4 ms·

Rome wasn't built in a single day either. If you want to eventually get to your destination, you must do the first step.

zepto 6y ago
That is a sentiment that I partially agree with. I frequently argue that iOS (for example) represents more than a decade of investment, so we can’t expect an alternative to pop up overnight. However using a Linux desktop simply is not a step in any particular direction. It is especially meaningless for non-developers to do if one of the other platforms just works for them. Steps in the right direction involve developing software to solve the problems that the corporate operating systems have in fact solved.
- vetinari 6y ago
  It works both ways: Windows (or Mac) are meaningless to any user, who can be served by Linux. The first step in solving problems that corporate OSes have solved is identifying them. For example, one of the problems is stable/versioned/sandboxable/distro-agnostic ABIs and that is something that is being worked on and they are quite usable nowadays. The related problem is, that the corporate-software is ignoring them (how many conference solution support Pipewire for desktop sharing? Or Wayland in Chrome? Heck, VA in Chrome? Exactly... but whatever Apple comes with, they support within weeks).
  - zepto 6y ago
    It’s easy to know what Apple is going to support and for how long, and how much warning you’ll get when things are deprecated. How would I even begin to know the answer to these questions when it comes to the Linux technologies you are naming. Based on what I read here, the community of people who do use them isn’t even sure.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      Is it? For few things yes (OpenGL or 32-bit depreciation); other things are simply not found in the new releases (Kerberos Ticket Viewer, TWAIN). Then there's a middle ground, where there is a window of few months to make significant architectural changes to your product (see VPNs and personal firewalls). So excuse me, I'm going to look for a new release of Cisco VPN that works with Big Sur. Of course, it is customer's VPN, and they don't care that their vendors might use Mac, so no help from them, it is my problem now.
      - zepto 6y ago
        Sounds like don’t buy Cisco. But more importantly - you verified my assertion. Even if a small number of security related technologies have a smaller deprecation window, the others have very long ones. More importantly - we can even find out what they are! With Linux, can you even tell me whether Cairo, the graphics library behind GTK and for which there is no alternative is even still supported?
        vetinari 6y ago
        > Even if a small number of security related technologies have a smaller deprecation window, the others have very long ones. It uses mechanism that was introduced in Mojave, so that deprecation window was very fast. Definitely faster than Cairo, which has already more than decade and half under it's belt. There are alternatives to Cairo, but not drop-in ones; they would require porting (Skia, for example). Other than that, Cairo is basically "done". Yeah, there is occasional need for release with small fixes, but as a software-based rendering library it is not going anywhere. Not that announcing deprecation is otherwise widely respected; the Xorg-server was declared obsolete years ago, the last major release was in 2018, but hey, some still think there's a future and in a few years are going to be surprised by "sudden abandonment".
        zepto 6y ago
        What are you talking about. Mojave is 2 years old. That isn’t a particularly small window. Even with the 2 year window on MacOS, an alternative was delivered. But you are confirming the point - nobody even knows what is deprecated or what the alternatives are. You still haven’t answered the question of how someone is supposed to tell whether Cairo is supported or not. Is it done? How do you know. Does it need to be developed further? It sounds like it does since people say it’s very slow compared to skia. It seems like you think you know what the status of things are, but other people don’t. How can that be? This is the reality of Linux.

zepto 6y ago

That is a sentiment that I partially agree with. I frequently argue that iOS (for example) represents more than a decade of investment, so we can’t expect an alternative to pop up overnight. However using a Linux desktop simply is not a step in any particular direction. It is especially meaningless for non-developers to do if one of the other platforms just works for them. Steps in the right direction involve developing software to solve the problems that the corporate operating systems have in fact solved.

vetinari 6y ago
It works both ways: Windows (or Mac) are meaningless to any user, who can be served by Linux. The first step in solving problems that corporate OSes have solved is identifying them. For example, one of the problems is stable/versioned/sandboxable/distro-agnostic ABIs and that is something that is being worked on and they are quite usable nowadays. The related problem is, that the corporate-software is ignoring them (how many conference solution support Pipewire for desktop sharing? Or Wayland in Chrome? Heck, VA in Chrome? Exactly... but whatever Apple comes with, they support within weeks).
- zepto 6y ago
  It’s easy to know what Apple is going to support and for how long, and how much warning you’ll get when things are deprecated. How would I even begin to know the answer to these questions when it comes to the Linux technologies you are naming. Based on what I read here, the community of people who do use them isn’t even sure.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    Is it? For few things yes (OpenGL or 32-bit depreciation); other things are simply not found in the new releases (Kerberos Ticket Viewer, TWAIN). Then there's a middle ground, where there is a window of few months to make significant architectural changes to your product (see VPNs and personal firewalls). So excuse me, I'm going to look for a new release of Cisco VPN that works with Big Sur. Of course, it is customer's VPN, and they don't care that their vendors might use Mac, so no help from them, it is my problem now.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Sounds like don’t buy Cisco. But more importantly - you verified my assertion. Even if a small number of security related technologies have a smaller deprecation window, the others have very long ones. More importantly - we can even find out what they are! With Linux, can you even tell me whether Cairo, the graphics library behind GTK and for which there is no alternative is even still supported?
      - vetinari 6y ago
        > Even if a small number of security related technologies have a smaller deprecation window, the others have very long ones. It uses mechanism that was introduced in Mojave, so that deprecation window was very fast. Definitely faster than Cairo, which has already more than decade and half under it's belt. There are alternatives to Cairo, but not drop-in ones; they would require porting (Skia, for example). Other than that, Cairo is basically "done". Yeah, there is occasional need for release with small fixes, but as a software-based rendering library it is not going anywhere. Not that announcing deprecation is otherwise widely respected; the Xorg-server was declared obsolete years ago, the last major release was in 2018, but hey, some still think there's a future and in a few years are going to be surprised by "sudden abandonment".
        zepto 6y ago
        What are you talking about. Mojave is 2 years old. That isn’t a particularly small window. Even with the 2 year window on MacOS, an alternative was delivered. But you are confirming the point - nobody even knows what is deprecated or what the alternatives are. You still haven’t answered the question of how someone is supposed to tell whether Cairo is supported or not. Is it done? How do you know. Does it need to be developed further? It sounds like it does since people say it’s very slow compared to skia. It seems like you think you know what the status of things are, but other people don’t. How can that be? This is the reality of Linux.