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I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tire

I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I'm tired of each device being an island. I like handing off calls from my phone to my laptop when I'm at work. It began frustrating me years ago when I couldn't just flick a few files off of my e-reader to a friend's phone despite the prevalence of available networks. Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption. I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on. I'm hopeful that people will find ways to invest in its development and find a way to introduce a competing product that is both secure, in the control of the user, and a delight to use -- able to integrate with a plethora of devices and, for the most part, just work.

rms_returns 11y ago
> Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users' needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled. > It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn't a top-priority for developers, but merit is! > And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption. All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development. > I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on. Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Unless you are heavily dependent of Microsoft Excel worksheets and their arcane proprietary macros, I don't see a reason not to switch (besides just being lethargic to learn something new).
- AlexandrB 11y ago
  > IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users' needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled. This is not really true. For example, high-dpi is still a complete crapshoot, font rendering is often bad bordering on terrible. Unity itself is a usability disaster that hides some of an applications most important elements (menu bar) most of the time. Network manager (Ubuntu) breaks frequently. I could go on...
  - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
    > hides some of an applications most important elements (menu bar) I don't know Unity; are you referring to it using a global menu bar, as OSX does? Because the latter is a wonderful idea as far as I'm concerned - it save screen real estate, reduces unnecessary distractions, and has no negative effect on functionality.
    - AlexandrB 11y ago
      By default in Ubuntu (and I know of no way to change this) the global menu bar in Unity is just an empty gray slate until you hover over it and "File", "Edit", "View", etc. appear. This means you have no idea where your mouse should be going until you've reached the top of the screen and have to move left/right until you get to the desired menu.
      - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
        Oh, fair point - that sounds ridiculous! Is there any advantage to that as opposed to the OSX method (which is to just always show a global menu bar, that acts pretty much like any standard GUI menu, populated with items pertinent to the active application)?
        rms_returns 11y ago
        > Oh, fair point - that sounds ridiculous! Don't say that thing until you try something for yourself! In the latest versions of unity, the global menu is integrated with the title-bar of the window itself. It means, you move the mouse pointer to the title area (which the user naturally does to invoke a menu anyways) and the menu appears there. Moreover, once you get into the habit of doing this, it comes naturally, so the above point that it is non-intuitive to user is just ridiculous. And speaking of: > Is there any advantage to that as opposed to the OSX method The advantage is that unity makes a more sensible use of your screen-real estate. Firstly, by combining both title bar and menu bar into one, you have just one bar on the screen when the window is maximized (which is how about 95% of users use it about 99% of time). Secondly, since menu bar is hidden by default, the only thing you focus on is the window or app content, and the title which also relates to the content. I personally find this kind of workflow much better to work.
serge2k 11y ago
> It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption. I think these "spyware features" actually help a ton with that. Without some level of usage data (anonymized is great) how are you supposed to know how your product is actually being used.
- agentultra 11y ago
  Certainly! Hence transparency is the issue not the collection itself in most cases.
KirinDave 11y ago
Come move over to windows. I have. I'm not unhappy. 1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now. 2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don't believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it's straightforward to disable them. 3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out. 4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX. 5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle's java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  I don't see how these are very windows specific advantages, especially if you doing something platform agnostic like mono or python.
- TheRealDunkirk 11y ago
  > 1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now. I've done "Windows" development for about half of my 20-year career, and PHP/Rails for the other half. (It's all mixed together; I'm talking about overall effort.) My job, for the past 2 years, has been 100% Visual Basic .NET. (Personal projects continue in Rails.) I'm sick to death with it, and eagerly await a side gig in Rails and OS X, which should lead to a massive side project in Java. I can't wait. I'll take development on OS X and Linux every day of the week and twice on Sunday over Windows and Visual Studio. Some days, like today, I don't know what I was thinking taking this job. I guess it all comes down to personal preference, but today was a perfect example. I spent half the day fighting updating packages with NuGet, from one machine to another, and a sudden incompatibility with Azure database exports with my local version. Sure, there are problems with every dev environment, but it just seems so much MORE of a hassle with Visual Studio on Windows, since, for all their money and effort and marketing and the fact that they own the whole stack, the pain ought to be much LESS than the alternatives. And I mostly HATE IntelliSense, always popping up and covering what I'm trying to type, and Visual Studio's stubborn way of screwing up my code with its auto-completion of IF statements. Yet I leave it on, for the 5% of the time I want to actually use it. It also doesn't help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run. (So I do that work on my home PC.) And they run their own DNS system, which doesn't know that about half the internet exists. Oh, and the proxy has recently started killing my application for one user at random. No, these aren't Windows or Visual Studio's problems, but these SORTS of problems are frequently part of a "Windows development ecosystem" found in large companies that pay a lot of money to rubbish consultancies. I know, I know. Horses for courses.
clouddrover 11y ago
> dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution A dearth of something is a lack of it (see http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dearth http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dearth). So a dearth of problems is a very good thing. I think you mean a plethora or an excess.
- agentultra 11y ago
  Ack... yes. Thank you.
ymm102p4 11y ago
Free software isn't in competition with non-free software. Free software is 100% up-side. It's not either-or, unless you see a reason for it to be. I need to support Windows for a paycheque, but I use Linux and free options wherever I realistically can, and it has improved my quality of life drastically. Even before I cared about privacy, I grew sick of the constant licensing treadmill. The privacy concerns, however, have long-since passed my tolerance, and I now consider proprietary software itself to be a backdoor. If I must run proprietary software for some practical reason, I will use tools like firewalls, virtualization, and proxies, to limit its potential.
barsonme 11y ago
> I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. I don't quite understand this. I've been on the bleeding-edge (using testing packages) of Arch for quite some time now and have had fewer problems than when I used, say, Fedora or Ubuntu. What sort of problems were you having?
TheRealDunkirk 11y ago
> I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. I'm glad to hear this "out there." I've run Linux on the desktop for 20 years now, and just concluded, as of today, that I was done forever. It was my main OS at home AND work for probably 15 of those years. I've done many years each with Slack, RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. I know them all very well. When I ran them on my desktop, I was running them on all my servers too, and getting both sides. With all the kerfuffle, I decided to reboot out of my work-from-home Visual Studio gig into my Ubuntu install yesterday, and I did the apt-get update and upgrade bit, and then COULD NOT LOG IN. (It would think about it, then kick me back to the lightdm login screen.) Simple reading of the logs showed me that the nVidia kernel module was out of whack. For about an hour I purged the packages and tried reinstalling. I tried the x-edgers PPA packages. Then I remembered that I had had this sort of trouble before, and had concluded that Ubuntu's graphical "restricted hardware" driver-installer widget does things outside of the normal package management, and decided that I didn't care any more. I scraped the whole thing off my machine. But I couldn't just NOT HAVE a Linux installation, so, today, against my better judgement, I installed Fedora. Within 5 minutes -- FIVE MINUTES -- of trying to install software, I had 2 SELinux error messages. Why in the world would installing native packages cause SELinux errors? And trying to install the Chrome browser RPM gave me some cryptic Gnome library error. I decided that was enough of THAT too. I've fought this kind of stuff for a couple of decades. I was using Linux when getting it going required asking for advice from the most pretentious jerks on the internet -- #linux on EFNet -- because the "internet" wasn't big enough to have a lot of documentation about it yet. I've learned the ins and outs of RPM, apt, and portage. I'm just done. I have enough trouble with Windows, and Linux is at least 2 orders of magnitude worse. (I'm typing this on OS X, which an order of magnitude better than Windows.) I BRIEFLY considered trying Arch, since that seems to be the only other viable alternative for Linux besides Ubuntu or Fedora, but my experience with Gentoo leads me to think that, like you say, it's just going to be a hassle. Even more of a hassle than either Ubuntu or Fedora, and I'm already DONE with them. So I guess that's that. Linux will be ready for the desktop just in time for everyone to stop running desktops in favor of tablets, phones, and -- according to Cringley, recently -- gaming machines in the cloud. If handing my activity stream to Microsoft and Apple is the price to NOT have to faff about with tweaking package management systems, then I guess I'll pay. As Murdoch said, in the Lethal Weapon movies, "I'm too old for this st."

rms_returns 11y ago

> Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users' needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled. > It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn't a top-priority for developers, but merit is! > And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption. All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development. > I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on. Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Unless you are heavily dependent of Microsoft Excel worksheets and their arcane proprietary macros, I don't see a reason not to switch (besides just being lethargic to learn something new).

AlexandrB 11y ago
> IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users' needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled. This is not really true. For example, high-dpi is still a complete crapshoot, font rendering is often bad bordering on terrible. Unity itself is a usability disaster that hides some of an applications most important elements (menu bar) most of the time. Network manager (Ubuntu) breaks frequently. I could go on...
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  > hides some of an applications most important elements (menu bar) I don't know Unity; are you referring to it using a global menu bar, as OSX does? Because the latter is a wonderful idea as far as I'm concerned - it save screen real estate, reduces unnecessary distractions, and has no negative effect on functionality.
  - AlexandrB 11y ago
    By default in Ubuntu (and I know of no way to change this) the global menu bar in Unity is just an empty gray slate until you hover over it and "File", "Edit", "View", etc. appear. This means you have no idea where your mouse should be going until you've reached the top of the screen and have to move left/right until you get to the desired menu.
    - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
      Oh, fair point - that sounds ridiculous! Is there any advantage to that as opposed to the OSX method (which is to just always show a global menu bar, that acts pretty much like any standard GUI menu, populated with items pertinent to the active application)?
      - rms_returns 11y ago
        > Oh, fair point - that sounds ridiculous! Don't say that thing until you try something for yourself! In the latest versions of unity, the global menu is integrated with the title-bar of the window itself. It means, you move the mouse pointer to the title area (which the user naturally does to invoke a menu anyways) and the menu appears there. Moreover, once you get into the habit of doing this, it comes naturally, so the above point that it is non-intuitive to user is just ridiculous. And speaking of: > Is there any advantage to that as opposed to the OSX method The advantage is that unity makes a more sensible use of your screen-real estate. Firstly, by combining both title bar and menu bar into one, you have just one bar on the screen when the window is maximized (which is how about 95% of users use it about 99% of time). Secondly, since menu bar is hidden by default, the only thing you focus on is the window or app content, and the title which also relates to the content. I personally find this kind of workflow much better to work.

serge2k 11y ago

> It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption. I think these "spyware features" actually help a ton with that. Without some level of usage data (anonymized is great) how are you supposed to know how your product is actually being used.

agentultra 11y ago
Certainly! Hence transparency is the issue not the collection itself in most cases.

KirinDave 11y ago

Come move over to windows. I have. I'm not unhappy. 1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now. 2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don't believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it's straightforward to disable them. 3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out. 4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX. 5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle's java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.

mahyarm 11y ago
I don't see how these are very windows specific advantages, especially if you doing something platform agnostic like mono or python.
TheRealDunkirk 11y ago
> 1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now. I've done "Windows" development for about half of my 20-year career, and PHP/Rails for the other half. (It's all mixed together; I'm talking about overall effort.) My job, for the past 2 years, has been 100% Visual Basic .NET. (Personal projects continue in Rails.) I'm sick to death with it, and eagerly await a side gig in Rails and OS X, which should lead to a massive side project in Java. I can't wait. I'll take development on OS X and Linux every day of the week and twice on Sunday over Windows and Visual Studio. Some days, like today, I don't know what I was thinking taking this job. I guess it all comes down to personal preference, but today was a perfect example. I spent half the day fighting updating packages with NuGet, from one machine to another, and a sudden incompatibility with Azure database exports with my local version. Sure, there are problems with every dev environment, but it just seems so much MORE of a hassle with Visual Studio on Windows, since, for all their money and effort and marketing and the fact that they own the whole stack, the pain ought to be much LESS than the alternatives. And I mostly HATE IntelliSense, always popping up and covering what I'm trying to type, and Visual Studio's stubborn way of screwing up my code with its auto-completion of IF statements. Yet I leave it on, for the 5% of the time I want to actually use it. It also doesn't help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run. (So I do that work on my home PC.) And they run their own DNS system, which doesn't know that about half the internet exists. Oh, and the proxy has recently started killing my application for one user at random. No, these aren't Windows or Visual Studio's problems, but these SORTS of problems are frequently part of a "Windows development ecosystem" found in large companies that pay a lot of money to rubbish consultancies. I know, I know. Horses for courses.

clouddrover 11y ago

> dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution A dearth of something is a lack of it (see http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dearth http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dearth). So a dearth of problems is a very good thing. I think you mean a plethora or an excess.

agentultra 11y ago
Ack... yes. Thank you.

ymm102p4 11y ago

Free software isn't in competition with non-free software. Free software is 100% up-side. It's not either-or, unless you see a reason for it to be. I need to support Windows for a paycheque, but I use Linux and free options wherever I realistically can, and it has improved my quality of life drastically. Even before I cared about privacy, I grew sick of the constant licensing treadmill. The privacy concerns, however, have long-since passed my tolerance, and I now consider proprietary software itself to be a backdoor. If I must run proprietary software for some practical reason, I will use tools like firewalls, virtualization, and proxies, to limit its potential.

barsonme 11y ago

> I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. I don't quite understand this. I've been on the bleeding-edge (using testing packages) of Arch for quite some time now and have had fewer problems than when I used, say, Fedora or Ubuntu. What sort of problems were you having?

TheRealDunkirk 11y ago

> I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. I'm glad to hear this "out there." I've run Linux on the desktop for 20 years now, and just concluded, as of today, that I was done forever. It was my main OS at home AND work for probably 15 of those years. I've done many years each with Slack, RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. I know them all very well. When I ran them on my desktop, I was running them on all my servers too, and getting both sides. With all the kerfuffle, I decided to reboot out of my work-from-home Visual Studio gig into my Ubuntu install yesterday, and I did the apt-get update and upgrade bit, and then COULD NOT LOG IN. (It would think about it, then kick me back to the lightdm login screen.) Simple reading of the logs showed me that the nVidia kernel module was out of whack. For about an hour I purged the packages and tried reinstalling. I tried the x-edgers PPA packages. Then I remembered that I had had this sort of trouble before, and had concluded that Ubuntu's graphical "restricted hardware" driver-installer widget does things outside of the normal package management, and decided that I didn't care any more. I scraped the whole thing off my machine. But I couldn't just NOT HAVE a Linux installation, so, today, against my better judgement, I installed Fedora. Within 5 minutes -- FIVE MINUTES -- of trying to install software, I had 2 SELinux error messages. Why in the world would installing native packages cause SELinux errors? And trying to install the Chrome browser RPM gave me some cryptic Gnome library error. I decided that was enough of THAT too. I've fought this kind of stuff for a couple of decades. I was using Linux when getting it going required asking for advice from the most pretentious jerks on the internet -- #linux on EFNet -- because the "internet" wasn't big enough to have a lot of documentation about it yet. I've learned the ins and outs of RPM, apt, and portage. I'm just done. I have enough trouble with Windows, and Linux is at least 2 orders of magnitude worse. (I'm typing this on OS X, which an order of magnitude better than Windows.) I BRIEFLY considered trying Arch, since that seems to be the only other viable alternative for Linux besides Ubuntu or Fedora, but my experience with Gentoo leads me to think that, like you say, it's just going to be a hassle. Even more of a hassle than either Ubuntu or Fedora, and I'm already DONE with them. So I guess that's that. Linux will be ready for the desktop just in time for everyone to stop running desktops in favor of tablets, phones, and -- according to Cringley, recently -- gaming machines in the cloud. If handing my activity stream to Microsoft and Apple is the price to NOT have to faff about with tweaking package management systems, then I guess I'll pay. As Murdoch said, in the Lethal Weapon movies, "I'm too old for this st."