Windows has always had the best desktop system and it still does. Also, Linux since RedHat 5.and I've definitely spent way more time configuring Linux to do shit that Windows does without any configuration than I ever spent on Windows security issues. Gee, I've been using Windows since version 3.1 and never ever, ever had a major problem with the allegedly bad desktop security. One can only hope that distributors will follow the lead of Fedora and move to Wayland soon. It's just not a very interesting target, because of its small marketshare. Linux on the desktop is way behind macOS and Windows when it comes to security. What security? It's running every application unsandboxed and each X11 application can read all keystrokes, mouse events, make screengrabs, etc. I was still in high school and I knew quite a lot of people that were using SuSE Linux. For instance, SuSE had quite a stronghold in Europe. There was a reason why you could buy Linux in bookstores for years. OS X was in the same situation a while back, for certain use-cases it still is, yet it prevailed because people have stuck with it. Voting with your wallet does work and if a company isn't supporting Linux then it means it doesn't want my money. And I've been transitioning away from 1Password. I pay a premium for Dropbox because it works on my Linux box, even though my primary workstation is now OS X. Speaking of which, I don't have a high regard for companies and products popular among developers and that don't support Linux. Nowadays all that average users need is a good web browser, coupled with Linux's security and remote debugging capabilities, it's a very good fit for my father for example. Nowadays Linux usually works well on most hardware you can throw at it, it doesn't choke on the most basic of tasks and while it still has an app problem, sadly, the web is making that less relevant. And people needed Win32 apps because there were no alternatives usable for Linux. Yes, you had Red Hat, Mandrake (later Mandriva) and SuSE that were trying hard to provide a usable desktop distribution, but nothing was working well. To say that back then Linux was unusable on the desktop would be an understatement. The Linux you remember is very different than what I remember. My first computer was a Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and I went through the painful transition to Win 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 8 and 10, so I've known them all. I started playing and using Linux around year 2000, before XP. Macs are becoming so expensive that it is hard to justify getting relatively bad specs for 1.5 times the price. there are serious worries among OS X users about the future of OS X and Apple's lack of focus 4. OS X is also Unix, so for OS X users it is quite simple to move OS X to Linux and vice versa and 3. people rely less than ever on native applications, so it's much easier to move now 2. I think there is some movement from OS X to Linux (though it is hard too tell whether it's not just some vocal minority) for four reasons: 1. Moreover, problems are far harder to debug than they were around 2000, because there are multiple layers of stuff piled on each other (D-Bus, systemd, Debian alternatives, *.d, et al. In 2017, the Linux distribution landscape is more fragmented than ever and the Linux desktop landscape is more fragmented than ever (heck, even GNOME has three popular forks). So a lot of interested people eventually abandoned the idea to switch to Linux, because they had some win32 application that they needed to run. The problem at the time was that web apps basically didn't exist. There was a genuine feeling that Linux was taking off on the desktop and many non-tech family/friends installed Linux. Loki was pumping out Linux ports of games like crazy. Corel released Wordperfect for Linux (which still had significance at the time). You could run Microsoft Office using CrossOver Office with virtually no glitches (I used Office like that for years). There was a very serious push some companies to make Linux easy to install (graphical installers popped up in Red Hat, Corel Linux, Caldera, etc.). There were only a few distributions and KDE and GNOME ruled the desktop. OS X just came into existence, but was slow and required expensive hardware.Īt the time, Linux was far less fragmented. At the time, consumer Windows (98/ME) was dramatically bad. There was a period at the beginning of the century where Linux was arguably far better positioned to take significant market share. I thing that this is a misrepresentation of the history of desktop Linux. There's been a tremendous amount of work over the last ten years to make the Linux desktop environment habitable.
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