3 ms·

I miss the free software activism bent of old slashdot. There was so much optimism at Linux and others being the way of the future, and beating Microsoft at the

I miss the free software activism bent of old slashdot. There was so much optimism at Linux and others being the way of the future, and beating Microsoft at the desktop. I feel like the Unix enthusiast's shift to the Mac kind of killed some of that. If people think a desktop ui is a "solved problem" (by Apple), there end up fewer people interested in those kind of projects. Now it's pretty common for a free software desktop to be a punchline in a joke, mocked as some infeasible fantasy and inevitable failure.

dehrmann 7y ago
What killed the "is this the year of desktop Linux" question was the smartphone. The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011.
- toyg 7y ago
  By 2011 the Linux desktop was already the butt of jokes. That dream died about 5 years earlier, when Ubuntu spread like wildfire in the geek community and then... failed to make any serious inroad anywhere else.
- asveikau 7y ago
  > The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011. Where is the data on that? I just googled around, I don't know if this site is reputable but it would indicate mobile didn't overtake PCs until 2016 and even now the gap is not huge: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/#monthly-201101-202004 https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob... I know I've read that PC sales went down pretty severely around the 2011 date you cite, however, it could be that sales of new PCs are down much more than actual usage because PCs need to be replaced less frequently.
aaron-lebo 7y ago
It's nuts to me how much peole despised MS at the time. I remember getting a hacked/modded version of Halo 2 (2004) and it came with a picture of Gates with a bullet hole in his head. Which is sick and not appropriate, but people despised him. They've done a really good job of rehabilitating their image. Having grown up at the time, it's hard for me to see Gates and them as different than that. It does make me somewhat sad that we've embraced a future where the bad guys won, that the schoolyard bully that tried to stifle progress is now succeeding by adopting that which they tried to strangle int he cradle.
- aikinai 7y ago
  Companies aren’t people though, and the people embracing it now might have very little overlap with the old stranglers.
  - aaron-lebo 7y ago
    It would make me feel a lot better if Gates didn't buddy with Epstein even after his first conviction for trafficking teenagers. I think MS, if it wants to have some respect, should basically disown him unless he has a legit and contrite apology. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-... It engrages and disgusts me it isn't a bigger deal.
    - asveikau 7y ago
      It's certainly very disappointing. On the other hand, Bill Gates is not law enforcement, is not the criminal justice system. Speaking abstractly, if someone is convicted of a crime, goes to prison, and is let out... At what point does a prominent individual need to say they'll never talk to that person under any circumstances? In some cases that would be too extreme and in the abstract, repentant ex-convicts may deserve forgiveness. In hindsight it's easy to say Epstein wasn't that. But we don't know how he may have misrepresented himself to Gates and others. We know from the press that there was some sketchy business involved in his relatively short prison stay, which I presume Gates did not know. My guess is it's not always an easy call to make, whether or not to show forgiveness to an ex-con, whether or not you can trust them as reformed, etc. The article you cite says he regrets making the wrong call.
- toyg 7y ago
  Sadly some of the re-evaluation of Gates is due to the bar getting lower and lower, when it comes to corporate governance in the tech space. MCI/Worldcom, Bezos’s ruthless Amazon, Zuckerberg and googlers despising their own users, Jobs squeezing money out of everyone, Larry Ellison being Larry Ellison, and Ballmer being even more of a bully than Gates was... Yes, the hate for Gates does look a bit naive now. To be fair, at the time there was a huge amount of admiration for him in the mainstream (I still meet people convinced he “invented” this or that software alone in a garage), so the hate was really niche. Hi
j45 7y ago
In a way OSS did become the future.. Linux powering Android.. Bsd powering macos and ios. Ubuntu 20.04 also looks to be an extremely usable desktop that just works.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  Ubuntu works great, i just installed it in a VM and it told me i can use "Ubuntu Software" to install new applications - i opened that and it was completely empty for a few seconds until images started to appear. Then i went to games which was empty and nothing would appear. I closed it and started it again and now games would show up, so i decided to install "WolfeDoom" which sounded interesting. While it was downloading, i went back and decided to also install ZZT (i think) so i pressed Install for that too. That installed fast so i tried to run it and... nothing happened. I tried again, but nothing - the game's name appeared for a bit at the top but then disappeared without any indication about what was wrong. So i uninstalled it and closed the Software app. At this point i thought to try WolfenDoom but... i couldn't find it anywhere. I opened the Software app to see where it was, went to the installed tab, scrolled down and found it, but instead of "Launch" (or whatever) it had an "Install" button next to it (which is weird since i was in the installed category). I clicked it and an error popped up about some state or whatever. So i restarted the Software app, went directly to the game's page and pressed Install from there - error again. So i googled to figure out what is wrong and i found vague messages about it. Eventually it fixed itself. Somehow. My guess it was installing at the background but this wasn't shown anywhere and trying to install it again was failing because of that. Very usable. Very just works.
  - j45 7y ago
    I agree, I just upgraded fro Ubuntu 18 to 19 to 20. I noticed it took some time to get going too, and suspect there are background tasks that complete after the base OS install. It reminds me of Early Mac OS X in someways, around the leopard, lion, mountain lion times. Just seems to work.
- asveikau 7y ago
  > Linux powering Android.. With a lot of closed components on every device. > Bsd powering macos and ios. There is BSD code in XNU just like there was BSD code in NeXTstep in the 80s but the link and resemblance is pretty tenuous. And it would be a huge stretch to call Darwin an open source project. There were efforts to build free distros out of it, long abandoned. And that is ignoring the vast amounts of closed components.

dehrmann 7y ago

What killed the "is this the year of desktop Linux" question was the smartphone. The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011.

toyg 7y ago
By 2011 the Linux desktop was already the butt of jokes. That dream died about 5 years earlier, when Ubuntu spread like wildfire in the geek community and then... failed to make any serious inroad anywhere else.
asveikau 7y ago
> The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011. Where is the data on that? I just googled around, I don't know if this site is reputable but it would indicate mobile didn't overtake PCs until 2016 and even now the gap is not huge: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/#monthly-201101-202004 https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob... I know I've read that PC sales went down pretty severely around the 2011 date you cite, however, it could be that sales of new PCs are down much more than actual usage because PCs need to be replaced less frequently.

aaron-lebo 7y ago

It's nuts to me how much peole despised MS at the time. I remember getting a hacked/modded version of Halo 2 (2004) and it came with a picture of Gates with a bullet hole in his head. Which is sick and not appropriate, but people despised him. They've done a really good job of rehabilitating their image. Having grown up at the time, it's hard for me to see Gates and them as different than that. It does make me somewhat sad that we've embraced a future where the bad guys won, that the schoolyard bully that tried to stifle progress is now succeeding by adopting that which they tried to strangle int he cradle.

aikinai 7y ago
Companies aren’t people though, and the people embracing it now might have very little overlap with the old stranglers.
- aaron-lebo 7y ago
  It would make me feel a lot better if Gates didn't buddy with Epstein even after his first conviction for trafficking teenagers. I think MS, if it wants to have some respect, should basically disown him unless he has a legit and contrite apology. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-... It engrages and disgusts me it isn't a bigger deal.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    It's certainly very disappointing. On the other hand, Bill Gates is not law enforcement, is not the criminal justice system. Speaking abstractly, if someone is convicted of a crime, goes to prison, and is let out... At what point does a prominent individual need to say they'll never talk to that person under any circumstances? In some cases that would be too extreme and in the abstract, repentant ex-convicts may deserve forgiveness. In hindsight it's easy to say Epstein wasn't that. But we don't know how he may have misrepresented himself to Gates and others. We know from the press that there was some sketchy business involved in his relatively short prison stay, which I presume Gates did not know. My guess is it's not always an easy call to make, whether or not to show forgiveness to an ex-con, whether or not you can trust them as reformed, etc. The article you cite says he regrets making the wrong call.
toyg 7y ago
Sadly some of the re-evaluation of Gates is due to the bar getting lower and lower, when it comes to corporate governance in the tech space. MCI/Worldcom, Bezos’s ruthless Amazon, Zuckerberg and googlers despising their own users, Jobs squeezing money out of everyone, Larry Ellison being Larry Ellison, and Ballmer being even more of a bully than Gates was... Yes, the hate for Gates does look a bit naive now. To be fair, at the time there was a huge amount of admiration for him in the mainstream (I still meet people convinced he “invented” this or that software alone in a garage), so the hate was really niche. Hi

j45 7y ago

In a way OSS did become the future.. Linux powering Android.. Bsd powering macos and ios. Ubuntu 20.04 also looks to be an extremely usable desktop that just works.

badsectoracula 7y ago
Ubuntu works great, i just installed it in a VM and it told me i can use "Ubuntu Software" to install new applications - i opened that and it was completely empty for a few seconds until images started to appear. Then i went to games which was empty and nothing would appear. I closed it and started it again and now games would show up, so i decided to install "WolfeDoom" which sounded interesting. While it was downloading, i went back and decided to also install ZZT (i think) so i pressed Install for that too. That installed fast so i tried to run it and... nothing happened. I tried again, but nothing - the game's name appeared for a bit at the top but then disappeared without any indication about what was wrong. So i uninstalled it and closed the Software app. At this point i thought to try WolfenDoom but... i couldn't find it anywhere. I opened the Software app to see where it was, went to the installed tab, scrolled down and found it, but instead of "Launch" (or whatever) it had an "Install" button next to it (which is weird since i was in the installed category). I clicked it and an error popped up about some state or whatever. So i restarted the Software app, went directly to the game's page and pressed Install from there - error again. So i googled to figure out what is wrong and i found vague messages about it. Eventually it fixed itself. Somehow. My guess it was installing at the background but this wasn't shown anywhere and trying to install it again was failing because of that. Very usable. Very just works.
- j45 7y ago
  I agree, I just upgraded fro Ubuntu 18 to 19 to 20. I noticed it took some time to get going too, and suspect there are background tasks that complete after the base OS install. It reminds me of Early Mac OS X in someways, around the leopard, lion, mountain lion times. Just seems to work.
asveikau 7y ago
> Linux powering Android.. With a lot of closed components on every device. > Bsd powering macos and ios. There is BSD code in XNU just like there was BSD code in NeXTstep in the 80s but the link and resemblance is pretty tenuous. And it would be a huge stretch to call Darwin an open source project. There were efforts to build free distros out of it, long abandoned. And that is ignoring the vast amounts of closed components.