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Comment by tytso | Hacker News Reader

This is ultimately a business model problem. There are FOSS projects out there; some of them are even listed in the article. The problem is that making it "Just Work(tm)" is hard; it's a lot of work, requiring a large number of engineers. And funny thing, engineers prefer food with their meals.

Saying "FOSS world" we need XXX is pretty useless. As a FOSS mainatinaer, the answer I always give people demanding their favorite pet feature is, "clean, maintainable patches are appreciated", ChromiumOS is free software; someone could take it use it as the basis for something like ChromeOS. But the author of the article has basically admitted that the derivitives of Chromium would quickly fail if Chromium stoped being something that they could free ride off of. Shouldn't that tell you everything about what the problem is with this picture?

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Programmers do stuff for free, all the time. People also donate to foundations so some programmers can be paid to make free stuff. It's how we got the Linux desktop as we know it.

Programmers often stop worrying about the details once they're satisfied, though, and there are a lot of details. Yes we could add thumbnails to the file picker, but we also need to support Nvidia hardware and the archive application is missing a few much more interesting compression formats, plus there are a bazillion logged bugs that actually crash software rather than being a minor inconvenience.

In theory someone could set up a collective of programmers, designers, and translators to create a usable Linux desktop for the Windows 10 refugees, but it'll require a lot of effort from a lot of volunteers and a lot of people who happen to share the same principles and preferences.

ChromeOS works because there's a single entity that can hire a small group of designers to tell an army of programmers what they want everything to look and work like.

There are actually projects and companies that fork ChromeOS, but they're pretty small and once Google stops maintaining the OS they're going to collapse pretty quickly.

People will do a small amount of work for free. But if something requires dozens or hundreds of programmers working full time, the chances of this happening is much less.

And if you want something which just works, it means you need a huge number of people doing grunt work, and that's the kind of thing that people are less likely to want to do in their free time.

> ChromeOS works because there's a single entity that can hire a small group of designers to tell an army of programmers what they want everything to look and work like.

ChromeOS works because it's pre-installed on selected hardware devices where it's been configured and tested before any user even get it into their hands which would solve the majority of the problems no matter what OS you're using. Then they also take all power away from the user do make any changes to those systems which helps solve the rest. Ultimately though, most people who know anything at all about computers want the power to make changes to what's installed on them..

Everyone I know who got a chromebook did it first and foremost because they were inexpensive and every one of them at one point or another found themselves frustrated by the limitations. A privacy respecting linux system won't be able to use massive amounts of data collection to lower the price of the hardware like Google can.

SteamOS is the closest thing to making this work. Valve has somehow worked their way into being a software store that not everybody hates.

Companies should be happy that there’s a FOSS community that lets them build up on top of it for free. It is a great deal! I wonder why there isn’t an EpicOS yet.

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