For the vast majority of users, their privacy needs are actually bimodal (probably using the word wrong). The default tracker block that comes with their browser is good enough for their daily lives. If they suddenly find out they’re a whistle blower then their security needs escalate all the way to a dedicated TAILS laptop in a coffee shop in another region.
The valley in between is difficulty to navigate. Any difficulty experienced in the valley results in users simply climbing out in the direction of the peak that is closest.
Ubuntu is just a little down the path into the valley. As you mention it’s community support is a lot bigger than most other distributions (likely all of them). Whatever your opinions of it (I remember them trying to add amazon search into the taskbar) it’s at this time better in privacy compared to windows in every single way, and especially since windows is trying to require a windows account for very installation.
Your climbed out of the valley, moved away from Fedora, but didn’t go all the way up the peak to Windows. Most people as I stated above would instead just go back to windows. Which I think hurts the privacy community.
Privacy guides should be recommending Ubuntu with caveats. An option to pick before you climb all the way back to windows.
I should clarify, I have no issue with people forking software and making something unique which meets their own needs. I’m a strong FOSS advocate and having forks of software is kind of the point. Instead, what I’d like to see is one (or maybe two) main FOSS desktop OS offerings that the average person could simply use without needing to know what a display server or package manager is and whether or not they can do what they want with their very specific distribution.
This is one of the main technical reasons I think Windows and macOS are so much more common and so much easier to use. You don’t even have to make any intention of picking the operating system, you simply buy a device and use it. Guides, documentation, and support are all readily available. The security and reliability of the OS is well known and understood. The same cannot be said for Linux distributions.
I think I said it best in the original post:
Maybe if you don’t have much criteria, then sure. But all sorts of people will need all sorts of things. We need a wide selection of devices which come in many variations in regards to size, budget, processing performance, ports, repairability, display specs, etc. There are dozens (or maybe hundreds) of little variations in devices that people may look for. With a tiny selection of Linux-compatible devices (which are typically not even available for those with a small budget) we don’t have nearly as much choice as Windows PC’s.
To be fair, the average person probably doesn’t have tons of criteria outside of the size and budget of the device. But even then, if they can’t afford a new “Linux device” or if they can get far better specs / features for the same price if they buy a Windows device, they’re not going to be well incentivized to take a stand and eat the cost of supporting a manufacturer which prioritizes Linux support for an inferior or more expensive device.
Unfortunately, no. This has been one of my main issues with Linux, and it’s one of the most common issues I come across. In fact, it’s one of the main issues I run into with switching devices over to Linux. If you buy a device that wasn’t made to run Linux, you are much more likely to run into hardware/driver issues. In my experience with trying Linux on multiple “Windows laptops”, I had hardware/driver issues with every single one. I only mention hardware because hardware/driver issues can be some of the most annoying issues you can face, and in my experience only some of them are actually possible to “fix”.
I’m not quite sure what you mean. The Linux ecosystem isn’t ran by a non-profit. It’s fragmented into hundreds of organizations and independent developers. Companies like System76 (and many others) do advertise. As for non-profits being successful, I’d be willing to bet there are countless examples. Signal could be one of them depending on what criteria you’re trying to use to filter out said examples.
Even if your premise were true, I’m not sure why I should care. Ultimately I want secure, private, and free (as in freedom) devices to be available and accessible to all users. If we tried accomplishing that through some non-profit that has failed to capture much market share after trying for multiple decades, then it’d be time to re-consider exactly how we should go about achieving that goal.
A part of the reason as to why Microsoft can do that is because people were able to use and enjoy their products, thus making them tons of money which they can then spend on improving their product or otherwise solidifying their position as the dominant desktop OS. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but this is one notable factor. Part of the reason companies/organizations pushing Linux have failed to capture a significant portion of the desktop market share is because the product is inaccessible and/or lacks critical functionality users require from their desktop/laptop.
Again, the market share speaks for itself. If someone believed Linux offered greater security, reliability, usability, etc, I’d have to ask why the vast majority of people are unable or unwilling to switch to it? (Including people who’ve spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to switch to it.) It just doesn’t make any sense.
I guess it is allready happened. But people still get advised to use Mint, Ubuntu, whatever. Those common distros are the past, the future is immutable distros. Android and Chrome OS are both popular and both are immutable. You probably should try Fedora Silverblue if you liked GNOME desktop in Workstation. There is no need to tinker with package manager or terminal, Software Center is your typical app store for all general needs. Even if you do something wrong, os will just load previous state and you are cool again.
The Cent OS replacement? Curious to hear your reasoning for that one lol
How? The angle you’re going for depends more on the hardware than the software, and at present, the most efficient hardware on the market runs macOS (though yes, the lack of repairability kinda negates the environmental benefits of that). There is also the business computer angle where e.g., Dell make some really low power Windows desktops for business usecases though I guess that’s more for saving money on electricity rather than being nice to the environment.
Here are some Linuxes and BSDs I could think of that are from a company:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, made by Red Hat, Inc.
SUSE, made by SUSE S.A.
Ubuntu, made by Canonical Ltd.
Darwin (more commonly seen as macOS), made by Apple, Inc.
chromeOS, made by Google, Inc.
Tizen, made by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
I could go on.
Signal is very common among cybersec professionals and government employees
yes exactly, the CentOS replacement. Bear in mind that I was talking about running AlmaLinuxon server hardware. I wasnt talking about desktop variant.
When you download bare server install image (netinstall), you basically end up with:
display driver, so you can see what system tells you,
keyboard driver, so you can input things,
default network connectivity, without firewall, rulesets etc.
basic ssh server
And all the rest is entirely up to you. You can make extra reliable, extra secure server that will work without interruption for, quite literally, years, and you can also configure it the way it will be zero reliability, close to non-existant security and so on.
Alma gives you this level of freedom, yes. Thats why I said its not for newbies.
It’s because of the snowball effect. Bill had a personal in at IBM via his mother and pretty much rolled from there. The money and hardware deals were the key. That and Excel acting as a killer product.
The market share speaking for itself…it’s actually just saying that most people aren’t technical enough to care about this. I don’t think it can properly serve as an illustration of how allegedly terrible Linux is.
The reason is that 99.99% of people don’t care about the internals of their computers, or security, and generally struggle to use their computers outside of web browsers and maybe some programs that they get really used to because they’re forced to use them. And every major OS is good enough to use for basic usage, so most people never change their OS.
I actually see 4+% mkt share as a huge achievement when you consider the fact that the other options are pre-loaded and the results of decades of work from tightly run trillion dollar organizations. Something a lot of people technical enough to do it don’t realize is that installing an OS is a barrier that the vast majority of people just won’t cross. It’s pretty advanced in itself. Think of the people that you may know that [used to?] do things like flash custom ROMs to their Android phone or jailbreak their iPhone. That’s a very small percentage of phone users.
Again, “all users” do not care about any of these that much. And, well, this is already basically true–availability being the keyword…it’s FOSS, so the community and resources are there for those that want it.
It’s fine for Linux to just be suitable for people that want what it offers already/is likely to offer in the future on the desktop. I’m reading so many claims that Linux is unusable/lacking but for what I want from my computer, it’s actually MacOS/Windows that are nearly unusable and lacking. Different strokes.
Hey, hope I’m not contributing to derail the conversation but just in case someone is following this discussion like was pointed Ubuntu has a head on this however the way to keep the keys singed to use secure boot on Fedora with Nvidia drivers isn’t that complicated. You can follow this instructions. I personally don’t recommend Nobara for not supporting this and actually effusive reinforcing no plans to support in the future.
I still prefer Ubuntu over Fedora in a laptop because of their more sophisticated battery management. Snap is a problem I’d really be interested to see the blog post describing how to make privacy-enahancing changes to Ubuntu that @jonah mentioned.
Well, since this was resurrect. I need to correct my current stance on this. I don’t feel that Ubuntu still really relevant in a security scenario. I don’t see Ubuntu, Debian, Mint or any other Debian based distro as reasonable options anymore.
The original point of this thread and its conclusion got buried. So long as Fedora falls short of being a “just works” distribution, it still looks like Ubuntu is the next best option for those who require something that’s more likely to work out of the box and offers a large support community.
I don’t think Fedora will ever be a great “just works” distro because of how strict they are with free software. On the other hand, I could see Universal Blue eventually becoming a viable alternative as they continue to develop and grow their community.
