At the start of this year, I tried to install various Linux distros on my laptop using a USB drive. Only Ubuntu and OpenSUSE worked. Why is this? Is the desktop really that irrelevant? This is not a bug report. I'm wondering what the institutional reasons are.
You are looking at it the wrong way: things do not work by default (imagine you got world's first computer, some one has to write the code for it), hence someone has to spend the work on it for it to work.
I thought Linux distros had enough in common that the low level stuff would mostly work the same. It's not the world's first computer. NixOS has the Linux kernel, x11, kde and systemd. Maybe that covers less than I think, but it sounds like a lot.
The high level stuff is the same, and works out of the box. But if you're asking about why Linux doesn't work on some hardware, then it's about the low level stuffs having slightly different optimization and changes and break older code.
Distros have to choose which kernel version they want. This can be a tradeoff for stability or new features etc. If they pick an older kernel, the decide which newer drivers they want to try to backport. Then they decide which drivers they feel like supporting and putting in the repositories, and which of those get loaded onto the installation media. Some distros might have closer relationships with specific vendors and have information about configuration details or workarounds. Laptops are notorious for using nonstandard hardware from niche suppliers and taking a lot of work to configure.
First, it's really not the case that only Ubuntu and OpenSUSE work on the desktop. You may have run into issues which YOU were unable to solve, but those issues may also have been specific to your laptop hardware configuration. It is well known that certain laptops tend to work better with Linux than others, in fact Im running Fedora on a Lenovo right now and it works great. So, is the desktop really irrelevant? Depends, different distros have different priorities. To date, Linux on the desktop has not shown mainstream appeal, but it does seem to gain more and more users every year. If you really insist on being obtuse regarding the reasons for poor Linux desktop support, the primary answer is that Linux has a long history of being a very good server OS. Security, stability, speed, price and customization are all reasons that is true. There is limited time in the day, and so one thing must be prioritized over another. Most linux distros choose to prioritize server development over the desktop experience, because that is where their primary user base is. Other teams made different choices. Why, at the start of this year, I tried to install various Windows versions on my rack server using a USB drive. Only Windows Server 2012 worked. Why is this? Is the server really that irrelevant to Microsoft? This is not a bug report though, I'm just wondering what the institutional reasons are.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was just under the impression that most of the hardware-facing software (kernel, drivers etc) were the same across distros and therefore keeping up with Ubuntu would almost be a given.
I was about to express my shock that Windows server had immediately obvious bugs, but then I sensed the irony. I would guess that Windows server on any given x86 server works a lot better than nixOS on my laptop. So not sure if I get your point there.
Ubuntu has a lot of non-free/proprietary drivers available for laptops. Other Linux distros don't, especially new ones with innovative aspects to the underlying system that are just becoming stable.
Try running the lsmod command on your laptop to see which kernel modules are loaded. Google a few of the module names - especially ones that look related to the make of your laptop or its video card.
