[AstroDogCatcher]

> If you want to make Ubuntu as nice as MacOS I think you need a private company willing to spend money and time in a concerted effort to get it to that point, which IMO won't happen.

Canonical employees would like a word with you.

[AtlasBarfed]

You mean because they "failed" with Unity? (which was technically not a failure I'd say, just a political/funding failure)

It seems to underline the necessary financial backing. Canonical barely pulls in 100 million in earnings.

Why there isnt't billions of dollars available for Linux alone from governments worldwide for securing and improving Linux since it is currently becoming the backbone of the worldwide data processing and security infrastructure is mystifying.

Why NVidia, Nintendo, AMD, Intel, Sony, Samsung, all the Chinese handset makers, Compaq, Dell, and all of them don't provide a billion a year to linux desktop so they can have market leverage against Microsoft and/or enable them to push their hardware out to the OS for utilization by the public at large within months (as opposed to decades for Microsoft) is beyond me.

The funny thing with the M1 architecture and OSX: it highlights how the entire PC stack tying themselves to the Microsoft behemoth has them cornered. How do you move to a competitive PC ARM architecture without waiting for MS (even if it has an arm-compatible windows, let's face it it doesn't have the software support or organization behind it) to move it's bloated carcass in about 5 years to support it properly at the OS level.

Meanwhile, Linux can support an Arm arch right now with practically all the necessary software.

If someone smart was with Linux, they'd have long ago been coordinating a desktop alliance, secret or not, and selling it actively to the major powers who could fund it with chump change.

Intel makes 20 billion a quarter. AMD 4 billion. NVidia 7 billion.

And then there's the US military.

And then there's google compute, AWS, and all the other cloud wannabes besides Azure. Linux is the reason your platforms mint money. Wouldn't you like companies and people to move to cloud-based desktops?

Why the EU doesn't fund this for economic competition with american software mystifies me. Why Africa, Asia, and South America don't fund it for language support and an affordable computing ecosystem for their countries is beyond me.

I'm not a Torvalds hater, but a super-technical person leading Linux was fantastic for the first 10 years, but really the last 15 needed a different skillset.

[AstroDogCatcher]

100% agree. Getting an M1 Mac has solidified this feeling for me too; I still want to be a Linux desktop user on philosophical grounds and will never go back to Windows, but as I age I have rapidly lost interest in tinkering and now want it to Just Work. Actually it isn't really the distro which needs fixing, but rather the package management space. Appimage/Snap/Flatpak need to be consolidated into a single open standard which is as easy to use as Homebrew.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Essentially none of the organizations you've mentioned care about desktop Linux. They may care about the kernel, and many of them do help fund aspects of kernel development. But desktops? It's not relevant to them, or their plans.

[AtlasBarfed]

You're mostly right, but most government orgs care about desktops, Intel/AMD care about desktops, IBM should care about desktops if they could get a foot in the door.

Amazon should be interested in providing a great remote desktop solution. IMO that is a huge untapped market, especially in BYOD orgs: sure, bring your crap device, but you RDP in for anything you need business-wise that needs to be secure.

[willbw]

Maybe they can do it if they 10x their revenue.

[nix23]

Really and what would the say? Sorry for the blocking "App Store"? The bs we started with mir and never finished ubuntu touch? That all our "home made" code is proprietary?