7 ms·

There's 288 Linux distributions currently listed on DistroWatch, multiple DE, package managers, and yet, Windows is still dominating on desktop. Having an open

by remir 10y ago

There's 288 Linux distributions currently listed on DistroWatch, multiple DE, package managers, and yet, Windows is still dominating on desktop. Having an open source clone of Windows makes perfect sense. Imagine if, after all those years, this project received more support from the open source community. Today we would have a free and open source OS that would be able to run Windows drivers and the Win32 apps people want to use. Adobe's stuff, AutoCAD, AbletonLive, games, MS Office, etc. In the end, the average person doesn't care about operating systems. What they care about is their apps.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mattnewton 10y ago
Is the desktop still a market worth dominating? It's relevant today, and will remain relevant, but in decreasing amounts. I think we're in a new era of thin clients and beefy *nix machine clusters again, and I think it will matter less and less what IT departments buy as long as they have a capable browser.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cududa 10y ago
  I think this would've been a good answer 6 years ago, but with tablet sales decreasing YoY and desktop/ laptop finally growing again, it might not be entirely accurate. 6 years ago we thought netbook thin clients paired with powerful backends would dominate. But here we are in 2017 - server side rendering of UI is waning while rich and robust client side interface applications are thriving. I think that late 2000's/ early 2010's vision of local computing withering in the shade of cloud resources is over. It turns out people want fancy, fat UI -- and rendering that server side isn't a very good idea.
  - stymaar 10y ago
    > robust client side interface applications are thriving. But a huge amount of them use web technologies which are pretty much OS independent. I'm using Linux for 10 years now and I used to have trouble to work with others because they where all using Windows-only software (proprietary chat client, MS office, etc.) but it's less the case anymore because for many use-cases everybody uses web applications instead of native software. > It turns out people want fancy, fat UI -- and rendering that server side isn't a very good idea. That's why JavaScript is the dominant language out there. And with WASM comming, even what's currently out of reach of JavaScript will be doable on a web plateform (except high-end gaming maybe).
    - leadingthenet 10y ago
      I see this argument often, but think about it this way: people use Electron style apps because they have no other real choice. If I had the same app written natively and another implementation based on Electron, I'd pick the native app every single time. It's developers who are pushing for JavaScript, not users.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        > It's web developers who are pushing for JavaScript Fixed that for you. I am a developer, with UI experience going back to Amiga/Windows 3.x days, and will only touch Electron if forced by customers/employer to do so.
        rpeden 10y ago
        I feel the same way about Electron, because I don't like shipping subpar applications to users. I've found the development experience using TypeScript and React to be fairly pleasant, though. I know some people gripe about JSX/TSX, but it seems to me it's a lot like XAML - declarative XML that you can use to lay out your interface and hook up event handlers. I've been enjoying the UWP, WPF, and macOS ports of React Native. They make it fairly easy to get up and running with something that'll let you share 80% of your code cross platform while still making it easy to write extensions with the native OS toolkit when needed. From what I've observed, RN desktop apps are much more CPU and memory efficient than Electron apps. In my mind, this is a much better way to create desktop applications using (mostly) web technology.
ftlio 10y ago
Windows 10 isn't too bad OS wise either though. I don't know, maybe I'm just too old now because I'm already tired typing about it. I still scratch my head when I see people developing non Windows apps on Windows. And I run Nix on everything. But I'd accept 'I like Windows more even if I could run my expensive industry specific software on Linux' without feeling the need to explain why they're wrong.
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
  but the proprietary nature of Windows 10 is the problem. Cost. Spyware. Security. ...
  - mephistopheles 10y ago
    I don't like the way Microsoft has lately begun treating both their devs and customers, but nevertheless they are a corporation - they have to someway make a profit - a business survives by adapting to their users and telemetry ("spyware") is data; data on which they (should) adapt to their user needs.
    - junk_disposal 10y ago
      >data on which they (should) adapt to their user needs. Then make it optional. Or at least opt-out. Or say that if you don't enable telemetry, your opinion won't count. Or at least tell you what they're getting and how.
    - ben0x539 10y ago
      The fact that you can spell out the motivation of someone's shitty behavior doesn't elevate it above criticism!
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > Spyware. Security. ... I hope you don't use web apps, ChromeOS or Android then.
    - 10y ago
adrianN 10y ago
It is my understanding that you already can run an impressive amount of Windows software (I think including MS Office) under Linux using Wine. That doesn't seem to help the popularity of Linux very much.
- krylon 10y ago
  In Germany we have a saying, "Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht". Most people just don't care about operating systems, and hence they do not see the point in trying another system when the one they know works well enough for them. A couple of years back, I set up my parents' notebook to dual boot either Windows 7 or Ubuntu 12.04. Despite the fact that both their printer and their (ancient) scanner worked out of the box (which did not work on Windows 7 at all), they have never used it.
  - stymaar 10y ago
    Changing habits is hard, most people don't want do it useless they are forced to. 5 of 6 years ago, my mother's old computer died. All the new ones where running Windows 7 while she was used to XP. I seized the opportunity to install Linux on here computer instead of Windows 7, and she was OK with that because she was going to be in a new environment anyway. She is now a proud Linux user for 5 or 6 years :)
    - DictumMortuum 10y ago
      The only computer that runs windows in my house is my dual boot machine. My parents and my sister all have ubuntu distros, because 99% of the time they just need firefox and a text editor.
  - lukaslalinsky 10y ago
    On the other end of the spectrum you have young people who equally do not care about the operating system, but do not have such strong ties to Windows. I was amazed that when I gave my Ubuntu laptop to children on our family meetings, they had absolutely no problem using it for anything they needed. It was mostly just browsing the web and watching YouTube, but the point is that it was not alien to them. If more cheap laptops shipped with Ubuntu pre-installed, the adoption could go up significantly.
chris_wot 10y ago
These things start off very slowly, and then tend to somewhat exponentially grow and improve over time. Have a look at LibreOffice. StarOffice was open sourced in 2000 by Sun as OpenOffice.org and started somewhat slowly. By 2004 OpenOffice.org was making steady progress, and had captured quite a bit of market share. Then the OpenOffice developers and Sun started stymying contributions, and eventually Michael Meeks setup Go-OO with a bunch of patches that made the program easier to use. Then Oracle bought Sun and really pissed off key external contributors so they forked the product and in 2011 The Document Foundation was formed to oversee LibreOffice development. Since then OpenOffice.org has stagnated and withered on the vine, whereas LibreOffice has had entire swathes of old and cruddy code rewritten and each point release has not only got huge numbers of bugs fixed, but often new features - and often entire subsystems have been rewritten without the end user ever knowing. So give it time - it's been just over 16 years since it the StarOffice source was opened to anyone. ReactOS has been around at least this long, and due to the nature of the project isn't quite as fast, but each time I read a new release it occurs to me that development is accelerating rather rapidly!
- laumars 10y ago
  The office suite market in general has been relatively stagnant over the last couple of decades. Sure there have been some noticeable advancements such as the introduction of ribbon bars and zipped XML documents replacing undocumented binary blobs. But feature MS Office reached a plateau in the late 90s so a significant amount of work since has been about user experience instead. Often just with pointless UI tweaks in the aim of milking their proverbial cash cow. This has made it easier for open source competitors to catch up with Microsoft. However compare that to operating system development - or to be more specific: reverse engineering undocumented APIs that receive updates every few years - and you have yourself a whole order of magnitude more difficult job to even just reach a usable parity let alone being a competitive alternative. As quickly as ReactOS developers can reverse engineers Windows, Microsoft will progress their flagship OS. ReactOS is chasing a moving target in a way that LibreOffice is not. Disclaimer: I'm not dismissing the developers efforts. I just don't agree with your statement that ReactOS will snowball in the same way that many other open source developments do.
Vinnl 10y ago
But if you only care about your apps, there's no real reason to run ReactOS. You'd also have to care about free or open source software.
nonsince 10y ago
Can't speak for the other stuff, but if you're not using wacky instrument drivers (I only have a pretty basic midi keyboard so I don't know what other instruments are like) Ableton Live 9 works like an absolute dream under Wine. I was shocked by how flawlessly it ran.

by remir 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mattnewton 10y ago

Is the desktop still a market worth dominating? It's relevant today, and will remain relevant, but in decreasing amounts. I think we're in a new era of thin clients and beefy *nix machine clusters again, and I think it will matter less and less what IT departments buy as long as they have a capable browser.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cududa 10y ago
I think this would've been a good answer 6 years ago, but with tablet sales decreasing YoY and desktop/ laptop finally growing again, it might not be entirely accurate. 6 years ago we thought netbook thin clients paired with powerful backends would dominate. But here we are in 2017 - server side rendering of UI is waning while rich and robust client side interface applications are thriving. I think that late 2000's/ early 2010's vision of local computing withering in the shade of cloud resources is over. It turns out people want fancy, fat UI -- and rendering that server side isn't a very good idea.
- stymaar 10y ago
  > robust client side interface applications are thriving. But a huge amount of them use web technologies which are pretty much OS independent. I'm using Linux for 10 years now and I used to have trouble to work with others because they where all using Windows-only software (proprietary chat client, MS office, etc.) but it's less the case anymore because for many use-cases everybody uses web applications instead of native software. > It turns out people want fancy, fat UI -- and rendering that server side isn't a very good idea. That's why JavaScript is the dominant language out there. And with WASM comming, even what's currently out of reach of JavaScript will be doable on a web plateform (except high-end gaming maybe).
  - leadingthenet 10y ago
    I see this argument often, but think about it this way: people use Electron style apps because they have no other real choice. If I had the same app written natively and another implementation based on Electron, I'd pick the native app every single time. It's developers who are pushing for JavaScript, not users.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      > It's web developers who are pushing for JavaScript Fixed that for you. I am a developer, with UI experience going back to Amiga/Windows 3.x days, and will only touch Electron if forced by customers/employer to do so.
      - rpeden 10y ago
        I feel the same way about Electron, because I don't like shipping subpar applications to users. I've found the development experience using TypeScript and React to be fairly pleasant, though. I know some people gripe about JSX/TSX, but it seems to me it's a lot like XAML - declarative XML that you can use to lay out your interface and hook up event handlers. I've been enjoying the UWP, WPF, and macOS ports of React Native. They make it fairly easy to get up and running with something that'll let you share 80% of your code cross platform while still making it easy to write extensions with the native OS toolkit when needed. From what I've observed, RN desktop apps are much more CPU and memory efficient than Electron apps. In my mind, this is a much better way to create desktop applications using (mostly) web technology.

ftlio 10y ago

Windows 10 isn't too bad OS wise either though. I don't know, maybe I'm just too old now because I'm already tired typing about it. I still scratch my head when I see people developing non Windows apps on Windows. And I run Nix on everything. But I'd accept 'I like Windows more even if I could run my expensive industry specific software on Linux' without feeling the need to explain why they're wrong.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
but the proprietary nature of Windows 10 is the problem. Cost. Spyware. Security. ...
- mephistopheles 10y ago
  I don't like the way Microsoft has lately begun treating both their devs and customers, but nevertheless they are a corporation - they have to someway make a profit - a business survives by adapting to their users and telemetry ("spyware") is data; data on which they (should) adapt to their user needs.
  - junk_disposal 10y ago
    >data on which they (should) adapt to their user needs. Then make it optional. Or at least opt-out. Or say that if you don't enable telemetry, your opinion won't count. Or at least tell you what they're getting and how.
  - ben0x539 10y ago
    The fact that you can spell out the motivation of someone's shitty behavior doesn't elevate it above criticism!
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > Spyware. Security. ... I hope you don't use web apps, ChromeOS or Android then.
  - 10y ago

adrianN 10y ago

It is my understanding that you already can run an impressive amount of Windows software (I think including MS Office) under Linux using Wine. That doesn't seem to help the popularity of Linux very much.

krylon 10y ago
In Germany we have a saying, "Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht". Most people just don't care about operating systems, and hence they do not see the point in trying another system when the one they know works well enough for them. A couple of years back, I set up my parents' notebook to dual boot either Windows 7 or Ubuntu 12.04. Despite the fact that both their printer and their (ancient) scanner worked out of the box (which did not work on Windows 7 at all), they have never used it.
- stymaar 10y ago
  Changing habits is hard, most people don't want do it useless they are forced to. 5 of 6 years ago, my mother's old computer died. All the new ones where running Windows 7 while she was used to XP. I seized the opportunity to install Linux on here computer instead of Windows 7, and she was OK with that because she was going to be in a new environment anyway. She is now a proud Linux user for 5 or 6 years :)
  - DictumMortuum 10y ago
    The only computer that runs windows in my house is my dual boot machine. My parents and my sister all have ubuntu distros, because 99% of the time they just need firefox and a text editor.
- lukaslalinsky 10y ago
  On the other end of the spectrum you have young people who equally do not care about the operating system, but do not have such strong ties to Windows. I was amazed that when I gave my Ubuntu laptop to children on our family meetings, they had absolutely no problem using it for anything they needed. It was mostly just browsing the web and watching YouTube, but the point is that it was not alien to them. If more cheap laptops shipped with Ubuntu pre-installed, the adoption could go up significantly.

chris_wot 10y ago

These things start off very slowly, and then tend to somewhat exponentially grow and improve over time. Have a look at LibreOffice. StarOffice was open sourced in 2000 by Sun as OpenOffice.org and started somewhat slowly. By 2004 OpenOffice.org was making steady progress, and had captured quite a bit of market share. Then the OpenOffice developers and Sun started stymying contributions, and eventually Michael Meeks setup Go-OO with a bunch of patches that made the program easier to use. Then Oracle bought Sun and really pissed off key external contributors so they forked the product and in 2011 The Document Foundation was formed to oversee LibreOffice development. Since then OpenOffice.org has stagnated and withered on the vine, whereas LibreOffice has had entire swathes of old and cruddy code rewritten and each point release has not only got huge numbers of bugs fixed, but often new features - and often entire subsystems have been rewritten without the end user ever knowing. So give it time - it's been just over 16 years since it the StarOffice source was opened to anyone. ReactOS has been around at least this long, and due to the nature of the project isn't quite as fast, but each time I read a new release it occurs to me that development is accelerating rather rapidly!

laumars 10y ago
The office suite market in general has been relatively stagnant over the last couple of decades. Sure there have been some noticeable advancements such as the introduction of ribbon bars and zipped XML documents replacing undocumented binary blobs. But feature MS Office reached a plateau in the late 90s so a significant amount of work since has been about user experience instead. Often just with pointless UI tweaks in the aim of milking their proverbial cash cow. This has made it easier for open source competitors to catch up with Microsoft. However compare that to operating system development - or to be more specific: reverse engineering undocumented APIs that receive updates every few years - and you have yourself a whole order of magnitude more difficult job to even just reach a usable parity let alone being a competitive alternative. As quickly as ReactOS developers can reverse engineers Windows, Microsoft will progress their flagship OS. ReactOS is chasing a moving target in a way that LibreOffice is not. Disclaimer: I'm not dismissing the developers efforts. I just don't agree with your statement that ReactOS will snowball in the same way that many other open source developments do.

Vinnl 10y ago

But if you only care about your apps, there's no real reason to run ReactOS. You'd also have to care about free or open source software.

nonsince 10y ago

Can't speak for the other stuff, but if you're not using wacky instrument drivers (I only have a pretty basic midi keyboard so I don't know what other instruments are like) Ableton Live 9 works like an absolute dream under Wine. I was shocked by how flawlessly it ran.