It’s got a reckognizable name and first party support from an actual company.

This.

The one step that would really push a lot would be if you can go to your local electronics store and buy a PC there with Linux preinstalled and completely setup, just like you can with Windows, Mac and ChromeOS.

That’s why the Steam Deck actually pushed the Linux market share quite a bit.

I mean, there is a thing like that and it’s called Chromebooks, but we, the tech people, deemed ChromeOS not Linux enough and told everyone not to buy chromebooks.

But still ChromeOS is by far the most popular Linux distro with about 5x the market share of the next most popular Linux distro (which is Arch, thanks to the Steam Deck).

Really difficult to actually get good numbers here since there’s a ton of sampling bias and user agent strings (which are used for most of these market share detectors) don’t capture Linux distros apart from ChromeOS.

But we can combine sources to get somewhere.

The Steam Hardware and Software Survey doesn’t include any data on ChromeOS, because there’s no Steam on ChromeOS, but it says that there’s a total market share for Linux of 3.2% with the most common Linux Distro being Arch with a market share of 0.32% (probably due to the Steam Deck), followed by Mint with 0.24%.

So double the maket share to get roughly to the 6.3% total Linux maket share from PH, and we get Arch with 0.64% and Mint with 0.48%, which is both much much lower than the 2.4% of ChromeOS on PH.

Well, all Linux distros combined are more than ChromeOS. If you split up by distro, ChromeOS is still the top Linux distro by far.

Successful compared to what? I don’t have data, but I’d venture to say that it’s the most popular desktop Linux distro.

It’s a bit past its peak, but in 2023 it had 7% market share in the quite lucrative North American market. That’s not nothing. In North America, all other Linux distros combined just overtook ChromeOS this year. World-wide it was last year.

There’s also no other Linux distro that comes pre-installed on devices from different manufacturers (at least none that I know of).

If you look at the commercially successful variants of Linux (ChromeOS and Android), you’ll see that taking away freedom/choice was the first thing they did.

And ultimately, if you are targeting the mass market, that’s almost required.

BSD, Haiku and pretty much anything that hides or manipulates the user agent string.

Contrary to what movies generally show, there’s a time after battle, and most of the time there were more than two factions at play in a given region.

If you go all-in on one battle, and both factions battle to the last man then (a) you won’t have anyone to do the next harvest and (b) you won’t have anyone who could defend against any random third party to swoop in and easily take both factions’ land.