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Comment by bollockitis | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, I'm happy to see the Linux kernel being used in all sorts of consumer devices. It's a real victory for the developers and for the open source model. On the other hand, it has only been successful because it has enabled major corporations to fight the mobile platform wars. Linux hasn't succeeded on its own merits but as an economical way for companies to bootstrap their own products to fight for Apple's leftovers.

The author isn't fooling anyone. We all know that the goal was for Linux to take the desktop. It was to be a win for freedom against the tyranny of Microsoft. That didn't happen. Instead, Apple stepped in and ate everyone's lunch, and now it seems the Linux warriors want to move the goal posts. Sure, Linux has spread far and wide, but most consumers still have no idea what Linux is, and nor would they care. Linux isn't something people want, it's something they use without being aware of it. Is that a victory or a tragedy?

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How would Linux success have been accomplished without integration into the current platforms de jour? This is a specious argument, to be sure. You are saying 'Linux did not succeed on its own because it required hardware vendors to pick it up and push it out there' - well, how else would it have succeeded? Linus building a hardware company?

The intention behind the developers of the Linux kernel have always been: build it, use it, let others use it if they want to. There has never been a 'commercialized Linux effort' that didn't involve some vendor capable of making its own hardware - and this is what happened with the mobile take-up.

>We all know that the goal was for Linux to take the desktop.

Linux has been a very viable desktop for over a decade. And besides that - Chromebooks are not a desktop to you?

>Linux isn't something people want, it's something they use without being aware of it. Is that a victory or a tragedy?

Its a victory of course. Linus didn't start a fashion company - he started a kernel project. That kernel powers more devices than any other kernel out there at the moment, across a more diverse range of product types.

And I rate that total success, personally .. but then I've only been using Linux since the day it was available on funet.fi ..

> Linux has been a very viable desktop for over a decade.

I've been using Linux regularly for the past half decade and daily for the past year as a PC (as opposed to as a development and deployment target for 12 years). No, it's not viable. Not when the competition is Windows and OS X. I'd explain why, but it'd devolve into a huge rant about poor UX, drivers, audio services, file system snafus, grub upgrades gone wrong, bad advice on forums compounding problems, all of which get brought up ad nauseum in any Linux thread. Linux is very good as a server, but that in no way translates into being a good PC.

And no, Chromebooks are not a desktop, they're "browser appliances".

The Linux desktop has no more difficulties than the MS desktop (which is also endless "poor UX, drivers, audio services, file system snafus, [...] upgrades gone wrong, bad advice on forums compounding problems.") With a billion dollar marketing budget (like either MS, Google, or Apple) and/or a hardware manufacturing company behind it, it would sell.

That's not even really a complement to the Linux desktop, it's more a statement about what a billion dollars can do.

The quality of the desktops of the members of this oligopoly has a negligible influence on the uptake IMO. The iPod/iTunes pair was one of the functionally worst (but one of the prettiest) products of its category. Android and iPhone have taken nearly a decade to reinvent basic functionality taken for granted on most computers. Doesn't matter.

> The Linux desktop has no more difficulties than the MS desktop (which is also endless "poor UX, drivers, audio services, file system snafus, [...] upgrades gone wrong, bad advice on forums compounding problems.")

Not in my experience, at least...I use Windows, Linux, OS X regularly these days, in increasing order of usage, with Linux and OS X being almost equal. On average, Linux has given me more trouble than the other two combined.

And there is a billion dollar marketing budget for Linux, and it does sell. Except it's only the kernel that's Linux, and the OS is called Android, and it sells because it has a completely different UX, one that was created with another billion dollars of investment from Google. This unfortunately has no bearing on the quality of the Linux UX on PCs.

I, on the other hand, have been using Linux on the desktop/laptop for over a decade and it's worked fine for me.

Granted, the last Windows version I used was Windows XP (pre SP 1), but I also got a SantaRosa MacBook several years ago and found OS X's WM to be fairly outdated at the time.

That being said, I am seriously considering buying a new MacBook Pro since I need a new laptop with lots of RAM.

"I'd explain why, but it'd devolve into a huge rant about poor UX, drivers, audio services, file system snafus, grub upgrades gone wrong, bad advice on forums compounding problems, all of which get brought up ad nauseum in any Linux thread."

Earth it all on a Web page somewhere and post a link back here. I'd be interested, with the exception of the bad advice on forums bit.

Your anecdote is as good as mine. I've had a viable Linux desktop for 15 years. I don't have driver problems, my machine has been settled and stable and working productively with very, very little effort on my part. I use it every day without even thinking about any issue whatsoever - and I have plenty of interesting hardware attached - two USB hubs, Firewire busses, multiple monitors with 3D acceleration, nvidia cards, and so on.. I've also had a viable Linux DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) for about 12 of those years (another machine). It kicks as much as as any OSX DAW ever did, and I have sources for everything, which OSX doesn't. So its nice if I want to tweak an audio plugin between sessions. I also have multiple Linux servers, countless VM's stored in various places for various things (compiler farms).

I have absolutely no problems with UX, drivers, audio, file system, or grub in any of this. You must have some bad mojo.

>And no, Chromebooks are not a desktop, they're "browser appliances".

Chromebooks are eating the desktop metaphor for lunch. Cloud, as well. Complaining about the Desktop was a good pitch in the 90's, but if you think it matters - at all - now, then you're really not being rational.

> Your anecdote is as good as mine.

Agreed, but as long as anecdotes like mine abound (see also: other comments in this thread, or on any Linux thread anywhere in general), I think Linux on the PC will go nowhere. As others have mentioned, this is often the fault of vendors and drivers that Linux can do little about, but that's not going to excuse it for most users.

> Chromebooks are eating the desktop metaphor for lunch.

I think it's too early to call that right now, especially based on some really questionable statistics. There is some potential for Chromebooks, but in the long run tablets will probably prevail in that space.

I'm seeing far more success stories for Linux adoption than failures. If, as you say, anecdotes like yours abound, then there would hardly be any Linux use at all. However, fortunately, your situation is not as common as you think - and in fact the successes are far, far more common. Or else we wouldn't have the subject to discuss: it would have festered, already.

But, it didn't fester, because the fact is: Linux works great on the Desktop. Really, really great. And it offers far more powerful features than the competition. So that is why its thriving.

The days of 'drivers being better on Windows' are over, by the way.

Chrome OS is a Gentoo-based distro. And they are quite capable. If you want the traditional Linux tools, put it in developer mode....

Linux has changed the world. Yes of course I'm talking about the kernel, that's what Linux is. It's what it's always been.

Without Linux there would be no Android and Apple would by now own 95% of the smartphone market(1). Server infrastructure across the industry, including Web hosting, would cost an arm and a leg due to proprietary Unix license costs. Services like Rackspace and AWS would likely be barely viable, if at all. A generation of geeks would have grown up probably on Windows without Linux to cut their technical teeth on.

Linux success is a bit like that of SQLite. There are probably over 50 SQLite databases in the room with me right now, on the smartphones the other people here have in their pockets, but you'd never know it. It doesn't matter if anyone knows it or not, in fact the technology being invisible is the point. It's why even the fact that OSX and iOS are unix under the hood is such a triumph.

The goal might have been Linux on the Desktop for some, as a back end guy for me that's always been a distraction. Mobile is making the Desktop almost irrelevant, or at least a niche market, and Linux and Unix are right there, out in the lead. They run the client devices in people's hands, and most of the back end services those devices rely on. They own the future.

(1) I'm a happy loyal iPhone user, but I'm not stupid enough to not realize that would be a bad thing.

I like Linux as much as the next guy, but if there hadn't been Linux FreeBSD would have just taken its place. Possibly more of a split between FreeBSD and Solaris.

This. Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeB...

Agreed. Free/Open OS'es changed the world. Linux happened to be the most popular one.

"Without Linux there would be no Android and Apple would by now own 95% of the smartphone market(1). "

You cant conclude that at all. The manufacturers would have had to do something else, and they obviously would have, as in many cases, they were. Android/Linux was an easy, convenient, perhaps even lazy, ship to jump to.

Which also means that one could make a case that the presence of Linux for Android use has distracted from innovation and competition.

Because hardware manufacturers can conjure mature software platforms out of their arse at will. Or something.

This is what so many people missed about iOS when it first came out. Building a software platform is a Hard Problem. The other phone manufacturers didn't come out with relevant, equivalently capable competitors to the iPhone in 2008 because it was physically impossible for anyone do so, even for a platform company with deep pockets like Microsoft, in that time frame. Even Android took years to redevelop so it could get even close.

There was nothing lazy about adopting Android, the handset manufacturers had no other viable choice. The advantage Apple had opened up was wide enough that even WebOS, which was arguably even closer to catching up than Android, failed because it didn't have the same level of long term investment and support from an experienced software company that Google gave to Android. It ran out of time and money, when we're talking about more than just a few years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Without Linux, Android would have used something else; likely BSD. iOS is a variant of BSD as well, albeit with a different kernel core.

Linux is not the only open source kernel. The main thing that makes Linux special is that it is the open source kernel that got popular. If Linux had never existed, there is no reason to believe that another kernel would not be filling the same niche today.

I love Linux, but GNU is the important part. If Linus had gone into housepainting or commercial fishing, I'd gladly be using Debian GNU/FreeBSD or Debian GNU/Minix or whatever.

it really isn't, there's no GNU in Android

Linux hasn't succeeded on its own merits but as an economical way for companies to bootstrap their own products...

That is one of the (biggest) merits of linux. Its a "compute core" that can be the start of many products, including but very much not limited to desktops. Sure we wanted linux to usurp the absolute power of Microsoft on the desktop in the 90s, but the "desktop" becomes less of a 'thing' every day, and linux (FOSS in general) is just getting started.

This is a very strange reading of history. From the time I came across linux in 97, there were always different groups within the linux world with different goals.

Yes, there was a large group devoted to the linux desktop. They never really succeeded at large scale.

But there was also a large group devoted to linux in the embedded space fighting the likes of windriver, qnx, etc. A sub-branch of this was the realtime linux folks. In the embedded market linux is pretty widely used. Even in real-time. Not dominant, but no longer a "WTF" level competitor.

A different group was focused on taking the server world over, at the time a "serious server" was a Sun box runing Solaris or something from HP running HP-UX. Occasionally Irix was used. Lots of things were serving from Windows NT. These days server tends to mean "Linux box".

Related but different was the world of HPC - at the time the big computers were running all sorts of OSes, IRIX was pretty popular, as was Solaris, and other forms of unix. Similarly supercomputing and cluster computing was proprietary OSes, but linux wanted in there too. Now they mostly run linux.

The argument you are making at it's core is that the thousands of people and companies that use and contribute to linux have a single unified goal. This is not true, nor has it ever been. Well, I guess you could say the goal has been "make it useful for my case", and that is a truth, but generic enough to mean anything.

In fact I would say that other than the desktop, an arguably mobile, linux has pretty much dominated the fields it entered.

I say arguably mobile, because it is still questionable if Apple dominated for technical reasons or fad reasons. There are lots of people these days I talk to who say stuff like "I'm thinking my next phone won't be an iPhone". It remains to be seen what will happen.

> Linux hasn't succeeded on its own merits but as an economical way for companies to bootstrap their own products to fight for Apple's leftovers.

This has been one of Linux's merits for a very long time, something they embrace.

> Sure, Linux has spread far and wide, but most consumers still have no idea what Linux is, and nor would they care. Linux isn't something people want, it's something they use without being aware of it. Is that a victory or a tragedy?

This benefits Linux desktop users as well, for example better hardware support.

>> Linux isn't something people want

Check out YouTube, Windows isn't something people want anymore, not like the 90's. Give it up, more and more people want a solid, stable, secure, reliable, fast computer. When they ask their techie friends how to get that, almost invariably the answer comes back - install Linux or buy a computer that comes with it pre-installed.

Am I the only person on the face of the earth who feels like they've had many more technical/reliability issues with Linux (perhaps the blame lies with distributions in particular) than with Windows, over less time?

Nope. Not as a desktop platform, anyway. Ever since KDE3 went obsolete, Linux on the desktop has been a joyless pain for me. Windows is more reliable, and OS X is generally more "usable" in terms of nifty things it can do.

Part of that can be blamed on crappy proprietary graphics drivers, but only part. Most of it is just a decade or more of mediocre design.

I hope this isn't being downvoted simply because TillE isn't fellating Linux. We all have different experiences here, and while I'd be interested to see elaboration on this comment there really is no reason to hide it.

Are you able to elaborate?

You should try KDE 4. Actually is very madure and more comfortable of using that Windows, also is reliable as actually is very rare to see a serious bug, and if this happens, KWin/KDE recover itself alone in seconds.

The only problems that I have (sometimes) actually with Linux are graphics drivers.

Sure no; but 97% of OS problems are hardware problems and OS/X and Windows are lucky to have hardware makers care to optimise their product for them. Still, with some research _before_ buying you can get a perfectly flawless Linux experience. And if you are lazy, there are rare but still options already baked for Linux, even from huge vendors like Dell.

>Linux hasn't succeeded on its own merits but as an economical way for companies to bootstrap their own products to fight for Apple's leftovers.

Please. Apple makes decent products, but I'm not aware of a single market they dominate. Microsoft (still) dominates laptops and desktops, Linux (still) dominates servers, and while Apple enjoyed a brief period of dominance in the US smartphone (but not overall mobile phone) market, they dont dominate that either now (and the in the international market, they are borderline irrelevant).

Apple is an influential but marketshare minor player in consumer electronics.

I don't see how it could possibly be a tragedy. An ordinary user should never have to care what platform she is running on.

I agree with everything else you said.

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