Week 1 - Rainer Toots - The falling behind of Linux

     It is quite clear to see that to make something successful you have to have a couple of bad ideas, but what is important is the fact that you learn from your mistakes and keep on pushing with better ideas, to perhaps get lucky once, then you have to just, as Microsoft would put it: "Keep riding the bear."

    I wanted to write about why Linux has fallen behind to the likes of Apple and Microsoft's operating systems, when there is a lot of good ideas for Linux in its development cycle. Open-source, more access, better control over your system, when Linux offers you these features, why didn't everyone just jump to it over Microsoft's OS. 

For a bit of background information: Linux started being developed at 1991 by Linus Torvalds as a hobby project at first but later on it would be additionally developed by other people to form distributions of Linux like: Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc.

Hardware compatibility

Currently Linux as an OS is very poor for home-use because of the fact that it has very poor open-soure support for some types of hardware, majorly decreasing their performance for gaming if the person would like to pass some of their time enjoyably. It would seem that the most used solution to this is having a dual-boot computer with Linux and Windows and once you have finished your tasks on the Linux part of your system you can switch over and enjoy your computer at full capability. There have been major increases recently, but graphical driver manufacturing companies tend to prioritize their support for the "closed" source drivers, leaving Linux to the back of the queue.

Confusion for consumer

Linux has the possibility of many and many distributions and each one of them has a speciality to them. You have Kali Linux for the hackers and cyber-security specialists, but wait, there is also Parrot and Arch Linux for exactly the same reason. Then for a general "desktop" use you could have Debian, Ubuntu or even Linux Mint. The amount of distros (distributions), might be cool, but for a new consumer looking to join the market, it might be a bit overwhelming and they will rather choose the OS that is simple to use, choose and acquire. For example, currently for Windows personal use the choice you would have to make would be either: Home, Pro. There are additional editions for Windows as well (Education, Enterprise, etc.), but the initial two are the main choices are regular consumer would have to decide upon.

Software availability

Sadly for now, Linux is limited to certain types of software, as for the points raised in Hardware compatibility carry over to software as well. By default, Linux cannot get classical commercial software on its systems, the likes of: Photoshop or Microsoft Word, which might hinder the agreeability of the general consumer if they got past the previously mentioned turning points, then this might prove to be the most difficult hurdle. There is a way to still get this software to work on Linux, by using a bypass via Wine software and then launching the software through that workaround, but this might become too tedious for the general consumer.

For these reasons I am most certain is why Linux has been falling behind and will continue falling behind in the OS game, I do like the use of Linux and all it offers, but my main OS will most likely always stay something other than it, till these crucial issues can be fixed.

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