Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Seems targeted at office workplaces. A locked-down system that cannot even be corrupted or tampered with. Consider a workplace of a receptionist at a medical office, or a library computer.

Linux is wonderfully flexible, which allows to create distros like that, among other things. Linux is also free as in freedom, which may be very important for trusting the code you run, or which a governmental official runs.

I bet that past the alpha stage they will offer a configuration tool to prepare the images to your liking, and ways to lock the system down even more. Would work nicely over PXE boot.

View on HN

That seems like a good niche to exist indeed and many people would probably misunderstand its purpose by it being called a “KDE distribution”. It would perhaps have been better if it were created by some independent group for this purpose and just happened to settle upon KDE as its interface, or rather offer multiple choices to be honest.

I disagree, KDE needs both a distro and a niche for that distro to fill:

> KDE is a huge producer of software. It's awkward for us to not have our own method of distributing it

No, KDE does not need its own distro, that's the issue. They don't need their own method to distribute it which benefits no one.

The idea of a distribution for this specific purpose is best left in the hands of some organization with experience with this specific purpose, not KDE whose experience is developing desktop environments.

How exactly is it “awkward” for them and how exactly does distributing this in any way improve the development process of KDE? They can't even dogfood it obviously.

Plasma[1] is a desktop environment made by KDE, who also makes lots of other software. They make stuff like Dolphin (file manager), Konsole (terminal emulator), and Partition Manager as OS basics already[2].

[1]: https://kde.org/plasma-desktop

[2]: https://apps.kde.org/

Yes, I'm well aware of that, Plasma can be installed on many distributions. How exactly is K.D.E. making their own software distribution benefiting the development of Plasma?

This really feels like they first decided they wanted to make their own distribution for no reason, and then went to search for the niche for it to fill which is the wrong way to do it. Usually someone, who typically does not do anything else at the moment, realizes there is a certain niche that needs to be filled and then decides to make a distribution that fills that niche.

The problem for this use case is that certain businesses, like medical offices, use specialized software that is often Windows only.

More and more of this software is moving to the cloud and only requires a web browser. A distribution that is very difficult to break and can launch a web browser would already meet many use cases for receptionists, hotels, consultation stations, etc.

Yes, but doctors offices are still the last places in the US to use a fax machine.

Not just in the US, they‘re surprisingly popular still here in Switzerland. I‘ve written interfaces to fax gateways (convert incoming fax to pdf, extract metadata, save in DB) multiple times.

The United States is not the only country in the world. In France, it is almost impossible to make an appointment without using Doctolib, which is SaaS software for booking consultations (and lots of other things).

Same in Germany. Doctolib got popular very quickly, in just a fee years. Now it’s almost mandatory.

I am not a fan. It’s a big outage waiting to happen. It’s an enormous data breach waiting to happen. It will inevitable be enshitified.

Doctolib is not the problem at all. he real problem is the lack of government proactivity on these initiatives.

If the government had already thought about this in advanced (even in 2013 when doctolib was just starting out), then there could be very strong protectiosn for data which would then allay all of these concerns, and we might have had multiple players in this space.

The best use of Doctolib for me is that I can make appointments without having to speak perfect German on phone. I can make appointments in evening when I'm back from office and can relax a little bit. So, doctolib is a godsend for me as an immigrant here. and I'm guessing for a lot of people too. I can look up doctors who are available without having to bother the receptionist. This is much more efficient way of doing things.

> It will inevitable be enshitified. that only happens with the western venture capitalist model in private companies. doctolib makers already have income from all these government contracts instead of just relying on adverts and hype

Doctolib is a B2B model. Patients are not the customers; medical practices are the customers. Doctolib saves on the cost of a medical secretary, which is why it is so popular.

What's more, this is a sensitive and regulated field, where trust is essential. They can't afford to mess around if they don't want to quickly find themselves subject to moe restrictive regulations.

They were heavily criticised in France because they allowed charlatans and people with no medical training to register (particularly for Botox injections). As soon as this became known, they quickly rectified the situation.

The fax protocol provides a real-time recipient receipt. Email doesn't.

Seriously. That's the reason that fax is still popular in the medical industry.

Also the limitations of fax sort of end up being it's differentiator to email and it's biggest advantage. Not needing an email server is a big boon, not really being susceptible to phishing is a boon, and with modern fax over internet it's virtually indistinguishable in user experience from email.

I remember fax phishing even before I had ever heard of email. From many large companies, simply paying a sub $100 invoice was standard procedure without even checking with the other internal bodies.

This is true, but it's much less of a concern because:

1. You get way less faxes than emails.

2. Faxes can't steal credentials.

3. You should be auditing expenses anyway.

If only a standard existed to do this... Hint: it exists since ages in Italy and it has been extended to Europe recently (See Registered Electronic Mail - RFC 6109 and ETSI EN 319 532 – 4)

Germany here. Fax is king.

In that case, wouldn't ChromeOS actually make the most sense?

Because ChromeOS is not an open base?

It is.

https://opensource.google/projects/chromiumos

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/

Because Chrome OS is offered on low-cost laptops that are unsuitable for office work.

What's more, it's Google, so we're not safe from a ‘Lol, we're discontinuing support for Chrome OS. Good luck, Byeeee.’.

Some offices still have bad memories of Google Cloud Print, for example. I'm not saying that being an early adopter of a distribution that's less than a year old is a good solution. Just that Google's business products don't have a very good reputation.

> Because Chrome OS is offered on low-cost laptops that are unsuitable for office work.

ChromeOS Flex exists, it is free of charge, and it runs on more or less any x86-64 computer, including Intel Macs.

Nordic Choice got hit with ransomeware and rather than paying, just reformatted most of its client PCs with ChromeOS Flex and kept going with cloud services.

https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/nordic...

Businesses seem okay using Google Chrome, Google Drive/Docs, and Gmail.

In my experience they're not, these are way less popular in enterprises as compared to Microsoft equivalents.

Being #2 with tens of millions of users is OK, you know. It doesn't mean you've failed.

Sure it's less popular. It came in under 20 years ago, competing against an entrenched superpower that was already nearly 30 years old back then. It's done pretty well.

The Google Apps for Business bundle has outsold by far ever single FOSS email/groupware stack in existence, and every other commercial rival as well.

Notes is all but dead. Groupwise is dead. OpenXChange is as good as dead. HP killed OpenMail.

ChromeOS stops getting updates when your hardware gets a bit too old, at that point even your web browser is no longer updated.

That's ridiculous.

Wine/Proton gets better every day though.

Doctors have better things to do that learn Linux and Wine.

Their office buys their stuff from a supplier which ships them a Windows box with all the batteries included.

Wine makes for zero difference in how the application looks and behaves, that's the point.

Are you working as a doctor? Or do you work in tech?

Are you a doctor?

You don't need a medical degree to have logic and common sense takes on the observed use of PCs by doctors around which I spend a lot of time around.

That's why doctors in my country still prefer legacy physical pen and paperwork, versus interactions with the modern digitized equivalents which are universally hated because they're not designed by doctors but by some consultancy who won the government tender.

Adding dealing with an unfamiliar OS and Wine on top of that is not the slam dunk you think it is.

pin this comment. it illustrates the fight between the real world and the linux nerds, maybe even nerds in general. flash idea, quite grating in practice

For the vast majority of people, including professionals like doctors, a computer or an OS is not a subject of interest, it's a tool, and they want it to be as invisible and reliable as the electricity that powers it. The moment the tool demands attention—be it through an error message, a confusing interface, or an unexplained requirement—it stops being a tool and becomes an obstacle that creates frustration, anxiety, and outright hatred.

The average user doesn't want (and shouldn't need) to understand technical stuff like file formats (JPEG vs. PNG), the data load of video streaming, what a "driver" is, etc. Forcing them to grapple with these concepts is a fundamental design failure, but I think it’s a difficult pill to swallow for nerds to accept that others just don’t care about these things.

This is why companies like Apple have been so successful: they don't just simplify the interface, they abstract away the complex, technical reality into a language and experience that feels intuitive and friendly for the users.

The industry has adopted entire, common UI elements that are hated by basically all people who aren't so used to computers that annoyances like this become invisible; I'm thinking especially of any kind of alert modal pop-up or announcement. The on-launch ones especially confuse the absolute hell out of "normie" users ("why's this here instead of the program I was trying to start? What's this about? How do I close it? 'Colorways'? WTF is that, do I need to do something with it, why did my browser icon open 'Colorways' instead of my browser and what the hell is it for? Is that what my browser is called now? Is that what my email (their usual default tab) is now?")

[EDIT] The core problem, in case the example didn't make it clear, is that these things interrupt a workflow they use often, and are accustomed to having always work the same way, and do so in service, usually, of showing them a bunch of stuff they don't give a fuck about and didn't really need to know. Even the ones that block interaction to highlight new features are really bad—OK, that's nice, but I'm trying to do the thing I always do with this and you're getting in my way, making my program temporarily behave and look weird and confusing, et c.

My mom often asks me to “fix” her phone, which means that she simply ventured to some unfamiliar place and doesn’t know how to get back to where she was supposed to be. For her, when something like that happens, the phone is “broken”.

She has no conceptual understanding of what’s an app and a webpage and why they’re treated differently, she just kinda accepted she uses something called Firefox to do a search and some icon in the phone that has the exact name of the other app she wants to use. She never understood (or cared) what it means to “close” an app if she already does that when she presses home or back, no matter how much I try to explain.

When you think about it, it’s all very confusing for them, and since people making these things already understand them well, they make stuff assuming the users will understand the whole thing as well as they themselves do.

This is why I think the single "home button" interface was one of the most brilliant UI innovations ever (no, I'm not joking) and Apple was insane to abandon it. Hit home (maybe twice, if you weren't on the very first screen of apps) and you're back to somewhere you know. Hit it too many times, nothing bad happens. And it's a physical (or, convincingly physical-imitating) button! It never moves around, it's always in the same place and you can feel it! It's one of the most comfortable, reassuring, and for normal users practically useful UI elements ever created. Even if you hold the button down and get in a "weird" mode (app moving and deleting mode) the way out is to... press the button once. It always works.

No other buttons (visible on the face, anyway) to confuse it for. It's right in comfortable reach of the thumb. "Which button do I push again? Oh right, there's only one."

(I also think going to "swipe up to unlock" instead of the brilliant slider they had before was a big mistake, as far as reducing the level of comfort for the median user)

Linux doesn't have to grapple with any of that. Consumer distros do, because they're general purpose operating systems designed to be run on anything for any use case.

But your POS system where you enter in orders? That's Linux. And guess what - it just works, it chugs along and does its thing.

There's no reason that doctors offices couldn't use software that utilizes Linux. And to pretend that windows is low maintenance? Tsk tsk, windows is a time bomb.

I happen to have started my career doing IT support for doctors and veterinarians...

Until there's a bug in Wine that affects the software that you use or new update of your software that uses stuff incompatible with Wine.

For games? Yes (with some very major caveats). Non basic applications not so much.

And that supplier could decide to bundle their box with such a distro, if this can save them money either due to licencing or better stability (=less support).

It is possible for somebody to make this into a workable bundle targeting specific professions/environments. A doctor would not care if double clicking X icon open an app through wine or not.

nice idea but enterprise cant rely on discord for tech support, they need stuff that works, and to be able to get it fixed when it doesnt

Jira on-prem and cloud works just fine on Linux. My experience is support tickets usually go through there. And then calls and stuff are on zoom or maybe teams - both also work on Linux.

My non-software engineer friends have better things to do than learn Wine, and yet they use it everyday when playing games on their steam deck, unaware of its existence.

My medical devices run Windows due to specialised software. But at my medical office PC I use Linux: EMR and receipts through a web app on browser (locally hosted but it can be cloud), LibreOffice, Weasis Dicom etc

What you want may be an "immutable" distro (KDE Linux also is). And there have be some immutable distros now. Such as Fedora Silverblue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com