Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Why Isn't Linux Catching on?

Filed under
Linux

Let’s get right to it: considering the popularity of open source applications and utilities, why hasn’t the open source flagship - the Linux operating system - caught on with mainstream PC users?

With the various incarnations of Linux available at the click of a button, why do the majority of PC users prefer to drop $200 US on a Windows Vista or Mac OS install disk instead of trying the third, free option?

According to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet, the lack of understanding between the Linux community and the average computer user can be boiled down to five crucial points:

More Here




Kicking a dead horse (old article)

There were many rebuttals to the cited FUD piece, which also neglects to mention the fact that Linux is a GPL-licensed kernel, not just a desktop O/S.

I think it's getting there though

Too many distro's?

Sun loves Ubuntu and many people (who are interested in Linux) have heard about Ubuntu.
Being honest I have pointed it out to many people as it has a massive forum based support and looks an appealing ditro to those new to Linux. Quite a nice feeling that I can point someone to a distro and say look on the forum's if you have a problem, you can do that on other ditro's am sure, but I have the impression the ubuntu one is the most active. (openSuSE user btw)

People don't buy Vista install disks!

I haven't seen anyone buy one yet. I know people that got Vista preinstalled or thrown in when they built an OEM system, but I haven't seen anybody run out and buy Vista to upgrade their machine.
I know someone who was tempted by DX10 but then UT3 came out and he was distracted by that.
If Linux were preinstalled/preconfigured like Mac/Windows then people would probably be very happy with it.

People are USED to Microsoft.

People can use Microsoft, it's easy to find what you want and people have some limited experience at using it. It's not brilliant, but for turning on and writing an email people can cope with it.
They simply, (in a LOT of cases) haven't heard of Linux, mac maybe and they think it looks nice... (then they see the price tag)

Command line not needed.
I can avoid the command line completely in OpenSuSE if I want and I think that says something for the development that has been put into Linux to date.
Not needed, but I still regularly use it as it's just so powerful.
I know a few Computing Students at University who have installed cygwin on windows simply for this.

I wouldn't call it geeky anymore.
I have left people to use my system and they haven't had to ask me what I have installed to do what on my desktop.
Whereas, if they saw my windows install I am sure that they would be completely lost. My Linux install looks better, is quicker, and has more app's in a lot less space, so for me it's an all round winner Smile

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.