Don't speak for everyone, I know plenty of people in that group whose dream during university was to land a job at Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, whatever.

> The early 00s were a fun time to be a Linux enthusiast.

Only if you enjoyed configuring X11.

Nvidia which people love to hate has both a console command to generate your x config or a handy gui which lets you set options and then write the resulting config to a file of your choosing. This worked fine in 2003.

I ran friggin Gentoo of all distros and even then I didn't need to configure X beyond setting the caps lock key as ctrl.

The best part was the warnings about how you could damage your monitor.

"> The early 00s were a fun time being given all those gold bricks.

Only you enjoyed lifting weights."

Linux on laptops/desktops will only survive if Microsoft maintains their model of working on different types of hardware and not insisting on being the hardware controller. With so many people embracing Apple's approach of one company controlling every part of the stack, I don't think Microsoft will keep supporting their model for long unless forced to.

That isn't Apple approach, rather Apple is the surviving vendor of that approach, which was quite common until the PC came into the scene, thanks to IBM not being able to prevent Compaq from the attack of the clones. They even tried with PS/2, MCA architecture, but by then the pandora box was open.

What is a "better operating system"? There seem to be largely two consumer camps - Windows and unix-like ones.

For what it's worth, Microsoft research actively contribute to the research community regarding operating systems.

Is there a 3rd way out there that's better?

> largely two consumer camps - Windows and unix-like ones

Oi! Mac oleee ole ole ole!

Mac is unix-like. I suppose Google's fuschia is new, but that's also unix-like.

MacOS diverged enough from *nix I think, to be third camp. Things they do like read-only system drive, app permissions, signed binaries, no package manager.

> I'm hopeful this spurs another surge of interest in better operating systems.

which is what?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24808479

There are other perspectives other than yours. I've installed Linux for many people: in fact I have an entire family (three kids, a dad and a mom) using Linux as their daily drivers. Zero complaints.

But I was also smart about what distro I put on their systems. Endless OS or Solus, for example, are not prone to breakage on upgrade.

You've been using Linux for a long-time. You should know that Arch and Ubuntu are not the only two choices in this space.

You should also know that when manufacturers weren't threatened by Microsoft to do otherwise, there was a thriving ecosystem of SFF laptops, netbooks, that shipped delightful Linux distros that just worked. Moblin and Jolicloud were fantastic explorations of UI and OS design that might have been.

Same here, most family (except my brother, but he lives abroad) on Linux and no problems. Even better when I switched them from Debian to Manjaro. Debian is still my favorite for tinkering, but to get things done and general stability there are better options.

And here is our main Linux problem: its fragmentation, which is the natural byproduct of its freedom; everyone and his cat can develop or modify things, which translates in different distributions, which of course is a nightmare if you are a software producer with developers paid to port your software to Linux, and that's why a lot of commercial developers either choose one or max two distributions to support or ignore it at all.

One thing the Linux Foundation could do about that is mandating a minimum set of requirements that all Linux commercial software could count on, and all distributions should meet if they want a badge that guarantees the software will be 100% compatible out of the box, or that the host system can be adapted with extremely low effort. I'm not sure how much having Microsoft as Platinum Member would help with this, though.