- NTSync coming in Kernel 6.11 for better Wine/Proton game performance and porting.
- Wine-Wayland last 4/5 parts left to be merged before end of 2024
- Wayland HDR/Game color protocol will be finished before end of 2024
- Nvidia 555/560 will be out for a perfect no stutter Nvidia performance
- KDE/Gnome reaching stability and usability with NO FKN ADS
- VR being usable
- More Wine development and more Games being ported
- Better LibreOffice/Word compatibility
- Windows 10 coming to EOL
- Improved Linux simplicity and support
- Web-native apps (Including Msft Office and Adobe)
- .Net cross platform (in VSCode or Jetbrains Rider)
What else am I missing?
The thing with Linux for the mainstream is that nobody cares about ntsync and HDR, because this stuff has been the norm for five to ten years on Windows.
You can't install the most recent version of MS Office or Photoshop in Linux. Only Steam works well. No, Heroic is not a usable alternative because the people making the games never tested them on it.
Linux is starting to eat Microsoft's lunch through Chromebooks, though. The Steam Deck also helps. And, of course, Android brings Linux to like half the planet. Linux for the general consumer is already here, but not in the form people who know how to install Linux want it to be.
ChromeOS though is a category on its own. Just because there is a Linux kernel in it, doesn't make it a Linux desktop.
For once, the people who insist on GNU/Linux are right here; Linux is a kernel, the userspace that runs on top of it completely separated from it.
I don't see why ChroneOS isn't a Linux distro. It's just Linux with a Wayland compositor (Ozone) and some bespoke applications (Aura for the application switcher and user UI, Chrome for the browser, etc.), plus a few containers to run Android stuff. A huge amount of Linux support and improvements have come directly from Google making the kernel work for their ChromeOS devices. You can build and develop the open source ChromiumOS on any computer with enough RAM, just like you could Gentoo with something bespoke like Hyprland.
The distinguishing feature is that some parts of the ChromeOS system aren't open source, the same way some parts of Chrome aren't, but it's still a full Linux desktop with all the standard components. Samsung has a similar Linux distro (Tizen).
You're arguing about naming conventions, though. If you want to refer to Linux as Linux Kernel that's fine, if a bit pedantic, but then you should be very strict about sticking to a separate name for the ecosystem of OSS Linux distros for desktops and laptops.
I haven't once thought of Android or ChromeOS as Linux, for the same reasons I have never once thought of Linux as Unix or MS-DOS as a PC DOS version. If we're going to conflate Linux with its proprietary alternatives let's just call it something else. Dinux? There you go.
Dinux has all those problems you outlined in your first post, I agree.
I can understand why you haven't thought of ChromeOS as Linux, but it really is just Linux under the hood. The power of ChromeOS, and the reason most "Linux" users hate it, is that you can't break it easily and that it's been set up to work reliably (and not offer hacky workarounds to plain users). The added security features also don't help with the FOSS community, though they're there for a good reason.
The reason I mention this stuff at all is that companies have made Linux on the desktop work. The "Linux" users don't like the way they did it, but until they can accept some of the lessons learned by these companies, we won't see the year of the FOSS desktop any time soon
Even the Steam Deck, with a regular old KDE desktop, is locked down to Flatpaks and no kernel modules, and from what I've read online from normal gamers, the Linux part is the part they like the least because when they need it, it usually involves config files or the command line.
People (understandably) cling to the "just open a terminal, switch out your kernel, and replace your display manager on the fly" level of customisation that leads to countless configurations, each as unsupported as the other, while the successful ones lock down Linux to a "this is what you get, if you alter it you get a stern warning and accept that things can break at any point" setup. It's how all the successful Linuxes good enough to ship to end users work, and as long as distros are in denial about it, Linux will always be that OS that the techie friend/guy on Lemmy keeps talking about.
You used a bunch of words but you aren't saying much new.
Again, those differences are meaningful. It makes sense to have a different name for it. You can lump it and MacOS and Android as a singular family of OSs, but they're clearly different products with different branding and different functionality.
You're also ignoring how much all of those "succesful Linux" non-Linux systems are tied to hadware, which is ultimately the issue. The terminal isn't as much of a dealbreaker as the Linux community makes it out to be (and neither is the UX not being identical to Windows, BTW). The problem is the lack of hardware support and the finicky configurations, terminal or no terminal. Steam OS, all the flavors of Android and Chrome OS are all customized to the hardware they ship with and work well with it. In all cases the hardware is locked and it doesn't need much readjusting, and when it does it's often through a live support update system.
And yes, I have thought of ChromeOS as Linux, don't be patronizing. I am saying it's not the same as the desktop-focused Linux distros that are trying to support modular PC hardware in the way Windows does. Because it isn't.
Yeah okay, now tell that to the guys at Statcounter or whoever determines the desktop market shares that they should fold in the chrome OS stat with Linux.
The Statcounter guys aren't very reliable for Linux market share anyway. They're publishing data collected from their web tracker on some websites, but most current Linux users are probably blocking those anyway. Same with Firefox market share.
ChromeOS is such a successful Linux desktop that they've decided it deserves its own category. If anything, that speaks to ChromeOS's success.
It's roughly consistent with Steam survey data, and given the current context, Linux Steam users are heavily incentivized to contribute to the survey. The numbers are what they are.
Plus the guy's argument is that relevant data sources separate ChromeOS out because it's substantially different, which is a fair point, regardless of the accuracy of the data.