Linux

I used to have more faith in people in general and believed this can actually happen. I changed my mind.

People are generally ignorant and even when working in tech where there’s a lot of interaction with Linux machines, most people I meet couldn’t care less about Linux on desktop. With how obvious advantage of free software might look at glance, it’s very rare for me to see somebody actually caring about freedom, privacy and being in full control over the piece of hardware they’re using or even seeing anything bad in blind trust towards big tech. Companies are stupid enough to on one hand not trust their employees and locking down their work machines, on other sucking corporate cock and enforcing intrusive services or straight up sending their data right to multi-billion companies for the sake of convenience.

I don’t blame home users who can’t or don’t want to switch for whatever reason. They’re just consumers using devices they’ve bought, there’s no reason to force them to the change. It gets really bad with public institutions though, where Windows remains the king on desktop and Microsoft does its best for that to never change. Everything relies on one corporation that is trusted to drive computers to deal with confidential stuff. When there’s security flaw in their software, only MS can fully understand what’s going on (in a timely manner, ofc it can be reverse-engineered) and fix it, which was already an issue numerous times. If I believe there might be some big shift in the desktop space, it’s definitely stuff like military and all sorts of national institutions in many different countries. To some degree it already happens in Germany and France among others.

As for home users and gamers, I believe the market can grow some more, but Windows won’t go anywhere anytime soon and will stay on dominating position in that area for decades to come. Maybe it will only be replaced eventually when the concept of personal computing will change drastically and traditional PCs that we know will become irrelevant.

With recent advancements Linux is showing how it can be a viable alternative for some people, but keep in mind it has been around for 30+ years at this point and the kernel was already solid by mid-2000’s. The adoption really boils down to how complete and accessible it is. The first thing is impossible to get 100% as lot of missing features comes from lack of hardware/software vendor support. The community can supplement a lot of it, but a lot remains unsupported. Without that, kinda hard to believe in a super significant shift.