An important reason for lack of adoption is simply because every PC or laptop comes with Windows installed for free (as in gratis). People are generally lazy and don’t bother with installing another OS. I’m pretty sure that the general public doesn’t need the feature rich MS O365, and certainly doesn’t care about the toxic community or GNOME vs KDE/Plasma. They just take what’s already installed.
Three years ago I installed Linux Mint on my fathers laptop because of the slow performance of Windows and all the malware issues that he had. Before that he used to call me once a week the ask for help for his laptop but that stopped immediately after I installed Mint. He’s a happy Linux user now but he can’t tell you anything about his desktop environment, package manager or whether he’s running systemd. He doesn’t care about that, he just wants his laptop to work. If the laptop had come with Mint in the first place he probably wouldn’t have known that it had Linux on it.
Agree with everthing @ericbuijs@lemmy.ml said below. That windows and macOS comes pre-installed on every purchasable computer is 99.9% of the reason that the linux desktop isn’t more popular. Everything else in this article were concerns that don’t affect most people using computers:
Lack of Testers and Reporters
Linux OS’s have more testers and reporters than windows, having a larger number of power users to report issues. This has lead to some very stable distros: watch those videos of some older non-savvy computer people trying to use windows vs some clean linux distros.
Lack of Code Contributors, Developers and Maintainers
Linux has probably 10x the code contributers that windows does. Also M$ and Apple are closed source, so that’s not even something they can compete on.
Toxicity
Exists on windows and mac forums and communities just as much if not moreso.
GNOME “Vs.” KDE/Plasma
Non-issue that people don’t have to care about after they install an OS.
Package Managers
Much easier to use than windows, and one of the main reasons to switch to linux!
I seriously doubt any of these are reasons for the masses. You can go and ask any average person and chances are (s)he won’t even know or care about GNOME/KDE, systemd, or actually have any idea of any kind of toxicity of this kind. I think the article exagerates the importance of some pretty irrelevant internet discussions that are only followed by those who are actually geeks that are passionate about technology, not “the masses”.
In fact, the first time I was ever exposed to toxicity in the computer world was when Microsoft, MS-DOS and Windows users continuously criticised aspects of those very same systems (the “blue screen of death” meme being a famous example of things like this later on). Not in the Linux community.
Also, the article claims there’s a lack of developers but fails to offer any numbers that can be compared. How many developers actually work on Windows (the OS, not apps) vs how many developers work on GNU/Linux OS? how many of them work in it for a living? (because there’s people who do actually get paid to work for Linux) how many don’t get paid and still contribute adding up to insane numbers of hours? I don’t think it’s that simple, you can’t throw an assertion based on a presuposition you hold on one particular aspect and forget about the rest of the picture.
