> If it really did "just work" and was that easy, you'd see way more computers in the wild using it.
I encounter a number every day, in software engineering. For non-technical users installing an operating system is beyond what most can comprehend anyway. I'd wager the vast majority of hardware never sees an OS change in its life. Add on that desktop linux is not supported by most games and you've more or less excluded the semi-technical market too. That easily accounts for a small user base regardless of how well it works.
And if you take into account what people use it for - software development largely, in my experience - it seems natural that it has a smaller user base.
> Unless you don't exclude servers, Linux doesn't "just work" for most people.
You haven't really shown that, just a small market share.
Yes
> then admitted that the only people you see using Linux are software engineers and that non-technical users can't even comprehend the install
Any install, you don't see them installing windows either. I'm not sure my mother (for instance) really comprehends what an operating system is as a separate entity to "the computer".
> Was your argument meant to apply to only the technical users because that wasn't clear, if that's the case.
My argument, as stated, was that it works fine and the trope that you'll spend your life fiddling with it is outdated. This has absolutely f*ck all to do with how many people use it, as that number is affected by a lot of other factors.
You'll find elsewhere on this page I've talked about messing around with xrandr to get DPI-related stuff looking good on Xfce. And yes, I had to spend some time figuring that out, an evening of my life gone.
I had to spend a comparable amount of time recently trying to figure out how to get my bluetooth keyboard working properly when attached to OS X, and ended up creating a custom keymap for it. And since Catalina my macbook pro has spontaneously rebooted a bunch of times while asleep.
Windows has been a complete bastard with its update packages lately, and it took days of effort to update the four PCs in our house to Windows 10 1903, for no known reason, having got stuck on an older version that was going out of support and started throwing up warnings about being out of date. I'm still not sure how I fixed that, having tried a whole bunch of different methods over the course of several days. Incidentally the old version it got stuck on only had partial support for HDR which explains a load of other weirdness I was seeing on one of the machines.
So to me this idea that Linux on the desktop is a pain in the arse to keep running properly but other systems are not just doesn't ring true.
They've all cost me time and effort lately. Probably the least troublesome system we have in the house is a laptop running Linux Mint that we use to order pizza in the living room... Or my old ARM chromebook I suppose, but that's in well deserved retirement now.
Practically nobody installs operating systems on their computer. The computer they bought comes with one and it never changes. The stability of Linux isn't the problem here.
For technical users, Linux is fine but it still needs some tinkering. Technical users are more comfortable with tinkering so it's probably not a big deal and "just works" for them but that's a very liberal definition of "just works", imo.
>Our drivers are pre-installed in many major distribution... Oftentimes, you can simply plug in your tablet and start working.
I understand it's just an example though. Yes you can sometimes buy some strange hardware that won't automatically work. This happens in Windows too, and installing a package does not require more technical capability than installing something on Windows.
>them but that's a very liberal definition of "just works", imo.
Anyone that's managing to install Linux on their computer has the knowledge necessary to make it " just work." Anybody that buys a computer with Linux on it should expect it to just work.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Linux is easy to install. It's not easy to write a driver for a piece of hardware. It's not even easy sometimes to install a driver that someone else wrote.
Case in point: the state of VR on Linux right now. It works for a lot of people that can dork around with setting things up. It's not, in any way, shape, or form, ready for use by people.
Edit: The Wacom example still supports my point anyways. The drivers that you say are included are from the project page. They are not official Wacom drivers and, as such, are missing functionality for some tablets.