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Linux is far less fiddly than it used to be, though. I just recently installed the currently frozen Debian testing (with the intent on staying on it once it replaces the previous stable) and there was nothing to configure, it just works, even starting with a minimal install (no DE) there was nothing to configure, just pull the right packages (like bluez, pulseaudio-module-bluetooth etc) and I could pair with my wireless headphones etc. If you install a complete DE like Gnome or KDE from the metapackages you don't even have to install anything yourself, it just works out of the box. Even for people like me who do minimal installs and run tiling wm there is little to nothing to configure. apt install xorg will get all you need for Xorg to work and autodetect your hardware, echo "exec dwm" >> .xinitrc will get your startx session up. The early 2k had the massive amount of suffering between very poor WiFI support (lots of kernel drivers out of tree, need to compile them yourself and pray the API was synced with the current kernel or do it yourself), terrible state of audio stack (pulseaudio has gotten a lot more stable now, and is better than what we had in early PA days, or ALSA days), terrible state of GPU support (with mostly nvidia being okay, but still you would have to be more careful with kernel upgrades. Now you can even run a rolling release distro like arch, and pick a LTS kernel).
But now it's great. You don't need the proprietary driver for AMD cards, intel iGPUs work fine, NVIDIA requires the proprietary driver for performance but the open source drv will still help you get a decent X session up in the first time install, audio just works, bluetooth just works, wifi just works. Even wifi with proprietary drivers, like the broadcom ship on my mac, it's just a matter of apt install broadcom-sta-dkms and it just works. Even Debian doesn't shy away from distributing the proprietary packages in the non-free repository and it's smooth sailing. Linux missed many window of opportunities during times when it really could have become closer to a mainstream OS. What is funny, is that in my opinion, Linux is now as ready for mainstream purposes as it could ever be, but the opportunities for it will not come again. And then we have the locked down versions that are getting popular, like Chrome OS, which is really linux underneath. We'll probably see more of that, not less, in the future, but it's not too bad as long as we have the freedom to unlock the bootloader and install what we want.
Google is in a good position to bring an alternative to MacOS/Windows, although it won't be GNU/Linux as we know it in full, but it's close enough. |