
Why Linux on Desktop ‘Failed’: A Discussion with Mark Shuttleworth - pjmlp
https://www.tfir.io/2019/05/15/why-linux-on-desktop-failed-mark-shuttleworth/
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bifrost
This has been an issue/complaint for 20 years... Lack of games, weird upgrade
issues, weird hardware issues, poor user community all contribute. Honestly, I
think the biggest thing is no Word/Office support.

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craftoman
Don't forget the pain when coding GUI apps. Worst experience ever, no docs, no
support, nothing. Creating GUI apps in Visual Studio is like an alien
technology to Linux.

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microwavecamera
When was that the 90s? It's really easy now.

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craftoman
Depends, if you consider Glade a great tool for creating apps. There's nothing
compared to VS and each desktop manager has it's own libraries unless you
don't care if your KDE users install another 100 packages. Qt is another
story...

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microwavecamera
I agree, I wouldn't consider Glade a great tool or even a tool for creating
apps. I only tinkered with some but it seems to be more like a visual designer
for testing layouts. Qt Creator is pretty slick though. There's definitely not
vis-a-vis alternatives for many business critical apps like VS in the Linux
ecosystem yet but it's not, well at least in my opinion, because of some
limitation with Linux itself. Breaking into the desktop market is incredibly
difficult now. To the point that even major tech companies like Google
struggle in the desktop market even though they dominate the mobile OS market
with a Linux based OS. To me it just seems like the chicken before the egg
problem. How do you attract the major app developers to an emerging platform
with a smaller user base when lack of applications is limiting adoption?

