Why Desktop Linux Still Hasn't Taken Over the World | FOSS Force

SGT (Join to see) - How so? I'm pretty average. Sandy :)

1LT Sandy Annala Ma'am, I get the impression that you and SGT (Join to see) have two different definitions of what an "average" and computer user is. Please correct me if I am wrong on this, but I think you are talking about the average commercial user, where he is talking about your average home user. Your average commercial user would use specialized software, such as CAD, high end video editing, control software for milling machines, etc... This software will not run "out of the box" on Linux, ie. install and go. Yes, I have talked about connecting my Linux laptop to our mixing board at when I was in the Marine Corps, and having the ability to control it just as well as the Mac. However, that mixing console was only supported in Linux by using third-party wrapper software. This required some time and research on my part to configure and run properly. For a business, this time spent tinkering to get something to work is lost money. So I can see how in some cases Linux would not be a viable alternative.

On the flip side, your average home user would use their machine for mainly e-mail, surfing the net, watching videos, listening to music, and maybe some photo and video editing. In this case, the popular Linux distributions run right out of the box.... in most cases. In my experience, the times it has not worked out of the box was due odd ball hardware that doesn't work properly even in Windows (I'm looking at you Atheros!). Most of this hardware can be found in laptops. I have worked off and on in "home User" tech support, sometimes officially and sometimes just as a hobby, for over 20 years. It has been my experience that most home users could use Linux without an interruption of their workflow.

Your initial comment was spot on about the driver support and commercial software support for Linux from major manufacturers. Unfortunately, there is not a real incentive for them at this time to produce them. As much as I hate to say this, until there is some incentive for them to do this, Linux will probably not see a wider adoption rate.

SSgt Mark Lines - Indeed, I am probably not the average home user. That said, unless something major has changed over the past few years, it is hard for me to believe Linux is going to auto install out of the box with the right high performance video / high performance network / high performance card audio drivers. Maybe this is now standard - but I would expect slow low res VGA / XVGA support . . . and similar low performance workarounds for network and audio exploiting legacy hardware support. That said I may be a little biased because I expect home users to be demanding game, photo editing, video editing -or- at least high performance web surfing users. My ideas about home users may be a bit more demanding than what you see as a consultant. In the office environment - no question Linux properly installed on a COTS HPC Cluster and/or in a Secure Cloud Environment - with the right development tools and the right libraries - and the right hardware - makes for a formidable Number Crunching / Math Modeling / Simulation / AI / NN / SIGINT / MASINT / IMINT / HUMINT processing system. We may be agreed that until the driver problem is resolved Linux prospects are limited, Warmest Regards, Sandy :)

1LT Sandy Annala Ma'am, thank you for the reply. You are correct on one point, but your knowledge has fallen behind on the other. Where your knowledge is out of date is that the default drivers installed now actually work very good with consumer level hardware right out of the box. As with a Windows (Windows 7 and later) install, a consumer level machine would be usable right after install. The default drivers have the basic functions for the hardware and will not need to be changed by the user to have full functionality. In fact, with video cards that are older than 5 years, the default open source drivers actually work better than the ones from the manufacturer.

You are correct when you say that Linux does not install all the drivers needed out of the box. It does not install any proprietary drivers, but neither does Windows. Mac on the other hand, is designed to run on a limited pool of hardware, so they can install the drivers out of the box. You will still have to install these drivers to replace the generic ones that Linux uses for their install. In the past getting video, network, and sound cards to work properly in Linux was a pain in the tukus. Now, depending on the distribution you use, it is actually very easy to install the drivers for consumer level hardware, example nVidia Geforce/ AMD Radeon graphics cards. With Ubuntu based distributions, there is a wizard that can be run right from the first run welcome screen. It will scan your system and then tell you what hardware needs additional drivers installed. It does not matter if it is a graphics card, sound card, or a wireless card. It will then download and install the needed drivers without any more input from the user. In some ways, this process is easier than installing the same hardware under Windows.

Since I do not use Linux on the professional side, I do not know how easy it is to install drivers for professional level hardware such as the nVidia Quattro/ AMD Fire graphics cards. They may need some tweaking and research for them to work. Which makes Linux unattractive to use in certain places.

As far as gaming goes, I build my desktop PC with gaming in mind. I tend to play games such as Rise of the Tomb Raider, Far Cry 4, etc.. so I use Windows. Linux support of these types of games has gotten much better, but there is still a long way to go until it can compete with Windows. Now my laptop, I run only Linux on it, and I have no problem gaming with it as long as the games are supported under Linux. I do some basic photo editing and video editing as well. For that I use GIMP both on my Windows machine and my Linux box. For video, I use Handbrake on both platforms.