Consumerism.

There needs to a single “App Store” where regular people can find free and paid apps that will work on all distros.

Basically, we need Steam for non-gamers.

Being able to do everything a “normie” would do without the need to use a terminal.

And a way for companies to get flatpak as an alternative, i remember a friend o mine who tried to use 'buntu budgie for a while and he needed a software for cartographic stuff.

We got lucky the company of said software (and yes, it needed to be THAT specific software to avoid compat’ issues, so no free alternatives were viable even if they were available) used to provide a .deb package, we got forced to change a lot of sys native binaries to make it work and ended up just breaking a lot of other stuff to make it work. Flatpaks (fuck snaps) need to be the default option to be available across systems without caring about distros, so anyone can run it on “mandragora linux” if they want to

Multi-million dollar advertising budgets from apple and Microsoft. Coordinated campaigns to embed those systems in education institutions and workplaces.

Some small but important taken-for-granted things functioning like screen and audio sharing/recording in wayland. Yes, I know sometimes with some apps/distros it works. But it needs to work all the time on all reasonably current hardware everywhere. Wayland is getting there, but we’re still a ways off and X11 has its own issues. It feels like we’re 80% of the way there for feature parity and stability vs Windows and MacOS, but this last 20% stretch is feeling like an eternity. The bugginess and lack of features stretches to multi-monitor support as well. Plus we’ve got a bunch of distros threatening off and on to remove 32bit libraries, which would really hamper software support that’s already anemic to begin with… There’s no one single blockbuster issue. It’s just little everyday things that produce just enough friction to keep the unwashed masses away.

I think the big problem is no Ubuntu circa 2010 distro anymore that “just works” ala netbooks of the era. Only Fedora has Ubuntu in 2010-level hardware support for actual modern hardware, but no Broadcom wifi sans internet and you will need to google for and execute like 40 lines of random cli commands that seem to add the same 3 codecs 14 ways apiece to make HEVC work (more for VLC HEVC ironically). Ubuntu does Broadcom wifi out of the box, but has gotten bad and has poor hardware support overall for new hardware. Mint has the best printer support, but as of 22.1 no longer does Broadcom wifi out of the box… SteamOS is actually really great – and has MARKEDLY better hardware support for dongles and such than Bazzite, no comparison, and Bazzite suffers from Fedora’s shit HEVC situation PLUS immutable distro BS where it DOES use system .so’s but is in denial – but isn’t a real distro…

I’d agree with the: come preinstalled. Most people buy a device and never change the operating system. So it needs to be the preinstalled operating system on the average computer or laptop, wherever people buy those.

(And mind that Linux completely dominates the market on servers. So technically, a lot of people use Linux in a way… Just not on desktop computers.)

Two things:

1. Obviously it needs to come pre-installed. This is a really tough hurdle to overcome and I’m not sure how it can be.
2. Security needs a lot of work if Linux is going to lose the small-target advantage.

They need to be able to buy accessory products that do more harm than good. It’s can’t be a proper alternative to windows without CCleaner support!

This most difficult one is probably the fact that 99% of people do not install their operating system.

The device they purchase needs to have a clean and elegant out of box experience like the Mac. Regular folk who are willing to stray from windows don’t consider any computer that doesn’t come off the shelf with sane defaults. Everything else is arcane to them.

We are not those people. I have to remind myself that not everyone likes to build their own systems.

I do have a friend who wants to buy a framework laptop with Fedora on it because that’s what they use in the Laboratory he works in but he doesn’t want to assemble it himself he just wants it to come like that.

I think we’re getting there finally.

I feel like we’ve been having the same conversation for 20 years. Meanwhile the linux family of operating systems is now the most widely deployed in the world.

I think with any alternative to big tech the problem is most people are really unwilling to change their habits and make short term compromises. A lot of people know on a surface level that big tech is stealing their data etc. But actually changing their habits goes to far.

Another issue is that its more or less a systemic issue.

To many people aren’t even awear of what FOSS even is. The state of Foss and is a bit complicated where you do have organizations and activists advocating for it but also gigantic corporations that use Foss technology and exploit the free labor that goes into it.

There definitely needs to be more activism for FOSS technology and alternatives to big tech. And those alternatives should be open to everyone like Linux is. Of course there are always multiple reasons why something isn’t used but I do think it is important to look at a bigger perspective than individual consumer/ in this case users

Stigma.

A very large number of people believe Linux is difficult to get into. There are a number of publisher that somehow think Linux users are all hackers that will cheat in their online games. There are a not-so-insignificant number of Linux users who like Linux to remain niche, and small, and exclusive, and difficult to get into, and scoff at the idea of a “general user”.

This question comes up every other week. I reject the premise that “more users” is a commonly held objective.

For most linux / OSS projects the objective is to be the best the project can be. Having an active community is usually part of that but “more users” is a low priority.

Linux doesn’t need more users.