> Chromebook shipments have grown 122% year on year to a total of 9.4 million units in Q3 of 2020. [1]
It covers big market, from tablets [2] to enterprise [3]. And they have AArch64 models [4].
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pc-shipments-google-chromebook...
[2] Lenovo Chromebook Duet (10.1") 2 in 1 ($266.79) https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/student-chromebo...
[3] Dell Latitude Chromebook Enterprise https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/chromebookenterprise/
[4] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...
The companies I can see who are in the right position to profit from developing and giving away an OS that's at least as user-friendly as MacOS or Windows and as open as Linux are Intel and AMD. But it's hard to imagine either of them making something that's a joy to use.
Something Linux-based could work, but Linux is kind of stuck with a lot of decisions made thirty years ago. The kernel is pretty good, but the basic abstractions of POSIX-like operating systems are perhaps not what you'd design if you were creating them from scratch in 2020.
If some company wanted to create an Apple-like desktop experience with purpose-built hardware but with an open OS, this could be a good route: implement all the drivers needed to run well on bare metal on the company's own hardware products, but anyone can run it in a hypervisor on any computer.
A better goal would be to isolate OS features to give us more choice. The file system would be independent of the GUI engine, which would be independent of the executable manager, etc. It would give one mix-and-match ability. Possible partitioning:
- Execution/task manager
- GUI
- File system
- Security system
- App and upgrade manager
- IntegratorIt seems like Microsoft or Google could double-down on the software-hardware integration and build a seamless, premium product that really, truly competes with Apple. It seems like it would be beneficial for MS or Google to identify and partner with (or acquire?) a hardware partner and develop their systems hard against that, creating a seamless hardware-software interface like Apple does with its devices.
And I guess I'm just baffled that nobody else is doing that. On the contrary, everyone seems to be going the Microsoft route of developing for as many hardware configs as possible.
Fascinating.
Microsoft is probably the most strategically important company on the planet. Literally too big to fail.
Tesla is, if anything, similar to Apple in how closed-off they are. Teslas are attractive because of their design and powerful electric powertrain, but polished they are not.
Why when there is no third OS that has even 1% share and all Linux combined is about 3%. And desktop Linux is bad.
I use MacOS (whatever it is called this week) Mint and LXDE
Love Mint (typing on it) The Apple OS has a lot of rough corners (e.g. (max/min)imising windows is a world of pain) LXDE is acceptable because it is on my PI and I do not use the desktop much
I have not used Windows desktop for about a decade, has it really gotten that much better?
I am really happy with desktop Linux
There are a huge range of reasons. There's no consistency, everything changes every 2 years, the documentation is awful when it exists at all, if software is outside your distro's package repo it's a bitch to install, there are too many different distros, the community is full of pricks, fragmentation is a time-honored pastime, complexity is fetishized... fuck sound still didn't work consistently on the last Linux based media center I built. A cursory search of the internet will turn up innumerable reasons Linux Desktop is bad.
Which isn't to say that MacOS and Windows aren't bad (and getting worse), but they're still a damned sight better.
Just a reminder there's like 7 different context menu styles in Windows 10, not to mention two control panels.
And as you say, Windows 10 still sits there having confusing and mediocre system UIs.
With my really simple needs, macOS and Windows is just mostly memory-wasting fluff to me. I switched away from Macs when I realized that what I need and what I can get is cheaper than getting a Mac. ("Cheaper" because I am very sensitive to cost vs. utility. I am typing on thinkpad t430s I found in the trash which I spent just a little to get a better screen, having everything else already that was missing.)
That said, sometimes get frustrating, but they don't happen frequently for me.
In the days of electron and web apps, it's clear that the users either don't care or developers are shooting themselves in the foot.
In either case, consistency died a while ago.
It all depends on the distribution (hence "too many different distros" is good). Choose Debian XFCE and you will never see any change, everything is rock-solid. Tested with my relatives.
In contrast, in all my years of using Apple computers, I've rarely if ever had a driver related issues that wasn't easily solvable by updating my OS.
I switched to Linux when I left the company and while I ran into issues installing it on both my PC and laptop (not Mac), the end result works perfectly. I think all the digging around has made me better understand computers. A lot of the Linux command line skills are transferable to Mac.
(just my data point)
Error messages, crashes, graphical anomalies, hardware kind-of working. There are often fixes, but how much time are you willing to spend trouble-shooting? When you get a new computer or reformat, will you remember what you had to do?
I've experienced this class of issues on a range of hardware and software over 2 decades.
My best guess: Too much design-by-committee, and losing track of emergent concepts - like responsiveness, how the overall ecosystem affects performance, and how the various parts (designed by different people and teams) work together.
Another potential root cause: The way software dependencies and linking works, and the expectation to compile software on your machine.
Keep in mind that the context of my original comment was with respect to having "premium" devices. People pay thousands of dollars for a Macbook because the hardware and the software feel very high-end. The UI/UX is generally seamless. Stuff "just works". There are regular updates. Any software written for MacOS will work on any other Mac, because the hardware/software integration is so tightly controlled. Is it perfect? No. Are there things Linux does better? Sure. But taking the entire Apple ecosystem into account, it feels cohesive and thoughtful, and it feels like it's worth the money.
Contrast that with Linux. With many Linux distros, it doesn't "just work." The OS itself can change very often. The software ecosystem is fragmented. You have to use apt or yum or some other package manager. Sometimes you need five different package managers to install the software you want! On top of that, you can't necessarily run all Linux software on every distro or any hardware. There's little to no UX/UI consistency. As someone else pointed out, Qt vs GTK apps can and do look totally different and there are no style guides or any enforcement mechanisms to make sure that users enjoy the experience. It's the wild west, which is good in many ways, but in the context of making a device feel like a premium device, a wild west methodology fails that criteria pretty hard.
In other words, Linux is fantastic for computer nerds like us who like tinkering with things and don't mind rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty. But it is no way, shape, or form a "premium" experience.
Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it just works. Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.
I turned an old Macbook into a Linux box, and it's fine*. It does what I need it to do, but it doesn't feel premium at all. I just wish I had really slick, solid, premium-feeling alternatives.
It seems to me that Microsoft or Facebook or SOMEONE with a bajillion dollars could afford to do this and really make a dent in the space and give us more alternatives. I guess the demand just isn't there. Very sad.