Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use.
I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
>I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I've been using Arch for about two months now. It's been great, yeah, but it's still a massive, long drawn exercise of friction because I have two literal decades of experience using a windows machine. That experience has value and the idea of throwing it away is a barrier.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
They don't. They switched over to iPad 10-ish years ago. Most normies I know use phones and/or tablets full-time for their personal computing. Laptops and desktops are either work machines, for games, or for work without wages (studies, excel, other things which are inconvenient or impossible on a phone).
Grandma is on Linux Mint since she still wants to do her banking on a computer and not an iPad. She'd be on Windows 11 if I weren't her tech support, since then she'd have bought whatever idiot at the local shop would have recommended, wasting a lot of money, and probably still have thrown her arms up in despair after a while due to the shit user experience. If the local shop had machines with Mint preinstalled, I'd imagine that would have gone well, if a lot slower than it would have with my help.
No Windows casual out there has ever even installed Windows, never mind another OS, on their computer, even if they theoretically want to. They can't have what they don't know about, and that barrier is probably never going to go away.
Completely agree. Modern computers are basically just web terminals for most people, so a basic Linux distro + browser is all they need.
Windows is actually terrible for non-technical users now. The constant pop-ups, nagging messages, and decision prompts create genuine anxiety. People don't know what they're clicking on half the time. Yet somehow most technical people I talk to haven't caught on to this.
Look at what younger generations are actually using: Chromebooks in schools, Google Drive instead of Microsoft Office. Even people who legitimately need Office aren't on Windows anymore, they're on Macbooks. That's the case at my company anyway.
At this point Windows is really just gamers, engineers who need CAD, and office workers stuck on it from inertia. There's nothing inherently attracting new users to the platform anymore. I honestly don't know who their primary audience even is at this point.
Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook? Also Windows is increasing in its share again. Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not? They're combining it with Android, which honestly seems like a decent bet for what Chromebooks are meant to be. The end result will have a different name, but it will still be a cheap laptop to do school work and simple computing, and that isn't a Windows machine.
> Also Windows is increasing in its share again.
Is it? And is that pie even getting any bigger?
> Then why is Google killing the ChromeOS/Chromebook?
They're not killing it, they're merging it into Android. Makes sense. Android already does everything ChromeOS does, it just needs better desktop input support. Google said this was to compete with iPads, which only reinforces my point.
> Also Windows is increasing in its share again.
Short-term fluctuations don't change the long-term trend. We're talking about where things are headed over the next decade vs where it once was
> Maybe that is due to companies that want AI in there systems.
My company went all-in on Copilot, but I'm not seeing this translate to more Windows usage. Copilot works fine on Macbooks, and that's what most people here use. When management gets excited about it, they talk about Outlook and Teams integration. Nobody cares about Windows-specific features. What does OS integration even buy you? Access to local files that are already in the cloud anyway? I'm using Copilot on my company-issued Ubuntu laptop right now. And honestly, the fact that IT at a massive, conservative corporation even started offering Ubuntu as an option says a lot about where things are headed.
Microsoft will be fine, but I'd bet on Windows declining over the next 10 years, not growing.
>Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
Because if they switch to Linux, I'll be on the hook for tech support. If they stay on windows, then it's mainly my brother's problem.
BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either. Linux wouldn't be any harder for them aside from getting support from random places, or buying random bits of junk with no research expecting them to kinda work.
> BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either
That's the thing that annoys me. People say Linux is "harder", but I really don't think that's true. People seem to just ignore all the weird awful bullshit in Windows that pops up and accept it as just part of the world, and when Linux has slightly different issues, OMG WHY IS IT SO HARD I'LL STICK WITH MY ADWARE MACHINE BECAUSE I LIKE HAVING UPDATES BREAK EVERYTINGGGG.
> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.
I have. They are convinced it will be "harder". I have tried to explain to them what seems a lot harder to me is when Windows Update decides to brick their computer [0], and they have to call me in a panic and I have to waste an entire day walking them through diagnosis stuff and eventually walk them through flashing multiple thumb drives of Linux and Windows 11 [2] and then walk them through nuking and reinstalling.
As I've said before, before I get any kind of "live and let live man if they want to run windows let them", I would like to point out that whenever their computers break, they call me to fix it, so I do not think it's unreasonable for me to want them to use an operating system that has recovery tools that actually work, with and with filesystems built after the neolithic age so that system backups are easy and cheap and actually do what they're supposed to.
[0] dig through my comment history if you details.
[1] made more annoying because, as far as I can tell, none of the Microsoft recovery tools have ever worked in any point in history.
[2] Linux because Microsoft doesn't have any kind of LiveCD/LiveUSB support anymore, so I had to boot into a live Linux so I could walk them through installing tmate and then I was able to mount the drive and rsync all the files over to my server for recovery.