An important reason for lack of adoption is simply because every PC or laptop comes with Windows installed for free (as in gratis). People are generally lazy and don’t bother with installing another OS. I’m pretty sure that the general public doesn’t need the feature rich MS O365, and certainly doesn’t care about the toxic community or GNOME vs KDE/Plasma. They just take what’s already installed.
Three years ago I installed Linux Mint on my fathers laptop because of the slow performance of Windows and all the malware issues that he had. Before that he used to call me once a week the ask for help for his laptop but that stopped immediately after I installed Mint. He’s a happy Linux user now but he can’t tell you anything about his desktop environment, package manager or whether he’s running systemd. He doesn’t care about that, he just wants his laptop to work. If the laptop had come with Mint in the first place he probably wouldn’t have known that it had Linux on it.
Imo this article misses the point enterly which is : Microsoft and Apple advertise and lobby. Linux doesn’t - or at least not on the same playing field.
Every time a young tech-savvy person gets frustrated doing free tech support, where they’d normally have to do a clean install of Windows they just swap it out with Mint/Ubuntu instead.
Just don’t do free tech support for huge companies (as they after all got paid for providing that support)… it will probably get you some annoyed responses from friends / family members, but they most likely would not ask you to do substantial repairs on their cars for free either. So just don’t do it.
You’re very much correct. The average user couldn’t care less about what kind of stiff is running behind the curtain, they just want their machine to work. And unfortunately, the vast majority only know there is Windows and Mac. We need more manufacturers shipping computers with Linux, but that is a really hard task due to Microsoft’s and Apple’s influence and all. Also, Windows licenses are not free, they are simply embedded in the final price, so you could get slightly lower prices with Linux machines.
An important reason for lack of adoption is simply because every PC or laptop comes with Windows installed for free (as in gratis). People are generally lazy and don’t bother with installing another OS. I’m pretty sure that the general public doesn’t need the feature rich MS O365, and certainly doesn’t care about the toxic community or GNOME vs KDE/Plasma. They just take what’s already installed.
Three years ago I installed Linux Mint on my fathers laptop because of the slow performance of Windows and all the malware issues that he had. Before that he used to call me once a week the ask for help for his laptop but that stopped immediately after I installed Mint. He’s a happy Linux user now but he can’t tell you anything about his desktop environment, package manager or whether he’s running systemd. He doesn’t care about that, he just wants his laptop to work. If the laptop had come with Mint in the first place he probably wouldn’t have known that it had Linux on it.
This.
People are not even aware of alternatives.
Imo this article misses the point enterly which is : Microsoft and Apple advertise and lobby. Linux doesn’t - or at least not on the same playing field.
How to get Linux on every computer by 2050:
Every time a young tech-savvy person gets frustrated doing free tech support, where they’d normally have to do a clean install of Windows they just swap it out with Mint/Ubuntu instead.
Just don’t do free tech support for huge companies (as they after all got paid for providing that support)… it will probably get you some annoyed responses from friends / family members, but they most likely would not ask you to do substantial repairs on their cars for free either. So just don’t do it.
And then they still have to do free tech support.
You’re very much correct. The average user couldn’t care less about what kind of stiff is running behind the curtain, they just want their machine to work. And unfortunately, the vast majority only know there is Windows and Mac. We need more manufacturers shipping computers with Linux, but that is a really hard task due to Microsoft’s and Apple’s influence and all. Also, Windows licenses are not free, they are simply embedded in the final price, so you could get slightly lower prices with Linux machines.