> Edit: there will never be "One Linux Desktop" we will always have at least 2 or 3 very popular ones, one for power users, one for GNOME/Apple types and one for minimalists
And all those "very popular ones" put together with the less popular ones will have 1% of market share and will never have high quality common commercial applications or high quality first party drivers or games that run on all distributions, etc.
It's a sad story, and I say this as someone who used to be on desktop Linux for years and years and have been around FOSS for 15+ years.
Yes, it is sad, but I wouldn't go as far as OP to claim that Linux desktop "is failing". That would be the case only if the goal of desktop Linux was to "get a considerably large market share". When I am contributing to FOSS, what I care about is that I improve it for whoever is using it now - maybe it is just 5 people in the whole world, that is fine. Sure I would _like_ if it was 5 thousand, and I will try my best to ensure that, but that is an extra, not the end goal.
I disagree. I've been using desktop Linux for 15+ years. I spent a lot of time a solo dev and yeah I was blown away at all the b.s. I had to deal with as far as making it run well. Then I got a job working for a larger company full of Macs and Windows. Man the problems those people were having? No freakin' way. I'll stick with Linux and its quirks. It's way less hassle than Windows or OSX.
Near as I can tell the high quality features that come from commercial applications center around:
* Telemetry and ads embedded in the apps and the operating system
* Upgrade costs
* Abandonware
* Lack of older hardware support
* Lack of configurability
* Not owning the software you run
> * Telemetry and ads embedded in the apps and the operating system
I imagine you're talking about Windows. It's annoying but for an experienced Windows user it's a 10 minute set up to get rid of them when you install the OS and at most another 5-10 minutes when you upgrade the OS.
> * Upgrade costs
Windows 10 upgrades are free :-)
> * Abandonware
Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Apple tends to ditch stuff but Microsoft's support for legacy stuff is legendary. That's why many things in the design of Windows are obiectively crap, because they really want to support old stuff.
> * Lack of older hardware support
I heard that Windows 11 bumped up the spec requirements so you're probably right. Windows 10, though, runs well on hardware from 7+ years ago.
> * Lack of configurability
Meh, after a while you just want something stable. And I say this as someone who was patching Conky and configuring FVWM for hours on end.
> * Not owning the software you run
This is primarily philosophical. In practice it doesn't matter much.
Especially since Linux distros are frequently self-serving too, see the many projects started and abandoned by Ubuntu.
A lot of your comment in practice is anti-proprietary FUD straight from Eric S. Raymond's book from 1998.
Everything has drawbacks in practice and not even Open Source devs are saints. See Gnome devs, Poettering, the glibc maintainer from a while ago, etc.
First, if you read what I said carefully I'm not just talking about operating systems but mainly "high quality commercial applications."
But to your point about Windows, why does it need to take an "experienced" Windows user to turn off ads at the OS level? In the U.S. at least all of our privacy laws center around a "reasonable expectation of privacy."[1] A private company adding telemetry and ads to an operating system erodes that expectation. If people accept that Microsoft can do it then it becomes easier to justify it state actors (for instance) do it. The same goes for what happens in software apps.
Upgrade costs: I'm talking about software here, not operating systems.
Abandonware: Cool for Microsoft.
Lack of older hardware support: Cool good for Windows. I still game on an even older laptop running Linux.
Configurability vs stability. You can have both, as I think you know.
Owning your own software: You've never run Adobe's Creative Cloud then. The SaaS model here isn't just a philosophical difference, it's a trap for anybody who can't afford spending > $120/year[2]
Yeah Linux distros (and their software) can definitely be self-serving, and that's awesome because anybody who doesn't like the direction of an open source project can fork it and go their own way. Yeah it leads to fragmentation, but with 7 billion people in the world there's plenty of room for that.
FUD: FUD implies disinformation. What did I say that isn't true?
And yeah I agree that everything has its own drawbacks. I'm just saying that there's plenty of high quality software in the non-commercial world, from operating systems all the way down to text editors.
This story is so strange to me. I get that if you read the papers and whatnot, you could think this.
But the charge of "low-quality" is just gobsmackingly daft in the face of the real life experience of people who use this stuff everyday. It may not have some of the bells and whistles, but it works. Every day.
The only "low-quality" I see is the struggles of the poor everyday folks in the Windows world who consistently have to deal with waking up in the morning once in a while and finding that Windows (or one of the big app makers like Adobe) has unilaterally decided to change or break your workflow and there's practically nothing you can do about it.
Random example. Find a big desktop publisher or any kind of big 2D graphics companies, I mean companies that create posters or stuff for websites, etc.
Disregard the OS and count how many graphic designers use non-proprietary applications for their main workflows.
It is what it is, we can't force people to work on GNOME and honestly Linux is not such a great of a kernel, the world needs something modern maybe Fuschia.
And all those "very popular ones" put together with the less popular ones will have 1% of market share and will never have high quality common commercial applications or high quality first party drivers or games that run on all distributions, etc.
It's a sad story, and I say this as someone who used to be on desktop Linux for years and years and have been around FOSS for 15+ years.