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The whole juggernaut that is now Linux on Dell started as the brainchild of two core individuals, Barton George (Senior Principal Engineer) and Jared Dominguez (OS Architect and Linux Engineer).
It was their vision that began it all back in 2012. It was long hours, uncertain futures and sheer belief that people really did want Linux laptops that sustained them. Here is the untold story of how Dell gained the top spot in preinstalled Linux on laptops.
[...] This first attempt at Linux on laptops failed mainly because most non-technical users were blinded by the cheap price and didn't understand what they were actually buying.
[...] This time the duo had the right initial market. It was big, commercial web-scale operators and their developers who were crying out for a fully supported Linux laptop.
People who do technical work, like Linux. People who don't, don't.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday November 18 2017, @02:04AM (1 child)
Yeah, I'm going to disagree there. Started out with Microsoft on the desktop, moved into Linux on the servers (headless), moved into BSD on the servers (still headless), and finally Linux on the desktop. I've been computing for decades, and love Linux. That said, it's not all that user friendly.
There have been many aha's and gotchas, and quite frankly, some really hairy shit that I thought would require a complete reinstall. Only my "technical mind" saved me, but it was nearly a straight up learning curve on key management for encrypted drives, how you handle with fstab, signed OS, etc. It was a kernel update that completely fucked my fstab and profile in how it was requiring an encrypted volume to load, but no longer had the correct syntax IIRC. I also had help that pointed me in the right direction, and helped me with syntax. Only thing I figured out on my own was key management, and that was after accidentally changing the password, promptly forgetting the new password, and learning the intricacies to the extent I could create new passphrases (8 slots), and regain access. That was only because it didn't get logged off and still had the key loaded in memory.
I've had issues with the windowing manager as well and needed to change the compositor. I'm pretty sure a technical mind is required just to understand the previous sentence, and I still don't entirely understand how the windowing manager works yet. Until maybe six months ago, I never used a windowing manager other than Microsoft. Only exception was for a little while when I had Ubuntu on an old laptop, but it didn't work well enough for me to use.
I will say it has become smoother than I expected, and is getting better, but a technical mind helps using Linux. It's like a very good custom car, but owning it means you do need to actually know what a distributor is, how to put oil in, etc. Linux is not anywhere near Apple's BSD in terms of ease of use. I hate everything else about them, but their windowing manager for BSD is better and easier than windowing managers in Linux.
I think what you meant was that a professionally installed Linux OS, with set up programs, profiles, cron tabs, etc. can make it be easy for the non-technical people. If you don't have a technical mind though, you're just as beholden to the Geek Squad as any other member of the "unwashed masses". Especially, since the vast majority of all the aforementioned diagnostics and fixes occurred after pressing F1 and getting a shell on tty1. Pretty sure a technical mind is required to understand how to send KILL/TERM/HUP to a process too, and I have to do that more often than I like.
If a technical mind were really not required, I think Linux would be at least half as successful as Apple by now, at least in terms of desktop presence.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Saturday November 18 2017, @09:36AM
By non technical people, I had in mind your friends and family that ask you for help whenever they need to reinstall Windows, or buy a new machine because it is "too old", as if it depended on some kind of internal gears that wore down as the machine got 'obsolete'. Most can get by using a browser to get on Facebook and with LibreOffice to edit their resume. The ones that were complaining to DELL were probably trying to install a Windows game, but I got bored with the article before confirming.
As for installing, one can still run into issues with unsupported hardware when installing Linux, but I have not encountered that in quite a few years. Unless you run into that scenario, I find that running a fresh Linux install is as easy or much easier for the uninitiated as there is no hunting for device drivers on the manufacturer's web site, or worse, digging out and identify original CDs that came with the machine, followed by multiple reboots.
I'm a BSD user myself and I would not trust Linux for a server environment unless I had paid support to take care of it for me, but every time I have put Linux on a machine outside of work, I have never had to support that machine again.
As for Apple, they control both the software and the hardware, which is why it gets much easier to make sure that everything works as intended. I think adopting BSD was the best decision they ever made. I don't use their products myself, but when I had to buy an entire system for someone else, that is what I bought just to make sure that I woudn't have to provide support.