In general this sentence is why the Year of Desktop Linux won't come in this millennia. Not only XOrg vs Wayland. Many such cases. Sad!
But, Android is a thing, and Linux is literally everywhere. OS has won, even if the mythical "Desktop Linux" didn't.
After installing their first distro, most people have a good experience. Then they install an update, that causes some ridiculous regression. At this time they have 2 choices: spend 2 weeks on reading all kind of arcane documentation, or go back to whatever they were using before. Or ask the maintainer, who responds "deal with it".
Just as another, fresh example, look at this: https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2023/05/10/gnome-core-app... - Gnome finally has thumbnails in the file picker, but they removed the music player. You can't have everything, I guess.
This kind of attitude why the Year of Desktop Linux will not be seen by our generation, not evil manufacturers.
Do you have to burn a flashdrive image, navigate through odd commands to disable secure boot, and find the magical incantation to boot from USB to install a soundcard driver?
I would love it to happen but the suggestion that there is anything the developer community can do is wrong. This isn't like the move to get friends and family to swap to Firefox in 2004, that was easy, it was in parallel with no data or app loss. With no new UX to learn.
I can get my parents to change to a different web browser. I could never get them to swap to Linux. I doubt I could get them to reinstall the os they currently use!
And yet the average user will probably not do that, just like their eyes will glaze over if you say the incantation "soundcard driver" in their presence. It's unfamiliar and their friends don't use it, and that's it. Easy to install? Okay, but can you give a reason for them to even try?
Many people don't buy a Windows/Mac OS laptop or Android phone or iOS tablet. They buy a MacBook, Samsung S42, iPad, Steam Deck. OS? Web browser? Doesn't matter.
switching your desktop to Linux is still niche.
i think it being niche and also “the most popular it’s been” doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
- Chrome browser,
- Skype, Discord or other chat applications,
- update GPU drivers regularly,
- tolerate the abusive Windows update/reboot policy,
- install multiple anti-virus software just to fight with Windows Defender,
- etc...
but not willing to install a new OS, even if it's literally a few click.
I think we kept saying this "Linux can't be mainstream desktop player because it isn't default" so long, that we can't even imagine anymore that there can be other, stronger reasons too.
Defaults are definitely not meaningless, but users are willing to change bad defaults, if there is a better alternative. Sure, not your parents, neither mine. But most of people around you (I assume) and around me (I know) would.
Sure, just anecdata, but over time I have had more than 1 colleagues telling me proudly that they started to play around Linux on their machine, only to learn a few weeks later that they have abandoned it due to some (for them) insurmountable problem they faced.
Of course if the user is technical enough they can figure out how to resize their existing partitions & set up a dual boot. But that's not the default, and that still risks corrupting the existing partition and therefore deleting all their programs & data.