Distributions for the Nexus 7 (TGDaily and HotHardware) [LWN.net]

Distributions for the Nexus 7 (TGDaily and HotHardware)

Posted Dec 29, 2012 0:25 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Distributions for the Nexus 7 (TGDaily and HotHardware) by shmerl
Parent article: Distributions for the Nexus 7 (TGDaily and HotHardware)

I care about technology and what is technically better.

Do you care about ability to use it for anything practical or not? That's critical question.

There are people who are doing things like Haiku: things which are technically interesting and challenging but which are not used by Joe Average and will never be used by Joe Average. Eventually they end up in some kinda VM and show “the possible alternate world” for the future generations.

And then there are practically useful things: for these you need popularity. Because technical problems can be fixed (Windows is prime example: Windows 3.0 was popular but highly unstable while Windows 7 is extremely stable and relatively secureз… more secure then Linux in some circumstances), but they can only be fixed when you have enough developers and you only have enough developers when your system is popular.

Systems which ignore “cheap popularity” and concentrate on “technical soundness” usually migrate from the second camp to the first one. Some developers accept and embrace such transitions (witness HURD), but some suddenly start caring about popularity at some point… but usually it's way too late then. *BSD are prime example: long time ago they stopped trying to win popularity contests and concentrated on “doing things right” (there are many ways to define what the “right” thing is—that's why we have many different versions of BSD). And they had huge headstart (when FreeBSD and NetBSD were already quite complete and useful systems Linux was a joke). Today they all are struggling to survive.

Note that this process is so acute today exactly because all these supposedly snobby Linux-only projects are struggling to survive, too: they are in similar race—but with Android instead. History repeats itself: Android started as something toy-like (from POV of “traditional” GNU/Linux), but it improves extremely fast (although not always in the direction people from traditional GNU/Linux background like) and it's easy to imagine world where in 5-10 years “traditional” GNU/Linux based desktop will be where *BSDs are today.

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