No more updates for Freecode [LWN.net]

No more updates for Freecode

Posted Jun 29, 2014 17:36 UTC (Sun) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: No more updates for Freecode by khim
Parent article: No more updates for Freecode

>> You seem to consider it a distribution's job to make it easy for users to install third party software.

> Of course. That's what an OS is supposed to do. The main function of general-purpose OS to provide support for wide variety of programs.

Yes, and the OS (Linux) does indeed support a wide variety of programs. I think you meant to say "proprietary programs"? We're talking about distributions, and in the Debian Social Contract it says "Our priorities are our users and free software". As long as the users are not clamoring for making it easy for proprietary developers, it's not going to happen. And rightly so. Debian does support a wide variety of free software and that's what the users want.

> There are OSes which do that well (Windows, Android), the ones which do that not so well (MacOS, iOS) and ones which are absolutely awful (classic Linux distributions fall into that category).

As long as each are meeting the needs of their respective users, what is the problem exactly?

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No more updates for Freecode

Posted Jun 29, 2014 18:22 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Yes, and the OS (Linux) does indeed support a wide variety of programs.

No, it does not. You may joke about quality of Android applications but it does not change the fact that there are millions of them. And Windows has similar number of application and most likely even more. And that's not counting special-purpose applications developed “in-house” (some estimates say that there are 10 times more of these). Linux has just a tiny fraction of that.

I think you meant to say "proprietary programs"?

I meant to say “programs delivered in usable form”. Since for most users binaries are the only usable form that's what I'm talking about. If application is actually open sourced or not is minor issue here. Even if user actually has the source (as with many “in-house” applications) there may be noone around who could actually modify/fix it.

As long as the users are not clamoring for making it easy for proprietary developers, it's not going to happen.

Users often try to ask about it but when faced with openly hostily reaction just go with MacOS or Windows.

As long as each are meeting the needs of their respective users, what is the problem exactly?

The problem is that the whole thing slowly falls apart. Few years ago people were able to manage the complexity by throwing huge amount of resources on a problem, but now, when number of developers is shrinking (how many active developers GTK+ have now?) and complexity of the task does not Linux desktop becomes more and more broken. And people who are trying to do something about it (e.g. Lennart Poettering) are met with outright hostility.

It really starts to look like the only solution to the whole mess is replacement of GNU/Mess with something based on Android and I, for one, not sure this will be a good thing.