being preinstalled on devices you buy. normal users just what to push some buttons and expect it to ‘just work’

solving the misogyny problem in the developer spaces and the community in general

as someone that has spent the past week working through different distros to figure out what I want to move to here is my list. Note that this is all coming from someone that actively wants to switch and not someone that doesn’t realize there’s other options like some of the other comments are getting at. This does not obviate everyone else’s comments that linux just needs to come preinstalled on stuff or that manufacturers and developers need to do more. Both of those are a given, but those are not something that distro maintainers or kernel devs can control.

• audio doesn’t work properly on half the distros I installed (linux mint, zorin both had popping and crackling anytime I played audio)
• video doesn’t work properly on many of the distros I tested (youtube being blurry is one example, zorin os couldn’t run games at all really). I understand this is a driver issue. But on mac I’ve never once had to maintain any driver, stuff just either worked or didn’t work. On Windows the most I’ve ever had to do was run an installer or uninstaller to re/un-install whenever something went wrong. Every distro has a different way of fixing drivers, and every help article is just “try this if that doesn’t work try this” for 15 different options. Here’s the thing, this isn’t something for driver maintainers to fix. Bazzite and CachyOS both have no audio or video issues, so it’s clearly working in some manner for the hardware I have, it’s just that some distros have it working and some don’t.
• choosing a distro is not as easy as loading up a usb with the live image and starting it up. lots of times things do not work properly in the live image, or they work differently. So testing out that way can give you errors, missing dialogs, etc. An example is CachyOS: in the live image (in CachyOS Hello) you do not get the “Install Gaming packages” option and as a result you might do what I did and try to install them a different way, resulting in broken Nvidia drivers or error messages that no sane person will ever take their time to figure out, they’ll just switch back to windows or mac.
• to expand on that point, lots of times testing in a VM would be a good way to see a new OS and that hasn’t worked for me a single time. Even more issues with that when I was testing Bazzite. Bazzite runs normally on its own partition, but in a VM it was terrible. Only way to figure this out is by installing on a partition and testing from there. That’s another friction point. The reason this is a friction point is because the common suggestions from the Linux community is that you should “find a distro you like”. No sane person is going to partition their drive into several 100gb sections like I did and test each one on an actual install rather than just testing on a live image. I know that because I have a bunch of non-computer friends and they want to switch to linux for the coming windows apocalypse and are just not going to because of the perceived difficulty. In my experience over the past week (and I tried this earlier this year as well) it’s not a perceived difficulty. It’s an actual difficulty.
• Testing multiple distros requires partitioning your drive up a bunch, which means dealing with bootloaders, which means dealing with grub vs limine vs rEFInd vs systemd etc. No sane person who has no computer experience is EVER going to understand these options. I don’t understand them and I run 20+ websites, have several (linux) servers at home, and have dealt with computers for decades. One issue I came across was that the CachyOS installer doesn’t make it clear that you have to choose your EFI boot partition so that it’s not the windows one, at least if you’ve already installed other linux distros (like I had). So I spent several hours trying to understand why the install kept failing (and according to the CachyOS instructions if it fails you have to completely reboot the live image due to the installer not unmounting the disks properly, which was another 30 minutes of troubleshooting) and it turns out that it was trying to install the bootloader onto the windows bootloader rather than the already existing grub bootloader from mint and bazzite.
• testing multiple distros requires understanding SO MUCH about how linux works that it’s just really not feasible for anyone. So it’s not just about choosing the right distro, but you have to get the right distro on the first time which means that every distro needs to work out of the box immediately. Which just isn’t the case.
• too many ways to install applications. Several other comments have covered this and then people respond saying that windows and mac have multiple ways to install things when really that isn’t the case. On windows 99.99999% of installs are going to be .msi/.exe. No normal user is installing chocolatey or winget packages. On Mac there’s two ways to install things and they’re always covered by the website: App Store or download and open and the file structure will literally tell you how to install in a nicely packaged window. Usually this is just “drag to this folder”. Sometimes it’s ‘double click this installer’. On CachyOS there’s no fewer than 6 ways to install things that you will get suggestions for: 1. Octopi 2. CachyOS Package Installer 3. pacman 4. paru 5. yay 6. tar.gz download. On Bazzite the options are completely different because it’s Fedora based. On Mint it was another set of options. Users are required to understand the underlying distro’s installation methods in order to figure out how to install stuff properly. Not only are they required to understand that, but they’ve got to figure out which install method for any given piece of software. For example, installing Dropbox one way vs another can make it work completely differently, including worse. Installing Spotify pops up a KDE Wallet dialog that users are expected to know how to manage.
• system dark/light mode switching. I still haven’t figured this out. On mac it’s built in. On windows I just double click installed Auto Dark Light Mode or whatever it was called. On arch apparently I need to install darkman and then set up some scripts and I have no desire to do that. Why isn’t it a single button like Mac? or at least 4 dropdowns like Intellij/other jetbrains products, where you just choose your light mode and light mode editor theme and dark mode/dark mode editor theme. I know there’s something in the works, I’ve seen people talking about how this is a desired functionality, but wasn’t everyone complaining about how wikipedia didn’t have system dark mode for like a decade? And linux is still behind that? User’s have to manually write shell scripts to get dark mode to turn on at night?

I wrote this the other day and never finished it, but that’s just the stuff I’ve found so far.

Fix long-standing issues that create headaches for new users. I’m not sure if it’s Mint-specific, but:

Backing out of the OS installation should not make it crash to the point that I have to rename a file in the USB to fix it.

Downloading the new video codecs while installing the OS and ticking some box should also not make it crash.

And warning me beforehand that I need to disable secure boot should be a must.

Fix that and you just saved your users three attempts at installing and a couple of hours of troubleshooting just to get their feet in the door.

None, sadly. Most of the things that make Linux a bad OS are problems in Linux, but not problems of Linux so there’s little that can be done.

The elitism mostly.

It’s seen as complicated because linux users behave a certain way

True secure and verified boot, robust MAC systems with easy control (similar to what MacOS uses).

Problems Linux itself has to overcome? Maybe two or three.

• Hopefully I’m mistaken but apparently accessibility has been going down the last few years.
• Settings that make sense to change should be exposed more adequately. No one should ever get a visual toggle to eg.: disable SELinux on their systray, but controls to adjust color profiles and screen “temperature” management should be more reachable and clear.

Problems that are mistakenly attributed to Linux but that are actually for manufacturers, sellers and provisioners to take responsibility for and overcome? A good lot.

• Sellers have to sell machines with Linux preinstalled. Getting a machine Linux-ready from factory is easy, but it’s only the commerces who can actually place them on a, ta know, selling point.
• Sellers or manufacturers should actually advertise when their device works with Linux. If people have to guess whether their next buy even boots / plugs in, that’s a hindrance to commerce.
• Hardware manufacturers are not providing adequate Linux support (FizzyOrange mentions the eternal issue of laptop battery management; Naiboftabr mentions stuff like “audio stops working”).
• Developers have to get back to developing for Linux natively (rather than eg.: “develop for a trimmed down Windows version that runs on Steam”).
• Developers of Linux itself need to provide a better “rescue mode” for when things inevitably go wrong. Something that boots up to a “guaranteed working state” that still has workable UI but with most or all customizations disabled.

Mobile non-Android Linux on more than developer devices and 5 year old tech would be the largest impact, especially if you could pull off half of what the Liberux Nexx was promising. An all in one convergent pro-privacy device with flagship hardware would be a game changer. Possibly more urgent now that Google is pushing Android to be more locked down.

Desktops are primarily used by hobbyists (mostly gaming), creators, and businesses. To get Linux more there you need OEM installs and more driver support, Adobe and other big holdouts finally porting their stuff, and alternatives to AD respectively.

Gaming

1. Reliable hardware support. Especially on laptops - as far as I know it’s still basically impossible to get battery life as good in Linux as in Windows/Mac.
2. Sane software distribution method that actually works reliably.
3. All settings accessible via the GUI. The terminal is still the default for most things. For example google how to disable SELinux (something most users should probably do). You have to edit /etc/selinux/config which is really quite complicated for “normal” users.

I think those are the main things. I think it would also help if KDE were the “default” desktop environment instead of Gnome. It’s much better, with one caveat - they seem incapable of good visual design! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot better than when KDE 5 first came out, but there are still very obvious spacing issues, and Gnome never has those.

A desktop that was not designed by a programmer with a side-interest in UI, but an actual qualified designer.

And before you reply and tell me I just need to try whatever flavor you like: it’s a piece of shit, don’t bother me.

Overcome the issue of anticheat/video games, I’d use Linux were it not for the fact that a lot of games I enjoy sometimes are not available.

Devotees have said to me that I should just abandon the games I like in favor of using Linux and they may as well be shouting into a hole in the ground.

Almost nobody “chooses” an OS. What needs to happen for wide-spread adoption is for first time computer users to be presented with something running Linux.

Microsoft understood this, that’s why Windows has been the default in classrooms since the 80s.

Linux and Windows have grown by stunning leaps and bounds over the years. So great to have such solid operating systems, but…

Linux absolutely sucks if you’re not a nerd. Sorry, I spit truth. I’ve tried a dozen distros as daily drivers over the last 15 years. Always had to fiddle and learn. Windows 10 & 11 work right out the box, every time.

I’m not totally ignorant! I’ve spun dozens of Linux servers, my VPN is on Debian server. If fact, just now realized it was still running my internet, and I haven’t logged into it in a few years. Rock solid.

So the question would be more to the point if we asked, “What is blocking normal people from making the move?”

To counter my own point, I used to make “little old lady” laptops and PCs for people who were too broke to get a new machine or pay me to fix Windows. I’d take their crap laptop/box, add whatever RAM I had on hand, SSD a must, load Linux Lite. Show them how to access the internet and their email, DONE. Never once had a call back. It just fucking worked.

Here’s the key! Listening you nerds? I never once told them they were running Linux, never explained the concept of an OS, nada, STFU with your evangelizing. I merely handed their machine back in a working state, with minimal instruction.

The Year of the Linux Desktop may never hit. Most people don’t use desktops outside their job and Microsoft has a lock on compatibility and business use cases. Can you imagine any sort of Linux Active Directory? LOL, hell no, what a scattered ecosystem.