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Comment by anaisbetts | Hacker News Reader

Really? You think that a modern consumer/professional operating system, upon double-clicking a video, should do nothing? That's a thing that you would ship to an entire planet full of Regular People and say "Yes, this is the Right Thing. You should be happy about this result"

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The Linux hivemind on HN would say that's OK, but that mindset is also why Linux has such a dismal consumer base. There should be a video player built it by default, yes, but it should also be easy to remove if you so choose.

Don't know when you last tried a Linux distro but most Linux distro's come with a video player out of the box and have done for the better part of the last 10 years at the very least

Correction: most Linux distros come with 12 video players out of the box (and at least 7 calculator apps)...... the philosophy of "we can't decide so just include them all" is pretty strong.

That's usually from installing multiple window managers which all pull their own dependencies. It should be possible in principle to install enough of a window manager without installing unnecessary packages.

There may be 12 video players in the package repositories but I can't think of any distro that installs with 2 video players.

xine, phonon and mplayer ? slackware at least

Distros not shipping with programs like video players installed by default isn't the reason Linux hasn't found mainstream traction. The real reason is because Linux simply doesn't solve the sort of problems most users need solving; there aren't many compelling reasons for a casual computer user to use Linux in the first place. For normal users, not technical/power users, Linux could work fine but Windows or MacOS also work fine, so they'll stick with what they and most other people know already. Oh you get the source code? Most users don't know what that is, they don't have a reason to care. You get the power to customize things? They don't want to. These things are important and valid to some people, but not important to many more. And that's fine. I've been using Linux for about 20 years and I love it, but I don't recommend it to normies anymore because I figured out that it wasn't doing them any favor. If Linux gave normies some great advantage over the alternatives then more would use it, but that's just not the way it is.

This was exactly what the EU ruled way back, yes

The EU government ruled that but no customer actually wanted it. The Windows N versions existed for legal reasons but that doesn't mean anyone bought them.

Nothing's stopping you from rebloating your OS after running this debloat command.

Wouldn't it be a sensible default to open and play the video with the web browser?

No. Browsers burn more power (20-50% more, assuming that hardware decoding is working. It's even worse if it isn't) and have fewer features. The default video playing interface in browsers lacks the ability to even display subtitles and change audio tracks. These should be table stakes for any video player.

This is about debloat. I don't want Microsoft's garbage utilities.

Yes, exactly.

A video player should be easily installed via the operating systems package manager.

Rando: "Gud, why's there no video player installed? How do I get to play my video player?"

Gud: "Just use the operating system's package manager."

Rando: "What's that? How do I find it?"

Gud explains what it is and how to find it.

Rando: "Wow, finally found it. What do I do next?"

Gud: "You search for a video player. Try [...]."

Rando: "I can't find it. This sucks. Why is there no video player installed by default? Makes no fucking sense."

Two hours later you've managed to achieve installation.

Rando: "I don't like this player. I want a different one."

Yeah. No. A video player should be installed by default.

Period.

Normally you would select which software to install during initial setup.

And FWIW, there is no way it would take me 2 hours assisting someone with installing a video player. Maybe 10 minutes.

Rando: "I don't like this player. I want a different one."

Gud: It's the player installed by default.

Gud spends the next two hours helping Rando install a non-default video player (and possibly battling Microsoft for the default apps for all of the different file types associations).

I can't reply to Gud below, but their comment really shows they haven't worked with real users at all. A lot of people on hacker news assume everyone is in the demographic of hacker news for some odd reason.

It absolutely can take 2 hours to help someone with a task it would take you 2 minutes to do (with 1.5 of those minutes watching progress bars)

Some people are just dumb as rocks. Some, if you say to click a button labeled whatever, they will instead close the window. Some will just get up and walk away while you're talking to them. Some arn't dumb, but are just trying to stretch time to keep from having to go back to work. Some people won't tell you their laptop turned off because they're not plugged into power.

> Some people are just dumb as rocks.

Or maybe they have become apathetic for what's on offer.

Its not like anyone documents what data is sent back to base by an app, and its not like anyone is even looking at how to use the firewall to block data phoning home, in order to protect privacy and reduce the attack vector from opportunists with network access.

This all seems like a side show.

How is any of that relevant to walking a use through self install of an app. From an app store or managed software centers, or wherever.

The app store demonstrates the computer in which it runs is not yours.

Presumably these users would be in a managed environment.

Yes. It didn't help obviously.

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