> If the games start to run on Linux, what's still keeping people on Windows?
Let me tell you a story:
In the late 1940s the US airforce had a serious problem: many pilots were dying in incidents caused by apparent pilot error. At one point this number reached 17 pilots a day. After ruling out training as a cause, they turned their attention to ergonomics. In the 1920s, they had conducted a study to determine the physical dimensions of the average pilot and standardized all cockpit layout based on said average. Naturally, they suspected that the average pilot had changed over the nearly-two-decades since and conducted another study. With over 140 measurements of over 4,000 pilots they expected to be able to create a new standard for cockpit dimensions and layout that would better fit the contemporary average pilot.
And they probably would have done just that, if not for Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels. Daniels was a junior researcher assigned to taking the measurements. Due to his previous work on human body measurements, Daniels believed that designing for the average pilot was useless at best. Daniels created a picture of the average pilot the military wanted, which he defined as being in the middle 30% of values in each measurement, and then demonstrated that exactly 0 pilots in the study matched all 10 of the dimensions determined to be most relevant. Further, even when you chose only 3 such dimensions, fewer than 4% of pilots matched.
The conclusion was that there was no such thing as the average pilot and if you designed around this fictional entity your cockpit wouldn't fit anybody. If you wanted to have pilots that fit the cockpit, you had to design cockpits that would adjust to fit individual pilots.
The lesson? Linux Desktop evangelists seem to expect that people should love Linux Desktop because they worked so hard to make it usable for what they imagine is the average user, apparently completely ignorant that there is no such person. Desktops are personal devices that need to be able to accommodate the user's individual workflows. Does Windows excel at this? Well, not really and it has been getting worse, but Windows accommodates software in a way that Linux Desktop doesn't: it isn't hostile to commercial software, it works hard at maintaining compatibility with old software, and it allows for direct distribution from developer to user without middlemen gumming up the works. That enables third parties to help users fit their computer to their workflow. Linux Desktop is bad at all these things and though it is theoretically more adjustable, the reality is that trying to fit it to your usecases is an exercise in fighting this average user mentality and often involves dealing with a ludicrously complex intertwined system of mis-matched components at a very intimate level.
That's what is keeping people on Windows.
There is commercial software on Linux - steam, opera, chrome, telegram, skype. I hope Flatpak and Wayland would provide secure way to run it, runtimes would solve compatibility issues — requisites for direct distribution. Distribution patches is choice of the user, for example Arch is upstream.
I do not think people switch to Linux because of love. They switch because they hate their OS. The question was about lowering yet another barrier.
> Linux Desktop is bad at all these things and though it is theoretically more adjustable, the reality is that trying to fit it to your usecases is an exercise in fighting this average user mentality and often involves dealing with a ludicrously complex intertwined system of mis-matched components at a very intimate level.
The reality is on Linux usually it is already done — someone wrote code, packaged it, wrote articles, posted on forums, made desktop or distribution around it. Something that's not possible on Windows.
Windows is monoculture, deployment platform but stay away from the system.
Interesting story. I personally find Linux (gnome) desktop to be easier to personalize than windows though. Easy to add 3rd party ppas, easy to add or replace functionality. Compatibility with old software isn’t great though
Personalization and GNOME are mutually exclusive. But it's a nice laptop DE.
For a workstation, you want KDE. It's the most full-featured and Windows-like and customizable DE, by far. Also, try Manjaro, so that you don't have to fiddle with PPAs or OS upgrade re-installations and have ALL the newest software (via the AUR) all the time, like you do on Windows. : p
I'm guessing you don't actually run a Linux Desktop. KDE is significantly more customizable than windows.
> I'm guessing you don't actually run a Linux Desktop.
Wrong. Until about 6 months ago the majority of PCs I owned ran Linux Desktop. Eventually I just got sick of dealing with its nightmarish tangle of half-thought-out systems and currently it only runs on one.
KDE is very configurable, but that's only one component of the entire system (and it still has some odd limitations in my opinon).
I've been running Linux Desktop (and Linux as a server for that matter) to varying degrees for 20 years now, have contributed to open source projects, and was once president of a LUG. I still think Linux Desktop has a ton of problems and would rather use Windows. I don't know if you're able to square that with your worldview or not, but that isn't my problem.
Woah, apologies if my comment was too short and came across as snarky. Sounds like are a lot more familiar with Linux Desktop than me. I'm fairly new (a few years) and for me everything just works and is more configurable. I am constantly battling with Windows in a way I do not on my Linux system. In my mind, KDE is a better desktop, but I am still forced to use windows because there are a few tools that don't have good Linux alternatives.
I hate how right you are.