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Comment by nullflux | Hacker News Reader

The whole joy of something not working and you sitting in front of the system for hours at length to get it working is something i truly miss.

I certainly don't. Are you sure this isn't just rosy retrospection?[1]

There's a reason why apt and yum exist today, and it's because most people want their primary OS to "just work". You only have to play this game once to get it. The second time the configure && make && make install doesn't change much, except for needing a flag here or a utility there.

I wonder if a lot more people would be using nixes on PCs today if something like a current Linux distro existed ten years ago and worked as well with the varying hardware in common PC laptops/desktops.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

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Had "the year of the Linux desktop" occurred in 2002 , I'm not sure it would necessarily be the awesome experience we would all have hoped for.

Sure , we would have had better support for commercial consumer apps and drivers etc.

But basically the situation would have become more like android, instead of people getting their distributions from debian or redhat every PC manufacturer would have created their own distro.

So you would have Dell Linux , HP Linux , hell maybe even Microsoft Linux.

Of course they would all have crap pre-installed from the vendor approved repos which would carry whatever software the vendor had struck a deal with, probably no GCC etc.

Fragmentation would also be an utter nightmare with many app vendors only supporting their apps on the most commonly used distros and home made PCs would have to run some "white label" type distro like debian which would have all the problems it does today.

But basically the situation would have become more like android, instead of people getting their distributions from debian or redhat every PC manufacturer would have created their own distro.

Upvoted for a very intelligent reply and extremely insightful comment. The "Linux desktop -> Android" bit oddly resonates with the way things feel today.

Is this really worse though? Distros themselves technically work as the vendors in this case with "crap pre-installed" (Unity, anyone?) , depending on how cynical you want to be and your choice of distro. Install Fedora Core 9 and Ubuntu 11.10 side-by-side to see that difference in play.

I think it could be quite a bit worse. Sure we have fragmentation today with distros doing their own thing but these are mostly due to differences either in ideology , philosophy or technical goals.

Having this controlled instead by OEMs run by MBAs who are more interested in kickbacks and splashing their logo on everything could be a worse experience.

GNU/Linux has a great deal of flexibility which is great for hackers, but is also great for those who would seek to abuse it.

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