Linux Has Run Out of Time | Hacker News Reader

Linux Has Run Out of Time

uk.pcmag.com

15 pointswfjackson17 comments

I really hope John didn't get paid to write this. He didn't bother to try to support any of his statements. He certainly didn't research them.

As far as I'm concerned, there are two types of users. There are power users, which I'll handily define as not necessarily experts at their desktop environment, but rely on highly specialized tools to do their job, tools that might only be available on one platform.

There are non-power users, the ones who just need a web browser, email, and an occasional spreadsheet.

For the first category, they need what they need. A UX expert will probably want OSX, not because of OSX's amazing interface, but because their tools (photoshop) of choice are there.

I need the Linux desktop. I don't "just kind of get-by" on Linux desktop. I demand it. I install Ubuntu on my Apple machines I'm forced to use. Why? Because I'm more productive on a Linux desktop. I have a windows manager configuration (i3) that is highly optimized for my workflows.

I've also been building tons around Docker as of late, docker is clumsy to use on OSX or Windows, but is a breeze on Linux. I could use it through a VM, but why, when my Linux Desktop experience is so powerful.

The 2nd category of users can use pretty much anything, from a tablet to a VM on a server, regardless of the OS. It just needs to run Chrome. I put my non-poweruser friends and family on Ubuntu so I don't have to deal with viruses or installing things.

There are a lot of non-power users that need Office to get their job done. This limits their options to OS X, Windows, or possibly iOS.

The workflow you're describing is pure power-user. There's nothing normal about that.

Also Docker on OS X is about as breezy as you can get if you use boot2docker (https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker).

Err.

'It's like vegetarians who crave meat and eat meat-"flavored" tofu burgers instead. Again, what's the point?'

Most vegetarians - especially those who 'crave meat and eat meat-"flavored" tofu burgers instead' - aren't doing it for the culinary experience. The point is to adhere to the set of ethics they aspire to. (Depending on just how those are conceptualized, and just how they practice their vegetarianism, this may or may not be a point well achieved, but that doesn't change the fact that it's clearly "the point"). Ignoring that is idiotic.

No particular comment on how well this translates to the digital.

I think he kind of has a point in this case. Everywhere Linux tries to mimic an application or experience from other platforms, it usually falls a little short.

Where does it gain? In doing the things that only Linux can do (Docker, massively scalable IO, etc)

Or doing things only the FOSS community can do: apt and yum are definitely killer apps. The attempts of the OSX and Win communities to mimic them are fairly dismal. Brew is getting decent, but it's taken a while with no large company sponsors, also fighting against Apple's attempts to ruin their dev toolchain.

So, we're supposed to tell the vegetarians, "No, you don't get fake meat" and the Linux users, "No, you don't get to do office things"?

The point is they still want (enough) to do those things if they can do them without compromising other concerns. And they want that even if those things aren't done as well (which is certainly usually the case for fake meat). If they didn't want to do those things enough to compromise, they wouldn't do them (and this certainly represents some portion of both populations). If they wanted to do them and cared more about the fact that the alternative is poor than about their other concerns, they would be eating meat or using Windows. Making the alternative suck less decreases the push away from vegetarianism or Linux, as spreading ethical concerns and improving package management and such increases the push toward them.

I don't think "Linux should play to its strengths" is a crazy position, necessarily, but I also think characterizing the other side as not having a point is disingenuous - in both the vegetarianism and FLO cases.

The issue with inferior Linux copies is where the original is closed source and the company hasn't ported it themselves.

Office suite compatibility issues are due to the incumbent software's closed formats. Evidently, this is a smart move to defend market share.

These aren't Linux problems, they're closed source software problems.

Sadly the Linux versions sometimes seem to make the same mistakes.

MS Office had clippy, and that kind of irritating help assistant made it into Open Office. (Especially frustrating since Clippy was poorly implemented.

Edit: this is the right link!! http://robotzeitgeist.com/tag/bayesian-inference-engine

I'll leave this here because it's interesting. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/sep/01/stonehenge-dr... )

I'm not sure if you meant to post a link about stonehenge, but I enjoyed it none the less.

Whoops, thank you!

http://robotzeitgeist.com/tag/bayesian-inference-engine

You could say the same about Macs. Not quite to the same extent, but it doesn't stop people using them. The majority of people use their computer for web browsing, email and basic office tasks. I agree that MS Office is a better than OpenOffice, but for the majority of people Google docs is probably sufficient. And what percentage of computer users use Adobe's stuff? 10% at most?

> ...will give up hope and move from its LiMux-brand of Linux to Microsoft Windows.

I don't understand this. Why does it have to be all or nothing? Give certain people Windows (Photoshop or Video editing needs?), and certain people Linux. Hell some people may even need Macs. If you move any subset of your user group off of Windows, you'll be saving money.

"If you move any subset of your user group off of Windows, you'll be saving money."

Unfortunately, that isn't quite guaranteed, though it may well be the case. Depending on the circumstances, I could see the rise in cost of support for a heterogeneous setup exceeding the savings of foregoing some Windows licenses. Certainly that's going to be the case in the degenerate case of hiring a Linux sysadmin to switch one computer from Windows to Linux while retaining your Windows sysadmins for a pile of other Windows computers.

I see your point, I guess there's probably a number of users that would need to be hit to become cost efficient. It just always seems like people say "Linux doesn't run X, so every user needs to run Windows/Mac", which may not necessarily be the best approach.

Certainly, and I expect on the scale of Munich they'd have more than a couple users that could do Linux just fine. Still, their spreadsheets, not mine...

I didn't know John C. Dvorak was still writing. It's been roughly 15 years or so since I last read any of his rants.

It takes talent to be a cantankerous curmudgeon for your entire career.

> If I have to run Windows applications, I want Windows, don't I?

Sure, and if you want Unix applications, you want Unix(tm), of course, like Solaris.

Dvorak has had plenty of time to understand the benefit of having a re-implementations of proprietary API's.

What we are reading here is the 1993-vintage Dvorak (or older). Dvorak has not changed his views in twenty years. Or, rather, we don't actually know; quite possibly, PC mag wants "classic Dvorak", and he delivers.

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