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LWN's 2013 PredictionsLWN's 2013 PredictionsPosted Jan 4, 2013 21:23 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)In reply to: LWN's 2013 Predictions by ebassi Parent article: LWN's 2013 Predictions
Compared to writing an application for Windows, yeah, writing an application for Linux is really easy. All you have to do is GPL it and make it attractive enough that users want it -- and presto! -- the distribution's people do the hard work for you, and they'll even help you figure out difficult things like processor optimization flags and so on. Sure, sometimes mistakes are made, like when a certain distribution compiles my app against a different version of llvm than their graphics driver, but that's kind of a given: mistakes will be made.
On Windows, on the other hand... There's the endless plethora of varieties of Windows, xp, vista, 7, 8 -- with the various service packs, but even with the various sets of patches: on some versions of Windows 7 with some set of security patches, installing an application while Windows checks for updates will make sure the install half-fails: the app will refuse to start, until Windows is booted for the first time, _or_ unless the user manually chooses "repair the install". And this is with Microsoft's own msi installer system, mind.
Linux makes life easy for the application developer. Real easy. Most of us app developers don't realize how easy we have it until we try to port to Windows (or OSX).
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LWN's 2013 Predictions Posted Jan 4, 2013 21:46 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
" Compared to writing an application for Windows, yeah, writing an application for Linux is really easy. All you have to do is GPL it "
Making all applications GPL'ed to get distributions to redistribute them just isn't going to fly. Lots and lots of apps that users want are never going to GPL'ed and it is not like distributions can package all GPL'ed apps either. The most commonly used ones? sure but there are hundreds of stuff that aren't in the distro repos and probably never will.
If you are already part of the core ecosystem of free software apps, the centralized repo model works for you. If you are a independent software developer, Linux model is very problematic and people who are doing it are sometimes targeting just one distro (commercial ISV market - RHEL, Steam like folks - Ubuntu) and excluding everyone else.
LWN's 2013 Predictions Posted Jan 4, 2013 22:29 UTC (Fri) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link]
Right, and also the distributions are really cool to you and have your fast release cycle instead of their own super slow cycle that only ships stuff you have worked more than two years ago.
LWN's 2013 Predictions Posted Jan 4, 2013 22:44 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
And you never get bug reports about bugs fixed in releases you made years ago but still running in ancient supported enterprise linux distros, either. Oh no never.
(Worse yet, sometimes the bug was never present in a release version at all, but the distro vendor picked up a prerelease! Sometimes you're lucky and they picked up the subsequent bugfix in an erratum, but even then there are some users who are too conservative to ever apply any bugfixes to their production systems at all because they might disrupt something, but who think that it makes sense to report the resulting long-fixed bugs to the upstream with great indignation, or rather to the first name that pops up in Google when they search for the name of the software...)
LWN's 2013 Predictions Posted Jan 5, 2013 9:24 UTC (Sat) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Yeah, it happens, for some reason pretty much only with Ubuntu users in my experience. Maybe because they are in a huge majority. If I get a bug report for an older version, I'll thank the reporter for the effort they took and point them to the kubuntu beta ppa, which always contains the latest version we've released. End of "problem".
I know it's attractive to see problems everywhere and argue that the status quo is broken and needs to be replaced, but for me as an application developer the current model really works a lot better for me than what I have to do on Windows. Especially if you try to push your application through one of the app stores on Windows.
LWN's 2013 Predictions Posted Jan 8, 2013 13:21 UTC (Tue) by jpnp (subscriber, #63341) [Link] ...for some reason pretty much only with Ubuntu users in my experience. Maybe because they are in a huge majority.Or because Canonical provide updates for Ubuntu for a longer period, certainly compared to Fedora which has a userbase who must be much more up-to-date to receive security patches.
LWN's 2013 Predictions Posted Jan 8, 2013 13:50 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
That's possible as well -- but I'm quite sure that I have way more users on *buntu than on Fedora.
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