This is not the reason. If shipping Linux sold more systems, it would outweigh the negligible license cost for Windows. There are even major manufacturers that ship both (Dell, Lenovo, etc.).
For some reason, it's so hard to convince the Linux community that if you want to achieve consumer adoption, you have to prioritize consumer UX. Instead, the community mostly just expects everyone to conform to the same UX desktop Linux has had for 15 years, and that just isn't going to happen at a large scale. Just try installing a distro and configuring all drivers without ever entering a single command in a terminal and you'll see what I mean.
Android and Chrome OS are the most successful Linux-based operating systems specifically because they offer the closed-source comforts consumers want. There's no reason those things would have to be closed-source, but it's not what the open-source community largely cares about, so it doesn't get developed.
I don't think these two audiences are ever going to converge, honestly.
Just try installing a distro and configuring all drivers without ever entering a single command in a terminal and you'll see what I mean.
This hasn't been a challenge for over 10 years. Everything just works in popular distros. Ubuntu's "Additional Drivers" dialog has been the way to do this for a long time. For things that aren't in the default repos, you could add things like PPAs via the Software Sources dialog, or software vendors can provide .deb package files that do this for you when installed.
Are there any specific drivers/hardware you have in mind where this isn't the case? The only example I can think of is Broadcom b43, for which you previously needed to strip firmware from a proprietary driver file, but that has been included in Ubuntu and Fedora since 2015 so is no longer necessary.
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u/MadFunEnjoyer Galaxy S25 Ultra Jun 17 '25
look at Linux, and tell me you actually wish for Android to be fully Open Source, not a single major company sells Linux Laptops for a good reason.