With Windows 10 set to be sunset near the end of this year, there is a lot of talk of whether this is when many Windows users will finally switch to Linux. Ultimately, I think most who say they will never install Windows 11 will just end up updating and/or buying new hardware— I mean the exact same thing happened in the Windows 7 to 10 jump, but it is interesting to consider the possibility of consumer-grade Linux. When it comes to recommending Linux to new users, everyone has a preferred distro of choice: Ubuntu, Mint, or even Arch. Yet there is a growing sense that these traditional distros are unable to handle the demands of consumers. The traditional package manager system offers a lot of failure points on every single update or install, which is pretty much a no-go for any intermediary computer user. While Granny who only uses Facebook via Firefox on Mint may be fine, and Debian Sys-admin may be fine, there are swaths of people trained in the Windows way of doing things who know how to mess with Windows a bit who will be frustrated when they try and do the same on Linux. There is also the fact that these “safe” and “beginner” distros often rely on security by slowness, the idea that simply putting off updates for a while will make things more stable, which is technically true but leaves buggy and feature-starved programs which do end up having problems when inevitably updates must happen.
This is compounded by the fact that most people hate updating anything. One of the biggest complaints I always hear about Windows is updates. Everyone complains about Windows randomly restarting and updating, how every update adds nothing, and that they will never update. The idea of needing to update programs for security or compatibility reasons is not something which ever passes a normal user’s mind. To their credit, Microsoft and Apple have done a remarkable job hiding updates from users. Everyone I know who brags that they never update Windows is always on the latest version of Windows because Microsoft sets up updates so that they install when people turn off or restart their PC, even if they don’t really choose to update. Apple has their devices update overnight, while the user is sleeping and their device is charging. Still, these traditional update methods still have problems. For one, they take a while with lots of esoteric restarts and progress bars. On top of this, if anything goes wrong, either on the user end via sudden loss of power or on the OS end, your computer is likely beyond repair without a fresh reinstall, as both macOS and Windows have no easy way to roll back corrupted updates.
It’s a strange trend that as Microsoft updates Windows, it becomes more like Linux. Windows 11 has seen a set of new features like tabs in the terminal and file manager, an open-source PowerShell, Windows Subsystem Linux 2, sudo, and the winget package manager, which move Windows into behaving more like Linux, in a bid to appeal to developers, data scientists, and other professional users who work in professions where command-line interfaces and POSIX are the standard. In a dual evolution, Linux has become more like macOS, moving away from X11, embracing containerized app formats, and immutable roots. Of which Fedora’s Universal Blue project is the frontrunner in this movement. In some ways, Linux is doing this better than its competitors. Updates on systems like Universal Blue are staged in the background and simply apply when the user restarts their computer. The restart doesn’t take any longer, and as long as a user turns off their computer once a week, they will always be up to date, without any nagging or notifications needed. Flatpaks via the GNOME or KDE “stores” basically work the way the Microsoft store or the App store should work. Theoretically, Microsoft and Apple have very safe, easy, and simple ways to install apps via their own stores, which no one actually uses due to the dev-hostile practices of these companies. By virtue of being open, Flatpak has seen a far wider adoption at the cost of being less unvetted and therefore secure. An average PC user could simply type Google Chrome or Zoom into the KDE/GNOME store, push a button, and instantly have these apps available while the Windows and Apple stores all struggle to get popular apps.
If people have no experience with traditional package managers, then switching over to flatpaks is a non-issue since they function more like normal apps anyway. Still, the problem comes when apps aren’t available by this method. You can tell people to use BoxBuddy to install something within a Debian distrobox, but you may as well be speaking Greek, especially to an audience which is used to just being able to search “(X program) download Windows” and instantly find an install wizard. Unless you have corporate backing to muscle in app support like Google has with Android and ChromeOS, then nothing will really change. The kids of the 00s were raised in Microsoft Windows Science as their computer class, but the kids of today are raised using web apps on a locked-down Linux. Really, as long as an OS can run Chromium or Firefox, it should be ready for mass adoption, right? But as much as Cloud Native evangelists think this, it doesn’t change the fact that people use their PCs for more than just browsing. Bazooka does a lot of the heavy lifting for gamers, but if HDR and VRR don’t instantly work perfectly on a gamer’s $400 monitor, it doesn’t matter how good the Proton compatibility is. If someone wants to edit files locally, they will try and run Microsoft Office and give up when they can’t. The idea of something like LibreOffice doesn’t exist.
If Linux wins on the desktop, it will be when a large company like Google makes an OS like Universal Blue but with their own proprietary app store, which will be able to muscle in on the vendor and proprietary platform (read: HDMI) support. People do not care about spyware in Windows, or X11 vs. Wayland, or System D vs. init freedom, or Apple’s developer policies and planned obsolescence. Despite all my praise heaped on Universal Blue, I wonder why the team is so obsessed with destroying traditional Linux and being the user-friendly future. People have been trained to operate computers in the way corporations have trained them, and they will never break out of this mentality. The year of the Linux desktop is a sort of Monkey’s Paw, which will likely see the space become something like Android or Chromium, free on paper but ultimately highly controlled. I guess in the end, this isn’t much of a change from the current status quo, where a large portion of the Linux space is controlled by IBM, Canonical, and Novell.
To summarize, I don’t think Universal Blue will be the future, but I imagine something like it but with more corporate backing will. Thanks for reading my unfiltered rant; may you have a god day, friends!