Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists.

I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the tedious and boring maintenance, bugfixing, and polishing.

The quality of Linux as a desktop operating system is in stark contrast with Linux as a server operating system. Thanks to the enormous amount of money invested in server-related components, Linux as a server is generally very polished and reliable.

On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

View on HN

The "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers" model ... http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

> Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair.

Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee.

And some argue that this is the only reason why these things actually make it into the Linux desktop ecosystem. If he wasn't a Red Hat employee would they ever make it into a distribution?

PulseAudio is used in Ubuntu, and systemd is in other non-Fedora distros, so I guess the answer is yes.

systemd didn't replace upstart in Fedora as soon as he wanted, so the fact that he's a Red Hat employee doesn't give him total control.

> On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

To each his own. For me it's much better than Windows and GNOME attempting to copy OSX features has made it much worse. I'm not certainly not switching to OSX ever.

I think"attempting to copy" is the operative phrase there.

The failure of Linux as a commercial desktop is also (not entirely, of course) his responsibility, considering the crap he pulled with all the desktop components he messed with (PulseAudio, HAL, DBUS etc etc), so clearly it's not a causal factor for his behaviour.

I think the 'failure' of the commercial Linux desktop can mostly be attributed to economics. Most importantly, consumers do not want to pay for a desktop operating system (even if it were proprietary). Microsoft effectively shut down the alternative market by making Windows-hardware coupling mandatory for large hardware vendors. This gives the perception (through scale and coupling) that Windows is nearly free. So, why would one spend money on an alternative operating system?

Then, there are social factors. A vocal minority of the Linux community is outright hostile towards proprietary software or even towards any form of capitalism. It is not a very attractive market to operate in - one misstep, and elaborate PR campaigns are set up.

"Microsoft effectively shut down the alternative market by making Windows-hardware coupling mandatory for large hardware vendors."

How did they do that, how?!

That is exactly why GNU/Linux on the desktop isnt used by more people.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Licensin...

The Findings of Fact in the United States Microsoft antitrust case established that "One of the ways Microsoft combats piracy is by advising OEMs that they will be charged a higher price for Windows unless they drastically limit the number of PCs that they sell without an operating system pre-installed. In 1998, all major OEMs agreed to this restriction."[30] This has been called the "Windows tax" or "Microsoft tax".[31][32]

monopolistic behaviour and a solid, conservative set of well-documented APIs.

Why would a hardware vendor care about APIs or monopolistic behaviour?

Why would a hardware vendor make a deal which said vendor can only use this software on the hardware they make but not other?

Unless I am misunderstanding you, your second question makes it appear that you didn't read the material cited in spot's response to your earlier post. If I'm wrong, could you perhaps rephrase your question?

He is responsible for distributions choosing to use his software?

Linux user since 1999, redhat 6.2 days I think, kernel 2.2. Messed with getting audio to work on an old ISA card, setting some ports in some config files, recompiling the kernel. I got it working, no big deal, even from several sources at the same time, with no artsD or esd, but I did try those to just for fun.

Invested same amount of time and effort, still have only horrible memories of pulseaudio. I shiver anytime I see puslea. Argh.arhgh.why,.asdhj as.

> On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

I did the exact same thing (except in early 2008 - been using Linux since 1995), for the exact same reasons. A Kubuntu upgrade breaking my mouse config was the last straw.

> the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007

I remember it was complicated in 2002. In 2007 it was already at the "mostly works" stage.

It was even more complicated in 1994. But, throughout high school and university I had plenty of time, and fixing things was an interesting challenge.

Then real-life started (internships, thesis writing, a day job), and the few hours per day that are left, you'd rather spend with loved ones, sports, and interesting projects. And then you suddenly realize that you'd rather have "works" than "mostly works".

YMMV

"Mostly" is not enough when it's not a hobby. It needs to "just work". Of course other OS'es aren't at 100% in that regard either, but at least they don't break stuff that used to work so often. I've used Linux since late 1990's into 2005-2007 or so, after that only revisiting it every now and then to see if things have improved. They have, but not enough. And the curve is only getting flatter, especially with much/most of the crowd that used Linux because it wasn't Microsoft moving to Macs over the last 5 years.

I started using Linux in 2001 and can agree with you that things were a bit messy up until 2005 or so. In my experience, I had very little problems since then, the only major frustration was Compiz not working on a cheap notebook that had 3D acceleration but no Linux support for it. Since then, everything just works, provided I don't sabotage myself buying hardware I know won't work properly.

I've also been a Mac user since the late 90's and I have a very solid experience with OSX since 10.2. It's not as flexible as Linux or FreeBSD, but, for a consumer-grade experience, it's excellent. I find the hardware choices somewhat limiting, but that's me. For work, I prefer Linux for its flexibility and, like I said before, I can't remember the last time my machine stopped working.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com