Opportunity for Linux golden age?

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
41

The “normies” need a walled garden where they have no control and only use a store. They cant be fucked learning internet STV’s and need MS, Google or Apple to just give them a “computer”. This market is what apple wants. The idiots that will pay to play as long as it works. Its a massive market of Billions including China!

And I get that. I know longer care but I want to be safe. I just want some one else to deal with it ETC.

With professional desktops Linux is missing apps in some area’s like Youtube creators. Or we would be all hailing Linux the Youtube OS. But in science, medicine, selfdriving etc. Linux is in there doing the work.

We all get lazy and watch Youtube for content. If Linux had an Adobe crusher. Linux would the the desktop of the year. Because every idiot on Youtube would praise it.

Gamers, well it a long hard road and the way is dark and full of terrors. I love the progress but we are a long way off yet. A long way could be AMD releasing SR-IOV or 6 years. Its in the hands of the gods so to speak. I dont see Nvidia LTX gaming cards.

In the end the normies need to pay someone to keep them safe and that will be the desktop “people use”. Hells knows IoT and Windows is an ongoing bloodbath that users dont patch or click the wrong thing.

I try not to make long posts. If you want a Linux Golden Age. Make Linux the OS the media makers use.

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42

A relationship exists between telemetry and the services MS/Apple/Google provide via their giant server farms. The most obvious example is probably phone navigation. Your phone can’t tell you where to go if your phone doesn’t know where you are. People like phone navigation.

These services are pervasive and popular and will become more pervasive and popular. They are incorporated into the proprietary desktop offerings for reasons of marketing and lock-in.

I don’t see Linux or FOSS having the capacity, or financing, to create infrastructures to deliver similar competitive services. While we were off chasing office suites, the rules of the game changed.

43

That’s pure nonsense. Have you seen anyone writing their report for university project on a phone? Have you seen any photographers editing photos on their phone? Have you seen anyone playing Witcher 3 on their phone? Have you seen any accountants doing their work on Android or iOS? I have certainly not.

The only thing you can do on phone that is comparable to desktop is browse the web. Even if the hardware is capable of some of these tasks the software is limited piece of shit. Hence people will always turn to desktop.

There are more phones than desktops/laptops because phones are generally cheaper and people in poor countries like India will end up getting a phone instead because they can’t afford £1000 computer.

Before you say that your iPad can RDP into a server. You are already admitting that you need a Real computer to do the job. See iPad can’t run Active Directory or Veeam Backup or pfSense firewall.

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44

You don’t know how much effort went into being distro agnostic in my post…

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45

People are doing text, photo and video editing on the ipad.

They are gaming on their phones and tablets. Or consoles. Witcher 3 is on the current gen consoles.

99% of people aren’t doing AD administration. They are doing email. content consumption, light photo/video editing and light document editing. And often - information reference or collection of data. The iPad does all of that. In addition, it does note taking, has better battery life, less weight, way more secure out of the box than Windows, etc. No reason any other tablet can’t as well. AR will enable the user to get information in and out of the tablet without their hands, and overlay it into the real world while they work.

Your mentions of RDP, VEEAM, AD, pfsense, etc. are very, very much niche stuff that the userbase here might be into but the normies (i.e., the 99%, as i said above) DO NOT GIVE A FUCK for.

Attitudes like yours above are why linux is going to be left behind when the paradigm shift from the traditional desktop (for the 99%) occurs.

News flash: most people grudgingly use computers as a tool to do their job. They don’t want to be sitting at a desk. They just either want the information available out of it or want to put information into it.

AR will enable that while they do their actual job, which is away from their desk (in the warehouse, on the shop floor, or whatever).

I never said that there will be no need for any desktop computers ever. But the market is done. The problem is solved. Linux lost. Move onto the next paradigm or be left behind. Right now, linux is nowhere, and being left behind. And will be starting out from 5-10 years behind AGAIN because people’s heads are too far up their own arses to see or accept what the new normal will be by the mid 2020s.

46

Keep it peaceful. :smiley: :rainbow:

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47

This is becoming me more and more.

Realistically if people come here wanting something like that, we should be pushing cloudready os. Which is just Chromium OS, the open source version of Google’s Chrome OS. Which is of coursed, based off of Gentoo Linux.

All tho, I believe Google is going to kill off Android and Chrome OS down the line and just have Fuschia OS, which will be based off of the kernel that is in Haiku OS. So it will no longer be a Linux distro.

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48

But remember, Microsoft is the one doing the Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish…

:roll_eyes:

Ye all been had. Thy game is rigged. Microsoft is the best ally Linux users have right now.

I’ve often wondered if Chris from Jupiter Broadcasting is some Google/CIA plant. They constantly gush on Chromebooks on their Linux shows, ignoring (or maybe just unaware) the direction they’re going.

But hey, you can run Linux apps on your Chromebook!

/tinfoil

P.S.

<tinfoil back on>

On their only “non Linux” show, they cycle loving and hating Windows/Mac every week. They had the audacity to rip Wendell and Linus for their gaming on Linux content whilst they constantly mislead and misrepresent their actual Linux usage.

PRAISE THINE WENDELL

/tinfoil off

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49

If Linux were the Rohirrim, and the Uruk-hai were Apple. MS would be Eomer and his soldiers.

If we were to equate this to the LoTR: The Two Towers.

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50

It’s not tinfoil hat time. It’s Mainstream headlines… Google still spying on you even when you turn off all your permissions for them to do so. Level1 tech news did a good article on it this week.

I loved, and rooted, my Galaxy S2… been on iOS since then, just for privacy.

The Purism phone that will nor track everything that is coming out sounds good. Saw it on New Screens Savers (video in post above). That might be my next phone as Apple is getting so stupid with it’s head up it’s @@@… Taking away headphone jack… so STUPID! I’m still on my 6Plus as I refuse to give anyone money who is so stupid.

Has Level one Tech covered the Purism? I’d love to see their take!

51

My niece got a brand new laptop. And she almost never uses it over her phone. She called me 6 months after I set it up with her user name and password just her name. Whats my password uncle Marten ? I told her to log on and change the password :frowning:

At this point . We will die before kids get security.

Kids phones will be there security token. For all devices there close too…While I hate it…They will love it.

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52

Would you mind linking the article? Can’t find it. Or was it a video?

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53

Not so hard to find. That´s not “the article”, there where many.

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54

I want the level1techs article mentioned by pianopraze.

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56

This is anecdotal, but most folks I know are not gamers and swapped their home desktop PC for a laptop at least several years ago because the PC and its monitor were big lumps of ugly taking up space. These days, the laptop stays closed and off because it is faster and more convenient to use their phones. For starters, you don’t need to wait for a phone to boot and shutdown.

Some tasks obviously benefit from a desktop-sized display. But, that doesn’t mean we need a desktop PC to feed a signal to that display. We will migrate to using the cheapest, smallest, and lightest tool that gets the job done. If the FCC and the corporates it supports are ever made to stop colluding to keep U.S broadband at second-rate levels, we could see a strong move to home and officer users abandoning their “local” software.

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57

Can we all for a moment take a step back and reconsider what this thread is about.

This thread loosing track of itself is reminiscent of the sort of community fragmentation that holds back linux on the desktop.

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58

So I shall pose a question to everyone here.

  1. Give 3 points in your opinion that make linux a great candidate for desktop use. FInd something different from the beaten path of “it’s free”, “It’s not microsoft” etc.

  2. Give 3 points which we as linux users can improve that in your opinion are seriously hampering Linux on the desktop.

Here are mine

1. Pro’s:

  1. Software distribution is well controlled via repositories and doesn’t require downloading from outside sources.
  2. Linux offers a diversity of desktop environments with extensive customization capability to suit just about everyone’s preference.
  3. Linux desktop users are very small malware target and the work done to secure linux in the enterprise server sector seamlessly carries over to the desktop.

2. Cons:

  1. Over reliance on the Command Line for simple tasks, a new user should not be required to make use of the CLI to get certain aspects of their work done or maintain a working system.
  2. Limited intuitive GUI based configuration tools.
  3. Distro Fragmentation - and distro ‘fanboys’ make an already intimidating switch from other platforms to any linux distro extra difficult or sometimes downright hostile. We should have a single simple ‘Standard Linux Distro’ that becomes the driving example to show to others for a linux desktop operating system.

Some further things I want to address:

  1. Lack of good GUI bug & issue reporting tools.
  2. Forums that are absolutely obscure to new users for reporting issues / asking questions, forums like ours are still obscure but bucking the trend of the bugzilla, mailing list, etc norm.
  3. Driver & general system hardware configuration options in GUI form, seriously power users switching from windows love this stuff on windows and we don’t have a good response to it on linux.
    1. How to OC a GPU.
    2. Easy benchmark and stats tools like CPU-Z and equivalents etc.
    3. Setting Fan speeds and temp curves.
    4. Just monitoring FPS is obscure.
  4. AUDIO CONFIGURATION - Pulseaudio is a massive failure in terms of the GUI config options it offers. Stuff that takes 3 mouse clicks on windows is several lines of abstract commands or text file configs away so that even I ( A decade long linux user and developer with kernel experience) give up and shout at the ceiling.
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59

It’s been on Level1Tech news several times in the past few weeks.

This was the last uploaded one at they spend like 10 minutes on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3vJFDwnwQU

@LostMoon some people are like that, I agree.

Others are like me who use a variety of tools for a variety of reasons.

I use my Phone to check Email.
I use my MacBook to browse forums (many look horrible on tablet/phone) and use Office apps.
I use my MacPro for Logic, Photoshop and Painter.

Different tools for different tasks.

60

Yup Samsung’s Tizen and LG’s WebOS are both Linux and power all sorts of stuff like phones, watches, Blu Ray players and TVs. Roku is massive on the TV tides and is Linux as well.

ChromeOS is making a big play at budget, lightweight and tablets and will have native Linux Software support shortly.

The common person is using Linux or another Unix-like OS than they use Windows at this point.

Desktops/Laptops while not dead are more niche and there is a lot Linux being used there whether with Dualboot, VMs or containers/emulation.

Growth of cloud computing and VPS has given the average Joe the means to run their own server. And it is Linux that is powering that.

On the physical side Qnap and Synology are the go to home server bands now and they are Linux too.

Linux is healthier than it has ever been. This is or the summit of a golden age.

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61

I’ll bite

Pro’s

  1. Excellent environment for development and admin work ready to run straight after install if you are text editor and terminal type of person. And not hard to do a graphical set up because software is easy to set up on modern distros.

  2. Software in many cases is easier to install. The GUI front end for package managers better than the wild west feel of the Windows Store. Not as polished as Apple’s offering and would like to see paid app support again.

  3. Having less people using Linux isn’t the only reason it is not secure. Better privilege management and sandboxing helps there. Linux runs so many servers the incentive to crack it is there. Major breaches don’t break the OS but some out of date software or the human element.

Con’s:

  1. “Not invented here syndrome” While the right to fork is a major tenant of OSS many times it happens it is just because they can. This waste effort that could be used to improve a project.

  2. information/choice overload on install can scare new users.

  3. True support: forums/wikis are great but the average person wants to talk to customer support not a forum. This is a harder issue and requires real capital and man power.

Modern distros really aren’t bad about the same as Windows with a dialogue box.

Yes real OEM or subscription support would alleviate this.

Kinda overblown, average person doesn’t much muck with this. And even gamers really don’t OC and if they do it is a stock OC. Now for myself and many of us here, yeah, would love to have that.

KDE’s defualt mixer is really nice but can be information overload. While other mixers are too bare bones and require downloading alternatives or getting into conf files.

I agree sound should now become the next be area of focus now that graphics is really starting to come together under vulkan and Wayland.

Edit: Final thought:

Then again how relevant is PC to the overall success of Linux?

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