I once get told to buy a new laptop, see the specifications displayed as having Windows 10, but when booted up for test, surprise surprise, the installed OS was Ubuntu lmao
Unfortunately it was for a coworker, and they're not quite tech savvy, and thus requested for Windows...
I'm all for linux, but it truly isn't in a state where it can be widely adopted by the average users(I'm talking about laptop users here). it'll take years for achieving even the current level of usability that Windows provides out of the box. popular DEs like KDE still ship with god awful garbage touchpad drivers for machines with bigger than average touchpads. and their gesture implementation is nothing short of atrocious. and this is all before even getting into other problems such as fractional scaling in Wayland and how Firefox no longer comes with hardware acceleration enabled by default
When I install Windows on laptop - I still have to go through drivers installation, googling what shitty 200-300mb software to install to simply change colour of my RGB keyboard and so on.
If Ubuntu goes with KDE by default, I would say more Windows users would like to jump into Linux as it provides quite similar experience. Ubuntu is probably most well know distro out there.
I agree, Linux has its own issues, like missing HDR support, but we will get there.
But don't you think that most of these issues stem from the fact that few manufacturers support linux? If they adoptes linux just as windows, they could very well make open source drivers and tweak popular distros to be 100% compatible with hardware, just like manufacturers tweak android all the time.
But thats why we are saying "if pre installed on more hardware". OEM installed devices usually install their good drivers for touchpad and all before reaxhing the customer. Proprietary hardware was the difficult part in making better drivers.
it’ll take years for achieving even the current level of usability that Windows provides out of the box
I'm currently dual booting Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 and would say that gap has already closed.
I cannot really work with the shell in Windows because it does not seem to understand bash which makes things difficult. The windows package manager is very cumbersome to use. Customizing the DE is a hassle and I cannot switch to other DEs. Most of the code base is closed so I cannot really see what is getting executed in the background. The settings come with telemetry enabled on default. I think it does not even have Vim installed.
Home and workstation PCs are about the only things that aren’t *nix based operating systems. Android uses a Linux kernel. Mac OS and iOS are Unix based. PlayStation 5 is FreeBSD based. Nintendo Switch is a Unix-like mashup of FreeBSD and Android according to Wikipedia. Most TVs run Android, WebOS (Linux), or Roku OS (Linux based). Most web/cloud servers are Linux.
And I get that Unix and FreeBSD aren’t Linux, but they all come from the same family of operating systems. The entire world runs on mostly Linux or other *nix based operating systems.