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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, these days I think if we want a proper OS and if we want the incentives of the vendor to align with ours, we need subscription OSes.

Right now we have:

* Android - basically ad supported, therefore misaligned incentives

* iOS/macOS - locked into Apple hardware

* Windows - old school licensing until 10, with the problems they mentioned for Vista; new licensing which seems to be more like Android adware

A cheap yearly subscriptions would realign the incentives: I am the client, I want frequent feature updates, I want fast security updates, I want to be the client and not the product, I don't want the company to go under or force development teams into stupid feature development or release trains cause they need to make sure there's a revenue stream.

Basically I pay them for providing timely security and regular feature updates, preferably in an incremental fashion.

Everyone who's not happy with this can either lock themselves into hardware (Apple) or go DYI, basically, with Linux/BSD or just accept that being tracked isn't that bad (Android).

I'd be really sad if the anti-tracking forces within the Windows division lose. There has to be a better revenue model than tracking users and providing ads, somewhere.

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There's nothing DIY about a ready made Linux distribution such as the Fedora Desktop.

As long as you don't fiddle around too much under the hood, and don't insert random commands in places because someone on the Internet told you to, things will Just Work like nothing else. There's something to be said to having the developers actually caring about making a useful computer without allowing the marketing department to take charge.

Don't try to run it on some unsupported hardware (including outside "third party drivers"), anything bog standard Intel based will do, and you'll be absolutely fine.

The OS itself is not that DYI, even though I don't like being constrained in hardware terms. Let's say that I get over that. Then the DYI part begins, at least for me.

I like AAA games, almost none of the games I play are available on Linux (primarily Blizzard games). A lot of desktop apps I like or need are not on Linux, etc.

In any case, let's just say I used to have a Linux site and forum back in 2007 or so, I'be been through the Linux evangelism cycle a few times.

For many people, such as myself, Linux desktop is acceptable but not the best option. And for a reasonable price I'd rather have the best option for me, personally.

> I like AAA games, almost none of the games I play are available on Linux (primarily Blizzard games). A lot of desktop apps I like or need are not on Linux, etc.

I don't have any first hand knowledge about the AAA gaming industry but from what I understand, the studios offload a lot of the work to the GPU manufacturer (nVidia most likely) who then "fixes" the bugs in what they call a graphics driver.

I think this is the main problem. The so called graphics drivers do too much work and games don't pull their own weight.

That's certainly a problem, but that's not why games aren't being ported to Linux, in my opinion, it's that A) the user base isn't large enough to bother in many cases (these same companies often release terrible Windows ports for more or less the same reason) and B) It's a pain in the ass for a multitude of reasons not the least of which is that the Linux community thinks it has a great development environment but it doesn't (at least for Destktop stuff).

>that's not why games aren't being ported to Linux //

What's weird to me is that a lot of games will run on Linux, eg via WINE (PlayOnLinux) say but the companies then appear to be hostile to users doing that. I used to play a load of the Tom Clancy games on WINE [single player], but then Origin messed with something, maybe their cheat system, making it no longer work on Linux. So now I don't buy games from Origin any more and stick with Steam.

It's not just "not ported to", game companies seem actively hostile to [paying!] Linux users, I don't know if MS pay them to be like that or what their motivation is?

I think you're reading too much in to it. They just don't want to have to support WINE users and have their brand associated with their problems.

>They just don't want to have to support WINE users //

Couldn't they just respond to support requests with "we don't support non-MS users" rather than actively preventing the use.

> the Linux community thinks it has a great development environment but it doesn't

This is an incredibly important point. The community is full of true believers and college students (and many are both) who just can't fathom that almost all of their dev tools and workflows suck compared to professional grade tooling available outside the FOSS echochamber. I have nothing against FOSS in principle, but in practical use I have become convinced that there is no reason to develop on Linux, unless you develop specifically FOR Linux. And even then it's such a PITA to do anything complex that it's often just not worth it to target Linux if you don't absolutely have to. Microsoft and Apple have realized how important it is to make it easy for developers to create good software.

> There's nothing DIY about a ready made Linux distribution such as the Fedora Desktop.

Until you want to change something. It is trivial to target a single use case and make it easy with Linux (most of the time) or almost any other OS, but that isn't what we want from Desktop OS, we want flexibility so we can conform it to our workflow, and Linux Desktop is absolutely terrible at that because it's become a giant Rube Goldberg machine of schizophrenic and often half-thought out components written with the idea that they're in a multiuser server environment but pretending they were designed for personal desktops.

If someone built a new, joy to work with and develop for, userland on top of the Linux kernel that wasn't oriented towards the idea that the system is a multi-user network server in 1983, I would subscribe the hell out of it (though in my opinion it had better be open source regardless). As a side project, I'm actually playing with concepts in this vein, but I'm really not that good a developer and don't have a lot of time to devote to it, it's just that no one else is doing it.

If you want to change something then run an OS that's built with the expectation that you change things (Alpine, Gentoo etc.)

They aren't any better because they still use all the same software and follow all the same broken paradigms.

No they don't? Alpine uses the BusyBox deamons (initd, evdev etc.) And Gentoo uses openrc. Both of these are much easier to tweak than systemd. Same for the network manager replacements and so on.

Different distros (that aren't just modified Debian or redhat) can differ by quite a lot.

> Both of these are much easier to tweak than systemd.

Disagree. The documentation for systemd is very detailed, and while it is in fact different from sysvinit (which I believe is 90% of the criticism), it is remarkably consistent with itself (compared to a feature-equivalent set of 100 separate tools).

The big achievement of systemd is that it steamrolls over a ton of idiosyncrasies that distributions built over the decades. These days, I can just SSH into a random distribution (Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat, Suse) and everything works as I expect (querying the status of services, finding logs, issuing administrative commands, etc.).

> it's become a giant Rube Goldberg machine of schizophrenic and often half-thought out components written with the idea that they're in a multiuser server environment but pretending they were designed for personal desktops

I don't get where you're getting this idea.

Wayland is an attempt to replace X11. PulseAudio is a (now decent) attempt to clean up the Linux audio space.

There are attempts being made. Your comment is too vague to be falsifiable, though. Would you mind being more precise as to what you'd like to see changed?

In the short version:

Package management and spreading files all over the hierarchy is a really terribly inflexible way to manage applications. Applications should just be folders that contain any resources the application requires that aren't in the base system (this requires a defined and stable base system). This requires no special management software whatsoever and fits intuitively into the file management metaphor that already exists. See: Application Bundles, AppDirs, AppImage, and just about any desktop os before Windows 95.

Permissions should not be oriented around protecting the system from the user. That's a concept that makes sense in multiuser servers and organization networks, not personal devices. Permissions should be oriented around protecting the user's data from misbehaving applications.

Base system libraries should be stable on at least decade long timelines, barring a severe security issue that cannot be mitigated in any other way. I generally agree with Linus's opinion regarding breaking comparability. Unfortunately, a lot of the developers of the userland stuff aren't Linus.

In general, the OS should not presume it knows what my workflow is. This is the problem with the difference between "easy", which requires understanding what I want, and "simple" which is making systems understandable enough that I can conform them to what I want. It is my opinion that Linux Desktop has put so much effort into being easy that it has destroyed any simplicity it once had (see common Linux Desktop evangelist argument: "normal users don't need that").

The commandline environment and toolset are ass. PowerShell implemented the same concept significantly better.

Explaining my ideas for the how a GUI interface should work would take a long time and are not really relevant because they could exist as just another compositor in the current ecosystem.

>Applications should just be folders that contain any resources the application requires that aren't in the base system (this requires a defined and stable base system)

You're basically describing OCI/docker/moby containers.

No. Well, yes, to a certain extent, but they don't need all the abstraction of containers, they can just be regular old directories. DOS applications were managed this way, MacOS applications were managed this way, RiscOS, NextStep, and OSX (now confusingly renamed to MacOS again) worked this way.

None of them use any containerization hackery to make it work, they just don't hardcode paths at compile time in their applications like UNIX developers do.

No they do not hardcode paths, they just have to use some other mechanism (for example: registry) to find each other's location. MacOS doesn't really work this way either, half the apps available use installer and have their files somewhere in /Library.

The time when applications were universes by themselves ended in 1990 with OLE.

Containers go a step further, tossing out most of the system above the kernel. This works, but might be too expensive for personal computing.

Flatpak in linux uses bubblewrap (namespaces, cgroups, bindmounts, seccomp, basically the same tech behind containers), and constructs /usr based on the frameworks the application requires in its manifest.

On the disk, it boils down to a single copy of each framework required. Additionally, the flatpak repository is content addressable, the constructed directory trees are hardlinks to the repository, so multiple versions or even separate frameworks will share identical files.

> I generally agree with Linus's opinion regarding breaking comparability.

Linus, the guy who doesn't give a shit about breaking the ABI of drivers.

Yeah, I also don't care for that, but I can't argue that that policy hasn't achieved its goals. The Linux kernel has more and better driver support than any other open source OS and also most closed source ones.

The driver ABI is not a part of the compatibility promise, it is an internal API.

However, the folks who break internal APIs also fix the users of these APIs -- if they are available to them. If they are not, tough luck, if you want to keep the driver to yourself, you get to keep all the broken pieces too.

So basically you want Snap packages?

https://docs.snapcraft.io/core/snapd

No, snaps are a completely ridiculous overengineering of the concept. They use a package manager and repositories and paclage format and, from what I can tell, some overlayfs, they don't fit in to the normal file management paradigm... Frankly, they're exactly what you'd expect from the Linux community.

AppImage did it much better and even that's overengineered, but its goal is to work on all Linux distributions (without a package manager or a new infrastructure or anything) and really doesn't do much more than the bare minimum to make that happen. Naturally, the Linux Desktop community largely ignores it for making too much sense.

ROX Desktop attempted to do app bundles a long time ago on linux as well.

Anyway you are missing one of the core problems of linux distros- they are not split between "base" or "core" OS and extra packages; they are a single monolithic thing! That is why debs and rpms install right into /usr/bin along with the core OS. There is no difference.

I know, I was there when ROX Desktop and ROX Filer hit the scene. Sadly, yet predictably, a concept as simple and flexible as AppDirs was completely ignored by the rest of the desktop linux community. I guess it didn't make them feel leet enough or something.

I may be wrong, but WindowMaker, being based on GNUStep, which was derived from NextSTEP, might have also supported application bundles (as in the actual NextSTEP Application Bundle specification).

“These days, the problem isn't how to innovate; it's how to get society to adopt the good ideas that already exist.” - Douglas Engelbart

> Anyway you are missing one of the core problems of linux distros- they are not split between "base" or "core" OS and extra packages

I didn't miss it, I mention right in there that having a defined base system is a requirement. Something I didn't mention is that I will not call the end product a "Linux Distribution", because it is not intended to play nice with existing Linux Desktop paradigms. It'll be like Android, a completely different OS underpinned by the linux kernel.

I agree completely. Linux as it exists today seems to be dialing up the complexity to 11. I am expecting (hoping, almost) that the whole thing implodes sooner rather than later so we can start getting simple things again.

It's not clear to me what the userland has to do with "the idea that the system is a multi-user network server in 1983." Pretty much any PC GUI out there today would be at least recognizable to a Windows 3 user OR a Unix workstation user--one of which was based on a multi-user network server but the other was not.

There are alternative models out there. There are Chromebooks where you basically live in the browser (which many people do anyway for most of their computing) and there's the app store model we see on phones and tablets.

I guess there's a potential for new paradigms that blend the flexibility of current GUIs with simplicity but I'm not sure a multiuser server foundation has much to do with it.

It's mostly about the way permissions are handled. User-oriented permissions are about protecting the system from the user. This is a useful notion when people connect to a multiuser server via a terminal, or for shared network resources, but is nigh useless and generally just gets in the way for personal computing devices.

The mobile OSs orient the permissions system around the applications, protecting the user's data and resources.

That's fair enough although one of the reasons that works is that applications are sandboxed and limited in terms of what they are allowed to do. Certainly one could imagine a tablet/phone OS that was more oriented to desktop use cases (mouse support, etc.). But now we're back to Windows 8 and possibly Surface Pros and that just hasn't been a particularly popular model.

But that's exactly what we want: applications that are only allowed to access what the user has permitted them to access. And I believe it can be done better than popping up a dialog all the time like UAC or just once at first launch like Android/iOS.

You don't need to tabletize your interface to implement this concept. Bubblewrap, FireJail, and some similar software already exists that implements this in Linux (poorly in my opinion, but it works).

People have done it.

The self-contained application bundles idea that you espouse can be found as Daniel J. Bernstein's "slashpackage" mechanism, from the turn of the century. It gives side-by-side installation of multiple versions of packages and simple packaged files installation, upgrade, and removal procedures.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357816

* http://code.dogmap.org/slashpackage/

The ability for users to isolate their own applications from one another is one of the concepts (removing the superuser) that underpins GNU Hurd, where one can sandbox one's own programs using translators and servers that substitute for the root ones.

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/hurd-daemons.html

I am aware that people have tried it, ROX Filer knew about AppDirs, I think WindowMaker/GNUStep supported Application Bundles, there are currently (in keeping with Linux Desktop tradition) at least 3 implementations of the concept (FlatPak, Snap, AppImage), all of which are overengineered (but AppImage is the closest to correct by a wide margin).

But there is no system I can install today that makes it the primary way of doing things. That's what I'm trying to build, a new OS (or perhaps "operating environment" would be a more precise term), not a "distribution", on top of the Linux kernel, that takes the good ideas that already exists and makes them the primary way of doing things.

It's likely that even if I did finish the project people would ignore it. Maybe only I think these are good ideas, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't care. When I look at the future of the desktop operating system I see Windows 10 continuing down its path of becoming increasingly uselessly stupid, and the Linux Desktop, and those two futures make me want to become Amish. I'm building this because if I don't build something like this because if I don't I'll probably just leave computing altogether.

> I am the client, I want frequent feature updates, I want fast security updates

Oh God no. I am the client, I DO NOT want frequent feature updates, or any update at all, except important (life-threatening) basic security patches. I want things to NOT CHANGE ever, esp. the UI and the way to do basic tasks.

Do you know of any GUI OS that actually works like that?

I'd rather have frequent small changes than Big Bang changes...

Anything with XFCE - you'd probably do well with Xubuntu.

This is XFCE in 2003: https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.2-3.jpg

This is XFCE today: https://cdn.xfce.org/about/tour/4.12/xfwm4-tiling-small.png

Dunno if XFCE qualifies for "frequent small releases" though :)

What you want is a Rolling Release Distro, like Arch or Gentoo, then you can add whatever GUI you want on top of it, I like XFCE as a sibling comment mentioned.

Another good example of a rolling release distro is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It has less of a DIY culture than Arch or Gentoo and the installer will install a graphical desktop by default so arguably it is closer to what the parent poster was asking about.

Regarding UI changes, minimalist Window Managers and Desktop Environments for *nix tend to work like that. They stick to their base paradigms and rarely, if ever change, once considered stable.

XFCE has been already been mentioned. But Openbox, dwm, awesome, etc... all could fit.

Note that it's expected, and assumed, that the user can switch to these more conservative UIs if they prefer, even if the base distro defaults to only one.

To be fair, most subscription model software that I know changes UI less frequently than pay–per-release software. As for every big release the marketing department steps in to fully redesign everything.

Do you use Windows 10. It is a nightmare full of gratuitious undocumented feature changes.

Then find yourself a Long Term Servicing Branch iso. The last Windows 10 Creators update trashed all the developer workstations in my company and made them unusable. The only knock on LTSB is the Linux-on-Windows stuff isn't there. Otherwise, it's Windows 10 without the bullshit and with added stability.

I'm using Win10 for years now and never noticed any ads. I don't think the Android comparison really stands.

I did notice a subtle ad on a coworker's laptop once. I am a bit afraid of what happens if their Windows revenue goes down.

Also, they do operate on the other spectrum of this continuum, Windows 10 collects a lot of data, for what I presume is user tracking for ads & co.

I noticed ads on the lock screen when it was set to Windows Spotlight.

It’s full of ads for Edge, OneDrive, Office and some more of their own services, and then it’s automatically installing and wasting the space you paid for on Candy Crush and other games, even if you tune the Start Menu so you don’t see the tiles.

I understand that you don’t see it if you don’t look but you certainly are paying for it.

For my home PCs, I purchased the MS Action Pack subscription so that I could install Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB and not get ads and Cortana. With it and ClassicShell, it serves me nicely.

I prefer my FreeBSD box running Motif as my daily driver though.

Aren't those Windows licenses upgrade only?

Yes. It's upgrade licenses only. but as with all MS OS media, they can be installed on blank machines.

Yeah, but don't they get deactivated afterwards?

No they ask you to activate nicely with a grey overlay in the bottom right corner. This can be disabled but is not that annoying in practice.

The Action Pack pack really is incredible value for what you get. It's also somewhat incredible that so few people seem to know about it.

They're not ads. They're "recommendations".

I come across various Windows 10 machines and see Candy Crush adverts, Office 365 adverts, OneDrive adverts, Lock Screen adverts. I believe some have even documented adverts showing on File Explorer (!)

I've been using win 10 since the last month of their free offering and I haven't seen a single add. So YMMV.

Just as a logged in now it presented links to msn articles on the login page. Yes: it was really nicely and tastefully done but it really worries me.

I've also had the login background turn into an ad for a game.

That time I and a number of others reported it quite loudly IIRC and since then I can't remember seeing anything like that before today.

And yes, ads in the start menu are real as well.

I can't edit anymore. It's probably because I live in Eastern-Europe, they don't target this region. Yet. Yikes :)

You can't edit after 2 hours on HN. It's global, I'm also from Eastern Europe, cut it out with the victim complex ;)

That's funny, because I'm from the West and can edit freely. ;-)

My Android device shows me no ads.

That's cause Android pushes Chrome and Google Search and Gmail and... you get it, the whole data collection and ad serving mechanism provided by Google.

I bundle telemetry/data collection with ads for my post since in the end they're just different ends of the same continuum.

Don't move the goalposts from "ads" to bundled apps. Furthermore, the "data collection" would be the same whether I accessed those services from my GNU/Linux desktop or Android device so I don't understand where you're going with that claim.

Well, the apps do. And Google has unfortunately forgotten to give you the tools to block those from doing that by not giving you ways to block internet access.

Talk about moving the goalposts. Regardless, simple hosts-based adblocking works well on Android.

No point in leaving the goal posts where they are when they don't reflect the goal: Not having ads in your face all the time.

Hosts-file-based blocking requires Root, which Google has also practically cut off from end-users. Yes, the manufacturers can give you root, so clearly it's their fault, but Google doesn't implement user access control, making Root extremely insecure on Android.

I'm not "having ads in your face all the time" in apps shipped with android distributions. 3rd party apps, anything goes but that's true for all platforms.

I was talking about the combo of tracking + ads, especially as they lead to misaligned incentives for me and Google. Google ultimately wants to sell more ads. It doesn't care about me as a software user. A company that sells (subscription) software does.

Why? Comcast et all sell subscriptions, are they paragons of customer care?

Well, I just pointed out that Google actively encourages and enables 3rd party apps to ship ads and track users, and your only rebuttal is that theoretically you can pull off the same on other platforms.

So, if you really need more examples of Google's doing to convince you that it is the platform which causes Android's 3rd party apps to have so much more ads and tracking than other platform's 3rd party apps:

- Android has an "AdvertisingID", uniquely identifying you towards advertisers or anyone else who has a use for it, with essentially no effort required.

- Google's ad display component is a native UI element on Android, so when developing an Android app, you pretty much just need to drag and drop it onto your UI to be 90% there to displaying ads. Really, you don't even need to plan on making revenue with the app, it's so easy to just include ads.

- The Play Store doesn't even attempt to quality control apps in terms of advertisements. No other major software distribution platform is as laissez-faire with that.

Replace Google/Android with Microsoft/Windows in your comments throughout this thread, and it will still be correct.

But at least Android is $0, and I have the choice to use a fork.

(not that I would use Android for productive work)

What tools does Apple give you to block iAds in apps?

Subscription incentives only work in the favor of users with viable competition and low switching cost. Neither condition exists right now for businesses or the overwhelming majority of home users.

"I am the client, I want frequent feature updates, I want fast security updates, I want to be the client and not the product, I don't want the company to go under or force development teams into stupid feature development or release trains cause they need to make sure there's a revenue stream."

You just described at least a dozen Linux and BSD distributions. They fit every single one of your points and are free.

I mostly agree.

Basically, you want Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora, but the last time you used one of them was 10 years ago.

I needed to escape Windows as soon as I installed the Windows 8 preview, and realised Microsoft's incentives where going against mine.

(and don't talk to me about lock-in or software unavailability, I had a 20 year career of MS tech)

How much do you think such an OS could be sold for?

For me, Windows wastes about 2% of my time per year (mostly due to Windows update). From a business perspective, that might justify a $10k expense to recover that lost productivity. From a personal perspective, I would pay $500 to recover that time for my own use. No idea if there's enough like-minded people to make a new OS profitable, though.

The sticking point is that to recoup time lost to Windows the new OS would have to completely replace Windows, which means being able to run key Windows-only business software (SolidWorks, etc.). Maybe it makes more sense to just support Wine instead of reinventing the OS.

What makes you think the new OS won't waste more than 2% of your time?

I am optimistic that it's possible to do better because: (a) I'm only counting time as "wasted" if I'm forced to fix something the OS broke with no action on my part, or if I'm forced to wait for it to do something that I did not ask for. E.g., watching Windows apply updates on boot is wasted. Adjusting keybindings to suit my preferences is not wasted. This isn't a high bar to clear. (b) Design choices, not physical or logical restrictions on what's possible, cause most of this waste. E.g., the choice to have Windows update do substantial work during reboot and to reset user settings (such as HKLM and HKCU keys) is an unforced error. It's demonstrably possible to do better: Linux Mint updates apply in the background, don't lengthen boot time, and leave existing settings unchanged. (c) If the new OS is worse than the current choices, I just don't use it. The time a new OS wastes is in all cases ≤ 2%. Building a new thing that fails hurts a lot, of course, but being a customer is easy.

I don't think Windows or Android are adware. They are "carrier" products, free but MS/Google can decide what services to bundle, and this is where they get the money (=app store, having Office preinstalled). So it's a much less obstrusive than adware which lives from constantly showing you ads like websites

For some strange cultural reason now computer bundles of yore are considered ads.

http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/a500batman.html

Back then they were Packs, now in digital format they are ads.

Ok, maybe not direct adware, but more like light spyware and "carriers", as you said. They bundle services, including data collection, so that they can turn you into the product. Microsoft less so, but and I hope they stop this trend they started.

Google started it, not Microsoft.

I meant the trend started in the company/in the Windows division.

No, Google was tracking users long before Microsoft.

It is not Microsoft that tracks me whenever I am, unless I disable the settings in play services, and even then I am not sure.

It is not Microsoft that sells an OS whose premise is that all my data lives on their servers.

It is not Microsoft that created an office suite that hides my data behind servers, with access to everything I might create with those applications.

Buddling software with the computer being bought was already a thing in the 8 bit era, with C64, Spectrum, MSX and Atari packs.

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