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Remote desktop vs. remote displayRemote desktop vs. remote displayPosted Feb 15, 2013 1:26 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: Remote desktop vs. remote display by neilbrown Parent article: LCA: The ways of Wayland
I'll point out that the comment I was replying to was making the case that a specific use case was a 1% or tiny fraction of users, and so we should just accept that we are such a small minority that our needs don't matter and we should just accept the loss of capabilities that we've used for decades because the vast majority of users don't need them.
If that is a valid logic trail to follow, all of Linux should not exist.
I fully agree with you that even small percentages amount to lots of people, and that the number of people doesn't matter as long as there are people who want to use it.
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Remote desktop vs. remote display Posted Feb 15, 2013 10:02 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] There is nothing wrong with serving the needs of tiny niche (there are a lot of specialized companies who sell things by hundreds and may be, if they are lucky, thousands), but you must understand that you are serving the needs of tiny niche. But there is such thing as fairness: if you serve some tiny niche you get the resources from this tiny niche, you can't demand the resources spent for them mainstream. When people demand to keep that "X network transparency" they, in fact, demand that their obscure needs must be honored before needs of wast majority of the population - which is quite strange thing to do. Develop software for the 99% of cases first, then start thinking about that remaining 1%. If it's turned out that you can not solve 99% problem and 1% problem simultaneously then solve just 99% problem. People who need solution for 1% problem can then solve it themselves or do without. I think people who endlessly raise this "perfect X network transparency" argument again and again actually understand these basic facts of life, they just refuse to accept them. I mean: they are trying to influence developers who are trying to solve 99% problem exactly because they know they don't have resources in their tiny niche to keep it from breaking. But I still don't understand why 99% of users should suffer for the needs of 1%. It's just illogical. It's as in hypothetical case where DirectX is banned on Windows because Linux users can't use it. Makes no sense at all.
Remote desktop vs. remote display Posted Feb 15, 2013 10:22 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
If you start cutting features because "99% of the users don't need that feature", you will very quickly get to a system that has no users.
I've seen businesses do exactly this. One company had a 3 year development effort to re-write their entire codebase, along the way they had a couple dozen decisions to cut features that only 1-2% of the corporate clients they had used. The end result (which got announced with great fanfare) was a version that only 30 out of their 2000 customers could use because of the missing features.
Remote desktop vs. remote display Posted Feb 15, 2013 10:49 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If you start cutting features because "99% of the users don't need that feature", you will very quickly get to a system that has no users. Sure. No doubt about it. But if you'll not implement features which are needed by 99% of users because they break this oh-so-important 1% of then you'll get there much, much, MUCH faster. And this is, in fact, what happened with Linux. Do you know that bestselling laptop on Amazon right now, today is Linux-based laptop? Go and check, if you want. What? What do you mean "it's not Linux"? It sure is. It just culled some features not useful by 99% of users (such as the ability to run compiler locally) and added some features useful for 99% of users (such as the ability to watch netflix), that's all.
Remote desktop vs. remote display Posted Feb 15, 2013 10:28 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
> When people demand ....
I've noticed that ... people seem to demand, but don't put any resources into it. I don't really understand that attitude.
People who endlessly raise any argument again and again are best ignored. But if they were, these comment threads would be much shorter.
:-)
Remote desktop vs. remote display Posted Feb 15, 2013 11:09 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I've noticed that ... people seem to demand, but don't put any resources into it. I don't really understand that attitude. It's not hard to understand, really. Think about it. Here is the feature they used for decades but which is not used by most of other users and which is major PITA to support. This combination means that they have no hope to keep it supported independently (because it needs a lot of resources) and it means that they can't argue that "hey, there are few of us, but we only need ten lines of code here and dozen more there", so what can they do? Raise huge racket and hope that developers will be intimidated. It's as simple as that. This strategy rarely works, but it sure is amusing to watch. Think "focus follows mouse" which went over similar contortions and was eventually punted from one of the most popular Linux desktops (I mean Unity here, of course). It to went from "something most definitely supported" to "something which works poorly" to "something which can be enabled but you can't really used" to "it's no longer an option". People who raise this racket are all too familiar with this pattern and they hope to slowdown (or, ideally, stop) it at early stages.
Remote desktop vs. remote display Posted Feb 15, 2013 12:16 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Assuming we're talking about remote display (per-window or per-desktop, both are equally possible with Wayland right now, today), who ever - ever - said it wouldn't be supported? What's being taken away?
What part of 'this works right now and here's the git branch to go look at if you don't believe me' was misleading?
Remote desktop vs. remote display Posted Feb 15, 2013 17:55 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
And who the heck does khim think is intimidating anyone? I've seen intimidation. There's none here. Yowls of 'please don't break this' perhaps, but intimidation? You must be kidding.
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