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Comment by azuanrb | Hacker News Reader

Looking through the replies, the theme seems pretty clear. Everyone has their favorite distro, which is great btw. But that is the issue imo.

If you just want something stable and boring, Linux is just not it. Every distro has its own goals and target users, so a lot of the effort gets spread across the ecosystem.

With macOS or Windows, for better or worse, everyone is working on the same platform. So more people are working on the same problems. With Linux, everyone is kind of doing their own thing.

It is basically the same Android versus iPhone argument. More choice and freedom on one side, more consistency on the other.

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Linux is just a kernel. It is so stable and boring that you can oftentimes update the kernel in-place, without rebooting, and nothing will break.

> It is basically the same Android versus iPhone argument.

Maybe, if you've never used desktop Linux? Android and iOS are both advertisement-ridden locked-down hellscapes. The false dichotomy of openness and polish is exactly why Linux is attractive to people; you can absolutely have both. Obviously Google and Apple don't want you to think that, but it's not any more wrong today than it was in 1995.

There's plenty of "stable and boring" distros: Debian, Alma Linux, Aurora, take your pick.

As for effort getting spread across the ecosystem, how does that matter, as long as everything works? Is there anything specific that's below par that you think that needs that concentrated group effort? If so, what is it?

> With macOS or Windows, for better or worse, everyone is working on the same platform. So more people are working on the same problems

No one's working on the same problem on these platforms, as they are proprietary closed-source platforms, so you can't really contribute to them. Unless by "working on problems" you meant making apps, in which case, people are making apps for Linux too. And guess what, you can run most Linux apps on most distros. Like say, LibreOffice or VLC or Firefox etc all work on every single distro out there. So I'm curious which problem(s) do you think Linux people need to work together on.

> If you just want something stable and boring, Linux is just not it.

What? I get the other arguments but I use Linux because it's stable and boring. I don't want the hassle of updates to Windows 8, 9, 10, 11 (or whatever is current now) or OS X updates breaking things ("Yay, they've removed another feature!").

Yeah, when CentOS got eaten, moved to AlmaLinux. No complaints. It works. I also use Slackware. Nice and boring. Compared to macOS on my MacStudio… exceedingly boring and stable.

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