Criticism of Linux
The criticism of Linux focuses on issues concerning use of operating systems which use the Linux kernel.
While the Linux-based Android operating system dominates the smartphone market in many countries and accounts for more than 72% of mobile device usage globally, and while Linux is used on the New York Stock Exchange, on most supercomputers, is used to host 96.3 percent of the top 1 million web servers, and even is used on more virtual machines on Microsoft's own Azure cloud service than Microsoft Windows, it is used in few desktop and laptop computers. Much of the criticism of Linux is related to the lack of desktop and laptop adoption, although as of 2015 there has been some controversy with the project's perspective on security and the adoption of systemd by leading Linux distributions
Desktop use
Critics of Linux on the desktop have frequently argued that a lack of top-selling video games on the platform holds adoption back. For instance, as of 2015, the Steam gaming service has 1,500 games available on Linux, compared to 2,323 games for Mac and 6,500 Windows games.As of October 2021, Proton, a Steam-backed development effort descended from Wine provides compatibility with a large number of Windows-only games, and potentially better performance over Linux-native ports in some cases. ProtonDB is a community-maintained effort to gauge how well different versions of Proton work with a given game.
Viability
Linus Torvalds has expressed that he intended the Linux kernel to be used in desktop operating systems. He argues that Android is widely used because it comes pre-installed on new phones, and that Linux distributions would need to be bundled on new computers to gain market share.Linux has been criticized for a number of reasons, including lack of user-friendliness and having a steep learning curve, being inadequate for desktop use, lacking support for some hardware, having a relatively small games library, and lacking native versions of widely used applications.
Some critics do not believe Linux will ever gain a large share in the desktop market. In May 2009 Preston Gralla, contributing editor to Computerworld.com, believed that Linux would never be important to desktop/notebook users, even though he felt it was simple and straightforward to use, but that its low usage was indicative of its low importance in the desktop market.
In his essay Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story, Eric S. Raymond stated that the lack of usability in many open-source and Linux tools is not from lack of manuals but from a lack of thought about the users' experience.
James Donald from Princeton University analyzed shared library concepts of several operating systems. In his 2003 paper titled Improved Portability of Shared Libraries, he worried about the lack of a Windows Application Compatibility Group equivalent.
Missed opportunities
Desktop Linux was criticized in late 2010 for having missed its opportunity to become a significant force in desktop computing. PC World executive editor Robert Stroh Meyer commented that although the Linux kernel and distributions based on it have exceptional security and stability, as well as great performance and usability, the time for desktop Linux based distributions to succeed has been missed. Nick Farrell, writing for TechEye, felt that the release of the poorly-received Windows Vista was a missed opportunity to grab significant market share.Both critics indicated that Linux did not fail on the desktop due to being "too geeky," "too hard to use," or "too obscure". Both had praise for distributions, Stroh Meyer saying "the best-known distribution, Ubuntu, has received high marks for usability from every major player in the technology press". Both laid the blame for this failure on the open-source community. Stroh Meyer named the "fierce ideology of the open-source community at large" as being responsible, while Farrell stated "The biggest killer of putting penguin software on the desktop was the Linux community. If you think the Apple fanboys are completely barking, they are role models of sanity to the loudmouthed Open Sauce religious loonies who are out there. Like many fundamentalists they are totally inflexible — waving a GNU as if it were handed down by God to Richard Stallman".
The accusation of over-zealous advocacy has been dealt with previously; in 2006 Dominic Humphries stated that the aims of the Linux community are not desktop market-share or popularity, but in Linux being the best operating system that can be made for the community.
Despite some members of the Linux community pushing beginner unfriendly software, and misconceptions based on old experiences with Linux based desktops, Linux desktop distributions nowadays are easy for anyone to install and use. Distributions with the KDE Plasma desktop environment, like Fedora KDE edition are particularly beginner friendly, as the Plasma desktop is designed to be a powerful and modern yet a easy and familiar Windows desktop drop-in, and because the Fedora operating system focuses on ease of use and stability, likely due to corporate backing from Red Hat, a major Linux desktop / Linux desktop support company.
Third-party application development
Some Linux based desktop distributions are criticized for the difficulty of developing third-party applications for the platforms, with distribution fragmentation, insistence on using shared libraries instead of including the libraries with the application, and lack of concern given to keeping APIs consistent and backwards compatible being cited as factors. This particularly causes difficulties for closed-source applications, which are distributed exclusively as binaries, since the burden of ensuring compatibility with the myriad of Linux distributions and release versions is borne solely by the developer. Dirk Hohndel, VMware's Chief Open Source Officer, criticized the lack of standardization across distributions for creating an unfriendly environment for application development, writing that it "basically tells app developers ‘go away, focus on platforms that care about applications. Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME desktop environment, regards the disregard of backwards compatibility as a cultural issue with the Linux development community:Tony Mobily, editor of Free Software Magazine, identified problems in the server roots of Linux in his article 2009: software installation in GNU/Linux is still broken – and a path to fixing it:
In August 2014 on the DebConf in Portland Linus Torvalds also voiced his unhappiness with the binary application packaging for the Linux distro ecosystem:
Linux kernel criticisms
Kernel development politics
Some security professionals say that the rise in prominence of operating system-level virtualization using Linux has raised the profile of attacks against the kernel, and that Linus Torvalds is reticent to add mitigations against kernel-level attacks in official releases. Linux 4.12, released in 2017, enabled KASLR by default, but its effectiveness is debated.Con Kolivas, a former kernel developer, tried to optimize the kernel scheduler for interactive desktop use. He finally dropped the support for his patches due to the lack of appreciation for his development. In the 2007 interview Why I quit: kernel developer Con Kolivas he stated:
Kernel performance
At LinuxCon 2009, Linux creator Linus Torvalds said that the Linux kernel has become "bloated and huge":At LinuxCon 2014, Torvalds said he thinks the bloat situation is better because modern PCs are a lot faster:
Kernel code quality
In a November 2011 interview with the German newspaper Zeit Online, Linus Torvalds expressed concerns about the increasing complexity of the Linux kernel. He noted that the software had become "too complex" and that developers might struggle to navigate the codebase. Torvalds remarked that even individual subsystems had grown significantly in complexity, and he stated that he feared a future scenario where an error might occur that could no longer be properly understood or diagnosed.Andrew Morton, one of Linux kernel lead developers, explains that many bugs identified in Linux are never fixed:
Theo de Raadt, founder of OpenBSD, compares OpenBSD development process to Linux:
Criticism by Microsoft
In 2004, Microsoft initiated its Get the Facts marketing campaign, which specifically criticized Linux server usage. In particular, it claimed that the vulnerabilities of Windows are fewer in number than those of Linux distributions, that Windows is more reliable and secure than Linux, that the total cost of ownership of Linux is higher, that use of Linux places a burden of liability on businesses, and that "Linux vendors provide little, if any indemnification coverage." In addition, the corporation published various studies in an attempt to prove this – the factuality of which has been heavily disputed by different authors who claim that Microsoft's comparisons are flawed. Many Linux distributors now offer indemnification to customers, including Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical, some of the largest providers.Internal Microsoft reports from the Halloween documents leak have presented conflicting views. Particularly documents from 1998 and 1999 ceded that "Linux... is trusted in mission critical applications, and – due to its open source code – has a long term credibility which exceeds many other competitive OSs", "An advanced Win32 GUI user would have a short learning cycle to become productive ", "Long term, my simple experiments do indicate that Linux has a chance at the desktop market...", and "Overall respondents felt the most compelling reason to support OSS was that it 'Offers a low total cost of ownership '."