Sheena S. Iyengar was studying Social Psychology at Stanford in the 1990s. She often visited the Menlo Park local market filled with all kinds of produce. 250 kinds of cheese, 75 kinds of olive oil, 150 kinds of vinegar etc. Iyengar one day she realized she hadn’t bought anythingand this led to an idea he wanted to validate, so he ran an experiment with one of the traders.

At one of the stalls he exchanged the offer of 6 jars of jam with another offer of 24 of these jars. After a few shifts, he came to a stunning conclusion: The 24 jar tables attracted more people, but The one with 6 jars encouraged more people to buy. And that’s just some of what happened, dear readers, to Linux.

Fragmentation killed Linux

The story I mentioned in an old post on my other blog is not mine, but The Chronicle Review. Iyengar would eventually write a book called ‘The Art of Choosing’, in which he discussed the paradox, although the choices were good. having too many options can be counterproductive.

Of course that’s what happens with Linux, I argued. This OS is great and ubiquitous, but in most cases its presence is almost invisible for the user. Android is the heart of our mobile phones, the basis of the workings of the internet and the cloud, and it definitely dominates the supercomputer segment.

And then there’s the eternal joke or meme that “this is really going to be the year of Linux on the desktop”. It’s never like this: Windows (87.56% according to the latest NetMarketshare data) and macOS (9.54%) openly rule our PCs and laptops, and Linux still hangs around It has 1% market share.

It never got over it and probably never will. I was talking about this too a former Linux journalist, Steven J Vaughan-Nicholswrites about Linux and Open Source since the war is not between GNOME and KDE, but between Bash and zsh. I’ve been talking about this operating system for almost a long time – one of the first articles I made money on was about how to install Linux on an Amiga – and I know exactly what Steven is talking about.

there is a paragraph particularly successful this explains a little bit what Linux has been through for years:

We have many excellent Linux desktop distributions, which means that none of them can gain enough market share to make a dent in the general market.

This is how it is. The famous Distrowatch website, which has been used for years to monitor the market for different Linux distributions, shows 271 active today. Imagine you have version 271 of Android or Windows, each essentially the same, but more or less different in the way they do things. You have one of the latest versions of the Linux distributions timeline on Wikimedia, this is a great chart showing how Linux “jam jars” are created.

The chronological tree of Linux distributions is huge, and this image is just a small part of one of the most recent registered releases. Long live the jam jars. Source: Wikimedia.

There are also 21 desktop environments and half a dozen package managers, as well as new application packaging systems for easier installation. Linux users are often aware of a few but not all of them. Imagine what it’s like for a new user to face this diversity. This is madness.

This is the jam jar problem. There are so many, often people do not know which to choose.. The options are great and Linux is proof of that, but those options also ruin it when it comes to being popular on the desktop. There are so many that one doesn’t know which one to choose.

In fact, the usual thing is to try jam jars and try others after enjoying them for a while. on Linux called “distribution hopping“. One day I’m using Ubuntu, another Fedora, and another Arch, and then more and more. Great for OS lovers, but not so good for those who want something more or less “universal”.

There really isn’t anything “universal” in Linux, because if that OS is defined by something, it’s its wealth of variables. What do you dislike about distribution? No problem. Wait: You like the distribution but not the desktop environment? Install another one and pull shaft. And so with almost everything.

To succeed on the desktop, perhaps the only option is for the major distributions to join forces. create something like unified Linux distribution. A single reference distribution, a single desktop environment, a single package manager, and a single app store. And even then, I think success will not be far from guaranteed.

But watch out: maybe this is better. It probably is, after all. It’s okay if this isn’t the year of Linux on the desktop. It is almost everywhere else.