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If that's true why do I see so many developers using Macs? Desktop Linux is a mess and always has been. The problem is structural. The people making it don't h

If that's true why do I see so many developers using Macs? Desktop Linux is a mess and always has been. The problem is structural. The people making it don't have any profit motive to make it better. They're all either volunteers having fun or subsidised by server products.

spdy 10y ago
Dont know i switch to arch linux and i3wm last year on my mbp and i dont want to go back. Same goes for the newest mbp in its current state i will buy another brand probably a surface when my mbp dies.
monkmartinez 10y ago
> If that's true why do I see so many developers using Macs? Because, until recently, Apple catered to professional users. The openly hostile act of soldering of RAM, addiction to thin, and buggy OS releases, etc. are relatively new developments in Apple hx. > Desktop Linux is a mess and always has been. The problem is structural. I posit that all OS's are a mess. Some are messier than others but most of them are filled to the brim with bugs... macOS definitely included.
pritambaral 10y ago
> The people making it don't have any profit motive to make it better While I won't disagree if you claim Desktop Linux wasn't nearly at the level of polish as OS X Snow Leopard was, I think you've got a completely wrong diagnosis here. Both because there can be motives other than super-high salaries and because quite a lot of them do actually have financial motives to make it better. And having seen how the development goes on behind the scenes for KDE, I would disagree outright that the developers of KDE lack seriousness or dedication. On the other hand, Windows Metro was made by people with profit motives.
davidron 10y ago
>If that's true why do I see so many developers using Macs? There are lots of developers who use Apple hardware with linux. Even Linus (at least as of 2012)! http://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvalds-i-love-my-macbook-air/ http://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvalds... > Desktop Linux is a mess and always has been. The problem is structural. The people making it don't have any profit motive to make it better. They're all either volunteers having fun or subsidised by server products. It sounds like you are saying there is a direct relationship between the quality ("betterness") of software and a profit motive to create that software and that there is no profit motive to make Desktop Linux better. I see two flaws with that argument: 1. You posit that there is zero profit motive to make it better, then there should be zero quality of the Linux Desktop. Certainly, you can't be saying that there exists nothing worse than Desktop Linux, even conceptually. 2. This argument, if I understand it correctly, also implies that it's impossible for an application to be "better" or "good" that has no profit motive. This would include all of the open source utilities, text editors, programming languages, compilers, games, emulators, and other applications - many of which ship with every single Mac on the market. Those two reasons make your argument logically inconsistent, I think. But, even if your argument were logically consistent, I believe that there is a profit motive to make it better. Some people, including myself, derive non-monetary profit from building something useful and we find that the open-source model allows us to collaborate on these things because they are too complex or time consuming to do alone. The fact that there actually exists a profit motive makes your argument factually inconsistent as well.
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  My argument is not logically inconsistent, but it may be a bit tricky to see why. Firstly, I did not argue that quality is a pure function of potential profit. I said there's no profit motive to make desktop Linux better than it currently is (my view is that desktop Linux has been at a pretty constant level of quality for the last decade, which I'm sure some will argue with, but that's been my experience). That's a slightly different argument which I'll elaborate on in a moment. Secondly, the fact that Macs ship with open source software doesn't invalidate my point. The popularity of MacOS X amongst developers can largely be summed up as "it's UNIX but with large parts replaced with proprietary components". What's left is whatever wasn't relevant to the consumer/pro-designer market segment, mostly a collection of command line tools. The other open source stuff (Apple's own code) was very much directed by the profit motive and open sourced secondarily, as a part of a product strategy. There are two problems with the volunteer/subsidised-developer model that shine through when using desktop Linux. And in case you think I'm a clueless idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about, I've used desktop Linux for many years and even did contribute open source work to it about 15 years ago (I had patches in a few well known desktop projects). Eventually I became disillusioned because of these two main flaws: 1) Volunteers avoid boring work i.e. fixing bugs in other people's software. 2) Subsidised developers and volunteers lack any incentive to discard flawed ideologies and convictions The second is the most important. The first problem can be addressed through Red Hat style cross subsidisation. The second results in massive, glaring weaknesses that developers rationalise as strengths rather than swim against established dogma. Some examples of crap that is simply not tolerated in desktop operating systems built by people seeking profit but is/was often rationalised away as a strength in Linux: the audio server situation, completely messed up software distribution model, lack of support for proprietary kernel drivers, flaky backwards compatibility, general hostility to proprietary userspace apps, a bizarre insistence that anything important be written in C, refusal to work with any kind of content industry that wants DRM ... lots of policies that Linux users have just learned to accept as futile to argue with that Apple and Microsoft don't have the same hangups about. And the end result is, guess what, Macs just work a whole lot better. I'm painting with a broad brush. The profit motive is just an incentive, a nudge, it's not an iron law. Apple and Microsoft have their own weird ideological hangups, especially in recent years, and they could really use a whole lot more competition. The Linux community has overcome entrenched attitudes a few times in the past - GNOME 2 and systemd are good examples of that. But overall the Linux community suffers far from more self-inflicted wounds that they're psychologically incapable of changing and without any financial incentive to do so, these things just fester for decades.

spdy 10y ago

Dont know i switch to arch linux and i3wm last year on my mbp and i dont want to go back. Same goes for the newest mbp in its current state i will buy another brand probably a surface when my mbp dies.

monkmartinez 10y ago

> If that's true why do I see so many developers using Macs? Because, until recently, Apple catered to professional users. The openly hostile act of soldering of RAM, addiction to thin, and buggy OS releases, etc. are relatively new developments in Apple hx. > Desktop Linux is a mess and always has been. The problem is structural. I posit that all OS's are a mess. Some are messier than others but most of them are filled to the brim with bugs... macOS definitely included.

pritambaral 10y ago

> The people making it don't have any profit motive to make it better While I won't disagree if you claim Desktop Linux wasn't nearly at the level of polish as OS X Snow Leopard was, I think you've got a completely wrong diagnosis here. Both because there can be motives other than super-high salaries and because quite a lot of them do actually have financial motives to make it better. And having seen how the development goes on behind the scenes for KDE, I would disagree outright that the developers of KDE lack seriousness or dedication. On the other hand, Windows Metro was made by people with profit motives.

davidron 10y ago

>If that's true why do I see so many developers using Macs? There are lots of developers who use Apple hardware with linux. Even Linus (at least as of 2012)! http://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvalds-i-love-my-macbook-air/ http://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvalds... > Desktop Linux is a mess and always has been. The problem is structural. The people making it don't have any profit motive to make it better. They're all either volunteers having fun or subsidised by server products. It sounds like you are saying there is a direct relationship between the quality ("betterness") of software and a profit motive to create that software and that there is no profit motive to make Desktop Linux better. I see two flaws with that argument: 1. You posit that there is zero profit motive to make it better, then there should be zero quality of the Linux Desktop. Certainly, you can't be saying that there exists nothing worse than Desktop Linux, even conceptually. 2. This argument, if I understand it correctly, also implies that it's impossible for an application to be "better" or "good" that has no profit motive. This would include all of the open source utilities, text editors, programming languages, compilers, games, emulators, and other applications - many of which ship with every single Mac on the market. Those two reasons make your argument logically inconsistent, I think. But, even if your argument were logically consistent, I believe that there is a profit motive to make it better. Some people, including myself, derive non-monetary profit from building something useful and we find that the open-source model allows us to collaborate on these things because they are too complex or time consuming to do alone. The fact that there actually exists a profit motive makes your argument factually inconsistent as well.

zigzigzag 10y ago
My argument is not logically inconsistent, but it may be a bit tricky to see why. Firstly, I did not argue that quality is a pure function of potential profit. I said there's no profit motive to make desktop Linux better than it currently is (my view is that desktop Linux has been at a pretty constant level of quality for the last decade, which I'm sure some will argue with, but that's been my experience). That's a slightly different argument which I'll elaborate on in a moment. Secondly, the fact that Macs ship with open source software doesn't invalidate my point. The popularity of MacOS X amongst developers can largely be summed up as "it's UNIX but with large parts replaced with proprietary components". What's left is whatever wasn't relevant to the consumer/pro-designer market segment, mostly a collection of command line tools. The other open source stuff (Apple's own code) was very much directed by the profit motive and open sourced secondarily, as a part of a product strategy. There are two problems with the volunteer/subsidised-developer model that shine through when using desktop Linux. And in case you think I'm a clueless idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about, I've used desktop Linux for many years and even did contribute open source work to it about 15 years ago (I had patches in a few well known desktop projects). Eventually I became disillusioned because of these two main flaws: 1) Volunteers avoid boring work i.e. fixing bugs in other people's software. 2) Subsidised developers and volunteers lack any incentive to discard flawed ideologies and convictions The second is the most important. The first problem can be addressed through Red Hat style cross subsidisation. The second results in massive, glaring weaknesses that developers rationalise as strengths rather than swim against established dogma. Some examples of crap that is simply not tolerated in desktop operating systems built by people seeking profit but is/was often rationalised away as a strength in Linux: the audio server situation, completely messed up software distribution model, lack of support for proprietary kernel drivers, flaky backwards compatibility, general hostility to proprietary userspace apps, a bizarre insistence that anything important be written in C, refusal to work with any kind of content industry that wants DRM ... lots of policies that Linux users have just learned to accept as futile to argue with that Apple and Microsoft don't have the same hangups about. And the end result is, guess what, Macs just work a whole lot better. I'm painting with a broad brush. The profit motive is just an incentive, a nudge, it's not an iron law. Apple and Microsoft have their own weird ideological hangups, especially in recent years, and they could really use a whole lot more competition. The Linux community has overcome entrenched attitudes a few times in the past - GNOME 2 and systemd are good examples of that. But overall the Linux community suffers far from more self-inflicted wounds that they're psychologically incapable of changing and without any financial incentive to do so, these things just fester for decades.