this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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I'm curious to hear thoughts on this. I agree for the most part, I just wish people would see the benefit of choice and be brave enough to try it out.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

First of all, this guy is correct that this is a significant reason that Linux is not more popular on the desktop. Desktop Linux is a community of things, not just one thing that people can experience and recommend.

That said, XKCD has a nice explanation about why that will never be solved:

https://xkcd.com/927/

From time to time though, a distro will dominate and. Linux will grow. For a while, that was Red Hat. Then, it was Ubuntu. Both of those moved things forward but were too early to reach mass adoption. There really is no front-runner right now but perhaps one will emerge again and “that” will be Linux for the masses.

In the meantime, things like Flatpak are addressing a lot of the problem. It is becoming realistic for a dev to target “Linux” ( Flatpak ) and have their application run predictably regardless of what distro any given individual has chosen. Freedesktop.org helps as well.

Really though, this problem will exist until most of us ( not all ) agree that one Linux Desktop distro is simply better than the rest and most of us begin to use it. We can then onboard new users onto that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Linus Torvalds had a great rant about this situation. He believes that it might require Valve to fix this by becoming the de facto standard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does Valve ship a usable desktop distro?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It’s immutable, so you probably consider it unusable, but I think it’s necessary for mass adoption. Developers know exactly how the OS is built and can ensure their applications and games operate well on Steam OS. I think it will become a de facto standard, if it’s not already.