[andy_xor_andrew]

just saying, the comment you just wrote could have appeared, word for word, on any HN discussion in the last 20 years. The only words that would have to change are "PopOS" / "Arch" / "Manjaro" for more timely distros. (and Chrome didn't exist until ~2009)

[godelski]

I really don't think so. We didn't have GUI installers 20 years ago. I think you're undermining the advances linux has made. I think it is harder for us on the techy side to see but having been getting people to switch to linux over the last 10 years I can say that the last 5 have been significantly easier.

[okanat]

We did have GUI installers in 2005. At least SUSE did. Linux hasn't made much significant changes to its core architecture. There are better implementations for many things like Pulseaudio and Pipewire or Wayland compositors are a bit more streamlined than X11.

The core issues existed in 2005 still exist in exact form: how do you make money for the software devs on Linux, how to bring good closed-source software support for decades. If Linux cannot solve those two problems, it will not replace Windows. I think, without changing the software architecture to look more Windows-like, the latter problem cannot be feasibly solved.

[vel0city]

There were GUI installers for a few distros 19 years ago. I remember using a graphical installer for Ubuntu 6.06.

But even then back in the day I remember Windows applications that would partition and install a Linux distro for dual boot from within Windows.

[fsflover]

This has been indeed more or less true for a long time, if you speak of preinstalled GNU/Linux, not using a "Windows-certified" hardware.