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Free is too expensive (Economist)Free is too expensive (Economist)Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:27 UTC (Sat) by farnz (guest, #17727)In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by danieldk Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
So choose an old version of RHEL as the starting point - if you choose RHEL 4, you're going back to before OS X 10.5 (but not before XP - however, XP is an oddity, as before XP, there was a new MS OS every 3 years or so, whereas Vista was delayed until 2006, and there was no mass upgrading until 2009 when Windows 7 was released). If you choose RHEL 5, as I suggested, you're going back to 2007 - as old as OS X 10.5, which you're holding up as an example. Further, RHEL 5 still has another 5 years of support left - it's not out of support until 2017; if you support RHEL 5 and RHEL 6, you've got two versions to support, compared to the 3 versions you have to support if you support OS X 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7. If that's all it takes, why aren't people releasing for RHEL in droves, and leaving other distros behind?
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Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:46 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Basically, that's what's happening with commercial Linux software. It's usually certified for a couple of recent RHELs and if it works on other distributions then it's a free bonus.
Why desktop users don't flock to RHEL? Well, mostly because RHEL is not really usable as a desktop.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 0:46 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If that's all it takes, why aren't people releasing for RHEL in droves, and leaving other distros behind? Do you see millions of RHEL desktop users anywhere? I don't. This is all about ROI. The goal of the application developer is to get as much bang for the buck as possible. Yes, even if it's free, noncommercial software: in this case developer does not get money back directly (thus we can not just calculate ROI) but s/he get the reputation, bug reports, etc. If your platform is too unstable (like Fedora or Ubuntu) then this raises development and, more importantly, deployment cost. ROI is negative. If it's too rare (like RHEL: quite popular on server, almost unknown on desktop), then ROI is negative, again. Stable API is strict requirement, but it's not enough. You also need good hardware support, pretty pictures (remember the infamous We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them?), etc. And the fact that GNOME3, KDE and others tackle this problem is good and proper if they want to attack desktop head-on. But all these nice developments will not help if there will be no easy way to develop and deploy applications for said desktop!
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:13 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Interesting. That would then explain why that there aren't many thousand very high-quality applications that work well together that actively track Fedora (or latest Debian, Ubuntu, or whatever fast-moving distribution tickles your fancy).
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 18:15 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Well, yes. Only a handful applications target Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever. Most just don't bother and only provide source (while MacOS and Windows users can easily try them). Then overworked and increasingly grumpy packagers try to port all these thousand applications - but the result is increasingly disappointing. Can I try VLC? Sure! Wow. Cool. I'm using Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS (because, you know, I need to do some work, too, not just play endlessly with experimental distributions). What are may choices? Well: we recommend you install VLC 1.1.x manually. Situation when you have one package for Ubuntu 10.04 only and another for Ubuntu 11.10 only is not uncommon. If that was sarcasm then sorry, it does not work: sure, some packages are still provided for a few major distributions, but increasingly people just stop doing this. And even when this happens Linux versions are often behind WRT features and bugs which are fixed in MacOS/Windows versions in hurry linger for years in Linux version. Chrome/Mozilla are prime examples: Linux users often complain about that, but frankly, do they deserve anything else?
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 8:26 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Why not RHEL on the desktop?
- it's expensive for non-enterprise users compared to Ubuntu
The idea of targetting a distro is reasonable, and Ubuntu is already the target to some degree, but the other 30%+ of the Linux world would be left out if this was the only target.
Ubuntu tends to require the latest OS version for some hardware support, yet imposes very disruptive 6-monthly updates generally - the LTSs are really no more stable than the other versions these days, so it's just luck if you end up on an LTS as the version that works for your hardware. In fact hardware regressions are the fly in this model - Ubuntu's quality is sufficiently variable and hardware-dependent that it's hard to predict which version will work well on a given PC.
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