make sense... what does Metro have to do with .NET, and what does .NET have to do with Win32, Win16, or DOS? I mean, for the record Windows 8 32-bit runs Win16 apps, has Metro, runs .NET applications and DOS applications, but that doesn't really mean anything?
>The Linux/Unix world is much more sustainable. You can likely still use applications which were written twenty years ago.
A UI application using MFC written against Win 2k will still work out of the box on a Windows 10 PC. What about an application written against Gnome 1.2. on Ubuntu 16.x?
Windows breaks horribly between upgrades. I know many people still using windows 7 because they're afraid to upgrade.
I remember this thread from last week too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603837
It's "breaking" in the sense of compatibility. If an app runs on Win 7 and Win 10, Win 10 didn't break compatibility between Win7 and Win 10 because an upgrade doesn't go through properly.
And while I have heard plenty of issues with upgrades, I've also personally had 0 issues with them since 7, on any of my personal machines, even some in the insider track.
Even in the thread you link to almost every other response is in line with what I mean: "it's usually very very hard to accidentally make a program run on Windows version N but not on Windows Version N+1"
A lot of that is still there in windows 10, it's still half phone OS, half desktop. Makes KDE/Gnome differences look irrelevant in comparison.
With Windows 8 users could not even figure out how to log in to the system.
Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP was more consistent.
>The Linux/Unix world is much more sustainable. You can likely still use applications which were written twenty years ago.
It's true that the kernel API on Linux is quite stable, but that doesn't get you very far with most applications, since they are usually linked against some old library, which depends on another old library etc.
You can see this when people talk "Mac vs. PC", they'll talk about the features of the hardware and the OS interchangeably (Macs are better because they get less viruses), even though bootcamp has been an officially supported path on Mac hardware for a long time.
There is a marketing problem with mainstream users in that most people don't know what Linux is, but I'd guess that many people don't know what Windows is, probably don't know what Android is and don't know what iOS or OSX are, so I'm not sure if understanding what Linux or Ubuntu is actually matters for usage.
I completely agree in that sense that Linux would work for average desktop users if OEM's installed it. The only major barriers I can think of are lack of MS Office and potential support overhead. Companies would have to hire a lot more dedicated Linux desktop support staff.
Take this example[0] from years ago when Dell had Ubuntu installed on some laptops. This is an example of an average user. For lack of a better words dumb as dirt. If it doesn't work right away and they can't solve it in under 5 minutes they get mad.
The article also brings up a relevant often over looked point, you need certain software that only runs on Windows or macOS. Libre Office will export to a Word format but the default is set to odt, expecting average users to know how to change format is pushing it. I've gotten in the habit of just exporting all my documents as PDF's because there's no question that the receiver will be able to read it but that isn't something that goes through the minds of most people I imagine.
[0]http://www.wkow.com/Global/story.asp?S=9667184&nav=menu1362_...
I've installed Linux for multiple non tecnical people, and they fared fine.
We don't realize just how much non-technical people struggle to do the most basic tasks on their computer. They struggle mightily to so much as connect to a new wireless network or download and run a graphical installer on Windows or Mac. Adding a printer, changing settings or connecting to a Bluetooth device are probably beyond their abilities.
My parents are both extremely intelligent, and early adopters of technology who've had PCs since the 80's; every time I see them they've filled their Macs with adware ("No, it's good; it does a cleanup! It's from Amazon!"). To send them an email is to risk it being lost in the flood of hundreds of newsletters they inadvertently subscribed to. I know fellow developers with Macs who run all their apps off of the still-mounted disk image instead of dragging them to the Applications folder.
You expect non-technical people to use a package manager? To find the non-free repository, or have the slightest clue what "package manager" or "non-free repository" even means? To hack on the command line? To edit configuration files? I often need to run to the docs and StackExchange for those kind of things, and I'm the guy my (intelligent, competent) team members come to about that stuff. You expect them to find and install drivers? To deal with stuff breaking when they update their distro? To update in the first place?
Like the woman in the story, they're likely to give up when they see MS Office isn't available. People in my graduate CS courses claim they can't open .docx files because they don't have MS Word. It's a more-competent-than-average person who even knows about and recognizes file extensions.
Think about how painful it is to get your coworkers to so much as try out a new language, library or development tool. How much hand-holding they need. How they whine and complain about the slightest difference, even when the new way is clearly superior. And this is talking about highly-intelligent people above the 99th percentile for knowledge and interest in computers.
So yeah, I don't think Linux is really in a state where it's usable (without handholding) by non-developers without lots of time, ability and interest to learn Unix. Even Windows and MacOS are something of a losing struggle. People do better with the more idiot-proof iOS and Android, but I'm still troubleshooting my folks' phones on a regular basis.
What's easy for you or I is worlds beyond what's easy for the average Joe or Sally who wants internet, email, MS Office and maybe gaming.
At the same time, driver situation on Windows can be actually worse than on Linux. Especially if we are talking about manufacturers dropping support for their closed drivers. It often happens, that with Windows the only solution is to upgrade your hardware, while Linux merrily continues working on it for years. I encountered this multiple times, especially with laptops.
Not sure what you mean about network configuration woes, Network Manager GUI for example is pretty straightforward and easy to use.
The problem with the GUIs I've seen for Network Manager is the same problem affecting nearly all Linux software, which is they're geared towards expert users. They expose too many configuration options to the user instead of hiding them in menus or preference panels. Experts like you or I see past all the noise and recognize the relevant bits. But a layman doesn't know what anything means or what's relevant, so they're likely to become stuck and confused.
Worse, many of the visible but probably-irrelevant options will prevent them from connecting to the internet if they're set to the wrong thing. The biggest part of idiot-proof UI/UX is looking at a "connect to a wireless network" modal and counting the number of ways it's possible to exit the modal without vs. with successfully connecting. You want all roads to lead to the happy path, even with Grandma rand() at the wheel.
Most Mac and Windows software could use improvement here too, although to a lesser extent, and same with iOS and Android but again to a lesser extent than with the desktop OSes.
Think of a person who leases a Camry. They like it because it's familiar and easy to drive, it meets all their needs more than adequately, and it has a low cost of ownership. If something goes wrong they bring it to the dealership and it's either covered under warranty, or, if not, they just pay whatever the cost is out-of-pocket. When their 2 years are up they lease another Camry.
One of the car blog Jalopnik's writers, Tavarish (https://kinja.com/apidaonline), doesn't know why anyone would want a Camry when they could have a 10-year-old European sports or luxury car at the bottom of its depreciation curve. The idea they're maintenance nightmares is a myth; he does all the maintenance himself, and finds like-new parts in junkyards instead of buying from the OEM, so they hardly cost him anything to own.
Obviously, Tavarish is an expert mechanic. He can replace a clutch or a turbocharger in his sleep, whereas so much as a fuse or a headlight is beyond the capabilities of our Camry lessee. We are experts. If our printer stops working we can recognize the issue, find and compile the community-supported open-source Epson 6000 SUX driver, and be on our merry way. Other people, who think a driver is a golf club or Morgan Freeman, just buy a new printer.
That's exactly the root of the problem that was discussed above, isn't it? So that's the real issue, and not inability of Linux itself to address common use cases of non technical users. Because Linux can address them today.
> So, if Linux is being installed by the user, you're rolling the dice on how nicely it plays with your wireless, touchpad, graphics, sound, webcam/microphone, HiDPI screen and so on.
Such users don't roll dice to decide what hardware to install on (if they are smart to install it on their own). They do research, get parts that work well with Linux, and then install it. Without doing research - well, anything can happen.
> The problem with the GUIs I've seen for Network Manager is the same problem affecting nearly all Linux software, which is they're geared towards expert users. They expose too many configuration options to the user instead of hiding them in menus or preference panels.
OK, for a test (KDE Plasma 5.8.4), I just enabled my WiFi (I'm currently on wired connection), selected a network from the list, and clicked a single button [Connect]. It opened a field for password right there. Type in the password - and voilà, it's connected. Nothing else is needed for the simplest scenario. Of course you can always go into connection settings and start changing around custom DNS and what not if you know what you are doing. But all of that in not exposed in the simplest case. So I doubt, configuring network will be an issue for Linux newcomers.
I think that's a lot truer than it was 15 years ago (although there hasn't been much improvement since 10 years ago), but it's still less true than is the case for Windows or Mac, which themselves are tricky for the inexpert user.
There's a reason Dell markets their Linux laptop as the "developer edition" and not the "Linux edition" or "Ubuntu edition" or whatever. As discussed elsewhere here, OEMs who've sold Linux PCs get many returns, and find their customer support lines (very expensively) jammed with buyers completely clueless about how to accomplish any simple tasks with Linux.
And, even if people who've never used a computer before would find Linux as easy to learn as Windows or MacOS (IMO it's in the same ballpark but still behind), most people have used computers, and have already learned how to accomplish basic tasks on one of the Big 2 desktop OSes. With Linux they need to relearn all that from scratch (and for that specific dialect). People have only so much free time, and that's a big time commitment for them, with a big opportunity cost.
When MS had their Windows 8 debacle (making their users have to relearn how to accomplish basic tasks), IIRC, Macs increased in market share, but the Linux market share didn't move (or at least it's relative improvement was worse than Mac). And then Windows 10 gained some of the market share 8 lost, at the expense of both Mac and Linux. My interpretation of those data is that they suggest Linux is harder for new mass-market users to learn than MacOS or traditional Windows.
> Such users don't roll dice to decide what hardware to install on (if they are smart to install it on their own). They do research, get parts that work well with Linux, and then install it. Without doing research - well, anything can happen.
Sure, but now we're talking about experts again.
Edit:
> OK, for a test (KDE Plasma 5.8.4)…
I don't know about for KDE, but Gnome and Unity display this (http://oi62.tinypic.com/kncl4.jpg) reasonable modal if it can deduce the network's security method, and this (https://hub.acadiau.ca/TDPortal/Shared/ImageViewer.ashx?file...) very unreasonable (for a layman) modal if it can't.
This comes down to MS and Apple trying to dominate the education system. IMHO schools could teach Linux from the start, and a major part of this issue would be gone already. Closed incumbents fear that, and provide "incentives" for schools, to make sure their lock-in remains unchallenged.
> There's a reason Dell markets their Linux laptop as the "developer edition" and not the "Linux edition" or "Ubuntu edition" or whatever.
There is too much inertia there. Since Dell had troubles in the past, they translate it into present. They should just start anew and offer Linux on all their models.
> very unreasonable (for a layman) modal if it can't.
If something can't deduce security method, what do you expect it to ask? Particular details of the UI adjust to selected security method (at least in KDE manual configuration). I.e. I find it completely reasonable, and I doubt Windows or any other OS can fare better if automatic configuration fails.
If I were a PC OEM I'd be in wait-and-see mode for Google's new OS, which may or may not be Android-for-the-desktop.
> If something can't deduce security method, what do you expect it to ask? Particular details of the UI adjust to selected security method (at least in KDE manual configuration). I.e. I find it completely reasonable, and I doubt Windows or any other OS can fare better if automatic configuration fails.
It should guess the possible security method(s) based on the entered password, and if that fails display the more complex modal, but with the lesser-used fields behind an "advanced" button.
> It should guess the possible security method(s) based on the entered password
I'm not sure it's a good idea security wise. I suspect, it might inadvertently expose your password.
I'd be investing in linux in case google and MS go the nexus/surface/mac route and cut third parties out of the equation. Kind of like what samsung is doing with tizen.
Linux for the past few years has been very easy to install and use. But for some time it was hard for most users.
If Windows is installed you use that. If OSX is installed you use that. If Android is installed you use that.
Still even now compare the number of options available for buying a PC / laptop with Linux on it to one with Windows on it.
Yes, that's exactly my point. Solving that problem is key to improving Linux adoption.
I tried to persuade a UK company Novatech that offers computers without an OS to go one step further and offer Linux. They liked the idea, but the support overhead wasn't worth it for them.
The support overhead killed Linux on Asus and Acer netbooks. That and hardware returns from people who found the operating system unusable....
Outside of Apple, PC margins are extremely thin.
I don't know if there's a term for this, but ironically, that's like a self-destructive goal. Most people who use Linux currently would wipe the hard drive as the first thing if they bought a laptop that came preinstalled with an OS. So if everyone became an enlightened linux user, everyone would start wiping their drives right after buying the machine, invalidating the need for preloading in the first place.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (518008), Dota 2 (456350), ARK: Survival Evolved (58477)
Linux version? 3/3.
Even if it's 10% - it's a lot of users.
There was some article, that availability grows gradually. I.e. if too many games will come out for Linux at once, the market will be too flooded with them, which will in turn hurt both developers, and users.
Considering the share that Linux has on the desktop, this is hardly a surprise.
Only 0.8% use Linux.
I was commenting on the availability of Linux games. There are very many and they generally don't suck. Avoiding Linux because of a lack of games is not a strong argument, if it ever was.
If more games were available on linux I wouldn't have to run the VM and be a lot happier. I still refuse to buy or play any blizzard games due to their policy of ignoring linux users.
Though the other issue is nvidia drivers.
Recent bigger focus on improving graphics situation (Vulkan and etc.) is helping that as well.
Not really. The author identified the real reason before that. Users wouldn't switch because most users don't even think about the choice of OS, which would mean switching. I.e. they only ever use what comes on the computer pre-installed, and that's it. They don't care much what it even is.
Therefore the main blocker wasn't the bad advocacy or anything of the sort, but the old and crooked stranglehold of MS on manufacturers. The only way to seriously increase Linux desktop adoption is for availability of Linux pre-instsalled computers to significantly rise. And MS use their heavy leverage of Windows pricing to prevent that.
> and the desktop itself became irrelevant
I hear this often, but it remains as wrong as ever. Desktop usage has its place, and it's not going anywhere in the foreseeable future.
> They still just want something that plays games and checks the Internet.
And Linux is good for that already. So, as above, that's not what prevents its adoption.