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Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

The tractor wheel, the race bicycle wheel or the 50000RPM flywheel?

The fact that the customer just needs a vehicle to get to and from work, but they're offered tractor wheels and 50k RPM flywheels is exactly the problem.

Stop inventing wheels, stop offering esoteric wheels and start solving customer problems simply.

But there are customers who are looking for tractor wheels and flywheels. Maybe not you or people you know, but there's definitely large industries for both. Just like there's a market for "vehicle to get to work". Same thing exists in software. Linux caters to all the uses, from low power embedded systems to huge high performance computing systems and everything in between.

I'm talking about the wheels that are analogous to the software needed for a decent consumer desktop computer.

How many window managers are there? How many different package managers? Ways to prepare code for said package managers? Scripting shells? File systems? Hell, how many distros are there based on Debian and/or Ubuntu?

If the goal is "free the world from proprietary software", then the talent spent on scratching an itch for a few thousand users is talent wasted because that isn't moving the needle fast enough. The three things driving consumer-grade (read: not enterprise or hobbyist) adoption of Linux right now are ChromeOS, gaming and the fact that Windows 10 support is ending soon. It has nothing to do with the fact that you can find just the right set of utilities for your Arch install.

But there's no money in making a consumer Linux OS. The market has shown this time and again. ChromeOS is effectively a loss leader, getting consumers and students into the Google ecosystem. MacOS is what you get if you want Apple hardware. That's about it for consumer oriented desktop/laptop *nix operating systems today.

So if there's no money in something, then the only people who will show up to work on it are going to want to scratch their own itches because it's a hobby and fun/interesting to them.

Do we know the money stats on the Steam Deck?

Android shouldn't be a loss leader at this point, though maybe it is in certain companies, and it's not exactly what most people think of when they think GNU/Linux.

Steam Deck is only being successful by translating Windows on top of Linux.

Valve failed to convince any major number of studios to bother about GNU/Linux, even when it would be relatively easy to port their games from Android NDK.

> But there are customers who are looking for tractor wheels and flywheels. Maybe not you or people you know, but there's definitely large industries for both. Just like there's a market for "vehicle to get to work". Same thing exists in software. Linux caters to all the uses, from low power embedded systems to huge high performance computing systems and everything in between.

And that's exactly the problem. Linux is so focused on ensuring it works for every possible user out there, that it never makes the tough choices to be optimized for the 80% of users.

80% of people drive cars and need simple care wheels and tires.

But they're forced to think about 100 different types of wheels before they can go anywhere. My mom has never had to consider a flywheel in her life, and yet if her car were linux she's need to think about that, and everything from low power, high power, LED, gas powered, and oil powered headlights. She'd need to consider 50 types of seats, 7 seatbelt configurations,

Linux is what you get when engineers own a product and there is no PM around to say 'No' and force you to make the hard decisions. It's good for what it is, but nobody is making it actually easy. There are just "complex" and "less complex" flavors of linux. None are actually consumer level of simple - they're just "simple" compared to the other variants of linux.

Chrome OS is actually consumer level simple.

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