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Free is too expensive (Economist)

[Posted March 30, 2012 by corbet]

The Economist complains about the state of desktop Linux. "That said, even the latest KDE distributions are proving just as annoying to set up as Gnome versions. Your correspondent blames the rapid upgrade cycle for leaving too many features with rough edges, too many wonky drivers and utilities, and too many unchecked regressions (bugs caused by changes) in the kernel. All that Linux developers seem to want to do these days is add cool new features, rather than squish existing bugs and make the software more usable." The article is a little muddled, complaining about the "we know best" attitude while saying that Linux lacks the integration seen in iOS or Android, but it's worth a look.
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Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 20:50 UTC (Fri) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (233 responses)

The reporter is indirectly making the same point many of us have made (most recently Ingo, on G+, citing those of us who have said the same stuff in the past) that for desktop Linux to succeed it needs a stable platform. We need to get out of the business of providing 20,000 packages in a distro and get into the business of providing a 100% stable OS platform for others to build upon. That has worked very well in the Enterprise space, and is the reason why you see Android succeeding in the client space. There also needs to be a willingness to tollerate (not love, but tollerate) the desire for users to have things that they want. They want flash, so give it to them. Don't put on the "holier than thou" hat and tell them they can't have it, because they don't care. So, it needs to be trivial for users to download commercial software that they want to choose to add (choice) to their system and for it to just work against a standard platform.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 20:58 UTC (Fri) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link] (151 responses)

They want flash, so give it to them. Don't put on the "holier than thou" hat and tell them they can't have it, because they don't care. So, it needs to be trivial for users to download commercial software that they want to choose to add (choice) to their system and for it to just work against a standard platform.
Didn't you just described (K)ubuntu?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 21:05 UTC (Fri) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (150 responses)

Nope :) I don't want to "apt-get install" software, or "yum install" software, I want to be able to go to a website on my Linux Desktop, click on "download this application for Linux" and have it just install and work. I believe it is long since not the time for distros to carry every piece of software someone might want. Ingo articulates these comments very well in comparing where we are to Android Market and things like that - many people would be better off listening to what he says, and taking it seriously.

That's all I'm going to say on the topic in the interest of my blood pressure, etc. But please, do let's think about articles like this one. People en masse read things like the Economist, which has more than an order of magnitude higher readership than (excellent) websites like LWN. Put another way, in general, those who make IT purchasing decisions are far more likely to read and be influenced by stories like that one.

Jon.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 21:15 UTC (Fri) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]

Nope :) (...) I want to be able to go to a website on my Linux Desktop, click on "download this application for Linux" and have it just install and work.
But that's what I have in Kubuntu. I go to youtube and when I click on a button "install missing plugins" or something like that it does what I want. :)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 21:31 UTC (Fri) by jedidiah (guest, #20319) [Link] (37 responses)

> click on "download this application for Linux"

The current package management frameworks already allows for that option.

The software vendor also has the option of providing a Windows style GUI installer. These have been commonplace since the mid 90s. The developer can also provide a self contained tarball.

The far bigger problem is the perception that the market is too small to bother with.

In general, downloading things from random sources doesn't seem to be where the market is going. Android and Apple are great examples of this. Furthermore, the old approach of downloading things from random websites doesn't always work out nearly as well as some people like to pretend. That's probably why the market is moving away from that.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:34 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (34 responses)

The current package management frameworks already allows for that option.

Rilly? How to do this? Note that jcm said: I want to be able to go to a website on my Linux Desktop, click on "download this application for Linux" and have it just install and work.

If it's single link then obviously this is a single package which supports most of the Linux distributions and support both 32bit and 64bit flavors in the same package. Oh, and it supports different versions, too. I've already asked about the possibility and got nice explanation for why I can not do what I want.

Which is exactly what the articles like that one are talking about.

The software vendor also has the option of providing a Windows style GUI installer.

This is possible, but it's non-trivial, too. Essential ABIs are routinely rearranged and broken. LSB was supposed to offer some stable foundation, but it's not a platform, it's a joke: it does not support neither audio nor video output. For desktop in 2012 this is totally unacceptable.

The far bigger problem is the perception that the market is too small to bother with.

It's much worse: the perception is that market will never grow. WP7 has less users and more programs right now because people believe in Microsoft. They don't believe in Linux.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 23:41 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (33 responses)

If it's single link then obviously this is a single package which supports most of the Linux distributions and support both 32bit and 64bit flavors in the same package. Oh, and it supports different versions, too. I've already asked about the possibility and got nice explanation for why I can not do what I want.

Of course you can do what you want. The app store will know what sort of machine you have and what Linux distribution is installed, and will magically send you the correct package for your system. We don't need to futz around with packages containing several sets of binaries and stuff like that.

After all, the Google app store knows what sort of phone you have and can tell you beforehand whether an app will run on it, so there's no reason why a similar approach could not work for Linux. You will probably at some point have to register your machine with the app store (once).

It would be up to the app developer to provide the appropriate packages. Something like the SUSE build service might be helpful there. The app store could even (optionally) do the building/packaging on behalf of the developer. There would in any case be no guarantee that any app was available for any distribution/architecture combination, much like Android apps today don't run on every single device out there. If we ever manage to agree on a reasonable standardised platform for third-party apps then so much the better, but it's not essential for the concept to work.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:43 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (12 responses)

The average Linux application can barely manage to provide a tarball and an Ubuntu/Debian .deb (which will only work on a few recent versions of Ubuntu). This leaves other distros out in the cold, and even slightly older Ubuntu versions can't easily get many apps.

Desktop Linux doesn't need radical innovations. It just needs a stable core and ABI that doesn't change for 5-10 years (like Windows XP) where you can install any application on "Linux Platform 1".

I'm on the cusp of uninstalling desktop Linux having used it as my main desktop for about 5 years now, and after a decade plus of using Linux generally. Mostly because I'm past the phase when spending a lot of time on getting Linux to work was fun, and I just want my desktop PC to work, with all the hardware enabled, no sound problems, no full screen Flash requiring a reboot, no frequent Firefox hangs for 30 sec, etc.

I will still keep Linux for web software development in a VM, but for that I only need a server distro, where Linux is currently much better suited. I will also use desktop Linux for an elderly relative where it has all the applications needed, mostly, and for servers.

It's a great shame - Windows is as prone to viruses as ever since nobody keeps their third party apps up to date. I've had three mass emails recently from Windows trojans, including one from a techie with up to date antivirus. So there is definitely a niche for Linux as something that's more secure than Windows, but supports third party hardware unlike OS X.

One problem with the stable core + app store model for Linux is security updates - without something like Secunia PSI (a free vulnerability alerts and updates tool that's only possible due to funded high-end vulnerability management tools), it could be more painful to ensure that security related updates are done. If the app store tool only does 'update all apps', some vendors will end up taking features away after you have paid for them (infrequent but has happened on the iOS app store).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:42 UTC (Sat) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (8 responses)

> Mostly because I'm past the phase when spending a lot of time on getting Linux to work was fun, and I just want my desktop PC to work, with all the hardware enabled, no sound problems, no full screen Flash requiring a reboot, no frequent Firefox hangs for 30 sec, etc.

I'm sorry for you, but which distro are you using? None of my machines (and I use a few) exhibit such problems. All hardware works, no exceptions. No sound problems whatsoever, full screen Flash just works (why would it require a reboot?), and Firefox hasn't crashed any single time in a long time (maybe a year?), but I actually prefer Chromium. Are you sure your motherboard and memory are working OK?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 0:24 UTC (Sun) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (1 responses)

You're just lucky. In my experience pulseaudio is enough to turn any machine into a never-ending source of audio problems. I've learned how to get back to a functional sound system when it messes up, but having to do this every 3rd or 4th time I suspend or reboot is way past being fun. Full screen flash works on my laptop screen, but using it on a large monitor tends to lock up the video (various generations of integrated Intel chips) requiring a full reset. I don't see how you can blame Flash problems on the distro, and I don't think any of this can be attributed to hardware problems. Just two examples of really poor software quality, one from each side of the free/closed divide. We suffer either way.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 5:56 UTC (Sun) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

I`ve had my share of pulseaudio problems a few years back, but never the last years. wifi and graphics still caused problems, but this was always due to nondisclosed specs.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 8:16 UTC (Sun) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (5 responses)

I've mostly used Ubuntu 8.04 LTS - here are a few of the problems, all on hardware carefully chosen for reliability (Gigabyte ultra durable etc) and Linux compatibility:

- Ubuntu server - kernel panic due to WiFi driver, had to install kernel from 8.10 - this on a WiFi card chosen for compatibility

- Ubuntu desktop with 11.04 LTS
- frequent hangs/freezes for another reason - only solved by switching to Linux Mint 11 (Intel G33 GPU)

- Ubuntu desktop (main PC), NVidia 7900 then GTX260:

- frequent hangs/freezes over some months - solved by irqpoll and all_ide_generic on kernel command line
1. Flash full screen - I can go full screen but it takes over the screen then stops, and I can't recover normal desktop without ssh-ing in from another PC to kill the X session. So I reboot.
2. Firefox frequent hangs - goes to 100% CPU on one core a lot at the moment, perhaps due to a single tab but it's hard to find which one. Currently disabling extensions.
3. Firefox bug where IFRAME popped out into a new window with corrupted display. Now solved but went on for a long time.

This isn't remotely all the problems, just perhaps the 10% that were most serious. Lots of other problems with sound have caused problems, and my Dell 3115cn printer still won't print with correct size from some applications.

It's not just one PC, nor just one distro version, though it has all been Ubuntu. Since Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro it's reasonable to assume it should work OK, and most of these versions were LTS which is supposed to be stable - I usually wait 6 months after LTS for key bugs to be fixed.

Meanwhile, Windows 7 is really quite stable - it has some problems on my laptop PC with lots of corporate overhead, but on two other PCs it works rather well. These two are almost never rebooted. I also multi-boot into Windows XP for gaming, which is quite problem free. I do have many more minor application-level problems with the Windows systems, but that's partly due to who's using them (less techie person) or what they are doing (HTPC).

Linux takes a lot less maintenance once it's working correctly (easy apt-get type updates, no need to reboot, no antivirus overhead), but Windows in my experience is much easier to get working with all hardware functioning correctly, working full screen Flash, etc.

I am quite geeky e.g. building own kernel occasionally, getting a small fix into Apache 2.0, writing wiki code, etc.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 12:55 UTC (Sun) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]

My experience is the exact opposite.

I usually get Ubuntu working within an hour, another hour to install all the neccessary software I need, and then maybe 2-4 hours more to hunt down any additional problems (getting WiFi to work, Suspend/Resume, sound maybe...) - and those problems become less and less with each release.

Windows, in contrast, take around 1 hour to install, one more hour to locate all drivers to non-functioning hardware and peripherals (and try to avoid installing the associated crapware in the process), and then I have to spend several hours installing the software I use (again dodging a slew of crapware).

Not saying either is better, but both ecosystems have their faults.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 15:59 UTC (Sun) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] (3 responses)

"It's not just one PC, nor just one distro version, though it has all been Ubuntu. Since Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro it's reasonable to assume it should work OK, and most of these versions were LTS which is supposed to be stable - I usually wait 6 months after LTS for key bugs to be fixed."

You make two assumptions: That Ubuntu should have the least problems among distros and that their LTS version actually provides bug fixes and back ports. Unfortunately for you, you are wrong on both assumptions.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 16:05 UTC (Sun) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (2 responses)

Ubuntu has got worse over the years, but this illustrates the problem with desktop Linux - if the most popular distro is actually a bad choice, you need to be even more expert to choose the right one (and configure it, as Ubuntu is generally easy to set up, though with too many bugs).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 19:04 UTC (Sun) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] (1 responses)

I think this illustrates the problems with Ubuntu, and what Ubuntu promises its users. I do not know what the "desktop Linux" community can do about that.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:01 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

Ubuntu isn't alone. Problems like this appear on every distribution, old stable and brand new... and they're usually never fixed. The answer, instead, is to upgrade to the new release which may have fixes and certainly breaks other things.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 10:47 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (1 responses)

> It just needs a stable core and ABI that doesn't change for 5-10 years
> (like Windows XP) where you can install any application on "Linux Platform
> 1".

And what exactly is part of that ABI? Some hundreds of libraries? You expect those not being updated for years?

By the way, XP doesn't have "a stable ABI" either. Every program comes bundled with a shitload of libraries, even system-libraries, so it can run on XP. So the whole point is moot, unless you propose everything to bundle its own librabry or link statically.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 14:47 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>And what exactly is part of that ABI? Some hundreds of libraries?
Windowing toolkit, audio, video, 3D, base system.

>You expect those not being updated for years?
Not break ABI for years.

Microsoft does this just fine with Win32 ABI.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:22 UTC (Mon) by jedidiah (guest, #20319) [Link]

Part of Linux is choice.

If you choose to not be the target market for the kinds of developers that provide this mythical sort of web installation experience that doesn't really exist for Windows either, then that's your choice.

A Gentoo user should not be surprised that game developers are not catering to them.

Linux gives you the ability to shoot yourself in the foot. You should not then whine afterwards because you think your foot is bleeding.

If you want a Mac, then buy a Mac. Clearly you don't value the wide array of meaningful choices that something like Linux distributions offer. Don't destroy something just because you don't understand the alternatives.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 9:28 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (19 responses)

After all, the Google app store knows what sort of phone you have and can tell you beforehand whether an app will run on it

It's the other way around. Application includes minimum version of API in it's manifest file. Store only blacklists applications by the third-party requests (for example carriers like to blacklist tethering apps), it does not proactively track the compatibility story.

there's no reason why a similar approach could not work for Linux

There is: Linux desktop has no stable ABI thus if application works in distro M version N it does not mean it'll work in distro M version N+1. And forget about distro MM! Google's app store works because hardware vendors certify their variants of OS, not because Google magically makes apps compatible with some random crap.

It would be up to the app developer to provide the appropriate packages.

Does not work this way. Sure, some packages will provide updated versions to support different form-factors (for example some games needed to redo the controls when Android phones lost trackball), but it's mostly up to the OS vendors. Typical app developer releases app bundle exactly once.

There would in any case be no guarantee that any app was available for any distribution/architecture combination, much like Android apps today don't run on every single device out there.

It guarantees that it'll run. It does not guarantee that it'll work. There are a difference. If some required hardware is just not available then you don't have much choice: it's up to the app to decide how to handle the degraded mode. In some cases you can use some new hardware (not available when app was released) to emulate old APIs (witness ICS phones without hardware buttons and sensors: they emulate them), but usually user just looks on the program and decides if he wants reduced functionality or not. App developer is not forced to do anything in any case.

If we ever manage to agree on a reasonable standardised platform for third-party apps then so much the better, but it's not essential for the concept to work.

Yes, it is. Without stable ABI the whole concept crumbles. Developers don't want to track OS releases. They may decide to redo some flagman applications to make them better integrated with new OS - and even then it's not guaranteed. Most applications will never be updated.

That's why Intel is fixing this problem WRT Google Play Store, for example. Not Google and not app developers.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 12:24 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (8 responses)

It's the other way around. Application includes minimum version of API in it's manifest file. Store only blacklists applications by the third-party requests (for example carriers like to blacklist tethering apps), it does not proactively track the compatibility story.

So what? You tell the app store that your machine is running Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 on an amd64 architecture. You pick an app and click on the »Download« icon, and the app store sends you a package for the app that will run on Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 on amd64. Everyone is happy.

It may of course be the case that the app store doesn't have the app packaged for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 on amd64. In that case you won't get a »Download« icon. You may get a »Ask the app developer to provide a package for my system« icon. This will help app developers to figure out which distributions to support. The app store could also publish statistics on which distributions have the largest number of supported apps available (possibly by topic such as »games« or »web development tools«), which may help people pick what distribution to use in the first place.

There is: Linux desktop has no stable ABI thus if application works in distro M version N it does not mean it'll work in distro M version N+1.

A popular app store may create pressure on distributors and upstream projects (such as KDE or GNOME) to get their act together and be more careful about backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility isn't really a problem with Linux as such or with distributions, it is mostly a problem of upstream developer negligence or incompetence.

Also, if somebody at some point does define a cross-distro ABI that actually does provide desktop apps with what they require, that could be an alternative to targeting individual distros. If an app targets »LSB-NG 1.1«, that package would automatically be made available to all distros that are known to support that standard.

App developer is not forced to do anything in any case.

My experience with packaging stuff for Debian is that it is usually not a problem to move simple desktop apps forward from one version of Debian to the next, as far as the actual packaging is concerned. The ABI problem is potentially a different issue, but as long as you can get your stuff to compile and run, making it into a package for Debian N+1 isn't a big thing if you have already made it into a package for Debian N.

The app store concept would make most sense if it came with tools that would assist app developers with actually providing packages for different popular distributions (again, the SUSE build service comes to mind as a possible model). The whole system could – and probably would – gradually move towards a more standardised platform. Doing it the other way round, by trying to provide the standardised platform first and hoping for people (and distributions) to adopt it, is probably going to be less successful.

What will definitely not accomplish anything is sitting here and whining about how not only the present situation is terrible, but also how all the suggested approaches to ameliorate the present situation will never work. The Linux community does not work by revolution but by evolution, which is by its very nature difficult to direct. In the absence of a Steve Jobs figure who will lay down the law for everybody, the only thing we can do is offer something and hope that people will consider it a good idea and go along with it.

Please outline how your app store concept is going to make Linux a viable option for current Windows or OS X users while at the same time making the existing Linux distributions obsolete and not driving off existing users who like things as they are. (Note that »Google will sort it all out for us« is not an acceptable answer this time around.)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 12:42 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (1 responses)

A cross-distro app store with a single package format is needed, with some degree of guarantee that apps don't interfere with each other (maybe a sandboxed filesystem tree for the app's own files and settings, with only data files in a shared cross-app tree).

This package format would reference a stable cross-distro ABI version that changes only every 5-10 years.

Once you have this, app developers could target the app store and package format for ABI version N, and then just focus on developing their app's features.

Although Android threw out a lot of other Linux features and mandates Java, it shows that a more extreme version of this can be done. I'm not suggesting Android is the way, just that a Linux based system can be extremely popular with developers with the right approach.

Most Android users have no clue they are even using Linux, and that's exactly how it should be.

An alternative to a cross-distro ABI and app store would be that one distro, probably completely new, adopts this and becomes extremely popular (more like Android than Ubuntu).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 1:54 UTC (Sat) by khc (guest, #45209) [Link]

I wonder if it makes sense to argue about what's needed or not. Clearly, if a wider user base is a goal (and some would certainly argue that's not a goal or top priority), linux hasn't progress much on the desktop. So I fail to see how keep doing the same thing is going to make significant progress.

Some of us believe that an app store like model is needed, and some don't, and it's clear that at this point we can't prove it by arguing about it. What about those who believe that it has a chance group together and try it instead? I mean, it would definitely be a better use of our time than arguing about it on lwn.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 16:09 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Note that »Google will sort it all out for us« is not an acceptable answer this time around.

You want details? I'm afraid I can not oblige at this point. And not even because I'm bound by NDA, but because the whole strategy is not yet finalized. The observation is simple: Google has two separate app stores and that's one too many. The question is: how to better merge them together. Different approaches are possible: you can invent some way to run Android applications in normal Linux distribution (perhaps even in browser?), or you can try to make sure Chrome Apps will be comparable to native Android apps on phone (right now they are quite limited), etc.

IOW: it's not yet clear yet just how the desired thing will be created, but it's obvious what is needed. The obvious goal is to create the single app store for all supported platforms (not all apps will work everywhere, but some will be available on all platforms: Angry Birds on desktop are not all that different from Angry Birds on mobile so why do they exist in totally unconnected worlds?

Please outline how your app store concept is going to make Linux a viable option for current Windows or OS X users while at the same time making the existing Linux distributions obsolete and not driving off existing users who like things as they are.

You are asking bikeshed color when it not even known if bikeshed will even be involved at all. There are sooo few existing Linux users that it makes no sense to actually care too much about them. Windows and MacOS are significantly more important: both systems include built-in App Store (Windows store is in planning stages), both are not going away any time soon and both use Android-incompatible foundation (MacOS is closer, but Darwin is still quite different from Linux). Some people care about Linux users simply because they themselves are Linux users, but noone ever suggested that they represent more then a footnote in the whole story.

Linux technologies, on the other hand, are quite important because they are used extensively in Android and ChromiumOS already. That means that, of course, solution (if and when it'll materialize) will use a lot of them - and that means that it should be easy to include Linux desktop in the plans. But it's hardly feasible if the infamous “Linux community” does not care and where all suggestions to participate in plans on early stages are indignantly rejected.

Doing it the other way round, by trying to provide the standardised platform first and hoping for people (and distributions) to adopt it, is probably going to be less successful.

Well, time will tell. As you can see from the above the whole idea at this point is to increase the audience which application developer can target with a single package, not to gradually move towards a more standardised platform. Perhaps someone else will create a different kind of app store with build farms and multidistribution support - but it'll be different story altogether. It'll be interesting to see how successful they'll be.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 16:24 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

This is a very long-winded way of saying »I haven't the faintest idea.«

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 18:09 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

That's actually a fair answer to the question.

Nobody really knows what's going to happen with Linux desktop in near future. There's that sense of fin-de-siècle in the air - the current situation is unsustainable and Something Has To Happen.

But history also shows us that this 'something' can often be quite unexpected.

We'll see.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 12, 2012 16:55 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

>So what? You tell the app store that your machine is running Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 on an amd64 architecture.

Oh my god. I don't think you understand how completely outside the realm of feasibility this is for the non-technical user.

When tech support people bitch about users who only know that they're running 'Microsoft', and know that 'the blue e' is the internet, *they're not exaggerating*. That's not hyperbole. It's a literal description of a sizeable proportion of the user base.

I don't think it's even a significant minority, but actually the *majority* of users who don't know what version of Windows they're using - assuming they even know they're using Windows at all.

The proportion of people who know what processor architecture they're running has got to be far, far below 1%.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 12, 2012 17:14 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I don't think it's even a significant minority, but actually the *majority* of users who don't know what version of Windows they're using - assuming they even know they're using Windows at all.

Well, usually they do know that - Windows is too hyped-up to miss. What they don't know is where Windows ends and other things begins. I've seen the cases when people bought new PC (with Windows obviously) and vainly tried to find Excel there (which they have not bought).

The proportion of people who know what processor architecture they're running has got to be far, far below 1%.

This is quite obviously not true because Linux occupies about 0.5% of the market share and most Linux users know that.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 12, 2012 20:16 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Oh my god. I don't think you understand how completely outside the realm of feasibility this is for the non-technical user.

The machine will presumably know (or be able to find out) about its own distribution and architecture, so it can tell the app store on the user's behalf. A method to do this is the first thing a prospective app-store proponent would want to standardise.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 15:15 UTC (Sat) by welinder (guest, #4699) [Link] (1 responses)

Aren't you precisely the same guy who elsewhere chants "out with
the old and in with the new" _all_ _the_ _time_? I.e., ABIs are
unstable precisely because people like you don't see stability
as very valueable.

That makes you look like a troll.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 17:25 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Aren't you precisely the same guy who elsewhere chants "out with the old and in with the new" _all_ _the_ _time_?

Well, kinda. If the old interface is not stable then there are no benefits in keeping it around. If I can not write SysVInit file once and use it for all distributions then I don't see why do you want to keep it around.

I.e., ABIs are unstable precisely because people like you don't see stability as very valueable.

Nope. ABIs are unstable because noone tries to keep them stable. It's Ok to introduce “one final distruption” if it's needed to keep ABIs stable from that point on: witness GLibC 2.x or X11R6+. But if something was declared stable then you, of course, must keep it around.

It does not mean you can not introduce new, exciting things! For example DirectX 10+ is radically different from DirectX 1-9. Everything is different: internals, drivers, API, etc. Of course DirectX 9 emulation is provided - but this is only feasible when old version had stable ABI to emulate!

"out with the old and in with the new" happens regularly in iOS (think multitasking), Android (think GPU acceleration), Windows (think WF), and MacOS world (think Launchd). But it does not mean backward compatibility is not important! These are different (albeit related) issues.

If you don't embrace and accept new realities then you'll eventually be left behind (think PalmOS), but if you embrace them by dropping support for old applications then it's also hopeless (again: think PalmOS and webOS).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:28 UTC (Sun) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link] (7 responses)

This could be fixed with the following model though;

1. App store receives the source code from the developer.

2. Signs a deal about this code may be modified to fit different distributions, but not released in public.

3. App store keeps track of OS updates. and takes out a reasonable fee.

4. ???

5. Profit!

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:57 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

1. App store receives the source code from the developer.

And this is where the story ends. It's easy to convince junk producers to give you their code. It's very hard to do the same with well-known (and thus desirable) programs. They perceive their code as one of the most precious things and emphatically don't want to send it anywhere. Do you know that Google does not have access to the Flash plugin sources, for example¹? Even if it has explicit agreement with Adobe and ships it with Chrome.

Stallman may dislike it as much as he wants but proprietary software will not go away any time soon. Either your accept and accommodate the fact or you are destined for the obscurity.

There are nothing wrong with serving niche needs (gNewSense is fine distro for some people), but if we are talking about mainstream then this approach will not fly.

──────────
¹) This is not 100% true. There are few Google employees who have read-only access. Of course the can not pull it to their regular workstation, they need to work with it under supervision in special designated place.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 12:41 UTC (Sun) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link] (3 responses)

But the thing is, in this model you don't give away your code to the general public, you merely give the code to a maintainer that is specialized in porting software. It's no different than hiring a consultant to scrutinize security bugs in your code, except instead of looking at it they package it.

Such a model would fix most problems, but someone need to put up an app store and make it work with various distros.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 16:44 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

But the thing is, in this model you don't give away your code to the general public, you merely give the code to a maintainer that is specialized in porting software.

So what? You still send your “crown jewels” to some tiny company which probably does not have enough money in the bank to properly reimburse you in a case of the leak.

Note that typically companies don't even have the source rights for all the components (witness mighty struggles when they want to open-source something) so even if you'll manage to placate internal legal dogs it's still will be mighty struggle to obtain sources for all the middleware used.

Huge undertaking. And for what? For 1% of users? May be 2% if we are lucky? Are you joking?

Such a model would fix most problems, but someone need to put up an app store and make it work with various distros.

Sorry, but no. Such model may help with open sources packages (and thus it's probably worthwhile) and will include much derided “glorified bookmarks”, but most serious developers will just ignore it.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 9:15 UTC (Mon) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link] (1 responses)

But the thing is, it's still no different than hiring a consultant. It does not have to be a small company - Canonical, or Novell for instance, would do rather nicely. So yes, I obviously believe this model has a future, and it's a better one than staticly compiling everything always...

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 9:41 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

But the thing is, it's still no different than hiring a consultant.

Consultant usually is given access to small piece of the code at time. Often it agrees to sign extensive and complicated agreements to see even that. And in any case that's for serious issue (security) which warrants serious efforts. 1% of market is just not enough to do something like this. Heck, 5-10% of the market (which MacOS owns) is not enough: companies which are contracted to port stuff to MacOS often receive some things only in binary form (that's why CrossOver for Redistribution is popular way to go in these cases)!

IOW: consultant you are hiring plays by your rules and must convince you to do this or that. Access to the whole codebase is rare luxury which consultant rarely gets! Yet here you are starting from that premise…

It does not have to be a small company - Canonical, or Novell for instance, would do rather nicely.

So what? Google is larger than both of them and it still is not trusted enough without extensive agreement negotiated separately for each piece of software. This process just does not scale.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:28 UTC (Mon) by jedidiah (guest, #20319) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't even think it needs to be source code. It could just be the binaries. Then the "store operator" would be in charge of packaging. Some of the Loki installers have been redone for newer versions of Linux. That kind of approach could be done wholesale.

A universal frontend could be done for the old games by someone like Linux Game Publishing as a proof of concept. They could even throw in some old apps too.

Distribution support would be driven by demand of course.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 18:41 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

This plan will fall apart because distributions remove old versions of libraries willy-nilly.

Sure, if you'll first create some stable ABI and will keep the set of libraries for that ABI around then it'll work… and this is what this thread is all about.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:09 UTC (Sat) by kklimonda (subscriber, #60089) [Link]

> The software vendor also has the option of providing a Windows style GUI installer. These have been commonplace since the mid 90s. The developer can also provide a self contained tarball.

neither of those options will add the software to the package database making it harder than needed to do wide deployments, updating and uninstalling those applications.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 10:42 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]

> The software vendor also has the option of providing a Windows style GUI
> installer.

Oh yes. Make our lives a hell. Kick us in the balls and fuck us with a chainsaw.

THAT is exactly what nobody, EVER, should do. Making their own GUI installers, that is.

There is a _huge_ advantage Linux has (well, at least Debian and derivatives), and that is a working package-management. And anything that breaks this is not an improvement, but a regression.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 0:40 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (103 responses)

> I want to be able to go to a website on my Linux Desktop, click on "download this application for Linux" and have it just install and work.

But other OSes are moving away from that way of installing software (iOS doesn't even allow it, it's discouraged on Android, and MacOS now has an App Store too) to the way that Linux distros were doing it many years earlier (i.e. from a central package repository).

Exactly...

Posted Mar 31, 2012 2:10 UTC (Sat) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328) [Link] (17 responses)

You could always make a very portable Linux application binary by ignoring the distribution-specific packaging system and all the shared-library conventions of such a distribution. Make a statically-linked executable and self-sufficient installation tree, depending on little from the host OS except the kernel ABI and the barest minimum of POSIX and/or LSB stuff.

Follow some conventions like searching environment, /etc/yourapp/, ${HOME}/.yourapp/, and /opt/yourapp/ for some configuration data to override the compiled-in defaults (even up to looking at the dirname of argv[0] to locate yourself). In the past you might need to use IPC to talk to the X server, etc. Today I'd recommend running an embedded web service so the UI can be exposed over loopback (or network, if the user wants) to run in a browser.

This seemingly archaic distribution approach is how Apple and Google have approached the bundling problem. They have extremely flat catalogs of applications, each of which is essentially standalone so there is no need for complex inter-package dependency management, nor questions of where a myriad other third-party components can be found on disk. This makes automatic installation of applications very easy, without the overhead of a classic Linux distribution needing to carefully package and quality-check all of the applications as parts of a monolithic whole. Given this approach, they also extended the platform ABI a bit, without trying to solve the entire OSS dependency problem. On the downside, you lose the storage efficiency and simultaneous patch/update capability for common third-party dependencies, as each application is now bundling its own copy of such third-party components.

Exactly...

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:39 UTC (Sat) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]

http://people.gnome.org/~alexl/glick2/

Exactly...

Posted Mar 31, 2012 9:44 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (15 responses)

> This makes automatic installation of applications very easy, without the overhead of a classic Linux distribution needing to carefully package and quality-check all of the applications as parts of a monolithic whole.

But it has its drawbacks, too. In particular, it leads to the situation where you have (for example) 20 applications, each of which uses the same 20 libraries, thus requiring you to have 380 redundant copies of libraries installed. ISTR reading a blog post by a Calligra developer porting Calligra to Android, saying that this issue of massive redundancy meant that you would run out of memory fast if you tried to run multiple Calligra apps at once.

And of course there's also the issue that a security vulnerability in one of those libraries means that every app using it will need to issue a security update — and the app developer might not even rebuild the app with the fixed library, leading to vulnerabilities remaining unfixed for a long time. (This has happened repeatedly with zlib in particular.)

Exactly...

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:05 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

(I haven't been able to find the blog post I thought I remembered seeing. Maybe it was about some other KDE/Qt software on Android? Also, maybe the problem I remember reading about was actually running out of SSD storage space for installed apps, rather than running out of RAM.)

Exactly...

Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:17 UTC (Sun) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (8 responses)

The solution to this problem is to have a shared core of libraries which change slowly enough that they can be reasonably dumped into the install media of the linux distribution itself, and frozen afterwards (in terms of functionality/abi). This cuts down the number of libraries you do have to bring with the application bundles, and defines a common binary interface for all software. In practice this requires very strict and careful maintenance, and ideally we could get a common set of baseline binaries ("linux core version 1") shipped by all distributions.

Secondly, the application bundles should provide multiple applications. For instance, if you were to install new version of KDE or GNOME by the application bundle method, it better all be in 1 bundle. This, in turn, makes it possible to ship shared libraries in the bundle, and therefore reaping the memory saving benefits, and therefore it is probably the method that the Calligra suite should be using. Maybe some amount of system dependencies would be acceptable, such as X libraries or glibc, to limit the size of the bundle somewhat. (Just handwaving the problems away here, obviously. It's difficult to do until we get the "linux core version 1" defined and deployed.)

Exactly...

Posted Apr 2, 2012 19:12 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (7 responses)

I've been thinking that this is probably the way to go as well. You would have to get support pledges from anything that goes into "linux core version 1" unless you get another set of engineers to backport fixes and such (basically start a desktop-oriented Red Hat distribution).

The problem is that KDE and GNOME are upgraded in one huge dump and tend to not be forward compatible (4.8-built KDEAppFoo is unlikely to work without at least 4.8 kdelibs). I'm not sure if the KDE or GNOME communities could be convinced to split out the libraries from the applications in terms of API/ABI stability so that there would be just one version of kdelibs on the system instead of every application needing its own (instead of only those that actually need a newer version).

Exactly...

Posted Apr 5, 2012 12:59 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (6 responses)

What I would suggest is that both KDE and GNOME will upgrade in one huge dump, all applications and shared libraries together, and it should include pretty much every application user cares about. Taking GNOME as an example, there simply should not be significant gnome-libraries-using applications outside the main GNOME bundle.

It's clear from a statement such as this that this distribution method just wouldn't meet diverse needs very well, but on the upside it ensures that everyone gets the full gnome experience and all the apps, and we could install the stuff the day we hear about it on slashdot or LWN rather than waiting for a distro to package it first. It's obviously very different approach culturally.

Exactly...

Posted Apr 5, 2012 18:25 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (5 responses)

I disagree. There are enough applications out there that *use* KDE but are not *part of* KDE (I worked on one, but they do exist). Some of the things offered in kdelibs make things painless (KPlugin, KParts, etc.) and if using them means you're tied to KDE releases, I would think that it's a hard decision between dropping those technologies or saddling up to KDE's release schedule.

It also means that you have to download *all* of KDE together. Of course, KDE could do like they do on Windows and have a package manager of sorts, but I don't know that that's the path that upstreams should be falling back on because that'd only bring us back to the same situation we have today (one supported version, keep updating or you get nothing new).

I don't think it'd be too onerous to get kdelibs and the core GNOME libraries pinned with a stable API and ABI (KDE has a policy, but it does get broken at times).

Of course, then there are projects like Boost which would need every version packaged in the base distro (expecting every project that uses Boost to deal with building and linking it on their own is asking a lot IMO).

Exactly...

Posted Apr 5, 2012 20:11 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

Of course, then there are projects like Boost which would need every version packaged in the base distro (expecting every project that uses Boost to deal with building and linking it on their own is asking a lot IMO).

Why? Boost is most headers anyway, so not much space-savings from sharing. You only need things in core which can not be easily bundled with application.

This is why I've always said LSB is brain-dead and 200% useless: the set of libraries it includes it totally insane.

Instead of including essential, most important facilities first it starts with “mature libraries” and provides totally insane environment. It provides a lot of stuff: libjpeg and libpng, freetype and libxml, pango and gtk+. Pile of “nice to have” libraries which can easily be omitted without any ill effect. Yet it does not provide a way to output sound and video, play with system tray and show notifications. IOW: it does not provide “must have, you are dead if you don't include them” things!

Why I say that libjpeg is less important then desktop notifications or sound?

Because you can not bundle desktop with your application! And you can not bundle sound device with your application! Sure, you can poke around in /dev and/or /etc and try to find them - but this immediately moves out way outside of LSB promises.

Freetype or libxml, on the other hand, can easily be bundled with your application if the need arises. Sure, it'll be nice to have them pre-installed to reduce download size, but they are not essential!

If your notification interface requires use of dbus and gtk+ - then these should be included, of course (BTW LSB still does not include dbus), but sound and notifications should come first while boost comes last or not at all!

Exactly...

Posted Apr 5, 2012 20:35 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree that Boost is not on the top of the list of things this distro should care about. It was just the first example that came to mind which breaks the ABI with *every* release (if not in reality, the libraries get renamed for each version which makes it a moot point).

Yes, first, whatever is required to implement freedesktop.org standards, hardware, and external communications should be included (starting from the bottom with a kernel, systemd, udev, dbus, upower, udisks, *dm, pulseaudio, cups, firewall, etc.). After that, get the user-facing applications done in an upstream-oriented way (app storeish). After that, I, at least, would like to see common libraries be provided by the system which apps can assume exist. The set of libraries included could be part of the interface declared for a version.

The reasoning is that I would think that development should still be easy, so getting libraries and such provided by the distro should be possible instead of going around and downloading umpteen dependencies to start some project. Unless a "developer's" store makes sense, but I think distro packages do better than an app store model would. Of course, that is further down the road after user applications work.

Exactly...

Posted Apr 5, 2012 21:07 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The reasoning is that I would think that development should still be easy, so getting libraries and such provided by the distro should be possible instead of going around and downloading umpteen dependencies to start some project.

Oh, yeah. Ease of development is important, but this is separate issue. If developers know that some platform will give them they are ready to jump through a lot of hoops. I'm not sure distribution-supplied packages will be good for an app-store model, or perhaps it'll be better to use something like Gentoo, but it does not matter: if packages developed using different IDEs and different distributions can be used simultaneously then they don't compete with each other.

In fact on Windows situation with libraries is extremely painful - yet this is most popular platform there is (Visual Studio is superb IDE, on the other hand).

Development on Linux is not that bad - but it's pointless if the thing you've just developed can not be delivered to the end user without jumping through many extra hoops.

Exactly...

Posted Apr 5, 2012 20:48 UTC (Thu) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm running firefox right now with no "system tray" or "notification system". Sure, video and sound are nice, but even the six packages you listed are enough for many web browsers, office suites, email clients, IM programs, newsreaders, terminals and calculators.

You can write development tools, network utilities, databases, window managers and crypto utilities all without stepping outside the LSB requirements.

Just because you cannot write Linux applications, and assume that your target systems are all iPods, does not mean that LSB is useless.

Exactly...

Posted Apr 5, 2012 21:27 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I'm running firefox right now with no "system tray" or "notification system".

Right. It's your choice. But that means that web sites can not use them, too. Amusingly, they can on Firefox on Android.

Sure, video and sound are nice, but even the six packages you listed are enough for many web browsers

Web browser without YouTube? Trashcan is over there.

office suites

Which can not use sound effect in presentations? Trashcan is over there.

email clients

Which can not notify you about new mail? Which can not open links in web browser? Is this a joke? Even GMail can do both (in Chrome, anyway).

IM programs

Without tray integration? Possible but ugly and inconvenient. More of the crap.

newsreaders

The same as with mail. Well, notifications are less important here. This one may actually be usable… if you'll forget that a lot of news today include video links. Out.

terminals

How will you terminal do the expected beep when BEL is received?

calculators

Well… that one is possible. I'm not all that sure why we'll want to have bazillion calculators.

You can write development tools, network utilities, databases, window managers and crypto utilities all without stepping outside the LSB requirements.

IOW: you can write some not desktop-related things. Yes. Probably. How is it related to desktop? On server RHEL rules, LSB is not needed there.

Just because you cannot write Linux applications, and assume that your target systems are all iPods, does not mean that LSB is useless.

It's useless on server (because it's not really needed there) and it's useless on desktop (it allows you to create program which can only excite someone who spent last dozen of years in coma), so what's the point? Where can you use it?

Exactly...

Posted Apr 1, 2012 20:43 UTC (Sun) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328) [Link] (2 responses)

I see the loss of library security updates as the biggest drawback to these vertical bundles. Many of us long-time FOSS users, developers, and sysadmins strongly prefer the distribution model with centralized patch management. It has evolved to address a very important need of the community to balance different integration goals of tens of thousands of developers and millions of users. For 95% of the software I use, if it doesn't exist in my chosen Linux distribution, it doesn't exist for me. The way to get your software to me is to get the attention of the distributors, cajole or employ package maintainers, and get it integrated into the system. Even if we erased the technical packaging/bundling challenges, I'd want this anyway. I want you to pass the basic sanity checks that the distributor imposes to validate that you are a viable project.

Every OSS developer (me included) has a built-in bias to feel that our latest code is the best thing, worth whatever risks or compromises it takes to get it on the system. But in almost every case, OSS releases are really beta software, where the community does much of the QA by accident as they use it. This is inherent to developing software without big commercial budgets. However, most users only have a small number of domains where they should really be a beta tester. And they need to be aware of the risk it reflects on whatever they are actually trying to achieve. Doing that for all the applications on a typical Linux system is just asking for trouble, for an experience of constant bugs and mistrust. I absolutely DO NOT want to disintermediate my consumption of software, leading to hundreds or thousands of independent developers trying to make software update policy decisions for me.

In my 20 years of using Linux, I've noticed prognosticators issue their "big picture" statements and anoint their favorite trends as the indisputable future. They've often seemed pretty myopic, as I've noticed that FOSS evolves a lot more organically than that, due to the myriad interests and motivations of all the contributors. I see that we're happily infusing FOSS Into every space from high-performance computing, to Internet servers, to routers, mobiles, and embedded systems. And this is happening due to real benefits to all the businesses involved, not out of some subversive religious effort. I feel fortunate that I've also been able to use it on workstations and laptops for my entire career. But if "Linux" fades eventually, I feel confident that it will only be because we've shifted our attention to an even more flexible FOSS platform, and it still won't matter if it has been the year of Linux on the desktop, or tablet, etc.

Exactly...

Posted Apr 7, 2012 19:00 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for your post, it sums up my thoughts nicely.

Do not yield to the flower of the day, be it mobile or phone. I would very much prefer having debian on my phone than android on my desktop!

Exactly...

Posted Apr 9, 2012 1:03 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

You can have it. Ubuntu works fine in a chroot on my Galaxy S.

Go on, install it and use it.

Exactly...

Posted Apr 3, 2012 13:36 UTC (Tue) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link] (1 responses)

> it leads to the situation where you have (for example) 20 applications, each of which uses the same 20 libraries, thus requiring you to have 380 redundant copies of libraries installed.

Somehow people seem not to care about RAM when they are writing their applications in languages like Python, Java, C$ or using databases to store local settings where simple text file would be enough (yes, Akonadi, I'm looking at you).

So yeah, I prefer 20 C/C++ "standalone" applications as opposed to fragile mess of higher-level language apps that have to have 30 dependencies installed to just start.

Exactly...

Posted Apr 6, 2012 16:08 UTC (Fri) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

"or using databases to store local settings where simple text file would be enough (yes, Akonadi, I'm looking at you)."

Just to clarify for other readers of this read: Akonadi stores its settings in INI-style text files in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/akonadi

KDE based Akonadi clients also store their settings in INI-style text files in $KDEHOME/share/config

It might be possible to use a simpler format than INI-style but for most developers it seems to be simple enough

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:24 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] (76 responses)

But the app store still contains stand-alone applications, and this relates to one of Ingo's other important points: why, on Linux, does one have to upgrade his/her desktop environment, kernel, and base system to get a new image editing application? Compare this to OS X, where you just drag the application to the Applications folder, and you are done. No need to upgrade Cocoa, Quarz, XNU, or some other system component.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 9:50 UTC (Sat) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (7 responses)

And yet Mac OS X does require you to upgrade XNU, Cocoa, Quartz and other system components to get new image editing applications. It's just that instead of applications telling you "you need Cocoa 1.5 and Quartz 3.7", you get told "Mac OS X 10.6 or later required". If you happen to be on an older Mac OS X, you must upgrade the entire system to get the new application (or new version of the existing application.

Maybe that's all that's wrong here? If applications stopped chasing "Linux", and started chasing (say) RHEL (so you need RHEL 5.2 or later to run the binary, or you're on your own), or Ubuntu (runs on 10.10 or later), people would be happy?

I suspect, though, that you'd hit the same problem as eComStation selling OS/2 - there's one OS/2 "distro", it's ABI compatible back to early OS/2, installers are Windows-style executables, and yet it doesn't have much software available. Why? Market share.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:00 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] (6 responses)

Except that usually pretty old versions are supported. For instance Creative Suite 5.5 requires OS X 10.5 (released in 2007). Microsoft Office 2011 also requires 10.5.

On Windows, most applications require Windows XP, which was released in 2001 (!).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:27 UTC (Sat) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (5 responses)

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?

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] (2 responses)

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 (guest, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

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 (guest, #7643) [Link]

Why not RHEL on the desktop?

- it's expensive for non-enterprise users compared to Ubuntu
- CentOS has had problems releasing security updates quickly enough
- Scientific Linux is not well known and sounds to an ordinary users like it is too techie

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.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 10:09 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (60 responses)

> No need to upgrade Cocoa, Quarz, XNU, or some other system component.

In my experience, that's not always true. For example, once I was developing a program on OpenJDK 6 for Linux and tried to run it on a Mac, only to find that this machine was running an older version of Mac OS X with an older JDK that didn't have one of the methods I was using, and that the only way to get a newer JDK was to upgrade to a new Mac OS X version or download or compile a build of OpenJDK that would run on this version (and I'm not sure if this latter option was actually possible). Or another time, I was trying to use ffmpeg on Mac OS X, and found that the most recent build of it (from the "ffmpegX" project) was long out of date, and trying to build the Fink package for ffmpeg (on a system where Fink hadn't been installed previously) took a really long time to download and compile all of its dependencies and build-dependencies.

By comparison, on Arch Linux, I've occasionally tried out development snapshots of various programs / system components (examples include: KWebKitPart before it was released; the Gallium-based alternative i915 video driver; and the Calligra branch of Krita and its dependencies) by building them from AUR packages, which is usually not too difficult, and it's also not difficult to remove them and revert back to the system-provided packages.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 16:25 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (57 responses)

In my experience, that's not always true. For example, once I was developing a program on OpenJDK 6 for Linux and tried to run it on a Mac, only to find that this machine was running an older version of Mac OS X with an older JDK that didn't have one of the methods I was using, and that the only way to get a newer JDK was to upgrade to a new Mac OS X version or download or compile a build of OpenJDK that would run on this version (and I'm not sure if this latter option was actually possible).

Oh, sure. That's the flip side of the coin. Because in Windows/MacOS you must support old technology (often decade old technology) thus development is nightmare. But you know what? Users don't care. And developers quickly learn to curse Bill Gates^W^W Steeve Ballmer and Steeve Jobs^W^W Tim Cook - yet still they continue to produce apps for Windows and [sometimes] MacOS because this is where users are.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 0:31 UTC (Mon) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (56 responses)

> Because in Windows/MacOS you must support old technology (often decade old technology)

Except that developers don't always support old technology, but instead sometimes say "you must have at least this version of Windows/MacOS". For example, people who bought new PCs in 1994 would have within 3-4 years would have no longer been able to run most off-the-shelf PC software, especially games, without at least buying a new Windows version (and maybe not even then, because of increasing hardware requirements).

(Incidentally, it's not always true that Windows and MacOS have better backwards compatibility. For example, Windows for x86_64 doesn't support 16-bit executables, but you can run them with Wine on an x86_64 kernel. And some early 680x0 Mac programs require black&white or 16-color video modes, which weren't supported even on hardware as old as the beige G3.)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 9:09 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (55 responses)

For example, people who bought new PCs in 1994 would have within 3-4 years would have no longer been able to run most off-the-shelf PC software, especially games, without at least buying a new Windows version (and maybe not even then, because of increasing hardware requirements).

Right. This often happens with a new technology. People who bought HTC Dream three years ago also can not run contemporary Android games. Unfortunately (for Linux desktop revolutionaries) desktop have reached “mature technology” stage and expectation have changed.

Incidentally, it's not always true that Windows and MacOS have better backwards compatibility. For example, Windows for x86_64 doesn't support 16-bit executables, but you can run them with Wine on an x86_64 kernel. And some early 680x0 Mac programs require black&white or 16-color video modes, which weren't supported even on hardware as old as the beige G3.

Yeah, that's the irony, isn't it? Underlying core technology in Linux is significantly more robust than in MacOS/Windows and it should be possible to provide much better compatibility then in Windows, but all these efforts are laid to waste by the distributions on the desktop which assume that “recompile the world” is valid answer to compatibility problems.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 1:12 UTC (Tue) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (54 responses)

> desktop have reached “mature technology” stage and expectation have changed.

I'm not convinced it has. Back when I used to use Mac OS X occasionally, I remember not being able to run some things because they required a newer version of the OS (which costs money). By comparison, on a Linux distribution with out-of-date libraries, you can at least try out a new program by using a locally-installed copy of the program and (some of) its dependencies. (I did that in order to run a Calligra Krita snapshot on Debian Squeeze.)

> all these efforts are laid to waste by the distributions on the desktop which assume that “recompile the world” is valid answer to compatibility problems.

The situation isn't as bad as you make it sound. Running old programs on a newer distribution is usually just a matter of installing old libraries, and distributions might even provide packages of those old libraries. (For example, it was common to keep running some KDE3 apps in the early days of KDE4, and also Arch Linux currently provides both Allegro 4 and Allegro 5 packages.)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 6:19 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (53 responses)

Back when I used to use Mac OS X occasionally, I remember not being able to run some things because they required a newer version of the OS (which costs money).

Yeah. This happens. Perhaps one of the reasons for why MacOS has less then 10% of desktop. Even so it fits in I've forgotten more than you'll ever know adage: number of programs which you can easily run on MacOS and Windows still dwarfs number of programs which you can run on Linux even if you'll not count oddballs which require too-new or too-old version of MacOS and Windows.

The situation isn't as bad as you make it sound. Running old programs on a newer distribution is usually just a matter of installing old libraries, and distributions might even provide packages of those old libraries.

Sure. And the current 1% of users correlates with number of people who not only know about that but consider the time required to hunt and install these fair price for the Linux use. Article we are discussing here claims Linux used to have 2.5% of desktop 10 years ago - this is consistent with this explanation: desktop grew about 3x times, but proportion of people which will tolerate this nonsense shrank. Most people never knew how to cope with these problems (and have no interest in finding out) and some people who do know how to do that decided they have more interesting things to do.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 6, 2012 2:37 UTC (Fri) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (52 responses)

> number of programs which you can easily run on MacOS and Windows still dwarfs number of programs which you can run on Linux even if you'll not count oddballs which require too-new or too-old version of MacOS and Windows.

But if that's why Linux has less usage share, then backwards/forwards compatibility doesn't matter — it's because of lock-in, not lack of backwards/forward compatibility.

> Most people never knew how to cope with these problems (and have no interest in finding out)

Sure, many users want programs to "just work" without needing to tinker with them. But users like those are unlikely to contribute to the development of the programs they use, and the entire purpose of FLOSS is to make it possible for every user to become a developer. That's why the user/developer community isn't willing to have a situation where "you must support old technology (often decade old technology) thus development is nightmare" just for the sake of attracting the kind of user who's not willing to get their hands dirty. (For example, it's better to have 10000 users where 1000 of them contribute to the software, than to have 1 million users where only 50 of them contribute to the software.)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 6, 2012 7:31 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (26 responses)

>But if that's why Linux has less usage share, then backwards/forwards compatibility doesn't matter — it's because of lock-in, not lack of backwards/forward compatibility.

That argument is growing old. Mac OS X started from basically the same position as Linux. I.e. no native software and a crufty compatibility layer (Classic Environment vs. Wine) with another major OS.

Yet Mac OS X captured more than 10% of the market, even though it requires overpriced proprietary hardware.

Android gains more users each month then the total number of Linux Desktop users. Even the frigging Windows Mobile has more users then Linux Desktop.

>Sure, many users want programs to "just work" without needing to tinker with them.
Not 'many'. It's 'the majority'.

>But users like those are unlikely to contribute to the development of the programs they use, and the entire purpose of FLOSS is to make it possible for every user to become a developer.
Wrong. I can download VisualStudio Express (for free!) and start developing Windows Phone applications in 3 minutes. With nice tutorials, great help system and one of the best IDEs.

>For example, it's better to have 10000 users where 1000 of them contribute to the software, than to have 1 million users where only 50 of them contribute to the software.

Nope, it isn't. Because 1 million users would be able to sponsor (say) 100 full-time professional developers, artists, testers, help writers. Who are going to produce software that these users really like.

Of course, if your target is to create a playground for developers, then I suggest looking at OpenBSD ( http://lwn.net/Articles/449697/ ):
> "We hack OpenBSD for ourselves. Not for you. Not for the users. If
> the users end up enjoying what we have created for themselves, good
> for them." (c) Theo de Raadt

Well, the only problem is that one day you might find yourself without open hardware capable of running your OS. And nobody would care about you.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 6, 2012 8:24 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

That argument is growing old. Mac OS X started from basically the same position as Linux. I.e. no native software and a crufty compatibility layer (Classic Environment vs. Wine) with another major OS.

Situation there is quite different. MacOS was basically frozen when MacOS X was introduced and no new releases were expected. Ever.

Some programs were abandoned as a result, some were ported to new platform but it was never the case that you an access to the new version of a program - but you needed to abandon MacOS X to have it. Well, you had the ability to switch to Windows, but while it had lots of new goodies it also was unable to run lots of old MacOS programs, too.

Wine, on the other hand is always playing catch-up. And the attitude of Linux pundits does not help. Even if someone releases some software for Linux using winelib the reaction is OPEN SOURCE IT UNDER OSI APPROVED LICENSE!!!.

Later the developer does the logical thing: abandons Linux altogether. This is typical response and it creates vicious cycle: some company releases something for Linux, public outcry is “gimme source”, program is withdrawn, Linux is added to blacklist as “don't try this: money sink without any gratitude”, users continue to switch to MacOS X (well, some go back to Windows).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 0:25 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (6 responses)

> > But users like those are unlikely to contribute to the development of the programs they use, and the entire purpose of FLOSS is to make it possible for every user to become a developer.

> Wrong. I can download VisualStudio Express (for free!) and start developing Windows Phone applications in 3 minutes. With nice tutorials, great help system and one of the best IDEs.

But that doesn't let you develop Windows Phone itself, nor the platform API libraries bundled with it, nor the majority of applications for it. And it really is true that the core purpose of FLOSS is to let every user become a developer of the software that they use.

As a consequence, in FLOSS, "user-friendliness" doesn't just mean making it easy to use the software, it also means making it easy to develop the software. Because (in all but a few of the biggest projects) no one is being paid to work on the software, the project needs to recruit new volunteer developers from its user base, or else it will die. That's why having a Windows-like situation of "you must support old technology (often decade old technology) thus development is nightmare" in the name of easy backwards compatibility would be bad for FLOSS, even if it did succeed in attracting more users.

> 1 million users would be able to sponsor (say) 100 full-time professional developers, artists, testers, help writers.

I won't believe it's possible for a FLOSS project to fund 100 full-time professional developers with donations from end-users until I see it, and I haven't seen it yet. (The project that's closest to what you describe is probably Linux itself, which has hardware manufacturers employing developers, but that business model won't work for the vast majority of projects.)

> one day you might find yourself without open hardware capable of running your OS.

That's a real problem, but the fundamental cause of it is that the majority of users don't see why locked-down hardware is a bad thing for them — it prevents them from developing the software they use, but that's not something they would do anyway, so why should they care? (They actually should care, for reasons such as avoiding lock-in, having a larger base of developers, having the possibility that the developers may fork the software in case of a bad mantainer, … but these reasons aren't readily apparent to someone who doesn't know anything about software development.) You seem to be suggesting that attracting users who don't care about being able to develop the software they use to Linux will help ensure the future availability of open hardware, but I don't believe it — I think it would more likely lead to a locked-down hardware platform that runs Linux (and maybe this even already exists, in the form of locked-down Android devices).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 11:26 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

That's a real problem, but the fundamental cause of it is that the majority of users don't see why locked-down hardware is a bad thing for them

Of course not! It's good for them! This is what they want!

Let's forget about FOSS for the minute and think about consumer devices. Radio, TV, phones (mobile and not mobile).

Once upon time all these decides were combined from parts which were easy to replace and it was easy to tinker with them. Some even included principal schemes in documentation! Today they usually have undetachable connectros (components are soldered on using surface-mount technology instead of sockets) and in general are non-serviceable (usually you need specialized tool to even open the cover). Why is that? Well, these are cheaper. They are more robust, they rarely need fixes and if one of them will break it's usually simpler to replace it rather then to fix it.

Some people need/want to tinker with electronics - and we have specialized shops and devices for them. But these devices usually sell some of the same parts (sometimes differently packaged)! If you'll try to create separate ecosystem "just for tinkerers" you'll quickly find out that it's not sustainable - there are just not enough of them!

They actually should care, for reasons such as avoiding lock-in, having a larger base of developers, having the possibility that the developers may fork the software in case of a bad mantainer, … but these reasons aren't readily apparent to someone who doesn't know anything about software development.

You asking users to give up concrete advantages for nebulous freedoms (which they don't want and don't need). It just does not work.

You seem to be suggesting that attracting users who don't care about being able to develop the software they use to Linux will help ensure the future availability of open hardware, but I don't believe it — I think it would more likely lead to a locked-down hardware platform that runs Linux

Sorry, but this is the only choice. Most of hardware in the future will be locked - simply because users don't case. This battle is already lost: smartphones outsell PCs already - and you can not replace OS on most of them (even if the bootloader is not locked you often don't have an image to use with it). Now we are at the next battle: make sure there are some unlocked hardware which can be used if you want to tinker with it. If most devices are locked yet use FOSS-friendly components then there will be some unlocked (or unlockable) devices for tinkerers. If devices are build around proprietary standards then there will be no FOSS-friendly devices at all.

Maybe this even already exists, in the form of locked-down Android devices.

Android is good example. Before Android most phones were tightly-locked and it was basically impossible to run your own OS on mobile devices. Openmoko tried to solve this problem in the fashion you suggest, but failed miserably - and it was obvious it'll fail from the onset. Android gave us CyanogenMod and plethora of the devices you can use it with. Sure, you may argue that some imaginary world where all devices are free will be better, but this is not in the cards.

Today Linux desktop survives on coattails of server market (where "freedom to tinker" is still important and will be important for foreseeable future), but it looks like Microsoft is finally wising up to the problem. If Microsoft will split standards for the desktop (fully locked up with some concessions to the enterprise - see how Apple does this with iOS) and server then this will be the end of desktop Linux (and Intel will be very happy indeed because people will finally stop using cheap desktop components for servers).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 13:47 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (4 responses)

> Of course not! It's good for them! This is what they want!

If someone actively prefers (rather than just doesn't care) general-purpose computing hardware to be locked down, like the iDevices are, then that person is fundamentally opposed to the core ideology of Free Software: users deserve to have complete control over the software and hardware that they use. The FLOSS community shouldn't be trying to bring those people into the userbase, unless they first convert to the FLOSS ideology.

(And if you actively prefer locked down devices, which it sounds like you do, then you are obviously an enemy of this community!)

> You asking users to give up concrete advantages for nebulous freedoms (which they don't want and don't need).

That's what the FSF has always done, since the very beginning.

> It just does not work.

If it didn't work, then FLOSS would never have gained any significant amount of users in the first place. Clearly that's not the case.

One reason why it does in fact work is that the freedoms aren't "nebulous" like you say, but instead there are real concrete benefits to them. For example, back when I used Windows 3.11, often something would not work (or would mysteriously stop working), and I would have no idea how it might be fixable, but now that I use Linux, I'm more often able to fix problems on my own.

> Sorry, but this is the only choice. Most of hardware in the future will be locked - simply because users don't case.

It sounds like you're trying to convince the FLOSS community to accept Linux-on-locked-down-hardware, because it's more important to have Linux gain lots of technically-illiterate users than it is to preserve user freedom. But we'll never accept that, because we don't care about "Linux" as such; freedom is all that matters to us.

Also, "Most of hardware" doesn't matter — what matters is that enough unlocked hardware remains available on the market, at low enough prices. And right now there seems to be plenty of such hardware, including desktop/notebook/server PCs (as they always have been) as well as the likes of the BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, IGEP, and the upcoming Vivaldi tablet.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 15:45 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

> You asking users to give up concrete advantages for nebulous freedoms (which they don't want and don't need).

That's what the FSF has always done, since the very beginning.

Sorry, but facts don't support your claims. First release of GCC supported VAX and SunOS. Later Cygnus developed extensive system which brought GNU tools to users of proprietary OSes and it was enthusiastically endorsed by FSF. And even when Linux finally made GNU/Linux OS usable support for users of other platforms continued.

RMS and FSF may sound like stuck-up zealots at times but they are very practical when it's important.

> It just does not work.

If it didn't work, then FLOSS would never have gained any significant amount of users in the first place. Clearly that's not the case.

See above. All the FOSS “success stories” (server, embedded, Android, etc) are in places where people care about normal users and not just about FOSS lovers. On desktop, where distributions reject such people Linux is confined to aforementioned 1% and lives at mercy of proprietary brethren: most (if not all) hardware for desktop is created without Linux in mind. Linux support is added later if at all. Compare support for server-related hardware (CPUs, NICs, etc) and for Desktop-oriented one (GPUs, WiFi, etc)

This is dangerous situation to be in.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 16:39 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (2 responses)

> First release of GCC supported VAX and SunOS. Later Cygnus developed extensive system which brought GNU tools to users of proprietary OSes and it was enthusiastically endorsed by FSF. And even when Linux finally made GNU/Linux OS usable support for users of other platforms continued.

None of which negates my point. Using free software has always involved giving up certain "concrete advantages" (in the early pre-Linux days, the disadvantages would have been forgoing first-party support from the system vendor, and spending extra effort to installand keep up to date a bunch of third-party software across all systems in the administrative domain) but getting other concrete advantages (such as the ability to fix problems yourself, the "with many eyes, all bugs are shallow" effect, the likelihood that a project with a bad maintainer will be forked rather than killed off entirely, etc.) in return for the ones given up.

> All the FOSS “success stories” (server, embedded, Android, etc) are in places where people care about normal users

In the examples you cited above (Cygnus, GCC on VAX and SunOS), how did "Joe Average"-type users matter at all? The people who decided to switch over to GNU tools on those minicomputer/workstation platforms were developers and system administrators, not technically-illiterate end users.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 17:20 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

The people who decided to switch over to GNU tools on those minicomputer/workstation platforms were developers and system administrators, not technically-illiterate end users.

“Joe Average” != “someone dumb and stupid”. “Joe Average” is Joe, you know, Average. VAX and SunOS users typically knew how to compile things and for them Cygnus solution was “good enough”. In fact it was easier to use them many alternative commercial offers.

Today Joe Average no longer knows or cares about compilation of programs from scratch. Thus the same solution is rejected.

In the early pre-Linux days, the disadvantages would have been forgoing first-party support from the system vendor, and spending extra effort to install and keep up to date a bunch of third-party software across all systems in the administrative domain.

Bullshit. GNU software was always parallel-installable and never required “forgoing first-party support from the system vendor”.

But getting other concrete advantages (such as the ability to fix problems yourself, the "with many eyes, all bugs are shallow" effect, the likelihood that a project with a bad maintainer will be forked rather than killed off entirely, etc.) in return for the ones given up.

Bullshit again. Most users of GNU software in these days cared about additional features, not about source availability. The fact that bash included nice command-line editing facility was more important then the fact that it included sources. The fact that GCC was free (while SunOS compiler was expensive) was the driving force, not the code availability. Sure, at some point a lot of users have “looked under the hood” (because they had the ability) and some even become contributors, but it was never (or almost never) the motivation for the initial installation of GNU tools.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 18:55 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> VAX and SunOS users typically knew how to compile things

I know firsthand that many VAX users didn't have anywhere close to that level of technical expertise. For example, people used to use dumb terminals on a VAX (or other minicomputer) for email at work (I remember one such place that used Pine on VMS, for example), or for using their employer's in-house applications, or even for searching public library catalogs. These users knew less about computers than most people today, and yet they probably outnumbered (by far) those who did know how to compile things.

> Bullshit. GNU software was always parallel-installable and never required “forgoing first-party support from the system vendor”.

Yes it did — the more that someone was using GNU software (or other third-party software, generally), the more they'd have to rely on other sources of help than the first-party system vendor. It's just that back then they were still using plenty of software from the system vendor, whereas with GNU/Linux on commodity hardware now, the proportion of non-system-vendor software has increased to almost 100% — though of course, some high-end server hardware vendors actually have first-party support for GNU/Linux now.

> Most users of GNU software in these days cared about additional features, not about source availability. […] it was never (or almost never) the motivation for the initial installation of GNU tools.

But that just goes to show that it's entirely possible for FLOSS to compete against proprietary software on practical features, and win. And it's not just a coincidence, either — the greater functionality of GCC and coreutils was a direct consequence of the ability of skilled users to join the developer-base, thus giving them a larger and more meritocratic developer-base than their proprietary counterparts had.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 9, 2012 23:03 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (17 responses)

Yet Mac OS X captured more than 10% of the market, even though it requires overpriced proprietary hardware.

Yes, but that's not because people specifically want OS X and therefore need to buy a Mac, it's because they want a Mac in the first place, which is a different ballgame altogether. People would buy Macs even if they came with a GUI version of CP/M, as long as there was a big-enough Apple logo on the computer. This is because for many people, buying Apple stuff is a life style decision, rather than a technical decision. Sort of like being vegetarian.

If Apple wasn't manufacturing its own PCs and OS X was an after-market OS to be installed on generic PCs like Linux is today, it would be just as (un)popular as Linux, simply because most people can't be bothered to change the OS on their computer. It would also have the same hardware support/developer buy-in issues, only worse because there would be less free stuff available and fewer hardware manufacturers would be interested in supporting with drivers or using it for their own products.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 0:08 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (16 responses)

Is there any OS that doesn't come pre-loaded on systems that has achieved any noticeable market penetration?

I would go out on a limb a bit and say that Linux is probably 100x as popular as the next closest competitor if you were to exclude pre-loaded OS installs.

That says a lot of good things about Linux, and you have to wonder where it would be if it wasn't for the Microsoft shenanigans.

and no, I don't consider the "distro that nobody has heard of" shipped pre-loaded on the early netbook machines to qualify as Linux being pre-loaded.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 9:20 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (15 responses)

I would go out on a limb a bit and say that Linux is probably 100x as popular as the next closest competitor if you were to exclude pre-loaded OS installs.

Yup. Linux desktop is large fish in this aquarium. But there are the problem: master of said aquarium can displace it at any time. The question: can Linux desktop survive in the ocean?

and no, I don't consider the "distro that nobody has heard of" shipped pre-loaded on the early netbook machines to qualify as Linux being pre-loaded.

Why not? It was the first time Linux desktop was seriously pitted against older contenders. It was eaten alive. I hope people who'll try to do that next time will be better prepared. But it looks these preparations will require complete divorce from the world of traditional Linux distributions. Which is sad because said distributions did many things right.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 10:42 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (13 responses)

But it looks these preparations will require complete divorce from the world of traditional Linux distributions. Which is sad because said distributions did many things right.

A computer manufacturer could do a lot worse than team up with somebody who will provide support for one of the major long-lifecycle distributions like Debian or Ubuntu (LTS). That would ensure a reasonable time between upgrades (which are usually seamless) as well as timely security patches, and a wide, easily-accessible selection of software from the get-go. Also these distributions are unlikely to go away anytime soon. So far this hasn't been seriously tried AFAIK.

It is important to emphasise that these distributions already come with lots of software that people would otherwise have to obtain, possibly at very considerable expense, from the open third-party market or an »app store«. So it's not as if one would immediately need lots of buy-in from third-party software developers (as in OS X). Certainly somebody who uses their computer mainly to surf the web, to write e-mail and letters, even to deal with holiday photographs, to catalogue books or DVDs or a stamp collection, and many other things that occur in the usual home or SOHO use, could go a very long way without having to install anything from outside the distribution's repositories.

Of course if the prime purpose of the computer in question is to run the newest Windows games, a Windows machine is likely to be the better bet – but that isn't going to change however much Linux is modified. It may not actually be worth the trouble.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 14:34 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (12 responses)

A computer manufacturer could do a lot worse than team up with somebody who will provide support for one of the major long-lifecycle distributions like Debian or Ubuntu (LTS). That would ensure a reasonable time between upgrades (which are usually seamless) as well as timely security patches, and a wide, easily-accessible selection of software from the get-go. Also these distributions are unlikely to go away anytime soon. So far this hasn't been seriously tried AFAIK.

This will never be “seriously tried” because of poor ROI: if there are no lock-in then how can you recoup your expenses? This is the case where Linux's greatest strength becomes it's greatest weakness.

Of course if the prime purpose of the computer in question is to run the newest Windows games, a Windows machine is likely to be the better bet – but that isn't going to change however much Linux is modified. It may not actually be worth the trouble.

Of course direct attack is hopeless! Linux must do something which MacOS and Windows just can't do and then grow from such niche to the full-blown desktop. There are some ideas about what exactly this niche can be - different companies play with different niches.

The problem is that it looks like all such attempts will happen with something like Android or webOS: Linux which has nothing to do with traditional Linux desktop.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 15:07 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (11 responses)

This will never be “seriously tried” because of poor ROI: if there are no lock-in then how can you recoup your expenses?

If you're a hardware manufacturer such as HP or Dell you're not interested in lock-in – you're interested in moving boxes. Anything that looks like it might move more boxes is worth looking into. The problem is to get things going in the first place; once you have a system set up, there is no reason why supporting Linux would need to be any more expensive than supporting Windows. (In the long run it may even be cheaper.) »Lock-in« doesn't enter into it from a hardware manufacturer's point of view because nobody is »locked into« generic PC hardware that you can get from dozens of manufacturers. Even if you're into high-end kit you can always get that from any of half a dozen manufacturers. (Apple is an anomaly here because Apple is no longer a computer maker, it's a life style. People are hooked on Apple in a way that they never get hooked on Dell or Asus. However, to a large extent OS X suffers from the same uptake problems as Linux; it just doesn't matter because Apple makes three quarters of its money selling stuff that isn't running OS X in the first place, anyway.)

There is nothing in principle to prevent someone like HP or Dell from offering Linux als a pre-installed alternative on all of its machines other than that the margins you get from moving boxes do not lend themselves to experiments. Microsoft has a nice little positive-feedback loop going that will ensure that as long as 95% of PC buyers buy Windows pre-installed, the hardware makers aren't keen on being the first to sink investment money into something new – and Microsoft is trying to keep things that way: The real reason Linux isn't preinstalled more is that Microsoft provides kickbacks to hardware manufacturers like HP or Dell to »recommend« Windows.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 16:48 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

Yeah, sure.

Microsoft doesn't provide kickbacks in Russia, Ukraine and lots of other countries. You can easily buy laptops and computers running FreeDOS there. Guess what's the first thing people do after they buy them?

Hint: it generally involves a CD with pirated Windows.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 17:14 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

OK. So Microsoft doesn't waste money on kickbacks to manufacturers in countries where people won't pay for Windows in the first place. What does that prove?

It certainly doesn't prove Linux couldn't compete with Windows on a level playing field. What is easier to come by for non-geeks in Russia and Ukraine, a CD with pirated Windows or a CD with Linux? What about CDs with pirated Windows games?

Also, Microsoft could easily crack down on pirated copies of Windows if they wanted to. However, that would be utterly counterproductive because it would just make Linux look more attractive in comparison. Microsoft knows very well that hanging on to their 95% market share is worth a bunch of pirated CDs in Russia.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 17:29 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I often hear laments: "Oh, if only Windows wasn't preinstalled. We'd rule the world with Linux, surely!"

They are definitely not true as I see a counter-example with my own eyes.

>It certainly doesn't prove Linux couldn't compete with Windows on a level playing field. What is easier to come by for non-geeks in Russia and Ukraine, a CD with pirated Windows or a CD with Linux?

A CD with Linux - broadband access is ubiquitous and cheap. I have 100mbit Ethernet connection for $8 a month, so I can download Ubuntu install CD in about 30 seconds. Of course, I can do the same for a Windows install DVD.

So I'd say they are on a level footing.

>What about CDs with pirated Windows games?

Actually, they are becoming quite rare. Why would you bother with buying CDs when you can download anything you want for free?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 18:28 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

and how many computer manufacturers build systems exclusively for those markets?

and what slice of the overall computer industry are these markets?

I suspect that the answers to both are very small numbers.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 20:43 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

These both are wrong questions. The answers to both are: there are more then enough computer manufacturers and they represent huge slice of computer industry (China alone is large enough), but in places where Windows is free and Linux is free Windows wins hands down. It's not even a contest. And since you can not attach any non-zero price to Linux (this will immediately make your Linux offer non-noncompetitive) the end result is that there are still no chance for “serious try”.

People somehow expect that “serious try” will be “identical push for Windows and Linux” but it just does not work: Windows in incumbent, identical push will always favor it, you need bigger push to succeed - and where money for said push will come from?

You can not even use typical bundling strategy (where producer of demo version of commercial program pays you dollar or two) because Linux distributions are typically designed to repel any and all proprietary commercial developers as we are discussing here.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 21:12 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

where linux and windows are both 'free', windows will win due to the network effect.

but if microsoft didn't allow for the piracy of windows to maintain this, they would not both be free.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 21:57 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

This is exactly what I'm saying. It's not up to the Microsoft to determine if given country has high piracy or not. But in both cases Windows wins: if piracy is high the Windows wins because of network effect, if it's low then Microsoft makes good money and spends some of it via kickbacks to promote Windows. Windows wins in both cases. Q.E.D.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 20:35 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

There is nothing in principle to prevent someone like HP or Dell from offering Linux als a pre-installed alternative on all of its machines other than that the margins you get from moving boxes do not lend themselves to experiments.

Ever wondered why systems with Linux preinstalled are always separate models (often with the same hardware but still with separate nomenclature article)? Apparently there are just this little teeeny agreement.

The problem is to get things going in the first place; once you have a system set up, there is no reason why supporting Linux would need to be any more expensive than supporting Windows.

Not enough. You need bigger margins, not the same margins, or else the whole exercise is pointless. For that manufacturer need some kind of lock-in - that's what I'm talking about. And indeed when nettop story started vendors tried to produce such lock-in - but unsuccessfully.

In the long run it may even be cheaper.

PC business is very low margin business. Companies just don't have luxury to think about long term: if they'll start producing losses then the end can come very fast.

»Lock-in« doesn't enter into it from a hardware manufacturer's point of view because nobody is »locked into« generic PC hardware that you can get from dozens of manufacturers.

Sure. But why start expensive and complex program which may jeopardize your relationship with Microsoft if the end result are the same tiny margins you already have?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 22:48 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

You need bigger margins, not the same margins, or else the whole exercise is pointless. For that manufacturer need some kind of lock-in - that's what I'm talking about.

As a PC manufacturer, you can't »lock in« people to your hardware (unless you're Apple, but we already said that special rules apply to Apple). If anything, a desire to create lock-in would be an argument in favour of preinstalling Linux as long as your Linux distribution is good enough and supports your machine well, because as long as you're the only one selling such a machine people will continue being your customers. This works for Apple – Macintoshes could just as well run Windows but people tend to stick with the OS X that comes with the machine. The margins on Macs aren't quite like the ones on iPhones, but we don't see Apple complain.

In the same vein, if a good computer came pre-installed with a good, supported mainstream Linux like Debian (rather than the low-end boxes with weird Linux distributions that hardware manufacturers tend to offer if they offer anything at all), most people would probably stay with that because putting anything else on it would be more of a hassle than it was worth.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 11, 2012 6:05 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

If anything, a desire to create lock-in would be an argument in favour of preinstalling Linux as long as your Linux distribution is good enough and supports your machine well, because as long as you're the only one selling such a machine people will continue being your customers.

Nope. Others sell similar machines, too. Both tiny firms with full selection of models (tiny selection because firms are tiny) and large companies like Dell, HP, or Lenovo - but with few models (again: Linux is not large enough to support the large range of models).

This works for Apple – Macintoshes could just as well run Windows but people tend to stick with the OS X that comes with the machine.

Some actually install Linux and/or Windows, but that's not the point. The point is that MacOS works poorly on anything else and Apple vigorously ensures that there will be no machines with Hackintosh preinstalled. This is where lock-in scheme starts to work and this is what you can not do with Linux.

In the same vein, if a good computer came pre-installed with a good, supported mainstream Linux like Debian (rather than the low-end boxes with weird Linux distributions that hardware manufacturers tend to offer if they offer anything at all), most people would probably stay with that because putting anything else on it would be more of a hassle than it was worth.

This was tried many times. It does not work. People find something deficient with tiny selection of “Linux preinstalled” offers and buy something else instead. And it makes no sense to create as many models with Linux as you create models with Windows if you expect 10x-100x less buyers.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 11, 2012 7:53 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

This was tried many times. It does not work. People find something deficient with tiny selection of “Linux preinstalled” offers and buy something else instead.

When I bought my current computer (an HP business notebook), HP did offer one configuration with Linux preinstalled. That was the bottom-of-the-line configuration with the slowest CPU and GPU, the lowest screen resolution, the smallest hard disk and half the RAM of the one I eventually got. It does not come as a big surprise that under these circumstances buying the machine with Linux preinstalled is not the option most customers will take.

On the »plus« side, the machine I bought in the end is also very nice for Linux, with basically everything working out of the box using Debian (I've so far not missed the fingerprint reader, and somebody like HP could probably get that supported by leaning on the chip manufacturer). It does make one wonder why HP does not offer a Linux preinstall for the top-of-the-line configuration rather than the bottom one.

In my experience, installing Linux on notebooks has become a lot easier over the years. Whether this is due to improvements in Linux itself or the manufacturers moving towards supported components is difficult to tell (probably a mixture of both), but the presence of any configurations of a model with Linux preinstalled is a good sign because it indicates that Linux will probably work well on the other configurations, too. There is certainly nothing technical that prevents manufacturers from offering more Linux preinstalls – the reason why this doesn't happen more often is mostly to do with Microsoft's sleazy business practices.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 10, 2012 10:57 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

the distros selected for the early netbooks were not any of the bigger name, well supported distros. They were ones that virtually nobody had heard of, that had no significant community around them, and then the vendors provided no updates for them on top of that.

That's hardly justification for saying that such installations will require "a divorce from the world of traditional Linux distributions", In fact, it's more a matter of showing that if you do make such a divorce, it's going to take a lot more effort on your part to make things work.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 6, 2012 8:06 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (24 responses)

But if that's why Linux has less usage share, then backwards/forwards compatibility doesn't matter — it's because of lock-in, not lack of backwards/forward compatibility.

More like lock-out. If you keep the existing application and convince people to create new ones then number of available applications grows and then you can try to attract new users which will make platform more attractive to developers which will give you new apps, etc.

Take a look on NextSTEP/MacOS plight. NEXTStep was extremely cool computer (it had rave reviews, etc), yet even Steve Jobs was unable to sell it.

Does it mean that he was incompetent back then and only become ruthless, successful businessman after it's return to Apple? No: he led the Pixar at the same which revolutionized the animation and went on to the very successful IPO. Later it was sold to Disney and Disney's stow formed the majority of Steve Job's wealth in 2011.

But when Jobs returned to Apple NEXTStep underwent a lot of cosmetic changes which resulted in contemporary 6-7% market for MacOS X. MacOS was at about 4.5% in 1996 when Steve returned. It does not look like much but keep in mind that 4.5% is about the same market share as MacOS X was couple of years ago. Steve's first priority was to keep existing users happy. That's why MacOS X development took years (it was released five years after NeXT was bought and for one more year it was not a default OS for newly sold computers). Later, when Apple got other strongholds (iPod, iPhone, iPad) it become more demanding to their developers - and still when developers threaten stampede Apple retreats (take a look on push against sandbox, for example).

Linux desktop, on the other hand, imposes more restrictions, breaks applications all the time and yes, has smaller (and shrinking!) market share. Yet it's developers claim everything is peachy and they are on the road to success.

Is it honest delusion or inability to face reality?

But users like those are unlikely to contribute to the development of the programs they use, and the entire purpose of FLOSS is to make it possible for every user to become a developer.

Users are unlikely to contribute. But this is not why they are important. The apps for said users don't grow on trees. Someone develops them. But if most users are not on Linux then most developers are not on Linux either. If they don't care or, even worse, don't know about Linux then they will not become Linux developers in any case.

That's why the user/developer community isn't willing to have a situation where "you must support old technology (often decade old technology) thus development is nightmare" just for the sake of attracting the kind of user who's not willing to get their hands dirty.

No? Then why all these pointless shiny changes features and breakage to the workflow of the existing users? Why the push for social? This behavior just does not adds up. Either you want to attract “dumb users” or you don't want to do that. If the first case you need to guarantee they'll see not just shiny new desktop, but lots of shiny new applications (and games), too, in the second case you should keep the existing users happy.

Today Linux desktop combines worst qualities of both approaches.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 1:18 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (20 responses)

> Linux desktop, on the other hand, imposes more restrictions

Like what?

> breaks applications all the time

But you can still run them, as I've already said…

> and yes, has smaller (and shrinking!) market share.

According to what study?

> Yet it's developers claim everything is peachy and they are on the road to success. Is it honest delusion or inability to face reality?

No, it's because the developer base and rate of development are both increasing steadily. That's all that really matters for the survival of a project — a project that can recruit new developers will survive, whereas a project that can't will die even if it has lots of users.

> But if most users are not on Linux then most developers are not on Linux either.

You seem to be assuming that the proportion of users who are also developers is the same for every platform, but I believe that it's much higher for Unix/Linux than it is for Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS. And the reason for that is simple: for this category of users, Linux is far more "user-friendly" than any other system.

> Then why all these pointless shiny changes features and breakage to the workflow of the existing users? Why the push for social?

Speaking as a KDE user, I don't know what you're talking about here. The user experience for me hasn't changed much throughout the last 8 years — and that's how I like it!

Whereas what you seem to be saying to people like me is essentially "Go away, you don't exist. The Linux desktop should be designed for the technically-ignorant masses, not for you." But those aren't the ones who are developing the system, nor are they funding its development, so (fortunately!) there's no chance that the changes you suggest will ever happen.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 12:06 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (19 responses)

Like what?

There are no SDK besides LSB. Thus you either need to spend huge amount of time trying to understand what APIs are safe to use and which are not or you are stuck with pitiful API set.

But you can still run them, as I've already said…

I can run them. You can run them. Joe Average can not - and that's the problem.

According to what study?

According to statcounter, for example. Actually it looks like recently the slide stopped. In fact it showed the largest result in April: 0.85% (it had 0.84% in July 2008). Of course March's result is 0.83% and April is not yet finished thus it's possible that it was some kind of blimp...

But do you really feel 0.01% growth in five years is good result?

That's all that really matters for the survival of a project — a project that can recruit new developers will survive, whereas a project that can't will die even if it has lots of users.

And the projects which lose the hardware to run on will become irrelevant even if there are bazillion developers. Take a look on GPE, Opie, etc. They also had growing number of participants and boasted their cool features. Where are they today? Well, they still alive and even produce new releases (but AFAICS number of developers is no longer growing)... which you can run on emulators or vintage hardware bought on eBay.

If that's your goal, then I have no objections, actually. Feel free to continue.

You seem to be assuming that the proportion of users who are also developers is the same for every platform, but I believe that it's much higher for Unix/Linux than it is for Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS.

No. I assume most developers are not hobbyists and they follow users. If users are on Linux (for example in HPC space) then most developers are on Linux. If the users are on Windows (for example on Desktop) then most developers are on Windows. It's as simple as that.

But those aren't the ones who are developing the system, nor are they funding its development, so (fortunately!) there's no chance that the changes you suggest will ever happen.

Don't be so quick to assert that. I know enough people in various companies who think about Linux desktop. Most of them, of course, just ignore FOSS pundits, but I wanted to see if they can be coopted.

Well, looks like “my way or the highway” is their principal stance… and since there are no way in hell their way can be acceptable by general public… well, the die is cast. Just remember: in the end it was your choice.

I'm actually cautiously optimistic WRT Linux desktop. I think in about 5-7 years Linux will have the same presence on desktop as it has on mobiles today (about 50%), and, of course, FOSS pundits will continue to moan that this is not what they meant when they talked about “year of Linux desktop”.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 14:32 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (18 responses)

> There are no SDK besides LSB.

That's not a "restriction".

> Thus you either need to spend huge amount of time trying to understand what APIs are safe to use

In practice, it's not so difficult to know what APIs are safe to use.

> I can run them. You can run them. Joe Average can not - and that's the problem.

In that case, the real problem here is that "Joe Average" isn't computer-literate enough. Because our fundamental goal isn't to increase the usage share of Linux, it's to get the public at large to start caring about software freedom — and better computer literacy is probably a prerequisite for that. (I seem to remember one of Stallman's essays suggesting that office workers should learn how to write Elisp code to do the common tasks they need to do.)

Maybe RaspberryPi will help with that, even if its hardware is a little more locked-down then we'd like.

> But do you really feel 0.01% growth in five years is good result?

Even if those figures are valid (and I don't believe they are), it doesn't matter, because "growth" (of the userbase) isn't what we care about. All we (current Linux desktop users) care about is that the software continues to be developed and continues to have the characteristics that attracted us to it in the first place (including user-freedom, which you keep telling us that we need to give up).

> Take a look on GPE, Opie, etc.

The reason those projects are dying is not because of locked-down hardware; instead, it's because they were designed for old PDAs with much less CPU/GPU power and smaller screens than the mobile devices of today. Today's equivalent devices have no need for Qt Embedded — they can run full Qt X11, so we have Plasma Active to fulfill the role that Qtopia/OPIE once served.

> there are no way in hell their way can be acceptable by general public…

The FLOSS community's goal is, and always has been, to convince the general public that software freedom is important. We must never give up on that goal, and we never will. Because it's really a matter of political power — in a computer-dependent society, if people aren't in control of their own computing environment, that means that other people are in control of it, and therefore those other people have power over them.

And this is all just a part of our broader political goal, which is to have a society where no one has power over anyone else; in other words, anarchism. That's the only way to have true "liberty and justice for all".

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 17:03 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (17 responses)

In that case, the real problem here is that "Joe Average" isn't computer-literate enough.

No, the real problem is that times have changed. Joe Average is quite computer-literate today. S/he knows how to use spreadsheets and web browsers, s/he knows how to create blog and publish video on YouTube. What Joe Average does not know and does not want to know is how to program. Just like s/he does not know how to fix the car. These skills were important when IT industry and automotive industry were young, but today… they expect that it'll be done by professionals.

Because our fundamental goal isn't to increase the usage share of Linux, it's to get the public at large to start caring about software freedom — and better computer literacy is probably a prerequisite for that.

I doubt it's even possible. The most you can do it mobilize general public when some changes threaten them directly (see SOPA/PIPA). But when it's something abstract… they don't really care.

All we (current Linux desktop users) care about is that the software continues to be developed and continues to have the characteristics that attracted us to it in the first place (including user-freedom, which you keep telling us that we need to give up).

Bullshit. Some Linux users genuinely care about software freedom and put it before everything else. But most of them are happy to use proprietary software if the need arises: ATI/nVidia drivers, Flash player, etc. It's hard to find Linux user who rejects them.

The reason those projects are dying is not because of locked-down hardware; instead, it's because they were designed for old PDAs with much less CPU/GPU power and smaller screens than the mobile devices of today. Today's equivalent devices have no need for Qt Embedded — they can run full Qt X11, so we have Plasma Active to fulfill the role that Qtopia/OPIE once served.

Than why there are tons of devices which use Android and nothing with Plasma Active?

And this is all just a part of our broader political goal, which is to have a society where no one has power over anyone else; in other words, anarchism. That's the only way to have true "liberty and justice for all".

Sorry to burst your bubble but this is impossible. Creation of silicone components is highly centralized business thus large corporations will always be in charge. If someone will find and way to cheaply replicate computer hardware then may be, just may be, you fantasies will have a chance to become reality. But till that happens they will remain pure vapor.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 18:21 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (16 responses)

> What Joe Average does not know and does not want to know is how to program.

If you don't believe that as many people as possible should be able to program, then you're rejecting the core ideology of FLOSS. Because if there's only a small elite who are able to develop software, that small elite will have power over others — and people having power over others is inherently wrong. There can be no argument whatsoever that it's not inherently wrong — it's a core value that needs no justification. It just is.

> Than why there are tons of devices which use Android and nothing with Plasma Active?

Because the phone carriers are hostile to user-freedom, and also because Plasma Active is new and immature. It's not true, though, that "nothing" runs Plasma Active, and the amount of devices it supports will increase over time. And it's not even the only current FLOSS mobile UX; there's Nemo Mobile, and there's CyanogenMod.

> Some Linux users genuinely care about software freedom and put it before everything else. But most of them are happy to use proprietary software if the need arises: ATI/nVidia drivers, Flash player, etc. It's hard to find Linux user who rejects them.

While it's true that just about all Linux desktop users are using at least some proprietary software (almost all of them are using proprietary system firmware / BIOS, for example), that in no way implies that software freedom wasn't part of what attracted them to Linux in the first place — and that is the point I was making.

Or to put it another way, suppose there's a "desktop Linux" platform that's a lot like iOS: it runs on locked-down devices only, and it only runs software from a single "app store" (unless you pay for a "developer subscription"). What's in it for me? (Nothing.) Why would I care that it has a Linux kernel somewhere inside? (I wouldn't.) You seem to be suggesting that this is what the future of the Linux desktop should look like — but the current user-base and developer-base want nothing like that.

> large corporations will always be in charge.

Another world is possible. All it will take is for FLOSS community members and other true believers to enter the heart of the capitalist system, and then destroy it from within. Because anything would be better than the current system — anything AT ALL!

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we'll keep the BLACK flag flying here…

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 20:26 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (13 responses)

Because if there's only a small elite who are able to develop software, that small elite will have power over others — and people having power over others is inherently wrong.

Small? Elite? What are you smoking? Very small percentage of people know how to farm today (and food is essential for living!) - does it mean they are “small elite with have power over others”? Very small percentage of people know how to stitch boots (and in many countries you can literally die without proper boots!) - does it mean they are “small elite with have power over others”?

Contemporary society is highly differentiated and any given skill (beyond small number of basics like the ability to speak) is only known to small percentage of it. Why programming should be any different?

On the contrary: I've worked as CS teacher some time ago and it's obvious to me that most people will never be able to program. Never. That's just fact of life. You can not do anything about it. You can ignore these people or you may adopt them somehow, but the society where most people know how to program is just impossible.

There can be no argument whatsoever that it's not inherently wrong — it's a core value that needs no justification.

Whatever. You may as well declare Law of Gravity as something “inherently wrong” - it'll not care. Just like I don't care about your crazy declarations.

It's not true, though, that "nothing" runs Plasma Active, and the amount of devices it supports will increase over time. And it's not even the only current FLOSS mobile UX; there's Nemo Mobile,

You forgot about webOS which is open source now. Yes, there are enough failed FOSS projects and I'm sure there will be many more. People just refuse to learn.

and there's CyanogenMod.

This is different kettle of fish. CyanogenMod is the only project with clear long-term perspective. Because it has evil twin designed for Joe Average - regular Android. If Android will fail at some point (for example if WP15 will kill it) then CyanogenMod, Plasma Active and other simlar projects will have no hardware to run on.

You seem to be suggesting that this is what the future of the Linux desktop should look like — but the current user-base and developer-base want nothing like that.

s/should/would/

It's either that or nothing at all. If Linux will form the platform which is used by Joe Average then there will be sibling platform for FOSS-lovers. If Linux will continue to form 1% of desktop and Microsoft will succeed in separation of closed Windows-only desktop platform from server (where Linux is not in danger for foreseeable future) then Linux desktop will be extinct.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 20:56 UTC (Sat) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]

You forgot about webOS which is open source now.

Not yet it isn't...

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 8, 2012 7:31 UTC (Sun) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (11 responses)

> does it mean they are “small elite with have power over others”?

If other people were actively excluded from joining that group (as is the case when copyright and/or patents and/or lack of source code exclude people who do know how to program from being able to modify the software that they use), then it might. Because if society depends on something that is under the control of an exclusive elite group, they will have political power over the whole society. That's why the core goal of FLOSS has always been to increase the amount of people who have control over the software they use. (And that's also why even non-programmers stand to benefit from FLOSS — with a large and non-exclusive base of developers, non-developer users have more options to turn to when developers/maintainers go against the users' interests.)

> Whatever. You may as well declare Law of Gravity as something “inherently wrong” - it'll not care. Just like I don't care about your crazy declarations.

What you dismiss as "crazy declarations" are nothing less than the core ideals that the 18th century French and American revolutionaries believed in.

> Yes, there are enough failed FOSS projects and I'm sure there will be many more.

It's way too soon to say that Plasma Active and Nemo Mobile are "failed". I believe they'll be more successful than the ones you mentioned (OPIE and GPE) ever were — mainly because the hardware they're designed for is itself far more commercially successful than the old so-called "PDA" devices ever were.

> CyanogenMod is the only project with clear long-term perspective.

It has no more "long-term perspective" than the rest. The only reason it has a larger usage share than the others is from riding on the coattails of it's "evil twin".

> If Android will fail at some point (for example if WP15 will kill it) then CyanogenMod, Plasma Active and other simlar projects will have no hardware to run on.

If that were true, then it would have been impossible for OPIE and GPE to run on hardware made for Windows CE (Jornada / iPAQ), but they did. And it's not guaranteed that Android being successful will ensure that unlocked hardware will be available in the future — for a while it seemed like there would be no more unlocked Android phones, when the Nexus One was cancelled.

> It's either that or nothing at all. If Linux will form the platform which is used by Joe Average then there will be sibling platform for FOSS-lovers.

Again, there's no guarantee of that. iOS is descended from FLOSS (Mach and 4.3BSD), and yet it has no "sibling platform for FOSS-lovers". And there's no reason why a (desktop or mobile) OS based on GPLv2-licensed Linux couldn't be just the same — indeed, Android could easily become like that if Google and the device manufacturers chose to stamp out all unlocked hardware.

The only real solution is for there to be a large enough niche market of people who actively prefer unlocked hardware, regardless of whether it's desktop or mobile. (And I believe that Google, for the moment at least, understands that there is such demand for unlocked hardware, or else there never would have been the Nexus product line.) That's why it's crucially important to make the case to the public at large about the benefits of user-freedom (and in particular the ways that locked-down hardware restrict it).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 8, 2012 10:11 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (10 responses)

If other people were actively excluded from joining that group (as is the case when copyright and/or patents and/or lack of source code exclude people who do know how to program from being able to modify the software that they use), then it might.

What this has to do with discussion in question?

What you dismiss as "crazy declarations" are nothing less than the core ideals that the 18th century French and American revolutionaries believed in.

Rilly? You must know how to program or you are not human are ideas of French and American revolutionaries? News to me.

I've said:
    Linux breaks applications all the time.
You answered:
    But you can still run them, as I've already said…
The next step was:
    I can run them. You can run them. Joe Average can not - and that's the problem.
Which prompted this crazy response:
    In that case, the real problem here is that "Joe Average" isn't computer-literate enough.
Which basically implies that people who don't want to learn how to build Linux systems and care for them should be considered defective and don't deserve lenience.

This is far cry from the “core ideals that the 18th century French and American revolutionaries”. It's one thing to empower people by giving them access to human knowledge. It's another thing to disqualify people by demanding them to learn things they don't really need or want.

It's way too soon to say that Plasma Active and Nemo Mobile are "failed".

They failed in the sames sense Linux desktop has failed. They don't come preinstalled (and will not come preinstalled in the future), they don't influence the markets they are in (hardware is designed to support Android 2.x or Android 4.x, never to support Plasma Active or Nemo Mobile), etc. The most they can hope for is something like Zaurus: niche product which will be on market for a few years mostly unnoticed and which will be later replaced with Android (or may be Windows8/9/10). They may survive as “curiosity project” like XMBC but this is side-attraction at best, this is not where future direction of the society is determined.

If that were true, then it would have been impossible for OPIE and GPE to run on hardware made for Windows CE (Jornada / iPAQ), but they did.

Sorry, but this is wrong. OPIE and GPE only had platform to run because Sharp created Linux-based PDA. And earlier efforts were also driven by companies, not by FOSS community. The same hardware was used for Windows CE devices thus it was an easy port (initially OPIE only supported Zaurus). When Sharp switched to Windows CE itself in 2007 OPIE and GPE lost the momentum, too. It's one thing to circumvent the bootloader and few unique components. It's another thing to port Linux to the hardware which has no public specification and which was never designed with Linux in mind.

And it's not guaranteed that Android being successful will ensure that unlocked hardware will be available in the future — for a while it seemed like there would be no more unlocked Android phones, when the Nexus One was cancelled.

That's separate issue. But if your hardware is using Linux-friendly components then to have free OS on it you basically only need to circumvent the bootloader. If your hardware is designed for totally different OS from the ground up then it's much, MUCH, MUCH harder.

iOS is descended from FLOSS (Mach and 4.3BSD), and yet it has no "sibling platform for FOSS-lovers".

iOS is only used by one producer which is quite explicitly is not interesting in filling all the niches. And it you can install Linux (Android) on iPhone - but it works significantly worse then Linux on Android handsets.

The only real solution is for there to be a large enough niche market of people who actively prefer unlocked hardware, regardless of whether it's desktop or mobile.

Bullshit. It just does not work. This approach was tried many times (Zaurus, OpenMoko, Nokia's Maemo/Meego efforts, etc). This niche market is just too small. It's large enough to support creation of a few devices from the components used by mainstream, but it's not large enough to support it's own separate ecosystem.

That's why it's crucially important to make the case to the public at large about the benefits of user-freedom (and in particular the ways that locked-down hardware restrict it).

“Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”? That's definition of insanity. This way was tried and it just does not work.

Time to move on: accept that public at large is just too ignorant to care about software freedom… and coopt it anyway. Internet community did that beautifully when it was threatened by SOPA/PIPA: general public don't care about copyright all that much (mostly because it's too ignorant about copyright-relevant issues), but it reacts when confronted with the danger of loss of their favorite toy.

This means that FOSS long-term survival is guaranteed only if FOSS community will learn to create toys used by general public. If they will be threatened then you you can mobilize millions if not billions in a case of danger. If FOSS will be used only by some FOSS-lovers then the destruction of the whole ecosystem will just not be noticed by general public.

FOSS community may be powerful, but it has an Achilles heel: ultimately it needs hardware to run on and said hardware can only be created by large companies. It is just as stupid to pretend that it's not important as it is to stupid to pretend that FOSS is powerless.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 8, 2012 10:54 UTC (Sun) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (6 responses)

As someone who was involved in the handhelds.org community for a long time and the current maintainer of Opie (yes, it's still barely alive) I feel that Opie and GPE are being bandied about here as if they have significant relevance to the discussion at hand. There are some parallels, but the situation was entirely different.

It was a few years ago now but after working for some time on handheld Linux I came to the unpleasant realisation that Opie, GPE and the Linux-based operating systems that they ran on where never, ever going to reach the masses. It was never going to happen.

Why not?

Because they never came pre-installed mass-market devices (among many reasons why not, at the time, GPL was a problem for many companies) and getting them onto existing devices was an exceedingly difficult and risky procedure even for the moderately competent - much more difficult than installing Linux on a PC. Unlike PCs, the hardware was almost completely closed and differed for almost every new device, and we couldn't keep up. Not to mention that building an OS for end-users for a mobile device was a gargantuan task for a group with fairly limited resources. The saddest thing of all though is that ultimately the effort was stymied by politics.

However, I wouldn't say the effort was a complete failure. We got a lot of real software development done, and out of the desire to be able to build an operating system grew the OpenEmbedded project, which flourished and has enjoyed commercial success that still continues to this day. Not to mention that developers who worked on various projects around handhelds.org had a lot of fun and learnt a great deal (myself included). This isn't particularly relevant to the desktop Linux discussion at hand, but worth noting.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 8, 2012 11:26 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

As someone who was involved in the handhelds.org community for a long time and the current maintainer of Opie (yes, it's still barely alive) I feel that Opie and GPE are being bandied about here as if they have significant relevance to the discussion at hand.

Well, yes, is is.

It was a few years ago now but after working for some time on handheld Linux I came to the unpleasant realisation that Opie, GPE and the Linux-based operating systems that they ran on where never, ever going to reach the masses. It was never going to happen.

Hmm, that's my point exactly.

Because they never came pre-installed mass-market devices (among many reasons why not, at the time, GPL was a problem for many companies) and getting them onto existing devices was an exceedingly difficult and risky procedure even for the moderately competent - much more difficult than installing Linux on a PC.

Sure. But here is the problem: as time goes on it becomes harder to install Linux on PC, not easier. Not just things intended to close the ability to install Linux totally (like Secure Boot) - there are other efforts, too. These changes are slow because when they interfere with lives of general public general public pushes back, but the process is quite steady.

Should we want till Linux desktop will reach the same stage as OPIE today? Or, perhaps, we need to do something to make sure it'll never happen.

Note that even the reason which kept Linux niche open for years (you need some Linux-compatible hardware to develop server solutions) is no longer valid: Virtual PC works fine for that.

Unlike PCs, the hardware was almost completely closed and differed for almost every new device, and we couldn't keep up.

Well, the history repeats itself with GPU, at least.

As Cyberax said: there's that sense of fin-de-siècle in the air - the current situation is unsustainable and Something Has To Happen. Either Linux desktop will finally reach general consumer or it'll die off. And the more I look on the situation the more likely it looks like we'll have both (like it happened on handhelds/mobiles): we'll get some kind of mainstream “Linux desktop”, but it'll be some kind of deep fork which will ignore most of the efforts which happened before it. Current distributions then follow the OPIE/GPE lead on the road to oblivion.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 8, 2012 16:30 UTC (Sun) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> as time goes on it becomes harder to install Linux on PC, not easier.

Not in my experience. I first tried to install Linux on a PC around 1997 or 1998, and couldn't do it. Since then it's gradually gotten easier; the last few times I've installed Linux (most recent one was this past December or January), I had no trouble whatsoever.

> Either Linux desktop will finally reach general consumer or it'll die off.

That's pure FUD, nothing more.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 8, 2012 19:40 UTC (Sun) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (3 responses)

Oh, and:

> Well, the history repeats itself with GPU, at least.

Not so much; right now there are only three major desktop GPU manufacturers (Intel, AMD, nVidia), all of which have free drivers available for all GPU variants up to almost the newest ones, and the latter two manufacturers also have proprietary drivers for Linux. And for mobile GPUs, proprietary drivers for Linux are readily available, and work is underway on free drivers for one mobile GPU family/manufacturer.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 9, 2012 1:40 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Care to explain how can I use switchable GPUs (ATI and Intel - both officially supported) on my Sony VPCSE?

Right now I have to blacklist radeon driver, or it simply hangs with black screen.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 9, 2012 8:44 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

That's not because they're being evilly kept secret by nasty hardware manufacturers trying to destroy desktop Linux. It's because switchable GPUs is hard enough when they're *not* completely different GPUs with distinct drivers. Even the first case has only been working for a year or so.

(And the people working on these free drivers are funded by... AMD and Intel! Normally, you'll note, competitors.)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 9, 2012 14:34 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

But that's exactly what khim and me is telling. Good switchable GPUs are a hard task to implement.

So vendors simply don't bother with Linux where it'll be useful only for a fraction of 1% of their users. NVidia hasn't even ported their Optimus technology to Linux in proprietary drivers.

In the area of switchable GPUs all we get is airled. And while he's a mega-super-developer, he can only do so much.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 8, 2012 17:47 UTC (Sun) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (1 responses)

> Which basically implies that people who don't want to learn how to build Linux systems and care for them should be considered defective and don't deserve lenience.

It implies nothing of the sort.

> It's one thing to empower people by giving them access to human knowledge.

That is what I've been saying all along: if people don't have sufficient knowledge about the technologies they depend on, they are disempowered. And things like locked-down hardware and source-unavailable software have the effect of disempowering people by excluding them from access to this knowledge. Therefore, what you said earlier — locked-down hardware is "good for them!" — can't be true (and is totally contrary to the core ideals of the FSF and the FLOSS community at large).

> They failed in the sames sense Linux desktop has failed.

The way I see it, the Linux desktop is successful today and getting better all the time — and there's no reason why it has to be used by the majority to be "successful".

(There's an old saying: "Unix is user-friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are." It was true then, and it's still true now.)

> When Sharp switched to Windows CE itself in 2007 OPIE and GPE lost the momentum, too.

Like I already said, the real reason why OPIE and GPE lost momentum was because the whole "PDA" device class was supplanted by smartphones and tablets.

> It's one thing to circumvent the bootloader and few unique components. It's another thing to port Linux to the hardware which has no public specification and which was never designed with Linux in mind.

The Windows CE devices were never designed with Linux in mind, and yet OPIE and GPE ran on them.

And for another example: the BeagleBoard / PandaBoard / RaspberryPi / IGEPv2 class of devices probably would never have existed if it weren't for both:

  1. The rise of the smartphone / tablet market that began 4-5 years ago (because these devices use CPUs and GPUs that are primarily sold to smartphone/tablet manufacturers), with most such smartphones / tablets not designed with Linux in mind until Android took the lead in marketshare; and
  2. The existence of enough people who do care about having fully-programmable hardware devices.
What this tells us is: if enough people demand computing devices that let the user (= owner) have full control over them, then the manufacturers will meet the demand with devices made from whatever commodity hardware components are currently on the market. That's why the FLOSS community must convince as many people as possible that unlocked hardware is a desirable thing (and this doesn't have to be a majority of people, it just has to be enough for the manufacturers to take notice).

> This way was tried and it just does not work.

It did work — that's why we've got the PandaBoard et al., and the Nexus series, and probably also why the threat posed by EFI was defeated (at least it looks that way currently).

> This means that FOSS long-term survival is guaranteed only if FOSS community will learn to create toys used by general public. If they will be threatened then you you can mobilize millions if not billions in a case of danger.

The problem is that they won't be threatened (or at least they won't perceive any threat) by the unlocked hardware going out of production or the destruction of the FLOSS ecosystem. If the Nexus and whatever other unlocked Android devices all were discontinued today, the majority of Android users would barely even notice. You said so much yourself: "Of course not! It's good for them! This is what they want!"

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 8, 2012 19:20 UTC (Sun) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

Also, one more thing:

> > It's one thing to circumvent the bootloader and few unique components. It's another thing to port Linux to the hardware which has no public specification and which was never designed with Linux in mind.

What about Rockbox, then? It was quite successful on hardware that was never meant to run it or any other OS/firmware other than the manufacturer's own one, and it only declined because (same as with PDAs) the smartphone/tablet boom has decreased the usage share of DAP devices.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 9, 2012 16:25 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Sorry, but this is wrong. OPIE and GPE only had platform to run because Sharp created Linux-based PDA.

Sorry, but this is wrong. DEC^WCompaq Western Research Lab had been working on SA1100 StrongArm prototype hand-helds well before the Zaurus, with Linux.The Compaq iPaq was borne out of the Itsy work and, though it shipped with WinCE, Compaq WRL provided Linux friendly bootloader firmware and distributions, which were pretty easy to install. The only daunting step was running the WRL provided WinCE app to reflash the firmware - still easy though. DEC^WCompaq WRL remained a nexus of the Linux StrongArm handhelds community for a long time after (handhelds.org remained hosted there for years after).

The Sharp Zaurus StrongArm Linux devices came after the Compaq iPaq. Also, they were, I think, harder to find. Compaq iPaqs were in a lot of shops at the time.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 8, 2012 23:22 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

>Because the phone carriers are hostile to user-freedom, and also because Plasma Active is new and immature. It's not true, though, that "nothing" runs Plasma Active, and the amount of devices it supports will increase over time. And it's not even the only current FLOSS mobile UX; there's Nemo Mobile, and there's CyanogenMod.

Care for a prediction? Plasma Active won't run on more than a handful devices with by the end of 2013. It will be used by relatively few users, mostly computer geeks. Then it'll either slowly wither away and die or will continue as a small 'niche' product.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 9, 2012 21:14 UTC (Mon) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> or will continue as a small 'niche' product.

There's nothing wrong with that, as far as I'm concerned. KDE has always been a "niche product", and yet it has survived for over 15 years and still has a thriving developer community.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 1:37 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (2 responses)

Oh, and a few more things:

> NEXTStep was extremely cool computer (it had rave reviews, etc)

The computer, or the OS? As for the computer, ISTR reading that it cost as much as a Unix workstation while having no better hardware than a 680x0 Mac, and it didn't even have a hard disk drive (at least on early models). No wonder it sold poorly.

> Steve's first priority was to keep existing users happy.

And you know what? If the Linux desktop were to be changed so that developers "must support old technology (often decade old technology) thus development is nightmare", existing users would be very unhappy, because a large proportion of those existing users are developers (which is how it should be, according to FLOSS ideology).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 12:12 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

If the Linux desktop were to be changed so that developers "must support old technology (often decade old technology) thus development is nightmare", existing users would be very unhappy, because a large proportion of those existing users are developers (which is how it should be, according to FLOSS ideology).

Linux has larger proportion of developers among it's users but these are still minority. That's why we have this discussion on first place. If you want to kick out all the “mere users” away and keep only developers then perhaps it's better for you to join the OpenBSD camp?

These people are at least honest: We hack OpenBSD for ourselves. Not for you. Not for the users. If the users end up enjoying what we have created for themselves, good for them. This may be because some of the users are have the same needs as us. But, then they are just lucking out, since we are doing it FOR OURSELVES.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 7, 2012 14:44 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> If you want to kick out all the “mere users” away and keep only developers

That's a strawman. No one ever suggested "kicking out" users — there's nothing preventing users from migrating to Linux if they prefer it over the alternatives. It's just that its developer base (which makes up a large proportion of the user base) is not, and should not be, willing to make things more difficult for themselves, and other current Linux users, for the sake of pandering to techinally-illiterate people (and you yourself admitted that "development is nightmare" on the platforms that those technically-illiterate users are currently using).

> perhaps it's better for you to join the OpenBSD camp? These people are at least honest

They're honest, and we're honest too — as far as I'm concerned, there's no significant defference between us and them. (In fact, I have used OpenBSD in the past.)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 2:48 UTC (Mon) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link] (1 responses)

Your Java example is pretty clearly the exception rather than the rule. Apple treated Java worse than a red-headed stepchild for a very long time. I really think they must have had regularly scheduled meetings where they said "OK, what can we do to make our Java support even worse without ending up with people installing 3rd party JREs?"

In some ways it was a relief when Apple said they were dropping the JRE- by opening the way for Oracle and 3rd party JREs it made actually made it more likely, not less, that people would get reasonably up-to-date Java support.

Maybe one of the undisclosed conditions of Microsoft's life-saving investment in Apple back in the day was that Apple would backstab Sun on the Java issue.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 9:17 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Maybe one of the undisclosed conditions of Microsoft's life-saving investment in Apple back in the day was that Apple would backstab Sun on the Java issue.

I sincerely doubt it. Steve said it best himself: the Apple's motto is we cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. Of course it means that all other developers are at mercy of Apple which is hypocrisy of highest caliber, but this is how Apple operates.

This meant that they must make sure there will be as few Java-based programs on MacOS as possible. No need to create insane Apple/Microsoft conspiracies (Microsoft backstabbed Apple exactly when five years passed as expected thus I doubt Apple and Microsoft had any obligations after that point).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:22 UTC (Sat) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]

The issue is shared libraries. If you build everything static, then the upside is that your software will work on just about everything. The downside is that everything uses a ton of resources (in particular RAM) since there is no sharing.

If you want shared libraries, then all packages have to be synced to the same set of libraries, or you have to use a source-based distro like Gentoo which does not require you to update the whole OS to update one app (but which requires every application to be compiled before it is installed - which is how you get around this problem).

Frankly, I'll take the latter. Have you ever looked at the chromium build system? The Chromium source tarball is huge, and 95% of it is rebuilding 3rd-party software like webkit that is already available as a shared library on virtually any distro. They static-link the whole thing, zlib and all. A few voices in the FOSS-community have complained about the practice, and Gentoo at least has been slowly patching the thing to use system libraries since it came out. The problem is that Google tends to use upstream sources, fork them, and not try to get the changes integrated upstream, so they aren't using the same webkit/etc that everybody else is.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 4, 2012 21:34 UTC (Wed) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link] (5 responses)

That is just silly. All you need to do is compile the program!

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 5, 2012 13:45 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

Not an options for 99% of desktop users. And this percentage goes down as time goes on.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 5, 2012 18:11 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

Don't you mean "up"? Or is compilation becoming more accessible for desktop users?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 5, 2012 19:39 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Percentage most definitely goes down - and pretty fast. Don't know what I've thought when I wrote that.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 5, 2012 21:15 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Umm…"up" again? You wrote that "compiling programs" is *not* an option for "99% of desktop users" and that the percentage is going *down* over time. Your first reply here seems to indicate that compiling their applications is becoming an option for more desktop users as time goes on. Am I (we?) getting confused with the negations here? Sorry for the pedantry, but things aren't lining up by my readings of this.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 5, 2012 21:35 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Well, if we remove all the negatives then the bare fact is that people perceive desktop in the same way as they perceive cars. Hundred years ago it was more important for the driver to know how to fix car rather then know how to switch lanes on highway (because highways had only two lanes back then). Today a lot of drivers never even look under the hood.

Desktop passed the same the same path but much faster. There are some enthusiasts who know all about compilers, computer languages, etc, but even developers are increasingly ignorant. Thus solution (source distribution) which was perfect forty years ago is not acceptable today.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:46 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (7 responses)

The app store model in iOS, Android, Mac OS X Lion, and Windows 8 is not the same as the Linux distro repository model. The app store is centrally curated but the individual app developer is responsible for creating the application package and uploading it. The app store doesn't do any repackaging or dependency management, so you can install any app without worrying about dependencies from elsewhere.

This is hugely different to the Linux model - see Ingo Molnar's posting on Google Plus recently for more about this.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 14:54 UTC (Sat) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

One problem with these "apple" stores is that they are designed for vendors with tiny portfolios.

Any vendor with a non trivial portfolio has components that are shared between its applications, some applications like office or creativity suites are specifically designed that way.

I can understand that those store services stay away from global dependencies sharable between vendors, but vendor internal dependencies would be handled by the vendor itself.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:26 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (5 responses)

> The app store model in iOS, Android, Mac OS X Lion, and Windows 8 is not the same as the Linux distro repository model

It's only different in policy not technology.

I could create an source for Debian and a web site where third parties could upload packages. I'd just say "By policy you may not depend on any package" or perhaps "on any package not present in release foo." Anyone who adds this apt source can go to his package manager and get third party apps, any third party who wants to can go to my web site and upload his apps. There's no dependency management because the packages simply don't request any. The only thing missing is a mechanism for paying for the apps.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:04 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

There's no guarantee that your app will continue to work year from now. For example, I can depend on 'libblah' package which packages version 2.71 of this library. Next year this package might switch to the next incompatible 3.141 version of this library.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 16:55 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (1 responses)

One would hope that, after the switch, the SONAME of libblah would be bumped to indicate this. The distro can then continue to provide the original libblah.so.0 indefinitely. Of course, this is the ideal, and it's not always adhered to strictly, but Debian is pretty good at spotting these kinds of problems and hitting upstream with the cluebat when they screw up.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 17:19 UTC (Mon) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link]

Yeah but that's not a good situation. The compatible version of the library is now unmaintained, orphaned. Is anyone making security fixes for it? More and more maintenance work will fall on the distributions, instead of being done in the project that's focused on the library. And some projects bump their versions several times a year, so the maintenance work on the old versions can really pile up. The result is of course that nobody does it, and installing a program that needs the old versions becomes really difficult.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 16:38 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

This is why I suggested "May not depend on any package"; that is, presume that you static link everything.

If you permit depending on some packages then this is a risk which the distribution vendor would have to be committed to preventing. Or, the third party repository maintainer might be willing to guarantee/mirror a set of packages at a certain version simply so that the apps can depend on them and only them (and then it's the app store owner's problem if the base distro makes an incompatible change).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:40 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It's only different in policy not technology.

These are related things. Ubuntu tries to ignore the difference and as was already discussed just says: In order for your application to be distributed in the Software Centre it must be in one, self-contained directory when installed.

Sadly it does not provide any means to create such one, self-contained directory.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 1:15 UTC (Sat) by bug1 (guest, #7097) [Link] (3 responses)

'Nope :) I don't want to "apt-get install" software, or "yum install" software, I want to be able to go to a website on my Linux Desktop, click on "download this application for Linux" and have it just install and work.'

When you say it like that, it sounds like you just want to be like everyone else, its worth examining why you want that. Im sure its deeper than just what buttons/commands you use to get a new app.

Perhaps what you really want is to be able go 'direct to the manufacture' rather than through a third party, to have a quality guarantee (you get want what others are getting, not a variation).

Or maybe you do only care are which buttons you press ?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 13:00 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

When you say it like that, it sounds like you just want to be like everyone else, its worth examining why you want that.

Because ubiquitous internet changed things? Because it's now feasible to download monsters like Photoshop? Because today users expect the ability to play with something after they've read the press-release or talked with a friend?

Im sure its deeper than just what buttons/commands you use to get a new app.

Well, yes. The times, they are changing. 10 years ago it was Ok to be ignorant about some new piece of software or some new game: it was hard to get it, sometimes you needed to hunt for it, some stores were out of stock. Today if you don't react instantly you are perceived as retarded. It's quite Ok to say "well, I don't like violence so I've skipped Left 4 Dead". But when you talk about virtues of GIMP or OpenOffice.org and someone says "well, cool, can you help me with understanding the features of a new release" and you answer "no, it's not yet in my distro, come back year from now" then it goes beyond embarrassment. You are falling out of your social group. And this is important - especially for younger people.

You get want what others are getting, not a variation.

Yup. That's the thing. Desktop have reached regular people and now fashion is the king. People don't want to be perceived as old-fashioned. They want to play Angry Birds Seasons when it's hot, not when it's few years old! And, as quite an opposite trend, some want to keep older “comfortable and weared in” versions around. Distributions basically impose “it's my way or the highway”: you can pick from the given selection of goods but the assortment is centrally planned and provided.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 0:54 UTC (Mon) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (1 responses)

> Distributions basically impose “it's my way or the highway”: you can pick from the given selection of goods but the assortment is centrally planned and provided.

This used to be a source of frustration for me, until I switched to Arch Linux. This is for two reasons:

  1. It is quite easy to develop package build scripts;
  2. It has a semi-official repository of user-contributed package build scripts.
As a consequence, it's much easier to use software that's not in the distribution. It's even possible to replace major infrastructure components (like installing the latest Git snapshot of Mesa with the experimental i915g driver), which would be a major hassle on dpkg/rpm-based distributions.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:27 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]

Having RPM spec files available for such stuff would be easy (for Fedora) and many source packages include the build machinery for Debian, but nobody has stepped up do organize "third party" repositories of said stuff. I did rebuild some packages for new versions (or local configurations) on Fedora and CentOS semi-routinely, but the need diminished over time due to better integration and more agressive upstream tracking.

Perhaps the non-existence of such repositories for other distributions is due to their users not indulging in routine wholesale recompilation, prefering a uniform, vetted set of packages instead...

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:59 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

A nice solution is this. If you integrate this in your website, like qupzilla did you offer something which both integrates with package management AND is darn easy. Of course it depends on the distro a bit, openSUSE has one-click-install which, despite needing a few more clicks than one, makes installing something 'over the web' really easy. Other distro's aren't there yet, requiring command line stuff to add repo's you'd need to keep things updated. But if and when OCI gets ported to other distro's we're getting closer to how it should be while staying within the distro's comfort zone. Which a self-extracting tarball or similar solutions usually don't do.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 16:43 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

A nice solution is this. If you integrate this in your website, like qupzilla did you offer something which both integrates with package management AND is darn easy.

It sounded “too good to be true” thus of course I went to check. I'm using latest version of LTS - Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and the only thing I see is the following text: “Ubuntu Precise, Oneiric, Natty and Maverick users can install QupZilla by running these commands”… FAIL.

This is what I'm talking about: I need to upgrade the whole distro just to get a new app! Worse: the distro I need to install is not yet even released (and I will probably need to wait few months till it'll be tested by our IT guys). If this is not demonstration of failure of the whole model then I don't know what is.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 8:09 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

A distribution where that was the default method of software installation sounds like something that goes against every principle of good software engineering I can think of. Not something I would use or work on, but I wish you good luck when you start working on it.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:36 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (11 responses)

"We need to get out of the business of providing 20,000 packages in a distro and get into the business of providing a 100% stable OS platform for others to build upon."

Except in my experience almost 100% of the time the distribution packagers get it right and the application authors more often than not get it wrong.

You'll have to excuse me for not wanting to go back to the wild west of system management or maintain the systems of those who do.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 23:17 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses) 

cyberax@cybnb:~$ sudo apt-get install photoshop
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package photoshop
Personally, I'm willing to sacrifice some usability of 'apt-get install' to get commercial applications and games on Linux.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 0:39 UTC (Sat) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (3 responses)

To what end? If you want the experience of running Windows or MacOS, and you're happy with proprietary software, then there a a couple of perfectly decent ways of getting those experiences. I run Linux because of the things it does differently - we don't need another Mac OS, we have one already.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:19 UTC (Sat) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link] (2 responses)

To what end? To have new KDE4 release in Debian at the same moment I have them in Windows, not 6 months later for example (this argument I've already given at least once in LWN).

I don't take notes, but I've seen it in other places too: source and Windows releases of software are at version x.2 while .deb file is at x.0. Also, beta builds are many times only available for Windows and OSX. Being able to run multiple versions is useful at times, but let's skip this argument as it's more complex.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 9:29 UTC (Sat) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

Strange. I usually have new KDE releases installed before the Windows packages are even ready. Just had to add the repository which is just a click on a Website with openSUSE's 1-click-install.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 19:19 UTC (Sat) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]

It's true that OpenSUSE has much earlier (better?) KDE support than Debian, but turning the discussion into a Debian vs. OpenSUSE would be bikeshedding*. My grief is not that that OpenSUSE has KDE earlier, but that _Windows_ has it earlier.

*but I'm pretty convinced OpenSUSE is lacking stuff that Debian has; after all, I left OpenSUSE and got Debian some years ago precisely because it was missing some packages Debian had.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 19:40 UTC (Sun) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (1 responses)

"Personally, I'm willing to sacrifice some usability of 'apt-get install' to get commercial applications and games on Linux."

Not interested thanks.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:33 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

Personally, I'm willing to include a stable platform and software installation mechanism that third party developers (including commercial ones) would be able to support and willing to use if it means that the market share of Linux, and thus the aggregate freedom of all people, goes up by an order of magnitude.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 5:53 UTC (Sat) by PhilHannent (guest, #1241) [Link] (3 responses)

"Except in my experience almost 100% of the time the distribution packagers get it right and the application authors more often than not get it wrong."

Surely that means that the package system is too complex and requires dedicated experts to get it right.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 8:51 UTC (Sat) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually, authors do get it wrong on occasion, and even when they don't, lack of coordination between different interdependent project often makes it unnecessarily hard for the latest versions of their programs to co-exist. Distributions are the only place where this kind of coordination happens.

And no, static compilation is not a solution, people do care how much memory their applications use (observe Mozilla's and LibreOffice's tremendous efforts towards that goal), and they shouldn't have to upgrade all their applications just because a vulnerability was discovered in one of the fundamental libraries.

Yes, the package system is complex. It has to be, because it's solving a complex problem. And yet, it's not that hard to use: there's a lot of good documentation and a lot of tools that automate the packaging, maintainance, building, inspecting your packages for common problems, and even basic integration testing.

A much larger part of the problem is created by the increased rate of change and a growing disregard for backwards compatibility in projects that are essential to Linux desktop and development experiences. That's what jcm is talking about in the first comment in this thread: many projects haven't yet realized that becoming part of our platform carries a certain responsibility to the users, and changes the balance between the benefits of rapid development and backwards compatibility.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 8:10 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Excellent comment, thanks for bringing some reality to this discussion.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 9:07 UTC (Mon) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> And no, static compilation is not a solution, people do care how much memory their applications use (observe Mozilla's and LibreOffice's tremendous efforts towards that goal), and they shouldn't have to upgrade all their applications just because a vulnerability was discovered in one of the fundamental libraries.

I may be completely off here, but I suspect that most libraries are so small (taking into account that parts of them won't be used by the application) that static linking won't be a big problem, and that many of the remaining libraries will be sufficiently exotic that only one or two applications will be using them anyway, and the gains from dynamic linking will be minimal or not. So it might be worth thinking of strategies to deal with libraries which don't fall into either category (like the Gtk+/Qt complexes, which in any case don't take well to multiple versions in use on a single system - perhaps using the system Python interpreter to access the system versions?)

Regarding vulnerabilities, perhaps this could be solved by distributing applications compiled but unlinked, so that just the vulnerable library needed to be updated? One might even find some half-way house between the way free software distributions work now and a fully do-it-yourself approach which would let multiple pieces of software get updated together. Though I suspect that for most software smaller than Mozilla or LO the gain would probably not be worth the effort.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 0:54 UTC (Sat) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link] (32 responses)

It is not being holier than thou, it is the license distribution of flash that has several limitations.

The license is rather clear :
http://www.adobe.com/products/players/flash-player-distri...

You need to have a agreement with Adobe to be able to distribute Flash. Just read the restrictions. And since the whole agreement may not be transitive, so distributing flash would make things difficult for stuff like free public mirrors ( as you cannot agree for them to not distribute flash to country who are under embargo ).

There is other various issues that most projects prefer to avoid, and not based on some religious attitude. There is lots of rational reason to not be able to distribute Flash.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 2:14 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (31 responses)

The thing is, clearly I do understand the licensing and redistribution restrictions :) Therefore, I would kindly ask that you re-read what I wrote. I want a Linux platform, where I can go to the Adobe website and just download flash "for Linux" and have it work (not have it discontinued because there are too many targets). And flash is a silly example. In general, I want to be able to go to software vendor X, download a package "for Linux", and have it just work, like it does on every other platform. I don't want the distinction to be whether or not distribution Y has a policy or inability to ship something. Like most users, sometimes I just want a particular package and I am willing (in certain cases) to live with that not always being Free. We would have more users if we made that experience far more pleasant than it is today, instead of telling them why we can't ship what they didn't ask us to ship on their behalf in the first place.

Note, I used to run vrms and let myself get all personally guilty at having any non-Free software installed. And I did that for many years. But after 17 years, I've donned a pragmatic hat. I want users to be able to make choices around their preferred software. This cannot happen if we allow our own personal preferences for an entirely Free world to cloud the bigger picture that we are going to lose out to platforms (however closed) that make it a simple process to get software. Android isn't winning just because it's Google, it's winning because it's a platform people can write software against fairly trivially. Maybe the answer (on Linux distro Y) is "HTML5 will save the day" (which I seriously doubt, but ok). Meanwhile, there is no real alternative to the Windows, Android, or OSX "app store" (no need to tell me all about what Canonical are doing, that isn't the same).

Jon.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 2:31 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

Adobe didn't discontinue flash for linux because there were too many packaging systems, they never supported the different packaging systems in the first place, they bundled everything in statically and bypassed the packaging system (the distros played catch-up to clean things up, but that didn't cost Adobe any effort)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 16:29 UTC (Sun) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]

Well, they still have a yum repo for fedora (and maybe RHEL): http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 3:57 UTC (Sat) by davide.del.vento (guest, #59196) [Link] (6 responses)

What you want is irrelevant to what linux distributions are or what they do.

You want proprietary software vendors like adobe distributing and selling their programs like photoshop on linux. Fair request, I wish there was Lightroom for linux. Unfortunately there isn't and there will not, it's a chicken and egg problem: the software vendors will not write software until there is a critical mass, and the critical mass will not use it until there will be the software they want.

Note that the situation with Android was different: that was an emerging market, there wasn't a huge leader with a massive user base and with a massive number of established software. Yes, iPhones were dominant, but there was a even larger user base of people not having *yet* anything comparable (which is not the case with laptops/desktops). And yes, iPhone had tons of "apps for that", but most of them were relatively small and simple that a random competitor startup could rewrite an app with similar functionality in a reasonable time for a different platform (and they did for Android). Try to do that with photoshop!

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:06 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (5 responses)

If I may, you highlight the problem by ignoring my point. My point is that the lack of a stable, consistent, easily targetable platform for third parties is what keeps that software out of user's hands. Sure, if we had a billion desktop Linux users, I'm sure no amount of headache would come between revenue sources, but we don't. Therefore, don't you think that actually making it very easy for third parties to write and distribute their own (not necessarily open) software would yield a higher chance of getting them to throw a few resources at it? That's a rhetorical question btw :)

Take this example. A long long while back, I installed the Amazon MP3 downloader. Now, I don't even know if it works any more because I've long since switched to using a Mac to download music. But at the time, they had to independently package the same application for a number of different moving target "platforms". Only a small number of vendors (like Amazon) are going to bother with that effort, and perhaps because their own engineers want this to work :) And 6-12 months later, when the distros have revved, those packages no longer work because system libraries and other pieces have changed underneath. Sure, I can and did fix this for a while for myself on my own system by using compat libraries or building stuff from source...but users aren't going to do this, and vendors writing these apps aren't going to go rev them every 6 months just to stand still. No, they (rightly) expect that if you install a software application today, it's going to work in 6 months, or 3 years from now. Maybe not in 10 years, but in 10 minutes from now it had better still work.

We can go back to thinking the answer is that we ignore proprietary software, or non-distro stuff. That's fine. But that is why it will never be the year of the Linux desktop. It won't be the year of the Linux desktop until a user can download a piece of software built more than 10 minutes ago, and not by the distro in question, and expect it to just work. And sure, we can all go out and buy Macs, etc. etc. but that's not the answer either. Let me summarize it this way: the Economist article has a number of very valid and useful points that should not be ignored.

Jon.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:50 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

Exactly - if the Linux community doesn't carefully analyse the arguments made by the Economist article, and think out how to prevent these problems, there is no chance for desktop Linux.

Even using the term desktop Linux is misleading - since there is no stable core API across distros and versions, there is really a huge proliferation of desktop Linux variants. That's great for adapting to unique user requirements, but only a fraction of this (perhaps Ubuntu) can support a third party application market.

The Humble Indie Bundle has been at the forefront of encouraging indie game developers to support Linux, and they have made some significant revenue out of Linux, but this is going to be limited by the installation hassles - I can't even get some Humble games installed on Linux, so I just reboot into Windows. The point is to play the games not to be a Linux administrator...

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:16 UTC (Sat) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (3 responses)

No, they (rightly) expect that if you install a software application today, it's going to work in 6 months, or 3 years from now. Maybe not in 10 years, but in 10 minutes from now it had better still work.
It is not like this is not possible it just not promoted good enough ... something like glick2 Let me quote from the site:
  • Easy to install apps
  • Apps keep working if the OS packages are upgraded, no sudden breaks due to some library change.
  • In fact, you can run the same bundle on older or newer OSes, meaning you can keep running an older OS and then cherry pick new versions of apps without having to upgrade the while OS to get the new dependencies.
  • You can install multiple versions of the same application
  • Bundling leads to an increased level of cross distribution compatibility. Although, you're not bundling your own xserver and kernel, so at some point there is a dependency on system installed things.
Seems to address most of your issues ... just no one uses it (yet?).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 16:30 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Seems to address most of your issues ... just no one uses it (yet?).

This immediately raises the question of: why. Who's behind this project? Why haven't they offered some new goodies in glick2 format (a lot of people would like to run latest versions of GIMP or LibreOffice on three-year old distribution using something like glick2) ?

The whole story looks promising, but it's in “too early to tell” stage. But thanks for the hint: the promises are intriguing.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 17:03 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

There were several similar systems (autopackage, various bundle implementations) but they've failed because they all need a critical mass of users to succeed.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 19:46 UTC (Sun) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]

They _failed_ because their continued use went and hosed a bunch of systems of poor newbies who bought all the "you just have to double click" schtick and perhaps thought autopackage & friends were anything more than a fancy "do anything you like to my system" shell script.

And then their distributions support communities were unable to really help them because they'd been running "installers" that ran slipshod over the whole system.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:31 UTC (Sat) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link] (19 responses)

I want a Linux platform, where I can go to the Adobe website and just download flash "for Linux" and have it work

What is "Linux"? Linux is just a kernel. Surely you're not proposing that a single package of Flash is going to work on an Android phone, a Tivo from 1998, and a dashboard GPS unit?

You can already download flash for some particular version of some particular distro, just as you can download flash for Windows v7.

Your real issue with the linux desktop world is fragmentation - tons of distros, and each changes too quickly. Windows releases about 3 versions per decade, and most distros release 3 versions per year. Windows 7 will probably run calc.exe from windows 3.0 (which didn't even have process isolation for windows apps).

The problem is that most of us FOSS types like it that way too much. Linux distros scratch our itches. Chances are I won't like the distro you want to run, so I'm not going to help maintain it. Instead, I'll help maintain the distro I like, and thus there will never be one. There is no unified goal in FOSS - just a loose confederation of shared interests that shift.

Will Linux ever succeed on the desktop? Meh, for me it already has. If you don't want to use it, then don't. :)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 15:59 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (18 responses)

"Linux" is a de facto term I've come to use. For the first N years of using Linux, I was a good little Stallmanite, went around running vrms, felt bad about any proprietary software (and met a good friend with the opening line "quick, I must find a computer running only Free Software!" - true story), etc. I would also go around correcting people about using the word "Linux" when they obviously were just uninformed and meant "GNU/Linux", and it isn't "hacker", it's "cracker", etc. etc. etc.

But now I don't care. 17 years later, I'm 30 and the entire world calls it "Linux". I know what it *really* is. I've read most of the kernel source out of sheer random bedtime reading. I used to do an LKML podcast just because I was that keen on reading LKML. So I think I get enough geek cred that you can accept that I know what "Linux" is, and I'm choosing to go with the term that the *entire* rest of the world is using at this point.

As to the rest of your comment. You make a good point. Many people would not want to use the only possible platform that is going to make "the Linux desktop" successful for a mass audience. The only way to do it is to have locked down APIs, far less churn, less re-invention, and a stable base that applications can target for many years at a time. See also Windows, OSX, Android (API revisions thereof), and so on. Enterprise Linux is successful because it fixes this mess in the server case and creates a stable base for folks to target. But doing that on the desktop is extremely unlikely to happen for all the reasons that you cited.

Note, I'm not that personally devastated. I use Linux as a server and embedded OS. I use it as a desktop for working on stuff (where I get to enjoy just how nearly close Spotify runs under Wine these days) but for media consumption and weekend hobbyist projects? I use a Mac for my desktop because I have X amount of time and I don't want to spend it fixing libraries, upgrading the rest of the system (python, every core library, etc.) just to install one application, and so on. I've made my peace with reality. I'm just trying to point out that if for some reason anyone still cares about getting to the "year of the Linux desktop", it will never happen until the issues in that article are fixed. Desktop users (the kind we'd actually win) don't care about shiny, they care that Microsoft Office from 3 years ago "just works". That's what would be required if we actually wanted to have a mass userbase on the desktop.

Jon.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 17:31 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (17 responses)

Small correction.
Desktop users (the kind we'd actually win) don't care about shiny, they care that Microsoft Office from 3 years ago "just works".

Sadly this is not so simple. They care both about Microsoft Office from 3 years ago (because they need to create their homework or need to create this !^#*@!*# presentation for their boss) and about “latest and greatest” buzz-generating gimmick (be it game or some new hobby).

This combination is fundamentally incompatible with ditribution-centric world.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:15 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (16 responses)

Ok, so maybe users also care about some latest gimmick like a game or whatever :) But fundamentally, they care that their computer *works*. They define works as "I click on the Microsoft Office icon, it works" or something similar to that. They don't give a damn whether you've got fancy 3D effects, or whether you can rewrite the whole UI in JavaScript. If I were a betting man (and I was one person who didn't buy a lottery ticket in the US yesterday), I would bet money that if we actually ever asked mass consumers what they want, many of the "innovations" would be low down the list and only of interest to the cadre of unwashed sweaty geeks who hang out at Best Buy on a Saturday afternoon building the latest gaming machine. In other words, the reason I don't go to PC stores on weekends.

Certainly in my experience of talking to real people - friends, family, etc. - who are not techie, none of them care about the latest stuff. Most of them are running some several year old version of Windows or OSX and running a mixture of older and newer apps. They have a very reasonable expectation that software just installs and works, and that software they bought 3 or 5 years ago just installs and works. They also have a reasonable expectation that brand new software still works because the platform they are on is not such a moving target that the developers of those apps are able to target something a few years old and reach everyone.

It's really not rocket science. It's *boring* science. It isn't fundamentally incompatible with distributions, it's fundamentally incompatible with "oooh, shiny". It requires extreme restraint, a co-ordinated, standardized approach, and dare I say it, a little intentional "stagnation" in terms of the burn and churn. And also, I'm not saying this has to happen. I'm only saying it has to happen if we care about getting mass adoption of Linux as a desktop and having articles like this one - and a number of other ones recently - end very differently.

Jon.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:20 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (15 responses)

So, dare I say it, being successful as a consumer offering would mean taking a huge amount of the current "fun" out of it. Absolutely, that is what I'm saying lest there be any doubt about that. Having a boring, stable platform would be very unsexy, but it would sell like hotcakes.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:44 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Having a boring, stable platform would be very unsexy, but it would sell like hotcakes.

Tell that to Nokia and RIM. Unless you can explain why the same people who abandoned “boring, stable platforms” on mobile (BlackBerry, PalmOS, Symbian, etc)and went with “oooh, shiny” iOS and Android will do the opposite on desktop this theory looks suspicious.

People want both “boring, stable platform” and “oooh, shiny” depending on their mood. You said so yourself:

Most of them are running some several year old version of Windows or OSX and running a mixture of older and newer apps.

Yes, and distros assume that if you want new version of GCC then you automatically need new GNOME or KDE experiments. That's the problem. It's hard to mix and match - and this is what people expect as you've explained.

That's why “just use CentOS” “solution” to GNOME3 “problem” does nor work, for example.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:25 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Unless you can explain why the same people who abandoned “boring, stable platforms” on mobile (BlackBerry, PalmOS, Symbian, etc)and went with “oooh, shiny” iOS and Android will do the opposite on desktop this theory looks suspicious.

That's easy. On a conceptual level, people understand phones much better than they understand desktop PCs. Mobile phones started out as phones that weren't screwed to your wall, then at some point you could use them when you were away from home, and then in small incremental steps they grew extras such as MP3 players, calendars, little games and so on. Eventually they got web browsers and then apps. (Do remember that the first iPhone didn't actually have native apps except from Apple.) Even so their users perceive them as »mobile phones«, not as »mobile computers whose thousands of features incidentally include the ability to place and receive phone calls«, which is, technically, what they really are these days.

Desktop PCs, on the other hand, are big and ugly machines that tend to malfunction in any of a myriad different ways or get viruses so you have to find somebody to fix them for you because they're much too difficult to fix by yourself. People like their computers to »just work« because that is a very precarious state which can change completely at no notice whatsoever (in the worst case, visit the wrong web site just once and ka-boom, there it goes) and is a big hassle to get right again. Phones, like most appliances, are generally a lot more reliable than desktop PCs and so people are a lot more open to small incremental additions that seem fun and exciting because, hey, whatever happens you can still make phone calls.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:38 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

Indeed. There's a lot of truth in there. I've blogged about my opinions on consumer behavior and how - on the whole - you get one chance to define expectations for something new and disruptive and then live with it forever. Microsoft would love to have thrown away Windows years ago, but they couldn't because they had to - shock - provide a compatible, consistent, customer and user experience. It's not actually consistently crap either. Sure, there are viruses, malware, and crashes...and what makes anyone here think that we're magically so much better that we wouldn't have all of the same kinds of problems if we were the 99% rather than the 1%?

Jon.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:22 UTC (Sun) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (11 responses)

You are basically asking for "reimplement windows".
Why would people switch to the "windows copy" and not just use windows instead? Cost is not a factor as the OS comes bundled so most customers do not even see the cost.

You cannot succeed by trying to copy your competition. You have to innovate and that means trying new things and not being overly conservative.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 21:25 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

Well, Linux has failed to innovate in the desktop experience.

Maybe we should actually _copy_ what makes competitors successful and THEN start to innovate?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 22:34 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (9 responses)

Well, Linux has failed to innovate in the desktop experience.

Not true. The one single outstanding feature that sold a friend of mine on Linux as opposed to Windows was that in KDE 3.5 (the current version at the time) it was possible to print from OpenOffice.org directly to a KMail PDF attachment. For her that was true innovation. It was great for her to see people actually add something that, viewed objectively, is such an obviously useful feature, instead of confusing and extraneous stuff that nobody ever actually needs. It improved her life considerably, not just because of the feature itself but through experiencing that here were people doing these things for her that the Microsoft guys never bothered to think of.

I personally think it is utter and pointless stupidity on the part of the KDE developers to not have hung on to the feature in KDE 4, but that is neither here nor there.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:49 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (8 responses)

> I personally think it is utter and pointless stupidity on the part of the KDE developers to not have hung on to the feature in KDE 4, but that is neither here nor there.
Really? I think that's more like the entire point. If you upgrade and a feature goes away, that's a backwards compatibility bug.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 12:38 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (7 responses)

It would only be a bug if the KDE developers actually cared about backwards compatibility, which on the whole they don't appear to do.

We must remember that, from what we can see, the KDE project's primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers, not convenience or stability for KDE users. Which is understandable given that volunteers, who make up the vast majority of KDE developers, tend to do whatever it is they do for fun, not for drudgery.

And I'm not picking on KDE here. I'm not a GNOME user, but from what I can see about GNOME, it's just more of the same thing.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 12:42 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (6 responses)

"We must remember that, from what we can see, the KDE project's primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers, not convenience or stability for KDE users."

Can you just stop gratuitously insulting us? It's extremely tiresome.

You must know you're wrong, and by now you must know there were pretty good reasons for the regressions in printer support and you must know that there are people working very hard with Qt to get back all that functionality.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:27 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

You must know you're wrong, and by now you must know there were pretty good reasons for the regressions in printer support and you must know that there are people working very hard with Qt to get back all that functionality.

So? KDE 4 came out in 2008. You don't mean to tell me that this job has taken more than four years and isn't finished yet? I was under the impression that Qt was meant to make things easier for developers. I don't really care about what kind of internal mess keeps KDE from providing features that it used to provide. All I can see is that stuff that used to work well no longer works at all. I'm really an understanding sort of person but I can't fault other people – especially the ones whose KDE-3.5-based Linux systems I support – for thinking this is not the way things ought to go. (The stock reply here is, of course, »If it is that important to you then effing do it yourself«. But that only reinforces my original point.)

It's not just printer support, anyway. We're having this discussion in the first place because ABI stability in Linux is problematic especially with respect to the desktop environments (the kernel, libc, and X11 ABIs, to move farther down the stack, are doing reasonably well there). If the desktop environment projects were more dedicated to maintaining backwards compatibility, the problems touched on in this thread would be a lot easier to solve.

This includes issues such as making it difficult to have several versions of the software installed at the same time (which I understand is a problem with GNOME 2 vs. GNOME 3), or dropping all support for KDE 3.5 basically immediately after KDE 4.x came out (which at the time was barely usable). As things stand today, even if something like LSB stipulated KDE SC 4.8 as the official »stable« base for desktop applications, nobody knows what things will gratuitously be broken in KDE SC 4.9 because, like in so many cases before, somebody thought they desperately needed to be reimplemented from scratch. The only obvious way out of this is to keep a complete 4.8-vintage KDE around on the off-chance, and to hope that it (and applications running on it) will be able to interoperate with newer versions of KDE.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:41 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, I'm going to tell you that. Anyway, read for yourself:

http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/kf5_localization_a...

details the current situation, and

http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/the_good_the_bad_a...

tells you about the earlier work. Let me quote:

"Just to recap, the branch at http://qt.gitorious.org/~odysseus/qt/odysseus-clone/commi... contains the Advanced Page Selection features such as Current Page, Odd/Even Pages, Server Side page selection, and non-continuous Page Ranges."

That was in 2009.

So just stop spouting offensive nonsense like "KDE developers primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers". That simply isn't true, and you know it.

You can make your point in a way that shows that you're "really an understanding sort of person". and there's no reason for you to be a jerk on behalf of other people who aren't.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:20 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

That was in 2009.

Indeed. It is now 2012. There are various adjectives that one might think of when hearing this. The one that comes to my mind, considering that we have gone through 9 releases of KDE and several of Qt since when this stuff used to work, is »pathetic«. I'm deliberately not dissing John Layt here, who AFAICT did all he could to advance the issue and more, but the observation that the development processes of KDE and Qt apparently managed to stifle any sort of useful progress on an important regression like this for years, while at the same time taking on board loads and loads of completely new stuff, speaks volumes.

So just stop spouting offensive nonsense like "KDE developers primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers".

That's not what I said. I said »The KDE project's primary mission …«, which is something completely different.

The fact that there are a few developers who do feel called upon to fix these long-standing issues does not detract from the picture as a whole. The problem is really that there are apparently too few such developers. For every single KDE developer like John Layt, who I will be more than happy to ply with good German beer if he ever shows up in the Mainz area, there are probably several who are only in it for the fun. What we see as a result is a project which seems deeply in love with everything that is new and shiny and cool while not-quite-so-cool things like feature regressions from five years ago are left to a small minority of people who feel responsible enough to address them, if they are ever addressed at all. In a properly governed infrastructure-type (as opposed to fun-type) project, regressions like these would not have been allowed to arise in the first place. We're not talking about random bugs here, after all, but about things that can be documented and planned for in advance.

Let me quote from the first comment on one of the blog posts you mentioned which said

»Perhaps 2010 will become the year of the kde desktop, with complete printing options, (hopefully) network management, supported video cards and FINALLY a decent standard browser.«
It is now 2012 and at least two of these items remain on the to-do list.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 20:33 UTC (Mon) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

I was ready to be sympathetic, despite being one of the people who has been suffering from the lack of decent print support in KDE4. Then I read this bit in the link you provided:
The CPD solves a very specific problem, that is the broken state of print dialogs on Linux using Cups. It doesn't solve the problem we and Qt have of also supporting printing on Windows and OSX using the same API.
So there is actually a decent module to handle printing, but linux users must wait 4 years to see it, just because the same solution wouldn't work on Windows? Heck, the Windows + KDE users, if there are any, probably have other ways to deal with printing. "We don't like #ifdef" hardly seems like an adequate justification for this decision.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:30 UTC (Mon) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

>> "We must remember that, from what we can see, the KDE project's primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers, not convenience or stability for KDE users."
>
> Can you just stop gratuitously insulting us? It's extremely tiresome.

That his point of view which is not said in an insulting way, you disagree so you feel insulted, but FWIW I agree with his view: if the KDE project's goal was primarily the convenience and stability for KDE users, then things would have been handled very differently, for example not activating by default unstable technology, not making "big bang" release such as KDE4.0, etc.
But as it makes things less fun for developers, I think that only small projects can work this way, IMHO KDE is way too big to be developed like this.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 16, 2012 12:06 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>"We must remember that, from what we can see, the KDE project's primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers, not convenience or stability for KDE users."

> Can you just stop gratuitously insulting us? It's extremely tiresome.

> You must know you're wrong

To be honest, I for one wasn't aware that that was disputed and was hence under the impression that his statement was an objective fact. I would never have guessed that it would be found offensive, so I doubt there was any insult intended.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 4, 2012 21:45 UTC (Wed) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link] (1 responses)

I want a Linux platform, where I can go to the Adobe website and just download flash "for Linux" and have it work

Me too. This will work the day Adobe releases it as a source tarball. Until and unless they choose to do this, it isnt going to happen. No one else can do that for them - they hold the copyright so they have to decide to do it. But strangely enough, the prescriptions here all seem to be counterproductive to that goal. Binary compatibility isnt going to encourage software release - quite the opposite, it only alleviates the discomfort due those who refuse to release!

So the whole thing sounds very counterproductive to me. Linux explicitly avoids a stable ABI and that is a very wise move. It makes things better for free software, and is only an inconvenience for those who try to take our freedom away. The more inconvenient for them, the better!

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 5, 2012 14:16 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Me too. This will work the day Adobe releases it as a source tarball. Until and unless they choose to do this, it isnt going to happen.

Then it'll never happen period.

No one else can do that for them - they hold the copyright so they have to decide to do it.

If the choice is between releasing the sources and dropping support for Linux then second option wins ten times out of ten. Some companies may decide to release sources (for example id Software usually releases id Tech N as open source when they start selling id Tech N+1), but if that's prerequisite for the decent support then the platform which demands that will never go beyond some FOSS pundits.

There is nothing wrong with developing pure-source systems - this is interesting experiment and you may even find some sympathetic people, but you can kiss your “Year of Desktop Linux” dreams good-bay.

Linux explicitly avoids a stable ABI and that is a very wise move.

You mean stable API nonsense? That's very different. Linux kernel explicitly decided not to support in-kernel API stable. But it's userspace ABI is not stable. It's super-stable. You can run programs written for Linux 0.9 on Linux 3.0 (in general, there are some exceptions)! When someone forgets that for a minute Linus becomes quite vocal: This is *not* about some arbitrary "30-year backwards compatibility". This is about your patch BREAKING EXISTING BINARIES. (emphasis in original). Nuff said.

Unstable in-kernel API created some problems but in general worked good enough because ultimately kernel pieces only interface with each other, userspace and with hardware. Hardware is hard to change once it's released and you can upgrade your kernel without changing too many things in userspace thus "update your Linux to get support for newer hardware" approach works. Recompile the world does not work, can not work and will never work - and kernel people know that down to their very bones. Sadly the desktop guys are still doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results. That's definition of insanity.

It makes things better for free software, and is only an inconvenience for those who try to take our freedom away. The more inconvenient for them, the better!

Depends on your goals, I guess. If your goal is to create super-uber-ultra-free OS which can be shown as great achievement in an emulator - then yes, you are absolutely right. If your goal is not the future exhibit for the Computer Science Museum, but something for real people, then this attitude leads nowhere.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 13:16 UTC (Sat) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (31 responses)

I am afraid you are not being very helpful. I sense and share the notion that desktop linux is progressing too slowly, and that we somehow need to improve. That said, simply asking for desktop linux to be more like windows or osx is not very helpful. To be helpful, you really need to get down and dirty with the details.

First thing up is packages and dependencies. I think many readers will interpret you to advocate that we should get rid of most dependencies, letting each application be it's own island like it often is for proprietary software. While a tempting thought, the dependencies is exactly the mechanism needed for free software to thrive. We build on each others work. Yes it is painful, but there really is no other way. We have to find ways to do that effectively, and the 20.000 packages is currently the answer. It is so effective that Android, ios, osx and win8 now are all copying it, one central management for handling applications and dependencies. Your comment of apt-get install is stupid, you know very well that there have been gui's available many years now, exactly like Android market and the likes. If you want to be helpful, you should avoid such flame baits.

Flash has been distributed for quite some time on the most popular distributions, with little to no hassle for the users. Again, if you want to be helpful then please make the effort of coming up with some of the real issues.

You may have a point on the subject of making distribution of proprietary software on linux easier. I believe there is still a lot of ground we need to cover here, but it is certainly not that bad either. The LSB is nothing to sneeze at, it provides a framework for handling dependencies of the most common libraries across all relevant linux distributions. For other libraries you are simply encouraged to compile statically. The biggest problem is actually that many developers don't even know it exists. Is it perfect? No, it isn't. There are still all the API's that some vendors (like Adobe) complain about, with fragmentation. In this department I believe GNU/Linux have made great strides to improve and avoid unfortunate fragmentation. On sound I would say that it is already settled. Gstreamer and Pulseaudio are now supported by everybody, and can safely be expected by any developer. Looking into the history with the OSS licensing mess, you will see that many of the problems were created by destructive forces exactly because somebody had your pragmatic "holier than thou" attitude. Red Hat's success is precisely because the have been crisp clear on their stand on licensing.

On video, things are progressing so slowly that it makes me want to scream. Intel singlehandedly ruined the desktop push with Ubuntu 10.04 by forcing users over to a GPU driver framework that was nowhere close to ready for prime time. Meanwhile the graphic stack (I am not talking about the proprietary drivers, they are like peeing in your pants to keep warm, in other words no long term solution), is slowly getting better. Intel finally seems to shape up and will have useful drivers for the first time in two years when 12.04 comes out. OpenGL3.0 support seems to come together on all three open drivers too. Wayland will probably be disruptive, just as pulseaudio was, but I *really* *really* *really* hope that the transition will be handled better this time around (i.e., don't throw everybody into the mess and deprecate xorg before things are reasonably stable for wayland).

As goes for KDE, the 3-series provided a good desktop experience, and KDE4 has taken too long (maybe it was too ambitious, but that is in the past now). I finally see signs that KDE is maturing again, and I hope 12.04 will bring it to a point where many non-savvy users can use it. There are already features in there that are simply fantastic, miles ahead of the proprietary offerings. We just need to make the last rough edges go away. As for Gnome and Unity, I don't really follow that development anymore.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 17:06 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (30 responses)

It is so effective that Android, ios, osx and win8 now are all copying it, one central management for handling applications and dependencies.

FAIL. Android iOS, OSX and Win8 are built on top on NeXTStep bundles idea. They quite explicitly don't track dependencies. At all. The whole store is flat: you have libraries and capabilities in the OS and application use them to talk to each other. They don't use capabilities from other bundles directly.

This is what makes it possible to create a store with 500'000 applications faster then Linux could build one with 50'000 applications.

The LSB is nothing to sneeze at, it provides a framework for handling dependencies of the most common libraries across all relevant linux distributions.

FAIL. LSB is nice piece of technology but it's totally unsuitable for real-world applications. For example it still does not offer a way to play sound or video - not even in latest incarnation. Come on: today is 2012, not 1982!

For other libraries you are simply encouraged to compile statically.

Yeah, nice idea. The only problem: ALSA or PulseAudio don't work this way. You need to somehow find the configuration and/or daemons before they'll work as user expects.

On sound I would say that it is already settled. Gstreamer and Pulseaudio are now supported by everybody, and can safely be expected by any developer.

Huh? This is nice to hear, but I still can not find them in LSB. Perhaps I'm missing some announcement which moved LSB site or something?

There are already features in there that are simply fantastic, miles ahead of the proprietary offerings.

That's cool, but again: when these features will be available for LSB users? Or how can I use them if I link all the libraries statically? How can I create applet for a KDE panel which is usable on all LSB-based distributions?

You are kind of right: most of the pieces needed to build stable Linux desktop ABI are there. But few small, yet important pieces are missing. glick2 looks like a nice try to finally create cohesive whole, but it does not yet look ready for prime time.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 6:38 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (29 responses)

"Android iOS, OSX and Win8 are built on top on NeXTStep bundles idea. They quite explicitly don't track dependencies. At all. The whole store is flat: you have libraries and capabilities in the OS and application use them to talk to each other. They don't use capabilities from other bundles directly."

I should have re-phrased my sentence. The app stores do not handle dependencies, they leave that up to the individual apps. Nevertheless, it is through them that apps have access to their dependencies, and then depend on them being present in the app store. If you build an Qt app for Android you will experience how this is used to pull in the Qt libraries. Problem is that this model is much more fragile, since you leave it up to packagers to handle all dependencies. That model simply does not scale. I repeat, the devil is in the details, you are mixing the dependencies which is a back-bone of open development with ABI breakage. For meaningful discussion we will need to separate between the two.

"This is what makes it possible to create a store with 500'000 applications faster then Linux could build one with 50'000 applications."

I beg to differ. There are far more linux applications than 50.000. I haven't checked, but Debian shouldn't be far away from 50.000 in the official repos by now. If you are familiar with what it takes for a pacage to enter Debian, you would now that you are badly mixing apples and oranges here. Bring in all the ppa's of ubuntu, and you have something more comparable. Then take into account the open development model, and you see how we avoid the 499.000 utterly useless apps. Even with a tiny tiny fraction of the attention, the widgets available for KDE already rivals the ones available on Android (my personal opinion of course). The point though is that proprietary applications are not tailored for in Debian. Ubuntu has adapted their software center for proprietary applications, so it is finally offered, but admittedly still in it's infancy.

"LSB is nice piece of technology but it's totally unsuitable for real-world applications. For example it still does not offer a way to play sound or video"

No, it doesn't, but it pretty much takes care of the ABI issues for most other standard libraries. Maybe I was not clear on this, but addressing sound and video in my post directly was exactly because LSB is not very helpful there. I agree though that media dependencies should have a place in LSB too.

"ALSA or PulseAudio don't work this way. You need to somehow find the configuration and/or daemons before they'll work as user expects."

ALSA has done hoops to cater to compatibility issues, supporting OSS based applications for instance. Still programming against ALSA is probably a bad idea, which is why I did not list it. I did mention Gstreamer on the other hand. Pulseaudio is a server, so I am not sure exactly what grievance you have developing against it. Along with Gstreamer I can also add SDL. Both should give you sane ways to provide sound in your applications that by now should be quite robust between linux distributions, and even across operatingsystems. Which is more than I can say for the alternatives on other platforms.

"How can I create applet for a KDE panel which is usable on all LSB-based distributions?"

The KDE desktop has been a rather fast moving target lately, I would even say partly due to proprietary development of Qt. If you are happy with the approach taken by other platforms, i.e., using a fixed low performing high level language, you can do it in Python quite easily and expect it to provide your precious stable ABI to kingdom come. If you do it in QML, chances are you are in luck. Qt is moving to an open governance model, and with it I expect a relatively stable ABI. In my book, linux has had a stable ABI. It is the drivers that don't have a stable binary interface, and I think we should be happy about that.

"most of the pieces needed to build stable Linux desktop ABI are there."

Indeed, let's get those last pieces nailed too.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 6:47 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (20 responses)

There are 38579 entries in my apt cache. Of them, 21536 are without the 'lib' prefix. So 20000 apps is a fairly good estimation.

It's a far cry from 500000 apps in iPhone/Android store.

And about uselessness, a lot of Debian packages are not particularly useful for end-users. So I won't be the one casting stones if I were you.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:10 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (18 responses)

You must be joking. There are practically no useful apps on ios or android. I can count the number I use of them on one hand, and of them a couple is bundled on any linuxbox. Granted I see my family members enjoy two or three more apps. To be generous I will estimate the number of useful apps at about twenty. Do you really want all that garbage on linux?

For your reference libs count like apps on android and ios too. It is not particularly positive to have few libs available. If you check out KDE, you will see that distribution of widgets and other stuff (like wallpapers, icons, plugins, etc) are outside the package system (in the package system you will typically find bundles of them, but only for some). So your estimate is disingenuous at best. The right answer in an apples to apples comparison is quite favourable for a debian based distribution.

Talk about throwing stones, that goes both ways.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 17:21 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

You must be joking. There are practically no useful apps on ios or android.

Indeed. It's like arguing with someone who claims to have 500000 bookmarks, because the threshold for "app" status is more or less at that level.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 21:24 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (16 responses)

Sure. And all those 300000000 people with Android have thrown away their smartphones and switched to featurephones.

Right now I have on my phone: Sygic navigation (there's no alternative on Linux at all), Yandex Metro (subway navigation for the Moscow subway), Yelp, barcode scanner, etc. Care to provide similar packages for OpenMoko?

Besides, let's look at Debian. I've chosen few random packages:
>gsettings-desktop-schemas
>wfut
>nana
>sofa-data
>kiki

Am I supposed to be excited by them more than I'm excited by a wet toilet paper?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 21:54 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (15 responses)

I am having problems taking you seriously. Maybe you are bored, and just want to argue for the sake of arguing for no particular reason?

Navigation is provided by Google, so it hardly counts in this setting. Moreover, it is not exactly an interesting application for a desktop now is it?

Openmoko was a nice project, just as Qtopia was. Nokia thought the latter was good enough to bet their future on, and I think the N9 proved the point. You are of course free to bash the N9, but in my book Microsoft did what they could to defeat it and Qt, the product itself was excellent. We simply got ass-raped by big money just to make sure it never got momentum. Just like everybody comes after Android these days.

As goes for Debian, there are so many packages I enjoy there the picking random ones is just stupid. Good luck with that.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 22:45 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (14 responses)

Google has no turn-by-turn navigation for almost all countries other than the US. It doesn't show current speed limit, there's no voice functionality and it doesn't work offline.

So which package out of 50000 Debian packages should I install on my phone to fix this? My phone actually runs Ubuntu in a chroot, btw!

No navigation? When what about barcodes and QR codes? Is there a simple scanner app with integrated search functionality for this in one of the 50000 packages?

>As goes for Debian, there are so many packages I enjoy there the picking random ones is just stupid. Good luck with that.

That goes for the 500000 apps in the Google Play. People enjoy their favorite games and tools even though they may seem stupid to you.

And yes, you have to provide comparable number of applications to attract users and vendors.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 6:51 UTC (Mon) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (10 responses)

Well, the only device using debian packages where navigation makes sense is N9, you will find all the features you mention there. I leave it up to you to search for a debian packaged barcode/qr-code scanner there, see if you can find it yourself.

As for desktop debian you should check out Marble, it is already competitive with Google maps where I live, and I believe it is ported to N9/N900 and can give you off line maps.
http://edu.kde.org/marble/
Quite astonishing when it has had little to no funding, and everything including maps is free.

As for Qr-code, did you know that generating qr-codes is built into the clip board tool in KDE, so that you can generate a qr-code out of everything on the clip board with a click? One of hundreds of useful features I miss on any proprietary desktop.

Keep an eye on plasma active. With little funding, no devices, it still already is quite capable. If devices with it comes with GPS, you can expect work on free navigation software to catch on. I do believe devices will come with camera, so I am willing to bet that barcode/qr-code reader will follow at some point if it is not already there. And yes plasma active is already distributed by kubuntu as debs.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 7:23 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (9 responses)

>Well, the only device using debian packages where navigation makes sense is N9, you will find all the features you mention there. I leave it up to you to search for a debian packaged barcode/qr-code scanner there, see if you can find it yourself.

Nope. N9 uses common app-store approach with solid packages, N9 does NOT use .deb-files-with-dependencies approach for software packaging.

>As for Qr-code, did you know that generating qr-codes is built into the clip board tool in KDE, so that you can generate a qr-code out of everything on the clip board with a click? One of hundreds of useful features I miss on any proprietary desktop.

So I want to scan QR/bar codes with my camera, recognize them and search information based on it. There are tons of 'useless' Android apps that do this.

Certainly, there should be at least one mega-useful Debian QR-scanner among these 50000 packages, right? (Well, no, I've just rechecked it)

Note, I'm thinking as a typical user.

>If devices with it comes with GPS, you can expect work on free navigation software to catch on.
No, I don't expect it (after 10 years of waiting). Navigation requires licensing of map data which is complicated and expensive.

So far, the only freely available map is OpenStreetMap which is woefully inadequate.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 7:57 UTC (Mon) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

Hm, so you challenge me to find phone oriented debs in repo's made for non-existent devices. Exactly what are you trying to prove? That open development typically avoid apps that are of absolutely no use? Frequently termed bloat. On this we agree.

I see you are not satisfied with openstreetmap. I beg to differ. With the progress it has had, I already find it useful, and within reasonable time it is set to rival any proprietary map. Then finally we may go over to a more productive model where just about anybody can develop a navigation app. But for free navigation apps to catch on, we need devices in peoples hands. The Vivaldi is the first device, openmoko was a nice attempt but never got functional enough to count.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 22:06 UTC (Mon) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (2 responses)

I had a look at openstreetmap and accidentally found a navigation application. It was of course conveniently available in Debian and Ubuntu repos too. Check out gpsdrive. I have no idea how good it is, but without relevant devices, even navigation is already in place on Debian. I think it is time you eat some of your own words.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 22:31 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yup. That's EXACTLY why Linux is failing.

I might use a free program for the sake of freeness, but normal users would cry and run away in horror from something like gpsdrive. Have you actually checked it? It can't do even a quarter of what a good navigation system should be able to do.

But let's go further. Why would something like gpsdrive need full Debian package management system?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 8:13 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

You might want to actually try using gpsdrive before presenting it as an example of a good software experience. (oh, the memories...) While they had a release in 2010, I don't think much has changed since 2004. It was certainly best-in-class in 2004!

The best OSM navigation tool I've found is called OSMAnd but it's still quite painful. Terrible address/city lookup, poor route selection (sometimes abysmal), difficult UI. I wish I could rely upon it but I just can't. I'm using Google Maps all the time.

For the past decade (since Bruce Perens was working with the Tiger data in 1999?), the year of solid Linux/OSM navigation has seemed pretty close. Just like the year of the Linux desktop, it's only a couple of years out! Too bad it seems to be constant time to completion.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 23:08 UTC (Mon) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (4 responses)

Not sure why you thinkg OSM is 'woefully inadequate'. OSM has been better than Google maps for at least 5 years where I live (Cambridge, UK). It's bang uptodate (when a bridge that had been closed for 6 months reopened, OSM reflected that within 24 hours. It took google maps another 6 months. Every footpath, bike route, pub and college is on it. Google maps just doesn't have this detail.

OSM has a cyclemap view and all sort of related tools and sites because it can be re-sused in much more versatile ways than google maps. e.g http://cyclestreets.net for cycle route planning anywhere in the UK.

Google's draggable routing tool is still very cool, but it is very car-centric, and OSM is a much better map for most purposes I need.

I have a tomtom device which illustrates the advantages of OSM. The maps that came with it 8 years ago are now _very_ out of date. I can pay a small fortune to get newer ones, or I can switch to an OSM-based nav tool. Not quite as slick interface but totally uptodate maps forever more at no cost. That's a big deal.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 0:58 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

Cambridge probably has a lot of students with lots of free time. So it's no wonder that the coverage is great there. It's not so great in other areas, though.

Commercial map providers often use data from official sources, so it's consistent everywhere. Quite often that requires obtaining various government licenses to work with it and/or converting complex formats.

This is not cheap, so applications have to be sponsored somehow. Through ads or maybe through direct sales.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 7:25 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

It's not so great in other areas, though.

The OpenStreetMap maps for Germany are, by now, widely considered superior to anything available on the commercial map market. Some loose ends need to be tied up but on the whole things are looking not at all bad.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 16:41 UTC (Tue) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (1 responses)

Cambridge is just an example, and in fact most of the initial mapping was done by a man with a job. Most of the UK now has excellent OSM coverage.

Mapping is the canonical example of something that is better crowd-sourced than done commercially. Getting data from official sources is about governments providing data in open formats.

I sometimes wonder why you post here - you don't really seem to believe in the idea of collaborative effort or free software at all. You just keep telling how much better commercial OSes and commercial map providers and massive phone companies are, when the point is that those entities can use and contribute to open data and free software too if they want and we all get better stuff.

Where are these places where the OSM mapping data is poor? I'd expect such places to be getting quite thin on the ground now. Clearly there is more data to add to OSM so that it is good for all purposes (such as motorway lane details for turn-by-turn style nav, speed restrictions) but no doubt that is all ongoing at a rate of knots.

For the last Debconf (in Bosnia and Herzegovina) it was notable that so far as Google or Deutsche Bahn were concerned the place was empty and devoid of roads or trains. OSM had excellent detailed mapping. That seems to be true for many 'lesser' countries where the big providers can't be bothered.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 17:44 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Well, for example, Google Maps show the hotel where I'm staying right now: http://g.co/maps/3xm25 and OSM doesn't. In my home city OSM gives me incorrect address for the US embassy: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=50.460314&lon=30.51...

And so on. I've been burned a couple of times by the OSM, so I won't use it for anything important (like getting from point A to point B in time).

So no, maps are definitely not something I'd trust to Wikipedia-style development. Now, maps based on official geodata with wiki-style corrections would be great. And we actually have it in Russia ("folks' map" by Yandex).

>I sometimes wonder why you post here - you don't really seem to believe in the idea of collaborative effort or free software at all.

I certainly do. Only an idiot would deny the success of the Linux kernel (btw, I hate the combination 'Linux kernel', sounds too much like 'ATM machine').

However, I'm not blind and I can see where the _non-commercial_ community development model fails. It usually fails in tasks that require a lot of drudgery and/or interaction with real users.

Linux kernel by now is not non-commercial, it's developed by for-profit companies as a way to avoid developing their own completely new OS. Besides, Linux is hardly boring at all.

OSM might actually be picked up by companies which need reliable mapping data but which don't want to pay to develop it from scratch and/or license it. That's arguably already happening (Apple is using OSM in one of their products).

But no company bets on Linux desktop right now. And unfortunately, a lot of desktop-related development is very boring stuff. Like keeping compat wrappers for old API or making sure you don't break anything with new updates. So we see the result - a lot of wonderful new development with no regards for backward compatibility and regressions in functionality.

A similar problem - there are no good tax/accounting packages for Linux. Just our favorite grumpy editor.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 22:55 UTC (Mon) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (2 responses)

Navit or tangoGPS?

No idea about QR codes - there is something called zbarcam that decodes qr codes from a video device. Is that what you mean?

It is true that a lot of android and iphone 'apps' are little more than a URL. It does turn out that those are popular though, and we probably should do more to make such things easy to come by on linux desktops. It seems tome that this is actually a problem of organisation - how do you find what you want in half-a-million bits of software?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 23:18 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Navit or tangoGPS?

Still no good. The first thing you need to have good navigation is to have raw data. Not just maps (OpenStreetMap slowly becomes better here), but traffic data (including historical traffic data), photos of complex interchanges, etc.

This data is rarely available for free: either it needs to be sold for money or it may be supported via ads.

Which basically excludes distros out of the equation immediately.

As Cyberax said: I might use a free program for the sake of freeness, but normal users would cry and run away in horror from something like gpsdrive.

Not because the program is not any good, but because the lack of data makes it sub-standard.

The same with QR-codes, NFC, etc: it's trivial to write program which parses QR code, read NFC or does something like this. And, again, I might use a free program for the sake of freeness, but normal users would cry and run away in horror because they don't need to just read the QR code. They expect that program will do “something sensible” with data (if it's URL it must be opened, if it's a vCard it must be added to address book, etc). If I touch phone with my metro ticket Simple? Yes. Boring? Sure. But this makes it actually useful for Joe Average! Similarly with NFC: yes, I can probably find program which will read data from card, but will it show number of trips you have left on subway ticket like “useless” Android's app?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 15:29 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> OpenStreetMap slowly becomes better here

I hope Apple's OSM usage[1] will accelerate OSM's coverage.

[1]http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2012/03/08/welcome-apple/

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 12:21 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

There may be 500.000 apps in the iOS or Android app store, but it is fairly safe to say that, for most users, at least 495.000 of them are not really worth looking at, let alone downloading, installing, or running. I'm pretty sure that my phone won't like me installing more than a few hundred apps at a time in the first place, so, as a conservative estimate, out of the 500.000, 499.500 or more are useless to me in any case.

If you separate out the »apps« that are really glorified web bookmarks or exist strictly because somebody wants to sell you something, I don't think the difference to what is in the Debian repository is all that significant any longer in practical terms. Whether there are 999 or only 9 useless apps to every single one that is actually worth my trouble doesn't really bother me a lot.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:26 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (7 responses)

Nevertheless, it is through them that apps have access to their dependencies, and then depend on them being present in the app store.

Have you ever actually used any appstore? Of course if someone will try to create app store which works this way it'll not work.

Applications are not supposed to depend on app store. At all. Yes, some of them include instructions which say “install package XXX before you can use this package”, but these are rare: developers know to the very bone that when you add any such dependency you risk alienating users.

For the most part application is standalone thing and it can be installed in isolation provided you have required version of Android. Some allow you to further install plugins - but this is handled by application itself, not by app store.

App store reliably solves dependencies problem - by refusing to support them at all. This approach is tested and it does scale. It uses more resources then distro packaging approach, but frankly in a world where entry-level phones have gigabytes of flash and entry-level laptops have hundreds of gigabytes of space on HDD this is not an issue.

If you build an Qt app for Android you will experience how this is used to pull in the Qt libraries.

Yes, I know. Qt abuses the system slightly. Time will tell if it'll work Ok for them or if people will complain too much.

Problem is that this model is much more fragile, since you leave it up to packagers to handle all dependencies. That model simply does not scale.

Somehow it scales pretty well on Web: all these Google Maps APIs, Facebook APIs and so on are supported by developers without distribution-appointed police officers and so far Web works.

I repeat, the devil is in the details, you are mixing the dependencies which is a back-bone of open development with ABI breakage. For meaningful discussion we will need to separate between the two.

I don't care about any back-bones. I care about the ability to build and deploy the program.

"This is what makes it possible to create a store with 500'000 applications faster then Linux could build one with 50'000 applications."

I beg to differ. There are far more linux applications than 50'000.

Yes. Show me one repo with at least this much - and you'll have a point.

Bring in all the ppa's of ubuntu, and you have something more comparable.

Nope. If you'll bring all the ppa's of ubuntu on one system then most likely result will be something crazy - I'll be surprised if the resulting system will even boot. PPAs are dangerous beasts. They conflict with each other, some of them can break your system even if they are used in isolation, etc. IOW: they push the burden on user. And the last thing user want is to play “private distro packager”.

Ubuntu has adapted their software center for proprietary applications, so it is finally offered, but admittedly still in it's infancy.

It's worse: it does not even address API stability seriously. The only thing it says:

 In order for your application to be distributed in the Software Centre it must:

  • Be in one, self-contained directory when installed
  • Be able to be installed into the /opt/<package-name> directory
  • Be executable by all users from the /opt/<package-name> directory
  • Write all configuration settings to ~/.config/<package-name> (This can be one file or a directory containing multiple configuration files)

Short, simple set of requirements, right? Well, let's start. Be in one, self-contained directory when installed. How can I do this when Ubuntu does not provide stable enough foundation for the development?

No, it doesn't, but it pretty much takes care of the ABI issues for most other standard libraries.

Rilly? SDL is not there, crypto (neither openssl nor gnutls) is not there, desktop integration (dock, notifications, etc) is not there, HTML widget is not included, etc. Just what kind of desktop application can I build using this foundation?

I did mention Gstreamer on the other hand.

Which is not in LSB either.

Pulseaudio is a server, so I am not sure exactly what grievance you have developing against it. Along with Gstreamer I can also add SDL.

My grievance is in the fact that nobody guarantees their availability. And if you'll take a look here you'll see that GStreamer is on the road to incompatible 1.0 version. When this happened with openssl Ubuntu immediately punted old version it to universe which effectively rendered all packages which used it out of “one, self-contained directory” category. SDL in the same boat. It looks like PulseAudio does not have plans to do this any time soon, but still, it's a gamble, not a stable platform with a stable ABI.

If you are happy with the approach taken by other platforms, i.e., using a fixed low performing high level language, you can do it in Python quite easily and expect it to provide your precious stable ABI to kingdom come.

Rilly? Can you gunrantee that two years from now KDE will not decide to switch to python3, for example?

In my book, linux has had a stable ABI.

Linux kernel has remarkably stable ABI. Linux desktop is a disaster. That's what we are discussing here.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 16:41 UTC (Sun) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] (1 responses)

You will be able to run both GStreamer 0.10 and 1.0 concurrently, just like you can run GTK2 and GTK3 together.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 17:28 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

But will GStreamer 0.10 come preinstalled or not? That's the question. Or else it'll me more of the same: I can't even get some Humble games installed on Linux, so I just reboot into Windows.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 16:55 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (4 responses)

"Have you ever actually used any appstore?"

Yes, of course. I have even made an Android app just for fun, and had to use necessitas to get a decent development environment. I am very happy to have most of my time focussed on linux applications, android and ios developers have my sympathy.

"App store reliably solves dependencies problem - by refusing to support them at all. This approach is tested and it does scale"

No, it doesn't. It will create the same disaster we have on the proprietary desktops.

"Somehow it scales pretty well on Web: all these Google Maps APIs, Facebook APIs and so on are supported by developers without distribution-appointed police officers and so far Web works."

No, web doesn't work. You cannot trust these api's. Facebook is already quite busy figuring out how to disable them to have people come over to their web-site instead. Google has changed api's on gmail and on google calendar for no good reason before. IMAP is the only sane way to talk to gmail, and google contacts are not available through any sane api yet. Moreover, you have probably seen the concerns over the internet being tested only on three engines. Html is no silver bullet, it may prove to look more like a thorny road.

"I don't care about any back-bones."

Then I suggest you go and troll elsewhere. The GPL is about building on each others work. If you don't care about that, and want to throw it away, I suggest you stop wasting your time here and go play on windows. Deploying programs on linux is not that difficult, I deploy a number of them across multiple distributions, and it hardly costs me any time. It is not a big issue. Those who want to do it manages. Your link to gstreamer only shows me that it finally is set to mature with version 1.0, hardly bad news for sound on linux.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 17:33 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

No, it doesn't. It will create the same disaster we have on the proprietary desktops.

What disaster? If you mean “the system where you can play games, easily watch latest videos and do my work”, then yes, I do want such “disaster”.

No, web doesn't work.

I think is the point after which the discussion becomes pointless. If you think that web does not work and linux distributions do then you deserve what you are getting.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 18:19 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (2 responses)

"What disaster?"

The disaster is that practically all software categories end up with one dominating vendor, also known as monopoly. Notably, games still have numerous vendors, but they enforce the monopoly on the desktop. Have a look at win7, it contains practically nothing, and costs more than a $100 in the cheapest stripped down version. It is a tragedy (or disaster if you like).

"I think is the point after which the discussion becomes pointless."

That is up to you, I simply informed you that some of your prime examples have proved messy environments for programmers and users. Changing API's and web-developers who only cater to a subset of browsers. Thanks to the open model you seem to detest the web has improved tremendously over the last years, but it has at least as long to go as the linux desktop before it can be considered a stable environment. You are not alone though. Everything on the web seems to be the new mantra, it will fail as badly as similar foolishness before it.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 21:34 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Windows 7 allows to run other programs. And users are more than happy to pay for this.

I've actually tried to migrate a couple of mid-range (50-100 users) organizations to Linux. We've tried pilot projects with just a few users. Invariably, it turned out that some small but critical app they are using since 90-s can't work in Wine. Then they try do arithmetic:
> 1) Maintaining Windows + Office licenses costs $100 per year per user.
> 2) Writing a new application costs $10000 - that's 3-4 years of Windows 7 licenses.

Large companies might decide to go on with the migration. Small companies usually just continue with Windows.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 7:43 UTC (Mon) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

You really do open up new topics as we go along here. Migrating company desktops to linux is indeed challenging. Mostly because of lock-in. Sure, there are applications, some places more than other places. In HPC related industry you frequently have the opposite, applications, yes even proprietary ones, are often only available on linux. Guess what, proprietary 3D viewers are abundant on linux.

Start a new thread and I can join you in this discussion. For this thread we have already expanded the capabilities of LWN.

Incentives

Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:29 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

On the other hand, what is the incentive for a software publisher to want to code/package for this "Linux platform" even if it were stable? [Look most coders who say the reason they aren't coding for Linux because ABI/API changes etc are mostly blowing air.. it is the easiest excuse in the book and gets them off the hook from saying the truth of "I have no f'ing reason to want to port to Linux."

With phone I have advertising dollars by selling the information to various companies about what my users are doing. With mac/windows there are programs where I get paid to port my program to another platform if I had a good market. Or if it is important enough, paid NOT to port it to any other platform.

Incentives

Posted Mar 31, 2012 23:48 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>With phone I have advertising dollars by selling the information to various companies about what my users are doing.

Most of apps on Android/iPhone only display ads, with little to no information transmitted to advertisers.

>With mac/windows there are programs where I get paid to port my program to another platform if I had a good market. Or if it is important enough, paid NOT to port it to any other platform.
...yawn...

Yeah, it's a conspiracy and now we have to kill you for breaching our secrets.

Incentives

Posted Apr 1, 2012 6:50 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]

"With mac/windows there are programs where I get paid to port my program to another platform if I had a good market. Or if it is important enough, paid NOT to port it to any other platform."

Can you provide documentation of the two? Not that I doubt it is happening, but it is helpful to have some reference.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 8:21 UTC (Mon) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

For context, here is Ingo's post on G+

https://plus.google.com/109922199462633401279/posts/HgdeF...

Jon.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 30, 2012 20:53 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (45 responses)

Right on the money. If you install, say, a printer driver in Windows you can be pretty sure that it will continue to work even after you install service packs or even upgrade to a newer Windows version. At the worst, you'll have to install the driver again when you upgrade; it almost never happens that a previously working piece of software suddenly disappears or loses functionality. But this happens all the time in Linux as things are churned and rewritten.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 30, 2012 20:55 UTC (Fri) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link] (14 responses)

Then I wonder why there were so many problems in Windows after installing some service packs? This article is totally biased.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 30, 2012 21:58 UTC (Fri) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link] (13 responses)

> Then I wonder why there were so many problems in Windows after installing some service packs? This article is totally biased.

Yep, this article is 100% bullshit. I've had about 10X the success in getting hardware to work between versions of Linux than I have between XP and Vista, in fact, it was the fact that hardware providers *simply wouldn't provide drivers for Vista*, not out of not being able to recompile the drivers, but out of a want to force people onto new hardware, that pissed me so off that I switched to Linux and havn't turned back since. If you buy a Windows computer, with Windows *preinstalled* and then keep it at that version, you don't go through what is the enormous pain of Windows hardware support (the reseller has already gone through it), so you never realize how much better Linux is in this department.

Moreover, I've had *amazingly satisfying* success with reporting bugs, and having them fixed, especially with Kernel bugs.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:49 UTC (Fri) by fre (guest, #83851) [Link] (7 responses)

Just an anecdote. Or a Rant.

Around last October went shopping for a new laptop. For the budget i had my choices were between two similar ones except for:

a) Intel CPU and Wifi, Nvidia graphics card
b) AMD CPU, BCM Wifi, Radeon graphics card

Option B was 50€ more expensive, but thinking that AMD released specs and Broadcom is funding open drivers i decided to go for this option.

As a result, my wifi cant work with the open source drivers and i wasn't able to make the closed ones work with custom compiled kernels. The graphics card somehow works, but with the closed drivers is crashy, with the open ones i can fry eggs in my laptop.

Now, i know the fault isn't much on Linux kernel. But whatever, so much for hardware support in linux, 2012 AD.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 30, 2012 23:09 UTC (Fri) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link] (3 responses)

I think that's unfortunately not the way to shop Linux computers.

The way to shop Linux computers is to take your latest beta home distro live CD and go for a walk around the computer shops.

Or if you want to internetshop, then the laptop on offer must *explicitly* support Linux (there are many sellers that have Linux compatible machines).

:-/
*t

The missed opportunity

Posted Mar 31, 2012 19:36 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

This is where the likes of Canonical have dropped the ball completely. To fix bug #1 or whatever it is called, you have to target the hardware vendors, if necessary becoming one yourself. There are plenty of people selling computers with Free Software operating systems installed, although you have to do some legwork to find them and see what they are actually offering, but these people are not the same people who have the resources to actively fix and improve the software in order to actively support a device.

Sure, Canonical certify some devices, but that doesn't guarantee anyone on this planet being able to buy them, especially if Dell is involved. And without people actively promoting, selling and supporting computers with Free Software operating systems, there will always be a certain difficulty in reaching the masses and a disconnect between available hardware and fully supported hardware.

The missed opportunity

Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:28 UTC (Sat) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link] (1 responses)

Linaro does this to some extent with ARM dev boards, but this is partially cause this is basically the only way to get a ARM device working these days, as the ARM tree in the kernel is in such a bad state (improving alot, and the flexibility afforded to ARM licencees make it harder) however the prices are not exceptional

http://www.linaro.org/engineering/getting-started/low-cos...

Also guys like the Marvell SheevaPlug, DreamPlug, etc, where the manufacture actively work with the Linux devs, and they are not the only hardware manufactures. CPU vendors have been contributing to Linux and gcc, etc (AMD even to coreboot) for a long time.

The missed opportunity

Posted Apr 1, 2012 17:25 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Yes, but there's a huge difference between organisations maintaining component-specific features in the Linux kernel and offering a complete, fully-supported system.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 1:52 UTC (Sat) by charris (guest, #13263) [Link]

Ah, so Radeon still runs hot with the open drivers? I went back to NVIDIA for just that reason. The NVIDIA drivers may be closed, but they are better maintained for compatibility than fglrx.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 14:58 UTC (Sat) by pataphysician (guest, #73773) [Link]

The Radeon driver in KMS mode has power saving turned off by default if your kernel 2.6.35 or less, it can be turned on if you want, then no more hot laptop. If you have the 3.0 kernel or greater it should be turned on by default in KMS mode.

The article is correct

Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:45 UTC (Mon) by jedidiah (guest, #20319) [Link]

Wifi a problem on Linux? Sure. It comes with it's own challenges. That's something that's vastly different as something absurd like printing being broken by an update. They are not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.

Dial back the hyperbole a little bit. Otherwise people are bound to not take you seriously at all.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:21 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]

Yep, this article is 100% bullshit.
There's even evidence the Economist is anti Linux site:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/11/operating_systems
Another Linux rant in the same spirit, but this time it's even worse. What s funny you can replace Linux with any other OS name and article will remain "valid", because it's nothing more than generalizations and subjective opinions. It reminds me MS FUD. I'm quite angry this appeared at lwn, but on the other side I would have missed a possibility to make some clarifications. ;)

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 8:03 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (2 responses)

You must be living in a different reality to me. Even with hardware specifically researched for use with Linux and built myself into a PC, I've had major hardware support issues (random freezes requiring irqpoll after I diagnosed this, WiFi driver causing panic, etc) with Linux, and nothing significant with Windows XP or Windows 7.

Windows is not a pain-free experience either, but installing it isn't that hard even with the odd third party driver. I've even transferred a complete Windows 7 image from one Thinkpad laptop to a much more recent model (admittedly with help from Paragon Backup which refreshes the drivers on the new machine before it boots). I almost always install Windows from scratch, as with Linux.

I agree that getting Vista/7 drivers for older hardware is sometimes impossible, but in practice I haven't found this is a problem.

I have never had much luck with getting reported bugs fixed - I still get bug updates from a few older Ubuntu bugs that never went anywhere. This isn't so different to Windows really.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 13:11 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link] (1 responses)

It seems I'm also living in a different reality than you. ;) The only problems I encountered in Linux were related to nVidia blobs that caused X server to crash sometimes. Currently I'm running fglrx and it's even more problematic, but Open Source drivers work very well. However, I also have Windows XP installed and it's more problematic. Sometimes BSoD happens and HP deskjet printer works only with service pack 2. When I have service pack 3 installed I can't even copy drivers from CD to hard drive, because there's an error.

The article is correct

Posted Apr 1, 2012 16:46 UTC (Sun) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]

There are Linux drivers that do not work and that do not get fixed, see
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30892
and
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=711489

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 10:18 UTC (Sat) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link]

I use Linux exclusively and do so partly because I support the free software ideal. However, I am also responsible for several other people trying to use Linux (family, colleagues). Some but not all of these other users are very technical people in other domains (scientists). My experience is most users, including these technical users, will usually run into a problem that they cannot solve alone. Their only option without quite dedicated support immediately available would be to fall back to what they know: windows or mac.

I think the article is quite typical in this respect: somebody who gave Linux a try and would be happy to use it as a replacement, but encountered too many problems. I wish it weren't so, but just saying that it is biased or that no such problems exist is just denial.

I think the distribution model is different, with both advantages (all software is securely updated, single source) and disadvantages, but we should continue to live with it. In my recent experience, the real problem has been the instability of the desktop apps and environment, with the occasional hardware problem thrown in. Once you've gone to the trouble of installing Linux and changed your habits, most people want to benefit from its legendary stability and get on with their work. However, it just hasn't been possible to continue working, the changes (and bugs) have been too intrusive.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:39 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (28 responses)

If you install, say, a printer driver in Windows you can be pretty sure that it will continue to work even after you install service packs or even upgrade to a newer Windows version.

This is about the worst example you can imagine: huge number of printers (mostly cheap printers) only work with Windows XP, but not with Windows Vista or Windows 7. I've had a professional video capture card from Pinnacle which officially only supported Windows XP Service Pack 1 (later some engineer from the company published unofficial patch on forum which supported Service Pack 2).

Sorry, but hardware is well-known pain point for Windows systems. Apple also has this problem (witness how MacOS Lean dropped support for some early Intel Macs with Intel Core CPU).

Kernel guys do a remarkable work WRT hardware support. But on the software side, yes, here Linux is disaster if you'll compare it with MacOS or Windows.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 30, 2012 23:21 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (23 responses)

It should also be pointed out the iOS and Android completely sidestep the issue of hardware drivers entirely. There's no expectation with the mobility operating system that'd you are ever meant to interact with any hardware not baked into the device. Both Google and Apple's solution for printing for the tablet age is basically turning printing into a weird web service of some sort..and encouraging you to buy specially capable printers to support their competing concepts of what that looks like.

The reality is... hardware drivers are hard for everyone. Mobility OSes just bake-in their hardware support and significantly reduce the complexity of the hardware they can interact with directly.

And operating system upgrades are...hard for everyone. Android upgrades fail. iOS upgrades fail. OS-X upgrades fail. MS Windows upgrades fail. There is no silver bullet. Vendors who take the time to certify OS upgrade path for previously purchased equipment is really the safest path for everyone. It's not perfect. There are enough iOS device owners out there who have gotten burned by an upgrade to make it clear that upgrades are inherently problematic for every vendor.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:21 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] (22 responses)

> And operating system upgrades are...hard for everyone. Android upgrades fail. iOS upgrades fail. OS-X upgrades fail. MS Windows upgrades fail.

Your comparison is way off. I have many non-computer-savvy friends that have an iOS device or a Mac with OS X. Yet, I still have to see the first upgrade fail. Sure, some third-party software didn't immediately work (especially after OS X upgrades) sometimes. Sure, failed upgrades probably happen, but that is a rare event.

Compare that with Linux distributions. In the ~2005-2010 timeframe Linux was quite popular among fellow programmers, mainly due to the rise of Ubuntu. Most have abandoned Linux by now, mostly because of regressions (both in software and drivers) between major versions or sometimes even when running stable versions (e.g. kernel upgrades botching suspend/hibernate on laptops).

Linux was an acceptable UNIX system for many developers and computer scientists, especially given its price and the lack of competition in the low-end. But for people who do not give much about free software ideology, OS X has become a far more stable alternative, for which a large variety of third-party software that people need is available.

Going to conferences made me realize how profound this shift has been. A majority is using MacBooks these days, the rest is split between mostly Windows and a bit of Linux.

Linux lost the desktop wars.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:29 UTC (Sat) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (1 responses)

> Linux lost the desktop wars.

That assumes that "winning" (by the marketshare metric) was a goal.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 8:49 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

To win in any sense you need decent market share. About 10% or perhaps even 20% in some market. Otherwise you lose third-party support and, most importantly, you lose hardware vendors support.

Once you do that it's back to square one where only enthusiasts will play with your platform. And with diversity of components much higher then it was twenty years ago and proportion of enthusiasts much lower than it was twenty years ago your very survival is not guaranteed.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:31 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (12 responses)

"Yet, I still have to see the first upgrade fail."

I have seen that happen with OSX. Quite badly, in fact, and more than once.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:55 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] (11 responses)

And this is exactly the mindset why Linux on the desktop will not grow in marketshare. It's never, "ok, indeed, we have too many regressions, let's fix that", but always "system Windows/OS X is at least as bad". If that were true, OS X wasn't so popular among developers and even non-developers. The common mantra you hear from techie OS X users is "it's a stable system with third-party software, but I can still open a terminal". I realize that the comparison is not totally fair, since Apple has a very small variety of hardware to target, but there is plenty to learn even software-wise.

(PS. no personal attack intended)

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:56 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

s/"system/"/

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 9:30 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't understand how you can go from a factual correction -- i.e., you're anecdotal evidence was wrong so I corrected you -- to "It's never, "ok, indeed, we have too many regressions, let's fix that", but always "system Windows/OS X is at least as bad"

There's no hint in what I said of that: there's no hint of me excusing bugs in Linux, no hint of "they are broken, so it doesn't matter we are broken as well". Of course we have to fix issues and make Linux the best user environment there is.

Sure, Windows 7 is a ghastly mess and Windows 8 will be worse, and OS X is broken in many ways -- but while that's a fact, it's a fact that is completely irrelevant for whether the Linux desktop is perfect. It ain't, but lots of people are working really hard in many ways to get there.

The mindset that _I_ object too, strongly, is the parrot-talk about how linux will never succeed. We succeed, we are succeeding, and it will only get better. As long as people work on it, instead of sitting down and claiming it's a lost cause, let's give up.

I detest defeatism.

The article is correct

Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:54 UTC (Sun) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] (3 responses)

> The mindset that _I_ object too, strongly, is the parrot-talk about how linux will never succeed.

Linux has already succeeded to a large extend in servers, routers, DVRs, and phones. Linux could also succeed on the desktop with some adjustment. Some things that are required:

- No crazy desktop changes in stable versions. I do like GNOME 3 and Unity, but the changes should've been more evolutionary.
- A stable ABI that is shared between all Linux distributions.
- An easy way to install third-party software. As easy as drag and drop. I know that this is technically possible today, but it requires the previous point plus maybe something like fat binaries. Also, the process of creating an application bundle should be easy.
- The core of the system and third-party applications should be decoupled more. It should be easy to continue running, say Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS, while being able to upgrade your applications without upgrading the base system, X11, toolkits, or the desktop environment.

I certainly believe that Ubuntu's PPAs (and SUSE's build system) have made live a bit easier for everyone: as a developer I can simply put a source package in the archive, and packages are built for i386 and amd64, and it is relatively easy to maintain packages for multiple Ubuntu versions. But it is still not trivial for a non-expert user to add PPAs, let alone mix them (since multiple PPAs may provide different versions of the same dependencies).

As a developer, I also have too many moving targets. E.g. one piece of software that we wrote and provide requires Berkeley DB XML. DB XML is not available in most Linux distributions, and requires db(++), xqilla, and Xerces. Some distributions provide the versions of db, xqilla, and xerces that DB XML requires, there we "only" need to roll our own packages for DB XML in addition to our own software. On older distributions the dependencies are too old and newer distributions provide incompatible versions of xqilla. There we have cascading dependencies that we need to roll our own packages for. So, on modern distributions, we have to (at least) roll packages for our own software, DB XML, and xqilla. Not only is this a big hassle, package maintenance becomes as much work as software maintenance, there is a growing risk of conflicts with packages from other people's repositories. In addition to that, our users have Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS in many different versions (Ubuntu being particularly ugly with their half-year releases) and platforms.

In contrast to that: on MacOS I just build one version on OS X 10.6 and it works for every OS X user. On Windows, I compile on any version with Visual Studio, and it works on all versions since Windows 2000. The result is that we pretty much ignore Linux, except for Ubuntu, and tell users to compile the software and some dependencies themselves on other distributions.

Given enough time, I'll probably roll a Linux version that includes all library dependencies and provide a wrapper script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH. But it would help tremendously if there was something standardized along the lines of an application bundle *and* a standardized ABI, so that we do not have to copy every library that the application depends on into that bundle (which in the case of the application discussed above would amount to including 50 libraries, or 76MB). Another possibility would be to statically link the application, but that has its own problems (e.g. no dlopen()).

The article is correct

Posted Apr 1, 2012 10:14 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Another possibility would be to statically link the application, but that has its own problems (e.g. no dlopen()).

You can link some libraries statically and the rest dynamically. GlibC, in particular, is remarkably stable and it's easy to support older distributions with older versions of GlibC via LSB.

Something like -Wl,-Bstatic -lunstablelib1 -lunstablelib2 -Wl,-Bdynamic should do the trick.

Of course dlopen creates complications: if you want to use some library both from plugin and from main application (or just from two plugins) then you'll end up with two copies of library in memory! This, too, is solvable (for example you can add appropriate library to the main executable and use --export-dynamic to make it available for plugins), but yes, it's a PITA.

Yet you solve this somehow for MacOS and Windows (last time I've checked Windows had no DB XML support) thus it should be solvable for Linux, too.

The biggest problem with Linux is Q&A: if you limit yourself to LSB then you can not do a lot of things which are expected from modern program and if you use libraries outside of LSB then you immediately lose then cross-distribution compatibility and need to test your application with different versions of different distributions.

The article is correct

Posted Apr 1, 2012 11:50 UTC (Sun) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

> You can link some libraries statically and the rest dynamically. GlibC, in particular, is remarkably stable and it's easy to support older distributions with older versions of GlibC via LSB.

Good point, thanks!

> Yet you solve this somehow for MacOS

By providing an application bundle, which is a standardized procedure and something users expect. Also, (ABI-stable) system libraries are not copied to the application bundle. So, the bundle only contains a fraction of the used libraries (Qt and DBXML).

> and Windows

Again, here we use standard libraries (VS2008 redistributable), and drop Qt/DBXML DLLs in the same directory as the executable and it works perfectly on Windows XP and up (probably also Windows 2000, but we didn't check), although the software is compiled on Windows 7.

> (last time I've checked Windows had no DB XML support)

There's Windows support for DB XML. Oracle offers pre-built DLLs, or a source archive with Visual Studio project files. We use the latter, and building the DLLs with Visual Studio 2008 is just one click.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/berkeleydb/dow...

The article is correct

Posted Apr 2, 2012 8:48 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

The only thing your post proves is that Berkeley DB XML is not a reliable foundation to build on. You can hide it under Windows or OSX, but I'm quite sure it will fail there someday too.

Writing clever code is not everything, you need to think about what you build it on too.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 14:08 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link] (4 responses)

What I know OS X is just popular amongst Apple developers and those who are using applications like Photoshop which aren't present on Linux. OS X doesn't exists in serious enterprise business, so following your logic it can't be true it's better than Linux.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 17:09 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

It certainly exists in enterprise. And more and more iPads pop in very 'enterprisy' roles.

For example, one of our suppliers uses iPads for inventory management. Its camera is more than enough to scan barcodes and large input surface allows workers to view all the shipment details at once.

They've used Win6.5-based devices before that, btw.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:07 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]

I meant enterprise computing. ;)

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 21:02 UTC (Sat) by bats999 (guest, #70285) [Link] (1 responses)

True, iPads can be used to fill a company niche, but so could any number of tablets running free software. For any larger usage iPads still need support just as any other system. One does not simply purchase a crate of iPads and distribute them to a hospital staff, for example.

It's a bit off topic because the article is about desktop Linux (whatever that is), but why do those companies choose to use iPads?

The article is correct

Posted Apr 2, 2012 16:00 UTC (Mon) by jedidiah (guest, #20319) [Link]

People may find that "legacy application support" is the key thing here. I saw someone who had been contemplating an iPad3 get very excited about a Win7 tablet over the weekend. This person has no love for Microsoft products and even tried defecting to Linux and then a Mac. Has also been disapointed by PhoneOS versions of desktop Windows apps.

It's not the platform. It's the killer apps. People will put up with a platform they detest over that.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 7:38 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link] (6 responses)

There are many problems with Macs after upgrades. It's not hard to find. I will be no surprised if you are safer with (K)Ubuntu.
Linux lost the desktop wars.
Nope, it didn't. It already won, because it's one of the three the most important desktops. Did you just missed the newest Phoronix article about STEAM coming to Linux? :) Games are very important part of the desktops and with STEAM Linux will become stronger than ever.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 8:05 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (5 responses)

Maybe you are kidding, but Steam on Linux is a recurring rumour with no basis in fact that I can see. Even if it does come to Linux, it would only matter if the games that it manages are also ported. I used to play some commercial 3D games on Linux under WINE but it was quite painful so I gave up and just dual-boot into Windows now.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:38 UTC (Sat) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (3 responses)

I've used Wine and Crossover for gaming with pretty good results, the main problem is losing at least half the raw performance of my video card. Fortunately they're so overpowered these days games are still playable. As for Linux support, why else would Gabe want to hire someone with Linux driver experience to improve performance.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 12:20 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (2 responses)

Interesting - would be good if Valve's games are ported, or even better if their Source engine is ported, but it won't have a huge effect on the overall market.

Perhaps they will do a cloud gaming service, similar to http://onlive.com - using Linux for Source engine game servers would let them reduce their costs somewhat, but many games wouldn't run on Linux as their engines are tied to Windows, so it's not clear that's a winning strategy.

Another Linux gaming option is the Gaikai cloud gaming service, which has a Java applet client and does work fine on my Linux box. Some pros and cons compared to OnLive, but it is one option to play a wide range of Windows games with almost no setup hassles.

I used to use Crossover Games as well, but it was quite a faff.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 12:26 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

In fact, OnLive Desktop is also interesting as a low cost way of running Windows apps in the cloud from a Linux desktop, tablet, etc. Or at least the concept is - they don't support Linux currently, but being able to easily run Windows desktop apps in the cloud would be great for consumers who just have one or two Windows apps they need, and can easily push them into the cloud without setting up their own Citrix type server.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 14:03 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]

Interesting - would be good if Valve's games are ported, or even better if their Source engine is ported, but it won't have a huge effect on the overall market.
It will have a huge effect on the market share, because every game that runs on OS X will run on Linux as well. OS X will become non relevant and Linux will become much more valuable player and this will bring new software and increase its popularity further. Imagine free, rock solid and robust platform with dozens of great Open Source applications (and Steam) that is supported for five years (KUbuntu). This sounds exciting.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 13:01 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]

If someone's kidding here it's Gabe from Valve:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MT...

I'm also doing a dual boot for now, because I want full performance.

The article is correct

Posted Apr 2, 2012 10:02 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

But you can still run Windows XP - Microsoft is still issuing security fixes for it, and pretty much any common software still works on it (though you must run IE8 not IE9).

I'd much rather one big upgrade every ten years than a steady churn where things stop working at unpredictable intervals.

The article is correct

Posted Apr 2, 2012 10:19 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

I'd much rather one big upgrade every ten years than a steady churn where things stop working at unpredictable intervals.

The fact that Windows XP has been around so long is really an accident. If it was up to Microsoft we'd all upgrade our machines every 3 years or so (consider Windows 95 – 98 – ME – XP – …). The problem with that was that Vista was delayed by a few years and – once it was there – it was so abysmally bad that when asked to upgrade, many people flipped MS the bird.

Hence XP had a much longer lease on life than was originally intended, people have become used to it more than they were supposed to in the first place, and many are reluctant to upgrade to Windows 7 even now because they fail to see the point.

In principle, Linux is at an advantage here because with most distributions upgrades are free, and with many they are pretty seamless. The main problem is really ABI churn, which we have people like the GNOME and KDE developers to blame for.

The article is correct

Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:00 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

>The fact that Windows XP has been around so long is really an accident. If it was up to Microsoft we'd all upgrade our machines every 3 years or so (consider Windows 95 – 98 – ME – XP – …). The problem with that was that Vista was delayed by a few years and – once it was there – it was so abysmally bad that when asked to upgrade, many people flipped MS the bird.

Microsoft's fondest wish is that everyone pays them money every year for nothing. The fact that MS wants a 3-year cycle and that XP's long life is a mistake don't matter, what matters is that, for the majority of people, there have been *two* operating systems: Windows 98 and Windows XP.

The first one most people used for 3-5 years, the latter one for 5-10 years. This is what people want, a *minimum* of 3 years of stability and 10 years is better. Nothing which breaks every 12 (or 6!) months will work.

The article is correct

Posted Apr 2, 2012 14:44 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>If it was up to Microsoft we'd all upgrade our machines every 3 years or so (consider Windows 95 – 98 – ME – XP – …). The problem with that was that Vista was delayed by a few years and – once it was there – it was so abysmally bad that when asked to upgrade, many people flipped MS the bird.

A lot of companies use the 'Microsoft Software Assurance' program to get updates for all Microsoft software. So companies pay a small sum per user each year to get all the updates don't worrying about future upgrade costs.

The article is correct

Posted Mar 31, 2012 0:56 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> If you install, say, a printer driver in Windows you can be pretty sure that it will continue to work even after you install service packs or even upgrade to a newer Windows version.

Not in my experience. The driver included with my Lexmark Optra E312 wouldn't run on Windows 7, nor could I find any Windows 7 driver for this model of printer. (I ended up using the HP LaserJet 1200 driver included with Windows instead, which seems to output a kind of PCL that the Lexmark printer can handle.)

I feel his pain.

Posted Mar 30, 2012 21:01 UTC (Fri) by rdmelin (guest, #8445) [Link] (1 responses)

I have to say I sympathize with the author's frustration. Having used linux exclusively as my desktop OS for more than 10 years, I can work around the kind of issues he describes. But trying help new users make the transition to desktop linux is often heart breaking.
Current example that illustrates the article's point:
My HP DV1000 laptop has run Ubuntu 10.04 since it was released. However I had to follow Kernel Backports for about six months before it stopped having display lockups. Opensource driver, Intel chipset. Anyway now I would like to upgrade to 12.04 LTS, so I've been testing the beta releases. Imagine my disappointment to learn that the Intel chipset wireless (ipw2200) doesn't work with 12.04. Apparently I've been bitten by bug 908380, as have many others, since it is marked as a duplicate of more than 40 other reported bugs.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager...
You'll notice if you look at the linked page that this bug is marked as "Fix Released". The fix is that Network Manager Applet doesn't crash while NOT connecting to WPA secured networks. This is a "cool new feature" as opposed to the nm's old behavior of not crashing while connecting to WPA secured networks.
Yes I can work around this. Simply by removing Network Manager and installing WiCD. But why should I need to when this hardware has worked with previous versions of this same distro for years. And how can linux newbies be expected to jump through this kind of hoop to make friends with a new OS experience.

I feel his pain.

Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:55 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Yes I can work around this. Simply by removing Network Manager and installing WiCD. But why should I need to when this hardware has worked with previous versions of this same distro for years. And how can linux newbies be expected to jump through this kind of hoop to make friends with a new OS experience.

This is the question people asked for year WRT new version of Windows (which often breaks support for old hardware). And the answer is obvious: buy new hardware with new version pre-installed (or you can buy hardware with old version pre-installed and coupon which guarantees free upgrade). This is not the problem.

The problem is this approach does not work in Linux. Compare Windows 7 (End Of Life 1/14/2020) with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (End Of Life April 2013 (Desktop) and April 2015 (Server). Note how you still can install most programs on XP including MS Office 2007 or MS Office 2010 (because it's still supported, obviously) but with Linux the only sane way to get net graphic editor or new office suite is to upgrade the whole OS!

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 21:09 UTC (Fri) by horen (guest, #2514) [Link]

Rather than complain, I'm quite happy that the author chose to profile Linux Mint. As a long-time LM user, I recognize his frustrations in upgrading versions (I share them), and understand his wishes that there were another way (short of a "clean install") to do so.

Thankfully, there is: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). Not only is it not based on Ubuntu, but it's what's known as a "rolling release" -- ongoing updates, with occasional "update packs" (akin to Micro$oft's Service Packs).

But -- and for many of us, most important -- LMDE's soon-to-be-released Update Pack #4 will contain MATE, which is, basically, Gnome 2 renamed. I've been test-driving LMDE (UP3) in VMware Player (it works perfectly), and look forward to installing Update Pack #4; if all works out, I'll install LMDE (UP4) on my workstation as the default OS.

As for KDE, well, it looks like it and Gnome 3 are a "match made in Heaven." YMMV.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 21:13 UTC (Fri) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link] (31 responses)

I wonder whether the solution could be to adopt an extended version of Android as a desktop Linux platform?

Sure, it's not a traditional desktop UI, but GNOME 3/KDE/Unity also aren't, and unlike those, Android has a lot of users, 3rd party developers, brand recognition, funding and is actually proven to work well on touch devices.

Of course it would need extensions like using glibc as a C library and providing X11 support, but I guess this should all be doable.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 21:52 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (25 responses)

> I wonder whether the solution could be to adopt an extended version of Android as a desktop Linux platform?

What Desktop needs and what Android provides are two dramatically and entirely different things. This is why Google themselves didn't take the Android approach when making their desktop operating system.

There is a good reason why Google went with a essentially Java-based OS and abandoned any pretense of 'Unix tradition'.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:01 UTC (Fri) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (24 responses)

No, there was no good reason. Google acquired a system (Android wasn't designed from scratch by Google, and previous design decisions were made by other people). The fact that Android got its own graphical stack and not went the Wayland way is sad, but it started historically earlier, and as a proprietary system which didn't care about any communities. (Unlike Wayland which promotes collaboration in Linux graphic drivers development).

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:41 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (7 responses)

Yes there was a good reason and it's the EXACT justification that Canonical and Microsoft are both ignoring with their development trends. Which is that Touchscreen hand-held computers (tablet, phone) and desktops have significantly different usage pattens, needs and expectations.

Trying to make the desktop interface operate like a tablet is frankly as stupid as making the hand-held interface require a keyboard and mouse. This is why most people hate Unity/Gnome3 and why Windows 8 is going to be a commercial disaster that makes Vista look like a raging success. These compute models are different animals and one size fits all is stupid, frankly given the trend I'm startled Google was smart enough to see this from the start, and they saw it years before both the current companies proved it doesn't work.

Don't get me wrong, there can be similarities and compatability (Canonical has been moving slowly this direction) but to throw out the usage paradigm of desktops and replace it with gestures and touchscreen paradigms is a recipe for being lynched by the users.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 3:47 UTC (Sat) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]

Shooting's too good for 'em? I'm afraid I don't think they're worth the cost of lynch - just walk away. I am. I've been installing Debian on the test boxes (Wheezy), and wish I'd noticed that Debian branch of Mint earlier. May not be too late yet, we'll see.

But seriously: thanks, Ubuntu, for all the good stuff you did before you went tablet-mad. You too, Gnome. Maybe some day again, but for now, no thanks.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:53 UTC (Sat) by kklimonda (subscriber, #60089) [Link] (5 responses)

> Trying to make the desktop interface operate like a tablet is frankly as stupid as making the hand-held interface require a keyboard and mouse. This is why most people hate Unity/Gnome3 and why Windows 8 is going to be a commercial disaster that makes Vista look like a raging success

What exactly about Unity/GNOME 3 screams "tablet-oriented design"? When you use Windows 8 with its Metro UI its shortcomings on a traditional desktop are plainly visible, but what makes first two unsuitable for desktops?

I'd love to hear actual arguments, not another round of "unity is designed with full screen applications in mind" or "try running multiple applications in unity". Ok, there is a global menu but what else?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 7:01 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (4 responses)

I've done this argument before.

1) The overview is _painful_ to use on larger screen. Application menus have a tighter pointer locality, and when done right (which no, GNOME 2's were not at all right, they were horrible) involved less contextual overhead and wrist strain. Keyboard accessibility is great, but it can be more inconvenient to switch between mouse and keyboard than to just use the mouse, especially when using primarily mouse-driven applications.

2) The workspace management removees the utility of workspaces. Workspaces were a killer feature of the Linux desktop. GNOME 3 makes them incosistent, hard to access on multi-monitor displays (fixed somewhat in newer versions, but still not as good as an always-visible switcher), and really just trained me stop noticing that Windows 7 lacks them entirely.

3) The hot-corner is obnoxious. It's also very obnoxious in Windows 7. However, Windows makes it both possible and super-easy to disable. Right-click the hot-corner, uncheck the menu item, done. People who use mice on unstable surfaces or who have slightly less than perfect motor control frequently hit those ****ing annoying hot-corners by accident on a frequent basis, completely disrupting their work flow. Clicks represent actions. Pointer movement means a change of possible targets, or it means your wrist brushed a track pad, or it means the table was bumped, or it means that the laptop surface shifted and the mouse slid. Mixing click-for-action and point-to-target is a good way to tell a lot of people "you can't use this OS, go away."

4) The new focus on full-screen everything by default. I don't even full-screen most apps on a 20" monitor. You can't imagine how little I want a full-screen window on a 30" monitor. Really. Full-screen makes sense on phones, tablets, and even netbooks. It does not make sense on a giant multi-monitor workstation.

5) No on-screen window/task management by default. Yes, the old GNOME 2 window list was lame. OS X did it a bit better. Windows 7 did it way better. GNOME 3 forgot that task management is something that workstation users need to do (including both quick launching of applications or monitoring running ones). The overview is nice sometimes, but not all the time.

6) Various little details. The lack of Power Off in the system menu is a common one. Yes, yes, tablets and phones are never powered off because they are not PC hardware. The giant $2,500 PC in my bedroom with the glowing LEDs and fans that could power a small plane really REALLY needs to be turned off at night so we can sleep, and (if one cares about electric bills) anytime it's not about to be used. Sleeping/hibernating is not reliable on Linux still (in fact, does not work on this PC on Linux without major issues).

7) Applications. Linux has none worth noting that Windows does not have. Windows has boat loads that Linux lacks. iOS has boat loads that Linux lacks. The only thing that GNOME is good for to an average consumer is browsing the Web, e.g. light casual computing. Only, there are far better options than GNOME for that use case.

The most annoying part is, of course, that GNOME 3 is also just a horrifically bad tablet interface. GNOME 3's interface is a GREAT fit for netbooks, as its paradigms are a good fit for ~11"-13" screens, touchpads, and light computing. Too bad netbooks are already dying off in popularity thanks to iPads and Ultrabooks, and the market that remains is already filled by Chromebooks.

Also, yes, a lot of similar complaints can be made about Windows 8 and OS X's direction. The regressions are less severe in those cases IMO (e.g., Windows 8 loses the awesome Start Menu, but not the entire rest of the PC desktop paradigm). Maybe Windows 8 will be the next Windows Vista. Maybe not. In either case, GNOME isn't going anywhere new in the market that it hasn't already failed to go in the last 15 years.

Start menus

Posted Apr 2, 2012 10:00 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (3 responses)

Application menus have a tighter pointer locality, and when done right (which no, GNOME 2's were not at all right, they were horrible) involved less contextual overhead and wrist strain.

Are you describing the "start" menu here? I checked out the version of GNOME that Debian Squeeze provides, along with KDE 4, and the tendency to throw everything into the start menu so that you not only have simple menus but also a bunch of dynamic stuff haphazardly arranged - you could probably have a weather applet in there as well - which seems to also be a feature of recent Windows releases, resulting in a kind of mini-desktop within the desktop, is just horrible. KDE 4 seemed to elevate this to the level of high art by having iPod-like menus squeezed into the tiny porthole in question. What's wrong with using the 80% of the screen the menu doesn't make any use of?

With such a mess, I can understand people wanting to make more use of the screen to show menus, but I guess that full-screen menus don't really scale nicely to 30" monitors.

Start menus

Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:10 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]

He's referring to the MacOS-style global menubar.

Which is, by the way, unusable with sloppy-focus and other things old unix-geeks take for granted ;)

Start menus

Posted Apr 3, 2012 13:29 UTC (Tue) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link] (1 responses)

> What's wrong with using the 80% of the screen the menu doesn't make any use of?

Because I don't want the rest of my screen obscured when I'm looking for recently used documents in Start menu?

Start menus

Posted Apr 3, 2012 22:25 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Couldn't you allow it to have just some of the 80%, though? Pretending that there's an iPod in the bottom left corner while the rest of the screen goes unused (apart from perhaps showing applets that only distract from the task at hand) seems to be a misallocation of resources.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:46 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (15 responses)

There was no Wayland when Android was being developed. There were beginnings of KMS and DRI2 support, but nothing close to production. So it's not like Android guys had much choice.

Oh, of course they could have used X-server. LOL.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 3:28 UTC (Sun) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (14 responses)

True, but you can see that Wayland went quite a different way, because they cared about the existing community.

From their FAQ: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_2

> Wayland is not really duplicating much work. Where possible,
> Wayland reuses existing drivers and infrastructure. One of the
> reasons this project is feasible at all, is that Wayland reuses
> the DRI drivers, the kernel side GEM scheduler and kernel mode setting.
> Wayland doesn't have to compete with other projects for drivers and
> driver developers, it lives within the X.org, mesa and drm community and
> benefits from all the hardware enablement and driver development happening
> there.

Since Wayland was designed as an open project, they considered needs of others as well. Android was designed for its own sake only, so you see the result - totally incompatible graphical stack, which doesn't share any success and effort with the rest of Linux.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 6:20 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Where was no KMS and only beginnings of TTM (not GEM) when Android was being developed.

And it has taken about 4 years to kick the Linux graphics stack into shape.

Besides, UI library is only a small part of Android.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 7:16 UTC (Sun) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]

It might be small, but it's one of the key reasons which sets it totally apart. I.e. hardware manufacturers produce GPU drivers for Android, and that's it. Since it's not compatible - it's useless for regular ("conventional") Linux and prevents ports from using this hardware, until drivers appear (may be never). I.e. in practice it causes distraction for HW manufactures, and excuse not to produce X (or Wayland) drivers, since they are already too busy with Android.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 8:09 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (11 responses)

Android was designed for its own sake only, so you see the result - totally incompatible graphical stack

Correction: Android was developed for app developers, not for “it's own sake only”. They used Linux as HAL and explicitly excluded all the userspace components (except few which they used to save development cost).

And there is real danger that the story will repeat itself on desktop if people leave it to Google.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 8:30 UTC (Sun) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]

What I mean by "for its sake only" that it didn't consider the broad community, only its own interests. And this resulted in a totally isolated, self contained system, which barely shares any success with the rest of the Linux world. It's in total contradiction with the values of the open source.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:41 UTC (Sun) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (9 responses)

I've started to think that if linux is ever going to gain traction in the desktop, it is going to happen through somebody like Google, because it requires a bunch of things that the community is not capable of delivering. I'll list a few things that I think are important:

- retailers that sell your devices (laptops?) with software preinstalled. Every hardware thing you ship and officially support must work without a hitch.

- credible application market. You are never going to get off the ground unless you allow for proprietary software, which takes in form of independent software vendors writing code on the platform. Proprietary software is critical for the symbiosis of end-user and developer interest on the platform.

- commitment to a stable ABI that works (= never break applications that worked on any previous version). The nice thing about a laptop/PC using x86 is that there's usually a whole lot of system resources and techniques that can be spent on this, so backwards compatibility could actually be fairly easy. The key to success is this principle: new version can not be deployed if it breaks old code.

As far as I can tell, the community has tremendous trouble with all of the above. First requires capital and credible story for a linux device as product, including a way to earn revenue from the thing eventually; second requires giving up on software freedom ideals for the sake of capturing user and (proprietary) developer interest; and third requires developer professionalism that tends to come only with a paycheck, because it's frustrating and thankless soul-sucking work.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 17:23 UTC (Sun) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (7 responses)

No, it's going to result in money driven system. And you should know where it leads.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 18:00 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

To a world where normal people have usable system and geeks have their toys?

Oh, you mean that it killed bunch of losers? Nope, I don't mourn them. They had their chance and squandered it.

All in all it'll be good outcome although I'm not sure Google will be able to pull it on desktop.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 18:07 UTC (Sun) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (5 responses)

No, to a world where direction is defined by money, and interests of a small group which controls it, rather than by the interest of people who use it.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 20:36 UTC (Sun) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (4 responses)

In that case we are facing an unwinnable education problem. It seems fairly evident to me that something far above 90 % of people just don't care about software in this sort of way. They are just dumb users, they have been educated to want shiny things and they want their games and social networking shits and cool applications people are buzzing about. Their own attitudes make them just a resource to be harvested, but they also have money and they are willing to spend it if you just give them something they want for a price they are willing to pay.

Think about it: with money, you can hire developers, while at the same time you grow your own market share, which makes hardware vendors pay attention to you. At some point they are starting to do work for your behalf, because you are important enough to matter. Imagine this: a new GPU chip arrives and instead of spending a few years of pestering the vendor for specifications to write a driver with, the vendor contributes a driver on the same day the thing hits market. Everything becomes easier with market share, but without it, there's a risk of being squeezed out of the game entirely.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 21:46 UTC (Sun) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (3 responses)

True, there is a need to interest common users as well as manufacturers. That's undeniable. I believe that KDE is doing something of that sort with Plasma Active efforts and the upcoming Vivaldi tablet. But again, KDE is a non profit, and directions are defined by the community. Making such things "for profit" right away introduces a potential risk.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 8:32 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

But again, KDE is a non profit, and directions are defined by the community.

I think you don't understand what “non profit” means. It looks like you perceive “non profit” as “someone altruistic who's fighting for the better future” and who's, obviously, “is not driven by money”.

Nothing can be further from truth! Here is an example of non-profit organisation. It precedes KDE, GNOME and Mozilla and deals with commercial interests all the time.

Nonprofit just means that participants are not planning to ever withdraw profits. They are supposed to be used to further pursue the goal of given non-profit. In a lot of cases these goals are better served when non-profit cooperates with some other for-profit entities - and when you do that you must think about market, about 90% of people just don't care about software in this sort of way, etc.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 16:33 UTC (Mon) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (1 responses)

By "non profit" in this case I don't mean the formal definition, but the fact that the direction of the project is not dictated by interests to gain money (which will inevitably result in conflict with public interest), but by community interests. If it sounds more altruistic than most commercial companies - then it is. Mozilla and KDE are good examples of this. Of course these project need to sustain themselves, and need income. I was talking about what defines the direction of their development.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 5, 2012 13:34 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

It's lovely to not care solely about money, but it's awful to be antagonist about money. Even if it were true that money will corrupt even the best intentions eventually, until that happens you fight the good fight. It could take quite long time.

To use an analogy: Bioware used to make great games for over a decade, founded by people who were evidently very passionate about gaming, until EA bought them and apparently destroyed the company and its values from inside. No matter: I think that the world is still better for Bioware's existence, even if it never again made another good game.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 5, 2012 9:51 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Regarding ABI: On my Android phone a lot of applications actually had to provide updates to work with ICS.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 21:55 UTC (Fri) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (1 responses)

No Android please. If something it should be Wayland based.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 30, 2012 23:19 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Wayland and Android are orthogonal. It should be pretty easy to run Android on Wayland, in any case.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 1:09 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (2 responses)

> it's not a traditional desktop UI, but GNOME 3/KDE/Unity also aren't

KDE isn't a traditional desktop UI? How so? (Remember, Plasma Active is a KDE-based "desktop shell" for mobile devices that is completely separate from the traditional Plasma Desktop.)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 23:19 UTC (Sun) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (1 responses)

I think in practice, KDE tackles this issue better, separating the design of the desktop and mobile UXes. Gnome and Unity for some reason decided to merge them into one, which is a questionable approach, since "one size fits all" usually doesn't work so well.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 13:38 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

Funny, "one size fits all" seems to be the GNOME mantra for many years.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 1:05 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link] (5 responses)

The only other head-to-head I can find from "babbage" on linux vs Windows is http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/11/operating_...

which seems to support my feeling that he's not much of a "Linux fan" but he does (claim to) run it at least.

Of course, with things like "open-source priesthood" and "Now let the angry ad hominems from the Linux faithful commence..." it's a pretty strong feeling.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 1:21 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

I've been running linux as my desktop since '96, and I while I disagree with some of what he says, there is also a lot of truth to what he is saying, and there is a self appointed "open-source priesthood" that does object to the sorts of things that he likes Mint doing, and I do expect that there will be a lot af ad hominem attacks on him because he is saying things that people don't want to hear.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 1:28 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link] (1 responses)

There are niches in everything: linux, Windows, Mac, BSD, Solaris. The "priesthood" is an attack on precisely those sectors (denying that they're rational but rather religious, which is itself a whole 'nother kettle o' fish).

>will be a lot af ad hominem attacks on him because he is saying things that people don't want to hear.

And exactly the same thing happens when you attack some other segment's holy cow. Why the hostile flavoring for Linux folks if he is one?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 1:35 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]

Eh, anyway, I've said my piece. The article is quite useless, it just says, "I had problems! It's the fault of package instability and focussing on features!" without any underlying support. Just blank assertions. And it's pretty clearly hostile, at least it seems so to me.

When we have something concrete, which I have an iota more hope for here on LWN than anywhere else, we can solve problems. Until then, it's just a bunch of fanboys arguing, which is also useless.

Time to get back to work.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 8:07 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

The point should not be to win over "Linux fans" (they already support Linux after all) but to win the ones who quite like Linux and maybe already run it, but are having some problems - such as the ones outlined.

Why are some people so resistant to really listening to users?

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 19:55 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Of course, with things like "open-source priesthood" and "Now let the angry ad hominems from the Linux faithful commence..." it's a pretty strong feeling.

A pre-emptive cry of "ad hominem" to round off an article: perhaps the editors at The Economist are already on their Easter vacation. I hope this is the reason we get to read such substandard prose.

Although one can be disturbed by the trends in the evolution of GNU/Linux distributions, the chopping and changing of desktop strategy, the apparent lack of attention to tedious detail that only those with the resources and full-time staff can really be expected to pay serious and sustained attention to, and the apparent lack of strategy of the distributions in general, the situation isn't completely desperate.

The choice of distributions still gives people the chance to run the more conservative desktop environments with a wide range of packaged software available for them, and although the less conservative desktop environments may not seem particularly compelling replacements, I'm sure that broadly satisfactory choices will emerge eventually.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 9:50 UTC (Sat) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link] (6 responses)

A curated application repository where things "just work"? Yup, that's Debian. Oh. Wait. Maybe that's just me. For the past 15+ years.

The "app stores" have some curation mechanism where apps are tested to ensure they work with the system as a whole, right? So does Debian. Debian's isn't fully automated, I admit, but Debian has managed to face various issues head-on like multiple BLAS and LAPACK libraries (quite important to me), a variety of network configurations, etc.

I'm touting Debian just because I use it. Fedora may well be similar. I know RHEL is *NOT*. It's a royal PITA to figure out how to install many things that just work under Debian. (Ubuntu is dead to me for situations that occurred long ago.)

Debian's problem perhaps is leaving too many choices to the end user. But an "enterprise" Debian could pre-choose (well, pre-seed, etc. for FAI) by providing a single deb. When I had more machines than I needed at home, that's how I ran it. Want to pin a version? The package dependency mechanisms handle that quite well. If that prevents some new package or version from installing, you have a clear error message to send to your support folks.

I just don't get what's so hard about all this. Other than there isn't a single company to blame for all the decisions with which you disagree but that you'll slavishly follow.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 10:47 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

> A curated application repository where things "just work"? Yup, that's Debian. Oh. Wait. Maybe that's just me. For the past 15+ years.

No they don't 'just work'. A very significant amount of manual labor goes into making it work.

And the same work is duplicated by Red hat, by Gentoo, by everybody else shipping a Linux system. It's a massive effort and very significant amount of work that goes on just doing the same thing that already has been done a dozen times for the sake of maintaining minor technical differences.

And if you want to use a application that is not have a few volunteers whose built it and packaged it for your specific configuration then you SOL. You are stuck copying binaries down using a tarball or some other out of band method, or far worse, have to compile something.

A easy example.

How many of these games can you install using 'apt-get'.
http://www.penguspy.com/#/All/free_and_commercial/open_cl...

Install just 20 of those.. the equivalent in Windows games would be very much easier in Windows (even with only rudimentary package handling tools) and trivial using Android, and you would have a much more massive selection. It bet it will take you a better part of a day to do it.

A significant number of those games won't work. Many of them will require you build things or copy files around manually. Almost none of them will be updated automatically when fixes and newer versions come out.

Nothing here 'just works'.

If all you ever use is Debian packaged software on Debian systems then that's fine, but don't fool yourself into thinking that is good enough for most people. Because it's obviously not. Because if it was good enough for most people then most people would be using it.

At my work we have to package and build most of the software we use. The majority of it is open source or based on open source products. Almost none of it is available using Debian's repositories. In this way there is very little advantage that apt-get would offer us over equivalent tools in Redhat.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 20:04 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

I've probably said it publicly before, so I'll say it again: what Debian and other distributions need are good, automated ways of packaging upstream code (which may mean more standardisation upstream), and a way for non-privileged users to build on the foundations provided by existing packages, potentially obtained from newer distribution versions, so that they may build, install and run the latest (not yet officially packaged) software if they need to, rather than having to configure, build and install every last dependency by hand.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 8:04 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

As a Debian maintainer since 2005, I have come to think that automated packaging just isn't possible. In the ideal world, maybe but we don't live in an ideal world. For a start there is a lot of this going on in the area of build systems:

http://xkcd.com/927/

With debhelper 7 we are pretty close, but there are build systems it doesn't support yet and many packages still need override_* targets, even some packages that use plain autotools.

Then there is all the packaging stuff that needs a human; good package descriptions, copyright/licensing stuff, communication with upstream etc.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 17:45 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Having been through the Debian packaging process recently, I certainly appreciate that there's a gulf between what upstream software provides, even with a helpful author and a well-engineered project, and the finished packaged "product" that has all the documentation and policy-compliance that end-users expect.

But while I understand that there's never going to be a magic button to press that takes just about any source code and produces a package, there could be ways of helping people achieve the technical and procedural standards required by downstream developers and ease the passage of their own code into distributions.

In certain circles, people would be pushed towards using some development environment or other that constrains the developer and generates any necessary boilerplate, although this doesn't ensure that the result is high quality. What would be more compatible with most Free Software development is just the acknowledgement that although distributions have differing practices and can be more or less rigorous than each other on certain issues, the general objectives are mostly the same.

From that point, I think that tools could help people make their software easier to package, such as those developed for Python, despite various baked-in features that have to be overridden because the tools want to do everything including things that they really should have no control over.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 21:57 UTC (Sat) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]

Of course there would be a way out: Package them for Debian. That way others can profit, too.

As for games you'll sadly soon find out that they couldn't care less about free software principles.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 20:01 UTC (Sun) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]

"No they don't 'just work'. A very significant amount of manual labor goes into making it work."

And y'know what it's pretty sweet being the beneficiary of all that manual labour.

"Because if it was good enough for most people then most people would be using it."

Wow that's incredibly naive. The major reason people aren't using it is because it doesn't fit in with the economics of today's world and "drive-by software sales", which there is a lot of money in.

I'm confident that a good 90% of software sales today are "drive-by" either through nagware or scareware that ends up on a user's machine either pre-installed by the vendor or by other means.

Even Microsoft do this these days with office sales on new PCs.

I such an environment I think it's pretty meaningless talking about what's "good enough" for a typical user, as they're really just exploited pawns in the market.

Wrong order?

Posted Apr 1, 2012 7:55 UTC (Sun) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (2 responses)

Given that distributions can't even agree on one packaging format (well in theory they agreed to use RPM, in practice this is meaningless), how could the distributions manage to have a stable desktop Linux?

So apparently 1) distributions don't really care.

And if stability was such a big point, 2) why the stable desktop like XFce have not seen a bigger usage compared to the 'cool' desktop (KDE, Gnome) and their constant 'big bang' re-invention?

Given (1) and (2), I also think that this is hopeless.

Wrong order?

Posted Apr 1, 2012 12:29 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

in theory they agreed to use RPM, in practice this is meaningless

Within LSB, RPM was supposed to be the distribution format for packages. Nobody ever said that a LSB-compliant distribution would need to actually use RPM for its own packages; it would only need to be able to install LSB-compliant third-party packages that came in RPM format, which is an entirely different ball-game.

Wrong order?

Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:26 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]

And besides, rpm was chosen because at that time the most popular distributions were using it, not because its the best. And some distibutions like Debian refused to "downgrade". As it happens, now distributions using deb are more popular (And I'm glad about it ;))

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 3, 2012 16:34 UTC (Tue) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link] (1 responses)

I recall around 1996 that I made a similar criticism of Linux as compared to OS/2 (which was my platform of choice at at the time). I claimed that Linux took too much effort because applications were not self-contained as they were on OS/2, where you could just download an exe, run it and have a working application shortly thereafter. And yet here we are almost 20 years later, I made a career developing Linux applications and OS/2 is completely gone. This advantage did not help it *at all* to succeed on the desktop.

For all the arguments I have seen in this discussion, I am still not convinced that Linux should adopt a similar application model. I just don't see why Linux should at this point alienate millions of existing users to cater to trend-chasing developers who are not really interested in building applications for a small market anyway. Linux has a fairly self-sustaining niche desktop presence at this point, and I think its dominance in almost every other aspect of computing will help ensure that it is in no danger of being OS/2-ed in the future.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 5, 2012 11:23 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

Linux shouldn't alienate any existing users. There's no need to fundamentally change how apps are built or distributed in order to fix the platform problem. People talking about UX are off base; there are a thousand ways to fix that problem and any or all of them would be okay, it's the lack of a platform that hurts. The rest will take care of itself.


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