We shouldn’t blame ourselves for the Linux desktop’s microscopic market share
valdyas.org
valdyas.org
BeOS was ahead of its time. It had a modern GUI, where each window had a dedicated thread. It had a fantastic filesystem, with journaling and database-like searching. Very advanced.
Be tried very hard to get OEMs to ship BeOS. But Microsoft's "per-processor" licensing meant that OEMs were charged for Windows on every computer they sold, even those without Windows.
At the end, Be was offering to license BeOS for free to any OEM that would ship it as the default OS (even allowing dual boot), and still had no takers. Then they tried to license BeOS to Apple, but they misplayed their hand and Apple went with NeXT. That was that.
By the time Linux became plausible on the desktop, the per-processor licenses were gone.
BeOS felt so good to use.
Fast forward to today, Linux + its distros are still technically ahead of its time in all areas but still has 'developers, tinkerers and hobbyists' of its users for the desktop rather than the average personal computer user.
Google seemed to have learned from the BeOS failure by 'using' Linux in the literal sense for Android, ChromeOS and Chromebooks which is working for them so far, and they are re-entering the desktop OS market with Fuchsia.
I've been noticing that as various applications, operating systems, and platforms have worked to become more focused on the common person, they've been increasingly becoming less useful (and more of a pain to use) to me. I fear that if Linux actually broke into the mainstream, the same fate would befall it.
For my own serious work, language stability over time is a core need.
"Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions."
Sometimes we need to have expert/power user's tools. It's not specific to IT jobs. You can see it in many other jobs.
I understand that there are highly specialized environments/needs that are niche, but I would argue Haskell (along with most programming languages) isn’t one. It’s a programming language plain and simple. It doesn’t even have special neiche feature like Ada for proving correctness because this is going to power a fighter jet. It’s a language for CS nerds... that’s it AFAIK.
By valuing elitism, you largely are guaranteeing less positive impact on the world, as well as pushing away people who might come with ideas to improve the state of the art. You’re also letting less people experience the power and “purity” of a pure functional language, which dampens the impact those ideas can have on other developments.
I've already stopped using several applications that I've been using for years because of this sort of thing. If it keeps up, I fear I'll run out of alternatives.
There are problems today that might not exist in a more Linux-y world, especially the remarkable power of a few huge companies to shape users' computing experiences. On the other hand, if Linux had had some huge commercial backer, whatever popular distribution won could have ended up with similar issues. In any case, my preferred desktop "winning" is not the only or best solution to those problems; users get some support from market forces (which I think we can partly credit for useful cheap devices and Microsoft's transformation) and where they don't help, well, regulation, including antitrust regulation, is always out there.
And if you think that antitrust case is the full extent of Microsoft's shenanigans, you are beyond naive. One example: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240214747/Microsoft-ral...
They can call the OS free all they like, but clearly the OS adds value to their hardware. If, say, RedHat wanted to sell an OS to a person who uses an Apple computer are they not also asking that potential customer to pay the same kind of "double tax" referenced? It seems like it to me, Apple just sells the hardware too so they can play pricing games and pretend the OS is valueless while the hardware is what you're paying for.
Sure, it's different in that they're probably not doing anything illegal -- they're not leveraging their monopoly to force other vendors to give them money for nothing because they are the vendor, but it is awfully parallel if the question you're asking is "why isn't Linux desktop marketshare increasing?"
Does it not do just as much harm to their customer if they can't buy the hardware minus a real reasonable price for the OS because they're going to use Linux on it?
Again, I'm not suggesting they're illegally leveraging a monopoly because they are also the vendor of the hardware and one company bundling their hardware with their software is common. But I am suggesting that they're not a counterpoint to the idea that this kind of "double tax" is holding back Linux use. If anything, it's a small point in favor of the idea that the author might be on to something...
I'd personally argue more that for profit companies leveraging free software without paying for its development is the root cause of project decay and poorly funded free software projects. Granted this is by design, but it's pretty embarrassing for our style of capitalism that there's not any kind of recognition among MBAs that they might have an ethical obligation to donate to people who are doing work their entire business requires to operate.
And the OEM licensing never much affected Apple to begin with since they make their own hardware.
Mass market products compromise. They simplify. They market, advertise, etcetera.
A truly mass market GNU/Linux distro with the clout of a Microsoft or an Apple would inevitably, I believe, end up forking off into its' own barely compatible universe.
If we're lucky, the 'old' universe sticks around. If we're unlucky, it fragments the ecosystem too much and the proper power user OS falls apart.
Android is an example of precisely that.
I've been using Linux for my entire adult life. All of the reasons that people give for not using it are reasons I use it. "It's too much tinkering", "I had to look at a config file", "I wanted to compile something to change it", etc.
It boggles my mind that it is 2019 and some people find it acceptable that you have to compile from source to install up to date software. Or to install software to a different location. Or to have two versions of the same software installed.
This is a ludicrous regression from the state of personal computing in 1985.
Rust's package manager for example compiles everything. 'cargo install bat'. There, you compiled it.
Python programs, JS are essentially being compiled on the fly.
The Arch AUR is a oneshot 'makepkg' command even without a helper.
It's only this big scary thing if the build tools are crap and you need a bunch of manual interventions.
Again, I find it strange that developers shy away from this. I can see that the man on the clapham omnibus may not be impressed.
Not to mention little things like not all software being open source, having to have compile dependencies installed that are not runtime dependencies, compilation being slow for a lot of languages, etc.
Here's how installing up to date software goes in a sane world: Download latest software direct from developer (or copy from some other media). Done. That's how AppImage works, it's how RiscOS worked, it's how classic MacOS worked, it's how DOS worked, it's how NeXT worked, and it's how a lot of Windows software works (though sadly not all of it).
I think within a few years we'll see distributions that have the option to build from source in the package manager as a first class citizen.
To me, that's the sane way to distribute software. Provided unverifiable binaries are sketchy. Closed source software is something other people use.
Almost no software provides binary releases at the commit level. Sometimes you can have nightlies.
Again, I think this is something that seperates userbases. You don't want this, you see it as effort or something. I see it as being absolutely necessary.
So, YMMV I guess. /shrug
Consider the common case that the software you want to install is not in the repo.
> Closed source software is something other people use.
Great for you, but what's this thread about again? Oh yeah, Linux Desktop being useful for people who aren't currently using it. As in, basically everybody who uses a personal computer.
Why do they use proprietary software? Because they have shit to do and they need tools. They can't always write the tools themselves so they pay someone else who has written the tool they need.
This isn't rocket science, yet Linux Desktop evangelists still don't get it even after 20 years.
I don't think that the Linux Desktop will be successful, and I think if it ever is, that would be because it's moved away from the principles that make it interesting to people like me to begin with.
I'm not talking about the man on the clapham omnibus, so responding to me along those lines is kind of silly. I don't expect the general public to spanner.
I do have disdain for developers that moan about it though.
I, as a tinkerer, developer, and general personal computing enthusiast think it is absolute unmitigated bullshit that my only options for installing software are to restrict myself to what is in some repo maintained by volunteers, or try my best to match the build environment of the developer and compile from source.
I don't like useless busywork, and I don't fetishize complexity. I do like the idea of an open and free operating system, so it bothers me a lot that the only one even coming close to being useful to me is still so far off.
> try my best to match the build environment of the developer and compile from source
This is analogous to someone releasing a Windows executable without the correct DLLs or whatever. The developer hasn't given you what you need to install it.
Your problem is with the developer of that software.
Again, YMMV, I reckon we just use different things. I've literally never had this problem for over ten years now.
I almost never have to compile anything on my desktops or laptops that isn't related to work on a server.
Sony has a similar issue with their smartphone division. For whatever reason, they are no longer displaying their products in cell phone carrier stores in the US. The consumer doesn’t even have the chance to think about a Sony product before making the commitment to a competitor, forming a good relationship with that manufacturer, and repeating the cycle to avoid change.
Why aren’t Linux laptops in best buy or the military department stores?
Maybe this shades into what you mean by diy, but I don't think finding one is the biggest issue--it's the papercuts. More precisely, I don't think many of us using it daily can in good conscience recommend it to anyone we suspect can't handle the papercuts without our help.
It blows my mind that I have to pay a lot more money for a computer with a mature free OS on it.
“ So, to make things painfully clear: Bill Gates made it so that his company would tax every computer sold no matter whether it ran Windows or not. If a manufacturer wanted to sell computers running Windows, all the computers it sold were taxed by Microsoft. He would get paid for the work a Linux distribution was doing, and the Linux distribution would not get that money.”
Till 1994, Microsoft charged OEMs based on the total number of computers they sold, not based on how many of them had Windows.
Now, whether Linux's low desktop market share in 2019 is because of a practice that happened from 1983-1994 is a different question.
Nothing illegal about it unless you are exploiting a monopoly (which Microsoft did according to the author of the post).
Microsoft's response was to demonize the practice as encouraging piracy. Their argument was that obviously nobody wants a computer without Windows, so people buying them that way were clearly intending to install a pirated copy.
Also, I suspect many people would have failed to install Windows. People used to say that Linux was hard to install, but they were comparing against a PC with pre-installed Windows.
Here's just one example: to this day, it is still difficult to install software that wasn't specifically compiled and carefully packaged for your distro. Software compiled just 2 years ago often won't work on the same distro today. It's insane. And the OS is full of things like that.
That's equally true for Windows, and there is no OS called Linux, you don't have to be an evangelist to know that
No it isn't. People routinely run software that was compiled decades ago on Windows.
> and there is no OS called Linux
Maybe that's part of why it's so shit? You have a problem with it, and someone pops up and says to use a different distro (with it's own set of different problems) or condescendingly explains how "Linux is just a kernel" like anyone gives a fuck.
Microsoft did a lot to cultivate their platform. They invested heavily in developer tools and APIs. Why do games use DirectX and not OpenGL? Better tools and better hardware support. Why do games only run on Windows? Because they use DirectX. Therefore, people buy Windows computers so that they can play games. Microsoft's investment in tooling paid for itself in sales right there. I imagine people also enjoyed Visual Studio (probably more in the past than now), good optimizing C/C++ compilers, and tools like that, as well. They had a platform, and they made it easy for you to use their platform. All that was engineering investment, not evil business practices. Though I'm sure that taking over the world was on their minds. What mattered was getting other people to help them, and that is something they succeeded at.
The other crucial thing that Windows did was allowing drivers to be shitty binary blobs. That is the best you can get out of most hardware companies. They make a million different products a year, and they don't have time to update their drivers when some kernel API changes. And, they stole a lot of IP from their competitors, so they can't release the source code and let the community do it for them. And, their customers probably never update to the latest version, so they'd have to maintain 100 different forks. But with Windows, you just make binary blob and it works for decades. Microsoft gives you an API, you program to that API, and Microsoft does the dirty work of keeping it working as they change Windows. (Linux doesn't have this, and that's why your Android phone only gets updates for like a month after it comes out.)
The Linux community says "drivers must be free", "only the highest quality is allowed", "software freedom is more important than having the latest features", and "we're sorry that you can't use patented algorithms without getting caught, join our fight against software patents!" The hardware manufacturers said NOPE to that. They don't make software, they don't invest in software engineering, and they'll do the bare minimum to sell their chips. Microsoft recognized this and made something that would work for them. The result is where we are today.
None of this is to discount Microsoft's questionable business practices. They certainly engaged in them. But I don't think they were as crucial to the success of Windows as the engineering investments they made. They had a stranglehold on the browser market for years and were even investigated by the government for it. Then someone came along and wrote a better web browser, and now nobody even knows what Internet Explorer is. Bundling it with Windows didn't matter; people use the built-in browser to download Chrome the instant the Windows installer exits.
So unfortunately I still have to agree - how come the built-in installer program not play ball with the built-in accessibility features, and why wasn't this tested?
Logging in with the OSK also had a quirk - if you request the OSK on the login screen, common sense would suggest that you also want the OSK to persist once you're logged in... but no - once logged in you have to manually go in settings and enable it again. This is not a big deal, but just having someone think about the UX would've taken care of this.
Finally getting Netflix to work was annoying; Firefox is actually nice enough to let me know that the page requires DRM content and offered to enable it in one click without arguing about licenses or non-free software, but it still didn't work... after searching around it seems like I had to enable the non-free repo and install an extra "libavcodec" package. I figured it out, but I wouldn't blame a casual user if they gave up and said "Linux sucks".
Isn't ffmpeg a basic dependency of Firefox? Can an Ubuntu user explain how it's possible to install Firefox without its dependencies?
Shipping a web browser package without a functioning H.264 decoder, for most people, is like shipping a kernel without mouse drivers.
Cisco also only builds a limited number of architectures and platforms.
All of these things make it difficult to depend on for open source projects like Firefox.
That sort of polish is the least fun aspect of programming. It consists of brutal iterative bug fixing, polish, design tweaking, and repeat. It's endless. Since this is the part of programming that is not fun, people rarely do it for free. Linux desktop has basically no economic model so it has no way to raise money to pay people to do the nasty grinding work required to make it truly competitive with a commercial OS.
The other huge problem is unnecessary fragmentation. There are like six popular desktop distributions that are all fairly similar under the hood. There aren't any fundamental differences between them sufficient to merit a fork. So you have to distribute your app many times to target one platform: Linux.
This is true enough. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with why it's not more widely used, given that it applies to all desktop OS's (each in their own distinct ways).
> Bill Gates doing bad stuff 20 years ago has nothing to do with it.
Well that's just not true, is it? If you successfully conspire with governments to force your OS on children, and with computer manufacturers to force it on purchasers, then this 'bad stuff' has a positive effect on your market share. It's not the only reason for Microsoft's position, but it's hardly insignificant.
If Linux had been forced on schoolkids and consumers for a couple of decades, do you not think it would be more widely used today?