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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today.

As it stands, after nearly three years using ubuntu desktop, I came to the conclusion that a windows license is very cheap by comparison. The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it. I keep linux in a VM where it's very easy and cheap to backup and rollback without affecting my data or ability to work. I really gave it a good try, and I liked a lot of things about the freedom to configure things like I want, without metro crapware infesting the place, but the downsides were just too much for me.

Again I wonder how things could have been if everyone was pulling as a coherent team instead of in different directions.

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I run windows in a VM to run lightroom. Similar situation except my experience about stability is the exact opposite.

> Again I wonder how things could have been if everyone was pulling as a coherent team instead of in different directions.

If everyone keeps pulling in the same direction you might end up in a dead end. With a plurality of approaches natural selection comes into effect.

Anyway, how do you propose to force volunteers to do your bidding when they have different ideas? Sometimes ideas are mutually exclusive.

Out of curiosity, have you ever considered darktable?

http://www.darktable.org/

Yes I have. And Rawstudio. And Raw Therapee. And while darktable is the fastest evolving one it's still not close enough. But I'm keeping tabs on it. Lightroom is slowing down and to be honest it's way past the diminishing returns elbow at this point so maybe next year. I no longer do photography professionally so it's less and less of an issue.

"becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace"

Seems like Linux has been competing just fine, but I take it you mean "a desktop linux that appeals to windows/osx users by being similar to them so the learning curve is small".

That seems to more be about a lack of effort and manpower, not because people are pulling in different directions but more that the people who would actually build that stuff don't want it enough to dedicate their free time to building it. That and designers don't seem to be nearly as interested in contributing to FOSS as do programmers.

Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects. A success is having a large number of contributors, all cooperating to solve a shared problem so they can all spend more time on something else, with some of them dedicating themselves to the problem because it's interesting and helps their friends.

No one is doing it at the scale necessary for the same reason Apple isn't spending all it's money developing products for people who couldn't possibly pay for them. They aren't stupid.

"Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects."

except that the size of the userbase drives companies to port their products to the platform.

Sure, there are long term high level strategic interests that could be helped for sure.

How convincing is this though?

"I would like you to volunteer to work on this project that you don't want and wouldn't use (and therefore probably won't do a great job with). You will be inundated with support requests from unskilled users. I would like you to do this because if a lot of people do it, it might convince a unspecified number of companies to port their software to linux at some unspecified time in the future. That's only if you are completely successful building this for and marketing this to people who you don't understand or care about. You will have no help from designers or user interface people because they don't give a shit about you or this. Design and user experience will be the most important parts of this, technical quality will not influence success because the users don't care about that. You will get no social capital from this because the users don't give a shit about what you do.

Do this instead of one of the huge number of really interesting projects building things you would love to have that are on your plate right now, the ones where your peers will recognize, appreciate, understand and value your hard work."

Big issue here is the issue that open source has with designers. It's really frustrating to try to get a clear vision executed in the "doocracy" of an OSS project, where developers will often implement features to "scratch an itch".

Yeah, it's hard not to see that as something it would be good to get past. Developers deal with that at the architecture level decently enough. Maybe the filling in part is just less fun than it is for software so it's harder to get volunteers? Maybe it's how credit/social capital works in a different community? It is frustrating, those skills make such a difference.

"Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects."

I'm sorry, but that's absolute baloney in the context of the parent post. By and large neither Windows or OSX users need to deal with low level OS stuff, whereas Linux users frequently do. These sorts of issues affect long time users and new users. From what I've seen, Linux users tend to either go straight to a mainstream distro, or distro hop for a while, get bored or frustrated with dealing with unnecessary complications, and end up on a mainstream distro as a result. At first you take pride in learning more, but after a while you just want something that works and gets out of your way. Describing user wants as drains on FOSS means that you're ignoring the issues that are drains for everyone.

These problems you describe aren't present for the people being asked to solve the problem, so they don't volunteer their time to fix it.

In my experience they aren't even problems for beginner computer users or people who don't need to unlearn Windows/Mac-isms post Ubuntu and modern hardware detection.

edit: I should add, I'm not saying a project solving these problems wouldn't be popular among users or generally great for Gnu/Linux as a whole, I'm explaining why it's not popular among potential developers. And when you aren't working in a market capitalism framework a large number of potential non-contributing users isn't enough to get things done.

> "a desktop linux that appeals to windows/osx users by being similar to them so the learning curve is small".

Isn't that what Zorin is / is meant to be?

http://zorin-os.com/

"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it."

Doesn't this assume that this cost for commercial OSes is zero? In my experience, that hasn't been the case (as an OSX user, haven't used Windows for software development in a long time).

The cost isn't zero, but it's proportional to how many other people are likely to have encountered the same pain point. If you run a desktop OS with 5% of Windows' market share, you're going to have more trouble finding help (or at least sympathy) when things go south.

Also, as an ISV or IHV, if your app or device fails to work with Windows, it's a DEFCON-1 emergency. If it fails to work with one of 5,000 random obscure Linux distros, well, they'll get back to you on that, someday, maybe. It's simply economics in action.

Note that neither of these are issues in the tablet or phone markets, which is why people citing those markets to defend Linux on the desktop are all wet. (They're in good company, of course -- lots of people in the Windows world have failed to understand why those markets are different, including the developer of Windows itself.)

That would make for an interesting whitepaper by someone. A country by country or regional calculation of the costs of implementing open source.

As an open source fan but also someone who has been burned by the hidden costs of implementing it in certain emerging market regions (extensive training, time, lack of people to fix it when it goes wrong, incompatibilities etc etc vs Windows environment with a wider base of support and usage), I would find this very interesting.

I think things often look different in London or SF but the idea of "free software" in poorer parts of the world is often a false one.

Some hardware is well supported by Linux, some is not. Same with Windows, though most vendors support Windows if they support anything on x86. But it's not always that clear-cut. Particularly on laptops, if you diverge from the OEM-included drivers you can have issues. I had a Dell laptop that I obtained second-hand, and I reinstalled my employer's stock Windows 7 ISO on it. It randomly blue-screened even with the latest appropriate graphics drivers, until I went back to the Dell website and found the exact version of the driver needed for that laptop.

FWIW OpenBSD, which I had installed on another partition, ran flawlessly with the exception of suspend/resume. This was a couple of years ago, I think there have been improvements since then.

Personally, I find suspend/resume to be critical functions without which a laptop is useless.

It is far from zero. On Windows, it is just not considered Microsoft's problem by most people - the blame is spread across lots of different software vendors/developers.

Just as an example, at our company, we run a Windows Server 2008 R2 Terminal server, with Outlook 2003 installed for email. A while ago we decided to replace the aging Internet Explorer 8 installed on that machine (shudder) with IE11 (still shudder - but it's company policy), and if people are going to use IE, I thought at least they should use a reasonably current one.

Turns out, that Outlook uses IE for rendering HTML emails, and that Outlook 2003 using IE 9 or newer for that purpose results in HTML mails being truncated randomly. Since some of our users run Outlook almost exclusively in their RDP-sessions instead of their local desktops, this was a rather big deal for us, and it took me a while to figure this problem out.

And keep in mind, this problem was caused by the interaction of two problems written by Microsoft itself. Imagine the non-deterministic fun you can run into with applications by a dozen or more software vendors, running across several versions of Windows, 32 and 64 bit.

(Yes, I kind of needed to vent. Sorry.)

MS does seem to support Outlook 2003 with IE9 and even released a hotfix for an incompatibility. IE11 was released close to the end of support of Office 2003 though, I wonder what is the support policy in that case.

Thanks for the info!

Now that Office 2003's support has ended, I don't think Mirosoft will do anything about the problem for newer versions of IE.

(If I could, I would also upgrade Outlook on that terminal server, but that is another story altogether.)

"I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today."

To a point it could be beneficial, but then we would hit the same wall we're coming to here. Over all, you do not need a large group of developers to work on a project. You just need people who have a specific knowledge in order to add features and fix bugs.

Too many people trying to all work on the same thing can lead to too many ideas on how to proceed ahead.

Another idea is having a form of management to help guide people towards more system complementary projects, rather than recreating the wheel.

  The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace.

Linux is a kernel. Linux distributions target a variety of different users, and that's where the fragmentation comes from.

I guess the problem is nobody really set out to build a Windows alternative at the beginning. As such they got what they set out to build, a powerful set of tools for building "things". It was never a coherent set of tools design toward making a comfortable user experience (grab a compiler from here, a windowing system from somewhere else, mash it all together).

Some distributions (I guess notability Ubuntu, and projects like KDE) have tried to polish what's available into something that's a good user facing experience. With varying success. Most of the issues here likely stem from a legacy of tools which were not designed to build a consumer facing system, and a lack of resources (and desire) to build a platform for the average consumer.

Others, have rewritten the userland (Android) and produced competitive consumer facing products.

Others, have continued to build what (I'd guess largely the developers) want, either to service their personal of commercial interests, things like Debian/RedHat.

So different distributions have targeted different users groups. I no more want to user an Android desktop than a Windows one. But I can see how Android could be far more competitive against Windows. The question is who wants to invest the resources in building that?

I take issue with the idea that if every developer was pulling in the same direction we would be somewhere better than where we are now.

I view the diversity and freedom in Foss projects as a feature, not a bug.

First off, assuming you got a group of people together who agree that they should all pull in the same direction, who gets to decide which direction that is? Why that person, and not this person? Secondly, speaking for myself only, being told to work on projects I'm not interested in will produce sub par work and will drain my motivation to both work with that team and the project itself.

Everyone has a different idea on what it would take to get to the Year Of The Linux Desktop, call me when you reach consensus on what exactly the requirements for that project are. Not to be cynical but reaching consensus seems like the biggest blocker, the fact that there are people pulling in multiple directions I think is a symptom of this problem.

Exactly why Linux will never dominate the Desktop environment by the average user.

You basically can't use Linux without at some time going to the cmd line to fix some dam configuration or driver problem.

And, yet, it dominates the tablet and mobile environment, which is already more important than the desktop market ever was. Funny how that works.

I know exactly what you mean. But we both know these are very different things. For most people, their tablet and phone works absolutely seemlessly, with drivers, apps, downloads etc just working they way they want them to. It just never works that way on the Desktop unfort. I know loads of "average" people who have tried to use MINT/Ubuntu but eventually a big chunk end up reaching for Redmond after they spend too long looking at StackExchange trying to figure something out.

It doesn't matter; there are literally more phones and tablets than there are desktop/laptop computers. Desktop/laptop is irrelevant in the future.

Chromebook and hybrid tablets are slowly eating into the "laptop" market. Many people will never buy a laptop because their tablet or phone does what they need. I know a lot of people who go weeks between opening their computer, but live on their phone and tablet. Desktop and laptop will be a thing people use at work for a long while, and it'll probably still be ruled by Windows. Creatives and developers will have beefy computers, and they'll probably still be running Windows and Mac OS X predominantly (though I use Fedora, and have never really worked on anything other than a Linux system). For now. I can't predict what will happen on that front, but phones and tablets are encroaching on so many fronts I never would have predicted (I just bought my first tablet last week, and thought they were ridiculous for years even after they'd started taking off).

I take issue with your hypothesis.

Tablets and chromebooks have already been around for several years. Why do I still use a desktop for work? Why don't I just ssh everywhere from my eyepad?

Because they suck at making me productive.

Desktops and actual laptops are not going anywhere, because they run fully featured OSs that people can contribute to, not some nasty walled garden of corporate shrink-wrapped ToS turds and ignored pull requests (if you're so lucky to even come within barfing distance of a FOSS component on lobotomy-hardware).

Look, IBM started predicting the death of the desktop, what, 20 years ago? 30? It's not going to happen. Then laptops came around. They're gonna kill the desktop! O noes! Not gonna happen. Ultrabooks are gonna kill laptops! Yeah, maybe.. Depends on how much they wind up resembling good laptops.

Starts to sound pretty familiar after a while.

Why do I still use a desktop for work?

Please re-read my comment; I've already conceded the workplace will remain a desktop/laptop domain for some time, and that I can't predict when that will change, and for the reasons I mentioned. And, as I said, I don't know how the workplace will play out on the desktop and laptop. I bet it will gradually show declining power for Microsoft and increasing market for Apple and various Linux variants (for different reasons).

So, I don't disagree with you. Desktops and laptops will stick around for a long time in some segments, including the workplace. I don't know how long that will last, possibly decades more. But, it doesn't matter; the desktop/laptop is already less important than the phone/table...and Linux won that market. It effectively won "Desktop 2.0".

> after they spend too long looking at StackExchange trying to figure something out.

Why are they on Stack Exchange? If they are installing a Linux distro on a Windows computer, then of course you will have an unpleasant experience. If you want to use Ubuntu the right way without having to butt heads with anything, you buy a system from zareason / thinkpenguin / system76.

You can / will run into the same "searching the Internet" for problems installing Windows on your custom built gaming rig. Driver bugs, config issues, etc. Except for those you will end up digging through yahoo answers or windows help with even more misinformation and bloat.

In the end fundamentally it is not a problem with the Linux desktop. You can use a terminal on Windows as well, but you don't expect to because you bought a Windows computer and expect it to work. The same expectation should be had of prebuilt Ubuntu systems, and I think nowadays it lives up to expectation in my experience.

Cheapest laptop on zareason: $699 Cheapest laptop on thinkpenguin: $599 Cheapest laptop on system76: $799

(unless, of course, I'm missing something)

...I'm running Ubuntu on an ASUS laptop that cost under $400, which worked almost seamlessly, and I installed Mint on my ma's laptop that cost under $400. (That incurred finding a new video driver to avoid running everything in 800x600)

I would love to have a Linux-out-of-the-box experience, but the price has to make sense.

I know this is a problem, that is why one of my side jobs is custom building Linux machines locally. I do tech support, and if the client doesn't need Windows specific software or it runs perfectly under Wine I'll set them up with Linux builds and notebooks. I have several Chromebooks I'm versed in reformatting and know they work flawlessly and on what kernel versions that happens.

That is not good UX for the average joe, or anyone you are just introducing to Linux. It is a UX fail and ruins impressions when people try to install Linux on arbitrary hardware and have a bad time of it. Yes, if you are a veteran and know what you are doing you can do better than the vendors, but to recommend anything else to a Linux newbie without absolute confidence in comprehensive hardware support is just ruining their first impression.

Linux doesn't dominate the mobile environment. A very specific port of it, by Google, does.

Given that it's Google, that's hardly a compelling argument. They could've made Windows NT dominant if they'd so desired.

No they couldn't make WinNT dominant if they wanted because WinNT's source code isn't freely available.

Linux doesn't describe one OS, rather a class of OSes. Like Cancer isn't a disease but a class of disesases, or functional programming isn't one language but a class of them.

Google is dominant because they dominiated. MS didn't dominate, google does, and it's not like both companies couldn't compete in a money fight. And this comes back to Windows NT not being dominant despite MS's wishes.

The comment I was replying to suggested that the diversity (the forks) of Linux were the reason Linux would never win the desktop. I made my comment to make two assertions: First, that the desktop is irrelevant today because more people use phones and tablets, and the spread will continue to grow. Second, that the forkability of Linux made it possible for Android to exist...and, to practically destroy every other competitor for the phone and tablet (except Apple, but Android has a very comfortable, and growing, lead over Apple).

And, when Google started down the Android path, they weren't the Google we know today. It was not a foregone conclusion, and had they chosen a tech which they couldn't control completely, I can't imagine how it could have worked out the way it has. Microsoft couldn't make Windows dominate on the phone/tablet, despite devoting plenty of resources to the task, I'm sure Google couldn't have (given that anybody that buys from Microsoft plays to Microsoft's tune or they don't play at all).

And, I feel like I should add:

"Make it on the desktop" always meant "the consumer desktop". There is no consumer desktop in the future. The consumer desktop is a tablet or a phone or a TV device or all three. I don't understand it, I don't necessarily like it (I like desktops with big monitors, big hard drives, big mouse and keyboard, and a nice chair to sit in), but it's the way things are. Computing isn't something consumers do sitting at a desk any more. So, Linux won what is currently the way consumers use computers. And, that's hella fascinating, and hella cool.

It's also interesting to notice that Android is developed in a fundamentally different way to the myriad of mutually incompatible GNU/Linux distributions: Android is developed in cathedral style by a single centralized organization that is able and willing to define categorically the APIs that ISVs can target and keep them stable.

This is a huge factor for its success, considering all previous efforts of coordinating distros (e.g. LSB) pretty much failed.

I can't remember the last time I had to fix a driver problem on Linux.

My GF, who is not very computer savvy, has been using Mint for years at home and at work. Unfortunately, there were no command line configurations needed even once to set it up. What a disappointment. Ah well, I personally use Slackware so I'll get my jollies there I suppose....

Granted, I did have to go by GF's work at one point and install a printer but you know what? I've spent a lot less time there than I used to as her Windows systems (she and an assistant now both use Mint) regularly got virus or gunked up and slowed to a crawl...

Linux on the desktop has actually been much easier and reduced my honeydo workload considerably. Fact.

That aside, I have to scratch my head and wonder about people who claim to have so many of these types of problems. Tech people too. People who should be eager to embrace and learn powerful command line invocations and the control this learning brings....

I remember, ten years ago I had to compile the kernel module for my sound card manually, because it was not part of the mainline kernel. shrug

Since then, my experience with Linux' driver support has been very smooth, as well, any a lot smoother than stuff I've seen on Windows. Getting a printer to work on Windows is incredibly convoluted compared to CUPS.

As if that was different on Windows. Windows only works smoothly until it does not, and then you inevitably have to invoke some command-line tool you never heard of before and won't find any documentation for, or you have to edit some arcane registry key.

Most people I know who use Windows at home either call "that guy" they know who knows his way around a computer, or they just reinstall their system (which is not such a bad idea, really, just very inconvenient).

Hmm, I possibly would have agreed with you up until XP, when it was very very buggy and crash prone, but after that for the average user I really doubt that is the case. Thought I think we can agree to disagree depending on our respective experiences.

This. I'm not saying modern Windows is fault free. It may have an inconvenient user interface for some things, it may not always do the thing you want it to etc. but it never fails to boot, everything but Apple hardware runs it flawlessly and it has a massive third-party software selection.

For me, though, Ubuntu's user interface is just so much more convenient for programming and the other things I do that I manage with debugging the occasional failure to boot, install etc., but that's because I have unusual priorities and good google-fu.

Just to toss something else into the mix...:)

Honestly,I really really dislike Apple...esp the fanboy culture, mythology of Steve Jobs (and the culture which means everyone in Starbucks knows him and not Norman Borlaug), the weird shops, the overpriced products and ripoff margins, lack of choice and individually vs Android...for years I've been known as the guy who slags off Apple etc etc

BUUUUUTTTTTT - and this might be relevant to Windows survivability in the future.

Having spent nearly a week humming and thinking, comparing every type of new business laptop (powerful, reliable etc) at any price to run as my next Windows machine, I can't really find any...Thinkpad has seemed to have gone to pieces, DELL I have only ever had bad experiences with, ASUS/ACER meh etc...

I quite literally am close to swallowing my pride (awaits incoming from friends who I slagged off over the years) and buying a MacBook and putting Windows on it.

Maybe it's just me, but as Windows (except for the Win 8 bloaty crap) software has gotten better, the hardware at the moment seems to be getting worse.

ASUS is basically the highest quality you'll get with consumer prices. Acer is among the worst - they're like HP. You can't compare the two.

> but it never fails to boot,

Except when it does. I have a friend who got a virus that deleted the Windows bootloader / ntldr from C:, but hes not as technically literate and lives two states away.

Nothing can fix it. He does not have the technical wherewithal to remove the drive and recover files, there is no way to rewrite those specific files without reformatting the disk, and if the Windows install CD does not fix it (and it did not) you have no resources to try to resolve it.

With Linux, he would have had a live USB on hand, and if it failed to boot he could have reinstalled over his root partition and have all his personal files preserved while effectively resetting the environment.

This is way OT, and I'm pretty rusty in Windows land, but there used to be a tool you could run if you booted to a command prompt from a windows install disc that would rewrite ntldr and the boot sector. bootmgr.exe maybe? Something like that. Not all hope is lost!

The context is that he is tech illiterate. So much so that I tried to get him to just use a gui tool on his windows notebook to put Ubuntu on a 2GB flash drive to save his files but he couldn't do it.

There is no way he would have been able to boot to the Windows recovery CD command prompt and run anything. Also, I'm pretty sure the boot repair on the disk runs bootmgr repair options during its "please wait were doing stuff and not telling you what is going on" phase.

People have so varying experiences it's not even funny. I guess fail to boot means some update was required to initrd that didn't make it, but it's not something that would be common among the mainstream stable distributions. I've certainly never seen it on hundreds of machines.

Windows is a different story altogether. Not primarily because of some technical inferiority, but because people run all kinds of not-even-broken things with admin privs just because they got it in a box.

Just last week someone pushed a mobile broadband stick in their Windows box. It purred and whirred for a while, and hasn't booted since. I've seen similar things before.

(OT: I'd be grateful if anyone had any helpers on how to remove things selectively from the Windows boot process. There is a safe mode boot, which also hangs. Can I step through it, like on DOS? Can restore the boot related registry settings to an older version? Google doesn't help me at all here, and it seems like it should be a pretty common problem.)

My day job is managing a company network of about 100 Windows clients, running anything from Vista to 8.1.

I agree that Windows has gotten a lot better over the years, but if you have enough machines in one place, you see some pretty strange things happening, like MS Office breaking for no apparent reason, or an update to Office 2013 breaking Autodesk Inventor, forcing me to reinstall Inventor, thereby breaking Outlook, forcing me to reinstall Office (afterwards, both Outlook and Inventor continued to work - I have no idea why).

The chance for an individual user to experience such problems is fairly low, but as an admin / help desk monkey (we have no dedicated help desk, so I am the one users call for help) I get to see all those problems.

Let me repeat, Windows has improved a lot over the years, and I honestly do not know what it would be like to manage ~100 Debian or CentOS clients. I am not saying Linux deployed on such a scale on such a variety of machines would run without problems.

But you do run into those situations where you have to invoke some arcane command or edit the registry on Windows, too. And at least in my experience, if that happens on Linux, at least you can look at the man page for the command or the config file.

Best Linux desktop? ChromeOS.

Same here, except with a Mac as the host. I really like the setup of a OS X developer environment and tools, with the ability to summon Vagrant boxes or whatever else on command.

Some things on Linux were broken from Day 1 like drivers and X because it they were easier. I doubt a coherent team could have fixed these without rewritting which taks too much time. It took MS 6 years to make XP into Vista, I doubt OSS people operate on that kind of timeframe.

XP to Vista took 6 years because MS had huge plans for Longhorn. It took some time to build these things, then some more time to decide they won't be ready any time soon and throw them all away.

In all fairness, they did not throw all of their plans away - some of the more visible ones, like WinFS, yes, but from what I know, they reworked a lot of Windows' internals going from XP to Vista/7, like the audio and the network stack.

They also made important changes regarding security that at least made it more difficult to exploit bugs in more recent versions of Windows.

And, having personally almost no experience with Vista, the changes they made to the GUI between XP and Windows 7 are, IMHO, rather nice in terms of actual usability.

Also, Vista development got stalled big time when Microsoft first pulled out a substantial part of the Longhorn team to work on XP Service Pack 2, and then decided to re-base Longhorn from XP to Windows Server 2003 (R2?).

The net result was, of course, still a system that took much longer than planned and ended up being a huge disappointment to pretty much everybody, even by Microsoft's standards.

But if you consider Vista a "public beta" of Windows 7 and compare XP to Windows 7 side by side, I think - as far as Windows systems go - Windows 7 was actually a big improvement. (Not only on its predecessors, but also on its successors, as they saying goes.)

Well, except for the Perl 6 project.

SCNR.

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