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Free is too expensive (Economist)Free is too expensive (Economist)Posted Mar 31, 2012 15:59 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262)In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by rich0 Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
"Linux" is a de facto term I've come to use. For the first N years of using Linux, I was a good little Stallmanite, went around running vrms, felt bad about any proprietary software (and met a good friend with the opening line "quick, I must find a computer running only Free Software!" - true story), etc. I would also go around correcting people about using the word "Linux" when they obviously were just uninformed and meant "GNU/Linux", and it isn't "hacker", it's "cracker", etc. etc. etc.
But now I don't care. 17 years later, I'm 30 and the entire world calls it "Linux". I know what it *really* is. I've read most of the kernel source out of sheer random bedtime reading. I used to do an LKML podcast just because I was that keen on reading LKML. So I think I get enough geek cred that you can accept that I know what "Linux" is, and I'm choosing to go with the term that the *entire* rest of the world is using at this point.
As to the rest of your comment. You make a good point. Many people would not want to use the only possible platform that is going to make "the Linux desktop" successful for a mass audience. The only way to do it is to have locked down APIs, far less churn, less re-invention, and a stable base that applications can target for many years at a time. See also Windows, OSX, Android (API revisions thereof), and so on. Enterprise Linux is successful because it fixes this mess in the server case and creates a stable base for folks to target. But doing that on the desktop is extremely unlikely to happen for all the reasons that you cited.
Note, I'm not that personally devastated. I use Linux as a server and embedded OS. I use it as a desktop for working on stuff (where I get to enjoy just how nearly close Spotify runs under Wine these days) but for media consumption and weekend hobbyist projects? I use a Mac for my desktop because I have X amount of time and I don't want to spend it fixing libraries, upgrading the rest of the system (python, every core library, etc.) just to install one application, and so on. I've made my peace with reality. I'm just trying to point out that if for some reason anyone still cares about getting to the "year of the Linux desktop", it will never happen until the issues in that article are fixed. Desktop users (the kind we'd actually win) don't care about shiny, they care that Microsoft Office from 3 years ago "just works". That's what would be required if we actually wanted to have a mass userbase on the desktop.
Jon.
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Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 17:31 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Small correction.Desktop users (the kind we'd actually win) don't care about shiny, they care that Microsoft Office from 3 years ago "just works". Sadly this is not so simple. They care both about Microsoft Office from 3 years ago (because they need to create their homework or need to create this !^#*@!*# presentation for their boss) and about “latest and greatest” buzz-generating gimmick (be it game or some new hobby). This combination is fundamentally incompatible with ditribution-centric world.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:15 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Ok, so maybe users also care about some latest gimmick like a game or whatever :) But fundamentally, they care that their computer *works*. They define works as "I click on the Microsoft Office icon, it works" or something similar to that. They don't give a damn whether you've got fancy 3D effects, or whether you can rewrite the whole UI in JavaScript. If I were a betting man (and I was one person who didn't buy a lottery ticket in the US yesterday), I would bet money that if we actually ever asked mass consumers what they want, many of the "innovations" would be low down the list and only of interest to the cadre of unwashed sweaty geeks who hang out at Best Buy on a Saturday afternoon building the latest gaming machine. In other words, the reason I don't go to PC stores on weekends.
Certainly in my experience of talking to real people - friends, family, etc. - who are not techie, none of them care about the latest stuff. Most of them are running some several year old version of Windows or OSX and running a mixture of older and newer apps. They have a very reasonable expectation that software just installs and works, and that software they bought 3 or 5 years ago just installs and works. They also have a reasonable expectation that brand new software still works because the platform they are on is not such a moving target that the developers of those apps are able to target something a few years old and reach everyone.
It's really not rocket science. It's *boring* science. It isn't fundamentally incompatible with distributions, it's fundamentally incompatible with "oooh, shiny". It requires extreme restraint, a co-ordinated, standardized approach, and dare I say it, a little intentional "stagnation" in terms of the burn and churn. And also, I'm not saying this has to happen. I'm only saying it has to happen if we care about getting mass adoption of Linux as a desktop and having articles like this one - and a number of other ones recently - end very differently.
Jon.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:20 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
So, dare I say it, being successful as a consumer offering would mean taking a huge amount of the current "fun" out of it. Absolutely, that is what I'm saying lest there be any doubt about that. Having a boring, stable platform would be very unsexy, but it would sell like hotcakes.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:44 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Having a boring, stable platform would be very unsexy, but it would sell like hotcakes. Tell that to Nokia and RIM. Unless you can explain why the same people who abandoned “boring, stable platforms” on mobile (BlackBerry, PalmOS, Symbian, etc)and went with “oooh, shiny” iOS and Android will do the opposite on desktop this theory looks suspicious. People want both “boring, stable platform” and “oooh, shiny” depending on their mood. You said so yourself: Most of them are running some several year old version of Windows or OSX and running a mixture of older and newer apps. Yes, and distros assume that if you want new version of GCC then you automatically need new GNOME or KDE experiments. That's the problem. It's hard to mix and match - and this is what people expect as you've explained. That's why “just use CentOS” “solution” to GNOME3 “problem” does nor work, for example.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:25 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Unless you can explain why the same people who abandoned “boring, stable platforms” on mobile (BlackBerry, PalmOS, Symbian, etc)and went with “oooh, shiny” iOS and Android will do the opposite on desktop this theory looks suspicious. That's easy. On a conceptual level, people understand phones much better than they understand desktop PCs. Mobile phones started out as phones that weren't screwed to your wall, then at some point you could use them when you were away from home, and then in small incremental steps they grew extras such as MP3 players, calendars, little games and so on. Eventually they got web browsers and then apps. (Do remember that the first iPhone didn't actually have native apps except from Apple.) Even so their users perceive them as »mobile phones«, not as »mobile computers whose thousands of features incidentally include the ability to place and receive phone calls«, which is, technically, what they really are these days. Desktop PCs, on the other hand, are big and ugly machines that tend to malfunction in any of a myriad different ways or get viruses so you have to find somebody to fix them for you because they're much too difficult to fix by yourself. People like their computers to »just work« because that is a very precarious state which can change completely at no notice whatsoever (in the worst case, visit the wrong web site just once and ka-boom, there it goes) and is a big hassle to get right again. Phones, like most appliances, are generally a lot more reliable than desktop PCs and so people are a lot more open to small incremental additions that seem fun and exciting because, hey, whatever happens you can still make phone calls.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:38 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Indeed. There's a lot of truth in there. I've blogged about my opinions on consumer behavior and how - on the whole - you get one chance to define expectations for something new and disruptive and then live with it forever. Microsoft would love to have thrown away Windows years ago, but they couldn't because they had to - shock - provide a compatible, consistent, customer and user experience. It's not actually consistently crap either. Sure, there are viruses, malware, and crashes...and what makes anyone here think that we're magically so much better that we wouldn't have all of the same kinds of problems if we were the 99% rather than the 1%?
Jon.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:22 UTC (Sun) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
You are basically asking for "reimplement windows".
Why would people switch to the "windows copy" and not just use windows instead? Cost is not a factor as the OS comes bundled so most customers do not even see the cost.
You cannot succeed by trying to copy your competition. You have to innovate and that means trying new things and not being overly conservative.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 21:25 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Well, Linux has failed to innovate in the desktop experience.
Maybe we should actually _copy_ what makes competitors successful and THEN start to innovate?
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 22:34 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Well, Linux has failed to innovate in the desktop experience. Not true. The one single outstanding feature that sold a friend of mine on Linux as opposed to Windows was that in KDE 3.5 (the current version at the time) it was possible to print from OpenOffice.org directly to a KMail PDF attachment. For her that was true innovation. It was great for her to see people actually add something that, viewed objectively, is such an obviously useful feature, instead of confusing and extraneous stuff that nobody ever actually needs. It improved her life considerably, not just because of the feature itself but through experiencing that here were people doing these things for her that the Microsoft guys never bothered to think of. I personally think it is utter and pointless stupidity on the part of the KDE developers to not have hung on to the feature in KDE 4, but that is neither here nor there.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:49 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
> I personally think it is utter and pointless stupidity on the part of the KDE developers to not have hung on to the feature in KDE 4, but that is neither here nor there.
Really? I think that's more like the entire point. If you upgrade and a feature goes away, that's a backwards compatibility bug.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 12:38 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] It would only be a bug if the KDE developers actually cared about backwards compatibility, which on the whole they don't appear to do. We must remember that, from what we can see, the KDE project's primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers, not convenience or stability for KDE users. Which is understandable given that volunteers, who make up the vast majority of KDE developers, tend to do whatever it is they do for fun, not for drudgery. And I'm not picking on KDE here. I'm not a GNOME user, but from what I can see about GNOME, it's just more of the same thing.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 12:42 UTC (Mon) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
"We must remember that, from what we can see, the KDE project's primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers, not convenience or stability for KDE users."
Can you just stop gratuitously insulting us? It's extremely tiresome.
You must know you're wrong, and by now you must know there were pretty good reasons for the regressions in printer support and you must know that there are people working very hard with Qt to get back all that functionality.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:27 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] You must know you're wrong, and by now you must know there were pretty good reasons for the regressions in printer support and you must know that there are people working very hard with Qt to get back all that functionality. So? KDE 4 came out in 2008. You don't mean to tell me that this job has taken more than four years and isn't finished yet? I was under the impression that Qt was meant to make things easier for developers. I don't really care about what kind of internal mess keeps KDE from providing features that it used to provide. All I can see is that stuff that used to work well no longer works at all. I'm really an understanding sort of person but I can't fault other people – especially the ones whose KDE-3.5-based Linux systems I support – for thinking this is not the way things ought to go. (The stock reply here is, of course, »If it is that important to you then effing do it yourself«. But that only reinforces my original point.) It's not just printer support, anyway. We're having this discussion in the first place because ABI stability in Linux is problematic especially with respect to the desktop environments (the kernel, libc, and X11 ABIs, to move farther down the stack, are doing reasonably well there). If the desktop environment projects were more dedicated to maintaining backwards compatibility, the problems touched on in this thread would be a lot easier to solve. This includes issues such as making it difficult to have several versions of the software installed at the same time (which I understand is a problem with GNOME 2 vs. GNOME 3), or dropping all support for KDE 3.5 basically immediately after KDE 4.x came out (which at the time was barely usable). As things stand today, even if something like LSB stipulated KDE SC 4.8 as the official »stable« base for desktop applications, nobody knows what things will gratuitously be broken in KDE SC 4.9 because, like in so many cases before, somebody thought they desperately needed to be reimplemented from scratch. The only obvious way out of this is to keep a complete 4.8-vintage KDE around on the off-chance, and to hope that it (and applications running on it) will be able to interoperate with newer versions of KDE.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:41 UTC (Mon) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Yes, I'm going to tell you that. Anyway, read for yourself:
http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/kf5_localization_a...
details the current situation, and
http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/the_good_the_bad_a...
tells you about the earlier work. Let me quote:
"Just to recap, the branch at http://qt.gitorious.org/~odysseus/qt/odysseus-clone/commi... contains the Advanced Page Selection features such as Current Page, Odd/Even Pages, Server Side page selection, and non-continuous Page Ranges."
That was in 2009.
So just stop spouting offensive nonsense like "KDE developers primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers". That simply isn't true, and you know it.
You can make your point in a way that shows that you're "really an understanding sort of person". and there's no reason for you to be a jerk on behalf of other people who aren't.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:20 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] That was in 2009. Indeed. It is now 2012. There are various adjectives that one might think of when hearing this. The one that comes to my mind, considering that we have gone through 9 releases of KDE and several of Qt since when this stuff used to work, is »pathetic«. I'm deliberately not dissing John Layt here, who AFAICT did all he could to advance the issue and more, but the observation that the development processes of KDE and Qt apparently managed to stifle any sort of useful progress on an important regression like this for years, while at the same time taking on board loads and loads of completely new stuff, speaks volumes. So just stop spouting offensive nonsense like "KDE developers primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers". That's not what I said. I said »The KDE project's primary mission …«, which is something completely different. The fact that there are a few developers who do feel called upon to fix these long-standing issues does not detract from the picture as a whole. The problem is really that there are apparently too few such developers. For every single KDE developer like John Layt, who I will be more than happy to ply with good German beer if he ever shows up in the Mainz area, there are probably several who are only in it for the fun. What we see as a result is a project which seems deeply in love with everything that is new and shiny and cool while not-quite-so-cool things like feature regressions from five years ago are left to a small minority of people who feel responsible enough to address them, if they are ever addressed at all. In a properly governed infrastructure-type (as opposed to fun-type) project, regressions like these would not have been allowed to arise in the first place. We're not talking about random bugs here, after all, but about things that can be documented and planned for in advance. Let me quote from the first comment on one of the blog posts you mentioned which said »Perhaps 2010 will become the year of the kde desktop, with complete printing options, (hopefully) network management, supported video cards and FINALLY a decent standard browser.«It is now 2012 and at least two of these items remain on the to-do list.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 20:33 UTC (Mon) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] I was ready to be sympathetic, despite being one of the people who has been suffering from the lack of decent print support in KDE4. Then I read this bit in the link you provided:The CPD solves a very specific problem, that is the broken state of print dialogs on Linux using Cups. It doesn't solve the problem we and Qt have of also supporting printing on Windows and OSX using the same API. So there is actually a decent module to handle printing, but linux users must wait 4 years to see it, just because the same solution wouldn't work on Windows? Heck, the Windows + KDE users, if there are any, probably have other ways to deal with printing. "We don't like #ifdef" hardly seems like an adequate justification for this decision.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:30 UTC (Mon) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
>> "We must remember that, from what we can see, the KDE project's primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers, not convenience or stability for KDE users."
> > Can you just stop gratuitously insulting us? It's extremely tiresome.
That his point of view which is not said in an insulting way, you disagree so you feel insulted, but FWIW I agree with his view: if the KDE project's goal was primarily the convenience and stability for KDE users, then things would have been handled very differently, for example not activating by default unstable technology, not making "big bang" release such as KDE4.0, etc.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 16, 2012 12:06 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>"We must remember that, from what we can see, the KDE project's primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers, not convenience or stability for KDE users."
> Can you just stop gratuitously insulting us? It's extremely tiresome.
> You must know you're wrong
To be honest, I for one wasn't aware that that was disputed and was hence under the impression that his statement was an objective fact. I would never have guessed that it would be found offensive, so I doubt there was any insult intended.
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