I actually had a bit of a discussion about this recently, one of the factors, that nobody wants to talk about, is just flat out because of fragmentation. There is no "reference" linux distribution, and until there is, there's zero chance of any sort of widespread use on the desktop. And that primarily comes back to what /u/fewt is talking about, the "community"
Nobody can agree on a damn thing. Debian wants to do things one way, Redhat/Fedora another, openSUSE/SUSE a third, Gentoo, Slackware, and don't even get me started on Ubuntu/Canonical. And that's fine, viva differences!
But it doesn't make for a unified experience. And that's never going to bring in your average $desktop_user. They just want to be able to install something, and have one place, or at least an easily googleable place to find answers if something goes wrong. They don't give a shit what philosophical reasons the developers chose one init system over another, or whether it's GNOME or KDE that they're staring at. Most users never change the default desktop in the first damn place.
And a "reference" won't ever happen.
The Debian/Gentoo/Slackware crowd generally distrusts any corporate Interests (and not neccessarily wrongly in all cases)
RedHat, and by extension Fedora and CentOS, well, RedHat has a business to run, and they need to differentiate themselves.
SUSE/openSUSE, same thing as RedHat.
Ubuntu/Canonical, well, the less said, the better, they've come the closest to a brain dead simple End-User distribution so far, but a huge swath of the FOSS world can't stand them.
So who do you put in charge? Nobody trusts anybody else, you put anybody with commercial interests in charge of a "reference" and there goes a bunch of developers for philosophical reasons. You put the Community in charge? Nothing ever fucking gets done, and every decision gets weighed down in personal fights and idiotic bikeshedding.
You make some version of GNOME the default desktop? You just pissed off 3/4 of the users, so you pick KDE, wow, you still pissed off 3/4, you pick something else, hey, 3/4 of the world is still pissed off!
We can't even get everybody to conform to FHS or the LSB, and until the point that you can go to your average website, and have a link there for $nifty_program that just says Linux, without any provisos (even if that link just ties back to the distribution repos and installs it through whatever your package manager is) it ain't happening, and none of these articles are anything but pointless handwringing.
/u/nebraska it's not entirely the users, there's plenty of ego to go around amongst the developers as well. There isn't a single cause solution if the end result you want is widespread desktop adoptance of a linux platform.
But the "community" is a toxic place, in many many many cases. (Admittedly, that doesn't just apply to the linux world. Reddit anybody?)
I actually had a bit of a discussion about this recently, one of the factors, that nobody wants to talk about, is just flat out because of fragmentation. There is no "reference" linux distribution, and until there is, there's zero chance of any sort of widespread use on the desktop. And that primarily comes back to what /u/fewt is talking about, the "community"
Nobody can agree on a damn thing. Debian wants to do things one way, Redhat/Fedora another, openSUSE/SUSE a third, Gentoo, Slackware, and don't even get me started on Ubuntu/Canonical. And that's fine, viva differences!
But it doesn't make for a unified experience. And that's never going to bring in your average $desktop_user. They just want to be able to install something, and have one place, or at least an easily googleable place to find answers if something goes wrong. They don't give a shit what philosophical reasons the developers chose one init system over another, or whether it's GNOME or KDE that they're staring at. Most users never change the default desktop in the first damn place.
And a "reference" won't ever happen.
The Debian/Gentoo/Slackware crowd generally distrusts any corporate Interests (and not neccessarily wrongly in all cases)
RedHat, and by extension Fedora and CentOS, well, RedHat has a business to run, and they need to differentiate themselves.
SUSE/openSUSE, same thing as RedHat.
Ubuntu/Canonical, well, the less said, the better, they've come the closest to a brain dead simple End-User distribution so far, but a huge swath of the FOSS world can't stand them.
So who do you put in charge? Nobody trusts anybody else, you put anybody with commercial interests in charge of a "reference" and there goes a bunch of developers for philosophical reasons. You put the Community in charge? Nothing ever fucking gets done, and every decision gets weighed down in personal fights and idiotic bikeshedding.
You make some version of GNOME the default desktop? You just pissed off 3/4 of the users, so you pick KDE, wow, you still pissed off 3/4, you pick something else, hey, 3/4 of the world is still pissed off!
We can't even get everybody to conform to FHS or the LSB, and until the point that you can go to your average website, and have a link there for $nifty_program that just says Linux, without any provisos (even if that link just ties back to the distribution repos and installs it through whatever your package manager is) it ain't happening, and none of these articles are anything but pointless handwringing.
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