5 ms·

Nonsense. There are billions of Android devices sold and customers don't seem too bothered by its fragmentation. They continue to buy Android devices en mass.

by mrj 4y ago

Nonsense. There are billions of Android devices sold and customers don't seem too bothered by its fragmentation. They continue to buy Android devices en mass. So it seems fragmentation has many problems but that alone won't prevent people from using a device. I think the author believes that a critical mass of Linux desktop users will create enough interest in polish and solving problems for end users, so therefore believes if everybody was using the same desktop there would be more polish (or something). I would counter that the desktops have plenty of polish. He says he loves the Linux Desktop and doesn't offer much criticism besides there's too much choice. Nah, they're already great and we don't need to abandon great desktops. Instead, I believe other factors are at play. Familiarity, inertia and monopolistic competition to name a few. Those are powerful factors and much more so than abstract fragmentation.

pjmlp 4y ago
Because Android is the only viable alternative for those that either can't or won't buy an iPhone.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- criddell 4y ago
  Android is effectively the default choice. If you don't care about your phone, you end up with an Android phone. Lots and lots of people use an Android phone and almost none of them would be called Android enthusiasts.
pupppet 4y ago
Call me a snob, but I bet no small number of Android users would have picked an iPhone if it were cheaper.
- scotty79 4y ago
  Snobbish ones would probably do.
- mrj 4y ago
  True, cost is also a motivating factor that is much more powerful than fragmentation concerns. This is probably why Windows is now essentially free or at least a hidden cost for the end user.
- krnlpnc 4y ago
  This sounds right, and also the marketing of Android is misleading and hardware focused which leads to false comparisons. "Look the camera has more megapixels than an iPhone!" Yeah ok, but the stock camera software outputs photos that look worse than an entry level iPhone.
corrral 4y ago
Once Windows stopped having shit-tier stability, some time around late XP or early Win7, Desktop Linux replaced it as the least-stable and buggiest of the three GUI desktop operating systems I regularly use. Even before that, it nearly matched it in instability, if you counted X-Window crashes as the same as a bluescreen or kernel panic (and if you're doing GUI work, they're close to equivalent) The kernel might be OK. The GUI & multimedia stacks aren't.
- lukeschlather 4y ago
  I'm running an MSI laptop on Windows that bluescreens all the time for me. I finally figured out it was bugs in the USB-C/HDMI hotplugging drivers and I know how not to trigger it. In contrast I haven't had an X-Windows crash in years and years. The closest thing I had was on a Dell XPS 13 and it wasn't a "crash" per se but the issue was very similar to the Windows issue I had with the MSI, the machine just totally locked up (ctrl-alt-backspace had no effect) when I plugged a USB-C to ethernet adapter into it. Unplug the adapter everything was fine. On Windows I have to kill explorer.exe because the systray crashes at least once a week. (taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer.exe is always in my Powershell history.) And that's not the only example of more userspace instability, I could go on and on. There's instability I run into on Xfce but it's usually pretty isolated, this one component has a problem, it's not like Xfce is just randomly locking up all the time the way explorer.exe is. For example I have this issue on Xfce with a logitech wireless keyboard which starts having input issues but unplugging the wireless dongle and plugging it back in fixes it. And that sort of thing happens with most peripherals on any platform.
- mrj 4y ago
  And yet Windows was successful even when unstable. I would say that's not a hugely motivating factor for people. Many people turn on and off their computer when they want to use it and it's fine. Excessive stability isn't a major factor for most people and being perfectly stable wouldn't by itself make this the year of the Linux Desktop. For this crowd it is important, of course, and I'd be deeply upset if my desktop crashed that often. That's not been my experience though.
  - 4y ago
notriddle 4y ago
> Familiarity, inertia and monopolistic competition Also compatibility, marketing, and being installed out of the box. In its heyday, Firefox had between 25% and 50% market share, depending on country. Compared to Internet Explorer 6, it was: * More stable. * Less buggy. * More secure. * More featureful. * Usually faster than IE6, though it took a bit longer to start. * Better development tools, which indirectly lead to web pages working better in Firefox than in IE6 even if that's not what management wanted. * ActiveX, which is clearly the way Microsoft wanted you to make "web apps," had to be hidden behind scare prompts, so public web pages couldn't use it. Here's Internet Explorer's big selling points, which allowed it to hold onto between 50 and 75% of the market share: * It shipped with Windows. Google Chrome only managed to unseat it by paying OEMs, which means that, de facto, Chrome now ships out of the box with Windows, too.
- mrj 4y ago
  Exactly. It's like saying if only Firefox had gotten rid of extensions so the UX was unified they could have taken over IE.
  - notriddle 4y ago
    There is only one extension that ever really mattered: Firebug. A lot of developers wound up using Firefox to develop web apps even when the web app was intended to be used in IE. That's important because it broke the vicious cycle where nobody used Firefox because nobody developed for Firefox and nobody developed for Firefox because nobody used it. You might use other extensions, as do I, but this is such a deal-breaker that barely anything else matters. The browser that runs your dev tools will be able to run your app, obviously, so being the browser with the good dev tools is a tactic to make sure web pages will actually run in it. The constant rhetoric around extensions is an irrelevant sideshow. It's the web pages that actually matter. Nobody would have bothered to use Firefox unless the majority of web pages they use work in it, and Firebug is the primary reason why so many web pages did work in it, along with Google strategically choosing to support Firefox as a way to hedge their bets against Microsoft making adversarial changes to IE to cut Google off.
krnlpnc 4y ago
Isn't Android effectively a base level linux distro optimized for smartphones though? Providing some level of uniformity between devices like package management, etc.?
hbn 4y ago
The fragmentation issue is with user choice, and the amount of learning and experimentation you have to do to make all of those decisions. There's no de facto "probably the best for you" Linux flavor, or method of installing applications. Whereas on Android, generally if you don't know what Android to get, you get a Samsung. You want to install an app? No matter which phone you have, you tap the Play Store icon. Plus there's large corporations selling these devices, and they set everything up to work for you out of the box. You're not gonna run into an equivalent of the experience setting up Linux desktop where it's not recognizing your monitor correctly and you have to mess with drivers and running mysterious commands in a terminal to make it work. Samsung made the phone and hardware work, turn it on, and you're good to go.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
phendrenad2 4y ago
Android fragmentation != Desktop Linux fragmentation They're completely different. Desktop Linux has APT, YUM, Snap, AppImage, FlatPak. Android has... APK. Desktop Linux has x11 vs wayland. Android has one renderer. ALSA/Pipewire/Pulse, what's the difference anyway? Will your favorite sound app work with all of them? Android has one sound API.

by mrj 4y ago

pjmlp 4y ago

Because Android is the only viable alternative for those that either can't or won't buy an iPhone.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
criddell 4y ago
Android is effectively the default choice. If you don't care about your phone, you end up with an Android phone. Lots and lots of people use an Android phone and almost none of them would be called Android enthusiasts.

pupppet 4y ago

Call me a snob, but I bet no small number of Android users would have picked an iPhone if it were cheaper.

scotty79 4y ago
Snobbish ones would probably do.
mrj 4y ago
True, cost is also a motivating factor that is much more powerful than fragmentation concerns. This is probably why Windows is now essentially free or at least a hidden cost for the end user.
krnlpnc 4y ago
This sounds right, and also the marketing of Android is misleading and hardware focused which leads to false comparisons. "Look the camera has more megapixels than an iPhone!" Yeah ok, but the stock camera software outputs photos that look worse than an entry level iPhone.

corrral 4y ago

Once Windows stopped having shit-tier stability, some time around late XP or early Win7, Desktop Linux replaced it as the least-stable and buggiest of the three GUI desktop operating systems I regularly use. Even before that, it nearly matched it in instability, if you counted X-Window crashes as the same as a bluescreen or kernel panic (and if you're doing GUI work, they're close to equivalent) The kernel might be OK. The GUI & multimedia stacks aren't.

lukeschlather 4y ago
I'm running an MSI laptop on Windows that bluescreens all the time for me. I finally figured out it was bugs in the USB-C/HDMI hotplugging drivers and I know how not to trigger it. In contrast I haven't had an X-Windows crash in years and years. The closest thing I had was on a Dell XPS 13 and it wasn't a "crash" per se but the issue was very similar to the Windows issue I had with the MSI, the machine just totally locked up (ctrl-alt-backspace had no effect) when I plugged a USB-C to ethernet adapter into it. Unplug the adapter everything was fine. On Windows I have to kill explorer.exe because the systray crashes at least once a week. (taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer.exe is always in my Powershell history.) And that's not the only example of more userspace instability, I could go on and on. There's instability I run into on Xfce but it's usually pretty isolated, this one component has a problem, it's not like Xfce is just randomly locking up all the time the way explorer.exe is. For example I have this issue on Xfce with a logitech wireless keyboard which starts having input issues but unplugging the wireless dongle and plugging it back in fixes it. And that sort of thing happens with most peripherals on any platform.
mrj 4y ago
And yet Windows was successful even when unstable. I would say that's not a hugely motivating factor for people. Many people turn on and off their computer when they want to use it and it's fine. Excessive stability isn't a major factor for most people and being perfectly stable wouldn't by itself make this the year of the Linux Desktop. For this crowd it is important, of course, and I'd be deeply upset if my desktop crashed that often. That's not been my experience though.
- 4y ago

notriddle 4y ago

> Familiarity, inertia and monopolistic competition Also compatibility, marketing, and being installed out of the box. In its heyday, Firefox had between 25% and 50% market share, depending on country. Compared to Internet Explorer 6, it was: * More stable. * Less buggy. * More secure. * More featureful. * Usually faster than IE6, though it took a bit longer to start. * Better development tools, which indirectly lead to web pages working better in Firefox than in IE6 even if that's not what management wanted. * ActiveX, which is clearly the way Microsoft wanted you to make "web apps," had to be hidden behind scare prompts, so public web pages couldn't use it. Here's Internet Explorer's big selling points, which allowed it to hold onto between 50 and 75% of the market share: * It shipped with Windows. Google Chrome only managed to unseat it by paying OEMs, which means that, de facto, Chrome now ships out of the box with Windows, too.

mrj 4y ago
Exactly. It's like saying if only Firefox had gotten rid of extensions so the UX was unified they could have taken over IE.
- notriddle 4y ago
  There is only one extension that ever really mattered: Firebug. A lot of developers wound up using Firefox to develop web apps even when the web app was intended to be used in IE. That's important because it broke the vicious cycle where nobody used Firefox because nobody developed for Firefox and nobody developed for Firefox because nobody used it. You might use other extensions, as do I, but this is such a deal-breaker that barely anything else matters. The browser that runs your dev tools will be able to run your app, obviously, so being the browser with the good dev tools is a tactic to make sure web pages will actually run in it. The constant rhetoric around extensions is an irrelevant sideshow. It's the web pages that actually matter. Nobody would have bothered to use Firefox unless the majority of web pages they use work in it, and Firebug is the primary reason why so many web pages did work in it, along with Google strategically choosing to support Firefox as a way to hedge their bets against Microsoft making adversarial changes to IE to cut Google off.

krnlpnc 4y ago

Isn't Android effectively a base level linux distro optimized for smartphones though? Providing some level of uniformity between devices like package management, etc.?

hbn 4y ago

The fragmentation issue is with user choice, and the amount of learning and experimentation you have to do to make all of those decisions. There's no de facto "probably the best for you" Linux flavor, or method of installing applications. Whereas on Android, generally if you don't know what Android to get, you get a Samsung. You want to install an app? No matter which phone you have, you tap the Play Store icon. Plus there's large corporations selling these devices, and they set everything up to work for you out of the box. You're not gonna run into an equivalent of the experience setting up Linux desktop where it's not recognizing your monitor correctly and you have to mess with drivers and running mysterious commands in a terminal to make it work. Samsung made the phone and hardware work, turn it on, and you're good to go.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

phendrenad2 4y ago

Android fragmentation != Desktop Linux fragmentation They're completely different. Desktop Linux has APT, YUM, Snap, AppImage, FlatPak. Android has... APK. Desktop Linux has x11 vs wayland. Android has one renderer. ALSA/Pipewire/Pulse, what's the difference anyway? Will your favorite sound app work with all of them? Android has one sound API.