Comment by externalreality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by externalreality | Hacker News Reader

externalreality

> Well, maybe we’ll still have Linux... None of the major Linux companies — Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE — makes the desktop a priority anymore. The Linux desktop will continue on, but it will keep going in the same way it is now: a platform only for power-using enthusiasts.

I'm a "power-using enthusiast" because I use Gnome3? Gee, thanks... but wasn't desktop a thing despite (in spite) the so-called "Major Companies". Canonical for one made "Unity" which was about as painful as a Rubix-cube covered in shards of glass. It couldn't have died sooner. I mean that what you get when a "Major" company tries to dominate the FOSS space - layoffs and an alienated base. Red Hat was corporate from the outset, they never pretended to otherwise, which is probably why they are actually successful and not using millions of person fortune to put on a show while loosing boku bucks in the background and laying off employees.

In short, desktop is not dead. FOSS people love desktops. Microsoft doesn't dictate anything anymore.

> FOSS people love desktops

I disagree. FOSS people love webapps, machine learning, and other big-computing stuff on the whole. Hardly any work is being done towards personal "small-computing" and, frankly, hardly any ever was. I can guess at a bunch of reasons why, but it mostly comes down to the problem space just not being interesting to very many people with the skill set to do anything about it.

Big and Small computing: https://hackernoon.com/big-and-small-computing-73dc49901b9a

Web apps have several advantages over the desktop, but one of them is that the web browser provides an abstraction layer over the GUI crap you'd otherwise have to write and the cross-platform support you'd otherwise have to worry about. Not only does this reduce the effort required, it also means you don't have to learn a whole new ecosystem.

They also remove almost all control from the user, so that's a nice bonus. Unless you're a user of course.

Several?

Besides UI programming and not requiring users to install anything, what other advantages are there?

UI programming and not requiring users to install anything are pretty big. You also get automatic syncing across devices, which is nice for things like RSS feed readers.

Don't underestimate the importance of the abstraction layer either! There's a lot of crap it's removing from the equation. You don't have to worry about cross-platform support, installing prerequisites, trying to deal with the program insisting that it needs MXYZPT32.DLL and can't find it when you go to run it...

The downside is that it's feudalism. But, hey, under feudalism, you don't have to defend your own land!

There are downsides to outsourcing defense of your land to the local lord, of course. The lord can force updates and sell your likes to the Rooskies, and the profitable enterprise that enables him to defend your land is the industrial-scale farming of human eyeballs. Maybe it'd be better if 7-11 carried Snow Crash sidecar nukes - i.e. if there were decentralized, open-source platforms that could do all this stuff - but I don't think they do.

Yet. Growth mindset.

> Hardly any work is being done towards personal "small-computing"

That's not true.

2019 year of the Linux desktop

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