Are we missing the point when talking about the average user?

Linux Discussion
23

The reason the existing Linux paradigms thrive is because the parts of the community capable of creating and maintaining want to do it. Just guessing here but i’d say most creators/maintainers/contributors own Android phones so if the desire was high enough to create an Android-like it’d be constantly pinging those people every Telegram ding so we’d probably have one by now.

I’d guess there’s 3 choices…

  • Find a way to inject enough financial incentive to artificially boost involvement.
  • Find a trendy new way to do an Android-like which excites creators/maintainers/contributors to join in. Maybe cast it as the initiate to move Linux to a memory safe language from the ground up beginning with something “simple”.
  • Create a thin Android-like wrapper for a lightweight version of an existing LTS so you need as few devs as possible and try to encourage community support by making “lock down” optional.
24

I’m one of the average Linus users, a retired IT developer since 1-1-11. I detected Ubuntu on a PC magazine in 2005 and was amazed how it worked on a surplus Pentium 2 with two SCSI HDDs (2 x 2GB) using LVM.
Currently I only really use Ubuntu (Host), Xubuntu VM (Office), Ubuntu 16.04 VM (VBox encrypted used for banking) and Ubuntu Mate VM (multimedia).
I tried a lot of other distros through Virtualbox, but with the exception of Peppermint 9 in a VM for half a year I never really used them.
I don’t like Lubuntu (too simple) and Kubuntu (too complex). I see no advantages to Ubuntu Budgie compared to Xubuntu with the Plank dock. I’m really interested in the remixes of Ubuntu-Unity, Ubuntu-Cinnamon and Ubuntu-DDE.
For new users from outside my house, often with computers older than10 years, I install Peppermint. For users inside the house on computers with an age after 2010, I install Ubuntu 20.04 again.

1 Like
25

I don’t want to derail this topic, but did you try adding the Packman repo? It has a bunch of software that openSUSE can’t include in its repos for licensing reasons, similar to the RPMFusion repos for Fedora or the “Install 3rd-party software” checkbox in Ubuntu.