People who don’t care about what you think is important are not stupid.
They can be, but prioritizing say function over privacy, and usability over (perceived) technogical superiority is not stupid.
People who for example assume that everyone would choose Foss if given the choice are always going to be proven wrong.
ups I misunderstood what ReemZ wrote
To be clear, what did you, or more importantly what do you now, think I meant?
Not what I said, nor meant to imply.
No argument here, in fact I’ve tried to point out something to that effect. Most people don’t give a shit, so expecting them to “switch sides” is completely in vain.
If you throw enough cash at the problem it will get solved 
(I’m referring to marketing campaigns etc.)
I don’t think people are stupid. A lot of people just don’t have any interest because for one thing “There is no mass marketing campaign to educate people about the advantages to using Linux!” The major manufacturers are the problem because they do not want to put the effort and cost into supporting Linux. If more manufacturers would start offering Linux and not just to the business community where they can charge more for the product and or after care support then maybe Linux would become more main stream. Until people learn about something they don’t know. I don’t think putting people in the stupid box is necessarily true nor the right way to think of it. That’s not my perception and nor my understanding of other people who are not me or you. People tend to do things out of convenience, ability and the amount of effort required. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea and i just don’t mean Linux. I mean computers and or technology itself. If it doesn’t work out of the box then there are some people who just aren’t going there. Their choice.
It is also a purely economic question: Is it profitable to develop X things for an operating system with 2% market share?
Unless you are marketing towards a VERY specific demographic… No.
The market share won’t grow without proper support, but proper support won’t happen as long as there is no huge profit involved.
Without getting too political about it, it is simply capitalism working as intended. Unprofitable endeavours (no pun intended) are supposed to fail, according to economists. That means the Free Market is working as it should.
I tend to think there is actually more than a 2% market share. We can’t just look at the retail side of things. If you look at Linux as a whole i think it’s more. Significantly…no! But i think it could be and would be if manufacturers stepped up to the plate like i said & started to offer Linux to the consumer market and support which ever distribution they decide to use. It could be their own like PopOS. It could be EndeavourOS! It’s not an impossibility. It only takes one to get the ball rolling.
I don’t see that there is much work for the manufacturers to develop things to work with Linux. They just need to embrace it and see where it leads. Just my opinion and everyone can have their own. I’m just saying it’s possible.
True, but not entirely.
Anti-competitive business practices also come into play, and have played a significant role over the years to achieve dominant market share.
The conversation turned a little towards Linux market share, to which I responded
Yes, this 2% market share also seems suspiciously small to me. At this rate, the Linux-based operating system is much better known, another issue is that it is still unusual for many to use. Lenovo and Dell have so far manufactured laptops installed with Linux. Another question is how much is the demand for these devices. https://news.itsfoss.com/best-linux-laptops-2021/
It depends on what you mean with “better known”. If you mean “Android” and “Chrome OS” then maybe?
We are talking desktop here, not servers, not virtual machines on servers…
A very unscientific poll I made among my non-computer interested friends (and that’s like 99% of them) show that virtually nobody even knew that there was another choice other than Windows. Some mentioned Apple as “that weird thing hipsters use”. None of them even knew what Linux was.
Big corporations moved away from Unix with the arrival of Windows NT, and the governments that run Linux are few, but huge.
The ones i know of are: China’s entire government, central and provinces, run on an unofficial Ubuntu spin (Eventually planned to be replaced by Deepin). Turkey’s government uses Pardus, which btw is the only Arch based distro used by a government I know of.
The White House, specifically, moved to Red Hat 2001. The American Military moved to Red Hat from Windows over a period between 2007 and 2013 and has ran Red Hat since then.
Apart from a few provincial goverments and cities in Austria and Germany I don’t know of any other up front.
Universities is a different story; many universities run Debian or Ubuntu on a number of machines. But again, we are not counting servers or virtual machines but thick destop workstations both private and in companies.
Basically 2% sounds about right summarizing private and corporate. It is probably 5-8% if only counting corporate.
true
In south America Every major laptop brand offers Linux Laptops, I think we are very misled. Here its a sin to support linux if your a Laptop manufacturer, in South America they don’t give a monkey as long as they can sell laptops,
Excuse my ignorance but would that be due to income differences? If they can offer a cheaper product they can sell more. Im not sure about all places in south america but i do know that it tends to trend a bit lower so maybe thats why Linux becomes more prominent and profitable?
Frequently these laptops are delivered with FreeDOS, instead of Linux. Of course nobody is expected to use it like that, so it’s clear these OSes are thought of as placeholder OSes. In poorer countries piracy is pretty popular. So offering a laptop with a free OS means nothing else than that the user is responsible for sourcing and installing windows.
It’s not a sin, people just don’t see the point of it.
Windows works absolutely splendidly for most people, all their apps are made for it and games too.
You cannot break into a market with price benefit alone.
For the average European or north American user to switch you need:
A fully compatible MS office port as well as other common apps like say full support for iPhone proprietary software like iTunes and spotify. No, people will not be willing to learn another office suite. Nor will companies be willing to pay courses for employees.
Full support either from the distro maintainer or computer manufacturer. This means voided warranty if switching distro or DE. Logically.
Full gaming compability without wine or proton including of course full NVIDIA and proprietary wifi support.
A faster but yet more stable implementation of standards. Having an Xorg / Wayland split (or a pulseaudio / pipewire) is a typical example of Linux being unfit. Standards like this should have been set and implemented years ago.
And open source is not an excuse but the problem here. No centralized authority.
There are many other similar demands that must be met before the average home user would be willing to switch and the market is, as they say, mature. The 10 percent that uses Mac won’t switch to Windows, and neither will switch to Linux. Chrome sells cheap laptops primarily for schools because cheap.
This was my answer to this
I think you got me wrong Windows in these countries is not a forced requirement so the laptop manufactures knowing people are poor and laptops cost a lot of money the savings are past on to the buyer, win10 copies cost $5 on any street corner so does Office even that equates to more than a days work a laptop can be 6-12 months or more in wages. The laptops in collages schools are 10 years plus old and never updated as the net is to expensive for most, while the governments use $3500 + macs.
bloooooated
As someone who’s actually using Win11 atm…
The usual Windows caveats and issues aside, Win11 is no worse than Win10 from a user-perspective. There were a few click-to-run apps “installed” on the start menu after installation, like Netflix, Instagram and Twitter, but no Facebook app or anything of the sort (and yes, I know Insta is owned by FB).
Aesthetically it’s more coherent and nicer to look at than Win10. It’s very Plasma-like in appearance, as everything is transparent & blurred on the desktop (Start Menu, Taskbar, right-click desktop menu).
Other stuff like the new Settings screen is much improved from Win10, as is the Action Center.
However there are a few niggles.
No system tray or clock on a 2nd monitor’s taskbar? WTH?
Setting individual wallpapers per-monitor is impossible until you delete the default-created 2nd virtual desktop. Even after that, and setting your two wallpapers, you can’t set them individually for your 2nd desktop once you recreate it. And once you recreate it you can’t again set wallpapers per-monitor on desktop 1 again until you delete desktop 2…
Also, installing was a bit of a pain. I don’t use Secure Boot (SB) on my PC, so obviously my Endeavour and Pop OS installs were done without it enabled. However installing Win11 requires SB be enabled. Thankfully though it’s only for the installation, as afterwards you can switch SB back off and use grub again to dual boot (or in my case triple boot).
Final niggle: you can’t move your taskbar anymore. So you can’t move it to the left, right or top of your screen. It’s inexorably locked to the bottom of the screen now. Definitely a backwards move.
However I am getting used to the centralised taskbar now, and treating it more like an extended Dock.
So after using it for the past week or so, there’s enough improvements overall to make me keep it installed over my previous Win10 installation, and nothing too egregious to make me want to go back.
It launches officially in about 3 weeks (Oct 5th?).