Then why bother?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 12:11 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Then why bother? by njs
Parent article: Android netbook is a possibility (Inquirer)

So, umm, your argument is that the reason the consumer market has not switched en masse to Linux is that lots of people would like too, but have decided to wait because they have piles of Linux software from 1998 sitting around, and modern Linux can't support it so they just stay with... Windows?

Nope. My argument is that it's the reason few "early adopters" return back in frustration. "The ability to seamlessly run 10 year old apps" and "the ability to run apps 3-5 year newer than your distribution" are necessary features, not sufficient. Transition is inherently slow and constly process process: Microsoft spent many billions and over 10 years to switch consumers from DOS to Windows - and it was in control of both DOS and Windows back then! But without expected ability to run newer programs on older systems and older programs on newer systems you are losing what little consumers you manage to gain!

Backwards compatibility of the sort you mention will start mattering a few years after Linux becomes mainstream and there are lots of funky binary-only apps being distributed through non-distribution channels -- if that day ever arrives.

Actually such compatibility matter here and now. How can I use Python3 on my Ubuntu 8.04 desktop? How can I use OpenOffice3 on Ubuntu 8.04 desktop? The answer is "there are no easy way" and frankly it's insane. The ultimate goal must be 8-10 years back and 3-5 years forward, but so far you don't have even few month compatibility in forward direction and 1-2 years in backward direction. That's not consumer-acceptable rate.

Until then, basically no-one cares about that lack of functionality, because no-one needs it, and community-developed FOSS is never written before there is user demand.

Then it just means that community-developer FOSS can not ever produce consumer desktop. Not a big deal, we have big companies for that. May be it'll be Android, may be it'll be something else - but eventually someone will produce FOSS consumer desktop, but it'll not be community-developed...

There's a separate question of whether we'll be able to provide compatibility then, when it does start mattering, but given our excellent support for *Windows* apps from 1998 (and for that matter, Mac apps, and I bet some of those consoles too), I'm not staying up nights worrying about our ability to make frikkin' ELF-with-some-old-libraries work.

Windows and Mac apps are supported well because Microsoft and Apple spent billions on solving this problem. They planned in advance (applications from pre-planned era are not well-supported at all) and while the did few mistakes then never suggested recompilation as solution for compatibility problem.

I think that eventualy we'll have FOSS consumer desktop, but it'll never be GNOME/KDE/etc desktop. They respect rights of developer more then rights of user and so they can not cover this niche.

Then why bother?

Posted Jan 8, 2009 13:21 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

>But without expected ability to run newer programs on older systems and older programs on newer systems you are losing what little consumers you manage to gain!

Please demonstrate one of these real existing users that switched to Linux, but then switched back when they could not run 10 year old Linux programs.

The argument about the forward direction you just added is more reasonable, but still -- please demonstrate one of these real existing users who switched to Linux, and was desperate to have the latest and greatest version of random apps like Python 3 and OO.org, *but* was scared of upgrading to the latest and greatest version of their distro.

Unless you can demonstrate that such users exist and are the normal case, then your claim that this is the actual cause of Linux's failure to dominate the desktop is simply inaccurate.

>Windows and Mac apps are supported well because Microsoft and Apple spent billions on solving this problem

Please read harder. Microsoft did not spend billions developing Wine. The opposite, if anything. Wine's existence disproves your argument that wah-wah FOSS people cannot achieve compatibility with anything -- they can do pretty amazing things, in fact, so long as doing so actually accomplishes something useful. The reason no-one spends much effort on compatibility for Linux apps because if they did, *under present circumstances* -- which are different from the circumstances for Windows and Mac OS! -- no-one would use it anyway, and it would have no positive effect in the real world.

Visit any newbie forum, please.

Posted Jan 8, 2009 14:00 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Please demonstrate one of these real existing users that switched to Linux, but then switched back when they could not run 10 year old Linux programs.

These people don't really create a lot of noise (who will admit they made a mistake?) but you can find a lot of horror stories related to distro upgrade (use Google is you wish) - usually it ends with Switch back to Windows? No way! (or something similar) but that just means guy is geeky enough to actually stick with Linux.

The argument about the forward direction you just added is more reasonable, but still -- please demonstrate one of these real existing users who switched to Linux, and was desperate to have the latest and greatest version of random apps like Python 3 and OO.org, *but* was scared of upgrading to the latest and greatest version of their distro.

Visit any newbie forum. Usually such people are ridiculed and ostracized, so you'll only ever find one or two messages from them and then long thread about virtues of the system upgrade - you can safely presume at this point person in question either gave up on Python3/OO.org/whatever and may be on Linux is general. I can name one such guy with 100% certainity however: myself. I'm using Linux on my "server system" but stopped trying to switch to Linux on my main system. Too much hassle. It was fun to tweak this and that 10 years ago - and Windows was pretty unreliable back then. Today Windows is pretty reliable, I can throw random stuff on it (including OO.org 3.0, Firefox 3.0 and so on) and it usually lasts 2-3 years before it becomes totally unusable - at which point it's just reinstall and start from scratch. I personally know quite a few Linux administrators who are using Windows (or sometimes Mac) on desktop "because it's easier to support"! If you can not convince guy who's work is to support thousand of Linux systems to use Linux on his/her desktop because "it's too much hassle" - who can you convince?

Microsoft did not spend billions developing Wine.

Microsoft spent billions developing backward- compatible system. Emulation is not invention. It's hard work, but if you manage do it - you get all properties of the original for free. There are free emulators for most consoles (except latest generation), yet there are zero free consoles in the world.

The reason no-one spends much effort on compatibility for Linux apps because if they did, *under present circumstances* -- which are different from the circumstances for Windows and Mac OS! -- no-one would use it anyway, and it would have no positive effect in the real world.

Sorry, but this is bull-shit. People do try to solve this problem (there are a lot of failed solutions like Autopackage or 0install) - but without organized effort from distributiors it's impossible. That's one of the reasons of low Linux penetration in my company, for example. We have choice of OS here: Linux, Mac or Windows on laptop (desktop is always Linux because a lot of our developer tools work only under Linux and only under one particular version of Linux). Most choose Windows (including me, of course), roghly 1/4 choose Mac and less then 5% choose Linux. Why? Too much hassle. Programs don't play well with others: flash can be blocked by acrobat reader, for example. This is result of backward compatibility neglect mostly: both flash and acrobat reader use OSS and linux still does not support such programs right on modern hardware.