3 ms·

To be fair, if you use a friendly distro like Ubuntu you don't have to touch the command line unless you want to or you're trying to do something reasonably adv

by jiggy2011 13y ago

To be fair, if you use a friendly distro like Ubuntu you don't have to touch the command line unless you want to or you're trying to do something reasonably advanced. Ironically I also find that I can often get things to work much more easily too. Tried to setup a printer the other day under Windows 7 and went through a process of faffing around with HP drivers, updates and weird dialog boxes. Under Ubuntu I told it to print and it basically said "on this printer?" , I said "yes" and it printed. Also trying to share files between 2 computers on a LAN is an order of magnitude easier. The bigger problem is that lack of strong options for certain types of software (e.g Music editing, Graphics editing, Games) under Linux and also support for some types of hardware. Though these would be quickly rectified if it had marketshare.

dylangs1030 13y ago
The problem with marketshare is that it's a cycle. Getting marketshare requires those kinds of features (generally), which requires paying your engineers a better salary (again, generally, there are exceptions). But that won't happen without a marketshare to bankroll better engineers. And at that point, you might as well be proprietary.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Not sure what salaries Canonical pay , but I assume that they are competitive enough. I have heard that the perks are good, work from home etc. So I doubt that they have a problem attracting good talent, I would wager that their average level of developer skill is significantly higher than the average devshop. Of course they are a smaller company (than say Apple), so may not have the resources to build every single program people want. OTOH third party vendors can certainly fill this gap, but then you hit the chicken and egg problem that third party vendors don't want to develop for it (at least desktop software) because marketshare is low. Web based and cross platform software alleviates this problem significantly though. Of course it depends if you are Richard Stallman and must use 100% GPL software for everything, or whether you are happy with certain compromises. I would say that having your core OS as 100% open source software even if you run proprietary apps on top is a significant step forward.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    rms doesn't have to use 100% GPL software, he's fine with MIT, Apache, BSD, etc ;)

dylangs1030 13y ago

The problem with marketshare is that it's a cycle. Getting marketshare requires those kinds of features (generally), which requires paying your engineers a better salary (again, generally, there are exceptions). But that won't happen without a marketshare to bankroll better engineers. And at that point, you might as well be proprietary.

jiggy2011 13y ago
Not sure what salaries Canonical pay , but I assume that they are competitive enough. I have heard that the perks are good, work from home etc. So I doubt that they have a problem attracting good talent, I would wager that their average level of developer skill is significantly higher than the average devshop. Of course they are a smaller company (than say Apple), so may not have the resources to build every single program people want. OTOH third party vendors can certainly fill this gap, but then you hit the chicken and egg problem that third party vendors don't want to develop for it (at least desktop software) because marketshare is low. Web based and cross platform software alleviates this problem significantly though. Of course it depends if you are Richard Stallman and must use 100% GPL software for everything, or whether you are happy with certain compromises. I would say that having your core OS as 100% open source software even if you run proprietary apps on top is a significant step forward.
- icebraining 13y ago
  rms doesn't have to use 100% GPL software, he's fine with MIT, Apache, BSD, etc ;)