I am not saying that more people using Linux is bad or that people shouldn’t use it (I mean, check my own post history; I am a recent convert myself), but if it reached the kind of saturation that Windows or Apple enjoys, it would bring not liberation but enshittification.
Nor am I trying to be some kind of elitist “the plebs don’t deserrrrrrve it” schlub; hell, I use Linux Mint Cinnamon and have to have a guide to handhold me through all but the most rudimentary, familiar-to-me-as-a-Windows-user tasks.
However.
A bar to entry (even such an ankle-high one as there is now) keeps Linux relatively off the radar of large, moneyed interests that would otherwise descend onto Linux distros and enshittify them in a heartbeat.
In other words, rather than “everyone who uses Linux will then see how bad they’ve had it under Windows and how anti-consumer certain software companies (let’s say Adobe for example) have been treating them!”, the more likely outcome would be “now there is Adobe Photoshop Linux Edition that is exclusive to the paid Adobe Linux distro” or other similar shackles and lockdowns and limitations (for which your credit card is the key), and the alternatives, not having ad money or corporate backing to prop them up, would be left by the wayside as other such enshittified distros/softwares gained users and traction.
Hell, just because a non-enshittified alternative to an enshittified software exists doesn’t mean people will know about or use it. To use an example, Excel is hardly the only way to make a spreadsheet. But it’s the one that is used, taught, known, documented, and widespread. It doesn’t matter that [some other software] is superior in every way if no one knows or cares about it.
Admittedly this is kind of my shower-thought guess and it’s not as if I have sat and thought through this thoroughly, but heck, here we are. Lay it on me.
Ubuntu has been the sacrificial lamb for this very example. People have praised Ubuntu for years, heralded it as the Linux OS of choice to go to, to tip their toes in from having Windows. But Canonical has been making dumb decision after dumb decision to where Ubuntu has now created a split in community where people prefer Mint.
Upvote for unpopular opinion.
I don’t believe free software will be enshittified. Because it can’t be controlled. There will always be a community willing to fork and keep a project or one of its many alternatives on the right path: the path of the user(s).
So, I’m not a recent convert to Linux. I’ve been using it pretty much exclusively for over 20 years now. And almost entirely Gentoo and Arch.
And I’ll tell you… the Gentoo community is hard core. The sort of hard core that will not tolerate any enshittification. They’ll make sure Gentoo stays pure.
And I’m not just talking about “free from corporate influence”. If Gentoo announced that moving forward, only SystemD would be supported as an init system (and I don’t think that’s likely any time soon), a big part of the community would fork Gentoo and declare they could take OpenRC (or runit or whatever) away when they could pry it from their cold dead hands.
No matter what enshittified Linux distros come to exist in the future, that lifeline of purists will always provide a way to buck enshittification. And that’s a lifeline that the Windows and Mac ecosystems don’t have.
So, while I have little doubt that enshittified Linux distros will exist (indeed already do exist – after all what is Android but enshittified Linux?), I think opting out of said enshittification will continue to be an option for the foreseeable future.
Two caveats:
- I do think the likelihood is that the opting-out-of-enshittification option will largely skew toward a more technical/hacker/power-user sort of user base.
- Some things that aren’t exactly “Linux” (or within the Linux ecosystem) may well enshittify in ways that negatively impact Linux users. For instance, I’d imagine web standards will get more and more captured by corporate interests. WEI will probably return as a web standard. That sort of thing. And while that’s not so much about Linux, it will affect Linux users.
It’s a little like with Android. It’s GPL, it’s hackable, there’s custom ROMs and such. Android 2.x hardly required anything to get it rooted or to install custom ROMs. Bootloaders were often unlocked by default, security options like RO-system or SELinux weren’t present in many cases. Rooting required you to download an app, press a button and done. Some devices even came pre-rooted.
Since then a lot of things have changed. A lot of manufacturers (recently Samsung) disabled unlockable bootloaders. Security has been enhanced a lot, to the point that rooting without an unlocked boodloader is all but inexistent. Even if you can root, SELinux stops you from doing anything with root. If your device lets you run custom ROMs, these are more and more hampered by Google closing the sources for Android modules (like e.g. the messages app) and by security measures like Play Integrity, which mean that you can’t run vital apps on rooted Android.
On Android 2.x/4.x rooting was purely liberating. You could do much more with rooted Android than without, while not losing anything at all. On modern Android, rooting is a tough choice, since there are legitimately things you can’t do on rooted Android any more (e.g. online banking if your bank decides to require strict Play Integrity verification).
I can see the same thing happening on “free” Linux variants if Linux were to ever become really mainstream.
For example, imagine Valve closed-sourcing Proton or purposely making sure that Steam only runs on SteamOS. I don’t see them doing that any time soon, but it would be possible. And Steam is big and important enough that I could imagine that a large amount of people people would then just buy a PC with SteamOS preinstalled.
Everything you’re saying is good and valid points. And yes, the future may be bleak for Linux like the present is for Android.
But at the same time, I’m tapping out this very comment on a rooted phone with an unlockable bootloader without any of the Google apps and in fact running zero proprietary apps.
I think the option to use Linux the unenshittified way in which it was always intended to be used will be there for the foreseeable future the way it, quite frankly, still is for Android despite Google’s best efforts at killing open mobile computing.
I predict a similar future and it is why I decided to come to Mint rather than another begrudging Windows upgrade (I was staunchly against Windows 10, but upgraded to it anyway because at that time in life I needed a new laptop, and it came with Windows 10 installed and during that stage I had bigger things on my plate than what operating system I was using/how to install and operate a new one).
While I am only taking baby steps into the Linux environment now, I hope that by the time the walls really start to close in, I will be technically adept enough to join the more hardcore holdouts.
I mean, counterpoint: paid, enterprise editions of Linux have existed for decades without destroying the libre versions, and as long as it’s fork-able, it always will. But increasing adoption, even of the “captured” versions, will benefit libre code lines; in obvious ways, such as when enterprise developers commit their changes upstream (Google still does for Android and ChromeOS); but also in less obvious ways, like making development for Linux more attractive (resulting in more compatible software) and in making the OS paradigms more familiar to the layperson and the junior dev.
What do you think enshittification would entail for something lile linux?
I can’t see a meaningful sense in which it is not already pervasive between almost everything expecting to have access to glibc and systemd. But even that’s relatively avoidable if it’s not what you want. Current, or even potential, user-base size has never stopped companies from pursuing shitty business models at the expense of the consumer/customer. Even now there’re distros selling free software to people who don’t know any better. So what’re you actually worried about?
There’s one extremely popular end-user Linux distro with billions of devices running it: Android.
And it’s exactly how you described it.
I don’t really care if Linux specifically becomes popular.
I want Free software to become popular.
What you’re describing just proves that Stallman was right all along.Among desktops, Linux already has roughly the same market share as macOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
That says more about how stupidly expensive MacOS is, than it does how popular Linux is.
Or how much of an afterthought it’s become to Apple.
now there is Adobe Photoshop Linux Edition that is exclusive to the paid Adobe Linux distro
I find this unlikely. There’s no market for a dedicated Adobe operating system. People will just keep using Mac/Windows instead.
Although I don’t deny that enshittification is happening in Linux. Just look at Ubuntu. Luckily there are much better alternatives available.
That kinda does exist though: Android/ChromeOS.
Not exactly Adobe (I don’t think the adobe suite is strong enough to pull that off), but there’s Google software that exclusively runs on Android/ChromeOS. There’s even software that runs exclusively on Google Pixel devices (a lot of their AI/image magic). Same as Microsoft Office exclusively runs on a handful OSes that Microsoft selected (and Desktop Linux is not an that list).
That’s a fair point. It would only make sense if Adobe also decided to make dedicated Adobe hardware along with the Adobe OS. I don’t think that’s where they’re headed though.
That is true.
But I could imagine Valve maybe pulling that off if they turn evil.
Imagine this scenario: Valve makes the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine, maybe a Steam Laptop and a handful of other devices. They become crazy popular, gaining Windows-level market shares. Now they turn evil and close their ecosystem. Steam and Proton is now only available on SteamOS running on Steam Hardware. I could imagine that pushing people to use Steam Hardware, since they have an almost full monopoly on Linux gaming.
The communities of enthusiasts, purists, and OSS advocates, I think would push back hard against any enshitification. And the license models would allow those same people to revert any changes made by moneyed interests by simply forking the software and making it better.
You already kind of have examples of that happening. RHEL and SUSE are both owned by corporate interests. Both have open source alternatives both upstream and downstream of them. History has already shown that when either do shitty things, people push back, and if that push back fails they fork it and fix it themselves.
It’s worth keeping in mind that Linux (and Unix-like) OSs are already the most common server and datacenter OSs by a country mile. At the risk of being the “um aktshually” person here I think you are trying to refer to specifically using Linux as a general desktop OS, specifically for consumers. This is a pretty huge distinction though because all those giant companies are already using Linux in their data centers. Many support desktop use of their applications on Linux, and it’d be pretty difficult to gain any real foothold by limiting use of say Adobe apps to only an Adobe distro. They could perhaps choose to only package for say RHEL to support enterprise users, but then that package will work on Fedora too, and CentOS, etc.
At its core, desktop Linux is already so fractured through various distros that a single one really doesn’t stand a chance at gaining enough foothold to be the Linux desktop OS, especially with SteamOS and Bazzite taking a good chunk of new users away from Ubuntu as an entry point to Linux, and Mint gaining ground as a good windows replacement. Debian and derivatives are likely to be a very sizable chunk of desktop users (in no small part due to Raspbian), but compared to how monolithic Windows or macOS are I don’t think any single distro can meet the needs of enough users to ever really get the market capture needed to be properly enshittified. Sure some will happen (through things like Snap no doubt), but it’s too easy to fork and create a new distro without that for it to become a Windows level problem. Plus Linux can’t be charged for directly due to its license (other aspects on top of the open source pieces can be, which is what RHEL does, but even there IBM has run into a ton of developer pushback with the stupid moves they made with CentOS a couple years back). The lack of real ability to commoditize the entire OS makes me confident desktop Linux won’t ever have the same enshittification issues as say Windows does.
See the thing about Linux is that, if a component is actively hostile to the user, the user has the freedom to not use that component, unlike Windows or MacOS.
Dude really thinks that a market already dominated by tech nerds and easily-forkable free products is going to be subject to corporate capture.
It’s hard not to see a way out of the old adage “If you build it, they will come shit all over it.”
In this hypothetical scenario. Companies are allowed to charge money for Linux. But they’re not allowed to implement some of the most unpopular enshittification measures. This is what crazed eyed activist are always going on about ranting of open source licenses. They are sticky. Meaning that code can’t have their license altered, and any software that uses said code must itself also comply with whichever license is in play.
We have real world case studies about these kind of issues. Canonical enshittified Ubuntu. As a response, communities have shunned the distro, it’s use on desktop jumped off a cliff, and it was forked into a myriad of other distros that correct the crap that Canonical is trying to do. Mint, for example, is the most recommended distro. Based on Ubuntu and probably far more popular than it on the desktop. There’s nothing Canonical can legally do about it.
Another one is red hat. Source of the biannual “oh god what is red hat trying to get away with now?” event. But thy are also behind Fedora, the third most popular core distributions. So, there’s some protections in place in the FOSS world that stem out of the philosophical principles that guide legal protections. This empowers developers in ways that proprietary software cannot.
Linux could get enshittified, but it would be a far steeper battle, with communities pushing back every step of the way.
All of this has occurred to me over the last couple of years. More so this year as the gamers start leaning hard into the OS and support expands. All of this equates to unrealized profits. The biggest hurdle will be getting qualified devs at a large enough scale.
