A Monday rant on various kinds of opinionated people | Hacker News Reader

A Monday rant on various kinds of opinionated people

people.gnome.org

7 pointsbkor6 comments

that's right, kill the messenger.

there's been a literal exodus away from Linux towards Mac and Windows on the desktop over the last 15 years because things have gotten steadily worse.

the problem isn't the handful of enthusiasts who are left, it's all of the people who gave up on desktop Linux or never gave it a chance because the people behind desktop Linux just weren't listening.

If your timeframe is the last 15 years, it would be wrong to speak of an exodus. In 1997, linux on the desktop was a niche market, only for people who didn't mind editing a text configuration file now and then. Nowadays, you give a desktop with Ubuntu to grandma and she'll be perfectly happy with it. What Ubuntu and RedHat did was copy the "it just works" experience from Apple's MacOSX, not caring about the non-grandma power users who got their arms and legs maimed in the process of fighting NetworkManager, dbus, and GConf-2. Or the *BSD people, who would prefer a desktop environment that runs without Linux emulation. So, as far as I (or anyone) can see it, people are still engrossed with the Egyptian standard of living and don't mind the slavery so much that they would do an exodus. It might still happen, I guess, if a substantial part of the distro-sponsored Linux developers (Ulrich Drepper, Lennart Poettering, whoever) operates with their fingers stuck in the ears, plowing through with whatever semi-evil plan that they set their mind on.

In 1997, linux on the desktop was a niche market, only for people who didn't mind editing a text configuration file now and then. Nowadays, you give a desktop with Ubuntu to grandma and she'll be perfectly happy with it.

The latter point (about Ubuntu being suitable for grandma) is true, but irrelevant. In 2012, Linux on the desktop is every bit as much a niche market as it was in 1997.

That's fifteen years of hard work by lots of people that has won negligible market share. Which is a huge problem, if you care about Linux on the desktop.

Moreover, there has definitely been an exodus of sorts, especially among developers. You see far, far more Apple machines in developers' hands in 2012 than you did in 1997. Some of these folks have switched from Windows, but a significant number switched from Linux or BSD. And losing developers means losing applications, which means even less likelihood of a market-share breakthrough.

I don't think things have necessarily gotten worse, but instead people are just done believing that things will get better.

I really liked this post. His experience - there are folk talking on mailing lists, there are folk actually doing stuff, and the two groups rarely overlap - matches mine. The concern I have with gnome 3 is that there is sufficient change to trip me up when I'm trying to get stuff done ;-)

http://doublebuffered.com/2009/06/16/the-players-are-wrong-b...

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