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Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

> the Layman discovers that Linux can possibly be just as shiny as Mac OS.

Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux customers or something?

We should let them be. Laymen will invariably be better served by Microsoft or Apple, trying to win them over in some sort of misguided drive to "win" market-share seems foolish. Linux should focus on it's niche, and Microsoft and Apple theirs.

This market-share envy makes no sense to me. Does Artic Cat stare with envy at Ford's userbase and expend effort trying to get suburban parents to drive their kids to school on snowmobiles? That would just be silly.

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Practically: I want to be using a system that I can be confident has good hardware & software support, not always double checking everything I buy to make sure it will work. That means getting at least a few % market share so that other companies take it seriously.

There's also an ideological angle: many Linux users feel that there's something wrong with a world where only the technically adept can use a free, open source operating system.

> not always double checking everything I buy to make sure it will work.

I feel like we've been there since... 2007? My last several purchases were made with zero caution or research anyway, maybe I've just been getting lucky.

> many Linux users feel that there's something wrong with a world where only the technically adept can use a free, open source operating system.

That's fine and all, I don't buy into that ideology but it is fine if others do. Perhaps someone should warn these unsuspecting masses that "Linux for your technologically illiterate grandmother" advocates are not as pragmatic as they may claim to be. I feel like these people are dressing Linux up as something that it is not in order to sell it to people who, were it presented honestly, would not pay it a second glance.

Even drivers that were previously mainline have broken. So while the Intel 4965 used to work fine on Linux, it no longer does. And that is for a driver in mainline.

The hardware situation has got much better, but there are still some problems. Laptops with both integrated and separate GPUs aren't very well supported (so I hear, I don't have one). There's a relatively new scanner in my office that's not supported by SANE. I wanted an external wifi adapter for a desktop recently, and I'm not sure how many will just work with Linux.

On the software side, Steam got ported recently, but there's plenty of other software that we'd like to see. Flash is no longer released for Linux, although for now at least I can still watch iPlayer with the last version of Flash that was released. Hopefully HTML5 will have killed it before much longer.

Of course we shouldn't pretend that Linux is something that it isn't. If it's not good enough, we aim to improve it. But I honestly think that, if non-technical users got something like Ubuntu 12.04 pre-installed on compatible hardware, it would work perfectly well... except for the expectation, both from users and app developers, that everyone has Windows. Which brings me back to the point about market share.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Ubuntu's raison d'etre, which is to bring Free (libre) software to the world.

Except the rest of the (consumer) world doesn't value libre as a first-class feature. They want the shiny.

The way we get to bring our values to the world is to be commercially relevant. Because otherwise, hardware vendors don't care about you, ISVs ignore you, app developers target other platforms, and so forth.

Market share isn't the end goal. It's a means to the end.

Seems dishonest and manipulative to me. Con a bunch of people into adopting something that doesn't really fit their needs, is just shiny, so that you can use them as leverage... that is not something I am interested in.

Meanwhile all of those unskilled users are not without a cost. Free software support infrastructure is not set up to handle that many unskilled users. If Canonical is going to be giving all of those people 3rd party support themselves, that is all well and good, but it seems to me they tend to punt the ball.

I don't think it's conning them into something they don't need. I think it's giving them what they want (shiny, easy to use) so that they have something that they need but don't realize it yet (libre).

The entire reason why desktop Linux has been a failure is exactly because it does not fit the needs of most people. And for that audience, "shiny" is equally important as "featureful".

In the modern marketplace, you can't choose either/or. It has to be both.

Ubuntu wants to do both and additionally add libre.

The strawman fallacy you inferred from my statement has the additional fallacy of incorrect causality.

People are initially attracted to Ubuntu for a variety of reasons, and we hope to keep them because we are fit for purpose, not for whatever ideological reason or niche feature, and certainly not due to any sort of con job.

Desktop Ubuntu has failed to reach that critical mass of users to be taken seriously by industry (our good friends at Valve notwithstanding), and the only logical place to jumpstart the install base is the mobile world.

The mobile market is brutally competitive. Ubuntu will succeed or fail on its own merits, not because of any dishonest manipulation of innocent users.

Has desktop Linux been a failure? By what measure, adoption of people who are not in it's niche market? Would it stop being a "failure" if we got a bunch of laymen using it?

Compare community desktop linux distros with community distros of something more oriented towards the masses... say.. Android.

The Debian Project is a well oiled machine, coherent and consistent. Everything has a well defined process. Technically capable users don't have to sort through piles of crap to get work done.

Cyanogenmod on the other hand is an utter shitfest. Standard operating procedure there is wading through clusterfucked forums looking for undocumented unofficial fixes (in prebuild binaries mind, no source) in threads thousands of posts long filled with idiots saying "hurr durr, I dropped my phone in the toilet, now this patch doesn't work". They cannot handle the size of their technologically illiterate community, and everyone attempting to use their software, technical or otherwise, suffers as a result. (This isn't even touching the issue of shittier hardware support than you would ever expect to see with desktop linux...)

If piles of unwashed masses were really what desktop Linux is "missing", then community maintained Android distributions should, far from being a nightmare, be the promised land. This is plainly not the case.

You keep putting up strawmen.

Show me the desktop Linux equivalent of Android, not Cyanogenmod. It doesn't exist - and you can measure that failure with any number of metrics.

If Ubuntu can achieve that type of success and protect the freedom of users with the GPL (instead of the permissive BSD model for hardware makers) then we will have accomplished something in the world.

You have missed the point. Show me the Android equivalent of Debian.

Show me an Android project, with all of the unskilled users that come with it, that is anywhere near as organized as the Debian Project. Show me that legions of unskilled users have allowed this Android project to achieve hardware compatibility at all comparable to what Debian achieves on the desktop.

Such a project does not exist. I assert that it does not exist in no small part because they have too many unskilled users, and because hardware support does not materialize as soon as you reach some sort of "critical mass" of unskilled users.

Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots. Only corporations that are prepared to completely disregard community involvement are capable of wielding an idiot userbases. Canonical is neither up to that task nor does it even appear to be pretending to be. Why? Probably because the lunatics run the asylum.

>Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots.

implying Firefox and Chrome will rot.

Firefox and Chrome have backing organizations that are willing to not rely on community support.

(And frankly, I would argue that Firefox has been rotting for years now, though likely for unrelated reasons.)

Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux customers or something?

Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots.

Wow. The level of arrogance and elitism on display here is breathtaking.

This is why Linux on the desktop is irrelevant. Not the fact that it's incompatible with most mainstream software, not the fact that it's low profile or the fact that most Linux desktops look and function like Windows' retarded younger brother – but because a tiny minority of the otherwise hugely welcoming community set themselves up as some sort of entitled priesthood and actively discourage 'idiot users' from getting involved.

New users, even idiot ones, are good. Yes, they bring problems and stupid questions. Everyone has to start somewhere. But more people involved means more investment and helps challenge entrenched assumptions about how things should work. Making things shinier and more accessible does not equal dumbing things down.

Why shouldn't everyone be able to use an approachable, thoughtfully designed system that 'just works' and yet shares our values of freedom, community and open source?

> Making things shinier and more accessible does not equal dumbing things down.

Except in practice, it almost always seems to. Which is why I don't and can't do any significant development, or work of nearly any kind for that matter, on Android, or an iPad.

> Which is why I don't and can't do any significant development, or work of nearly any kind for that matter, on Android, or an iPad.

That's about picking the right tool for the job, not dumbing down.

It's like complaining that a trowel is a dumbed down shovelling device because it can't make any significant headway with digging a massive trench.

That said, I develop Drupal sites locally on my jailbroken iPad and it's pretty nifty to have access to a full development environment on something that portable.

Arrogance or not, the fact remains that community developed Android distributions have all the unskilled users Ubuntu could ever dream of having, yet the projects are even worse.

Projects that rely on community support simply cannot handle the load. It is a failing of community driven open source to be sure, it would be great if it were otherwise, but I simply see absolutely no reason to think it is not reality. Your theory is nice, and it would be nice if it were reality, but it does not fit the data.

>but because a tiny minority of the otherwise hugely >welcoming community set themselves up as some sort of >entitled priesthood and actively discourage 'idiot users' >from getting involved.

I've spoken to many people over the years and looked at why they use Windows rather than Linux. The reasons, in order from most common are:

1. Lack of the applications they need; nearly always Outlook and Excel

2. Familiarity with Windows that they feel they've invested a lot of time in

3. Simply didn't realise there even was an alternative

Out of all the people I've talked to, there have been a grand total of ZERO that have ever given "Had a bad experience with a member of the Linux community" as a reason. None. Ever.

So, I'm more than a little dubious about your claim that this is in fact the main reason. Got any figures to back up that little theory of yours?

Show me the desktop Linux equivalent of Android, not Cyanogenmod. It doesn't exist - and you can measure that failure with any number of metrics.

Sounds like what you're really saying is "you can come up with any metrics you want, then define that as failure to justify my position". There's really no objective basis for saying "desktop Linux is a failure", especially when there's no objective standard by which we could say "desktop Linux is a success" either.

Like somebody else just said "market share? Who cares?" Market share is a means to an end, not it's own end. Desktop Linux works reasonably well for a certain population of people with a certain set of values. Does anybody expect that desktop Linux should gain Microsoft Windows like ubiquity?

Failure?

It's an incredibly useful tool, with a lot of very smart engineers contributing awesome stuff to it. It's a development platform second to none and far more capable than any other OS I know of.

Oh did you mean market share? Who cares?

"This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Ubuntu's raison d'etre, which is to bring Free (libre) software to the world."

Here's my marketing campaign, sad as it is, its the best possible spin:

"Hey world, I've got something new for you, its incompatible with everything and doesn't work with anything and can't actually do anything you want, but, hey, its new so it must be better and it does a bunch of stuff that nobody outside the dev community cares about. Oh and we "had" to take some stuff away like network transparency which is awesome, err, I mean ignore the man behind the curtain and someday VNC might work, oh and every dev who's finally gotten used to the existing weird design will have to retrain. Other than that trust me its awesome you better switch now. And by switch, I really mean it since it'll be incompatible with everything else ever written." How could anyone not drop their entire legacy installed base of hardware and software and training and switch, I mean its got transparent animated dancing robots which no one can do without, and its got electrolytes that plants crave!

I'm sorry I just can't do any better given bad news.

I agree. But then the great thing about Linux is we don't have to use the layman distribution.

If someone wants to put the time and effort into making something that is great for my grandparents but awful for me then more power to them.

Meanwhile the rest of us can stick to the distros that are suited to our needs. I think this state of affairs is much better than any one operating system ruling. So long as we have binary compatibility among the Linuxen then I'm happy.

Who are we? I only see a Company and a Foundation geared to serve a platform namely Ubuntu and not Linux.

Yes Ubuntu is based on a FOSS ecosystem but it does not mean it shares the same goals as linux, whatever the goals of linux are.

It means its backed by a company which in my eyes want to bring the wonders of a second unix based operating to the laymen. Only in this one everything is open, and that for me makes sense.

It could help make the software market more competitive. We can already see that Apple and MS want a lot of power over their platforms to the point of being able to decide what software will run. A more neutral platform in wide use could make the playing field more level thus leading to better software in the long run.

I agree. This is why I dislike Ubuntu. It constantly tries to appeal to Mac and Windows users.

Simply don't use it...

Embrace extend extinguish.

Wait until the only way to run FF / Chrome / 3-d accelerated video driver / vi / emacs / something else thats "critical" is to switch to Mir. After all its free, all you have to do is abandon everything else. What could go wrong?

Simply don't use it is like telling people to take up a new hobby once theirs has been destroyed. But I don't want to take up a new hobby and I like this one. Sorry, no, someone else has decided to destroy it, so don't complain or try to work around the damage just select a new hobby. Hey, you look like a technical type of person, sorry about the death of free software and all that, but I bet you'd like Ham Radio or maybe advanced model railroading? ...

If a free software program decided to stop supporting X and Wayland, it would be because no one cared enough to contribute the code for continued support, which would imply that very few people were still choosing to use X or Wayland over Mir. If Mir really ends up being that wonderful, why shouldn't it win?

How does one free software program replacing another constitute the death of free software?

vi or emacs? Not going to happen, these are among the most portable software that exists.

About Chrome or FF that's only depends on the developers who use the product, I doubt that Google will ever target Mir, actually I believe that the GTK+ backend could target Mir and then boom, all GTK+ applications will then run on Mir, including Chrome. If Google ever comes to target a system with their browser this will probably be Chrome OS.

Firefox is another beast, but unless there's a decision to abandon Linux altogether there'll be devs working on it, or on iceweasel, it's Debian cousin, and this will probably run/compile in every Linux (and BSDs?) out there.

About 3D this is a shit area, I believe this move signals that Canonical will try to sell ARM computers in the future, there's a know lack of free drivers for GPUs in the ARM world. To see what I mean you'll only have to search for the Raspberry Pi "open source" GPU drivers debacle to see how things are going. This is not a criticism of Broadcom who has it's trade secrets to protect, but there the situation is far from perfect and always will be.

Hey VLM, could you take a look at this [1]? I wanted to get your advice on something, but it got buried. Thanks!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5289406

For better or for worse, market share was always Canonical's goal. See their bug #1.

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