To devils advocate a little in general with this topic: For wider spread adoption, Linux kinda needs to adopt around more standards. If you put yourself in the shoes of the average windows or Mac (even iOS/Android) user; it’s an overall standardized experience.
Linux now, is mostly a choice of DE and package manager. I still absolutely want distros like arch and Gentoo to still exists as they are.
Windows and Mac don’t have standards; they’re single solitary stand alone monoliths. The user experience is the same in their walled gardens because they are the same, not because those systems embrace standards. In particular Microsoft’s lack of standards has been a point of pain for Linux and FOSS users for decades. Linux has actual standards and that is exactly why there is so much diversity. That diversity would have crumbled into chaos long ago if the Linux community did not embrace standards.
If Windows users had to deal with the dependency issues, it likely would’ve never taken off. That’s kind of the problem I’ve seen around various Linux distros, though I wager it’s gotten a lot better in recent years. For the record, I’ve been out of the Linux game for a good 6 years, and I barely ever boot up my computer much. I’m able to run my business completely off my phone (except tax season), and I haven’t made the earnest effort to get back into it due to time constraints.
I mean it has gotten a lot better. Dependency hell is mostly a thing of the past. If you were around back then using it then you should know the suffering we all went through to get ANY sort of usability out of it. Half the time it wouldn’t even fucking work at all due to some weird hardware you had, or you were limited to terminal only because XFree86 didn’t know what to make of your video card (it was a time of cheap shitbox Pentium MMX/Pentium II/Celeron machines, some of which came in cow print boxes). It sure has come a long way from my perspective.
To devils advocate a little in general with this topic: For wider spread adoption, Linux kinda needs to adopt around more standards. If you put yourself in the shoes of the average windows or Mac (even iOS/Android) user; it’s an overall standardized experience.
Linux now, is mostly a choice of DE and package manager. I still absolutely want distros like arch and Gentoo to still exists as they are.
Windows and Mac don’t have standards; they’re single solitary stand alone monoliths. The user experience is the same in their walled gardens because they are the same, not because those systems embrace standards. In particular Microsoft’s lack of standards has been a point of pain for Linux and FOSS users for decades. Linux has actual standards and that is exactly why there is so much diversity. That diversity would have crumbled into chaos long ago if the Linux community did not embrace standards.
If Windows users had to deal with the dependency issues, it likely would’ve never taken off. That’s kind of the problem I’ve seen around various Linux distros, though I wager it’s gotten a lot better in recent years. For the record, I’ve been out of the Linux game for a good 6 years, and I barely ever boot up my computer much. I’m able to run my business completely off my phone (except tax season), and I haven’t made the earnest effort to get back into it due to time constraints.
Have you never heard the term “DLL Hell?” It’s called that because DOS and Windows specifically use
.dll
files for dependencies.Man…we’ve been saying that since '99…
I mean it has gotten a lot better. Dependency hell is mostly a thing of the past. If you were around back then using it then you should know the suffering we all went through to get ANY sort of usability out of it. Half the time it wouldn’t even fucking work at all due to some weird hardware you had, or you were limited to terminal only because XFree86 didn’t know what to make of your video card (it was a time of cheap shitbox Pentium MMX/Pentium II/Celeron machines, some of which came in cow print boxes). It sure has come a long way from my perspective.