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The Linux desktop never made it because it’s a terrible platform for distributing commercial applications. The brutal fact is commercial software is essential

by simonh 5y ago

The Linux desktop never made it because it’s a terrible platform for distributing commercial applications. The brutal fact is commercial software is essential to the success of any desktop or mobile platform. That’s because it brings massive investment. The total ongoing investment in commercial applications dwarfs that of open source desktop applications, in developer-hours terms, probably thousands, or tens of thousands to one. Getting to that scale means paying people money, and not just developers. Artists, designers, QA and domain experts in the specialist fields niche apps serve. There’s just no way open source apps can possibly compete. By failing to provide compelling support for commercial application development and distribution, the Linux desktop has starved itself of the breadth and depth of apps needed to succeed. When you’re competing with the Mac, Windows, iOS or Android you’re not just competing with Apple, Microsoft or Google. You’re competing with the hundreds of billions of dollars in app and service ecosystems that have been built around those platforms.

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jacquesm 5y ago
I actually love this aspect of Linux, and if it ever does become successful it will kill it for me. Because every medium that gains a certain level of popularity will bring along a whole raft of commercial parasites that will spoil the original experience. It happened to the web, it happened to smart phones and it certainly would happen to Linux if it ever did gain substantial traction on the desktop.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Has this happened to macos? I don't get that impression. It has other problems, but not that.
  - JadeNB 5y ago
    With the increasing convergence of macOS and iOS, we're surely on the way. Already it's true that the app mindset has encouraged a lot of the wonderful free software I loved on the Mac to become paid. (Which, (1) of course is the creator's right, but I still miss the old mindset, and (2) "why not just keep using the old software?" doesn't work because Apple's commitment to backward compatibility is, umm, not high.)
    - btilly 5y ago
      You seem to have misspelled "nonexistent" at the end there. Also their moving Big Brother onto the iPhone is a pretty good sign where they are taking all of their systems. No, I don't want my computer spying on me for the sake of my government. Not so much because I think that they will do me wrong, as because it provides a way to target inconvenient people who I don't want targeted. (Think Snowden.)
      - zikduruqe 5y ago
        Don’t forget MacOS last year or so, would bypass firewalls and VPNs, and Apple said “oops”. That was probably is a hook that was accidentally exposed.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    You mean that operating system that creators of digital content would swear by? The one that you would pretty much have to own if you were going to run Photoshop or a whole raft of other creative pieces of software? The one that developers preferred? That one is 90% gone and Apple will likely kill off the remainder before long. They're in the consumer gadgets business now, that there is accidentally a computer in there somewhere is more of a historical artifact than the main business driver. It's all about eco-systems and lock in, not about productivity or creativity.
    - Klonoar 5y ago
      >That one is 90% gone Citation needed...? Everything you've listed still works and works very well on macOS.
      - imachine1980_ 5y ago
        apple revenue 2009 $42.7 billion mac revenue 2009 $13.6 billion(30%) apple ""2014 $182.6 billion service""2014 $17.8 billion(%9.8) mac "" 2014 $23.9 billion(13%) apple "" 2020 $274.3 billion service "" 2020 $53.6 billion (19%) mac "" 2020 $28.4 billion(10%) edit"Spanish" from key product to small fish, now sell service to your mac is mor key than selling the mac itself and ipad pro whit magic keyboard is mor expensive than the mac air.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        Twenty years ago, the Mac version of Photoshop was just better than the Windows version. That hasn't been true in a while. And then you don't have to choose between a Mini which doesn't have enough cores, an iMac which tops out at a 27" monitor when you can get a PC with a 32" monitor (or a 40" or 80" or 17" or whatever you want), or a Mac Pro which starts at $6000. Developers used to prefer Mac because it was Unix when the UI on every other Unix-like was bad. Now the UI on Linux is better than it used to be, and Windows has WSL et al, and Mac is full of "pay for a license annually and deal with code signing nonsense" that developers hate.
        Klonoar 5y ago
- BoysenberryPi 5y ago
  This just sounds like some weird hipsterism. While Linux has plenty of programming tools, there are plenty of other industries that are underserved by Linux and I don't see how putting out commercial programs for those people will "kill it for you." Linux more than anything else allows you to just not involve yourself in things you don't want concern yourself with.
  - windexh8er 5y ago
    It's definitely not a "hipsterism". I agree with OP as I've been using Linux as my daily driver on both desktop and all personal laptops since 2003. I've gone through a number of distros over that time and I do pay for a few applications that run natively on Linux. However all mainstream OSes, today, are a garbage experience comparatively. Locked down, too many choices made for you already out of the box, excessive local advertising and that's just getting started. I'm forced to use Windows or OS X at work, I choose the latter, but still do the majority of my productive tasks outside of Apple. I'd pick my aging T470 all day long over my corp issued 16" MBP. I don't want corporations like Apple or Microsoft controlling my hardware. We can see where that's got us and it's a disgusting dead end of the user not truly having control or ownership.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      "I'm not like the normies" definitely is a hipsterism. Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering. Tinkering is the point. It's all about building random crap for the sake of building it and hand-editing config files. On the desktop 90% of the projects are second rate clones of commercial software with a weird GUI, poorer features, and added user hostility. As for corporations - they already control your hardware. There is no such thing as open hardware, and won't be until chip-level designs can be fabbed at home. (And even then, because chip design is far beyond the skills of the average hacker and won't be practical without AI doing the heavy lifting.) But worse - Linux and corporations have both locked down your imagination to the point where you cannot imagine that your experience does not generalise. Access to source doesn't change that, because access to source code and tinkering aren't a substitute for being able to imagine original, beautiful, and useful new things for end users - not just an endless churn of half-finished clone projects and infinite dev tools.
- deleted 5y ago
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- mapgrep 5y ago
  You’ve correctly observed that success can bring unpleasant side effects. I think it’s too late to save Linux from this. It is used by all manner of parasites. The tracking bugs that slow down the web and invade our privacy? They are quite often backed by Linux. The Android OS that allows Google to follow users’ every last movement, web search, and email? Linux. Database servers at Facebook, Google, and any number of data brokers? Linux. I am not saying this makes Linux bad. What I am saying is, making it easier to charge for software is not going to “spoil” Linux with commercial parasites. If anything, paid software could help undermine the surveillance economy by providing a more direct way to support the creation of good software that doesn’t spy on you, like the default Google Android apps or the Google web apps many people use on Linux desktops. All that stuff is commercial too, you just don’t pay for it in money, and maybe the source code is open, but you darn sure pay with your personal data.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    What most people think of as Linus is really GNU/Linux, and while I don't think the distinction usually needs to be made, it's actually important in this case because it makes it obvious there is no one "thing" to infect and change. Linux is a commodity, and open, and we're in no threat of major problems like that than we are of someone jacking up the price on ibuprofen. The solution is the same in both cases, someone else will offer a better alternative because there's nothing forcing you to use the bad offering.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - dasil003 5y ago
    This is gibberish. The discussion topic is about what happens on your Linux distribution that runs on your hardware. The fact that other parties are using Linux for user-hostile purposes says nothing except that Linux is a successful technology. And like all technology since fire was first controlled by humans, it has been used for good and evil.
- elihu 5y ago
  I think the problem with commercial apps on Linux is just that the standard Linux security model is too loose for it. Android and IOS have the right idea that apps should be denied permission to do things unless the users says it's okay. I don't want random inscrutable binaries from various companies reading my passwords or email just because all my files are wide open to any software I run on the same user ID. So far desktop Linux has successfully repelled most commercial software simply by being very difficult to package software for.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > So far desktop Linux has successfully repelled most commercial software simply by being very difficult to package software for. A couple of guys could figure out how to package Ardour so that it runs on every Linux distro except NixOS [0]. The idea that its hard to package software in a cross-distro way is pure BS. [0] NixOS plays games with ld.so, which breaks any packaging that relies on being able to set LD_LOAD_PATH. It's the only Linux distro that does this to my knowledge.
    - elihu 5y ago
      That's an open-source application, which provides two fallbacks if the binary on their website doesn't work for whatever reason: you can compile from source, or you can install from a package provided by your distro, if there is one. Those last two generally aren't an option for closed-source commercial software. Also, since they're not asking about package format I'll assume their package is just a tarball, which works fine for some programs but it's not a proper package in the sense of being something you install from a package manager (and can later upgrade/remove with a package manager). In general you can probably get a program to run on just about any Linux platform by providing X86 and ARM binaries, statically linking everything, and having fallbacks in case you need to use a certain subsystem (graphics, audio, etc..) and you don't know which one the user is going to want to use. My experience with software development for big enterprisey customers is that you figure out what distros most of your customers are going to be using, and you test on those distros. That's a fair bit of work, because you might have to release both apt and rpm packages and maintain them, and the test environment is complicated and it doesn't cover the case where some random person wants to run your product on Arch/Mandriva/Gentoo/Mint or whatever. Testing every Linux distro is just not practically feasible, so a lot of people will end up running on platforms you didn't test. Maybe that's fine.
- ori_b 5y ago
  Linux has already succeeded in a way that makes it useful for commercial programs: Just as a layer below enterprise networking and SAAS. This has already brought along the 'commercial parasites' that have spoiled the original experience, pushing in a thousand different directions with a thousand different things that need to be done quickly to meet business goals, elegance, clarity, and simplicity be damned.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Cloud deployments and serverless running directly on top of type 1 hypervisors make that irrelevant.
    - ori_b 5y ago
      Make what irrelevant, exactly?
- OneTimePetes 5y ago
  Commercialization in that anything goes spirit, would results in Linux just becoming another carbon-copy of they Mac/Win flailing walled in garden ecosystems, everyone wants to escape from. The whole project lifes and breaths because it didn't open up to the parasites of decay. And now that these are squeezing there platforms to death, some people will even put up with homespun clonky UI. GNU Linux was specifically developed, to escape the Softwarmageddon that is currently playing out in the other centralized eco-systems. To weaken that, would be to re-invite disaster. In my eyes, linux should ban commercial software like Teams from running, if there is a open source alternative. Chop of a limb if you want to survive the infection of end-stage-surveillance capitalism. Let the corpo-borgs eat one another.
  - simonh 5y ago
    "Mac/Win flailing walled in garden ecosystems, everyone wants to escape from." This is the problem with living in a techie bubble like HN. Meanwhile in the real world billions of people are happily using Windows and MacOS, and would have no idea what you're talking about. You remind me of the dyed-in-the-wool Marxists I knew in the 80s sitting tight* waiting for capitalism to collapse, and those before them in the 20s and 30s. And those before them in the 19th Century. Still waiting. Any day now. The signs are everywhere. * Almost literally. One friend at the time quit college to pick potatoes in Norfolk because when capitalism collapsed having practical skills would help him live off the land. That was about 1987. I wonder how he's doing.
    - OneTimePetes 5y ago
      Well it does collapse right now, doesent it? The Tax-idermy, were a society pushes ridiculous amounts of stabilization money into collapsing external peripheral "shell" societies who in return send refugee waves in convulsions, while slowly sinking into the civil/war/crime collapse accepting end-state is in full, brutally visible progress. The politicians, leering for the authoritarian toolkit, because they doubt they can stabilize the mess that is to come. How bad does it have to get, before you take a step back and acknowledge, that yes, this is un-subjective worser and even local recovery is unlikely, due to interconnected nature of global society and nature. Sorry if things are bleak, but software seems to be one of the few levers i myself can pull towards a positive outcome, a better place, by allowing others to escape the dystopia of government eating the cooperated monopolies for societal control because government needs to be in control of something- anything and its definitely not in control of anything that would change outcomes.
- simonh 5y ago
  That's absolutely fine, I appreciate this view and I don't want my comment above to imply that your take on this is somehow wrong. The fact that desktop linux is this crazy fragmented anarchy of technologies and distros is fine. A lot of people get a lot of value out of it. It's not directly monetisable economic value and that's ok. The top comment for you right now makes a snipe about hipsterism. Well yes, but that shouldn't be a pejorative. It's great that this ecosystem exists in all it's hipster geekery. It's a hobbyist community serving hobbyist and techno-geek purposes. We need that. Where the cognitive dissonance comes in is thinking that this has anything whatever to do with mass appeal and serving the needs of ordinary non-technical users. That's a very different and in many ways mutually incompatible objective. What non-technical users need is a radically standardised, easy to use platform with a wide variety of highly compatible software and devices with solid QA, services and support. Only the commercial market has proved capable of providing these at anything like the scale needed because that means paying a lot of people to do these things every day as a job. This is why mass market Linux projects like OLPC fail. They think 99% of the work has been done by the community already and they just need to package it up and deliver it to users. The problem is making all that work seamlessly and efficiently for users, developing a complete high quality product, delivering and selling it and building services around it is a huge ton of work. It's not 1%, it's more like 50% and you need people doing it day in, day out.
- jeffe 5y ago
  work on linux, daily driver is windows. how exactly to these commercial parasites 'spoil the original experience'? Sure theres preinstalled bloatware and telemetry, but you still have root access and I have had no problem tinkering to have my setup to do what I want how I want, probably much less than what I would have to do to reach parity on a linux system.
bgorman 5y ago
Do you have any concrete criticism or are you just spreading FUD? How do Windows or Mac OS provide better support for commercial development? The reason Mac OS and Windows have more users is because of pre-installs. It is almost impossible for a regular user to find a PC with Linux preinstalled on it, so application developers ignore the platform. Lots of companies have successfully built commercial GUI products on top of linux. However most of these products are specialist tools (e.g. EDA, video editor) or embedded. I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the development or distribution tools.
- lmm 5y ago
  > How do Windows or Mac OS provide better support for commercial development? They commit to long-term support for software distributed as shrinkwrapped binaries? You can buy a program written for Windows 20 years ago and it will work. If you try to run a program written for Linux 5 years ago it probably won't.
  - commoner 5y ago
    Packaging systems such as Flatpak, AppImage, and Snap allow Linux apps to have extensive backward compatibility going forward.
    - lmm 5y ago
      Maybe. I don't think the Linux world has made a credible commitment to support all or any of those going forward. In 5 years' time we can try to run 5 year old apps in those formats and see whether they work; I wouldn't bet on it myself.
      - commoner 5y ago
        Flatpak is confirmed to work on 28 Linux distros, and is pre-installed on 9 of them: https://www.flatpak.org/setup https://www.flatpak.org/setup. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is committing to a 10 year support lifecycle for its Flatpak runtimes: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-the-red-hat-flatpak-runtime-for-desktop-containers https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-th... AppImage just works on any Linux distribution. There are no external dependencies, since the package bundles all of the dependencies and there is no runtime required. I don't see how an AppImage downloaded today wouldn't work in 5 years. I don't like Snap because the server implementation is closed source and controlled by a single company (Canonical), but Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (which bundles Snap) is supported until April 2030.
bdw5204 5y ago
The issue isn't that Linux lacks proprietary applications. Its that Linux development focuses on apps that appeal to people who write code and this means Linux has a highly technical userbase that prefers open source software. If Linux desktops had a critical mass of users that were willing to buy proprietary software, the proprietary software companies would make Linux software for the same reason that game development companies make games for Nintendo's underpowered gaming hardware if it sells well (but don't if it ends up flopping like the Wii U). To get to that critical mass, Linux desktop needs something that Mac and Windows don't offer that appeals to the average non-technical computer user. The single best opportunity for Linux was when Microsoft came out with Windows 8 with its awful new "Metro" interface. If a Linux distro had a GUI that was at least as good as Windows 7, out of the box support for Windows applications, drivers that just work and major OEMs willing to sell it preinstalled at the time, it would have drawn Windows users. Right now, thanks to Valve's efforts at getting Windows games to run on Linux, the Steam Deck is likely to be the most commercially successful GNU+Linux computer ever made because it can run most of your Windows Steam library and gaming is the main reason consumers buy Windows these days (the needs of low end consumers who just want to read email and be spied on by Facebook are best served with an iPad or Chromebook). Linux is, on the surface, a much more appealing platform than iOS or Android for developers because there's no monopoly app store taking a 30% cut and demanding you take features out of your software. Its also more appealing than Mac because there's no Gatekeeper program that you have to take extra steps to get around. Developers tolerate these practices because the users are on those platforms and especially because Apple products tend to sell to wealthier people who are more willing to spend money on software than Android or Windows users (let alone Linux users who are generally believers in open source and some of whom are "free software" advocates who agree with RMS's views on the immorality of proprietary software). Ultimately, software companies will go where the users are. Platforms don't have to cater to them. They have to attract the users which forces the software companies to release their software for the platform. When you focus on making a platform that appeals to software companies instead of users, you end up with the Epic Games Store which has lots of software but few users.
- astromd 5y ago
  As a highly technical person that writes code, does media, and fixes high-level computer networks and essential systems, the last thing I want is to have to dig into mysterious config files and have to debug every little thing that goes wrong with installing a piece of software. I can give up a certain degree of control and customization in exchange for a stable operating system and desktop environment that lets me get my work done. This is why I use macOS for the desktop.
sudosysgen 5y ago
Android was (massively) successful with very very few native commercial software.
- 29083011397778 5y ago
  Android may have been helped along with the backing of, and too-important-to-fail attitude of, one of the richest, most influential, and most technologically adept conglomerates to ever exist.
elliotlarson 5y ago
I totally agree with this. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I feel like Electron is really helping here. I've been a Mac user since 2003, but built an Ubuntu based desktop recently. The fact that I can run Figma, VSCode, Slack, etc. means it's actually a workable solution. I know Electron is slow, but I don't think producing native software for Linux is economically viable or commercially interesting for a lot of companies. But if a company is building with Electron, I get the impression that it's not a lot of extra work to support Linux and it means the platform actually gets an app. Ironically, I think this will make Linux a more reasonable choice for day to day work and will eventually result in increasing the economic viability of producing software for the platform.
- jiggunjer 5y ago
  Wasn't Java supposed to solve the platform problem?
  - 9front 5y ago
    Java was supposed to "write once, run anywhere". Instead it became write once, debug anywhere.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Since Electron folks don't want to debug anywhere they just ship Chrome along for the ride. Ah but Google is taking over the Web and such, blame on all that help them achieve their goal.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Write once, debug everywhere. FTFY.
- toastal 5y ago
  Personally, I wish PWAs were generally better supported so I could skip the Electron bit and could install the same app on my phone. Being a part of the main browser gives better resource handling, better sandboxing that Electron allows but I would prefer most apps didn't have, and access to the extensions I want. Too bad Firefox killed off SSB (site-specific browser) before it even launched.
clarkmoody 5y ago
We're building a cross-platform commercial application[0] in Rust (with Iced[1]), and it's deployed for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. We get blazing-fast speed and cross-platform operation without Electron or Web tech bloating the build. Distribution to Linux has been fine so far, and hopefully we're part of the solution to the problem you've outlined. [0]: https://cryptowat.ch/apps/desktop https://cryptowat.ch/apps/desktop [1]: https://github.com/hecrj/iced/ https://github.com/hecrj/iced/
- brundolf 5y ago
  A lot of that probably just comes down to Rust and its standardized tooling and static linking. Which, maybe that is the solution.
  - jatone 5y ago
    it is. dynamic linking is a mistake on today's desktops/laptop. disk is plentiful and most of a graphic programs space usage is in assets rather than the program.
AussieWog93 5y ago
I release maintain a small commercial open-source app (partner app for a piece of open source hardware), and I don't think people understand how burdensome "proper" Linux binary distribution can be until they actually try it. Linux accounts for about 5% of my users, and for whatever reason the community thought it would be a good idea to fragment that minority further into Arch users, Debian users, CentOS users, OpenSUSE users, Ubuntu users (14, 16, 18 and 20, all with different glibc versions). Modern tools like AppImage make this at least somewhat standard, but Windows has had sane, standardised installers for almost 3 decades now.
- holri 5y ago
  The distribution form of open source software is as the name says source code.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - hanche 5y ago
    How many users compile Firefox or LibreOffice themselves, rather than just downloading the binaries? And don’t even most users of popular package managers just install binary packages?
    - holri 5y ago
      Installation is not the same as distribution. All upstream packages that I am aware of distribute in source form.
      - AussieWog93 5y ago
        Yes, and if you want to take this route you can either maintain your package yourself on every single major distro or deal with support tickets for issues that have either already been fixed in old versions or arise from strange interactions with dynamic libs.
      - 5y ago
cies 5y ago
> commercial software All the commercial (proprietary) software I run (and my colleagues run) is web based nowadays. The commercial (proprietary) software we build is also web based nowadays. Sure there are exceptions. But for most office work: web based is the norm. The fact that linux does fine in this area can be reduced from the fact that Chromebooks haven't flopped.
swiley 5y ago
The brutal fact is that the web has the same APIs that iOS has at this point. You should not be running closed apps on your OS. Ever.
frobisher 5y ago
Do tools like Electron not alleviate linux app development pains?
peakaboo 5y ago
> The Linux desktop never made it because it’s a terrible platform for distributing commercial applications. Good. Please let Linux continue to remain exactly what it is now, an amazing operating system for people who want to avoid Microsoft and Apple. I certainly don't want it to "make it" so commercial apps take over.

by simonh 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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jacquesm 5y ago

I actually love this aspect of Linux, and if it ever does become successful it will kill it for me. Because every medium that gains a certain level of popularity will bring along a whole raft of commercial parasites that will spoil the original experience. It happened to the web, it happened to smart phones and it certainly would happen to Linux if it ever did gain substantial traction on the desktop.

kzrdude 5y ago
Has this happened to macos? I don't get that impression. It has other problems, but not that.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  With the increasing convergence of macOS and iOS, we're surely on the way. Already it's true that the app mindset has encouraged a lot of the wonderful free software I loved on the Mac to become paid. (Which, (1) of course is the creator's right, but I still miss the old mindset, and (2) "why not just keep using the old software?" doesn't work because Apple's commitment to backward compatibility is, umm, not high.)
  - btilly 5y ago
    You seem to have misspelled "nonexistent" at the end there. Also their moving Big Brother onto the iPhone is a pretty good sign where they are taking all of their systems. No, I don't want my computer spying on me for the sake of my government. Not so much because I think that they will do me wrong, as because it provides a way to target inconvenient people who I don't want targeted. (Think Snowden.)
    - zikduruqe 5y ago
      Don’t forget MacOS last year or so, would bypass firewalls and VPNs, and Apple said “oops”. That was probably is a hook that was accidentally exposed.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  You mean that operating system that creators of digital content would swear by? The one that you would pretty much have to own if you were going to run Photoshop or a whole raft of other creative pieces of software? The one that developers preferred? That one is 90% gone and Apple will likely kill off the remainder before long. They're in the consumer gadgets business now, that there is accidentally a computer in there somewhere is more of a historical artifact than the main business driver. It's all about eco-systems and lock in, not about productivity or creativity.
  - Klonoar 5y ago
    >That one is 90% gone Citation needed...? Everything you've listed still works and works very well on macOS.
    - imachine1980_ 5y ago
      apple revenue 2009 $42.7 billion mac revenue 2009 $13.6 billion(30%) apple ""2014 $182.6 billion service""2014 $17.8 billion(%9.8) mac "" 2014 $23.9 billion(13%) apple "" 2020 $274.3 billion service "" 2020 $53.6 billion (19%) mac "" 2020 $28.4 billion(10%) edit"Spanish" from key product to small fish, now sell service to your mac is mor key than selling the mac itself and ipad pro whit magic keyboard is mor expensive than the mac air.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      Twenty years ago, the Mac version of Photoshop was just better than the Windows version. That hasn't been true in a while. And then you don't have to choose between a Mini which doesn't have enough cores, an iMac which tops out at a 27" monitor when you can get a PC with a 32" monitor (or a 40" or 80" or 17" or whatever you want), or a Mac Pro which starts at $6000. Developers used to prefer Mac because it was Unix when the UI on every other Unix-like was bad. Now the UI on Linux is better than it used to be, and Windows has WSL et al, and Mac is full of "pay for a license annually and deal with code signing nonsense" that developers hate.
      - Klonoar 5y ago
BoysenberryPi 5y ago
This just sounds like some weird hipsterism. While Linux has plenty of programming tools, there are plenty of other industries that are underserved by Linux and I don't see how putting out commercial programs for those people will "kill it for you." Linux more than anything else allows you to just not involve yourself in things you don't want concern yourself with.
- windexh8er 5y ago
  It's definitely not a "hipsterism". I agree with OP as I've been using Linux as my daily driver on both desktop and all personal laptops since 2003. I've gone through a number of distros over that time and I do pay for a few applications that run natively on Linux. However all mainstream OSes, today, are a garbage experience comparatively. Locked down, too many choices made for you already out of the box, excessive local advertising and that's just getting started. I'm forced to use Windows or OS X at work, I choose the latter, but still do the majority of my productive tasks outside of Apple. I'd pick my aging T470 all day long over my corp issued 16" MBP. I don't want corporations like Apple or Microsoft controlling my hardware. We can see where that's got us and it's a disgusting dead end of the user not truly having control or ownership.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    "I'm not like the normies" definitely is a hipsterism. Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering. Tinkering is the point. It's all about building random crap for the sake of building it and hand-editing config files. On the desktop 90% of the projects are second rate clones of commercial software with a weird GUI, poorer features, and added user hostility. As for corporations - they already control your hardware. There is no such thing as open hardware, and won't be until chip-level designs can be fabbed at home. (And even then, because chip design is far beyond the skills of the average hacker and won't be practical without AI doing the heavy lifting.) But worse - Linux and corporations have both locked down your imagination to the point where you cannot imagine that your experience does not generalise. Access to source doesn't change that, because access to source code and tinkering aren't a substitute for being able to imagine original, beautiful, and useful new things for end users - not just an endless churn of half-finished clone projects and infinite dev tools.
deleted 5y ago
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mapgrep 5y ago
You’ve correctly observed that success can bring unpleasant side effects. I think it’s too late to save Linux from this. It is used by all manner of parasites. The tracking bugs that slow down the web and invade our privacy? They are quite often backed by Linux. The Android OS that allows Google to follow users’ every last movement, web search, and email? Linux. Database servers at Facebook, Google, and any number of data brokers? Linux. I am not saying this makes Linux bad. What I am saying is, making it easier to charge for software is not going to “spoil” Linux with commercial parasites. If anything, paid software could help undermine the surveillance economy by providing a more direct way to support the creation of good software that doesn’t spy on you, like the default Google Android apps or the Google web apps many people use on Linux desktops. All that stuff is commercial too, you just don’t pay for it in money, and maybe the source code is open, but you darn sure pay with your personal data.
- kbenson 5y ago
  What most people think of as Linus is really GNU/Linux, and while I don't think the distinction usually needs to be made, it's actually important in this case because it makes it obvious there is no one "thing" to infect and change. Linux is a commodity, and open, and we're in no threat of major problems like that than we are of someone jacking up the price on ibuprofen. The solution is the same in both cases, someone else will offer a better alternative because there's nothing forcing you to use the bad offering.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dasil003 5y ago
  This is gibberish. The discussion topic is about what happens on your Linux distribution that runs on your hardware. The fact that other parties are using Linux for user-hostile purposes says nothing except that Linux is a successful technology. And like all technology since fire was first controlled by humans, it has been used for good and evil.
elihu 5y ago
I think the problem with commercial apps on Linux is just that the standard Linux security model is too loose for it. Android and IOS have the right idea that apps should be denied permission to do things unless the users says it's okay. I don't want random inscrutable binaries from various companies reading my passwords or email just because all my files are wide open to any software I run on the same user ID. So far desktop Linux has successfully repelled most commercial software simply by being very difficult to package software for.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > So far desktop Linux has successfully repelled most commercial software simply by being very difficult to package software for. A couple of guys could figure out how to package Ardour so that it runs on every Linux distro except NixOS [0]. The idea that its hard to package software in a cross-distro way is pure BS. [0] NixOS plays games with ld.so, which breaks any packaging that relies on being able to set LD_LOAD_PATH. It's the only Linux distro that does this to my knowledge.
  - elihu 5y ago
    That's an open-source application, which provides two fallbacks if the binary on their website doesn't work for whatever reason: you can compile from source, or you can install from a package provided by your distro, if there is one. Those last two generally aren't an option for closed-source commercial software. Also, since they're not asking about package format I'll assume their package is just a tarball, which works fine for some programs but it's not a proper package in the sense of being something you install from a package manager (and can later upgrade/remove with a package manager). In general you can probably get a program to run on just about any Linux platform by providing X86 and ARM binaries, statically linking everything, and having fallbacks in case you need to use a certain subsystem (graphics, audio, etc..) and you don't know which one the user is going to want to use. My experience with software development for big enterprisey customers is that you figure out what distros most of your customers are going to be using, and you test on those distros. That's a fair bit of work, because you might have to release both apt and rpm packages and maintain them, and the test environment is complicated and it doesn't cover the case where some random person wants to run your product on Arch/Mandriva/Gentoo/Mint or whatever. Testing every Linux distro is just not practically feasible, so a lot of people will end up running on platforms you didn't test. Maybe that's fine.
ori_b 5y ago
Linux has already succeeded in a way that makes it useful for commercial programs: Just as a layer below enterprise networking and SAAS. This has already brought along the 'commercial parasites' that have spoiled the original experience, pushing in a thousand different directions with a thousand different things that need to be done quickly to meet business goals, elegance, clarity, and simplicity be damned.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Cloud deployments and serverless running directly on top of type 1 hypervisors make that irrelevant.
  - ori_b 5y ago
    Make what irrelevant, exactly?
OneTimePetes 5y ago
Commercialization in that anything goes spirit, would results in Linux just becoming another carbon-copy of they Mac/Win flailing walled in garden ecosystems, everyone wants to escape from. The whole project lifes and breaths because it didn't open up to the parasites of decay. And now that these are squeezing there platforms to death, some people will even put up with homespun clonky UI. GNU Linux was specifically developed, to escape the Softwarmageddon that is currently playing out in the other centralized eco-systems. To weaken that, would be to re-invite disaster. In my eyes, linux should ban commercial software like Teams from running, if there is a open source alternative. Chop of a limb if you want to survive the infection of end-stage-surveillance capitalism. Let the corpo-borgs eat one another.
- simonh 5y ago
  "Mac/Win flailing walled in garden ecosystems, everyone wants to escape from." This is the problem with living in a techie bubble like HN. Meanwhile in the real world billions of people are happily using Windows and MacOS, and would have no idea what you're talking about. You remind me of the dyed-in-the-wool Marxists I knew in the 80s sitting tight* waiting for capitalism to collapse, and those before them in the 20s and 30s. And those before them in the 19th Century. Still waiting. Any day now. The signs are everywhere. * Almost literally. One friend at the time quit college to pick potatoes in Norfolk because when capitalism collapsed having practical skills would help him live off the land. That was about 1987. I wonder how he's doing.
  - OneTimePetes 5y ago
    Well it does collapse right now, doesent it? The Tax-idermy, were a society pushes ridiculous amounts of stabilization money into collapsing external peripheral "shell" societies who in return send refugee waves in convulsions, while slowly sinking into the civil/war/crime collapse accepting end-state is in full, brutally visible progress. The politicians, leering for the authoritarian toolkit, because they doubt they can stabilize the mess that is to come. How bad does it have to get, before you take a step back and acknowledge, that yes, this is un-subjective worser and even local recovery is unlikely, due to interconnected nature of global society and nature. Sorry if things are bleak, but software seems to be one of the few levers i myself can pull towards a positive outcome, a better place, by allowing others to escape the dystopia of government eating the cooperated monopolies for societal control because government needs to be in control of something- anything and its definitely not in control of anything that would change outcomes.
simonh 5y ago
That's absolutely fine, I appreciate this view and I don't want my comment above to imply that your take on this is somehow wrong. The fact that desktop linux is this crazy fragmented anarchy of technologies and distros is fine. A lot of people get a lot of value out of it. It's not directly monetisable economic value and that's ok. The top comment for you right now makes a snipe about hipsterism. Well yes, but that shouldn't be a pejorative. It's great that this ecosystem exists in all it's hipster geekery. It's a hobbyist community serving hobbyist and techno-geek purposes. We need that. Where the cognitive dissonance comes in is thinking that this has anything whatever to do with mass appeal and serving the needs of ordinary non-technical users. That's a very different and in many ways mutually incompatible objective. What non-technical users need is a radically standardised, easy to use platform with a wide variety of highly compatible software and devices with solid QA, services and support. Only the commercial market has proved capable of providing these at anything like the scale needed because that means paying a lot of people to do these things every day as a job. This is why mass market Linux projects like OLPC fail. They think 99% of the work has been done by the community already and they just need to package it up and deliver it to users. The problem is making all that work seamlessly and efficiently for users, developing a complete high quality product, delivering and selling it and building services around it is a huge ton of work. It's not 1%, it's more like 50% and you need people doing it day in, day out.
jeffe 5y ago
work on linux, daily driver is windows. how exactly to these commercial parasites 'spoil the original experience'? Sure theres preinstalled bloatware and telemetry, but you still have root access and I have had no problem tinkering to have my setup to do what I want how I want, probably much less than what I would have to do to reach parity on a linux system.

bgorman 5y ago

Do you have any concrete criticism or are you just spreading FUD? How do Windows or Mac OS provide better support for commercial development? The reason Mac OS and Windows have more users is because of pre-installs. It is almost impossible for a regular user to find a PC with Linux preinstalled on it, so application developers ignore the platform. Lots of companies have successfully built commercial GUI products on top of linux. However most of these products are specialist tools (e.g. EDA, video editor) or embedded. I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the development or distribution tools.

lmm 5y ago
> How do Windows or Mac OS provide better support for commercial development? They commit to long-term support for software distributed as shrinkwrapped binaries? You can buy a program written for Windows 20 years ago and it will work. If you try to run a program written for Linux 5 years ago it probably won't.
- commoner 5y ago
  Packaging systems such as Flatpak, AppImage, and Snap allow Linux apps to have extensive backward compatibility going forward.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Maybe. I don't think the Linux world has made a credible commitment to support all or any of those going forward. In 5 years' time we can try to run 5 year old apps in those formats and see whether they work; I wouldn't bet on it myself.
    - commoner 5y ago
      Flatpak is confirmed to work on 28 Linux distros, and is pre-installed on 9 of them: https://www.flatpak.org/setup https://www.flatpak.org/setup. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is committing to a 10 year support lifecycle for its Flatpak runtimes: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-the-red-hat-flatpak-runtime-for-desktop-containers https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-th... AppImage just works on any Linux distribution. There are no external dependencies, since the package bundles all of the dependencies and there is no runtime required. I don't see how an AppImage downloaded today wouldn't work in 5 years. I don't like Snap because the server implementation is closed source and controlled by a single company (Canonical), but Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (which bundles Snap) is supported until April 2030.

bdw5204 5y ago

The issue isn't that Linux lacks proprietary applications. Its that Linux development focuses on apps that appeal to people who write code and this means Linux has a highly technical userbase that prefers open source software. If Linux desktops had a critical mass of users that were willing to buy proprietary software, the proprietary software companies would make Linux software for the same reason that game development companies make games for Nintendo's underpowered gaming hardware if it sells well (but don't if it ends up flopping like the Wii U). To get to that critical mass, Linux desktop needs something that Mac and Windows don't offer that appeals to the average non-technical computer user. The single best opportunity for Linux was when Microsoft came out with Windows 8 with its awful new "Metro" interface. If a Linux distro had a GUI that was at least as good as Windows 7, out of the box support for Windows applications, drivers that just work and major OEMs willing to sell it preinstalled at the time, it would have drawn Windows users. Right now, thanks to Valve's efforts at getting Windows games to run on Linux, the Steam Deck is likely to be the most commercially successful GNU+Linux computer ever made because it can run most of your Windows Steam library and gaming is the main reason consumers buy Windows these days (the needs of low end consumers who just want to read email and be spied on by Facebook are best served with an iPad or Chromebook). Linux is, on the surface, a much more appealing platform than iOS or Android for developers because there's no monopoly app store taking a 30% cut and demanding you take features out of your software. Its also more appealing than Mac because there's no Gatekeeper program that you have to take extra steps to get around. Developers tolerate these practices because the users are on those platforms and especially because Apple products tend to sell to wealthier people who are more willing to spend money on software than Android or Windows users (let alone Linux users who are generally believers in open source and some of whom are "free software" advocates who agree with RMS's views on the immorality of proprietary software). Ultimately, software companies will go where the users are. Platforms don't have to cater to them. They have to attract the users which forces the software companies to release their software for the platform. When you focus on making a platform that appeals to software companies instead of users, you end up with the Epic Games Store which has lots of software but few users.

astromd 5y ago
As a highly technical person that writes code, does media, and fixes high-level computer networks and essential systems, the last thing I want is to have to dig into mysterious config files and have to debug every little thing that goes wrong with installing a piece of software. I can give up a certain degree of control and customization in exchange for a stable operating system and desktop environment that lets me get my work done. This is why I use macOS for the desktop.

sudosysgen 5y ago

Android was (massively) successful with very very few native commercial software.

29083011397778 5y ago
Android may have been helped along with the backing of, and too-important-to-fail attitude of, one of the richest, most influential, and most technologically adept conglomerates to ever exist.

elliotlarson 5y ago

I totally agree with this. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I feel like Electron is really helping here. I've been a Mac user since 2003, but built an Ubuntu based desktop recently. The fact that I can run Figma, VSCode, Slack, etc. means it's actually a workable solution. I know Electron is slow, but I don't think producing native software for Linux is economically viable or commercially interesting for a lot of companies. But if a company is building with Electron, I get the impression that it's not a lot of extra work to support Linux and it means the platform actually gets an app. Ironically, I think this will make Linux a more reasonable choice for day to day work and will eventually result in increasing the economic viability of producing software for the platform.

jiggunjer 5y ago
Wasn't Java supposed to solve the platform problem?
- 9front 5y ago
  Java was supposed to "write once, run anywhere". Instead it became write once, debug anywhere.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Since Electron folks don't want to debug anywhere they just ship Chrome along for the ride. Ah but Google is taking over the Web and such, blame on all that help them achieve their goal.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Write once, debug everywhere. FTFY.
toastal 5y ago
Personally, I wish PWAs were generally better supported so I could skip the Electron bit and could install the same app on my phone. Being a part of the main browser gives better resource handling, better sandboxing that Electron allows but I would prefer most apps didn't have, and access to the extensions I want. Too bad Firefox killed off SSB (site-specific browser) before it even launched.

clarkmoody 5y ago

We're building a cross-platform commercial application[0] in Rust (with Iced[1]), and it's deployed for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. We get blazing-fast speed and cross-platform operation without Electron or Web tech bloating the build. Distribution to Linux has been fine so far, and hopefully we're part of the solution to the problem you've outlined. [0]: https://cryptowat.ch/apps/desktop https://cryptowat.ch/apps/desktop [1]: https://github.com/hecrj/iced/ https://github.com/hecrj/iced/

brundolf 5y ago
A lot of that probably just comes down to Rust and its standardized tooling and static linking. Which, maybe that is the solution.
- jatone 5y ago
  it is. dynamic linking is a mistake on today's desktops/laptop. disk is plentiful and most of a graphic programs space usage is in assets rather than the program.

AussieWog93 5y ago

I release maintain a small commercial open-source app (partner app for a piece of open source hardware), and I don't think people understand how burdensome "proper" Linux binary distribution can be until they actually try it. Linux accounts for about 5% of my users, and for whatever reason the community thought it would be a good idea to fragment that minority further into Arch users, Debian users, CentOS users, OpenSUSE users, Ubuntu users (14, 16, 18 and 20, all with different glibc versions). Modern tools like AppImage make this at least somewhat standard, but Windows has had sane, standardised installers for almost 3 decades now.

holri 5y ago
The distribution form of open source software is as the name says source code.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hanche 5y ago
  How many users compile Firefox or LibreOffice themselves, rather than just downloading the binaries? And don’t even most users of popular package managers just install binary packages?
  - holri 5y ago
    Installation is not the same as distribution. All upstream packages that I am aware of distribute in source form.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      Yes, and if you want to take this route you can either maintain your package yourself on every single major distro or deal with support tickets for issues that have either already been fixed in old versions or arise from strange interactions with dynamic libs.
    - 5y ago

cies 5y ago

> commercial software All the commercial (proprietary) software I run (and my colleagues run) is web based nowadays. The commercial (proprietary) software we build is also web based nowadays. Sure there are exceptions. But for most office work: web based is the norm. The fact that linux does fine in this area can be reduced from the fact that Chromebooks haven't flopped.

swiley 5y ago

The brutal fact is that the web has the same APIs that iOS has at this point. You should not be running closed apps on your OS. Ever.

frobisher 5y ago

Do tools like Electron not alleviate linux app development pains?

peakaboo 5y ago

> The Linux desktop never made it because it’s a terrible platform for distributing commercial applications. Good. Please let Linux continue to remain exactly what it is now, an amazing operating system for people who want to avoid Microsoft and Apple. I certainly don't want it to "make it" so commercial apps take over.