I’m not proposing anything here, I’m curious what you all think of the future.

What is your vision for what you want Linux to be?

I often read about wanting a smooth desktop experience like on MacOS, or having all the hardware and applications supported like Windows, or the convenience of Google products (mail, cloud storage, docs), etc.

A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it’s now your desktop computer. That’s one vision. ChromeOS has its “everything is in the cloud” vision. Stallman has his vision where no matter what it is, the most important part is that it’s free software.

If you could decide the future of personal computing, what would it be?

  • Jeremy [Iowa]English
    1·
    1 year ago

    For Linux desktop to grow past the single digit market share it is at today. It needs to be led by tech visionaries not by code evangelists . The average user doesn’t care about if it’s running Wayland or x11 or whatever shit you name it they only care about their OS having all the features they need and support all the latest hardware they buy.

    I had a fantastic opportunity to reflect on this exact concepts while setting up a new Gentoo install. Even when a handbook provides a comprehensive happy path, when that happy path can go so wrong as to require the divination of Gentoo greybeards even when following the instructions, the barrier of entry isn’t exactly doing the distro any favors.

    Even Ubuntu and the “user-friendly” distros leave ample room for pain for the average user despite the efforts invested in rounding off some of the sharp and jagged edges - Windows does a ton to make things “just work” to some degree even in a bad state. Short of the wise Indian programmer YouTuber meme gaining a Linux equivalent, there’s much left to do to make this approachable in Linux-land.

    For example, if, you add an fstab entry for a CIFS mount that goes poorly, forget to remove it, and reboot, you’re setting yourself up for a delay in boot or a failure to boot and a trip to the recovery CD to fix fstab. Windows… just continues on with the mount unavailable.