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Comment by edwcross | Hacker News Reader

I'm increasingly pessimistic about everyday reach of Linux.

Around me, all I see are Windows users, volunteers teaching old people how to use several tools... on Windows. Public institutions relying on Windows, upgrading to Windows 11, doing everything despite Trump, despite Microsoft, despite all of the negatives associated with it.

When primary school students are given Windows laptops instead of Linux ones, there's not much hope in changing. But how can you amass enough momentum and volunteers to get enough manpower to at least try to move in the other direction?

KDE surely helps, but it's like, nowadays simply trying to explain what a non-mobile OS is useful for, seems like yet another uphill battle, and I cannot fix even my small town by myself.

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Inertia is a hell of a drug. The US failed to break up Microsoft in the 90s, and never took antitrust action against them again after that. So the world built its entire tech infrastructure on top of Windows (as far as endpoints go, web facing servers are another matter).

But,

> When primary school students are given Windows laptops instead of Linux ones,

At least this is changing, although not true "desktop linux," students are mostly given Chromebooks, and grow up on google docs/g workspace so that early familiarity with Windows + Office is dissapearing.

It's not going to be a good thing long term though, I already see it with employees where I work (I'm in IT). We have plenty of younger employees that don't even have computers at home if they aren't gamers. They are familiar with iOS/iPad OS only. Windows + Office is a mystical black box, and file management/file systems are a foreign concept.

That, IMO, makes Linux desktop adoption that much more difficult. At least Windows->Linux you can take a lot of basic concepts with you. MobileOS->Not mobile OS is much more difficult.

First and biggest challenge is that there's no single default desktop Linux, and even one distro could have different DEs, window servers, etc.

Imagine asking for tech support as a newbie, and giving your laptop model and OS and version is still not enough info.

It's completely unavoidable with open source software, we just have to adapt around it.

We do have one main Linux kernel (while other open source like BSD is far less popular on PCs) and a bunch of tools like bash and git that are de facto default. Seems like Linux community actively avoids converging on a default DE though.

We have many, many Linux kernels. Many distros compile their own kernels. You aren't using "the" Linux kernel most likely, you're using your distros Linux kernel. It's just that nobody notices because the kernel has stable interfaces.

Thats also why you can run kernel 6.5 on a version of RHEL from 15 years ago.

By its nature as a community, the Linux community will never converge on a default DE.

The only reason Windows pulls it off is because it's not a community. It's a dictatorship and you're a serf. You use what Microsoft tells you to use.

But, even then, there is divergence. No doubt you've heard of people sticking to 10 even though Microsoft is abandoning it. Some people still use 7, or even XP.

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