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Comment by xorcist | Hacker News Reader

Everything you say is completely applicable to Android as well, and it's not clear how that is making the platform a non-option for people. Very few people installs third party packages.

The market share of any PC desktop operating system has mostly to do with the type of office work that took place in the 90s, when computers took over.

That's slowly changing as the web is taking over, and Chromebooks, Android, Mac, and "regular" Linux desktops becomes a viable platform for sharing your work with others.

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On Android, software developers package applications and push directly to the repo - no 3rd party is involved for a packaging step. Developers have a high degree of control in the application's packaging.

> Everything you say is completely applicable to Android as well, and it's not clear how that is making the platform a non-option for people. Very few people installs third party packages.

Consider that the usecase for a personal desktop computer may be different from that of a smartphone or tablet. There's more to personal computing than a web browser.

Right, but the Android comparison was meant as a counter example to how packages outside the main repository being difficult to install is somehow a deal breaker to ordinary users. It's not. Desktop computer market share is mainly due to historical reasons.

Of course an easier to use third party packing system would make the desktop easier to use, but that's not where the pain points are. (Especially since most third party binary packaged software is just something you unpack and run.)

Even the most easy to use packaging system you could imagine wouldn't impact the Linux desktop market share measurably.

> Desktop computer market share is mainly due to historical reasons.

Historical reasons like it being an open platform that developers could target without the requirement of third party approval, among other strengths.

Android is very different. You only need to make one file for many different stores, and that file is pretty trivial to install even if it isn't in a store.

Linux doesn't have anything like that traditionally. You have to make a deb, rpm, whatever Gentoo uses, etc. And ./configure && make && make install is laughably unintuitive.

It depends. If you use the NDK you have to make sure you can build for both x86 and ARM (the play store will hand out the relevant variant silently).

Also, Google have done some serious work to ensure at least some backwards compatibility (and providing a support library, that i fail to recall the exact name of, for backporting various functionality).

While the FOSS world seems to lean on "compile it" along with "lacking resources" as an excuse for not maintaining anything more than incidental compatibility across releases.

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