What a horrible take, nothing but a tautology. It only runs the apps most people want to use because it's installed on so many computers, so developers target it. Linux can run anything Windows can. It's the same hardware, and if it was a much more popular desktop you bet your life that banks and streaming companies and AAA game developers would target linux as a supported platform. Has nothing to do with the quality of Windows, only the install base, which was the original point.

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raw_anon_1111 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn’t matter why it only runs apps most people want to use. As long as you don’t think a “quality” of something is that “it can do what I want it to do”.

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colordrops 4 hours ago | parent [-]

As long as you think of "quality" as "something that is not quality". bad logic. There are many systems that are only usable because they are popular but everyone hates them and thinks they are garbage. Market capture doesn't equal quality, sorry, that's a horrible take.

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raw_anon_1111 4 hours ago | parent [-]

If I need to do a thing and a product I use can’t do it? Why should I buy it? Does Linux have the software support of Windows? The hardware support?

So what argument could you give Joe Normal about how Linux is better than Windows ?

	▲	colordrops 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's a fair argument as to why someone should use windows. What does that have to do with quality though? You are confusing two things. Whether you should use it or recommend it is not the same as whether it's good quality.

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Sirental 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You do have to ask yourself why Windows has such a high market share. Chrome OS is Linux based but still managed to poke a deeper hole than much of us expected in the consumer space. Android is Linux based and practically annihilated Windows CE off the face of the earth. Mac OS has been competing fairly well with Windows despite being hardware exclusive. I very very very rarely see a Linux distribution in the wild being used on a PC/Laptop. When I do, it's usually being used by a nerd who knows their thing.

I think the reason Windows is so successful is because it's stable, bulletproof and easy. You don't have to burn an ISO to a USB and boot from it, partition a disk and install it. You don't have to grep grub at any time. You rarely have to use PowerShell for much of anything at all, including device management, managing services and even tweaking the registry.

The "desktop environment" is the operating system, not a seperate abstraction around it. There's no research required on what distro works best for you, what package manager is ideal, what file system to use, what window manager to use, what desktop environment to use. There's no messing with repositories either. No issues with drivers that require compiling from source, no marking an executable as "executable" through chmod.

I like Linux, but the Linux community overestimate how usable it is outside of their meta, and underappreciate their own mental model of what a computer is and how it differs from the layman. Most people want to open their laptop, double click a browser and watch Family Guy funny moments on facebook.com without having to troubleshoot PulseAudio because it's suddenly gone super quiet.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		ChromeOS did not poke a hole in the consumer space. It’s the B2B of hardware where the user is not the buyer. To a first approximation, no one wants a ChromeOS based computer for their home anymore than they want to run Salesforce at home. It is cheap and from what I have heard, Google’s MDM software is top notch. Android “won” as pyrrhic of a victory as it is since Android manufacturers besides Samsung make very little profit and every one who has money (again to a first approximation) buys iPhones. It won because Google gave it away, shared ad revenue with OEMs and it bent over backwards to the carriers and Apple wouldn’t. And yes Linux would save OEMs maybe $30 on licensing Windows. But OEMs make mire than that on bundleware.
	▲	colordrops 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's so simple. It's because windows DID have a much better desktop experience in the past, for decades, and they built a trillion dollar company around it. It's no longer the clear winner though, and they are simply surfing the momentum of having an existing user base that doesn't want to relearn apps and UIs, apps and games that only work on windows due to the size of the user base, and general marketing and sales and existing corporate contracts. None of this has anything to do with the quality of the desktop of Linux or windows. If Linux had 75% market share I promise you all those things above would quickly become true for Linux as well.