Hear me out, the big players in the Linux space I.e. Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE could release trailers commercially on TV and social media to general users who may not be tech savvy or have a “basic windows” lingo in IT.
I know what you’ll say “Granny smith and Dave the accountant aren’t gonna care”. That’s fair but the adverts could outright say about how MS is a nortorious privacy invader and that you and your family could save spending more money on a supported Win 11 laptpp by just upgrading to Ubuntu or Linux Mint on one you already own with carefully simple instructions.
I understand that they use YouTube, I’m just talking about more traditional sorts of advertising, these firms are pretty big in the enterprise server space and considering they offer desktop versions of their respective distros, you’d think they would try cater to that market as well.
TLDR : Big corpo has money, advertise their distro, make them a better alternative.
In my opinion, you’re solving the wrong problem with the wrong solution.
The user base for Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE is not the general public watching traditional TV to decide that they want to install Linux across their enterprise data centre, it’s ICT professionals who talk to other ICT professionals and read white papers and implementation guidelines, then pay installation, management and subscription fees to get ongoing support across their shiny new data centre.
Growing the user base with mums and dads is not something that Linux vendors are interested in, since it only costs money instead of generating an income stream.
Linux as a commodity comes from rolling out Android phones and tablets, from deploying embedded Linux on network routers, security cameras, in-car entertainment systems, set top boxes, etc.
The final hurdle for general desktop Linux is not resolved by getting more users through advertising, it’s through having a product that can be purchased. Chromebooks were promising, but missed the mark.
System76 are trying, but the scale is too small and Linux isn’t ready as a general computing platform yet. I say that having been a Linux user for 25 years.
If you don’t agree with that last statement, consider what all computer manufacturers would do at the drop of a hat if they thought it would be cheaper, they’d drop Windows like the hot mess it is.
Unfortunately, it’s still cheaper to pay the Microsoft tax because the associated support network is already in place for the general public.
That’s not there, yet, for Linux.
It remains to be seen if ever will be.
Yeah, actual desktop Linux will probably come from some company building their own shit on top of the kernel, like Steam Decks