What Linux Needs To Go Mainstream

I would say that what Linux needs to go mainstream as a user desktop operating system is proper marketing and a ‘got-to’ OS.

Microsoft doesn’t need to market. Everyone knows what Windows is – it’s everywhere. They market anyway and it puts them at a massive advantage. The average person hasn’t heard of Linux let alone a specific distro like Ubuntu – that needs to change.

Chromebooks aren’t exactly thriving. But people have at least heard of ChromeOS – that’s because Google marketed.

But what would you even market? Mint? Debian? Ubuntu? Fedora? There are a million distros. I’m not calling for that to change… I just think that this makes things much more difficult. It scares people and I think it can fragment development when x amount of distros use one method to install software and y amount use another method etc.

There needs to be a figurehead distro. Ubuntu/ Mint are the obvious choices as they’re designed for this.

The whole thing has to snowball just the right way. Linux users need to support developers so that more will come (they’ve been great about this) – the more developers the more high quality products, the more high quality products the more users, the more users the more support and feedback, and the cycle continues.

I don’t know if desktop Linux will ever happen but I think that free software is good (not that proprietary software is bad, I don’t believe it is) and I’d like to see an OS built on it.