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Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

The thing that befuddles me is if someone came up to you on the street and handed you $100, you'd most likely refuse until you could figure out what the catch is. If someone offered you free movies or music on the internet, you'd either assume they were stolen or there was a catch. But when people download software that was both complex to build and intricate and expensive to maintain, they assume that there isn't a catch. I don't understand.

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I agree but one would expect that AV vendors have enough opportunities to make money without sacrificing their users and their reputation. Look at how many products AVG has. I think they should do just fine by converting free users to paid subscriptions. Couple of years ago most of their revenue came from toolbars. Since then they have converted their business model to push more for premium upsell. They do it well, I don't have problem with such a business model. Free users serve them well as free marketing force, they don't have to abuse them.

linux is free. What is the catch?

Significant expertise is required to install, configure (sound, sleep, 3d accelerators, multiple monitors, printers, scanners, projectors), and maintain the os.

Linux is only free if your time is worthless.

And Windows is free if you your time is worthless and you pretend you didn't fork over a wodge of cash. Can we kill this meme already?

On one hand Windows is free because it came with my laptop, on the other hand a day of my time lost on Linux is worth more than the $200 Windows license.

Although this is very much about Linux on desktops.

Your laptop costs more because it comes with Windows. It's not free.

I've lost orders of magnitude more time on windows, than on linux. (Embedded linux devices included in the math).

Windows: easy things are easy, normal things require some googling, hard things are impossible.

Linux: easy things are easy, normal things require some googling, hard things are hard.

Well, from my short experience with linux, easy things require googling on linux. I was trying to open a port to make remote desktop work. I classify that as easy.

You may be right, googling doesn't take much time though. A Linux system without internet is indeed barely usable. Thos man pages are absolutely unreadable.

> Significant expertise is required to install, configure (sound, sleep, 3d accelerators, multiple monitors, printers, scanners, projectors), and maintain the os.

Worked out of the box for me (sound autoconfigured, sleep via thinkpad acpi autoconfigured, intel gpu autoconfigured, external monitor via thunderbolt autodetected, one network printer/scanner autodetected via bonjour, other network printer/scanner had driver package from the vendor on the web, were projectors ever a problem?).

Did I do something the wrong way?

Linux does work out of the box if you buy hardware from a company that has a very large corporate install base (Dell, Lenovo, etc).

Linux also works really well if your hardware isn't bleeding edge.

The part where Linux becomes hard to use and requires expertise is learning the new UX, understanding what software and tools are no longer available and figuring out how to live and work with the alternatives that exist.

The degree of technical proficiency that you have is probably relevant to your "out of the box" experience - you are reading and posting on HN, which means that your level of technical knowledge is probably higher than most users given the typical audience of this site.

Why would there be a catch?

The internet is full of free stuff - you even access the web through a free bit of software.

only firefox could remotely be said to be free

chrome is google's tool to control browser apis and to fight apple (viz who is attempting to move app-like functionality into the browser, vs who is keeping that inside apps for their leading app store). It also gives them various other capabilities: monitoring browsing (site suggestion), monitoring ssl cert corruption, etc. And it's their attempt to replace the OS with a browser ala chromeos.

safari is similar: apple's ability to control the internet and how it evolves, including veto power over apis that strategically threaten their business

so too ie/edge, both historically (stifling development of js and internet apis, activex) and now with their still leading os marketshare

and even firefox only lives as long as yahoo, microsoft, or google find them useful, since one of those three basically pays all the bills with search revshare deals. So you could consider even ff as their bulwark against being recognized as a monopoly

The general public doesn't make a distinction between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. Browsers are free, as far as the general public are concerned.

The general public also has no idea how difficult it is to make software. Frequently even programmers don't see software as that difficult - witness how many times someone has to raise the 'mythical man-month' or similar.

If people could give $100 and not lose them, there would be people trying to give you a bill at every corner. Mostly for good reasons.

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