alt Hacker NewsThis is always a problem when big mega-corporations are involved, be it Google or Microsoft. They want to control the platform.
We really need viable solutions. I have been using Linux since +21 years or so, so it does not affect me personally, but I think Linux needs to become really a LOT more accessible to normal people. And it really has not (on the desktop); all the various "improvements" on GNOME3 or KDE are basically pointless, they have not solved the underlying problem. Ideally problems should be auto-resolvable. If someone wants to use the proprietary nvidia driver, that should be a single click - on ALL Linux distributions. Instead you see some distributions have their own ad-hoc solution and other distributions have no easy solution (for simple people).
I will continue to suppose that the “real issue” with Linux is that the people drawn to developing it will not work well with others and continue year after year to waste time and duplication of effort on five decent, and ten thousand pointless distributions.
Whatever reason for this refusal / inability / choice to not contribute but rather re-create is on the reader to assume.
There is very little effort put into real progress as you point out. Sure, tons of work to move from x11 to Wayland, cool, only the developers give a shit… where is Office/365 that would make daily driving actually viable?
While WINE is impressive, it seems the only real progress for anything past Windows 7 is on paid versions of which there are at least three competing options.
Linux Desktop progress is slow because there it’s thousands of floundering side-projects without a goal of actually pulling normal users in.