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The whole concept that "Linux is just a kernel" sounds like some kind of whining pedantic hair splitting, unless you understand that almost all the stuff that s

The whole concept that "Linux is just a kernel" sounds like some kind of whining pedantic hair splitting, unless you understand that almost all the stuff that ships in a Linux distribution including all the FOSS stuff we call "the desktop" runs perfectly well on all modern Unix-like systems like FreeBSD et al. xorg, Firefox, Gnome/KDE/foo/bar, yada yada. Admittedly there are fewer and fewer Unix-like systems left (I cut my teeth on OSes that are now dead and buried), but it's a massive disservice to all these wonderful projects that we don't have a better ways to describe this stuff so that we don't have people talking about "the Linux desktop". Get off my lawn, etc.

jillesvangurp 8y ago
It's worse, things like the Gimp and most most other major user facing linux applications have a history of also being built for windows and mac os. E.g. I regularly use Darktable on my mac and with the last release they also started supporting windows builds. Why not? The more users the better from their point of view. Linux has a software packaging issue. There are several so-called package managers and they basically have overlapping goals and they all suck from an end user perspective. On Ubuntu when you do an apt-get install darktable, you pull in a gazillion of packages. Everything and the kitchen sink, basically. On a mac, I drag the darktable.app file to the applications after I download it. And it runs. Exact same software. It's a 217MB self contained package. There are no software conflicts. Apple designed the way that stuff works last century when they were designing OS X and wanted to keep the simplicity of how software installations worked on OS 9. The disk usage is a non issue There are no dependencies to manage. This stuff works across major versions of OS X even. Package managers don't solve a problem real users have. The existence of package managers led to what we now call distributions, which made a lot of sense in the early nineties when slackware came in the form of 27 disks (been there, done that) but not this century. No two distributions are the same. They each need to test and integrate the same software to work in their ecosystem. Even major versions of the same distribution tend to be very different. I personally think Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. have no business whatsoever acting as a gatekeeper here and I tend to think of them more as an obstacle then as an enabler. E.g. I know the Darktable people are preparing a 2.6 release (awesome stuff). I'd like to get a binary package from them as soon as they release it. I don't see what value Ubuntu doing the same months (optimistic?) later adds. Why wait? Their need to test before they can integrate is self inflicted. It's a problem they have yet to solve. Flatpak and similar solutions are sort of aiming to solve this for linux. But standards are lacking, progress is slow, and this stuff is nowhere close to being standardized. So, again fragmentation. Compare that to the docker eco system. Most custom stuff you deploy to a server comes as a docker image. And you can run those on many different operating systems. This kind of OS neutral way of packaging software needs to start extending to desktop software. We need Docker for end user applications.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

It's worse, things like the Gimp and most most other major user facing linux applications have a history of also being built for windows and mac os. E.g. I regularly use Darktable on my mac and with the last release they also started supporting windows builds. Why not? The more users the better from their point of view. Linux has a software packaging issue. There are several so-called package managers and they basically have overlapping goals and they all suck from an end user perspective. On Ubuntu when you do an apt-get install darktable, you pull in a gazillion of packages. Everything and the kitchen sink, basically. On a mac, I drag the darktable.app file to the applications after I download it. And it runs. Exact same software. It's a 217MB self contained package. There are no software conflicts. Apple designed the way that stuff works last century when they were designing OS X and wanted to keep the simplicity of how software installations worked on OS 9. The disk usage is a non issue There are no dependencies to manage. This stuff works across major versions of OS X even. Package managers don't solve a problem real users have. The existence of package managers led to what we now call distributions, which made a lot of sense in the early nineties when slackware came in the form of 27 disks (been there, done that) but not this century. No two distributions are the same. They each need to test and integrate the same software to work in their ecosystem. Even major versions of the same distribution tend to be very different. I personally think Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. have no business whatsoever acting as a gatekeeper here and I tend to think of them more as an obstacle then as an enabler. E.g. I know the Darktable people are preparing a 2.6 release (awesome stuff). I'd like to get a binary package from them as soon as they release it. I don't see what value Ubuntu doing the same months (optimistic?) later adds. Why wait? Their need to test before they can integrate is self inflicted. It's a problem they have yet to solve. Flatpak and similar solutions are sort of aiming to solve this for linux. But standards are lacking, progress is slow, and this stuff is nowhere close to being standardized. So, again fragmentation. Compare that to the docker eco system. Most custom stuff you deploy to a server comes as a docker image. And you can run those on many different operating systems. This kind of OS neutral way of packaging software needs to start extending to desktop software. We need Docker for end user applications.