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Comment by bornhuetter | Hacker News Reader

> some hopeless ideology

The fact that someone would say, on a forum called Hacker News, that the free software movement is a hopeless ideology is astonishing.

> irrelevant in the desktop space

Hardly. Ubuntu is about as popular now as Macs were a few years ago, or at least in the same league.

> hobble my computing experience

Ubuntu has many productivity advantages over both OSX and Windows. It's not necessarily the best for everyone, but the have taken a lot of good ideas from both Windows (eg. Maximise works properly, aero snap) and OS X (Expose), and added their own (HUD). If you consider Ubuntu to be hobbling your experience, then other people could consider using OSX as hobbling theirs.

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>The fact that someone would say, on a forum called Hacker News, that the free software movement is a hopeless ideology is astonishing.

Patent free is what I'm calling hopeless. Nice try though, I guess.

>Hardly. Ubuntu is about as popular now as Macs were a few years ago, or at least in the same league.

Uh, no. Unless by "years" you mean "decades".

>Ubuntu has many productivity advantages over both OSX and Windows.

I've used Windows for years. I've used OS X for a few years now. I've used Unix for years and I've used Ubuntu off and on since it was started. Ubuntu had some advantages over windows for me but day-to-day OS X is simpler in every possible way. Except the "do tons of tweaking of every pixel on my desktop" way.

> Patent free is what I'm calling hopeless.

The ideology behind Ubuntu is the free software movement. I'm not sure that "Patent free" even is an ideology.

> Uh, no. Unless by "years" you mean "decades".

About 10? That's years, not decades. Even 5 years ago they were well under 5% weren't they?

I'm glad to hear that OSX suits you, that's fine. What I object to is you calling Ubuntu a hobbled experience. Personally I find that both Unity and OSX have DEs that really get in my way without a lot of tweaking, but both can be made to give a reasonable experience.

I wouldn't have said anything, and just chalked it up as someone making an opinionated comment that I disagree with if it weren't for the ridiculous line about Ubuntu's ideology being hopeless.

> What I object to is you calling Ubuntu a hobbled experience.

I might be wrong, but I think he's talking about a future in which Canonical is forced to remove features from Ubuntu due to patents. Whereas Apple would just pay the licensing fees.

I don't see this happening because software patents don't exist in most of the world. The worst thing that could happen is they wouldn't be able to sell phones in the U.S. and other patent-crazy territories.

> Whereas Apple would just pay the licensing fees.

More like Apple would be the one firing the lawsuits.

I find it troublesome to see so many otherwise talented hackers chop off their own feet by supporting the top company fuelling the patent-war and undermining the software-industry as a whole.

You are truly a delight.

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