The Only Success for Linux on the Desktop is by Another Name.
When I first started using Linux on my laptop, I was in my second year of high school. Already familiar with the nitty-gritty technical mumbo-jumbo that made both Windows and macOS systems work, I was a tinkerer and an enthusiast. Making the choice to install “Linux” then was a completely different inclination than my choices when installing “Linux” now. I don’t seek Linux anymore, and I don’t think most users ever should.
That’s not to say that somehow Linux is undesirable, or that it’s a failure. Linux is an immensely powerful and flexible kernel, and many of the tools built on top of it are often the best of the best… If you only look at technicalities though, and not usability. After about five years using Linux distributions as my primary operating system(s), it became clearer and clearer to me that Linux itself was only desirable when Linux was what I wanted to focus on. I wasn’t using it to be productive with other tasks, it itself had become the task.
I’ve spent the majority of my time with elementary OS, which by far is the most user-focused and accessible operating system I’ve found that runs with Linux at its heart. The more I used it, the more I realized that it was the entire experience that made it worthwhile for me, not just the kernel. Users are not going to benefit from an OS in their daily lives just because it’s Linux, but rather that they’re using an OS that is competent and comfortable at the same time.
The fact that Linux itself is so flexible, open source, and widely used in other spaces is a massive benefit to its deployment on a consumer OS with priorities on transparency and accessibility, but it also means there are a lot of papercuts that need to be dulled or masked. Much of that work is done by the folks at Ubuntu, who’ve done an incredible job at making the core of the OS run swimmingly on thousands of consumer devices. At the same time, elementary OS’ goals go even further in the direction of the end user, which means they also do a significant amount of work creating an environment that feels natural and precise, which most traditional Linux distributions simply can’t do.
elementary OS is just an example in this case, but the point here is how much gets layered, adapted, fixed… All to make “Linux” usable. It’s quite obvious that Linux is the tool OS builders use to create these functioning environments, rather than being a functional environment on its own. It’s hacky by nature, and that makes it incredibly difficult to present to the majority of the world that doesn’t sleep in a server closet. It’s the same reason Apple doesn’t rave about how wonderful their kernel is in every commercial or presentation for their customers. Why Microsoft doesn’t advertise NT everywhere. Users should not, do not, and will not care. Ever.
So where does this leave Linux? Some would argue that Linux deserves the name recognition as it’s what makes so many projects possible. That we should stick “Linux” at the end of an OS’ name because it’s an important factor for the users. It’s not, though. Difficult as it is to accept, users don’t want Linux. They want what Linux does. They want an operating system that caters to them and does what makes their priorities attainable. Strapping Linux to the end of it creates confusion and/or uncertainty. What is the priority here? Is it the technical cleanliness that tickles the fancy of server admins who are capable of handling the underlying components themselves? Or is it the user, who the OS is designed for, tested for, and used by?
Linux isn’t the priority here. It’s the user. The only way Linux becomes relevant on the desktop is through this realization.
