The short answer is 'no' but thing are looking up.
This week the Linux community received two very promising news stories that have bloggers buzzing. The first is about how Ubuntu’s market place growth went up 599% to a 1.89% share of operating systems. Linux as a whole went up from 1.36% to 2.87% of the share. These results are for the time period between March and April 2020, when Ubuntu just had one of their most successful point upgrades in their history.
The other side of the coin is that MacOS Catalina jumped from 3.41% to 4.15% which is a huge jump for the Apple MacOS as well. I bring this up is because people believe the reason for the jumps in Linux and MacOS is because of the end of life of Windows 7 in January 2020. It could be but there are lots of other things to look at.
Windows 7’s EOL might have been part of the reason but Windows is starting a gradual decrease in market share that will continue. More and more people are turning to more portable systems like Android tablets and Ipads and less to laptops as an everyday home appliance. Sure the Microsoft Surface is in this group but they were a little late getting to the show and this will hurt them. That is hurt them at the home level. The corporate world might be a long time from switching from Microsoft and more and more corporations are switching to Apple. Google Chromebooks will gain more due to use in the educational fields and with people moving from school to corporate jobs, are they going to stay with Chromebooks or are they going to switch to Macs (I’m old school so when I say Mac I mean any Apple OS in general) or to a Microsoft Surface? The thing that hurts Linux is that comparable systems is the availability and when they are available how do they stack up to the price of the others? For Linux, things like battery life and NVIDIA drivers are problems that are being resolved and just now coming into the market but you have to pay dearly for them. Also the difference in operating systems will have people that have been on Windows their whole life don’t want to learn new software.
As for software on Linux, one of the three biggest drawbacks might have been solved. One Ubuntu developer is running Microsoft Office on his Ubuntu computer, per this Twitter post, but will it be something that will be a workable solution for everybody? Yes, you can use the web based Office 365 on about any system but people really want Office on their computer, not on a cloud. But I expect that will change.
Another problem with Linux is the lack of Adobe support. Linux users say there are plenty of solutions that you can use, both free and proprietary but the problem with these is that you really cannot collaborate with people using Adobe Suites. Going back to Office 365, Microsoft will probably drop the installed version and move everything to the cloud. Adobe has proven that corporations will pay subscriptions for software, be it monthly or yearly and that will be more profitable for them in the long run, eventually only supporting one release and doing updates that will mean the only way to get up to date software is by subscriptions, and with all the collaborations between different companies on the same projects happen, then people will have to pay subscription fees to be able to keep competitive. Microsoft will be following this business model, it’s just a matter of time.
The third biggest drawback for Linux is gaming. This seems to go hand in hand with the market share. The only way this can be overcome is to get the market share up to around 5% and then that would put them around the same place Apple is in gaming. Not 100% but probably around 90%. This will in time come around, but probably not in the near future.
Even if Microsoft does something weird, like switch over to the Linux kernel it probably wouldn’t help Linux that much in the beginning. I bring this up because Microsoft will probably in the next few years switch over to the Linux kernel. It will be a locked down OS comprised of proprietary code surrounding the kernel, similar to Android but I just see Microsoft heading in that direction. I base this on the Microsoft / Ubuntu collaboration with WSL and also their dropping their Edge browser as we know it today to a Chromium based browser. Add this to more and more programs becoming cloud apps along with the fact that internet connections are a standard for life just like electricity, water and sewage and it does seem it will happen.
I said two things and never got around to the 2nd so here I go. Lenova will come out later this summer with a line of laptops that will be shipped with Fedora 32. This isn’t a stretch to add all this up, with Lenova buying the IBM computer laptop line a few years ago along with IBM now owning Redhat or RHEL and keeping their relationship with Lenova. Naturally the only way for Lenova to do this is to have a demand before they start offering these laptops, even though Lenova has been supporting Linux for a few years. Now add Dell into the mix with their Ubuntu computers. Neither company is making a special laptop for Linux, just re-tasking parts of their line and putting a Linux OS on them for the masses to buy. But this again goes to pricing. These are not entry level laptops. These are top of the line with cutting edge hardware that has been tested with Linux. My guess the pricing starts around $1200 for an entry level Linux OS computer and then the top tier lines probably $3500 or more, depending on upgrades. These are laptops that I am talking about. Towers are available at Dell. The laptop prices will put you in line with an Apple laptop so what would a Windows or Apple user buy for the same amount of money. Then there are companies like System 76 here in the US, that offer top of the line computers, but they don’t come cheap. So this adds to a whole new problem, price. Have casual users (hobbyist like myself) been priced out of buying a new laptop with Linux preinstalled on it?
All of this is my speculation, ramblings of an old guy that will probably never buy another new laptop or tower in his life. For me, this is what Linux is all about. Taking hardware and running an operating system that I choose, an operating system that I either install in a terminal like Arch or Gentoo, or if I run a live USB and install Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora, Debian or OpenSuse. Full disclosure I’ve never tried Gentoo. That will be a summer project.
