I think this is just more evidence of the problem. There is so much infighting between the distributions that the community is unable to come together to create a solution. Linux is a tool for developers, not users, and its values put the convenience of developers ahead of the needs of users.
> I think this is just more evidence of the problem. There is so much infighting between the distributions that the community is unable to come together to create a solution.
With all due respect, but I think this completely misses the mark, the various distros do in fact do things in different ways, I know to Windows/macOS users this may seem baffling but even if we were to come together and create a single distro I think many Linux users, myself included, would reject that.
You see, there's a certain philosophy that is behind most major distros and is whichever philosophy you sync up most with, that's the distro you tend to sick with. Windows/macOS suffer from the lowest common denominator problem for many power users and that's fine as long as there's an out for them, like Linux provides right now.
If you're just going to have a single distro, you recreated exactly the same problems current Linux users ran away from originally. I don't know why everybody has to conform to a singular interface or vision, it seems wrong to me.
If Linux is just for developers because of that, fine. Developers are users too and if they're not well served by the proprietary platforms, I think it's pretty legitimate for Linux to be what primarily speaks to them. I do have plenty of stories of non-developers, (even digital artists), being happy with Linux, but that's for another time.
As for "the community is unable to come together to create a solution", looking at major cross distro projects like GNOME, KDE, GNU etc. nothing can be further from the truth. There's a great amount of cross-distro collaboration happening there.
That does not mean one cannot compare or contrast the distros, that's not immediately 'infighting'. For example even if I prefer Arch, I do use CentOS on some of my server deployments and I certainly appreciate it and by extension what the Fedora folks are doing.
This push to be uniform everywhere, in terms of interfaces, opinions, consensus etc. is not healthy nor sophisticated in my opinion.
If you look at the world of politics, all that gets you is two parties who both agree to launch offensive wars. Some healthy, principled differences aren't a bad thing per se.
The term “power user”, from the perspective of the Linux philosophy, is synonymous with a person who customizes every aspect of their workflow, often writing lots of code and scripts, to arrive at something unique and specific to them.
This is not what a typical Mac or Windows power user does. Instead, on those platforms, being a power user can also be marked by being a user of powerful productivity software, whether it be graphics or audio or video production, or even advanced usage of business productivity software such as Excel.
These users do not typically customize their workflow very much. They insist that their computer be as powerful, low latency, and reliable as possible. They have neither the knowledge nor inclination to delve into the operating system internals in order to troubleshoot issues of latency or performance or reliability. Yet they get far more out of their computers than a typical user, who merely use them for browsing and social media. Linux users do not consider these users to be power users but Apple and Microsoft do.
This is what I meant when I said that “Linux is a tool for developers, not users, and its values put the convenience of developers ahead of the needs of users.”
Or do these not count because they don't have an active Adobe CC subscription?
The actual issue at play here is that most laptops you can buy come with Windows or macOS preinstalled so you need to go out of your way to install Linux. Most people are not going to do that as they probably barely know it's even an option.
So instead as they grow up with Windows/macOS and morph more into power users, they're going to stick with that.
The GNU/Linux community view is just that you generally can't audit Windows/macOS and therefore even be sure that the OS is working (just for) you in a sense. That's the additional dimension of power Linux gives you, higher confidence that you're in fact truly in charge of your machine. Take it or leave it, but that is a legitimate segment that needs to be served.
Another is that on Windows/macOS, (more so), you're subject to those allowances changing or not being allowances enough, the company changing focus etc. With Linux you don't need to rely on tricke down allowances graciously granted to you by a faceless corporation and thus be subjected to their whims, (or "vision").
And yet my stated reason for giving up on Linux after a decade of use was just the opposite: the feeling that I was not in charge of my machine, that the Arch maintainers were instead, when they knowingly pushed updates that broke things to the point where I needed to make a deep dive into configuration files while booted from the console, just to be able to get back to my graphical login screen so I could continue using my computer. This has never happened to me on macOS. Not once! Yet it happened many times over the years on Linux.
I guess it depends quite a bit on your hardware and experience. On Arch I can install anything I want in seconds, configure things exactly how I want, including whether I want a DE or a tilling VM etc. write services for anything using a very straightforward declarative syntax, (not XML or Apple Scipt), to wire up pretty much anything as a managed service or a cron, flying around the system.
On a Mac I constantly have to fight it not letting me do this or that or SIP preventing this other thing, you couldn't even snap windows for a long time, maybe you still can't - I installed some 3rd party, (again paid, of course) utility to do such a basic thing and it looks like Windows is going to beat it, (Unix-based OS), to an official package manager.
But I guess am not the target.
When I got accepted into school, I realized that all had to change. I couldn't spend hours configuring things anymore. I had to focus on getting work done quickly. The Mac gives that to me with minimum fuss.
I think you are definitely not the target. The Mac is not designed for people to treat their own computer as a hobby, the way I did with Linux for a decade. It's designed for getting work done and being as seamless and unobtrusive as possible, for as many people as possible.
I both started and sucesfully completed my CS degree on Arch. I didn't have to spend hours to configure anything. I now work as a full-time software dev on Arch every day, 8 hours a day. This is an often repeated myth but I haven't experienced it. Am not sure Linux, (any distro at this point), is the problem.
As the LTS version gets older, most of your software starts to get seriously out of date, so every time you need something newer, it's easy to make a mess because you will have multiple versions of the same thing, as well as the dependencies and so on.
Upgrades are also quite scary, and often results in broken systems.
Rolling releases like Arch are much more user friendly in that regard, and breakage are uncommon. Installing older versions of already installed software is also much less frequent, and with the AUR it's really easy (at least compared to PPAs).
I am certain your experience was as your describe but I do wonder if the community is making a mistake by continuing to recommend Ubuntu or the like as I've always heard most stories of this nature from there.
Which is kind of funny considering Arch is generally considered not stable, but I am was able to depend on it during my uni years as well as now when I am a full-time software dev, running close to a decade without major issues in fact.