Comment by trelane
1 day ago
> it can be a really fun experiment and I would be interested to see how that would pan out.
It would fail, and just be another corpse in the desktop OS graveyard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Flora_Prius
https://www.osnews.com/story/136392/the-only-pc-ever-shipped...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire
Unless you ship your own hardware or get a vendor to ship your OS (see the above), and set up so the user can actually use it, you have to get users to install it on Windows hardware. So now your company is debugging broken consumer hardware without the help of the OEM. So that hopefully someone will install it on exactly that configuration for free.
This is not a winning business model.
Hm I see the confusion, what I was proposed was for something like loss32 to have a window manager / desktop environmnet which looks like windows 7
Loss32 is itself a linux distro and thus there should technically be nothing stopping it from shipping everywhere
I think you were assuming that I meant create a whole kernel from scratch or something but I am just merely asking a loss32 reskin which looks like windows 7 which is definitely possible without any of the company debugging consumer hardware or even the need of company for that matter I suppose considering that I was proposing an open source desktop environment which just behaved like windows 7 by default as an example.
I don't really understand why we need a winning business model out of it, there isn't really a winning model for niri,hyprland,sway,kde,xfce,lxqt,gnome etc., they are all open source projects who are run with help of donations
There might be a misunderstanding between us but I hope this clears up any misunderstanding.
I think fundamentally I disagree with your optimism. I've seen a number of these come and go over the decades. I do not think making something that looks like Windows would be sufficient to be successful.
> you were assuming that I meant create a whole kernel from scratch or something
No, making Linux run reliably on random laptops is already a monumental challenge.
Agreed but there have been some real strides in innovation recently in linux, definitely worth checking out :)
Regarding successful, well they already are, ZorinOS is an OS which looks like windows 7 or has some similarities to it and its sort of recommended to beginners but usually linux mate is the most recommended distro
> No, making Linux run reliably on random laptops is already a monumental challenge.
Not sure about this but I ran linux in 15 year old dell mini like its no big deal so I can only assume that support has been better but I feel like I can assure you that linux support is really good for most laptops in my observation.
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