Comment by Dalewyn
3 years ago
I feel this is the chief reason why the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop" will never be a thing.
Microsoft expects Windows to be a means to an end: You run Windows to use your computer.
Linux neckbeards expect Linux to be the end to a means: You use your computer to run Linux.
If Linux is fragmented so bad that it is completely incompatible with the way software development and support work in the real world, the problem is Linux because Windows, Mac/iOS, and Android (incidentally a flavor of Linux) can all deal with it.
Of course, if you're not interested at all in mainstream desktop Linux adoption and are content hacking away at FOSS code while grumbling about the evils of capitalism and proprietary code, then more power to you.
You can absolutely choose Linux for strictly practical reasons - if you do serverside or embedded programming choosing anything else is counterproductive. But for desktop programming Linux is a struggle.
And yet, successful software are developed and run on Linux.
Doing productive distributed computing for about 25 years, most of them not spent on GNU/Linux.
Nowadays, with cloud platforms making the underlying OS transparent, even less.
You run GNU/Linux because you believe in free software. It's not surprising that you run into problems when developing nonfree software for it.
No, you run GNU/Linux for the freedom. Everyone else* runs Linux because it’s cheap, it’s fast, and it works with all their GoRust ElasticDockernetes gizmos.
We want things on our terms, not theirs. They're the ones who need to learn to do things our way, not the other way around.
Are you seriously telling me these billion dollar corporations can't manage to get in contact with some popular distribution's maintainers and work something out?
Why on earth would they ever do that? Nobody in the entire world, to several approximations, would ever know or care. I doubt any of those companies are interested in writing off the wasted dev cost for ideological purity.
>Are you seriously telling me these billion dollar corporations can't manage to get in contact with some popular distribution's maintainers and work something out?
Nope, because those Linux distros aren't making them any worthwhile money while sending over far too many worthless end-user complaints.
If Linux neckbeards truly want to realize the Year of the Linux Desktop, they have to accept how the rest of the world at large works and play by those rules. It's how Android obtained mainstream success despite being Linux, and it's something any other Linux distro can do if they ditched the neckbeard pride.
Or to put it another way: The vast majority of computer users don't care about free-as-in-freedom or open-as-in-auditable source code. The only thing users care about is getting shit done. All other operating systems, including Android, understand and respect this. It's only Linux that chooses to be either willingly naive or in denial.
>If Linux neckbeards truly want to realize the Year of the Linux Desktop, they have to accept how the rest of the world at large works and play by those rules.
Firstly, name-calling does not help in getting your point across.
The opposite argument could easily be made. What would be the point of the "year of the Linux desktop" if Linux is not substantially different from other OSes in the way it treats its users? That's why nobody is celebrating the "era of the Linux palmtop" with Android.
Linux makes different trade-offs from those made by the commercial OSes. The diversity is valuable. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement, but I would be pretty bummed if Linux lost what makes it different.
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> It's how Android obtained mainstream success despite being Linux, and it's something any other Linux distro can do if they ditched the neckbeard pride.
They can do it, but it’s not guaranteed/unlikely to lead to mainstream success. Android had a multi billion dollar corporation behind it, and likely needed that to succeed.
Another Linux distro that freezes its ABI and supports commercial software distribution likely would be irrelevant until it got hundreds of millions of users, and getting there is a big challenge.