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.
Canonical and the others don’t make money from individual users. They get money from companies so there isn’t really any incentive to make tv ads. What would be more likely would be hardware manufacturers like tuxedo to do this. I know tuxedo does magazine ads but not sure if they have the budget for tv.
Tuxedo is part of Schenker, so if they invested heavily into ads they would probably first advertise their Windows counterparts as that market is much bigger. Linux laptops are a niche within a niche so targeted ads make more sense imo.
To add, Linux only just hit 2% market share, and that was big news. General advertising wouldn’t pay off until it becomes a more mainstream consumer purchase factor.
Linux only just hit 2% market share
That’s steam players, linux on desktop is estimated at 4%, and 6% if you count chromeos.
Imo it doesn’t make much sense to advertise an OS while it’s still required to install it manually. Last time I was looking for a laptop I couldn’t find a store selling anything with Linux or even without Windows pre-installed. How many people will be convinced by an ad to look up instructions online and actually go through the process?
They did this in the 90’s. From a server perspective they won big time. Everyone and there NAS runs Linux. From a desktop perspective it doesn’t much sense to push Linux. There isn’t any money involved
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
It’s a different kind of world. You need a different kind of software
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Tbh, I’d rather they use the money to make Linux distros better. Valve made the Steam deck a winner not through advertising, but through making a good quality product and supporting the ecosystem.
I have no interest in people making Linux popular beyond the minimum required to get companies to support it. If it’s good, people will naturally learn about it through word of mouth.
Also, directly attacking Microsoft feels like they could get sued for libel or something like that.
