Your Computer Isn't Yours

There are probably also plenty of companies which exclusively develop on Windows. You can have an entire career in the embedded industry, target Linux all the time, but never use it for development. Development is not all Linux based, I never said that. What I quoted were percentages.

> it should be widely accepted in spite of being a distant third in usability.

As you shared your anecdote, let me share mine. Recently I had to set up a new networked printer on both Windows and Linux. On Linux it worked immediately, on Windows it didn't and required installation of a manual driver. That installation was partially botched and removal didn't work. Only after a few attempts it did, at which point I've spent an hour with the problem. It's the same old crap that you had with Win 95, but now on Windows 10, while Linux has a proper IPP driver and no need to install outside software. Maybe Windows has an IPP driver too, no idea, but it didn't work which is what matters :).

Also, there are definitely distros that are more usable and ones which are less usable. I think there is a true core in the meme of people being lured to linux by "use linux it's user friendly", then being told that Arch isn't that much harder anyways, and then ending up using one of the expert distros which often break in subtle and hard to debug ways.

But yes, in many ways Linux could do better usability wise. For example, it's a nightmare to target GUI Linux and then expect your binaries to work for years. It's almost easier to just ship Windows software and then use Wine. Nvidia also has shitty drivers, and in general, the driver situation isn't perfect. But things are improving I think and the gap is shrinking.

Also note that there is an effect when more people use a piece of software, there is a larger market for people who make a living with improving that software, via support contracts, consultancy contracts, etc. So once desktop Linux gets adopted widely, it might improve in many ways from the current state, simply due to ecosystem size.

I think now that Apple has learned from iOS how profitable a walled garden business model is they are trying to bring that model to the PC world as well. Shipping hardware with their own processors is an important step in that direction because it gives them control over the IP of arguably the most important component of the computer, which in turn makes it easier to control software distribution for their architecture as well.

The transition will be slower of course because people have to get used to seeing computers as closed-source devices with app stores, there are still too many of us who have the mindset that you can just install anything you want on a computer without asking Apple for permission and without paying tax to them.

At this point I really wonder how any serious "hacker" can work on such a device, it's becoming the antithesis of everything that the original Hacker culture stood for.

1: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/11/judge-dismisses-apple...

Apple really doesn't need to do this, and it subverts their own privacy policies and features, including their commitment to on-device processing:

https://www.apple.com/privacy/features/

When you choose a distro, you choose that distro's install-and-update policy. If you prefer a different policy, choose a different distro.

I understand Linux Mint and Pop!_OS are like Ubuntu but without Snap, so they may be what you want. Personally I use Silverblue.