Linux

Linux actually needs to just work first

Atomic OSes should be evangelized more aggressively to laypersons. IMO, they’re great for 3 specific use cases:

• gaming (bazzite) - personally, I want my gaming box to “just work”
• thin clients/low-powered laptops used as an entry point to your homelab or other remote systems - again, I like having at least one fairly bulletproof and super stable system to use as a human:homelab gateway/admin machine
• non-techies. If the update fails, just roll back. Can’t remember if that’s generally an automated recovery process or not, but that sort of idiot-proofing is precisely what the general public needs in the context of Linux. Because there are a lot of idiots out there.

Honestly Linux does work pretty much just as well as MacOS if you run it on hardware thats super well supported and that tons of linux users use. MacOS has integration with its hardware because its all made by the same company. They only have to support a few models of computer.

If you installed Linux Mint today on a Thinkpad t480, and on some obscure weird laptop with rarely used hardware your gonna get 1 install that just works out of the box and your gonna get 1 that you have to hunt for drivers, and do tons of work on. Its just the nature of being able to use any hardware. Some will work better than others.

If you want an example of how to increase adoption you pick a line of computers thats of high quality and have them be supported by the community a ton. Then you convince the company that makes these computers to ship a version of them with linux pre-installed, and potentially help atleast with funding the development of whatever distro they use.

If your average user bought a laptop, opened it, turned it on, and it had linux on it and worked relatively well, they are never going to change it. Its not a normal thing to just change your OS most people don't even know that you can do that. I gave my grandmother a linux mint laptop and she thinks its windows.

Look at the Steam Deck as an example:

• Linux is preinstalled
• Integrated hardware and software
• Immutable OS that is very hard to bork
• UI is Windows-like which is familiar to the target market
• Good value for the price
• Offered by a well-known and well-liked brand
• Marketed and advertised to the target market

We need more Linux devices like this to gain market share.

Software-wise, it seems that the relatively fast adoption of flatpaks and other containerized formats somewhat solves the typical dependency hell that was so common in Linux just a few years back (and to some extent still is an issue today depending on your distro and use case). The hardware support side is a little harder. That's going to be up to vendors to play nice with the Kernel team and/or introduce reasonable userland software that doesn't break the golden rule. Until Linux gets more market share the latter isn't likely to happen. A nice side benefit of the emergence of immutable and/or atomic distros is that users can play around and try things with much lower risk of bricking their systems, so I'd also consider that a step closer in the "it just works" department.

Automatic updates are essential. and unfortunately, it should not be an option to keep an old version of something, because through shared libraries it will hold back the entire system. fatpaks should be used for those programs.

Fortunately it's getting there, like KDE is working on it too, but it's still got a long way.

Fedora has been "just working" for me for the last couple of years. It is my go to for older relatives for that very reason.

It would be nice of it was possible to simply go to a website, check off on the stuff you want and then get a full package.

I liked the idea of AV Linux, because it comes in a bundle of stuff that I need, but it also comes with a lot stuff that I don't need, and I'm not sure the desktop is my choice. It also didn't really work at the time I tried it.(Some years ago).

So.. if I, a stupid user, could simply go to a website, check mark at the desktop, check off which office package, music apps, browser, etc.etc. and then get a download of that in one go where it's all set-up and works, it would be a lot easier than having to go through the process of installing the OS and then installing/removing apps, and then making it work..

Like, let's say I want a PC just for music creation, I should be able to download the the OS with the DAW of my choice, all the VSTis and potentially also the most common free sound banks. In one file.

If I wanted an office PC, I should be able to get the OS, the office suite of choice and all the misc. PDF tools, email client and whatnot of choice. All in one go.

Windows and macOS sort of came with everything before, but these days they're just as annoying to set up as any Linux distribution. Linux as a whole could take advantage of that situation by offering a prepackaged but custom installation.

Of course it would also help if someone made a Linux installer for windows, so users didn't have to use windows to create a bootable USB. I think this is the step that normal users hesitate on. I don't know if it's possible, but it ought to be possible from software to partion the disc and install dual boot or something.

By promoting the distros that have this as a goal, such as Mint.

I would suggest Ubuntu in this category, but... eww..