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Quotes of the weekQuotes of the weekPosted Mar 23, 2012 17:48 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Quotes of the week by nim-nim Parent article: Quotes of the week
Those developers could make distributions irrelevant in a blink by releasing software that didn't need massaging for mass deployment. Wow. This is bold statement. I'll bite. Can you explain how to do that - even in principle? The requirements are obvious (nothing onerous - all platforms except Linux obey these rules without asking): Assume I'm doing a simple 3D game which need to play sound and some video (that's what most games do nowadays, after all). I don't see any way to do that thus your assertion that developers can “release software that didn't need massaging for mass deployment” looks quite a lie. Except that would mean tackling the issues distros solve today, would identify the same pain points distro point out now, and the whole point of the exercise is to postpone integration and avoid paying the technical debt of past mis-decisions. Exactly. This is not my piece of cake. Sure, I can assign some people to the task of supporting “Linux desktop mess”… but why will I want to do that when I can spend the same resources on PS3 or Android port with much better ROI? In fact those developers quite often deny there is a need for integration and associated rules, justify this denial by pointing the supposedly minuscule Linux market share, and always forget to mention the even more abysmal market-share of their own not-integrated direct developer-to-user binaries. Bullshit. Widely cited and quite plausible market share of Linux is 1-2%. This is 15-30 millions of users. I've participated in many projects which had (some still have) more users then that. Most of them were never ported to Linux, because, as was pointed above, it's pointless. No, they prefer to compare to the Windows/OSX/Android/whatever ecosystem, and conveniently forget that those ecosystem have rules too, and that their owners are at least as directive as Linux distributions. And what rules are these, please tell me? That you must think before you write and not do a crazy things (like assuming that “Program Files” is always “Program Files”?), isn't it? Well, this is covered in easy-to-follow documentation and all the examples obey them thus it's not such a big deal. The usual excuse is 'but $x does not ask for $y like Linux distributions', forgetting $x asks for $z when Linux distributions do not care about $z. Not forgetting. Not caring. You see, if $x is “Windows” then I'm ready to €N to implement $y. If $x is “Mac OS” then I'm ready to spend ≈0.1✕€N (well, I can spend ≈0.2✕€N and compensate with higher price if I feel that Mac OS users will be more generous then Windows users). But when Linux users come to me and ask to implement feature $z which is not required neither by Windows nor by MacOS and that will cost me ≈0.05✕€N, then the obvious answer is “are you nuts?… bring me as many users brings at least and then may be, just may be I'll think about it”. Beggars can't be choosers - and right now Linux desktop is as poor (by number of users) as they come. Later, when you'll have many-many Linux desktop user you may start adding new rules (like Google is doing with Google Play Store), but today… sorry, you have no such luxury. You do know know that a lot of programs (especially games) are ported to MacOS with a help of CrossOver for Redistribution because ≈0.1✕€N is not enough for native port, right? In comparison to that typical requirements of Linux distributions is not “onerous” or “crazy”. They are “beyond good and evil and well unto realms of terminally insane”.
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Quotes of the week Posted Mar 23, 2012 18:32 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
> The requirements are obvious
Requirements are always obvious to the complainer. What they are not necessarily is reasonable. You object to the way distributions have solved the deployment requirement. What you've not done is producing anything better. If you had you would have made distributions irrelevant, since their only raison d'être is distributing software better than you do.
> Beggars can't be choosers - and right now Linux desktop is as poor (by
Quite apart from being offensive, your statement is wrong. Linux distributions are not a free service. They're not begging. They help themselves and entities that help them back, and it worked quite well in the datacenter or embedded space (for everyone involved).
If desktop players such as you prefer dancing to the whims of Apple or Google or Microsoft, that's as much your loss as the distribution loss (in fact it's more of your loss because distributions depend more on the datacenter than on the desktop, and have proved resilient to third party vendors hostility).
Quotes of the week Posted Mar 23, 2012 20:36 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Requirements are always obvious to the complainer. What they are not necessarily is reasonable. These requirements were not changed from the desktop concept inception decades ago. Only Linux chooses to ignore it. Well, that's not our problem. What you've not done is producing anything better. Right now we don't yet have enough pieces to directly attack desktop so Linux developers have few years of opportunity - and it's not at all clear that we can offer something better then Windows and MacOS, but we are thinking about it, believe me. They help themselves and entities that help them back, and it worked quite well in the datacenter or embedded space (for everyone involved). Entities which own the datacenter and embedded world (RHEL in datacenter and Montavista, Wind River and other similar providers in embedded world) know that they must offer stable ABI (they break it with new releases but these are spaced years apart and their support time overlaps by significant margin). Only desktop distributions feel they are entitled for something else. If desktop players such as you prefer dancing to the whims of Apple or Google or Microsoft, that's as much your loss as the distribution loss. Contrary to Church of Emacs preachers “desktop players” don't like to dance to Apple, Google or Microsoft “whims” - they just want to help users (sometimes for a fee, in some cases gratis) and Linux users are not considered more important then Windows users (why should they?), the rest follows from said principle. Actually we even do more for Linux users then 1% market share implies, but to treat them 100 times more important then Windows users is out of the question. In fact it's more of your loss because distributions depend more on the datacenter than on the desktop, and have proved resilient to third party vendors hostility. And third party vendors proved more then resilent enough to Linux distribution's hostility. Hmm… there are exceptions, of course: few vendors which targeted Linux desktop niche and ignored Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android/etc (most of them are dead). Well… it's their loss, not ours.
Quotes of the week Posted Apr 11, 2012 13:44 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
<blockquote>Right now we don't yet have enough pieces to directly attack desktop so Linux developers have few years of opportunity - and it's not at all clear that we can offer something better then Windows and MacOS, but we are thinking about it, believe me.</blockquote>
Who is 'we' here? I was following the discussion OK until this point.
All I will add to the discussion is that it is true that there is a lot of obscure software not available for Linux (e.g. building supplies companies calculators for number of fixings required per foot). This is annoying, but in a fairly minor way.
But the preditions of the death of Desktop Linux are overstated IMHO. I can't see any prospect of ever switching to anything else, and I expect I'm not the only one. Freedom is much more important to me than random bits of (mostly unimportant) software not available on my platform. I don't see that changing. And I'm very happy with the integration job my distro does. The userbase could shrink enormously and I'd still get the main benefits I came for. And actually I don't see a shrinking userbase at all, although that may be the circles I move in. Certainly usage is growing fast amongst developers at the large company I work for.
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