Why don't more people use Linux?
world.hey.com
world.hey.com
>Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better.
I have to disagree here. Using Linux doesn't mean you "understand" computers better. It just means you understand linux better. Every operating system abstracts the hardware in its own way. They are opinionated in how they do this with some shared fundamentals. Being extremely comfortable in linux means you are comfortable in how linux abstracts the hardware. That's all.
I am not trying to discredit linux as an OS here. Just not a fan of the elitist mentality that if you are not a linux user, then you don't know computers.
Writing web apps that run in Linux containers on some cloud provider somewhere teaches you very little about the fundamentals of how computers work. For the most part, it doesn't even teach you much about how Linux works. The developer is so far abstracted from the hardware at that point that the OS doesn't really matter.
Whether you like Linux or not, this is a circular argument. It attempts to answer why Linux is beneficial by analogizing Linux to exercise, good diet, etc. which itself presupposes that Linux is as beneficial as those things.
Beyond that, a lot of things you can do from a Linux shell can also be done through Windows Powershell even if the syntax is clunkier and documentation is harder to find. Windows has not been standing still.
Android uses a modified version of the Linux kernel; it depends on the Linux kernel project. According to Statcounter, Android has about 72% global market share on smartphones, with iOS at about 28% [1].
Many websites and web services run on Linux, at least in part. Wordpress, the most popular CMS, with around 63% market share [2], can run on other OSes, but it's usually run on Linux.
Linux is now more used on Azure than Windows Server [3].
Linux is also used in lots of other everyday things, e.g. automobiles, microwave ovens, routers, etc. You get the idea.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
[2] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...
[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-developer-reveals-li...
Increasingly, it is using a mostly standard kernel. The kernel fork is here,[0] although I'm not sure exactly how many out of upstream patches they have now. It would be nice if someone how knows how to do this in git could check. See also GKI.[1]
[0] https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/
[1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/gen...
Because time is more valuable than money.
You can always get more money but you can't get more time.
This is just as true for developers as anyone else. Time spent fiddling with your OS is less time you have available to create new software or plan for your next career or build a life beyond computers.
Even Mint wasn't 100% fiddling free last time I tried, anything using traditional package management is never going to be reliable as far as I can tell.
Expecting a dozen modern apps updated constantly with 100 overlapping dependencies each to not have conflicts seems completely insane.
The whole idea came from the era of systems maintained by hand over time, sometimes with things compiled from source, mostly using simple CLI software.
so i moved to an OS that does what its told, and stays like that until its told otherwise.
This makes the common assumption that Windows (or MacOS) requires less fiddling than Linux. I haven't compiled a Linux kernel in anger in maybe 10-12 years. Installing or uninstalling software is frankly painless.
On the flip side, I'm forever fixing my wife's wireless or printing, or trying to figure out why some file doesn't open magically. Typically, she just emails files to me to print, although this may be due to me buying a Kyocera laser printer, and her using some trash HP inkjet.
Time spent working around some Windows inconsistency or big or missing feature or poorly documented feature fits in the same category.
Linux has gotten progressively better and less needy over the years.
Windows today is just as broken and janky as Linux was a decade ago. It's crazy how bad things have gotten.
these march hand in hand, and are probably the most potent factors. mix it in with extreme friction uninstalling windows and deconfiguring the other than windows settings, and this is a vendor lockout.
the consequent question seems to be, why are there not more POS "nux" installations on new hardware?
Everyone who tries to do that seems to invent their own distro, making fragmentation worse, and now they have to also be distro makers which probably doesn't help costs much.
If I wasn't a developer, and wasn't often using cheaper hardware, I might also be using completely stock windows. I'm not sure what the "killer app" would be aside from privacy concerns.
I wouldn't even think of coding a system app myself unless I worked for Canonical or Red Hat, whatever I make is almost guaranteed to not be the next big thing with a full paid team backing it, and I'm not a fan of "software for one person".
or provided an install ready hware configured item, with a runthis first disk, i.e. onboarding stream, so it is an enduser install?
there is a business near me doing these things and he keeps his home n bills paidfor.
Like, how many really neat technologies have been completely forgotten because nobody put it on the play store?
A lot of them would only have been a week of work. But I sure don't want to maintain it all by myself, the odds of it becoming a community project that mostly runs itself are low, and for personal use it's easier to just use whatever crappy solution is readily available.
We have all the tech for so many cool things, what we don't have is said tech packaged and maintained.