Why does this topic come up ever other day, and every time people go on tyraids about individual projects and developers being wrong or right, when the answer isn't complicated at all.
Windows is the default. Microsoft got in bed with hardware producers and computer retailors and got Windows on every product on every shelf. For 2 decades you went to buy a PC and you were buying a PC with Windows pre-installed. The extreme majority of PC users and buyers have no comprehension of how to build your own PC, what an OS is, or that they can even use alternative operating systems. At this point, Windows is the computer to a tremendous majority of desktop OS consumers.
OSX is prosperous because it is the Mac default in the same way Windows was prosperous because it was the everything default. The average consumer does not conceptualize or think about how the software is independent of the hardware, what they see and get is what they stick with 99% of the time. The other 1% is Linux / BSD / everything else.
The day of the Linux Desktop is the day a laptop running any flavor of a linux distro sits in Best Buy next to a Windows laptop and costs $50 less because it doesn't have the Windows license fees attached. Everything else is just window dressing of that issue, which is in plainest terms that Apple and Microsoft have a profit motive in getting their OS on your machine, and go out of their ways to see hardware with the OS preinstalled so Joe Shmoe uses it, whereas Linux distributions have no financial incentive or warchest of influence to push Linux as the default. And the default is what matters.
> The day of the Linux Desktop is the day a laptop running any flavor of a linux distro sits in Best Buy next to a Windows laptop and costs $50 less because it doesn't have the Windows license fees attached
Well... It's not Best Buy, but, still, it's something:
You should read the "story" before commenting. Allow me to copy and paste the response I gave to a similar comment earlier:
"None of this recent discussion is about why the average computer user doesn't use Linux or won't try it -- that topic has long since been beaten to death. It's about why Linux has the inferior desktop experience, and how OSX was able to steal away so many of the developers and users that, in a perfect world, should have been happiest on Linux."
But that's not really sparking a discussion. "Inferior desktop experience" is completely subjective. Personally I think OSX has the worst desktop experience of the three (Windows, Linux and OSX), Windows sits in the middle and Linux is the most joyful one to use. That might not be true for you or for anyone else though and arguing about it is really leading nowhere.
All I know is, that I'm glad to see differences between OSes regarding not only kernels and the way things happen but also regarding UX and interfaces (where Linux is by far the most flexible, because there's more than one desktop environment - a further differentiation) and I don't want them to be the same either.
Windows is the default. Microsoft got in bed with hardware producers and computer retailors and got Windows on every product on every shelf. For 2 decades you went to buy a PC and you were buying a PC with Windows pre-installed. The extreme majority of PC users and buyers have no comprehension of how to build your own PC, what an OS is, or that they can even use alternative operating systems. At this point, Windows is the computer to a tremendous majority of desktop OS consumers.
OSX is prosperous because it is the Mac default in the same way Windows was prosperous because it was the everything default. The average consumer does not conceptualize or think about how the software is independent of the hardware, what they see and get is what they stick with 99% of the time. The other 1% is Linux / BSD / everything else.
The day of the Linux Desktop is the day a laptop running any flavor of a linux distro sits in Best Buy next to a Windows laptop and costs $50 less because it doesn't have the Windows license fees attached. Everything else is just window dressing of that issue, which is in plainest terms that Apple and Microsoft have a profit motive in getting their OS on your machine, and go out of their ways to see hardware with the OS preinstalled so Joe Shmoe uses it, whereas Linux distributions have no financial incentive or warchest of influence to push Linux as the default. And the default is what matters.