Hacker News Reader

Comment by misterbowfinger | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the detail and the link!

I was perhaps a bit naive and continue being so...

It feels as though the issues you listed seem solvable? As in, the work to create a distro & craft a community that solves the above problems is work that can be monetized, possibly in a RedHat-like way. I don't know much about RedHat's customers, but I'm curious what percentage of them use RedHat for desktop GUIs.

It'd for sure be a lot of work, particularly the hardware support since you'd have to convince other vendors that it's in their best interests to play nicely. It really feels like there's huge potential upside here because you'd be able to drive down prices (with open source development) and have contracts on the enterprise support angle.

View on HN

They are totally solvable. They're so solvable, most of them have already been solved several times. The biggest issue is that very few within the Linux Desktop community seem willing to untie behind these solutions and instead prefer to keep everything fragmented, or cling to some backwards way of doing things because of some nigh-religious adherence to "the unix way", forgetting conveniently that even the people who created unix went out and improved on it because it really wasn't that great.

Google basically did solve a lot of these problems with Android, but doesn't seem to have any interest whatsoever in the Personal Computing Desktop market. Not surprising, their business model depends on keeping people in the web browser as much as possible, and the reality is that it isn't a very lucrative market anyway.

I'm not even entirely sure that's a bad thing. Now that I'm watching Microsoft turn their once-decent Personal Computing Desktop OS into a steaming pile of user-hostile garbage, I'm not sure I want the future of personal computing to be in some company's hands. Sadly, it is my considered opinion that the current open source community is largely worse.

> The biggest issue is that very few within the Linux Desktop community seem willing to untie behind these solutions and instead prefer to keep everything fragmented

I suspect this is the case with most open source communities that don't have a clear "market leader".

But if it's all open source someone can run with it and solve all the things if they wanted to, right?

I think the community could solve most of the problems if they wanted to, yes. Actually, I think if you could find and organize all the people who really want an open source desktop and have congruent goals towards a personal computer OS that embraces simplicity, consistency, and user empowerment, it could happen without having to deal with the mainstream Linux Desktop community. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anywhere for these people to find each other, no project to rally behind, no community to engage with.

Very few people use Red Hat (RHEL) as a desktop. It simply gets outdated and has (intentionally) very long release cycles. Most Red Hat shops I have been part of use Fedora for the desktop, and ship the RHEL/CentOS on the server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com