10 ms·

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts

by eloff 12y ago

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly three years using ubuntu desktop, I came to the conclusion that a windows license is very cheap by comparison. The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it. I keep linux in a VM where it's very easy and cheap to backup and rollback without affecting my data or ability to work. I really gave it a good try, and I liked a lot of things about the freedom to configure things like I want, without metro crapware infesting the place, but the downsides were just too much for me. Again I wonder how things could have been if everyone was pulling as a coherent team instead of in different directions.

mikepurvis 12y ago
Same here, except with a Mac as the host. I really like the setup of a OS X developer environment and tools, with the ability to summon Vagrant boxes or whatever else on command.
secfirstmd 12y ago
Exactly why Linux will never dominate the Desktop environment by the average user. You basically can't use Linux without at some time going to the cmd line to fix some dam configuration or driver problem.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  And, yet, it dominates the tablet and mobile environment, which is already more important than the desktop market ever was. Funny how that works.
  - secfirstmd 12y ago
    I know exactly what you mean. But we both know these are very different things. For most people, their tablet and phone works absolutely seemlessly, with drivers, apps, downloads etc just working they way they want them to. It just never works that way on the Desktop unfort. I know loads of "average" people who have tried to use MINT/Ubuntu but eventually a big chunk end up reaching for Redmond after they spend too long looking at StackExchange trying to figure something out.
    - SwellJoe 12y ago
      It doesn't matter; there are literally more phones and tablets than there are desktop/laptop computers. Desktop/laptop is irrelevant in the future. Chromebook and hybrid tablets are slowly eating into the "laptop" market. Many people will never buy a laptop because their tablet or phone does what they need. I know a lot of people who go weeks between opening their computer, but live on their phone and tablet. Desktop and laptop will be a thing people use at work for a long while, and it'll probably still be ruled by Windows. Creatives and developers will have beefy computers, and they'll probably still be running Windows and Mac OS X predominantly (though I use Fedora, and have never really worked on anything other than a Linux system). For now. I can't predict what will happen on that front, but phones and tablets are encroaching on so many fronts I never would have predicted (I just bought my first tablet last week, and thought they were ridiculous for years even after they'd started taking off).
      - esoterae 12y ago
        I take issue with your hypothesis. Tablets and chromebooks have already been around for several years. Why do I still use a desktop for work? Why don't I just ssh everywhere from my eyepad? Because they suck at making me productive. Desktops and actual laptops are not going anywhere, because they run fully featured OSs that people can contribute to, not some nasty walled garden of corporate shrink-wrapped ToS turds and ignored pull requests (if you're so lucky to even come within barfing distance of a FOSS component on lobotomy-hardware). Look, IBM started predicting the death of the desktop, what, 20 years ago? 30? It's not going to happen. Then laptops came around. They're gonna kill the desktop! O noes! Not gonna happen. Ultrabooks are gonna kill laptops! Yeah, maybe.. Depends on how much they wind up resembling good laptops. Starts to sound pretty familiar after a while.
- jqm 12y ago
  I can't remember the last time I had to fix a driver problem on Linux. My GF, who is not very computer savvy, has been using Mint for years at home and at work. Unfortunately, there were no command line configurations needed even once to set it up. What a disappointment. Ah well, I personally use Slackware so I'll get my jollies there I suppose.... Granted, I did have to go by GF's work at one point and install a printer but you know what? I've spent a lot less time there than I used to as her Windows systems (she and an assistant now both use Mint) regularly got virus or gunked up and slowed to a crawl... Linux on the desktop has actually been much easier and reduced my honeydo workload considerably. Fact. That aside, I have to scratch my head and wonder about people who claim to have so many of these types of problems. Tech people too. People who should be eager to embrace and learn powerful command line invocations and the control this learning brings....
  - krylon 12y ago
    I remember, ten years ago I had to compile the kernel module for my sound card manually, because it was not part of the mainline kernel. shrug Since then, my experience with Linux' driver support has been very smooth, as well, any a lot smoother than stuff I've seen on Windows. Getting a printer to work on Windows is incredibly convoluted compared to CUPS.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    screwing with command line nonsense to make wifi and audio work reliably on my laptop isn't learning, it's technical masturbation. I want to use my computer to do actual work, not make-work. This was within the last 12 months on ubuntu and a lenovo laptop, btw.
- krylon 12y ago
  As if that was different on Windows. Windows only works smoothly until it does not, and then you inevitably have to invoke some command-line tool you never heard of before and won't find any documentation for, or you have to edit some arcane registry key. Most people I know who use Windows at home either call "that guy" they know who knows his way around a computer, or they just reinstall their system (which is not such a bad idea, really, just very inconvenient).
  - secfirstmd 12y ago
    Hmm, I possibly would have agreed with you up until XP, when it was very very buggy and crash prone, but after that for the average user I really doubt that is the case. Thought I think we can agree to disagree depending on our respective experiences.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      This. I'm not saying modern Windows is fault free. It may have an inconvenient user interface for some things, it may not always do the thing you want it to etc. but it never fails to boot, everything but Apple hardware runs it flawlessly and it has a massive third-party software selection. For me, though, Ubuntu's user interface is just so much more convenient for programming and the other things I do that I manage with debugging the occasional failure to boot, install etc., but that's because I have unusual priorities and good google-fu.
      - secfirstmd 12y ago
        Just to toss something else into the mix...:) Honestly,I really really dislike Apple...esp the fanboy culture, mythology of Steve Jobs (and the culture which means everyone in Starbucks knows him and not Norman Borlaug), the weird shops, the overpriced products and ripoff margins, lack of choice and individually vs Android...for years I've been known as the guy who slags off Apple etc etc BUUUUUTTTTTT - and this might be relevant to Windows survivability in the future. Having spent nearly a week humming and thinking, comparing every type of new business laptop (powerful, reliable etc) at any price to run as my next Windows machine, I can't really find any...Thinkpad has seemed to have gone to pieces, DELL I have only ever had bad experiences with, ASUS/ACER meh etc... I quite literally am close to swallowing my pride (awaits incoming from friends who I slagged off over the years) and buying a MacBook and putting Windows on it. Maybe it's just me, but as Windows (except for the Win 8 bloaty crap) software has gotten better, the hardware at the moment seems to be getting worse.
- tootie 12y ago
  Best Linux desktop? ChromeOS.
anw 12y ago
"I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today." To a point it could be beneficial, but then we would hit the same wall we're coming to here. Over all, you do not need a large group of developers to work on a project. You just need people who have a specific knowledge in order to add features and fix bugs. Too many people trying to all work on the same thing can lead to too many ideas on how to proceed ahead. Another idea is having a form of management to help guide people towards more system complementary projects, rather than recreating the wheel.
seccess 12y ago
"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it." Doesn't this assume that this cost for commercial OSes is zero? In my experience, that hasn't been the case (as an OSX user, haven't used Windows for software development in a long time).
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  The cost isn't zero, but it's proportional to how many other people are likely to have encountered the same pain point. If you run a desktop OS with 5% of Windows' market share, you're going to have more trouble finding help (or at least sympathy) when things go south. Also, as an ISV or IHV, if your app or device fails to work with Windows, it's a DEFCON-1 emergency. If it fails to work with one of 5,000 random obscure Linux distros, well, they'll get back to you on that, someday, maybe. It's simply economics in action. Note that neither of these are issues in the tablet or phone markets, which is why people citing those markets to defend Linux on the desktop are all wet. (They're in good company, of course -- lots of people in the Windows world have failed to understand why those markets are different, including the developer of Windows itself.)
  - secfirstmd 12y ago
    That would make for an interesting whitepaper by someone. A country by country or regional calculation of the costs of implementing open source. As an open source fan but also someone who has been burned by the hidden costs of implementing it in certain emerging market regions (extensive training, time, lack of people to fix it when it goes wrong, incompatibilities etc etc vs Windows environment with a wider base of support and usage), I would find this very interesting. I think things often look different in London or SF but the idea of "free software" in poorer parts of the world is often a false one.
  - ams6110 12y ago
    Some hardware is well supported by Linux, some is not. Same with Windows, though most vendors support Windows if they support anything on x86. But it's not always that clear-cut. Particularly on laptops, if you diverge from the OEM-included drivers you can have issues. I had a Dell laptop that I obtained second-hand, and I reinstalled my employer's stock Windows 7 ISO on it. It randomly blue-screened even with the latest appropriate graphics drivers, until I went back to the Dell website and found the exact version of the driver needed for that laptop. FWIW OpenBSD, which I had installed on another partition, ran flawlessly with the exception of suspend/resume. This was a couple of years ago, I think there have been improvements since then.
Paul_S 12y ago
I run windows in a VM to run lightroom. Similar situation except my experience about stability is the exact opposite. > Again I wonder how things could have been if everyone was pulling as a coherent team instead of in different directions. If everyone keeps pulling in the same direction you might end up in a dead end. With a plurality of approaches natural selection comes into effect. Anyway, how do you propose to force volunteers to do your bidding when they have different ideas? Sometimes ideas are mutually exclusive.
- hajile 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, have you ever considered darktable? http://www.darktable.org/ http://www.darktable.org/
  - Paul_S 12y ago
    Yes I have. And Rawstudio. And Raw Therapee. And while darktable is the fastest evolving one it's still not close enough. But I'm keeping tabs on it. Lightroom is slowing down and to be honest it's way past the diminishing returns elbow at this point so maybe next year. I no longer do photography professionally so it's less and less of an issue.
freshhawk 12y ago
"becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace" Seems like Linux has been competing just fine, but I take it you mean "a desktop linux that appeals to windows/osx users by being similar to them so the learning curve is small". That seems to more be about a lack of effort and manpower, not because people are pulling in different directions but more that the people who would actually build that stuff don't want it enough to dedicate their free time to building it. That and designers don't seem to be nearly as interested in contributing to FOSS as do programmers. Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects. A success is having a large number of contributors, all cooperating to solve a shared problem so they can all spend more time on something else, with some of them dedicating themselves to the problem because it's interesting and helps their friends. No one is doing it at the scale necessary for the same reason Apple isn't spending all it's money developing products for people who couldn't possibly pay for them. They aren't stupid.
- relate 12y ago
  "Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects." except that the size of the userbase drives companies to port their products to the platform.
  - freshhawk 12y ago
    Sure, there are long term high level strategic interests that could be helped for sure. How convincing is this though? "I would like you to volunteer to work on this project that you don't want and wouldn't use (and therefore probably won't do a great job with). You will be inundated with support requests from unskilled users. I would like you to do this because if a lot of people do it, it might convince a unspecified number of companies to port their software to linux at some unspecified time in the future. That's only if you are completely successful building this for and marketing this to people who you don't understand or care about. You will have no help from designers or user interface people because they don't give a shit about you or this. Design and user experience will be the most important parts of this, technical quality will not influence success because the users don't care about that. You will get no social capital from this because the users don't give a shit about what you do. Do this instead of one of the huge number of really interesting projects building things you would love to have that are on your plate right now, the ones where your peers will recognize, appreciate, understand and value your hard work."
click170 12y ago
I take issue with the idea that if every developer was pulling in the same direction we would be somewhere better than where we are now. I view the diversity and freedom in Foss projects as a feature, not a bug. First off, assuming you got a group of people together who agree that they should all pull in the same direction, who gets to decide which direction that is? Why that person, and not this person? Secondly, speaking for myself only, being told to work on projects I'm not interested in will produce sub par work and will drain my motivation to both work with that team and the project itself. Everyone has a different idea on what it would take to get to the Year Of The Linux Desktop, call me when you reach consensus on what exactly the requirements for that project are. Not to be cynical but reaching consensus seems like the biggest blocker, the fact that there are people pulling in multiple directions I think is a symptom of this problem.
new299 12y ago
The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. Linux is a kernel. Linux distributions target a variety of different users, and that's where the fragmentation comes from. I guess the problem is nobody really set out to build a Windows alternative at the beginning. As such they got what they set out to build, a powerful set of tools for building "things". It was never a coherent set of tools design toward making a comfortable user experience (grab a compiler from here, a windowing system from somewhere else, mash it all together). Some distributions (I guess notability Ubuntu, and projects like KDE) have tried to polish what's available into something that's a good user facing experience. With varying success. Most of the issues here likely stem from a legacy of tools which were not designed to build a consumer facing system, and a lack of resources (and desire) to build a platform for the average consumer. Others, have rewritten the userland (Android) and produced competitive consumer facing products. Others, have continued to build what (I'd guess largely the developers) want, either to service their personal of commercial interests, things like Debian/RedHat. So different distributions have targeted different users groups. I no more want to user an Android desktop than a Windows one. But I can see how Android could be far more competitive against Windows. The question is who wants to invest the resources in building that?
frozenport 12y ago
Some things on Linux were broken from Day 1 like drivers and X because it they were easier. I doubt a coherent team could have fixed these without rewritting which taks too much time. It took MS 6 years to make XP into Vista, I doubt OSS people operate on that kind of timeframe.
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 12y ago
  XP to Vista took 6 years because MS had huge plans for Longhorn. It took some time to build these things, then some more time to decide they won't be ready any time soon and throw them all away.
  - krylon 12y ago
    In all fairness, they did not throw all of their plans away - some of the more visible ones, like WinFS, yes, but from what I know, they reworked a lot of Windows' internals going from XP to Vista/7, like the audio and the network stack. They also made important changes regarding security that at least made it more difficult to exploit bugs in more recent versions of Windows. And, having personally almost no experience with Vista, the changes they made to the GUI between XP and Windows 7 are, IMHO, rather nice in terms of actual usability. Also, Vista development got stalled big time when Microsoft first pulled out a substantial part of the Longhorn team to work on XP Service Pack 2, and then decided to re-base Longhorn from XP to Windows Server 2003 (R2?). The net result was, of course, still a system that took much longer than planned and ended up being a huge disappointment to pretty much everybody, even by Microsoft's standards. But if you consider Vista a "public beta" of Windows 7 and compare XP to Windows 7 side by side, I think - as far as Windows systems go - Windows 7 was actually a big improvement. (Not only on its predecessors, but also on its successors, as they saying goes.)
- krylon 12y ago
  Well, except for the Perl 6 project. SCNR.

by eloff 12y ago

mikepurvis 12y ago

Same here, except with a Mac as the host. I really like the setup of a OS X developer environment and tools, with the ability to summon Vagrant boxes or whatever else on command.

secfirstmd 12y ago

Exactly why Linux will never dominate the Desktop environment by the average user. You basically can't use Linux without at some time going to the cmd line to fix some dam configuration or driver problem.

SwellJoe 12y ago
And, yet, it dominates the tablet and mobile environment, which is already more important than the desktop market ever was. Funny how that works.
- secfirstmd 12y ago
  I know exactly what you mean. But we both know these are very different things. For most people, their tablet and phone works absolutely seemlessly, with drivers, apps, downloads etc just working they way they want them to. It just never works that way on the Desktop unfort. I know loads of "average" people who have tried to use MINT/Ubuntu but eventually a big chunk end up reaching for Redmond after they spend too long looking at StackExchange trying to figure something out.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    It doesn't matter; there are literally more phones and tablets than there are desktop/laptop computers. Desktop/laptop is irrelevant in the future. Chromebook and hybrid tablets are slowly eating into the "laptop" market. Many people will never buy a laptop because their tablet or phone does what they need. I know a lot of people who go weeks between opening their computer, but live on their phone and tablet. Desktop and laptop will be a thing people use at work for a long while, and it'll probably still be ruled by Windows. Creatives and developers will have beefy computers, and they'll probably still be running Windows and Mac OS X predominantly (though I use Fedora, and have never really worked on anything other than a Linux system). For now. I can't predict what will happen on that front, but phones and tablets are encroaching on so many fronts I never would have predicted (I just bought my first tablet last week, and thought they were ridiculous for years even after they'd started taking off).
    - esoterae 12y ago
      I take issue with your hypothesis. Tablets and chromebooks have already been around for several years. Why do I still use a desktop for work? Why don't I just ssh everywhere from my eyepad? Because they suck at making me productive. Desktops and actual laptops are not going anywhere, because they run fully featured OSs that people can contribute to, not some nasty walled garden of corporate shrink-wrapped ToS turds and ignored pull requests (if you're so lucky to even come within barfing distance of a FOSS component on lobotomy-hardware). Look, IBM started predicting the death of the desktop, what, 20 years ago? 30? It's not going to happen. Then laptops came around. They're gonna kill the desktop! O noes! Not gonna happen. Ultrabooks are gonna kill laptops! Yeah, maybe.. Depends on how much they wind up resembling good laptops. Starts to sound pretty familiar after a while.
jqm 12y ago
I can't remember the last time I had to fix a driver problem on Linux. My GF, who is not very computer savvy, has been using Mint for years at home and at work. Unfortunately, there were no command line configurations needed even once to set it up. What a disappointment. Ah well, I personally use Slackware so I'll get my jollies there I suppose.... Granted, I did have to go by GF's work at one point and install a printer but you know what? I've spent a lot less time there than I used to as her Windows systems (she and an assistant now both use Mint) regularly got virus or gunked up and slowed to a crawl... Linux on the desktop has actually been much easier and reduced my honeydo workload considerably. Fact. That aside, I have to scratch my head and wonder about people who claim to have so many of these types of problems. Tech people too. People who should be eager to embrace and learn powerful command line invocations and the control this learning brings....
- krylon 12y ago
  I remember, ten years ago I had to compile the kernel module for my sound card manually, because it was not part of the mainline kernel. shrug Since then, my experience with Linux' driver support has been very smooth, as well, any a lot smoother than stuff I've seen on Windows. Getting a printer to work on Windows is incredibly convoluted compared to CUPS.
- x0x0 12y ago
  screwing with command line nonsense to make wifi and audio work reliably on my laptop isn't learning, it's technical masturbation. I want to use my computer to do actual work, not make-work. This was within the last 12 months on ubuntu and a lenovo laptop, btw.
krylon 12y ago
As if that was different on Windows. Windows only works smoothly until it does not, and then you inevitably have to invoke some command-line tool you never heard of before and won't find any documentation for, or you have to edit some arcane registry key. Most people I know who use Windows at home either call "that guy" they know who knows his way around a computer, or they just reinstall their system (which is not such a bad idea, really, just very inconvenient).
- secfirstmd 12y ago
  Hmm, I possibly would have agreed with you up until XP, when it was very very buggy and crash prone, but after that for the average user I really doubt that is the case. Thought I think we can agree to disagree depending on our respective experiences.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    This. I'm not saying modern Windows is fault free. It may have an inconvenient user interface for some things, it may not always do the thing you want it to etc. but it never fails to boot, everything but Apple hardware runs it flawlessly and it has a massive third-party software selection. For me, though, Ubuntu's user interface is just so much more convenient for programming and the other things I do that I manage with debugging the occasional failure to boot, install etc., but that's because I have unusual priorities and good google-fu.
    - secfirstmd 12y ago
      Just to toss something else into the mix...:) Honestly,I really really dislike Apple...esp the fanboy culture, mythology of Steve Jobs (and the culture which means everyone in Starbucks knows him and not Norman Borlaug), the weird shops, the overpriced products and ripoff margins, lack of choice and individually vs Android...for years I've been known as the guy who slags off Apple etc etc BUUUUUTTTTTT - and this might be relevant to Windows survivability in the future. Having spent nearly a week humming and thinking, comparing every type of new business laptop (powerful, reliable etc) at any price to run as my next Windows machine, I can't really find any...Thinkpad has seemed to have gone to pieces, DELL I have only ever had bad experiences with, ASUS/ACER meh etc... I quite literally am close to swallowing my pride (awaits incoming from friends who I slagged off over the years) and buying a MacBook and putting Windows on it. Maybe it's just me, but as Windows (except for the Win 8 bloaty crap) software has gotten better, the hardware at the moment seems to be getting worse.
tootie 12y ago
Best Linux desktop? ChromeOS.

anw 12y ago

"I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today." To a point it could be beneficial, but then we would hit the same wall we're coming to here. Over all, you do not need a large group of developers to work on a project. You just need people who have a specific knowledge in order to add features and fix bugs. Too many people trying to all work on the same thing can lead to too many ideas on how to proceed ahead. Another idea is having a form of management to help guide people towards more system complementary projects, rather than recreating the wheel.

seccess 12y ago

"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it." Doesn't this assume that this cost for commercial OSes is zero? In my experience, that hasn't been the case (as an OSX user, haven't used Windows for software development in a long time).

CamperBob2 12y ago
The cost isn't zero, but it's proportional to how many other people are likely to have encountered the same pain point. If you run a desktop OS with 5% of Windows' market share, you're going to have more trouble finding help (or at least sympathy) when things go south. Also, as an ISV or IHV, if your app or device fails to work with Windows, it's a DEFCON-1 emergency. If it fails to work with one of 5,000 random obscure Linux distros, well, they'll get back to you on that, someday, maybe. It's simply economics in action. Note that neither of these are issues in the tablet or phone markets, which is why people citing those markets to defend Linux on the desktop are all wet. (They're in good company, of course -- lots of people in the Windows world have failed to understand why those markets are different, including the developer of Windows itself.)
- secfirstmd 12y ago
  That would make for an interesting whitepaper by someone. A country by country or regional calculation of the costs of implementing open source. As an open source fan but also someone who has been burned by the hidden costs of implementing it in certain emerging market regions (extensive training, time, lack of people to fix it when it goes wrong, incompatibilities etc etc vs Windows environment with a wider base of support and usage), I would find this very interesting. I think things often look different in London or SF but the idea of "free software" in poorer parts of the world is often a false one.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Some hardware is well supported by Linux, some is not. Same with Windows, though most vendors support Windows if they support anything on x86. But it's not always that clear-cut. Particularly on laptops, if you diverge from the OEM-included drivers you can have issues. I had a Dell laptop that I obtained second-hand, and I reinstalled my employer's stock Windows 7 ISO on it. It randomly blue-screened even with the latest appropriate graphics drivers, until I went back to the Dell website and found the exact version of the driver needed for that laptop. FWIW OpenBSD, which I had installed on another partition, ran flawlessly with the exception of suspend/resume. This was a couple of years ago, I think there have been improvements since then.

Paul_S 12y ago

I run windows in a VM to run lightroom. Similar situation except my experience about stability is the exact opposite. > Again I wonder how things could have been if everyone was pulling as a coherent team instead of in different directions. If everyone keeps pulling in the same direction you might end up in a dead end. With a plurality of approaches natural selection comes into effect. Anyway, how do you propose to force volunteers to do your bidding when they have different ideas? Sometimes ideas are mutually exclusive.

hajile 12y ago
Out of curiosity, have you ever considered darktable? http://www.darktable.org/ http://www.darktable.org/
- Paul_S 12y ago
  Yes I have. And Rawstudio. And Raw Therapee. And while darktable is the fastest evolving one it's still not close enough. But I'm keeping tabs on it. Lightroom is slowing down and to be honest it's way past the diminishing returns elbow at this point so maybe next year. I no longer do photography professionally so it's less and less of an issue.

freshhawk 12y ago

"becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace" Seems like Linux has been competing just fine, but I take it you mean "a desktop linux that appeals to windows/osx users by being similar to them so the learning curve is small". That seems to more be about a lack of effort and manpower, not because people are pulling in different directions but more that the people who would actually build that stuff don't want it enough to dedicate their free time to building it. That and designers don't seem to be nearly as interested in contributing to FOSS as do programmers. Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects. A success is having a large number of contributors, all cooperating to solve a shared problem so they can all spend more time on something else, with some of them dedicating themselves to the problem because it's interesting and helps their friends. No one is doing it at the scale necessary for the same reason Apple isn't spending all it's money developing products for people who couldn't possibly pay for them. They aren't stupid.

relate 12y ago
"Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects." except that the size of the userbase drives companies to port their products to the platform.
- freshhawk 12y ago
  Sure, there are long term high level strategic interests that could be helped for sure. How convincing is this though? "I would like you to volunteer to work on this project that you don't want and wouldn't use (and therefore probably won't do a great job with). You will be inundated with support requests from unskilled users. I would like you to do this because if a lot of people do it, it might convince a unspecified number of companies to port their software to linux at some unspecified time in the future. That's only if you are completely successful building this for and marketing this to people who you don't understand or care about. You will have no help from designers or user interface people because they don't give a shit about you or this. Design and user experience will be the most important parts of this, technical quality will not influence success because the users don't care about that. You will get no social capital from this because the users don't give a shit about what you do. Do this instead of one of the huge number of really interesting projects building things you would love to have that are on your plate right now, the ones where your peers will recognize, appreciate, understand and value your hard work."

click170 12y ago

I take issue with the idea that if every developer was pulling in the same direction we would be somewhere better than where we are now. I view the diversity and freedom in Foss projects as a feature, not a bug. First off, assuming you got a group of people together who agree that they should all pull in the same direction, who gets to decide which direction that is? Why that person, and not this person? Secondly, speaking for myself only, being told to work on projects I'm not interested in will produce sub par work and will drain my motivation to both work with that team and the project itself. Everyone has a different idea on what it would take to get to the Year Of The Linux Desktop, call me when you reach consensus on what exactly the requirements for that project are. Not to be cynical but reaching consensus seems like the biggest blocker, the fact that there are people pulling in multiple directions I think is a symptom of this problem.

new299 12y ago

The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. Linux is a kernel. Linux distributions target a variety of different users, and that's where the fragmentation comes from. I guess the problem is nobody really set out to build a Windows alternative at the beginning. As such they got what they set out to build, a powerful set of tools for building "things". It was never a coherent set of tools design toward making a comfortable user experience (grab a compiler from here, a windowing system from somewhere else, mash it all together). Some distributions (I guess notability Ubuntu, and projects like KDE) have tried to polish what's available into something that's a good user facing experience. With varying success. Most of the issues here likely stem from a legacy of tools which were not designed to build a consumer facing system, and a lack of resources (and desire) to build a platform for the average consumer. Others, have rewritten the userland (Android) and produced competitive consumer facing products. Others, have continued to build what (I'd guess largely the developers) want, either to service their personal of commercial interests, things like Debian/RedHat. So different distributions have targeted different users groups. I no more want to user an Android desktop than a Windows one. But I can see how Android could be far more competitive against Windows. The question is who wants to invest the resources in building that?

frozenport 12y ago

Some things on Linux were broken from Day 1 like drivers and X because it they were easier. I doubt a coherent team could have fixed these without rewritting which taks too much time. It took MS 6 years to make XP into Vista, I doubt OSS people operate on that kind of timeframe.

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 12y ago
XP to Vista took 6 years because MS had huge plans for Longhorn. It took some time to build these things, then some more time to decide they won't be ready any time soon and throw them all away.
- krylon 12y ago
  In all fairness, they did not throw all of their plans away - some of the more visible ones, like WinFS, yes, but from what I know, they reworked a lot of Windows' internals going from XP to Vista/7, like the audio and the network stack. They also made important changes regarding security that at least made it more difficult to exploit bugs in more recent versions of Windows. And, having personally almost no experience with Vista, the changes they made to the GUI between XP and Windows 7 are, IMHO, rather nice in terms of actual usability. Also, Vista development got stalled big time when Microsoft first pulled out a substantial part of the Longhorn team to work on XP Service Pack 2, and then decided to re-base Longhorn from XP to Windows Server 2003 (R2?). The net result was, of course, still a system that took much longer than planned and ended up being a huge disappointment to pretty much everybody, even by Microsoft's standards. But if you consider Vista a "public beta" of Windows 7 and compare XP to Windows 7 side by side, I think - as far as Windows systems go - Windows 7 was actually a big improvement. (Not only on its predecessors, but also on its successors, as they saying goes.)
krylon 12y ago
Well, except for the Perl 6 project. SCNR.