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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

> and international users

I might be mistaken here, but it seems to me that the international users who want a simple experience are already well served by smartphones (android or otherwise).

The international users who are going to install linux on a laptop are the tinkerers and fiddlers and the self motivated learners who aren't going to be motivated by a dumbed down, inaccessible interface.

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It's important to remember that GNOME is primarily funded/developed by Red Hat, who are owned by IBM. Red Hat's goal isn't to make something for the kind of person who would install Linux on a laptop themselves -- they're trying to make a clone of macOS they can sell in bulk to enterprise customers. The intended user population is very different.

I'm not sure where you heard any of that, but I have never heard any Red Hat employees say anything to that effect, ever. Fedora still exists, and to me that seems perfectly fine to install on a random laptop.

Not necessarily with that line of thought, Red-Hat has already acknowledged many years ago that there is no money to be made on the GNU/Linux desktop (Mandrake, SuSE and Canonical also found out years later).

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2536558/red-hat-sees-n...

https://lwn.net/Articles/56947/

It may surprise you to learn that Red Hat's primary revenue stream is not Fedora, but a separate distribution called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux".

Sure, but that shouldn't really matter to an ordinary Fedora user, at least not to the ones I've heard from.

If Fedora (or GNOME, for that matter) fits your needs, you should feel free to use it! But if you're wondering, like the grandparent comments, why projects like GNOME seem to be moving away from fitting your needs, the answer is that they're being designed for Red Hat's enterprise customers first and any use you get out of them is a happy afterthought.

Again I'm not sure where you got that, I have not heard any Red Hat or Fedora developers say that's the focus. In fact if you follow GNOME development, there are various other directions that people are pulling in. It might be the case coincidentally for some things, but that could be yet another one of those happy afterthoughts.

you are mistaken.

smartphones have small screens, and terrible keyboards.

almost no one will creatw anything except simple photography and tweets on a phone.

my phone can't even provide capital letters reliably.

self motivated learners aren't stopped by a simple UI; they can use terminal and web apps.

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