Comment by crossroadsguy
6 days ago
I miss my early days of CS college and tinkering with distro installs and installs and so on. In fact it was so fulfilling that it felt like “cooking your own meal”. I never used Windows. So in last two decades my experience has been Linux distros to osx/macos. If it was not for the internet cafe computer+internet usage before college (had no other exposure to either, otherwise) my experience of Windows would have been absolutely ZERO which is what it is now.
I wish OEMs had made Linux distros first class citizens for their laptops and computers and I wish these distros also imagined “regular people” using their OS/software. I guess both never happening kinda kept nullifying each other. Maybes it’s too late now?
In fact there was a time (around a decade ago?) when the Linux based laptops had started becoming kinda “normal” — I remember buying a Linux Dell Vistro with Linux pre-installed from Dell, had helped a friend buy an XPS with linux pre-installed. We both haven’t touched anything other than a Mac in a really long time and last two times I had to buy a laptop I found zero Linux options (in India) — let alone “good” options.
PS. Oh, my favourite was always Elementary OS even though it was clearly in beta when I migrated to the macs. There was just something about that distro.
> I wish OEMs had made Linux distros first class citizens for their laptops and computers
What more are you waiting for? Pretty much the only holdout is Nvidia, and they don't really make great laptop chips anyways. Almost every x86 chipset with UEFI and ACPI supports Linux to some degree. At this point, if your chip isn't running Linux it's because you've made a concerted effort to prevent users from accessing the bootloader.
When people say 'first class citizen' I feel like it's always a moving goalpost. First it's 'working WiFi drivers' but Broadcom modems have been supported for a decade now. Then it's 'proper Wayland support' but even Nvidia has a working Wayland session now. So then the goalpost moves to 'but I want Wayland on XFCE' and the cycle starts anew. These days, the 'regular people' workload I see on most computers boils down to gaming and running Google Chrome. Linux does both of those fine; it's the culture that has to change before people accept it. Look at how successfully the Steam Deck penetrated the market.
"First class citizen" never moved that much other than Bluetooth being kind of a requirement now, since it's increasingly hard to find good headphones that use 1/8" jack.
Elementary's terminal emulator and the notification bell which rang every time my computer finished a bell is embedded in my brain. I learned how to program properly on that OS and enjoyed every minute of it.
first linux is just the kernel, you can't do much with only the kernel, you have to target a distro.
But which distro to target?, Ubuntu, Linux mint or fedora, or all of them. That would take a lot of effort to developing and validating (And no, we don't only validate the kernel, it's not enough).