Linux is the absolute leader in supercomputing, it is much more used than Windows on servers, and in 2017 Android became the most used operating system, surpassing Windows for the first time in history. That Android triumph is also a Linux triumph.
But on the desk, on the desk, the story is a very different one, one that Linus Torvalds himself considers his personal failure. The creator of Linux started it as a desktop operating system and that is exactly the only area in which Linux does not dominate.
The question that many have been asking for years and continue to ask until today is, why? Why doesn’t the year of Linux on the desktop arrive? To answer this question, who better than Linus Torvalds himself.
No one wants to install an operating system
https://youtu.be/KFKxlYNfT_o
Surfing the sea of YouTube videos, recently I got a small segment of a round of questions and answers in which Torvalds participated in 2012. There they asked him exactly why Linux does not dominate the desktop, and his answer was extremely simple and makes all the sense in the world: nobody wants to install an operating system on their machines.
The reason the desktop is so hard to come by is because most consumers don’t want to install an operating system on their machines. And that is not something that focuses only on computers, most people do not want to install an operating system on their mobile either. The reason Linux is successful on mobile is not because you have 900,000 people downloading disk images to install on their smartphones every day, it is because the system comes pre-installed on the device. And that has never happened in the desktop market and it is really very difficult to make it happen.
Torvalds talks about how there are some manufacturers like Dell that have done it, especially in situations like a company that wants Linux computers and buys them from the manufacturer and asks that they come with Linux pre-installed, but there is the detail, you have to specify than ask for it. It is something that is made for a very limited number of the machines they sell.
If you don’t have the pre-installations you will never gain market dominance.
Dell is not the only company that sells computers with Linux pre-installed, others have. Some like System76 are even dedicated only to selling computers with Linux (before with Ubuntu and now with their own fork Pop! _OS). But they are still niche markets that barely help Linux touch that 2-3% market share on the desktop.
When Torvalds wonders if that Linux dominance on the desktop is ever going to happen, the first side he looks at is ChromeOS and Google Chromebooks, but back then he mentioned that they were horribly slow. Linus said back in 2012 that we would have to wait to see the third, fourth and fifth generations. And Chromebooks are already on the right track, and although not nearly Windows if they have begun to make a big dent in the education sector.
Interestingly, Windows has fewer users than ever and has lost over 500 million users in the past three years. However, Windows 10 is found on more than 600 million devices.
It is also curious that the desktop market is so similar and so different from the mobile market. While Android has succeeded thanks to the fact that Google has made the system free and open and manufacturers have chosen to use it on their devices with different layers of customization, this has never happened on the desktop, where computer manufacturers prefer to work with Microsoft and pay Windows licenses.
It seems that not only is it that people do not want to install their own system, it is that computer manufacturers are also not interested in breaking the mold and having their own “distributions”. The only ones that do this are Apple with their Macbooks, and Google with their Chromebooks. If the day of Linux on the desktop becomes a reality, it will only be when Windows is no longer the manufacturer’s choice to pre-install on all its products.