Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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