Remember the 2000s when linux tried its best to enter the home computing scene? If not, just get some beers and let me tell you another story.

As is it nowadays, you’ll find linux in a smartphone, industrial systems, all sorts of servers and maybe some people on their desktops and laptops that want to nerd it out. I remember back in the day when linux companies tried their best to make home users switch from Windows or Mac.

At some point, a company emerged that tried to battle it out with Microsoft, it was called Linspire. Many of might not know this now defunct os, you could google it up and find that it was initially released as Lindows. Bam! That was a major trigger for you know who and lawsuits soon followed. I remember first seeing this distro in magazines, yeah back in the day there was MyLinux, for all your nerdy needs. Linspire was awesome, looked awesome. Well, we had Windows 2000 and XP at that time and Linspire looked something like Vista/7. The desktop environment was tuned to much that it looked out of this world and it wasn’t a resource hog.

Linspire looked great, ran great, it even had a thing called CNR, which stands for Click-n-Run. This little things made installing software a breeze. This was kind of a web based software center-ish type of thing. Sources were compiled similarly to a .deb or .rpm file. The important thing was that it had a cool interface, something like the App Store today on Macs, nothing like that piece of shit Ubuntu Software Centre. Another plus was the awesome driver support, I never imagined such a great plug and play support on a linux os at that time.

Well, what went wrong? Despite the lawsuit with Microsoft, it had another major flaw, money moolah. This distro came with a price, an actual price. You heard me, pay for it if you wanted something other than a Live CD. You could go pass this issue by using the little sibling of Linspire, named accordingly, Freespire. It had almost all the featured drivers and desktop gadgets. Yeah, so much for that…

Some time later another similar os with a similar business model emerged, Xandros. Same stuff, different prices for different versions of it. Later Xandros aquired Linspire and guess which project got cannibalized?

About at the same time Canonical started shoving free cds up eveybodys ass with their Debian based Ubuntu operating system and its derivatives. They made quite a huge effort in pushing linux to the masses with Kubuntu which had a more Windows like feel to it and with Edubuntu which tried implementing cost free software solutions for the educational sector. The 3^rd one actually had a major success. Huge sums of money were poured into the marketing of linux worldwide and it did have an effect. When most people google something on linux they usually end up on Ubuntu related content. Did it hold on? No it didn’t. It increased the home user market share, but not a lot.

So let’s get back to that out of the box bullshit. Back in the day drivers were a major issue, legacy hardware was a no-no. Of course there was a helpful community that could help you, but then you couldn’t talk about out of the box. I’m not saying Windows didn’t have the same issues, but hardware manufacturers didn’t actually care about the linux community so working open-source drivers were a gift from god if you could get your hands on some.

The first major issue I encounter while trying to implement linux for home users was the ability to run the majority of Windows compatible games. Nobody wanted a “Windows” that couldn’t run games.

Fast forward a couple of years and emulators actually became a thing, like CrossOver. Things started to get some ground but not much. Fast forward to today and you’ll really see how the market share on home computers really is like. Ever since Microsoft offered Windows 10 as a free upgrade everything changed. Think about this for a second, any home user could download and install an original Windows 10 .iso from the Microsoft website with no need of an actual activation, key or other bullshit. You get some features disabled, it does kind of violate the EULA, but it’s free. It’s not like the black guys in suits will show up at your door. It’s fucking free, it runs everything you need, it’s Windows. Point and case.

From an office perspective, linux has come a long way. Productivity at it’s finest, you got all you need, but you you want something more then I’m sorry, the princess is in another castle. My first choice for an out of the box experience is surprisingly not Ubuntu as most might think, it’s actually openSuse. Stability, a dash of corporate, a funky chameleon logo and you’ve got yourself a working linux os out of the box, a small one, but still a box.

So can linux fight the desktop war with Microsoft? No, there was never such a thing! Can you just turn the key and gas it with linux? No, too much of a hassle. You could compile your own distro for mass deployment and bundle it with all the software you can think about and all the drivers you need. Yeah, that might work. And don’t give me that “Steam games work on linux” crap, that’s not an argument pro linux.

You could go for the old switcheroo and trick some users using a desktop environment that is close or even a clone of the visuals of Windows, for example Kylin. Nuff said!