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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

This is the whole open source community destroying (edit: maybe better term would be "damaging") itself.

Basically it starts civilly about finding the one best way to do something. They agree to disagree.

Then there 2 standards...Then 4, then 8 all not having the effort exerted to make each solution great.

Then one party writes something like "don't buy this it not free/ doesn't do this".

And in the end 99+% of people can't be bothered with the arguments and end up running Mac/Windows laptops, harming the open source adoption goals of everyone who was arguing before.

I still own redhat stock. Corporations love having a point of contact when things go wrong and will pay for that.

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Hyperbole

Dozens of projects have gone this way and the open source community still exists

It’s almost as if the notion of one size fits all is a utilitarian idea to simplify production of physical goods

We need to maybe look at why we keep trynna force that on more ephemeral ideas

I’m not obliged to speak English any one why. Why bother with making sure everyone runs the same code or manages only one or two key projects collectively?

Cause Big Corp? Meh.

Linux is great. But even with a strong personality leading there are just too many options for the average consumer.

Software and operating systems are a feedback loop. The more software for a OS the more people use that OS which drives more and better software. As a Mac user in the 90s we suffered from a lack quality software and almost the demise of that platform.

It’s always the year of the Linux desktop, but it can’t seem to displace windows despite being cheaper.. I want great options for computers with Linux pre installed.

But it’s hard sell. Which disto?

Which desktop to use? Gnome, kde.... filesystem? Want to install something non standard? Better hope that they build the software with the same libraries and the same distribution.

Choice is great, but after reading about the linux desktop in another post, people have their favorites, but it seems like there is a lot of work to be done polishing them. With limited developers volunteering we end up with 10ish ok options instead of 2 or 3 great ones.

You want as many people using your platform to keep it healthy and strong.

The lastest Ubuntu LTS has been the 'standard' at least since 12.04. Others (like me) have favorites because we're free to do so, and we're nerds. It solves all of the questions that you have above very reasonably, and it runs on almost anything.

The main gripes with it are that it's 'bloated' (in Linux terms, yes, but it's way lighter than Windows/MacOS), or that it encourages the installation of proprietary binaries to make things work (also way less than Windows/MacOS).

Not hyperbole, a real problem that leads to interop issues. For example, the hellish filesystem wars of the mid 2000s.

Most distros STILL ship ext4 despite there being better options.

Hellish? I was running linux back then (since 97 actually) and while there was a fair amount of confusion, it wasn't due to the many choices we had, and there was nothing hellish about it. The confusion was because we hadn't realized that the right way to handle file system issues is to keep backups and have automated rebuilds. In some tiny minority of cases you also need some flavor of RAID. Other than that, why worry about file systems?

With respect you missed my point

Why should your interop concerns influence choices I need to make for my project?

Shared utilitarian solutions to basic human problems like food, healthcare, shelter, Linux kernel I get

Why do I need to adopt anyone else’s “code slang” for my otherwise specific needs? If ext4 works who are you to tell me to use something you think is “better”?

What general purpose FS would be a better standard?

I still think that Richard is kinda irritating in this case.

Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/927/

good to see the auto-downvote-xkcd-links bots are still operational

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