Ask HN: Why is Linux not a mainstream OS? - cronjobma
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chha
Several reasons:

Perception: Linux has historically required tweaking and doesn't work straight
out of the box. This requires computer skills, and the guts to actually make
changes that might potentially break your installed system. For the
mainstream, this is a turnoff. While things tend to work better today, the
image persists; Linux is for geeks, and is too difficult for people with no
interest in the computer itself.

Software: While tools such as wine, playonlinux, steam and similar
alternatives make life easier for those who want windows-only applications in
Linux, they are not perfect and rarely work out of the box, especially on new
applications. While patches or workarounds tend to turn up, around half of the
applications on appdb.winehq.org are rated silver or less, requiring tweaks to
work, if at all. People want their things to work without any hassle, and
aren't interested in spending time to learn how to configure wine or the rest
of their system for it to work.

Hardware support: Although improving, drivers can still be a problem. Getting
drivers from eg. Nvidia is fairly easy but installing them is not as easy as
it is for Windows, unless you know how to add the Nvidia PPA (which requires
knowledge, see above). AMD is supposedly worse, but I have still to buy a GPU
from them. Getting drivers for other proprietary hardware can be a lot more
difficult, depending on what it is. I've got a fairly common MB from MSI, but
I still have to tweak the default Ubuntu config to get the sound to work. If
it wasn't for the fact that I know how and prefer Linux over Windows, I'd just
stick with Windows (where it just works).

Why bother: There is nothing Linux does so much better for most people that
it's worth taking the time to switch. Most people I know (not counting
colleagues) know virtually _nothing_ about their computers or how they work,
let alone which version of Windows they run. I think most people are somewhat
like that; the computer is a tool for them to do "stuff", as long as it works,
they're happy. Or at least content. Switching to Linux doesn't help them in
any way, but generally mean that they have to figure out how to get a lot of
things working properly (which used to work just fine in Windows) and they
have to struggle with howtos that might be outdated or just plain wrong for
their situation.

A major selling point for many Linux advocates is that it's free and open
source. But most people doesn't care; they might buy a new laptop every 3-5
years which comes with Windows pre-installed, along with a discount for
Microsoft Office and a bunch of other stuff they think they need. So why
bother having to learn something they don't see the benefit from?

------
oscrperez
IMO, in the late 90s and early 2000s it wasn't as simple to get Linux working.
There was a lot of tweaking involved and a lot of headaches to get your
hardware to work properly. Device manufacturers supported Windows (and
sometimes Mac), rarely Linux. Big software labels didn't see the incentive in
building software for Linux, it was always for Windows and Mac. Once Ubuntu
came out this situation changed, and many people began replacing Windows
installs with Linux. Specially for under-powered computers that couldn't run
the latest version of Windows. This, combined with the popularity of web apps
helped Linux on the desktop be usable. But, at that point it was too late, the
desktop can today pretty much be considered legacy and mainly used for
specialized cases such as content creation and other ultra-high-performance
use cases.

Once you look at the post-desktop world, Linux is mainstream. The cloud,
mobile, IoT devices. Linux has very large market-share in all of these.

