Come pre installed. As much as it pains me, LTT guy is probably right to a degree as well. Shit needs to work without tinkering. Personally I don’t mind some tinkering - enjoy it even. But the average Joanne does not.

Be preinstalled on laptops/desktops.

everything else is ready unless you use niche software. Most people just use a browser and word or a pdf editor.

note the distro MUST be an immutable up to date kde flatpak using one for normal people, however

Two things:

1. Obviously it needs to come pre-installed. This is a really tough hurdle to overcome and I’m not sure how it can be.
2. Security needs a lot of work if Linux is going to lose the small-target advantage.

This most difficult one is probably the fact that 99% of people do not install their operating system.

The device they purchase needs to have a clean and elegant out of box experience like the Mac. Regular folk who are willing to stray from windows don’t consider any computer that doesn’t come off the shelf with sane defaults. Everything else is arcane to them.

We are not those people. I have to remind myself that not everyone likes to build their own systems.

I do have a friend who wants to buy a framework laptop with Fedora on it because that’s what they use in the Laboratory he works in but he doesn’t want to assemble it himself he just wants it to come like that.

I think we’re getting there finally.

People can’t be bothered to run better messaging apps. Expecting them to change OS is crazy

Consumerism.

Most of the comments here seem to be from the consumer perspective, but if you want broader adoption, you need to consider the corporate market too. Most corporate software these days is web-based, so the problem is less with the software and more with the people responsible for it.

The biggest hurdle is friction with the internal IT team. They like Windows because that’s all they ever learnt and they’re not interested in maintaining a diverse set of company laptops. They won’t entertain Linux in a corporate environment unless it’s mandated by management, and even if the bosses approve it, IT will want a way to lock you out of your laptop, force updates, do a remote wipe, etc.

There are (proprietary) tools to do some of this, but they generally suck and often clash with your package manager. Microsoft is just way ahead of Linux in the “bloatware that tours your hands” department.

People who convince themselves they “just aren’t good with computers.”

In the early 2000s, it was widely thought that everyone who grew up with them would be reasonably competent with them. We now have 20-30 year olds who are still stumped with basic computing concepts like how to reset a forgotten password. I literally ran into this a couple of months ago: Really? You haven’t had to do this a dozen times in your life by now? How did you finish college (this person was highly educated)?

CAD software.

FreecCAD just released it’s first full version and it’s a pain to use. Back in 2018 somebody said FOSS CAD software was at least ten years behind the big windows commercial software. I think now it’s about fifteen behind.

I think with any alternative to big tech the problem is most people are really unwilling to change their habits and make short term compromises. A lot of people know on a surface level that big tech is stealing their data etc. But actually changing their habits goes to far.

Another issue is that its more or less a systemic issue.

To many people aren’t even awear of what FOSS even is. The state of Foss and is a bit complicated where you do have organizations and activists advocating for it but also gigantic corporations that use Foss technology and exploit the free labor that goes into it.

There definitely needs to be more activism for FOSS technology and alternatives to big tech. And those alternatives should be open to everyone like Linux is. Of course there are always multiple reasons why something isn’t used but I do think it is important to look at a bigger perspective than individual consumer/ in this case users

Adding my voice to the hardware compatibility issue. While most hardware just works, Linux usually lacks the ability to configure the device. Audio interfaces are a good example of this. They work but you can’t set the sample rate or enable any custom features on ANY of them.

I believe government regulators should step in and require hardware manufacturers to provide Linux support equal to Windows or Mac. This could be relaxed for low volume or highly specialised devices, but mainstream consumer stuff should be more universal.

Either:

1. A smarter and wiser population able to discern and care enough that they’re being cucked by Microsoft, overcoming the inertia to install Linux.
2. Linux invents a game/feature that is so goddamn appealing that everyone wants in on the action.
3. Preinstallation.

A multi-billion dollars marketing budget, anti-competitive practices and confidential agreements, blacklisting hardware vendors if they dare proposing an alternative, and of course a legal department the size of a small city to sue all competition out of existence.

Oh wait that’s Microsoft/Google/Apple/Meta/Amazon.

Being able to do everything a “normie” would do without the need to use a terminal.

And a way for companies to get flatpak as an alternative, i remember a friend of mine who tried to use 'buntu budgie for a while and he needed a software for cartographic stuff.

We got lucky the company of said software (and yes, it needed to be THAT specific software to avoid compat’ issues, so no free alternatives were viable even if they were available) used to provide a .deb package, we got forced to change a lot of sys native binaries to make it work and ended up just breaking a lot of other stuff to do so. Flatpaks (fuck snaps) need to be the default option to be available across systems without caring about distros, so anyone can run it on “mandragora linux” if they want to

This question comes up every other week. I reject the premise that “more users” is a commonly held objective.

For most linux / OSS projects the objective is to be the best the project can be. Having an active community is usually part of that but “more users” is a low priority.