Comment by pjmlp
5 days ago
The only UNIXes that I consider ever caring for the whole experience as a full stack, for users and application developers alike, were Irix, Sun NeWS, Solaris, NeXTSTEP and its evolution as OS X.
Sure you can argue Linux distributions can also offer something similar, the problem is which flavours and for how long, which brings us to shipping the Linux kernel underneath Java and Web frameworks, as being the most successful approach thus far.
> the problem is which flavours
Whatever distro which is pre-installed on the computer you buy, or whatever your geek acquaintance picks, or whatever you pick as a geek yourself (any mainstream distro will do).
> for how long
The lifetime of the computer in all of the cases, or, in the last case, until you want to try out something else.
Seems decent in any case.
Worked very well for netbooks, with OEM specific distros.
It was a vision on what something like Android would be.
Not sure what's your point, netbooks like the eee PC are starting to become ancient history anyway.
When it comes to our current era, Dell, Lenovo and HP computers sold with Linux are fine, and there's KDE-related hardware that seem nice too [1] (at KDE they understood that it's important to be the default OS, so they are pushing towards this). system76 too I've heard. Obviously choice is more limited than for Windows (although macOS is doing well with limited choice too), more biased towards pro, but there are decent options. The installed distros are quite standard too, there's some customization but not more than what we see on Windows computers.
[1] https://kde.org/fr/hardware/