We spent a whole week rewriting nouveau’s website — the drivers for NVIDIA cards. It started as a one-person effort, but it led to a few people helping me out. We addressed several issues in the nouveau website and improved it a lot. The redesign is live on nouveau.freedesktop.org. In this article, we’ll go over the problems with the old site and the work we’ve done to fix them.
ChromeOS is Linux, and it has pretty decent penetration.
And I know what you're going to say: "But ChromeOS isn't proper Linux". But it's a desktop OS based on Gentoo, built on the Linux kernel and, GNU coreutils and bash (although not GCC, as far as anyone can tell). It certainly has all the hallmarks of being GNU/Linux (or something very close to it).
The fact that it doesn't really resemble any "mainstream" Linux distro is kind of the point. It's a locked down corporate product with a minimalist front-end locked into a bunch of commercial web services, and that's exactly the kind of device that sells volumes.
Mainstream Linux is a tough sell. It was a tough sell 15 years ago when PCs were still the king of personal computing. In the post-smartphone, post-iPad world which we're in now, we have to accept that that's never going to be the device your grandma uses to check her email.
Plenty of Linux distros aren't just volunteer-based, and are instead made and supported by for-profit companies. Red Hat/Fedora is made by the big blue, IBM themselves; it doesn't get much bigger than that. Ubuntu, SUSE, Manjaro, all for-profit commercial outfits. None of these are failures, it's just that their products aren't targeting the market for cheap commercial laptops. You can buy Ubuntu preloaded on a laptop from Dell or Lenovo, but they're targeting IT professionals and data scientists and people who work with Linux servers. Or they're targeting fleet deployments of 100s of devices in municipal organisations. There's a good market there, it's just a different market.
ChromeOS is Linux, and it has pretty decent penetration.
And I know what you're going to say: "But ChromeOS isn't proper Linux". But it's a desktop OS based on Gentoo, built on the Linux kernel and, GNU coreutils and bash (although not GCC, as far as anyone can tell). It certainly has all the hallmarks of being GNU/Linux (or something very close to it).
The fact that it doesn't really resemble any "mainstream" Linux distro is kind of the point. It's a locked down corporate product with a minimalist front-end locked into a bunch of commercial web services, and that's exactly the kind of device that sells volumes.
Mainstream Linux is a tough sell. It was a tough sell 15 years ago when PCs were still the king of personal computing. In the post-smartphone, post-iPad world which we're in now, we have to accept that that's never going to be the device your grandma uses to check her email.
Plenty of Linux distros aren't just volunteer-based, and are instead made and supported by for-profit companies. Red Hat/Fedora is made by the big blue, IBM themselves; it doesn't get much bigger than that. Ubuntu, SUSE, Manjaro, all for-profit commercial outfits. None of these are failures, it's just that their products aren't targeting the market for cheap commercial laptops. You can buy Ubuntu preloaded on a laptop from Dell or Lenovo, but they're targeting IT professionals and data scientists and people who work with Linux servers. Or they're targeting fleet deployments of 100s of devices in municipal organisations. There's a good market there, it's just a different market.