Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get this obsession everyone outside the Linux-space has with desktop Linux being viable or not.

To me, as a developer who likes to form the tools to fit my needs (as opposed to doing the opposite), Linux is great. It’s not for everyone. It’s not perfect in all ways, but for me it represents a pretty decent local maxima, and that’s all that matters for me.

I could probably rant on about how desktop Windows can never be a true developer OS, because it definitely doesn’t work out for me. But you know what? I’m not going to do that.

Clearly it works for some people as I see some people using Windows for development tasks. Maybe that’s their local maxima? Who am I to judge?

Why obsess over what OS can and can not be used on the desktop (or server)? Why focus on negatives? Why can’t we all just get along? ;)

It's not just people outside the community.

I've used linux professionally for a long time. I've also used it as my desktop / laptop OS on and off for about the same amount of time.

From a purely selfish point of view, I'd like to stop dual booting. 60% of my CS:GO time is in windows because of faceit anti-cheat. Beyond that, I almost need another OS.

Now I have a bunch of reasons why I think open platforms are better, but they don't matter. Pragmatism tells me that if enough people use linux to game, the anti-cheat problem will go away. There's other software, but wine mostly works now.

Ergo, I don't actually want a steam deck, but I really hope it does well. :)

It is quite a weird assumption I think, that the open source community should want a year of Linux on the desktop. It is a nice project and I’m sure everyone would like it the world to get as much use out of it as possible. But it is a community developed effort. Adding a bunch of new non-technical users to the community who don’t do development wouldn’t be a win, it would be a big new tech support problem with not much upside.

I think it must just be a wrong assumption based on accidentally applying the motivations of for-profit operating systems or something.

I think this obsession is mainly from inside the Linux-space.

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