As my colleague Alex Wolfe noted, Linux hasn't made a dent in the desktop after years in the wild. The climb looks all the steeper now that Windows 7 and new versions of Mac OS X have arrived. I can think of a few other reasons why Linux hasn't achieved more than a fractional marketshare with end users, and they aren't pretty. (I've already donned my asbestos suit.)
Linux's best features are not things that matters to end users. More than anything else, I think, this it. The things that make Linux so, well, Linux-y -- its malleable kernel, its open source development -- don't automatically present anything to an end user that makes them sit up and beg...
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written by Rudolf Olah, November 08, 2009
Doesn't matter. GNU/Linux has different uses as does Windows. However Windows is packaged specifically for the desktop. This is why there are different distros of GNU/Linux that are packaged specifically for the desktop.
We should also look beyond UNIX and anything in its tradition and look towards efforts such as Haiku OS which present a feature-rich and coherent structure for GUI desktops.
We should also look beyond UNIX and anything in its tradition and look towards efforts such as Haiku OS which present a feature-rich and coherent structure for GUI desktops.
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Linux has a long way to go to match the general ease of use of Windows and Mac. But, even if someone hit upon the magic formula that would bring Linux into the mainstream, there's another big bad word where Linux proponents have barely even tried to compete: "Marketing."
The average non-tech computer user thinks "Windows" is synonymous with "computer," because Microsoft has been leading people to think so for almost 3 decades. And people know "Mac" as the only existing competition to Windows because that's all they've heard of. "Linux" is just some term used by geeks, that doesn't mean anything to typical consumers. It's a curiosity, not an OS.