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Android shows how you do it. You get a big company with tons of money that wants to seriously build a working platform from end to end. If a company with pocket
by mevile 8y ago
Android shows how you do it. You get a big company with tons of money that wants to seriously build a working platform from end to end. If a company with pockets deep enough had stepped up to create a 3rd viable platform for consumers based on Linux, we'd have it. Mark Shuttleworth's pockets were not deep enough. System76's pockets aren't deep enough. It would have to have been a company like HP or Dell. Dell played with consumer side Linux but never found it lucrative to go all in.
- taeric 8y agoIsn't android heavily fragmented? There are hopes they will get better, for sure, but there is a marked difference between Samsung and other phones. I don't see that going away anytime soon, sadly.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIt is. It has the same problems with everyone having different UI tweaks, but at least the base Android comes with _some_ UI. Fragmentation isn't that big of a problem for users, because there's only so much you can do on a phone - between your photo album, contacts app, web browser and social media, any kind of UI will do. It also helps that most popular apps ship their own UI.
- flukus 8y agoAndroid took off when we had HTC sense, Samsung touchwiz and others, almost no one was running the stock UI. But if KDE and GNOME and others were all running on GTK you'd still probably call it fragmented. There's no consistency between apps on android so you don't notice it as much.
- wvenable 8y agoYes, but apps (for the most part) run consistently across all Android phones. There are multiple UI's but a "single" API. Desktop Linux is fragmented at a much deeper level than just what they look like. This adds a lot of unnecessary complexity to the Linux desktop experience for developers and that ends up affecting the end users more indirectly.
- pjmlp 8y agoIt is, but the Android Frameworks + NDK are still more consistent that jumping between Linux distributions and whatever their users might be using for the desktop. Even GNOME and KDE libraries aren't as functional as the Android Framework, featurewise.
- fyfy18 8y agoIn the early days Android had a very poor user experience, and Google didn't put much effort into changing that for the first few years. If you wanted a useable Android phone you'd buy from HTC or Sony who had a more user friendly UX, so in a way fragmentation helped there. Nowadays the experience is more mature, but even so a Samsung device has a very different feel from a Pixel or Xiaomi device, even though under the hood they can all be running Android Pie.
- dschuetz 8y agoAbsolutely! Let Linux desktops gather tons of data and then sell it! Sarcasm out.
- part200 8y agoI agree, we should all be such luddites that anything other than a CLI interface to watch youtube should be heresy.