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.
As usual the issue is more systemic than individual. You can never trust an individual to make the "right" choice. This is why I don't believe free markets are a good way to organize society. The only way the general populace switches over to Linux is it gains foothold in enterprise and educational institutions as the main OS to be used.
Ditched Windows late last year and jump to Linux as my main driver. I've had Linux servers for years but it is completely different when it's your main driver.
I mainly play games and from the over 100 games that I tried to play only 2 had issues and I was unable to get them working (BattleField 4 and FaF Forever).
Honestly Wine and subsequently Proton is the true game changer when it comes to games BUT I'm on an all AMD hardware and had 0 issues with driver stability, however a friend of mine on an Intel/nVidia has had a couple of issues which were eventually resolved but took a bit of wait for fixes and updates.
Gaming was absolutely the only reason I didn't switch permanently
Switched all my machines over to Linux within a month or so of getting my steam deck and see no reason to go back
Can't imagine I'm the only one who was waiting for this, though that said I am fairly technical, I don't think most non technical people will see enough of a reason to switch
Yes! I'm an example of this. I've decided to give Linux a try on my old 2012 Macbook last year, because I've heard so much about it on Lemmy. I played with it for a few days and realized it was the OS I've been dreaming of. Ended up installing Nobara on a partition of my gaming PC (with NVDIA) and cant remeber last time I've booted Windows. I still have to work on macOS on my M1, but I've install Asahi and alternate between the two. I am now convince 80,% pc user would be way more happy on Linux. I really think FOSS are now better then licence software in most case.
How easy is it for someone who has no PC gaming experience (they are computer literate) and hence no steam library, to buy a steam deck and it be a comfortable user experience?
Its the most simple handheld gaming PC by far. As with all unfamiliar systems, there is a learning curve that exists, and person to person the difficulties in this will vary. But at a base level, out of the box, the SteamDeck is almost as simple to grasp as something like a Switch (or any other console). If you just want to game, and just want it to work, SteamDeck is your best choice.
Full disclosure though, the deeper you choose to dig into advanced use, the more complicated this question becomes. If you are more familiar with Windows, then using the desktop on a Windows handheld will naturally make more sense at first. But if you are comfortable with Linux (or put in the time to learn), the SteamDeck is far easier to use fully handled than it's competition thanks to easy to remap on the fly controls and the track pads. But again, this second "advanced usage" point is moot if you just want to buy games from Steam and have them work out of the box.
Awesome. I keep recommending them to people asking me if they should buy one even though they don't game on their PC and i love mine but the last console i owned was a Sega so i didn't feel like I'm really unbiased at all.
I have seen tech illiterate people who are very comfortable with steam deck.
She doesn't even know macbook charger can charge steam deck. She was complaining to me that she is very afraid of losing her steam deck charger, since she doesn't have a spare.
So the total positive rate, from my observation, is around 100%, with sample size of 1.
There sure is new comers thanks to the enhancement of graphic environment and gaming.
But this is still very marginal, and there is some good reasons.
If we want to promote linux and FOSS we couldn't only rely on use-cases and good-will of people, we need to find structures that make people use mac and windows.
FOSS movement make some interesting stuff about the education system, and the institution use of windows, which are a lot more impact on the OS we are using than the qualities of such systems. But the so-called "politically neutral" forbade us to prevent this situation to repeat itself.
Microsoft works on daily bases with tremendous resources (not only monetary). People who are making this decisions have some carrer interests that is not align on those of the masses.
Free-software without anti-capitalism is only open-source, sry
That not a moral state; some capitalist on corporation help us a lot. The main reason for the linux promotion is the choice of Valve, but because that choice is not profitable (in a capitalist way), we should consider it as the exception.
I'm not saying that it's helpless. It's quite the opposite : I'm saying that if we want to have a massive action, we have to take the power were it is.
I think it's still a migration of a rather knowledgeable part of the windows users.
I did migrate a year ago because of frustrations from windows pop ups showing up like they own the computer.
I a still reluctant to recommend it to my partner who is comfortable with windows but not really techy. As long as Linux works, it works. But when you need something a bit more involved or something breaks, the terminal will be harder for those users who might not have ever opened CMD in windows.
When a problem arises in windows, the same people that never opened a cmd would be equally puzzled about how to solve the issue when something breaks.
I'm my opinion and experience, great majority of users don't have the skills to solve common issues on windows either. Cue all the jokes and memes from the tech savvy family members that have to fix uncle Lou infested pc.
Maybe we are talking about tradition. People are used to windows, the hardware companies works with them. The pc stores had been selling pre installed windows on pcs for decades. Software and games are being made for windows. People know it's not a good garbage OS, but you have to fight so many walls that the common user is never going to make the jump by himself.
