Hacker News Reader

Comment by dllthomas | Hacker News Reader

Err.

'It's like vegetarians who crave meat and eat meat-"flavored" tofu burgers instead. Again, what's the point?'

Most vegetarians - especially those who 'crave meat and eat meat-"flavored" tofu burgers instead' - aren't doing it for the culinary experience. The point is to adhere to the set of ethics they aspire to. (Depending on just how those are conceptualized, and just how they practice their vegetarianism, this may or may not be a point well achieved, but that doesn't change the fact that it's clearly "the point"). Ignoring that is idiotic.

No particular comment on how well this translates to the digital.

View on HN

I think he kind of has a point in this case. Everywhere Linux tries to mimic an application or experience from other platforms, it usually falls a little short.

Where does it gain? In doing the things that only Linux can do (Docker, massively scalable IO, etc)

Or doing things only the FOSS community can do: apt and yum are definitely killer apps. The attempts of the OSX and Win communities to mimic them are fairly dismal. Brew is getting decent, but it's taken a while with no large company sponsors, also fighting against Apple's attempts to ruin their dev toolchain.

So, we're supposed to tell the vegetarians, "No, you don't get fake meat" and the Linux users, "No, you don't get to do office things"?

The point is they still want (enough) to do those things if they can do them without compromising other concerns. And they want that even if those things aren't done as well (which is certainly usually the case for fake meat). If they didn't want to do those things enough to compromise, they wouldn't do them (and this certainly represents some portion of both populations). If they wanted to do them and cared more about the fact that the alternative is poor than about their other concerns, they would be eating meat or using Windows. Making the alternative suck less decreases the push away from vegetarianism or Linux, as spreading ethical concerns and improving package management and such increases the push toward them.

I don't think "Linux should play to its strengths" is a crazy position, necessarily, but I also think characterizing the other side as not having a point is disingenuous - in both the vegetarianism and FLO cases.

The issue with inferior Linux copies is where the original is closed source and the company hasn't ported it themselves.

Office suite compatibility issues are due to the incumbent software's closed formats. Evidently, this is a smart move to defend market share.

These aren't Linux problems, they're closed source software problems.

Sadly the Linux versions sometimes seem to make the same mistakes.

MS Office had clippy, and that kind of irritating help assistant made it into Open Office. (Especially frustrating since Clippy was poorly implemented.

Edit: this is the right link!! http://robotzeitgeist.com/tag/bayesian-inference-engine

I'll leave this here because it's interesting. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/sep/01/stonehenge-dr... )

I'm not sure if you meant to post a link about stonehenge, but I enjoyed it none the less.

Whoops, thank you!

http://robotzeitgeist.com/tag/bayesian-inference-engine

Reply on news.ycombinator.com