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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

> It's actually pretty great.

Subjective, but needless to say I disagree.

I disagree with all of your reasoning too. Inserting a middleman into the software distribution process is needless friction and adds another point of failure. Even Linus has spoken on how much of a pain in the ass it has made it to distribute software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=340s

But hey, you guys keep doing what you're doing and ignoring what potential users want. I'm sure the Year of The Linux Desktop is just around the corner.

P.S. Yes, I know, it's been your Year of the Linux Desktop since 2001 or whatever. We both know that's moving the goalposts. So is saying "but Android" since it replaced everything above the kernel with a completely new userspace stack and, oh yeah, it doesn't really run on the desktop anyway.

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Why such a snarky reply? Some users do find value in having different flavor distributions and them exercising some control on the source, you obviously do not. Yes that means spending resources on this, and that will sometimes cause issues and bugs, same as with any other extra code.

>But hey, you guys keep doing what you're doing and ignoring what potential users want

Both me and the parent users are not "potential" users but actual users. Why we shouldn't count but some "potential" users should? We already have plenty of distributions which don't do patches.

Parent poster didn't mention anything about "Year of the Linux Desktop" so your diatribe about it is completely uncalled for too. Plenty of people are absolutely fine with current trajectory of user base and don't subscribe to prioritizing user growth above serving existing users.

It's a bit lame when a positive well-written article gets the usual negative response about how everyone is doing everything wrong and "Linux desktop is completely broken".

> Why such a snarky reply?

Because at this point I guess I just assume I'm talking to an evangelist about 90% of the time. That seems to be the case with people who insist that the Linux Desktop Experience is "actually pretty great".

> Some users do find value in having different flavor distributions and them exercising some control on the source, you obviously do not.

The fact that Linux Desktop needs hundreds of bespoke distributions to offer those choices is precisely the problem, in my opinion. A well put together system shouldn't require everything to be compiled just-so and all together by an army of volunteers to work properly. You should just be able to use the software you want, as up-to-date or out-of-date as you want, why is that so hard in Linux?

While you see it as problem, lots of people see this as a feature, just different priorities that's all. I do prefer distros which curate the packages they maintain to provide some logic and predictability to the way packages are meant to be used, where and how they store the config files, remove various nonsense from it and so forth. And all the issues you've listed just isn't a problem for me. "Well put together" system isn't an objective measurement and opinions vary.

And anyway your app based view is slowly becoming more prominent, with so much development dedicated to various app based solutions(appImage, flatpak etc). You don't see me complaining about army of volunteers wasting their time. People work on stuff they think is useful to them, nothing to see here or be negative about.

> Even Linus has spoken on how much of a pain in the ass it has made it to distribute software

I've watched that Q&A before. Linus is of course right but not because of package managers and not because of distribution maintainers. He eventually starts talking about binary interfaces which are the root cause of this issue.

The fact is most open source projects out there don't have stable binary interfaces. So we have important libraries in the system breaking working binaries because they do things like change structure layouts and function signatures. This is a problem of the wider free and open source software ecosystem in general. In that same talk he contrasts this with the kernel which does have a stable binary interface and can therefore effortlessly run binaries compiled in the 90s with no changes at all.

If all software had stable ABIs, you wouldn't even need packages at all. You'd be able to just compile stuff and distribute that binary directly.

> But hey, you guys keep doing what you're doing and ignoring what potential users want.

Sure thing. I don't really care at all about what "potential" users want. I'm a programmer and I want a system suitable for programmers. "Normal" people are more than welcome to keep using whatever it is they're still using. If they don't see the value I'm not gonna convince them.

With Linux I get to trust that if something's made it into the package repositories then it's trusted by the community. That also means maintainers fix idiotic "features" like old and insecure bundled libraries in the case of dynamically linked distributions, telemetry in the case of a privacy-focused distribution or non-free code in the case of Debian.

> I've watched that Q&A before. Linus is of course right but not because of package managers and not because of distribution maintainers. He eventually starts talking about binary interfaces which are the root cause of this issue.

An issue exacerbated by the package managers and repo model. Developers think "why should I bother with binary compatibility when package maintainers are just going to recompile everything anyway?".

> If all software had stable ABIs, you wouldn't even need packages at all. You'd be able to just compile stuff and distribute that binary directly.

Gee, it's almost like other Desktop OSs did that.

> Sure thing. I don't really care at all about what "potential" users want. I'm a programmer and I want a system suitable for programmers. "Normal" people are more than welcome to keep using whatever it is they're still using. If they don't see the value I'm not gonna convince them.

That's fair, I'm just tired of dealing with evangelists. There are reasons people use other OSs and it isn't because they're stupid or uninformed or whatever nonsense people use to feel superior. In my case, it's because I don't like the way Linux does things.

> With Linux I get to trust that if something's made it into the package repositories then it's trusted by the community. That also means maintainers fix idiotic "features" like old and insecure bundled libraries in the case of dynamically linked distributions, telemetry in the case of a privacy-focused distribution or non-free code in the case of Debian.

They also fix idiot features like actually-working cryptography (Debian), or a "you're using a horrifically out of date version" notification from the developer (also Debian). Oh, and of course the whole model really can't handle simple tasks like:

- Installing software to different disks

- Installing more than one version of the software (unless explicitly packaged separately)

- Choosing to have a mix of old and stable versions of some software and the latest hotness of other software

These are all things that are trivial in other operating systems, but I need to use something like AppImage to get them in Linux software. Sadly not a lot of software is distributed that way because the culture of Linux is that everything must flow through a walled garden repo for your own good, and if you don't like then compile from source.

> Developers think "why should I bother with binary compatibility when package maintainers are just going to recompile everything anyway?".

Because it's good engineering.

> Gee, it's almost like other Desktop OSs did that.

They don't. Every now and then Apple breaks mac applications like they're nothing. Microsoft used to care about this to an almost heroic extent but that's history. I literally can't play some old games on Windows 10 without troubleshooting stupid DirectX DLL errors. Ironically that game just worked on Linux.

> That's fair, I'm just tired of dealing with evangelists.

Wait, so anyone who's happy with Linux is an "evangelist" now? Why even start this conversation if you don't actually want anyone to reply?

Windows compatibility isn't perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than Linux's. I can't even take a binary from a 2 year old version of Ubuntu and run it on the latest Ubuntu in most cases without a lot of dicking around. By contrast Windows API is so stable that Linux has better compatibility with it than it does with old versions of its own.

No, not everyone who likes the Linux Desktop is an evangelist, but when I come out and say the experience sucks and the very next reply is "actually it is great" it is hard not to read that as evangelism.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but what I said was "I find this experience terrible" and what they said was "you are wrong". If they had left out the "actually" it would have read differently, but as it was it seemed like just another evangelist trying to tell me what I do and don't want in an OS.

Note that "Linux" in this case refers specifically to typical userland, the kernel ABI, by contrast, is quite stable.

> when I come out and say the experience sucks and the very next reply is "actually it is great" it is hard not to read that as evangelism.

Let's review. You said that the Linux desktop experience is "awful" and provided no evidence whatsoever for your claim. The reply to you, "It's actually pretty great" at least provided a couple of points in favor of believing that the situation on the Linux desktop is good, at least for some people.

From where I'm standing you're the evangelist, insisting that their own picture of how a Linux desktop should be architected is the only good way with no evidence. Claiming that the way things are currently done is garbage, with no real evidence. I think it's totally unfair for you to claim that you were just giving your opinion and then had other people walk all over you and "tell you what you do and don't want in an OS".

Rather, what people in this thread have been trying to get across (I think) is that we like Linux the way it is. We think it's "pretty great". We don't want to see it change because a bunch of tech "evangelists" (if you'll pardon the expression) think static linking and AppImages are a much better way to do things. Sure at the end of the day that's "subjective" (meaning it's the result of us finding certain things valuable that not everyone else finds valuable), but, well, so are any alternative conceptions of the Linux desktop.

If you want evidence then all you need to look at is the extremely low adoption rate. Even developers often prefer MacOS. My statement about Linux's awfulness included an opinion qualifying phrase, theirs did not. Why do I need evidence for a subjective opinion? Besides, I know from experience that if I air my grievances with the Linux Desktop an army will come out of the woodwork to tell me how wrong I am, attacking my intellect, my use-cases, the very facts of my experiences, etc. If you need evidence I suggest you do even the tiniest amount of looking at how negative opinions of Linux Desktop are treated in forums. I, for one, am not even remotely surprised to be downvoted steadily every time I express them.

> Rather, what people in this thread have been trying to get across (I think) is that we like Linux the way it is.

And that is fine, I don't want to harass people who use and like Linux any more than I want to be harassed for not using. What I want is to not have to keep having the same arguments over and over about why I feel the way I do about it, because the community has made it clear they don't care.

> We think it's "pretty great".

IF parent had said "I disagree, I think it is pretty great" we wouldn't be having this conversation.

> If you need evidence I suggest you do even the tiniest amount of looking at how negative opinions of Linux Desktop are treated in forums.

Your opinion about this mythical Linux Desktop was not the reason why I replied to your post.

I replied to your opinion on the packaging model. It is great and in my original post I explained why I think so. It's a highly successful model. Just look at the huge number of platforms with app stores these days. It's fundamentally the same thing. Apple is notorious for enforcing quality control on apps and forcing them to integrate with their wider ecosystem. Linux invented it with software repositories and automatic package managers and it's even more open compared to modern solutions.

> My statement about Linux's awfulness included an opinion qualifying phrase, theirs did not. Why do I need evidence for a subjective opinion?

I disagree. I do not read this statement as containing an opinion qualifying phrase about whether the Linux Desktop experience is awful, the opinion being qualified here is that the repo/package manager model is the root cause of it.

> As far as I am concerned the whole repo/package manager model is the root cause of most of the reasons the Linux Desktop experience is as awful as it is.

You appear, in this statement at least, to just take "the Linux Desktop experience is ... awful" as an underlying objective fact that everyone should just accept, and we're all debating the reason for it. I don't accept it.

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