A tour of elementary OS, perhaps the Linux world’s best hope for the mainstream

I have not tried this distribution yet. It would be nice to see Linux gain popularity on the desktop, and thereby bring about more commercial support for applications and hardware.

A tour of elementary OS, perhaps the Linux world’s best hope for the mainstream
With its new release, pay-what-you-want OS project now has a pay-what-you-want app store.
Scott Gilbertson - 12/28/2018, 7:00 AM

Everyone is a Linux user, but almost no one knows it. The operating system is a strange beast. You'd be hard pressed to come up with another tool so widely used, so widely deployed, and so absolutely necessary to the functioning of the modern world that is simultaneously so utterly unknown outside the tech community.

From ATMs, to phones, to in flight displays, to the Web server your browser got this page from, we are all using Linux every day even if we don't all realize it. Yet even with that ubiquity, there's one place Linux has never really succeeded: the desktop. Despite passionate communities of users (as seen in place like Ars comment threads), Windows and macOS dominate the desktop and that's unlikely to change in the near term. Though if it ever does, it will likely be because of projects like elementary OS—an operating system that seeks to bring the polish of commercial desktops to the world of Linux.

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The default look of elementary OS Juno.

... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/201...he-linux-worlds-best-hope-for-the-mainstream/

 

And ultimately it will not take off, and matters little.

90% of users only care about their device working with the software they want to use. Most software developers making software for the "common people" code for Windows, because that is the most common OS for computers. They do not want to get into any variant of Unix, because it is not what they need.

Joe Consumer wants to know that when they buy or download "Super Battle Tanks VII" and finish pressing a simple install button that it will just work. Ask more than 4 or 5 questions and most get ticked off, they do not want to be "techies", they want to push a button and have it work. As simple as that.

The Unix-verse is simply to fragmented now to ever become "main stream". We have hundreds of variants of it, along with dozens of variants of variants. And some by big names, like Microsoft and Google. But it never became mainstream because it was simply "to technical" for the common users.

And software developers never adopted it for widescale use for the same reason. And today trying to get the "Platform Wars" going again 20 years after the last of the former attempts was defeated (although it lingered on life support until 18 years ago) is an exercise in futility.

Heck, if any OS was to ever possibly gain a real foothold against Microsoft, I think the best bet would probably be Arca. But even then, I do not see it as being other than another nitch operating system. Yea, it runs OS/2 and Windows 16 bit natively, and many Linux and Win32 programs can be ported to it. But it is also a non-Hyper-threading 32 bit OS, and that will always kill it now that most people have had 64 bit systems for over a decade.