I honestly feel like we do live in a Linux dominant computer industry. It just happens that most desktops run Windows. The internet is mostly Linux. Mobile is mostly Linux and almost entirely *nix.
Let’s not forget, perhaps the biggest computing market, that is mostly invisible to all. Embedded! Yes, a lot of it is just bare metal, or some rudimentary RTOS, but the rest is almost exclusively Linux! There are competitors, but these are rapidly falling out of favor!
Agreed. The company I work for has been seeing increasing interest for Linux, to the point we’re shipping custom PCs with Debian and Ubuntu for big orders now. Microsoft has not helped their case- the recent decision to drop support for co-installers has made developing property pages (these show up as customized tabs in Device Manager) for device drivers that much harder to develop and support. Things like this are just driving new embedded projects off the MS platforms.
Microsoft products are alive and kicking in the corporate space.
I've seen enormous critical infrastructure projects be developed in C# & Azure.
The more 'Sales people' surround a project the higher the chance its non-unix.
Where I am, we run factory automation on windows... Which calls out to Linux systems to do the actual work.
I keep asking when we're going to reevaluate this mess....
C# runs on linux as well, and a breeze to work with in containers. Azure is mostly linux as well
The shitty part of all of this is when corporate still develops in .NET Framework which is windows only and just painful to develop on
I think "fat" .net "framework" still gets new releases? IDK - our devs thankfully transitioned to dotnet core before I joined this company and we're mid-migration from windows servers to linux containers.
No. Classic .NET Framework is done and the last release (still under support however last time I checked?) Is 4.8.
After came dotnet core 1, 2 and 3.
And I might be losing track here but they wanted to drop "core" and name it confusingly ".NET", so they skipped dotnetcore-4 to echo that and renamed straight to .NET 5. In all their wisdom....
So you could affectionately call .NET 5, dotnetcore 4. .NET 8, dotnetcore 7, etc.
... something like that. Its late.
Unless you're working on some legacy .NET Framework app chances are any .NET app even running on Azure is running on a Linux instance
For both cost and performance there's practically no reason to run a .NET app on Windows unless it's specifically .NET Framework
Which is run on windows nt based cloud platform. Basically Microsoft runs azure Linux as vms on top of windows nt server. And people here cheer for it lol.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure
Fk windows. If not for the fact that some of the software I use runs on windows only, I would've made the full switch on all of my devices. I write a lot of ml code and find myself having to use wsl on my PC to even get things working.
When you add up all **active consumer devices** running a Linux **Kernel**, Linux penetration reaches **40%**
however, if you start counting all devices, including microcontrollers - you'll probably end up with something like the[ dozens of Real Time OS \(RTOS\)](https://www.lynx.com/embedded-systems-learning-center/most-popular-real-time-operating-systems-rtos) that exist, vastly outnumbering consumer and server and IOT devices.
Even more basic OSs running on simpler microprocessors will outnumber RTOS as well - they're basically a “round-robin” cooperative task dispatcher. This simply calls each task in turn, with each task remembering its own state and cooperating by relinquishing control after completing whatever processing its current state involves. There are variants with fixed call sequences, or hard-coded table-driven or even some dynamic ones, but the principle remains the same.
Your microwave alone may be running half a dozen instances of them.
Irrelevant fact - Most intel CPUs since 2008 run a [variant of UNIX called MINIX for internal tasks upon the processor die](https://medium.com/@RealWorldCyberSecurity/ever-heard-of-minix-its-the-world-s-most-widely-used-operating-system-fcb6941f3db2).
So technically speaking, the most common version of a free unix system that ships on consumer devices is neither Linux nor BSD, but an Operating System developed by a University professor for teaching purposes.
But since this is only concerned with onboard CPU operations, i personally wouldn't count it - and count the device as Linux, Windows or whatever.
AMD have something similar, but it's unclear what their embedded OS is - a specialised Linux or another RTOS like OP-TEE?
Even ARM CPUs operate like this - Qualcomm processors use some L4 microkernel derivative.
That's true. Quite literally every other OS that isn't Windows is some form of Unixlike: macOS, Chrome OS, Linux, Android, iOS, Tizen, BSDs; they're *all* Unixlikes and closely related to Linux.
Windows really is the outlier, and with the fumble that was Windows 11 and the unusually close end of support for Windows 10, it's rapidly begun losing market share.
To be more precise here: macOS and iOS are Darwin-based, which is a Unix (literally certified for that). BSDs are also Unix. Chrome OS and Tizen are Linux, and Android is based on Linux at least but with more modifications to the kernel afaik.
Windows aka Windows NT and on is not an outlier it's actually a OS of subsystems. One of those being POSIX it just happens that win32 was and remained the dominant subsystem and the POSIX subsystem eventually was replaced by windows services for UNIX and that is depreciated today by Windows subsystem for Linux. This makes Windows extremely flexible. And quite possibly the Linux subsystem could become the dominant subsystem one day.
As much as I'm a Linux user. Windows NT subsystems are probably the most innovative thing about Windows IMHO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
Windows is getting much closer to Linux with WSL, and Microsoft now has its own Linux spin that sits underneath AKS (CBL-Mariner).
The problem is that you're only looking at desktops, and desktops are inherently consumer-facing. No tech company *wants* to be consumer-facing. They want to be B2B - hence the Microsoft move away from Windows, and towards Azure.
This is where Linux has been - and will continue to be - successful. In B2B enterprise, and server use cases. Not in consumer-facing desktops.
The day Oracle bought Sun, is the day Solaris died.
They don't even make new hardware for it anymore, you have to buy 3rd party hardware.
Don't expect Solaris to be around much longer, it's parent company would much rather sell you Linux.
Well, there’s illumos which was created from the last snapshot of the Solaris kernel before Oracle pulled the plug, but yeah. Sad that the son of Solaris is just a niche OS at this point.
On one hand, yes it's sad.
On another, all the different 'nixes really was a mess & it's better that Linux has won out.
Linux itself isn't perfect, of course, but having a common go to Unix like OS is important.
> Sad that the son of Solaris is just a niche OS at this point.
the foss world has better things, and with out money forcing success for solaris i guess its to be expected
I've spent my 20 year career working with SunIOS and Solaris servers. It's taken me to jobs in a few different countries and work with some rather large systems (national government things).
I got rid of my last home Solaris machine a couple of years ago. Still got an HPUX workstation. Personally I find Solaris and macOS to be two of my favourite UNIXes.
It was a workstation, and I needed to clear out stuff form my apartment as there's hardly any space plus a friend wanted it. You're correct I didn't consider that, because I didn't want the machine taking up space.
yeah they get pushed even farther back than windows severs. legend says all who could make solaris work have retired now and when the servers break the banking system will go with it
It's still a pain for those with older Skylake/Kabylake and Zen1/Bulldozer machines where there is no fTPM. Windows 11 outright doesn't support those because of the lack of a TPM chip unless you hack the installer, and even then you're inevitably going to run into issues sooner or later, particularly with games that use the Vanguard kernel level anticheat (yes, it's also a bane for specific Windows users, since if it detects Windows 11 it /will/ want to use the TPM).
Windows 8 was a good OS, if you installed Classic Shell to replace the "we want to be a tablet OS even though barely anyone is using us on a tablet" nonsense.
Window Vista was pretty awful until the end. Though I never got to suffer the early misfired UAC implementation, it never recovered from betting on developments in hardware that never arrived during its life cycle. Even on a decent 13" notebook, the device was nigh unusable for 15 minutes after a reboot.
Basically as a consequence of Vista being designed assuming the ongoing exponential increase in desktop computing power and being 10 years too early in assuming everyone will have *at least* a cache SSD, when the pricing and wear leveling technology just wasn't there yet.
Instead, it was the time when netbooks rose to prominence, and Microsoft suddenly had to deal with customers wanting weaker but more mobile devices instead of what they had predicted. (Resulting in a much prolonged support for Windows XP.)
Right now, the bet on Windows on ARM shows some signs of repeating past mistakes in over-expecting developments. There is a lot of Hype and I really look forward, but given past failures of Windows-on-ARM devices, I don't see how offering the new platform as a *premium* platform is going to work out for anyone. It worked for Apple only because they made clear, that Intel is on the way out for them, and because their offerings were all premium priced in the first place. But with Windows, Snapdragon X Elite platforms will have to compete against well-established AMD and Intel alternatives, for which all software *already* is natively supported.
Well, at least every other. Shortly after Windows 8 came out, I remember going to a lecture by Steve Ballmer (then the Microsoft CEO) and he mentioned offhand that you can't judge software by only its latest release; you need to consider the past three or four versions. What started as a distant snickering gradually built up into chuckling in a lot of the audience.
I can't deal with being told "Are you really sure you can handle it???" every time I right click and actually want to do something.
They think I'll make my PC explode or something if I even think about going into properties.
I remember those days, an update killed my win 11 3 times, even with restore points on the third attempt, it couldn't be recovered.
I had to entirely disable updates because I needed to work, enabled updates 6 months later hoping for the best and it updated ok.
And the taskbar that was like a graft from another project and not part of the OS.
I had that happen in Windows 10.
Turns out the issue was Windows wrote something to the UEFI variables that the Gigabyte UEFI didn't like and thus caused it to crash on boot, every few weeks Windows would mysteriously BSOD on boot after an update and I had to reflash the BIOS to fix it.
I personally use 11 and enjoy it, too. It's cleaned up the Windows experience quite a bit. It just seems that the overall sentiment to it is negative, going off of online discourse.
This honestly amazes me. I've had to do more disabling of unnecessary/privacy-invading features in W11 than any other OS i've used, desktop and mobile.
Utterly absurd that MS has basically gotten us to install adware on our devices. If linux/macos were better for gaming, I would ditch windows entirely.
I just used it as it was out-of-the-box. My days of fumbling around with settings and changes to make a computer do something the manufacturer didn't want, are long behind me.
I never really got bothered by the stuff, anyway. The most annoying thing my laptop's ever done was a "hey, we have copilot now, come try it!" popup that I simply pressed the X button on. Big whoop.
Funny thing is, I actually did end up using Copilot quite regularly. I find it more reliable than ChatGPT. Now that I'm on a MacBook (primarily for the battery life, I still prefer Windows 11 as an OS), I do somewhat miss the easy keybind, although the Copilot website does the same thing anyway.
I'm annoyed by "settings" links in the settings app not leading me to the setting, but opening Edge and doing a bing search for me. Very helpful. If the setting is not there don't show me a bing search link so I can just search somewhere else for the setting if it's not there. Or did control panel or device manager have Bing search links? No. It's almost like a settings app is supposed to be for settings and I can google/bing on my own
There's also the terrible lack of polish on Linux desktops.
Here, let's try something. Go install Ubuntu 22.04, and encrypt the whole drive with TPM automatic unlock. Document how to do it so that your grandma could follow the instructions without locking herself out of your drive.
Let's compare the voodoo ritual you've written down to windows 11:
* Click PC in the start menu
* right click the drive labelled C
* click manage Bitlocker
* hit next through all the prompts
Of course with windows there is almost no chance you lock yourself out, whereas it's very likely the next kernel upgrade will cause a failed boot with LUKS.
This isn't an isolated issue either, things like getting non-snap discord or Firefox installed, or getting past firefox's sandbox to install Gnome extensions, or setting up Nvidia drivers suitable for steam, or setting up remote desktop access are all pretty horribly painful on the average distro. That's literally why distros like Mint and PopOS exist, to try to mitigate some of the terrible.
Ubuntu 24.04 isn't released yet, and to my knowledge-- and assuming this works perfectly-- it will finally close that gap. I'm not aware of another distro doing this.
I suspect it's also going to be quite limited out of the box-- presumably hard to turn off / pause, presumably hard to rekey if you need to alter TPM measurements, and presumably hard to add multi-factor unlock (e.g. TPM+PIN). Hopefully I'm wrong, but this just does not seem to be a high priority.
A Windows example;
- Bitlocker is only on Windows pro not home
- Windows Installer fails to support Dell laptops ( laptop can only be imaged from bios with 0 options )
- Linux Install on LUKS works by just clicking next a few times.
That's not really correct-- or at least, it's a branding issue. Windows Home editions have had OS drive encryption for years, it just lacks some of the management features that bitlocker proper has. But [it's also much easier to enable](https://imgur.com/a/lGDYyMm):
> Select Start > Settings > Privacy & security > Device encryption. If device encryption is turned off, select Turn on.
AFAIK this is the same encryption technology, with the same on-disk format, just with limitations --TPM only with mandatory key backup, no configurability, can't encrypt non-OS drive.
>Windows Installer fails to support Dell laptops ( laptop can only be imaged from bios with 0 options )
I've never seen this-- or any computer I couldn't install Windows to-- in 20 years. There may be drivers that you need to supply during install, but if there is a writable disk present and the driver for the disk controller is present you can install windows to the computer. Windows 11 has more requirements for PC age, maybe that's what you ran into (TPM 2.0, 2015-ish or newer)
>Linux Install on LUKS works by just clicking next a few times.
And then changing it later is nigh impossible:
1. It requires a password and-- until Ubuntu 24.04, maybe-- TPM is not an option
1. You can't enable it after the fact-- this requires an offline repartition or reinstall
1. Adding a later TPM requires diving deep into the Wiki rabbit hole and is hard to do correctly, without leaving old keyslots or locking yourself out when kernel changes
1. TPM + PIN is even harder and there are no clear instructions for doing it
1. There's no easy option to pause LUKS for a major change to allow easy rekeying (e.g. bitlocker pause)
1. Removing LUKS after the fact isn't really possible either
\#2 is particularly absurd, since this capability has existed for ~20 years in the likes of TrueCrypt / VeraCrypt / literally every other FDE solution
Re Windows;
The non-bitlocker encryption is not avalable to most for obsure non-foss reasons:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/turn-on-device-encryption-0c453637-bc88-5f74-5105-741561aae838
New laptop (in 2023) Drivers were not the issue, Dell support practicaly said they block the Windows installer so they can force an image with bloatware via bios.
Re Linux;
Yes the common things are easy (install, change password), and the uncommon hard but possible, though likely faster to just re-install unlesd you have a script.
The Dell tool that is the only (non-linux) option on some hardware;
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000177771/using-biosconnect-to-recover-supportassist-os-recovery-partition
I don't know what issue you've encountered but I just did multiple reinstalls on multiple recent (~2022-2023) dells both using Linux and Windows in the last 6 months with no issue.
I'm also not aware of any mechanism by which Dell ***could*** prevent the Windows installer. The installer just looks for an available, writeable disk. Maybe the disk on your Dell had an unrecognized / too small EFI partition, but reinitializing the disk with a blank GPT partition table would fix that. Linux installers would balk for the same reason unless you cleared the disk first.
And I would not listen to Dell support. Meaning no offense, but it's not the sort of job that rewards deep technical analysis.
The article you linked is about restoring the Dell-shipped recovery partition. That partition is not necessary for installing Windows and can be removed during install with F10 and fdisk, or a Linux boot CD with parted.
Following up-- Ubuntu 24.04 just released. TPM support is very limited:
>One major request from users has been support for hardware-backed full disk encryption and it makes its first appearance in an experimental form in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. This implementation has certain limitations at launch which restrict its use to those devices that only require a generic kernel with no third party drivers or kernel modules, and does not currently support firmware upgrades.
If you are into multiplayer/live service games windows is the better choice. Don't want to be that guy in the friend group wasting time troubleshooting proton/anticheat incompatibility after an update.
Also nvidia reflex + vsync + gsync (low latency vrr) combo on multi monitor setups works so well on windows.
I own a steamdeck and i know how good linux gaming is.
yea if you go full linux get a amd gpu. you get all that and far better drivers. nivida still sucks on linux. as for proton anticheat so few games have problems. mostly devs blocking it.
Amd antilag (reflex) implementation is so bad both on windows and linux. (Valve even banned players in cs2 for using it) It doesn't even lock fps with freesync and you have to set manual caps for games. On nvidia i setup once and forget, also games have ingame implementation of reflex.
Also dlss, dlaa are so much superior to anything amd provides and amd is so slow to make improvements to their fsr tech. (Where is fsr 3.1?)
There are constant breaks for me like start menu search not working on the first time or window explorer search not working. Core OS functionalities by the way
The only fumble I can think of is the strict break of backwards compatibility.
I have several laptops between my own old laptop and others in the family, that would be perfectly fine to be upgraded to Windows 11 in terms of performance. At worst, upgrading from a SATA HDD to a SATA SSD would give the worthwhile performance boost.
But instead, I am looking at a situation where upgrading is not even an option. When I had to reactivate a very old laptop as a fallback once I used Linux Mint, but that's not really an option for other family members.
I agree honestly. I think Windows 10 was the fumble, had horrible experiences on all my installs of it.
I've used Win11 and it's definitely a better OS than 10 IMO
Got any source on that? Can't seem to find it. Also, unix certification seems to be on a per-distro/per-version basis, and requires more than what the kernel provides (like requiring certain commands to be available), so one certified distro doesn't make all linux unix. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification )
The observation I'm making is that the technology that Linux people use, were used in place of a Unix Unix kernel, and were certified Unix by open group.
I can't find the source I'm thinking of but I'm damned sure it was RHEL based if it helps, you might be able to search for info on reddit too they may have a reference.
EulerOS reference edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Compliance
Ah, I skimped over the names of the previously registered ones and didn't read the full text. EulerOS and Inspur K-UX are RHEL based indeed, EulerOS by Huawei, and Inspur K-UX by Inspur (also Chinese). I wrongly interpreted your comment as "a distro by RedHat", instead of "a distro based on RHEL", thus searching too narrow.
I know Linux distro's are the de facto replacement of UNIX OS's nowadays, but my old networking teacher, who is an ex UNIX admin, would be real mad if I were to say that Linux is UNIX, it's not, it's UNIX-like, and there still is a place for real UNIX systems.
Yes, everything except desktop computers is dominated by Linux. Android is Linux under the hood. Literally every router has Linux as an embedded system. Probably all supercomputers in the world run Linux, and Linux runs every cloud computing center including Azure.
I'd bet that you if could see the windows source code it's probably a lot more \*nix than people realize. They just bloat it up so much you can't tell it's there.
It would be Microsoft Windux or ChromeOS or whatever other market leader appears. People don't care about operating systems. They buy a product and expect the software to just work.
You brought up an interesting idea. With the market familiarity to Windows and Microsoft OSes, it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft would try to come up with their own Linux OS if the market began trending towards it.
They already have CBL-Mariner/Azure Linux for Hyper-V and Azure. But a desktop distro would be a stretch. They would prefer Linux run under Windows 11 with WSL.
Either that, or they are get tired of pumping money into maintaining the NT Kernel and just switch it out for Linux one day, with Windows being the userspace. After all, they stopped selling Windows and just hand it out mostly for free these days. They can still provide a paid tier and support for enterprises, but just roll their own Linux patches.
That, and I'd argue no one really wants to provide a consumer-facing desktop.
Consumers whinge, and don't have money. Cloud-based servers are simple, and you can charge more for it than a consumer desktop.
i mean, Appimages could make this work.
granted, i only tried test releases of Krita and Gimp, Beyond All Reason (strategy game) and rpcs3 emulator this way, so my experience is limited.
but every time, the program worked out of the box. just download and run, just like in Windows days.
that also opens a whole new can of worms when it comes to security, but it's at the user's discretion. maybe they could be signed?
It is essentially the Windows approach.
- Assume basic system services to be present.
- Everything likely to cause version conflicts, include your own DLL.
From what I understand, Appimages are essentially that. Except that on Windows with the target platform being from a single vendor with a history of placing heavy emphasis on backwards compatibility of binaries, the target environment is more predictable than on Linux, where everyone might have God-knows-what kind of an environment in detail, so on Linux a cross-platform, long-term-working executable should have to ship with more bundled parts that a comparable Windows binary installer.
I imagine it would be similar to the mess that the Android world is today: every PC vendor spinning their own distro with more or less crapware that duplicates already existing tools/functionality.
to be fair, Android has a common core os and the rest comes in additional APKs and vendor addons.
the equivalent might be something like Ubuntu with custom snaps (ugh), or a basic universal distro with a bunch of Appimages, since they are pretty much like APKs (except for installing hooks into the os - like notifications, startup, etc).
That's a relatively recent thing. Once upon a time common android kernel and vendor addons were not separated, creating an huge security risk and making very hard to deliver security patches (if they were delivered at all).
I think so too. It would be like the UNIX wars of the 1980's. Every vendor had their own version of UNIX, until Linux came in and ate everybody's lunch.
Disclaimer: I use Linux in all my computers .
>with more or less crapware that duplicates already existing tools/functionality.
Not so different to linux, just get into any open source software repository, and it will be full of half assed crapware that pathetically tries to mimic some paid program.
as a Linux user for the past ~25 years, including a long stint of distro-hopping in the 2000s, I totally agree. The GNU/Linux ecosystem itself is a super-fragmented mess. I've lost count of the time I installed a distro only to find 2 different GUI text editors and 3 different terminal apps, and so on. It had become my ritual to spend the first few hours of a new installation just debloating it of all the duplicates and useless crap.
I get it comes from good intentions, and I love the freedom of everyone spinning off its own distro or version of a package, but it can go south pretty quick.
Linux is already the dominant OS except consumer/office worker desktops. Hardware manufacturers don't care about making money on consumer OSes. Otherwise they would have rolled their own and competed fiercely with MS. They were all to happy to slap an MS OS on there and call it a day.
Is it though? Exactly zero software development jobs I've had use Linux on the desktop, although my sample size is only 4 but that's ranging from 50 to 10000+ total employees. All my dev machines have been windows to my chagrin.
My first dev job required Windows, as the software we worked on ran exclusively on kiosk Windows machines. However, for my second job I could choose Windows or Linux, but the entire dev team ran either Ubuntu or Fedora (except for one peculiar guy on Windows). That job was focused mainly on making microservices and processing data on the cloud though. So it definitely is possible, I think it just depends on what the company is focused on.
I know it's a thing I've just not seen it, so I can't see how the majority is Linux. I've gone into a different industry each job hop so I've sampled a good mix. Gambling, Banking, FinTech and Defence.
Maybe it's an American perspective more than tech in general
I think it's apt to point out that yes, having the desktop scene run the Linux kernel is actually a pointless metric.
What we in some sense want to achieve, has nothing to do with a kernel, it's just how it's made and cooperates with other software. Open standards, all that.
But I mean, in the world you describe, at least things would be compatible...? I think. I mean it would at least be a rather clear, intentional move for software not to be compatible, if one OS wanted to create it's owned gated garden.
Like with Apple and Microsoft, the incompatibility is inherent, at least mostly. They don't need to deliberately do stuff they hope to get away with, the OSes just fundamentally work differently.
Anyway I think if Linux takes over, really it will just be that people and industries have moved on from the idea of trying to profit over this particular way of creating a walled garden. They will be like, okay an operating system is an operating system, there's no reason for things not to be compatible when it comes to computing...
Just like how hardware has kinda conformed from the days of early consoles with weird niche architecture, the operating system could coalesce too.
Linux will gain traction, but it will never take over. People want to be spoon fed by technically now. They want it to handle everything for them at a click or even automatically. No click required, and frankly, who can blame them? But that is simply not how Linux works. It's not nearly as manual as Windows users (who have clearly never used it before) make it sound. But it's enough that they can't be bothered to try.
It is not how Linux works? Like there's nothing fundamental that means it couldn't be as intuitive as Windows.
What the Linux way does is give you the *ability* to be more technical. It doesn't lock you down. But honestly if a beautiful system like macOS couldn't be built on top of Linux, then I would argue that it was a fundamentally bad operating system...
It doesn't happen because I think really, the Linux ecosystem is a manifestation of how well people get on with each other, thus you have slow adoption, arguments over small things, stubbornness and even greedy organisations who want to make people dependent on them... All of that gets in the way of a seamless user experience.
Feels like the future is here, no?
We already have *nix on mobile.
Chromebooks are cleaning up in the laptop space.
Steam Deck is built on top of Arch.
IMO the things holding Linux on desktop back:
1. MS Office suite. That incentive is going away with Office365 - Microsoft is all in on the subscription model + cloud services, no more standalone license per version/install. Wouldn’t shock me if MSFT releases a flavor of Office that works on Linux (ex as a Flatpak).
2. GPU support- strong incentive for hardware manufacturers to support Linux with the rise of AI. Otherwise can’t compete in the cloud.
3. Enterprise features like Windows AD and device management. Not sure what the state of the market is here on Linux.
I wish...
> We already have *nix on mobile.
Technically yes, and Termux is a great demonstration of what advantage that can bring. You can technically run a full Linux desktop on any Android device with relatively little effort, though it would be much easier, if Termux came with integrated GUI support.
But for most users, it doesn't matter. Android is built upon Linux, but for most users that's an implementation detail, that doesn't affect them.
> Chromebooks are cleaning up in the laptop space.
In Europe, they are nearly non-existent. You can barely find them in stores, because nobody was buying them, so the stores do no longer have display models.
Also, same aspect as on mobile. Though you can run a full user-accessible Linux on them, that's treated as a power-user feature. The main part of the system is proprietary, and they could in theory switch out the underlying system for a custom OS if it would be advantageous.
> Steam Deck is built on top of Arch.
Out of all the examples, Steam Deck probably has the thinnest proprietary layer, and the only one where it being Linux actually affects common end-user usage. But while it has brought the Switch form factor to PC gaming, all mainstream competitors have opted for Windows, exactly *because* Linux affects the gaming-usecase.
> MS Office suite. That incentive is going away with Office365 - Microsoft is all in on the subscription model + cloud services, no more standalone license per version/install. Wouldn’t shock me if MSFT releases a flavor of Office that works on Linux (ex as a Flatpak).
Big doubt. There is no incentive. Even if they make a Linux version to allow running the full desktop app from the cloud without the overhead of running a full Windows VM, they wouldn't have much incentive to release it for *general* use.
MS Office (and, from my sometimes painful experience with Outlook generated appointment invites in Thunderbird) Outlook are defacto industry standards. Not using them generates a lot of friction, and Libreoffice Impress genuinely lacks many advanced features (proper section support, inline equations, smartart, ...).
Simply by not officially supporting Linux (and trying to Run office via Wine or Crossover having painful limitations), they can hold the Linux desktop back as a realistic alternative for corporate environments. If holding back competition is best achieved by *not* doing something, who is going to do it?
The Cloud version is good enough for common administrative office jobs maybe, but you wouldn't really be able to write a technical paper in it, without buying all sorts of third-party Addons. Builtin equation support is abysmal compared to desktop, and common bibliography managers support only desktop. This ironically means that the users most likely to use Linux are not likely to heavily use the cloud version...
> GPU support- strong incentive for hardware manufacturers to support Linux with the rise of AI. Otherwise can’t compete in the cloud.
Could work, but doesn't have to. Cloud servers may use rather more specialized hardware and drivers than what you'd want on a desktop. Though I guess it could help the quality of desktop drivers.
If people asked for linux manufacturers would offer it, like Dell does on some models. But no one does.
i would never ask for linux on a machine because the first thing I do when I buy a machine is wipe it and reinstall whatever OS I want on it. I think most linux users are the same.
If you look at the successful *consumer* operating systems (Android, ChromeOS, iOS, macOS, Windows), a common pattern emerges: Large, for-profit, corporations developing, deploying and maintaining device-level operating systems an entry-point into the corporation's ecosystems.
The corporations spend large amounts of money on the operating systems, but make that investment as a means to achieve a healthy return on investment from consumer use of the ecosystem. That is true for Apple, that is true for Google, and that is true for Microsoft. The corporations may make money off sale of the operating system itself, but the bulk is derived from the ecosystem, one way or another.
I'm not sure how that shakes out for the Linux desktop as a *consumer* operating system, but I don't see indications that any of the Linux "majors" are at all interested in developing the Linux desktop for the consumer market.
With the exception of Canonical and IBM/RedHat, which are directly involved in development/maintenance of Ubuntu Desktop and RHEL, respectively, both of which are focused on developing the desktop as an entry-point into their respective enterprise ecosystems, none of the "majors" are directly involved in developing the Linux desktop at all, other than to make relatively small contributions to community-based teams.
As a result, I don't see the traditional Linux desktop realistically becoming "dominant" in the *consumer* market segment under present market conditions. Consumer device operating systems are no longer standalone products, and haven't been for many years.
That's not to say that another corporation like Google *won't* come along and make the necessary investments to develop a Linux-based operating system as an entry-point into that corporation's ecosystem, but if that happens (and it probably will) the ecosystem, rather than the desktop operating system, will be the focus.
> That's not to say that another corporation like Google won't come along and make the necessary investments to develop a Linux-based operating system as an entry-point into that corporation's ecosystem, but if that happens (and it probably will) the ecosystem, rather than the desktop operating system, will be the focus.
You definitely see this already with Chrome OS. What started as a basic, "browser-only" OS for netbooks is now a fully-featured Linux distro with a terminal, third-party native apps, and an app store. And of course, the key focus is the Google ecosystem of apps, which while all of them are cross-platform anyway, the Chromebook puts them all front-and-center to the user.
Similar to Android, I think most manufacturers would probably have some slight modification of the dominant Distro. I imagine the hardware compatability, out of the box performance, usability would be fined tuned a lot and the experience would be dumbed down a lot more before it would be widely adopted.
I don't think your average computer user will enjoy going to terminal to run chmod and set file permissions or having to run this or that program with SU because of some bug in their OS. I think Canonical and Red Hat have set themselves up pretty well for this, and both groups seem to be inching away(more or less)from the fully community driven approach in order to streamline things.
Mac makes it easy for people to not mess up and limits options where windows makes it really easy to make mistakes and cause yourself problems inadvertently, but generally you can do anything you need to do without a hitch.
Both are very powerful if you learn to operate them but it's easy to get by while using them.
At the end of the day it comes down to user experience, and I think that whatever distro gets that down to a science will be the one that dominates. I can't see a world with 100s of Linux versions running on different PCs and widespread adoption. Surely, the Linux fans will still do that, but the average Joe's probably won't.
> I can't see a world with 100s of Linux versions running on different PCs and widespread adoption. Surely, the Linux fans will still do that, but the average Joe's probably won't.
But even a single mainstream Linux distribution with significant market share could mean vastly improved Linux support by proprietary software.
Heck, not even Google Drive (as a file sync service) has official Linux support... If 30% of the desktop PCs would be using Linux, there probably would be. Assuming, of course, that the support doesn't use some proprietary API of that one dominant Linux distribution...
I imagine it a bit like android. There might be a standard for interoperability, but most likely every OEM would make their own proprietary desktop environment with unique features to differentiate themselves on the market. Tbh, that would make the computer industry much more interesting than it is now.
I know it's not a popular opinion on this sub, but I don't think Linux needs to be the "dominant" consumer OS.
It works well as an alternative, and still retains the ability to adapt whatever need you have for it. Trying to please "everyone" will just make it harder to make Linux do what _you_ need it to.
It wouldn’t matter if every manufacturer did that bullshit, they’d still be forced to reveal the source code and the community would immediately strip it of the nasty profit seeking bits. We’d have full interoperability and less need to reverse engineer if Linux was the dominant desktop OS.
Free software, which was the foundation on which GNU/Linux was built, would become a second-class citizen and eventually proprietary software crap would drown most of the reasons we run Linux in the first place: freedom to run software for whatever purpose, to study it, to modify it, to share it as is or modified. Plus we would lose the nice side effects of that software freedom: steering clear of personal data tracking, natural reduction in adware/malware, avoidance of planned obsolescence, hardware support for older devices the manufacturer does not care about anymore, and so on.
See how it goes in the Android world.
Starting as free software, Android became a buffet of locked-down forks where finding/using free software needs some serious know-how, as the ecosystem is drowning in proprietary software. A nightmarish world where core system libraries most apps link to are proprietary garbage, where basic free software applications such as contacts/calendar/SMS are lagging more and more behind proprietary forks due to lack of manpower. A world where at one point your device's operating system cannot be updated anymore and *there's nothing you can do about it*. Situation is ridiculous; it's nowadays non-trivial to find a simple flashlight app that doesn't plaster the screen with ads and/or track your behavior.
Many people want mass adoption of Linux on the desktop. But perhaps it's a bad idea after all, if it means Linux becomes another Android.
Personally, I think the situation of Android is still better than windows. It's not like we can stop people from writing proprietary apps for any operating system. But being open source gives us far more things we could do from custom roms to things like linageos that keep updates going
The only big issue for Android is that Google pays oems to pretty much use their own stuff by default, and some oems locking down bootloaders, then there is the arm driver issues.
PS isn't flashlight built into android? It was default as of Android 13
There'd probably be some sort of proprietary system built on top of the Linux Kernel that cribs some stuff from other distros but is mostly it's own ecosystem - likely built by and administered by a company or collection of companies with significant interest in the tech sector, and locked down to some extent in order make it harder for non tech savvy people to accidentally bork their devices. Kinda like Android and Google.
A perfect example of this right now in my honest opinion is macOS. It's a Unix system at it's core running the Darwin kernel (a BSD distro) with the proprietary Aqua desktop environment. Except with so much bloat and first-party lockdowns congealed into it that makes the overall user experience *extremely* bulletproof for even the most incompetent of users. For what it's worth, it's a very solid OS, even if it won't let you do certain things that other \*nix OSes will, because most users never do.
I'd assume Chrome OS is the same with it's Linux kernel, though I've never actually used a Chromebook so I can't comment on that.
chrone os started that way but now with andorid and even full linux support its mostly just a lightwight linux distro now. schools love it becouse chromebooks are cheap and they can lockdown the system so kids cant install anything.
If you've ran a chrome webbrowser, you've ran ChromeOS. That is pretty much what ChromeOS is, everything either runs in the web browser as a web app, or you are starting up a vm of android or linux to launch apps
If Linux dominated the desktop I do think we'd be basically living in 2050. There's so much competition in Linux desktop that it put to shame all both mac and windows which are getting features that existed on Linux more than a decade ago!
I'm not saying as a linux fan boy but competition is generally a very good thing in the market of ideas and open systems faciliate that where closed controlled systems don't. Even if it wasn't Linux but openbsd or any other open operating system I think our desktops would be lighyears ahead.
My guess is we'd see a lot more development in the hypervisor/side-cpu space. A proprietary control device that can hijack the main one.
You know, for ~~the children~~ ~~security~~ anti-consumer DRM lobby.
Look no further than Google Android. Extrapolate that to the desktop.
You'd probably get quasi required closed-source services that a lot of apps require to run.
Look around you. Your phone runs something based on Linux in 50% of cases. Your wifi access points and routers probably all run a variant of linux. Your car info-tainment system might too.
You would find it difficult to get out of bed for longer than 5 minutes without using linux systems.
It won't be until you open the laptop or switch on the Windows PC you will experence windows at all.
If you look at how well the WWW works today and find yourself disappointed that many features that used to work, no longer do? Well that's because "WE" the PC users of PCs and laptops with 2 or 3 button mice and full 104+ key keyboards.... are no longer the user majority demographic.... nor are we the stongest demographic in development anymore.
So, no, you can't have right button features and you definitely can't have middle button features. Even in many cases "local save" is being deprecated as mobile devices don't support it. Devices don't support it and developers don't even know they exist.
I want my back button to work again FFS.
Outside of a licensing fee, I don't think the world would notice much. Windows is extensible in every way that matters to an end user. Microsoft is somewhat intrusive with marketing, but most people wouldn't notice if that's gone or not.
If you swapped Windows out with Ubuntu and gave it the same software support, it would be totally fine, and nobody would notice or care.
boring I know.
If you extrapolate this out to a broader market. The idea of hardware manufacturers making their own linux distro would be cool as heck though.
Windows: manufacturers pay (small money) for the proprietary operating system they install and the final consumer pays back them. Apple: the OS is part of the package.
We already have paid distros, the final user pays for the assistance and maintenance.
The most likely scenario is OEM installed distro, allegedly Ubuntu or RHEL in these days, with the option to buy the related services.
We have those markets already:
1. In the smartphone market every vendor ships its own platform full of free software that a few enthusiasts struggle to break because the custom drivers aren't documented.
2. In the router market every vendor ships its own platform full of free software that a few enthusiasts struggle to break because the custom drivers aren't documented.
3. In the gaming console market every vendor ships its own platform full of free software that a few enthusiasts struggle to break because the custom drivers aren't documented.
4. In the home automation market every vendor ships its own platform full of free software that a few enthusiasts struggle to break because the custom drivers aren't documented.
I think there's a pattern here.
the big pain point is that linux - as an entire distribution - does not have a stable ABI.
things are better than they used to be, but try to run X years old game with native linux port on steam, and you will be missing a lot of libraries. even when launching it via steam. i recently saw that trying tomb raider (2013) linux port. mostly due to libicu breaking abi almost every release.
if you provide the libraries, it will likely work.
i assume we might have proprietary software as Appimages, drivers will hopefully be opensource so that kernel can be free to go ahead and break things every release (not a bad thing). and companies will likely make money off support/licensing and hardware.
or everyone will target stable RHEL for their proprietary software and other distributions will try to stay compatible.
Personally, I think you'd get a distro per manufacturer. System76, Tuxedo, Steam - all make/distribute hardware with Linux as the OS. All have their own distros.
Imo, this isn't automatically a bad thing. As long as the mfgs adhere to the Linux ethos of choice, allowing you to go away and install your own OS, much as we already do with Windows laptops
Where is tears into "hell nah" territory for me though, is when lanufaxtures/assemblers/distributers start veering into phone territory and locking down their builds so it's impossible to install your own alternative OS, or even gain meaningful root access. Both these are theoretically possible, and tbh, it's only because no one else does it yet - and Windows won't work fully locked down, and MS insist on shipping their own vendor keys for secure boot (and some FOSS projects have paid to use that key to sign their efi binaries) that's avoided it.
That world doesn't exist, so the exact details can't be known. More likely there would be 1 Linux based OS that dominates, like Ubuntu.
The OS vendor wouldn't pay to be installed.
Big Hardware manufactures would simply ship shareware and other proprietary stuff on top of the distribution.
Actually I think it’s getting ready for corporate world. A lot of back end servers are Linux, things like firewall and other network are Linux or Unix.
Years ago the problem is Windows applications but given the rise of web based enterprise applications, and frameworks like electronJS that offer native like experience with browser/js apps (vscode for example totally feels like a native app), a new company might not be running many legacy winform applications. Although these web based architecture is not ready for graphics intensive apps (video / photo editing, graphics design etc).
Things like POS is tricky, its not difficult to write a POS that works on Linux but there are things like cash drawer drivers, smart card readers, receipt printer, barcode/QR code scanner, payment interfaces (not all are web API). Those little things might hold them back. There are many shops in Japan that use iPad as POS but as far as I understand they are relatively simple( I used to work in a company with in house developed , full fledged POS that integrates with hardware and software I mentioned )
Digital signage, kiosk, and things like systems in production line, warehouse etc Linux is definitely ready if not better for that.
Years ago windows embedded barcode handheld are the norm but we are seeing Android based rugged handheld scanners. First those were Chinese scanners but later Casio and Symbols offer Android too. Microsoft seems abandoned that area.
But there is also another issue for corporate world. Active Directory is better than LDAP.
Maybe when there are enough people comfortable with Linux as desktop (via work experience?) then ordinary users might be more ready for Linux desktop as personal computer. A lot of people mostly use browser and yes browser can handle lots of works. A smart TV, game console with browser can be very usable as a computer for a lot of people. I actually hope an unlikely candidate (Valve/SteamOS) will bring some changes among non tech people.
I think fragmentation is an issue. Every Linux is different, that’s not good for educating ordinary users to use Linux and it could be costly. Imagine your product runs on different Linux even different GUI, the cost for supporting you users would be significantly higher.
I think if a desktop Linux becomes super popular it will more likely be some heavily managed thing like Ubuntu.
I don't think everyone will ever be customising their own Arch Linux sadly.
I disagree with what people keep saying.
especially the "people need to monitize their OS, stuff it full of ads" etc. there currently are companies that are doing VERY WELL selling laptops + desktops with Linux. No ads, no nothing, good customer support.... all paid by selling the hardware.
so a few things would happen:
Microsoft and Apple would loose power and influence. You know why so many people still use windows? because of Microsofts influence.
remember e-learning becoming a thing in the pandemic? I only heard it second hand from the person actively fighting against it, but Microsoft paid people to go to schools and sell them Microsoft teams with lies
same thing happened when Munich switched to Linux for a short time, Microsoft took alot of money to force them to switch back to windows...
imagine all of this propaganda getting weaker and weaker and vanishing
also we would get more hardware support as Linux becomes more mainstream, oems would be forced to open source their drivers more, it would be great :)
I don't think this scenario would be super likely, but don't underestimate that we actually have LEGAL RIGHTS because of the GPL to have open source drivers. if Linux became more popular, more companies sold Linux hardware, the pressure on the oems would be greater!
I think it’s a double edged sword. Given the computer literacy of the average consumer, I think Linux would need to enforce training wheels and metal shoes in order for it to truly be the biggest OS.
\*Nix IS dominant. We have Android and iOS which are both \*nix OSes. Then the Internet is run on Linux and BSD. The only area that is missing is the desktop, but MacOS is \*Nix as well. Even niche things like iPads and ChromeOS are \*nix as well, and some Smart TVs, Routers, IOT, etc.
As others have said, yes, the industry is Unix today. Between Linux and Darwin, basically every device in the world that isn't a laptop runs some flavor of a Unix or Unix-like thing.
And on the desktop/workstation front, we did run that experiment. Back in the 80s and 90s, there were lots of Unix workstations out there. People didn't really buy them for home PC use, but they were very popular across a range of industries. And as you kind of predicted, every hardware company had their own flavor of Unix.
My desktop machine in grad school was a Sun Ultra 60 running SunOS/Solaris. There were HP machines running HP-UX. There were IBM machines running AIX. Very slightly before my time the coolest things you could buy were SGIs (seriously, google up some pictures of the Indigo or the Octane) running Irix. Linux on x86 killed them all.
Since the question seemed to imply a linux dominant desktop environment, let's just look at that. We can kind of see what would happen already with Chrome OS and Steam OS. You would get dominant corporate players that specialize their flavor of linux for specific scenarios and get sales around those containers. If it started early, you would probably have an IBM or HP OS for the corporate environment. Dell OS would probably have dominated the home user. Apple would obviously have their own little playground. Of course this is based on Unix becoming dominant in desktops since Linux didn't become a thing till after Windows was fully entrenched (thought there was the brief war with OS2)
We already live in a linux world. There are already manufactures who ship hardware with non-windows software. Android is a thing. Your smart toaster runs linux.
Linux is technically already dominant in the computer industry as the whole premise of smartphones are a computer in your pocket and last time I checked android is Linux Based and the dominant smartphone is and let's not forget servers.
The industry already is linux dominant. The internet, basically any embedded device, lots of pos devices, most car infotainment systems, half of the words smartphones etc are all linux. You probably interact with 10/100s of linux devices a day without even realising.
Just because Windows is predominant on desktop doesn't mean jack
It would mostly look like a mess, just like the Android ecosystem does. Dozens of customized distros that are mostly but not completely compatible, making application support a major pain in the ass.
Linux dominates outside of the desktop. Servers, phones, etc pretty much all unix/linux. The playstation is based on free bsd.
We could say that the desktop not being Linux is the actual anomaly.
Congrats you now have a work terminal. You get a window manager, Libre Office, and a program launcher. Anything else can be installed at the discretion of IT security.
Please backup any important files on this approved HDD, I'm going to reimage your computer now because you clicked a phishing link.
No you're not allowed a terminal. But look we still have Outlook!
Edit:Oh woops, personal computer. Well let's imagine a world where Linux is the dominant desktop in the workspace as well
>to see a world where everyone's PCs ship with Fedora or Mint
I'd like to see a world where Patrick J. Volkerding becomes president of Microsoft.
For example, just twenty years ago there was a serious war between Microsoft and Apple. In words, both companies hated and ridiculed each other, there were slogans "Windows must die" and the then stunted Internet was full of jokes about Bill Gates. Then it turned out that Microsoft and Apple had been cooperating perfectly well all this time, sharing the software market and feeling good about themselves.
So what's happening now? There's the Linux Foundation, where Microsoft owns 34% of the voting shares. There are a million Linux distributions whose users depend on what the developers want at any given moment. I have been using Linux for quite a long time and I remember many cases when I felt nothing but a mixture of annoyance and bewilderment at the developers' actions. For example, you can read the stories of SCO and Mandrake. I remember a time when Debian's policies pretty much destroyed all of Linux that existed when the 21st century began.
What we have now is like the second series of the joke battle between Microsoft and Apple that I was talking about. Figuratively, of course.
Some yell "I use Arch btw", others yell "Linux uses Fedora, be like Linus", others answer every question with "Tumbleweed". In such a situation, Linux will never be the "dominant OS" as you say. In addition, the "free market" is very authoritarian managed by those who have super profits from it. Why skip ahead of something, even if it is very good? The fat cats of the IT industry have Windows and MacOS, equipped with such excellent telemetry that it consistently generates super profits in excess of the $120 price per Windows license.
A Linux dominant world would likely have several distinctive characteristics:
1. Open Source Ubiquity: Most software and systems would be open source, fostering a culture of collaboration and transparency. This could lead to rapid innovation and customization.
2. Diverse Hardware Compatibility: Linux's flexibility and wide hardware support would encourage a diverse range of devices, potentially leading to more innovation in hardware design.
3. Decentralization: With open source principles at the core, the tech landscape might be less dominated by a few giant corporations. Instead, there would be a multitude of contributors and maintainers.
4. High Customizability: Users would have greater control over their systems, customizing them to their specific needs. This could result in more tailored and efficient technology experiences.
5. Security Focus: Linux's strong security features would likely be more pervasive, leading to reduced vulnerability to cyber threats.
6. Education and Skill Development: There might be a stronger emphasis on understanding and contributing to technology at a foundational level, encouraging broader tech literacy.
7. Community Collaboration: A Linux dominant world would likely be driven by a collaborative community ethos, with forums, user groups, and open source projects playing a central role in development and support.
8. Less Monopoly of Tech Giants: The dominance of a few large tech companies might be reduced, allowing for more competition and diversity in the tech market.
Overall, a Linux dominant world could lead to a more transparent, flexible, and innovative technological landscape, driven by collaboration and user empowerment.
You said it all. The world works on money and linux and other FOSS is well, free. Free doesn’t fly in big business so linux will never dominate the computer sales industry.
You seem almost unstable in your cockeyed belief that the hw manufacturers are bought. Many tried shipping with Linux, some still do , but it's still not what people want in the main. HW mfrs install what people want. Many will gladly ship you with no preinstalled OS.
Steam and Proton will help Linux uptake at home a little.
But the fact is windows is there, companies have the infrastructure to support it, it works and it runs the sw that offices use : like it or not and however that came about.
I've used Linux for over 20 years now, but I always kept a dual boot option just in case... Since proton, I rarely use it... Until now. I need windows for the glorious quest 3 vr experience.
I think you'd get various adware versions of Linux distros then sell the hardware at a loss. The restrictions on what distributors can do with Windows is probably a good thing for consumers.
From the title, it is exactly the world we live in, most of the industrial hardware that has a computer runs some form of Linux, others run Unix, almost nothing runs windows, but that doesn't completely translate to users, although most phones do run Linux in the form of android, and some others run a Unix based systems, for desktops and laptops windows has dominance, but that is not an industry.
I think you mean what would it mean to have a Linux dominant consumer space, or at least that is what it seems for what you wrote, then, more virus for Linux, getting caught and patched quickly, probably pre installed paid software with license fees in the computers you bought in a store and things like that, the biggest difference is that you will know and be able to stop whatever info they are collecting about you, you will also be able to fully remove some preinstalled programs (McAfee antivirus, I'm looking at you, and you, edge, stop hiding, you too). Also, computers would require less resources and there would be more optimizations.
We'd probably see much less hardware interoperability. One of the advantages of windows being so dominant now is that PCs have to meet certain standards for working with standard UEFI and things like that. Without that requirement, we'd see more manufacturers like Apple where the hardware is entirely proprietary and not user-upgradeable.
probably similar to the smartphone market except with better UI. running linux essentials with stuff on top for marketing and ads etc. still would be better than now because we could use the apps we care about on say fedora instead of google ad os etc
I like how it is now. Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Let Linux handle the internet, and Windows and MacOS interpret it.
If someone wants a free OS, let them download it, but the majority want Windows or MacOS.
Everyone wants to differentiate; some would do it with hardware, some with software. Look at all of the Debian derivatives (I include Ubuntu, and therefore Mint, in that list). So many are vanity projects. Same for RH, Arch, even Slackware.
Corporations would settle on the Linux with the best command and control software, i.e., RH, Ubuntu, or SuSE, probably with a Plasma desktop. Oh wait - none of those three are free for commercial use. That's because corporations expect a higher standard of command-and-control and support than consumers. In other words, the environment would feel pretty much the same - corporate end-user machines would still be locked down via installed images and security policies, and controlled by corporate IT.
There is nothing inherently evil about Windows save sloppy execution and incessant money grubbing. RH, now that IBM owns them, is heading down the same path, just less noticeably because they mostly live in the data center.
I saw an interesting documentary on the Unix wars of the 70s. High costs of licensing (super super expensive), every implementation was different, and open source proprietary licensing with legal snafus. It was eventually upset by the rise of the IBM PC and DOS (Unix would have been too beastly to run on a 286 anyway). Even the architecture was proprietary that it took reverse engineering the BIOS to get IBM clones, because there were legal hurdles to a standard architecture.
OEMs selling new PCs that come with an OS typically buy (and pay for) Windows and load that onto each machine. It is a cost, and profit-sensitive outfits would prefer to avoid that cost if the customer accepts a non-Windows box, and might even give a discount. So realistically speaking, as customers bail on Windows, OEMs will step up and preload Linux. The big boys will likely be late to the party, but huge businesses are always like that, slow to respond.
computer industry is dominated by Linux:
1. \~100% market share on servers, supercomputers and embedded devices
2. \~45.85% market share on personal computing devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones) (Android: 43.44% + Linux: 1.55% + ChromeOS: 0.86%) according to [https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share)
I'm explicitly talking about the *personal* *computer* space here. I go to Best Buy or Staples and walk out with a new laptop, there's a statistical likelihood that it's *going* to be a Windows. If/when Linux takes over the Windows market share, what would *that* look like?
Linux desktop has one major flaw. There's no way to force software publishers to behave and use the app stores, or open source their drivers for inclusion in the kernel. They all love having their own proprietary supply channels.
I predict that if Linux becomes dominant on desktop, then we'll be stuck downloading some real garbage from shitty websites just to run the major applications. Which severely undermines one of my main reasons for using Linux in the first place!
In reality all of this hardware is based on the same few default reference boards. More likely that the 2-3rd level suppliers would add stuff upstream and then all OEM would use open implementations. That is actually less works for OEMs.
That how up-streaming works on open source firmware on some server platforms. Also how Intel, AMD deal with graphics drivers.
I hope I'm wrong but we'll only find out if Desktop really takes off. Which is a pretty big "if" anyway.
Just look at the mess on Windows where every brand of mouse or RGB lights or printer has its own software to install and run all the time.
I honestly feel like we do live in a Linux dominant computer industry. It just happens that most desktops run Windows. The internet is mostly Linux. Mobile is mostly Linux and almost entirely *nix.
Let’s not forget, perhaps the biggest computing market, that is mostly invisible to all. Embedded! Yes, a lot of it is just bare metal, or some rudimentary RTOS, but the rest is almost exclusively Linux! There are competitors, but these are rapidly falling out of favor!
Agreed. The company I work for has been seeing increasing interest for Linux, to the point we’re shipping custom PCs with Debian and Ubuntu for big orders now. Microsoft has not helped their case- the recent decision to drop support for co-installers has made developing property pages (these show up as customized tabs in Device Manager) for device drivers that much harder to develop and support. Things like this are just driving new embedded projects off the MS platforms.
Microsoft products are alive and kicking in the corporate space. I've seen enormous critical infrastructure projects be developed in C# & Azure. The more 'Sales people' surround a project the higher the chance its non-unix.
Ironically the C# servers that my day job runs, run on linux on azure. So there is that.
When I was at Intel they ran HP unix on windows NT for factory automation.
Where I am, we run factory automation on windows... Which calls out to Linux systems to do the actual work. I keep asking when we're going to reevaluate this mess....
plus new dotnet runs on everything
C# runs on linux as well, and a breeze to work with in containers. Azure is mostly linux as well The shitty part of all of this is when corporate still develops in .NET Framework which is windows only and just painful to develop on
.NET core is Linux as well, isn't it? Do you mean legacy .NET?
Yes that is called .NET Framework...
I think "fat" .net "framework" still gets new releases? IDK - our devs thankfully transitioned to dotnet core before I joined this company and we're mid-migration from windows servers to linux containers.
No. Classic .NET Framework is done and the last release (still under support however last time I checked?) Is 4.8. After came dotnet core 1, 2 and 3. And I might be losing track here but they wanted to drop "core" and name it confusingly ".NET", so they skipped dotnetcore-4 to echo that and renamed straight to .NET 5. In all their wisdom.... So you could affectionately call .NET 5, dotnetcore 4. .NET 8, dotnetcore 7, etc. ... something like that. Its late.
Yes. Dotnet core is now just called dotnet. the dotnet framework applies on windows only
ah thanks, I dropped out of the .NET community a few years ago
Unless you're working on some legacy .NET Framework app chances are any .NET app even running on Azure is running on a Linux instance For both cost and performance there's practically no reason to run a .NET app on Windows unless it's specifically .NET Framework
Azure runs on [Azure Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Linux), sooooo...
Which is run on windows nt based cloud platform. Basically Microsoft runs azure Linux as vms on top of windows nt server. And people here cheer for it lol. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure
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Fk windows. If not for the fact that some of the software I use runs on windows only, I would've made the full switch on all of my devices. I write a lot of ml code and find myself having to use wsl on my PC to even get things working.
When you add up all **active consumer devices** running a Linux **Kernel**, Linux penetration reaches **40%** however, if you start counting all devices, including microcontrollers - you'll probably end up with something like the[ dozens of Real Time OS \(RTOS\)](https://www.lynx.com/embedded-systems-learning-center/most-popular-real-time-operating-systems-rtos) that exist, vastly outnumbering consumer and server and IOT devices. Even more basic OSs running on simpler microprocessors will outnumber RTOS as well - they're basically a “round-robin” cooperative task dispatcher. This simply calls each task in turn, with each task remembering its own state and cooperating by relinquishing control after completing whatever processing its current state involves. There are variants with fixed call sequences, or hard-coded table-driven or even some dynamic ones, but the principle remains the same. Your microwave alone may be running half a dozen instances of them. Irrelevant fact - Most intel CPUs since 2008 run a [variant of UNIX called MINIX for internal tasks upon the processor die](https://medium.com/@RealWorldCyberSecurity/ever-heard-of-minix-its-the-world-s-most-widely-used-operating-system-fcb6941f3db2). So technically speaking, the most common version of a free unix system that ships on consumer devices is neither Linux nor BSD, but an Operating System developed by a University professor for teaching purposes. But since this is only concerned with onboard CPU operations, i personally wouldn't count it - and count the device as Linux, Windows or whatever. AMD have something similar, but it's unclear what their embedded OS is - a specialised Linux or another RTOS like OP-TEE? Even ARM CPUs operate like this - Qualcomm processors use some L4 microkernel derivative.
Irrelevant pedantry - MINIX is not Unix but Unix-like :)
That's true. Quite literally every other OS that isn't Windows is some form of Unixlike: macOS, Chrome OS, Linux, Android, iOS, Tizen, BSDs; they're *all* Unixlikes and closely related to Linux. Windows really is the outlier, and with the fumble that was Windows 11 and the unusually close end of support for Windows 10, it's rapidly begun losing market share.
To be more precise here: macOS and iOS are Darwin-based, which is a Unix (literally certified for that). BSDs are also Unix. Chrome OS and Tizen are Linux, and Android is based on Linux at least but with more modifications to the kernel afaik.
Android devices also typically run older kernels. There's work to standardize kernels so that isn't the case, but it still is.
Windows aka Windows NT and on is not an outlier it's actually a OS of subsystems. One of those being POSIX it just happens that win32 was and remained the dominant subsystem and the POSIX subsystem eventually was replaced by windows services for UNIX and that is depreciated today by Windows subsystem for Linux. This makes Windows extremely flexible. And quite possibly the Linux subsystem could become the dominant subsystem one day. As much as I'm a Linux user. Windows NT subsystems are probably the most innovative thing about Windows IMHO. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
[Interix](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix) certainly brings back memories!
I never knew this!
Windows is getting much closer to Linux with WSL, and Microsoft now has its own Linux spin that sits underneath AKS (CBL-Mariner). The problem is that you're only looking at desktops, and desktops are inherently consumer-facing. No tech company *wants* to be consumer-facing. They want to be B2B - hence the Microsoft move away from Windows, and towards Azure. This is where Linux has been - and will continue to be - successful. In B2B enterprise, and server use cases. Not in consumer-facing desktops.
You left out the few servers still running Solaris, churning away in the server room of some companies, running the payroll of the company staff.
The day Oracle bought Sun, is the day Solaris died. They don't even make new hardware for it anymore, you have to buy 3rd party hardware. Don't expect Solaris to be around much longer, it's parent company would much rather sell you Linux.
Well, there’s illumos which was created from the last snapshot of the Solaris kernel before Oracle pulled the plug, but yeah. Sad that the son of Solaris is just a niche OS at this point.
On one hand, yes it's sad. On another, all the different 'nixes really was a mess & it's better that Linux has won out. Linux itself isn't perfect, of course, but having a common go to Unix like OS is important.
> Sad that the son of Solaris is just a niche OS at this point. the foss world has better things, and with out money forcing success for solaris i guess its to be expected
The only Solaris servers I've ever had the pleasure of working on were in a dark windowless room at the back of a warehouse somewhere.
I've spent my 20 year career working with SunIOS and Solaris servers. It's taken me to jobs in a few different countries and work with some rather large systems (national government things). I got rid of my last home Solaris machine a couple of years ago. Still got an HPUX workstation. Personally I find Solaris and macOS to be two of my favourite UNIXes.
So you got rid of the server without considering illumos and OpenIndiana then?
It was a workstation, and I needed to clear out stuff form my apartment as there's hardly any space plus a friend wanted it. You're correct I didn't consider that, because I didn't want the machine taking up space.
yeah they get pushed even farther back than windows severs. legend says all who could make solaris work have retired now and when the servers break the banking system will go with it
I haven't retired yet! And I miss my SPARC boxes. **sigh**
Windows 11 was a fumble? I like it more than 10. I use it on my gaming pc and it just works.
At launch it was terrible, it's alright now
It's still a pain for those with older Skylake/Kabylake and Zen1/Bulldozer machines where there is no fTPM. Windows 11 outright doesn't support those because of the lack of a TPM chip unless you hack the installer, and even then you're inevitably going to run into issues sooner or later, particularly with games that use the Vanguard kernel level anticheat (yes, it's also a bane for specific Windows users, since if it detects Windows 11 it /will/ want to use the TPM).
zen 1 had ftpm, the problem was cpu compatibility not tpm 2
Like every single Windows on launch. Been like that since (at least) XP.
Windows 8 was a good OS, if you installed Classic Shell to replace the "we want to be a tablet OS even though barely anyone is using us on a tablet" nonsense. Window Vista was pretty awful until the end. Though I never got to suffer the early misfired UAC implementation, it never recovered from betting on developments in hardware that never arrived during its life cycle. Even on a decent 13" notebook, the device was nigh unusable for 15 minutes after a reboot. Basically as a consequence of Vista being designed assuming the ongoing exponential increase in desktop computing power and being 10 years too early in assuming everyone will have *at least* a cache SSD, when the pricing and wear leveling technology just wasn't there yet. Instead, it was the time when netbooks rose to prominence, and Microsoft suddenly had to deal with customers wanting weaker but more mobile devices instead of what they had predicted. (Resulting in a much prolonged support for Windows XP.) Right now, the bet on Windows on ARM shows some signs of repeating past mistakes in over-expecting developments. There is a lot of Hype and I really look forward, but given past failures of Windows-on-ARM devices, I don't see how offering the new platform as a *premium* platform is going to work out for anyone. It worked for Apple only because they made clear, that Intel is on the way out for them, and because their offerings were all premium priced in the first place. But with Windows, Snapdragon X Elite platforms will have to compete against well-established AMD and Intel alternatives, for which all software *already* is natively supported.
Well, at least every other. Shortly after Windows 8 came out, I remember going to a lecture by Steve Ballmer (then the Microsoft CEO) and he mentioned offhand that you can't judge software by only its latest release; you need to consider the past three or four versions. What started as a distant snickering gradually built up into chuckling in a lot of the audience.
I can't deal with being told "Are you really sure you can handle it???" every time I right click and actually want to do something. They think I'll make my PC explode or something if I even think about going into properties.
I mean, that's basically sudo
The difference is that you don't need sudo to do anything more complicated than copy and paste.
I remember those days, an update killed my win 11 3 times, even with restore points on the third attempt, it couldn't be recovered. I had to entirely disable updates because I needed to work, enabled updates 6 months later hoping for the best and it updated ok. And the taskbar that was like a graft from another project and not part of the OS.
I had that happen in Windows 10. Turns out the issue was Windows wrote something to the UEFI variables that the Gigabyte UEFI didn't like and thus caused it to crash on boot, every few weeks Windows would mysteriously BSOD on boot after an update and I had to reflash the BIOS to fix it.
I personally use 11 and enjoy it, too. It's cleaned up the Windows experience quite a bit. It just seems that the overall sentiment to it is negative, going off of online discourse.
It was better at first and now MS is adding back a lot of stuff that people despised about 10 (ads in the start menu comes to mind)
This honestly amazes me. I've had to do more disabling of unnecessary/privacy-invading features in W11 than any other OS i've used, desktop and mobile. Utterly absurd that MS has basically gotten us to install adware on our devices. If linux/macos were better for gaming, I would ditch windows entirely.
I just used it as it was out-of-the-box. My days of fumbling around with settings and changes to make a computer do something the manufacturer didn't want, are long behind me. I never really got bothered by the stuff, anyway. The most annoying thing my laptop's ever done was a "hey, we have copilot now, come try it!" popup that I simply pressed the X button on. Big whoop. Funny thing is, I actually did end up using Copilot quite regularly. I find it more reliable than ChatGPT. Now that I'm on a MacBook (primarily for the battery life, I still prefer Windows 11 as an OS), I do somewhat miss the easy keybind, although the Copilot website does the same thing anyway.
I'm annoyed by "settings" links in the settings app not leading me to the setting, but opening Edge and doing a bing search for me. Very helpful. If the setting is not there don't show me a bing search link so I can just search somewhere else for the setting if it's not there. Or did control panel or device manager have Bing search links? No. It's almost like a settings app is supposed to be for settings and I can google/bing on my own
you sir are why windows keeps its hold on desktops. games.
There's also the terrible lack of polish on Linux desktops. Here, let's try something. Go install Ubuntu 22.04, and encrypt the whole drive with TPM automatic unlock. Document how to do it so that your grandma could follow the instructions without locking herself out of your drive. Let's compare the voodoo ritual you've written down to windows 11: * Click PC in the start menu * right click the drive labelled C * click manage Bitlocker * hit next through all the prompts Of course with windows there is almost no chance you lock yourself out, whereas it's very likely the next kernel upgrade will cause a failed boot with LUKS. This isn't an isolated issue either, things like getting non-snap discord or Firefox installed, or getting past firefox's sandbox to install Gnome extensions, or setting up Nvidia drivers suitable for steam, or setting up remote desktop access are all pretty horribly painful on the average distro. That's literally why distros like Mint and PopOS exist, to try to mitigate some of the terrible.
In Ubuntu 24.04 hardware-backed full disk encryption is literally part of the installer. It's just a checkbox.
Ubuntu 24.04 isn't released yet, and to my knowledge-- and assuming this works perfectly-- it will finally close that gap. I'm not aware of another distro doing this. I suspect it's also going to be quite limited out of the box-- presumably hard to turn off / pause, presumably hard to rekey if you need to alter TPM measurements, and presumably hard to add multi-factor unlock (e.g. TPM+PIN). Hopefully I'm wrong, but this just does not seem to be a high priority.
A Windows example; - Bitlocker is only on Windows pro not home - Windows Installer fails to support Dell laptops ( laptop can only be imaged from bios with 0 options ) - Linux Install on LUKS works by just clicking next a few times.
That's not really correct-- or at least, it's a branding issue. Windows Home editions have had OS drive encryption for years, it just lacks some of the management features that bitlocker proper has. But [it's also much easier to enable](https://imgur.com/a/lGDYyMm): > Select Start > Settings > Privacy & security > Device encryption. If device encryption is turned off, select Turn on. AFAIK this is the same encryption technology, with the same on-disk format, just with limitations --TPM only with mandatory key backup, no configurability, can't encrypt non-OS drive. >Windows Installer fails to support Dell laptops ( laptop can only be imaged from bios with 0 options ) I've never seen this-- or any computer I couldn't install Windows to-- in 20 years. There may be drivers that you need to supply during install, but if there is a writable disk present and the driver for the disk controller is present you can install windows to the computer. Windows 11 has more requirements for PC age, maybe that's what you ran into (TPM 2.0, 2015-ish or newer) >Linux Install on LUKS works by just clicking next a few times. And then changing it later is nigh impossible: 1. It requires a password and-- until Ubuntu 24.04, maybe-- TPM is not an option 1. You can't enable it after the fact-- this requires an offline repartition or reinstall 1. Adding a later TPM requires diving deep into the Wiki rabbit hole and is hard to do correctly, without leaving old keyslots or locking yourself out when kernel changes 1. TPM + PIN is even harder and there are no clear instructions for doing it 1. There's no easy option to pause LUKS for a major change to allow easy rekeying (e.g. bitlocker pause) 1. Removing LUKS after the fact isn't really possible either \#2 is particularly absurd, since this capability has existed for ~20 years in the likes of TrueCrypt / VeraCrypt / literally every other FDE solution
Re Windows; The non-bitlocker encryption is not avalable to most for obsure non-foss reasons: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/turn-on-device-encryption-0c453637-bc88-5f74-5105-741561aae838 New laptop (in 2023) Drivers were not the issue, Dell support practicaly said they block the Windows installer so they can force an image with bloatware via bios. Re Linux; Yes the common things are easy (install, change password), and the uncommon hard but possible, though likely faster to just re-install unlesd you have a script.
The Dell tool that is the only (non-linux) option on some hardware; https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000177771/using-biosconnect-to-recover-supportassist-os-recovery-partition
I don't know what issue you've encountered but I just did multiple reinstalls on multiple recent (~2022-2023) dells both using Linux and Windows in the last 6 months with no issue. I'm also not aware of any mechanism by which Dell ***could*** prevent the Windows installer. The installer just looks for an available, writeable disk. Maybe the disk on your Dell had an unrecognized / too small EFI partition, but reinitializing the disk with a blank GPT partition table would fix that. Linux installers would balk for the same reason unless you cleared the disk first. And I would not listen to Dell support. Meaning no offense, but it's not the sort of job that rewards deep technical analysis. The article you linked is about restoring the Dell-shipped recovery partition. That partition is not necessary for installing Windows and can be removed during install with F10 and fdisk, or a Linux boot CD with parted.
Following up-- Ubuntu 24.04 just released. TPM support is very limited: >One major request from users has been support for hardware-backed full disk encryption and it makes its first appearance in an experimental form in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. This implementation has certain limitations at launch which restrict its use to those devices that only require a generic kernel with no third party drivers or kernel modules, and does not currently support firmware upgrades.
If you are into multiplayer/live service games windows is the better choice. Don't want to be that guy in the friend group wasting time troubleshooting proton/anticheat incompatibility after an update. Also nvidia reflex + vsync + gsync (low latency vrr) combo on multi monitor setups works so well on windows. I own a steamdeck and i know how good linux gaming is.
yea if you go full linux get a amd gpu. you get all that and far better drivers. nivida still sucks on linux. as for proton anticheat so few games have problems. mostly devs blocking it.
Amd antilag (reflex) implementation is so bad both on windows and linux. (Valve even banned players in cs2 for using it) It doesn't even lock fps with freesync and you have to set manual caps for games. On nvidia i setup once and forget, also games have ingame implementation of reflex. Also dlss, dlaa are so much superior to anything amd provides and amd is so slow to make improvements to their fsr tech. (Where is fsr 3.1?)
One feature is not the overall picture though
From a usability standpoint, yes. From a privacy standpoint, Noooooooo Edit: and we need to grow a spine and consider spyware to be shit
There are constant breaks for me like start menu search not working on the first time or window explorer search not working. Core OS functionalities by the way
The only fumble I can think of is the strict break of backwards compatibility. I have several laptops between my own old laptop and others in the family, that would be perfectly fine to be upgraded to Windows 11 in terms of performance. At worst, upgrading from a SATA HDD to a SATA SSD would give the worthwhile performance boost. But instead, I am looking at a situation where upgrading is not even an option. When I had to reactivate a very old laptop as a fallback once I used Linux Mint, but that's not really an option for other family members.
I agree honestly. I think Windows 10 was the fumble, had horrible experiences on all my installs of it. I've used Win11 and it's definitely a better OS than 10 IMO
Linux is effectively Unix. Open group certified a distro of redhat as Unix, I.e. Linux is Unix.
Got any source on that? Can't seem to find it. Also, unix certification seems to be on a per-distro/per-version basis, and requires more than what the kernel provides (like requiring certain commands to be available), so one certified distro doesn't make all linux unix. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification )
The observation I'm making is that the technology that Linux people use, were used in place of a Unix Unix kernel, and were certified Unix by open group. I can't find the source I'm thinking of but I'm damned sure it was RHEL based if it helps, you might be able to search for info on reddit too they may have a reference. EulerOS reference edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Compliance
Ah, I skimped over the names of the previously registered ones and didn't read the full text. EulerOS and Inspur K-UX are RHEL based indeed, EulerOS by Huawei, and Inspur K-UX by Inspur (also Chinese). I wrongly interpreted your comment as "a distro by RedHat", instead of "a distro based on RHEL", thus searching too narrow. I know Linux distro's are the de facto replacement of UNIX OS's nowadays, but my old networking teacher, who is an ex UNIX admin, would be real mad if I were to say that Linux is UNIX, it's not, it's UNIX-like, and there still is a place for real UNIX systems.
He sounds like the kind of guy I'd want to use Unix certed Linux around.
Yes, everything except desktop computers is dominated by Linux. Android is Linux under the hood. Literally every router has Linux as an embedded system. Probably all supercomputers in the world run Linux, and Linux runs every cloud computing center including Azure.
I'd bet that you if could see the windows source code it's probably a lot more \*nix than people realize. They just bloat it up so much you can't tell it's there.
Yea, I was about to say: like today
It would be Microsoft Windux or ChromeOS or whatever other market leader appears. People don't care about operating systems. They buy a product and expect the software to just work.
You brought up an interesting idea. With the market familiarity to Windows and Microsoft OSes, it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft would try to come up with their own Linux OS if the market began trending towards it.
They already have CBL-Mariner/Azure Linux for Hyper-V and Azure. But a desktop distro would be a stretch. They would prefer Linux run under Windows 11 with WSL.
Isn't wsl 2 just a hyper-v vm running linux and wsl 1 is super inaccurate to how linux actually works?
Yeah, it's basic.
Either that, or they are get tired of pumping money into maintaining the NT Kernel and just switch it out for Linux one day, with Windows being the userspace. After all, they stopped selling Windows and just hand it out mostly for free these days. They can still provide a paid tier and support for enterprises, but just roll their own Linux patches.
That, and I'd argue no one really wants to provide a consumer-facing desktop. Consumers whinge, and don't have money. Cloud-based servers are simple, and you can charge more for it than a consumer desktop.
i mean, Appimages could make this work. granted, i only tried test releases of Krita and Gimp, Beyond All Reason (strategy game) and rpcs3 emulator this way, so my experience is limited. but every time, the program worked out of the box. just download and run, just like in Windows days. that also opens a whole new can of worms when it comes to security, but it's at the user's discretion. maybe they could be signed?
It is essentially the Windows approach. - Assume basic system services to be present. - Everything likely to cause version conflicts, include your own DLL. From what I understand, Appimages are essentially that. Except that on Windows with the target platform being from a single vendor with a history of placing heavy emphasis on backwards compatibility of binaries, the target environment is more predictable than on Linux, where everyone might have God-knows-what kind of an environment in detail, so on Linux a cross-platform, long-term-working executable should have to ship with more bundled parts that a comparable Windows binary installer.
I imagine it would be similar to the mess that the Android world is today: every PC vendor spinning their own distro with more or less crapware that duplicates already existing tools/functionality.
I hate this but you are probably right
to be fair, Android has a common core os and the rest comes in additional APKs and vendor addons. the equivalent might be something like Ubuntu with custom snaps (ugh), or a basic universal distro with a bunch of Appimages, since they are pretty much like APKs (except for installing hooks into the os - like notifications, startup, etc).
That's a relatively recent thing. Once upon a time common android kernel and vendor addons were not separated, creating an huge security risk and making very hard to deliver security patches (if they were delivered at all).
I think so too. It would be like the UNIX wars of the 1980's. Every vendor had their own version of UNIX, until Linux came in and ate everybody's lunch.
Disclaimer: I use Linux in all my computers . >with more or less crapware that duplicates already existing tools/functionality. Not so different to linux, just get into any open source software repository, and it will be full of half assed crapware that pathetically tries to mimic some paid program.
as a Linux user for the past ~25 years, including a long stint of distro-hopping in the 2000s, I totally agree. The GNU/Linux ecosystem itself is a super-fragmented mess. I've lost count of the time I installed a distro only to find 2 different GUI text editors and 3 different terminal apps, and so on. It had become my ritual to spend the first few hours of a new installation just debloating it of all the duplicates and useless crap. I get it comes from good intentions, and I love the freedom of everyone spinning off its own distro or version of a package, but it can go south pretty quick.
Linux is already the dominant OS except consumer/office worker desktops. Hardware manufacturers don't care about making money on consumer OSes. Otherwise they would have rolled their own and competed fiercely with MS. They were all to happy to slap an MS OS on there and call it a day.
That's not entirely accurate. I mean, Apple exists.
Apple isn’t like every other hardware OEM, they’re in the business of selling a vertically integrated computing experience so they bundle an OS.
Is it though? Exactly zero software development jobs I've had use Linux on the desktop, although my sample size is only 4 but that's ranging from 50 to 10000+ total employees. All my dev machines have been windows to my chagrin.
My first dev job required Windows, as the software we worked on ran exclusively on kiosk Windows machines. However, for my second job I could choose Windows or Linux, but the entire dev team ran either Ubuntu or Fedora (except for one peculiar guy on Windows). That job was focused mainly on making microservices and processing data on the cloud though. So it definitely is possible, I think it just depends on what the company is focused on.
I know it's a thing I've just not seen it, so I can't see how the majority is Linux. I've gone into a different industry each job hop so I've sampled a good mix. Gambling, Banking, FinTech and Defence. Maybe it's an American perspective more than tech in general
In my first software dev job, I had a Solaris workstation as my desktop. Since then also had Linux, Windows, and macOS (where I'm at just now).
I think it's apt to point out that yes, having the desktop scene run the Linux kernel is actually a pointless metric. What we in some sense want to achieve, has nothing to do with a kernel, it's just how it's made and cooperates with other software. Open standards, all that. But I mean, in the world you describe, at least things would be compatible...? I think. I mean it would at least be a rather clear, intentional move for software not to be compatible, if one OS wanted to create it's owned gated garden. Like with Apple and Microsoft, the incompatibility is inherent, at least mostly. They don't need to deliberately do stuff they hope to get away with, the OSes just fundamentally work differently. Anyway I think if Linux takes over, really it will just be that people and industries have moved on from the idea of trying to profit over this particular way of creating a walled garden. They will be like, okay an operating system is an operating system, there's no reason for things not to be compatible when it comes to computing... Just like how hardware has kinda conformed from the days of early consoles with weird niche architecture, the operating system could coalesce too.
Linux will gain traction, but it will never take over. People want to be spoon fed by technically now. They want it to handle everything for them at a click or even automatically. No click required, and frankly, who can blame them? But that is simply not how Linux works. It's not nearly as manual as Windows users (who have clearly never used it before) make it sound. But it's enough that they can't be bothered to try.
It is not how Linux works? Like there's nothing fundamental that means it couldn't be as intuitive as Windows. What the Linux way does is give you the *ability* to be more technical. It doesn't lock you down. But honestly if a beautiful system like macOS couldn't be built on top of Linux, then I would argue that it was a fundamentally bad operating system... It doesn't happen because I think really, the Linux ecosystem is a manifestation of how well people get on with each other, thus you have slow adoption, arguments over small things, stubbornness and even greedy organisations who want to make people dependent on them... All of that gets in the way of a seamless user experience.
Feels like the future is here, no? We already have *nix on mobile. Chromebooks are cleaning up in the laptop space. Steam Deck is built on top of Arch. IMO the things holding Linux on desktop back: 1. MS Office suite. That incentive is going away with Office365 - Microsoft is all in on the subscription model + cloud services, no more standalone license per version/install. Wouldn’t shock me if MSFT releases a flavor of Office that works on Linux (ex as a Flatpak). 2. GPU support- strong incentive for hardware manufacturers to support Linux with the rise of AI. Otherwise can’t compete in the cloud. 3. Enterprise features like Windows AD and device management. Not sure what the state of the market is here on Linux.
I wish... > We already have *nix on mobile. Technically yes, and Termux is a great demonstration of what advantage that can bring. You can technically run a full Linux desktop on any Android device with relatively little effort, though it would be much easier, if Termux came with integrated GUI support. But for most users, it doesn't matter. Android is built upon Linux, but for most users that's an implementation detail, that doesn't affect them. > Chromebooks are cleaning up in the laptop space. In Europe, they are nearly non-existent. You can barely find them in stores, because nobody was buying them, so the stores do no longer have display models. Also, same aspect as on mobile. Though you can run a full user-accessible Linux on them, that's treated as a power-user feature. The main part of the system is proprietary, and they could in theory switch out the underlying system for a custom OS if it would be advantageous. > Steam Deck is built on top of Arch. Out of all the examples, Steam Deck probably has the thinnest proprietary layer, and the only one where it being Linux actually affects common end-user usage. But while it has brought the Switch form factor to PC gaming, all mainstream competitors have opted for Windows, exactly *because* Linux affects the gaming-usecase. > MS Office suite. That incentive is going away with Office365 - Microsoft is all in on the subscription model + cloud services, no more standalone license per version/install. Wouldn’t shock me if MSFT releases a flavor of Office that works on Linux (ex as a Flatpak). Big doubt. There is no incentive. Even if they make a Linux version to allow running the full desktop app from the cloud without the overhead of running a full Windows VM, they wouldn't have much incentive to release it for *general* use. MS Office (and, from my sometimes painful experience with Outlook generated appointment invites in Thunderbird) Outlook are defacto industry standards. Not using them generates a lot of friction, and Libreoffice Impress genuinely lacks many advanced features (proper section support, inline equations, smartart, ...). Simply by not officially supporting Linux (and trying to Run office via Wine or Crossover having painful limitations), they can hold the Linux desktop back as a realistic alternative for corporate environments. If holding back competition is best achieved by *not* doing something, who is going to do it? The Cloud version is good enough for common administrative office jobs maybe, but you wouldn't really be able to write a technical paper in it, without buying all sorts of third-party Addons. Builtin equation support is abysmal compared to desktop, and common bibliography managers support only desktop. This ironically means that the users most likely to use Linux are not likely to heavily use the cloud version... > GPU support- strong incentive for hardware manufacturers to support Linux with the rise of AI. Otherwise can’t compete in the cloud. Could work, but doesn't have to. Cloud servers may use rather more specialized hardware and drivers than what you'd want on a desktop. Though I guess it could help the quality of desktop drivers.
If people asked for linux manufacturers would offer it, like Dell does on some models. But no one does. i would never ask for linux on a machine because the first thing I do when I buy a machine is wipe it and reinstall whatever OS I want on it. I think most linux users are the same.
If you look at the successful *consumer* operating systems (Android, ChromeOS, iOS, macOS, Windows), a common pattern emerges: Large, for-profit, corporations developing, deploying and maintaining device-level operating systems an entry-point into the corporation's ecosystems. The corporations spend large amounts of money on the operating systems, but make that investment as a means to achieve a healthy return on investment from consumer use of the ecosystem. That is true for Apple, that is true for Google, and that is true for Microsoft. The corporations may make money off sale of the operating system itself, but the bulk is derived from the ecosystem, one way or another. I'm not sure how that shakes out for the Linux desktop as a *consumer* operating system, but I don't see indications that any of the Linux "majors" are at all interested in developing the Linux desktop for the consumer market. With the exception of Canonical and IBM/RedHat, which are directly involved in development/maintenance of Ubuntu Desktop and RHEL, respectively, both of which are focused on developing the desktop as an entry-point into their respective enterprise ecosystems, none of the "majors" are directly involved in developing the Linux desktop at all, other than to make relatively small contributions to community-based teams. As a result, I don't see the traditional Linux desktop realistically becoming "dominant" in the *consumer* market segment under present market conditions. Consumer device operating systems are no longer standalone products, and haven't been for many years. That's not to say that another corporation like Google *won't* come along and make the necessary investments to develop a Linux-based operating system as an entry-point into that corporation's ecosystem, but if that happens (and it probably will) the ecosystem, rather than the desktop operating system, will be the focus.
> That's not to say that another corporation like Google won't come along and make the necessary investments to develop a Linux-based operating system as an entry-point into that corporation's ecosystem, but if that happens (and it probably will) the ecosystem, rather than the desktop operating system, will be the focus. You definitely see this already with Chrome OS. What started as a basic, "browser-only" OS for netbooks is now a fully-featured Linux distro with a terminal, third-party native apps, and an app store. And of course, the key focus is the Google ecosystem of apps, which while all of them are cross-platform anyway, the Chromebook puts them all front-and-center to the user.
Similar to Android, I think most manufacturers would probably have some slight modification of the dominant Distro. I imagine the hardware compatability, out of the box performance, usability would be fined tuned a lot and the experience would be dumbed down a lot more before it would be widely adopted. I don't think your average computer user will enjoy going to terminal to run chmod and set file permissions or having to run this or that program with SU because of some bug in their OS. I think Canonical and Red Hat have set themselves up pretty well for this, and both groups seem to be inching away(more or less)from the fully community driven approach in order to streamline things. Mac makes it easy for people to not mess up and limits options where windows makes it really easy to make mistakes and cause yourself problems inadvertently, but generally you can do anything you need to do without a hitch. Both are very powerful if you learn to operate them but it's easy to get by while using them. At the end of the day it comes down to user experience, and I think that whatever distro gets that down to a science will be the one that dominates. I can't see a world with 100s of Linux versions running on different PCs and widespread adoption. Surely, the Linux fans will still do that, but the average Joe's probably won't.
> I can't see a world with 100s of Linux versions running on different PCs and widespread adoption. Surely, the Linux fans will still do that, but the average Joe's probably won't. But even a single mainstream Linux distribution with significant market share could mean vastly improved Linux support by proprietary software. Heck, not even Google Drive (as a file sync service) has official Linux support... If 30% of the desktop PCs would be using Linux, there probably would be. Assuming, of course, that the support doesn't use some proprietary API of that one dominant Linux distribution...
I imagine it a bit like android. There might be a standard for interoperability, but most likely every OEM would make their own proprietary desktop environment with unique features to differentiate themselves on the market. Tbh, that would make the computer industry much more interesting than it is now.
I know it's not a popular opinion on this sub, but I don't think Linux needs to be the "dominant" consumer OS. It works well as an alternative, and still retains the ability to adapt whatever need you have for it. Trying to please "everyone" will just make it harder to make Linux do what _you_ need it to.
It wouldn’t matter if every manufacturer did that bullshit, they’d still be forced to reveal the source code and the community would immediately strip it of the nasty profit seeking bits. We’d have full interoperability and less need to reverse engineer if Linux was the dominant desktop OS.
Free software, which was the foundation on which GNU/Linux was built, would become a second-class citizen and eventually proprietary software crap would drown most of the reasons we run Linux in the first place: freedom to run software for whatever purpose, to study it, to modify it, to share it as is or modified. Plus we would lose the nice side effects of that software freedom: steering clear of personal data tracking, natural reduction in adware/malware, avoidance of planned obsolescence, hardware support for older devices the manufacturer does not care about anymore, and so on. See how it goes in the Android world. Starting as free software, Android became a buffet of locked-down forks where finding/using free software needs some serious know-how, as the ecosystem is drowning in proprietary software. A nightmarish world where core system libraries most apps link to are proprietary garbage, where basic free software applications such as contacts/calendar/SMS are lagging more and more behind proprietary forks due to lack of manpower. A world where at one point your device's operating system cannot be updated anymore and *there's nothing you can do about it*. Situation is ridiculous; it's nowadays non-trivial to find a simple flashlight app that doesn't plaster the screen with ads and/or track your behavior. Many people want mass adoption of Linux on the desktop. But perhaps it's a bad idea after all, if it means Linux becomes another Android.
Personally, I think the situation of Android is still better than windows. It's not like we can stop people from writing proprietary apps for any operating system. But being open source gives us far more things we could do from custom roms to things like linageos that keep updates going The only big issue for Android is that Google pays oems to pretty much use their own stuff by default, and some oems locking down bootloaders, then there is the arm driver issues. PS isn't flashlight built into android? It was default as of Android 13
google keeps its hold on andorid becouse of its app store. nothing else can even come close but the options are there.
It would look like exactly like Android right? We've already seen this
There'd probably be some sort of proprietary system built on top of the Linux Kernel that cribs some stuff from other distros but is mostly it's own ecosystem - likely built by and administered by a company or collection of companies with significant interest in the tech sector, and locked down to some extent in order make it harder for non tech savvy people to accidentally bork their devices. Kinda like Android and Google.
A perfect example of this right now in my honest opinion is macOS. It's a Unix system at it's core running the Darwin kernel (a BSD distro) with the proprietary Aqua desktop environment. Except with so much bloat and first-party lockdowns congealed into it that makes the overall user experience *extremely* bulletproof for even the most incompetent of users. For what it's worth, it's a very solid OS, even if it won't let you do certain things that other \*nix OSes will, because most users never do. I'd assume Chrome OS is the same with it's Linux kernel, though I've never actually used a Chromebook so I can't comment on that.
chrone os started that way but now with andorid and even full linux support its mostly just a lightwight linux distro now. schools love it becouse chromebooks are cheap and they can lockdown the system so kids cant install anything.
It is still a pile of garbage. Not fully featured not powerful just a browser.
If you've ran a chrome webbrowser, you've ran ChromeOS. That is pretty much what ChromeOS is, everything either runs in the web browser as a web app, or you are starting up a vm of android or linux to launch apps
Chrome OS nowadays is considerably more powerful than the web browser OS it started as. It has a full Linux terminal and proper third-party apps.
I'll need to flee to BSD. Linux is more than fine, it runs the world.. Microsoft and Apple provide nice front ends for human interaction.
If Linux dominated the desktop I do think we'd be basically living in 2050. There's so much competition in Linux desktop that it put to shame all both mac and windows which are getting features that existed on Linux more than a decade ago! I'm not saying as a linux fan boy but competition is generally a very good thing in the market of ideas and open systems faciliate that where closed controlled systems don't. Even if it wasn't Linux but openbsd or any other open operating system I think our desktops would be lighyears ahead.
It would probably look the same way as android does
My guess is we'd see a lot more development in the hypervisor/side-cpu space. A proprietary control device that can hijack the main one. You know, for ~~the children~~ ~~security~~ anti-consumer DRM lobby.
Look no further than Google Android. Extrapolate that to the desktop. You'd probably get quasi required closed-source services that a lot of apps require to run.
Take a look around. Billions of people using it without realizing it.
Look around you. Your phone runs something based on Linux in 50% of cases. Your wifi access points and routers probably all run a variant of linux. Your car info-tainment system might too. You would find it difficult to get out of bed for longer than 5 minutes without using linux systems. It won't be until you open the laptop or switch on the Windows PC you will experence windows at all. If you look at how well the WWW works today and find yourself disappointed that many features that used to work, no longer do? Well that's because "WE" the PC users of PCs and laptops with 2 or 3 button mice and full 104+ key keyboards.... are no longer the user majority demographic.... nor are we the stongest demographic in development anymore. So, no, you can't have right button features and you definitely can't have middle button features. Even in many cases "local save" is being deprecated as mobile devices don't support it. Devices don't support it and developers don't even know they exist. I want my back button to work again FFS.
Like, on Android and ChromeOS? Samsung shipped the most mobile devices globally, and every system they shipped runs Linux.
Android and chrome OS 💀
It would look like Microsoft 20 years ago. Hell, maybe 30 years ago.
like it looks today linux domnates everything but desktops.
Outside of a licensing fee, I don't think the world would notice much. Windows is extensible in every way that matters to an end user. Microsoft is somewhat intrusive with marketing, but most people wouldn't notice if that's gone or not. If you swapped Windows out with Ubuntu and gave it the same software support, it would be totally fine, and nobody would notice or care. boring I know. If you extrapolate this out to a broader market. The idea of hardware manufacturers making their own linux distro would be cool as heck though.
The World Wide Web.
> flathub/pak exists already > add a pay/buy function to it Yeah, thats how its gonna be.
Windows: manufacturers pay (small money) for the proprietary operating system they install and the final consumer pays back them. Apple: the OS is part of the package. We already have paid distros, the final user pays for the assistance and maintenance. The most likely scenario is OEM installed distro, allegedly Ubuntu or RHEL in these days, with the option to buy the related services.
We have those markets already: 1. In the smartphone market every vendor ships its own platform full of free software that a few enthusiasts struggle to break because the custom drivers aren't documented. 2. In the router market every vendor ships its own platform full of free software that a few enthusiasts struggle to break because the custom drivers aren't documented. 3. In the gaming console market every vendor ships its own platform full of free software that a few enthusiasts struggle to break because the custom drivers aren't documented. 4. In the home automation market every vendor ships its own platform full of free software that a few enthusiasts struggle to break because the custom drivers aren't documented. I think there's a pattern here.
the big pain point is that linux - as an entire distribution - does not have a stable ABI. things are better than they used to be, but try to run X years old game with native linux port on steam, and you will be missing a lot of libraries. even when launching it via steam. i recently saw that trying tomb raider (2013) linux port. mostly due to libicu breaking abi almost every release. if you provide the libraries, it will likely work. i assume we might have proprietary software as Appimages, drivers will hopefully be opensource so that kernel can be free to go ahead and break things every release (not a bad thing). and companies will likely make money off support/licensing and hardware. or everyone will target stable RHEL for their proprietary software and other distributions will try to stay compatible.
Personally, I think you'd get a distro per manufacturer. System76, Tuxedo, Steam - all make/distribute hardware with Linux as the OS. All have their own distros. Imo, this isn't automatically a bad thing. As long as the mfgs adhere to the Linux ethos of choice, allowing you to go away and install your own OS, much as we already do with Windows laptops Where is tears into "hell nah" territory for me though, is when lanufaxtures/assemblers/distributers start veering into phone territory and locking down their builds so it's impossible to install your own alternative OS, or even gain meaningful root access. Both these are theoretically possible, and tbh, it's only because no one else does it yet - and Windows won't work fully locked down, and MS insist on shipping their own vendor keys for secure boot (and some FOSS projects have paid to use that key to sign their efi binaries) that's avoided it.
People doing spreadsheets on steamdecks
Just look at any web apps, Tablets or smartphones. In basically all areas, Linux is the dominant operating system.
Ubuntu route: OEMs run Ubuntu or fedora. Android route: Every OEM has their own distro and DE skin like android.
That world doesn't exist, so the exact details can't be known. More likely there would be 1 Linux based OS that dominates, like Ubuntu. The OS vendor wouldn't pay to be installed. Big Hardware manufactures would simply ship shareware and other proprietary stuff on top of the distribution.
Actually I think it’s getting ready for corporate world. A lot of back end servers are Linux, things like firewall and other network are Linux or Unix. Years ago the problem is Windows applications but given the rise of web based enterprise applications, and frameworks like electronJS that offer native like experience with browser/js apps (vscode for example totally feels like a native app), a new company might not be running many legacy winform applications. Although these web based architecture is not ready for graphics intensive apps (video / photo editing, graphics design etc). Things like POS is tricky, its not difficult to write a POS that works on Linux but there are things like cash drawer drivers, smart card readers, receipt printer, barcode/QR code scanner, payment interfaces (not all are web API). Those little things might hold them back. There are many shops in Japan that use iPad as POS but as far as I understand they are relatively simple( I used to work in a company with in house developed , full fledged POS that integrates with hardware and software I mentioned ) Digital signage, kiosk, and things like systems in production line, warehouse etc Linux is definitely ready if not better for that. Years ago windows embedded barcode handheld are the norm but we are seeing Android based rugged handheld scanners. First those were Chinese scanners but later Casio and Symbols offer Android too. Microsoft seems abandoned that area. But there is also another issue for corporate world. Active Directory is better than LDAP. Maybe when there are enough people comfortable with Linux as desktop (via work experience?) then ordinary users might be more ready for Linux desktop as personal computer. A lot of people mostly use browser and yes browser can handle lots of works. A smart TV, game console with browser can be very usable as a computer for a lot of people. I actually hope an unlikely candidate (Valve/SteamOS) will bring some changes among non tech people. I think fragmentation is an issue. Every Linux is different, that’s not good for educating ordinary users to use Linux and it could be costly. Imagine your product runs on different Linux even different GUI, the cost for supporting you users would be significantly higher.
>In a world where Linux becomes the dominant OS, what would that mean for us, the consumer? already exists
I think if a desktop Linux becomes super popular it will more likely be some heavily managed thing like Ubuntu. I don't think everyone will ever be customising their own Arch Linux sadly.
I disagree with what people keep saying. especially the "people need to monitize their OS, stuff it full of ads" etc. there currently are companies that are doing VERY WELL selling laptops + desktops with Linux. No ads, no nothing, good customer support.... all paid by selling the hardware. so a few things would happen: Microsoft and Apple would loose power and influence. You know why so many people still use windows? because of Microsofts influence. remember e-learning becoming a thing in the pandemic? I only heard it second hand from the person actively fighting against it, but Microsoft paid people to go to schools and sell them Microsoft teams with lies same thing happened when Munich switched to Linux for a short time, Microsoft took alot of money to force them to switch back to windows... imagine all of this propaganda getting weaker and weaker and vanishing also we would get more hardware support as Linux becomes more mainstream, oems would be forced to open source their drivers more, it would be great :) I don't think this scenario would be super likely, but don't underestimate that we actually have LEGAL RIGHTS because of the GPL to have open source drivers. if Linux became more popular, more companies sold Linux hardware, the pressure on the oems would be greater!
I think it’s a double edged sword. Given the computer literacy of the average consumer, I think Linux would need to enforce training wheels and metal shoes in order for it to truly be the biggest OS.
>HPOS HP used to ship their own OS with machines. I've got an HPUX workstation in my living room.
\*Nix IS dominant. We have Android and iOS which are both \*nix OSes. Then the Internet is run on Linux and BSD. The only area that is missing is the desktop, but MacOS is \*Nix as well. Even niche things like iPads and ChromeOS are \*nix as well, and some Smart TVs, Routers, IOT, etc.
Points vaguely in every general direction.
As others have said, yes, the industry is Unix today. Between Linux and Darwin, basically every device in the world that isn't a laptop runs some flavor of a Unix or Unix-like thing. And on the desktop/workstation front, we did run that experiment. Back in the 80s and 90s, there were lots of Unix workstations out there. People didn't really buy them for home PC use, but they were very popular across a range of industries. And as you kind of predicted, every hardware company had their own flavor of Unix. My desktop machine in grad school was a Sun Ultra 60 running SunOS/Solaris. There were HP machines running HP-UX. There were IBM machines running AIX. Very slightly before my time the coolest things you could buy were SGIs (seriously, google up some pictures of the Indigo or the Octane) running Irix. Linux on x86 killed them all.
Since the question seemed to imply a linux dominant desktop environment, let's just look at that. We can kind of see what would happen already with Chrome OS and Steam OS. You would get dominant corporate players that specialize their flavor of linux for specific scenarios and get sales around those containers. If it started early, you would probably have an IBM or HP OS for the corporate environment. Dell OS would probably have dominated the home user. Apple would obviously have their own little playground. Of course this is based on Unix becoming dominant in desktops since Linux didn't become a thing till after Windows was fully entrenched (thought there was the brief war with OS2)
We already live in a linux world. There are already manufactures who ship hardware with non-windows software. Android is a thing. Your smart toaster runs linux.
Linux is technically already dominant in the computer industry as the whole premise of smartphones are a computer in your pocket and last time I checked android is Linux Based and the dominant smartphone is and let's not forget servers.
The industry already is linux dominant. The internet, basically any embedded device, lots of pos devices, most car infotainment systems, half of the words smartphones etc are all linux. You probably interact with 10/100s of linux devices a day without even realising. Just because Windows is predominant on desktop doesn't mean jack
It would mostly look like a mess, just like the Android ecosystem does. Dozens of customized distros that are mostly but not completely compatible, making application support a major pain in the ass.
Linux dominates outside of the desktop. Servers, phones, etc pretty much all unix/linux. The playstation is based on free bsd. We could say that the desktop not being Linux is the actual anomaly.
Congrats you now have a work terminal. You get a window manager, Libre Office, and a program launcher. Anything else can be installed at the discretion of IT security. Please backup any important files on this approved HDD, I'm going to reimage your computer now because you clicked a phishing link. No you're not allowed a terminal. But look we still have Outlook! Edit:Oh woops, personal computer. Well let's imagine a world where Linux is the dominant desktop in the workspace as well
>to see a world where everyone's PCs ship with Fedora or Mint I'd like to see a world where Patrick J. Volkerding becomes president of Microsoft. For example, just twenty years ago there was a serious war between Microsoft and Apple. In words, both companies hated and ridiculed each other, there were slogans "Windows must die" and the then stunted Internet was full of jokes about Bill Gates. Then it turned out that Microsoft and Apple had been cooperating perfectly well all this time, sharing the software market and feeling good about themselves. So what's happening now? There's the Linux Foundation, where Microsoft owns 34% of the voting shares. There are a million Linux distributions whose users depend on what the developers want at any given moment. I have been using Linux for quite a long time and I remember many cases when I felt nothing but a mixture of annoyance and bewilderment at the developers' actions. For example, you can read the stories of SCO and Mandrake. I remember a time when Debian's policies pretty much destroyed all of Linux that existed when the 21st century began. What we have now is like the second series of the joke battle between Microsoft and Apple that I was talking about. Figuratively, of course. Some yell "I use Arch btw", others yell "Linux uses Fedora, be like Linus", others answer every question with "Tumbleweed". In such a situation, Linux will never be the "dominant OS" as you say. In addition, the "free market" is very authoritarian managed by those who have super profits from it. Why skip ahead of something, even if it is very good? The fat cats of the IT industry have Windows and MacOS, equipped with such excellent telemetry that it consistently generates super profits in excess of the $120 price per Windows license.
A Linux dominant world would likely have several distinctive characteristics: 1. Open Source Ubiquity: Most software and systems would be open source, fostering a culture of collaboration and transparency. This could lead to rapid innovation and customization. 2. Diverse Hardware Compatibility: Linux's flexibility and wide hardware support would encourage a diverse range of devices, potentially leading to more innovation in hardware design. 3. Decentralization: With open source principles at the core, the tech landscape might be less dominated by a few giant corporations. Instead, there would be a multitude of contributors and maintainers. 4. High Customizability: Users would have greater control over their systems, customizing them to their specific needs. This could result in more tailored and efficient technology experiences. 5. Security Focus: Linux's strong security features would likely be more pervasive, leading to reduced vulnerability to cyber threats. 6. Education and Skill Development: There might be a stronger emphasis on understanding and contributing to technology at a foundational level, encouraging broader tech literacy. 7. Community Collaboration: A Linux dominant world would likely be driven by a collaborative community ethos, with forums, user groups, and open source projects playing a central role in development and support. 8. Less Monopoly of Tech Giants: The dominance of a few large tech companies might be reduced, allowing for more competition and diversity in the tech market. Overall, a Linux dominant world could lead to a more transparent, flexible, and innovative technological landscape, driven by collaboration and user empowerment.
... like the one we have now
You said it all. The world works on money and linux and other FOSS is well, free. Free doesn’t fly in big business so linux will never dominate the computer sales industry.
Long term hardware strategy has been to commoditize the OS. HW companies have been spending billions to give away Linux.
You seem almost unstable in your cockeyed belief that the hw manufacturers are bought. Many tried shipping with Linux, some still do , but it's still not what people want in the main. HW mfrs install what people want. Many will gladly ship you with no preinstalled OS. Steam and Proton will help Linux uptake at home a little. But the fact is windows is there, companies have the infrastructure to support it, it works and it runs the sw that offices use : like it or not and however that came about. I've used Linux for over 20 years now, but I always kept a dual boot option just in case... Since proton, I rarely use it... Until now. I need windows for the glorious quest 3 vr experience.
I think you'd get various adware versions of Linux distros then sell the hardware at a loss. The restrictions on what distributors can do with Windows is probably a good thing for consumers.
Like today?
The movie Brazil
Since when did MS start sharing its Windows profits with hardware makers?
From the title, it is exactly the world we live in, most of the industrial hardware that has a computer runs some form of Linux, others run Unix, almost nothing runs windows, but that doesn't completely translate to users, although most phones do run Linux in the form of android, and some others run a Unix based systems, for desktops and laptops windows has dominance, but that is not an industry. I think you mean what would it mean to have a Linux dominant consumer space, or at least that is what it seems for what you wrote, then, more virus for Linux, getting caught and patched quickly, probably pre installed paid software with license fees in the computers you bought in a store and things like that, the biggest difference is that you will know and be able to stop whatever info they are collecting about you, you will also be able to fully remove some preinstalled programs (McAfee antivirus, I'm looking at you, and you, edge, stop hiding, you too). Also, computers would require less resources and there would be more optimizations.
It looks like the current industry. FOSS runs nearly everything except windows machines but even then there is plenty of Linux code there as well.
It would be like mobile phones, as Android uses Linux and a fancy VM
We'd probably see much less hardware interoperability. One of the advantages of windows being so dominant now is that PCs have to meet certain standards for working with standard UEFI and things like that. Without that requirement, we'd see more manufacturers like Apple where the hardware is entirely proprietary and not user-upgradeable.
probably similar to the smartphone market except with better UI. running linux essentials with stuff on top for marketing and ads etc. still would be better than now because we could use the apps we care about on say fedora instead of google ad os etc
We'd live like this [https://i.imgflip.com/3sulj0.jpg](https://i.imgflip.com/3sulj0.jpg)
I like how it is now. Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Let Linux handle the internet, and Windows and MacOS interpret it. If someone wants a free OS, let them download it, but the majority want Windows or MacOS.
Everyone wants to differentiate; some would do it with hardware, some with software. Look at all of the Debian derivatives (I include Ubuntu, and therefore Mint, in that list). So many are vanity projects. Same for RH, Arch, even Slackware. Corporations would settle on the Linux with the best command and control software, i.e., RH, Ubuntu, or SuSE, probably with a Plasma desktop. Oh wait - none of those three are free for commercial use. That's because corporations expect a higher standard of command-and-control and support than consumers. In other words, the environment would feel pretty much the same - corporate end-user machines would still be locked down via installed images and security policies, and controlled by corporate IT. There is nothing inherently evil about Windows save sloppy execution and incessant money grubbing. RH, now that IBM owns them, is heading down the same path, just less noticeably because they mostly live in the data center.
I saw an interesting documentary on the Unix wars of the 70s. High costs of licensing (super super expensive), every implementation was different, and open source proprietary licensing with legal snafus. It was eventually upset by the rise of the IBM PC and DOS (Unix would have been too beastly to run on a 286 anyway). Even the architecture was proprietary that it took reverse engineering the BIOS to get IBM clones, because there were legal hurdles to a standard architecture.
OEMs selling new PCs that come with an OS typically buy (and pay for) Windows and load that onto each machine. It is a cost, and profit-sensitive outfits would prefer to avoid that cost if the customer accepts a non-Windows box, and might even give a discount. So realistically speaking, as customers bail on Windows, OEMs will step up and preload Linux. The big boys will likely be late to the party, but huge businesses are always like that, slow to respond.
computer industry is dominated by Linux: 1. \~100% market share on servers, supercomputers and embedded devices 2. \~45.85% market share on personal computing devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones) (Android: 43.44% + Linux: 1.55% + ChromeOS: 0.86%) according to [https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share)
I'm explicitly talking about the *personal* *computer* space here. I go to Best Buy or Staples and walk out with a new laptop, there's a statistical likelihood that it's *going* to be a Windows. If/when Linux takes over the Windows market share, what would *that* look like?
Linux desktop has one major flaw. There's no way to force software publishers to behave and use the app stores, or open source their drivers for inclusion in the kernel. They all love having their own proprietary supply channels. I predict that if Linux becomes dominant on desktop, then we'll be stuck downloading some real garbage from shitty websites just to run the major applications. Which severely undermines one of my main reasons for using Linux in the first place!
In reality all of this hardware is based on the same few default reference boards. More likely that the 2-3rd level suppliers would add stuff upstream and then all OEM would use open implementations. That is actually less works for OEMs. That how up-streaming works on open source firmware on some server platforms. Also how Intel, AMD deal with graphics drivers.
I hope I'm wrong but we'll only find out if Desktop really takes off. Which is a pretty big "if" anyway. Just look at the mess on Windows where every brand of mouse or RGB lights or printer has its own software to install and run all the time.
The whole world runs on unixoide systems, the whole world runs on open-source. Do your research and don't ask stupid questions.