this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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I'm somewhat amused by the fact that lots of people are suggesting Linux as an alternative but can't agree on which flavor to use as the alternative.
Don't get me wrong, I think Linux is awesome, but this is the problem. You're never going to get the saturation necessary to bring average consumers over in significant numbers until they have a clear choice.
So, Linux is written by system programmers for system programmers.
The rest of us get to outsource that work by using a premade distribution, where system programmers mostly volunteer their time and efforts to package togther the system they want to use and they distribute it for free. Of course, there is no consensus of what anyone wants to use so there are lots of different distributions.
This isn't a problem and there will never be consensus.
If you need a "clear choice", you can always subscribe to one from Microsoft.
This must be one of the most uninformed comment in a long time. Already 2001, there was quite a lot of UI work being done by the company Eazel, founded by Andy Hertzfeld who from Apple and with a bunch of former Apple people. Around the same time, Ximian (I think) was pushing project Utopia with the idea to form project teams of people from kernel devs up to UX, to ensure common tasks worked out of the box. One result of this is that printer configuration on Linux is a much easier than on any other OS. This all happened 20+ years ago, there have been quite a lot of UX people involved after that. And my experience is that people with little prior knowledge have an easier time with a modern Gnome desktop, than with Windows. The problem here is that most people know Windows to some extent, and are used to the weird quirks there, but any slight inconvenience on a new OS make them quit.
Maybe that's true for gnome, but gnome isn't linux just like CUPS isn't an operating system and systemd isn't an operating system (which is based on launchd).
It all has to be packaged together and distributed and unless you're doing all your own packaging (and LfS is an experience, but not really an OS!), you're relying on a distro maintainer to do that for you.