[...] This baffles me. Why do we need a centralized authority to dictate what can and can't be installed? The main benefits of an app store are monetization, advertisement, etc, which are not...
On the end user side you need a consumer OS with an integrated app store, where people can get the great apps developers make.
[...]
Ubuntu is one of the most popular ones, and unlike others it has its own app store.
This baffles me. Why do we need a centralized authority to dictate what can and can't be installed? The main benefits of an app store are monetization, advertisement, etc, which are not benefits to the end-user. The walled garden approach shuts out independent developers by imposing hurdles to distribution. Many of the best developers don't have or don't want to spend a hundred bucks a year rent to be in the apple's app store. Having to cover that cost imposes a perverse need to monetize your software, which is the antithesis of the FOSS philosophy. Ubuntu's "app store" is just a frontend for their repo, which is pretty much debian's repo, which is one of many you can choose, which is a concept that's been around for 25+ years. It really bothers me that a gnome developer is saying "You absolutely need an app store or you can't call yourself an OS."
The author is saying that in order to be a platform you need to have an OS along with an app store, dev tooling and design language. They aren't saying you need one for an OS.
The author is saying that in order to be a platform you need to have an OS along with an app store, dev tooling and design language. They aren't saying you need one for an OS.
Can you point me to KDE/Qt's design language? Qt applications have very little cohesion to me. Also, it would be nice if you didn't try and denigrate other people based on their experiences.
Can you point me to KDE/Qt's design language? Qt applications have very little cohesion to me.
Also, it would be nice if you didn't try and denigrate other people based on their experiences.
https://hig.kde.org Again, it's like the author has never heard of, or seen, or used, KDE. It's not denigrating their experience, when pointing out the massive blinders they are wearing. This is...
Again, it's like the author has never heard of, or seen, or used, KDE. It's not denigrating their experience, when pointing out the massive blinders they are wearing.
XFCE is just one of the oldest, and one of the more common DEs in the Linux world. If you don't know what it is, or does, you probably shouldn't be working on a DE's design team. It shows you don't actually know what works, or what has been tried in the past.
Are you implying William Jon McCann and Tobias Bernard are the same person? I mean, they're not and I think obviously so. It's also kind of shameless of you to base your opinion of someone on a...
Are you implying William Jon McCann and Tobias Bernard are the same person? I mean, they're not and I think obviously so. It's also kind of shameless of you to base your opinion of someone on a comment on an issue tracker they did 9years ago, it shows you have a good memory- Ah, wait, It's just one of those often linked messages that people like to bash the GNOME team with. Please reconsider how you judge people.
Not only that but to add insult to injury, Tobias, in the same article above, talks about how he not only knows but has talked to KDE developers about KDE Neon since he believes it's a step in the right direction but they only consider it a developer product (source : https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linux-platform-1/#comment-18265)
No, they are not the same person. They are two separate people, and it indicates a problem endemic to the project developers. And 9 years ago was when GNOME 3 was being developed, and apparently,...
No, they are not the same person. They are two separate people, and it indicates a problem endemic to the project developers.
And 9 years ago was when GNOME 3 was being developed, and apparently, the attitudes haven't changed much. I mean, look at some of the comments from your link:
"Agree.
Gnome OS has to be built as a unified source code platform with all companies work together in cooperation at the same code."
"Gnome really needs to control the full stack, "
If Tobias has spoken to the KDE team, perhaps he already knows there's an app store, and he is purposefully leaving that out?
How so? Tobias hasn't said anything that would indicate that he doesn't know what XFCE is like McCann did, I really don't see what you mean regarding Tobias' apparent ignorance Woah there, not...
No, they are not the same person. They are two separate people, and it indicates a problem endemic to the project developers.
How so? Tobias hasn't said anything that would indicate that he doesn't know what XFCE is like McCann did, I really don't see what you mean regarding Tobias' apparent ignorance
And 9 years ago was when GNOME 3 was being developed, and apparently, the attitudes haven't changed much. I mean, look at some of the comments from your link:
"Agree.
Gnome OS has to be built as a unified source code platform with all companies work together in cooperation at > the same code."
"Gnome really needs to control the full stack, "
Woah there, not only is that not Tobias speaking in those quotes but that's a totally different thing than ignorance, it's simply a wish for gnome to try and integrate more of their platform together.
If Tobias has spoken to the KDE team, perhaps he already knows there's an app store, and he is purposefully leaving that out?
If you mean KDE Discover, no, that's not a store just like GNOME Software is not a store. Both are simple clients that interact with repositories set by the distro or user. Not only that but the article never states the only requirement is a store nor does it even mention KDE. Probably because Tobias wanted to talk about what he was most familiar with and didn't wanna write about all the environments which exist on Linux which only makes the problem talked about in the article even more obvious.
I see, that's nice. Do you think that people who work on Qt applications respect this HIG? I mean, from what I can see, there's some guidelines but they're quite loose and vary quite dramatically?...
I see, that's nice. Do you think that people who work on Qt applications respect this HIG? I mean, from what I can see, there's some guidelines but they're quite loose and vary quite dramatically?
I've personally not found much in common in terms of design and placement between KDE applications, they tend to very much do their own thing how they want but maybe that's my ignorance and lack of exposure to KDE applications speaking.
Linux already has an "app store" in form of package managers. They just suck at delivery apps to average end users (ie people who want to install word and don't care about libaio-perl being...
Linux already has an "app store" in form of package managers. They just suck at delivery apps to average end users (ie people who want to install word and don't care about libaio-perl being installed or not).
I mean, package managers are app stores, it's just distros do a poor job of showing them and the application process is not really made easy on someone who knows little and well, differ from...
I mean, package managers are app stores, it's just distros do a poor job of showing them and the application process is not really made easy on someone who knows little and well, differ from distros to distros because they don't offer the same things in most cases which causes issues.
Flathub imo does a pretty good job at marketing itself and making it fairly easy to distribute applications compared to the traditional repositories. Also, the integration in GUIs is fairly good whether we're talking Gnome software or KDE's store application which I can't for the life of me remember the name of.
Sure, there are different solutions favored by different distrobutions, but I don't think that it's that much of a problem with most 'user-focused' distros. I haven't used it in a while, but I...
Sure, there are different solutions favored by different distrobutions, but I don't think that it's that much of a problem with most 'user-focused' distros. I haven't used it in a while, but I know Ubuntu does a great job of making sure that Ubuntu Software Center is visible on a fresh install. And using Discover with KDE-based distros gives users an experience very similar to the Mac App Store. The biggest problem with linux package manager frontends tends to be the package metadata itself; descriptions typically aren't well written and don't have helpful screenshots.
Well, yes they do integrate but the issue is that if a developer actually wants to modify the listing or have a listing that they maintain themselves then they have to do it for every distribution...
Well, yes they do integrate but the issue is that if a developer actually wants to modify the listing or have a listing that they maintain themselves then they have to do it for every distribution on earth which is... basically impossible, there's no middleman in those cases which can just serve you up to more than one distribution. So, what happens in some cases is that they'll release for only one distribution and the community will try to make it work elsewhere so then they also have to deal with those issues meaning even if you setup for only one distribution, you'll be forced to support most other distributions if you don't want to be despised by the community.
It's why in my opinion the flatpak solution is so good, you ship it there and you're done. You don't even need to use Flathub, make your own repository if you want and it'll still work on all the distributions.
A RPM and a DEB mean nothing at all. An RPM could be used inside Fedora, OpenSuse or whatever really. A Deb could be used in Debian, Ubuntu Linux Mint, ElementaryOS, etc. The packages only state...
A RPM and a DEB mean nothing at all.
An RPM could be used inside Fedora, OpenSuse or whatever really. A Deb could be used in Debian, Ubuntu Linux Mint, ElementaryOS, etc. The packages only state their dependencies, they do nothing of the versions, of the differences between distros, nothing at all. If you try to use a Deb made for Ubuntu on Debian or vice-versa, you will not have a good time.
If it was that easy, flatpak and snap would've never been thought of. Please don't think people are stupid.
Is use redhat rpms on centos all the time, along with debian debs on ubuntu... There is also alien that allows use to transform rpms and debs, with pretty good success.
Is use redhat rpms on centos all the time, along with debian debs on ubuntu...
There is also alien that allows use to transform rpms and debs, with pretty good success.
RHEL and Centos are exact copies of each other, that's not a fair showcase. As for the debian debs, do you actually know they were made for debian? .debs can be made for any distribution but I...
RHEL and Centos are exact copies of each other, that's not a fair showcase. As for the debian debs, do you actually know they were made for debian? .debs can be made for any distribution but I mean, it is possible but you're bound to fall into issues since the packages it expects and those it needs may be different.
Alien is an hit-or-miss tool which suffers from the usual issue of versioning and package name being different in distributions.
Well, that's nice. It's still not something that can be assured to work because of their differences. The binary will expect certain things and if they're not there or different from what it is...
Well, that's nice. It's still not something that can be assured to work because of their differences. The binary will expect certain things and if they're not there or different from what it is expecting, it will cause issues.
Say, for example, that the binary expects to be able to use package Xyz version 10.0 and another distribution uses 11.0 which has breaking APIs changes or that 10.0 in a distro is actually using 10.0 + patches that break the API in some ways to fix another problem, it would cause issues. Of course, it could work in some cases depending on what it needs but it's not something that can be easily scaled to include all distributions.
That's why the concept of runtimes in Flatpaks exists, it allows you to have one set of packages that you can reliably use and that will allow your application to run no matter what's on the user's system since it doesn't rely on it.
There's a reason there's no "Linux Platform". Linux is designed using the bazaar model, and has worked fantastically well. If the author wants a cathedral, they should be looking at any of the...
There's a reason there's no "Linux Platform".
Linux is designed using the bazaar model, and has worked fantastically well. If the author wants a cathedral, they should be looking at any of the BSDs.
There's a huge culture split between the BSD and Linux community for this very reason.
What is being described here as a platform is not about the development method but how integrated the end result is. There is no reason a platform cannot be developed with a bazaar model and is...
What is being described here as a platform is not about the development method but how integrated the end result is. There is no reason a platform cannot be developed with a bazaar model and is what the article is advocating.
You will never be able to get that tightly integrated in a bazaar model. This is why you've never seen such a thing. And, having one tightly integrated platform is not a guarantee for success on...
You will never be able to get that tightly integrated in a bazaar model. This is why you've never seen such a thing.
And, having one tightly integrated platform is not a guarantee for success on the desktop. If it were, True OS is already there. I don't see too many people talking about.
I think most desktop Linux users are satisfied with their distros. I value stability more than anything, and that’s something BSDs seem to take very seriously.
I think most desktop Linux users are satisfied with their distros. I value stability more than anything, and that’s something BSDs seem to take very seriously.
I would agree that most desktop linux users are quite satisfied with their distros, and how things work (As are BSD desktop users). Which is why this article is just ridiculous on it's face.
I would agree that most desktop linux users are quite satisfied with their distros, and how things work (As are BSD desktop users). Which is why this article is just ridiculous on it's face.
The Gnome team wants to enforce on Linux the same uniformity of Apple. Cohesion is not a bad goal in itself, but failing to acknowledge the great difference between a for-profit closed platform...
The Gnome team wants to enforce on Linux the same uniformity of Apple. Cohesion is not a bad goal in itself, but failing to acknowledge the great difference between a for-profit closed platform and a largely non-profit FOSS enterprise is either ignorant or dishonest. Most Linux distributions and packages are maintained by volunteers. And if you’re not paying for their services you cannot expect them to abide by your idiosyncratic demands.
BSD is designed, and distributed in a Cathedral model. Linux is done using the bazaar model. This is pretty commonly accepted as the main difference between their development process. It's why you...
BSD is designed, and distributed in a Cathedral model. Linux is done using the bazaar model. This is pretty commonly accepted as the main difference between their development process.
It's why you have FreeBSD 11: The entire system was architected together. You don't upgrade bash on FreeBSD, you upgrade FreeBSD, for example.
I think I just said that... EDIT: Crap, I reversed the original. GNU was considered the cathedral model. My bad /u/bloup, I suck at reading, and writing, apparently.
I think I just said that...
EDIT: Crap, I reversed the original. GNU was considered the cathedral model. My bad /u/bloup, I suck at reading, and writing, apparently.
It's okay that Linux is its own thing, aimed at tech enthusiasts who mostly want to work in terminals. But it's just a reality that, if there should ever be a serious (in terms of market share)...
It's okay that Linux is its own thing, aimed at tech enthusiasts who mostly want to work in terminals. But it's just a reality that, if there should ever be a serious (in terms of market share) Windows and macOS alternative, Linux is our only chance. Nobody can force anybody to make it so but it's just how it is. I can understand excuses that ultimately argue that this isn't Linux' job or any specific distro's job. That is disappointing but fair and realistic. But the frustrating part is that I see people who genuinely are enthusiastic about the prospect of beefing up Linux as an open, mainstream alternative, who maybe even are willing to put in thousands of hours of work into the technical side of that but who get dismissive and defensive when it's pointed out that Linux, as a platform, absolutely sucks.
It's great that an idealistic college student can set up an Ubuntu desktop for their parents and they "totally don't complain" but that's not enough. Linux has the equivalent of a multi-billion-dollar company's work put into it but even the most user friendly distros have an UI that’s wonky as hell and constantly breaks. Drivers are a nightmare. It is expected that, if you want to do anything more complex than open a browser (though sometimes even that!), you have to spend an afternoon reading poor documentation and vague forum posts to get it to work. Support from major hardware and software companies is poor, because of all of the above and more, which is a bit of vicious cycle but these companies have zero incentives to take the first step.
So I think posts like this are an absolutely vital message to anyone still idealistic about Linux making a dent in the PC operating system market. But I can already hear the excuses.
Nice way to reduce anyone who disagrees with what you wrote to a whiny fanboy. Isn’t it? If a (presumably) technologically inept person can make an operating system work for them without...
Exemplary
But I can already hear the excuses.
Nice way to reduce anyone who disagrees with what you wrote to a whiny fanboy.
It's great that an idealistic college student can set up an Ubuntu desktop for their parents and they "totally don't complain" but that's not enough.
Isn’t it? If a (presumably) technologically inept person can make an operating system work for them without complaint, I’d call that a success. That they need someone more technologically literate to install the OS is irrelevant because that type of person wouldn’t be installing Windows or MacOS on their own either.
but even the most user friendly distros have an UI that wonky as hell and constantly breaks
Can you give an example? Ubuntu’s (using it as the example here since it’s pretty much the de facto “easy Linux”) DE is straightforward enough for a beginner to navigate. Considering Windows 10’s UI (referring specifically to the systems settings menus) is a cobbled mess of new menus and reskinned inherited menus from 7 I don’t think a perfectly clean UI is even necessary for wide scale adoption. People learn to use whatever’s placed in front of them. That happens to be largely Windows. If Ubuntu came preinstalled on computers, people would use that too, despite its imperfections (which do exist – I certainly don't mean to imply the desktop Linux experience is perfect).
if you want to do anything more complex than open a browser (though sometimes even that!), you have to spend an afternoon reading poor documentation and vague forum posts to get it to work
Not sure which distro you’re cherry-picking here, but Firefox comes pre-installed on Ubuntu. You can be surfing the web with literally a single click after the OS is installed.
Support from major hardware and software companies is poor, because of all of the above and more, which is a bit of vicious cycle
Agreed, particularly the “vicious cycle” part. It’s important to note, though, that the community of Linux users is great at finding workarounds to make products work on Linux even when hardware and software companies don’t natively support them (see Wine, nouveau, CUPS). Those workarounds generally require a higher degree of technical literacy to use than would be possessed by a standard user, though, which probably contributes to the perception that Linux can only be used by tech enthusiasts. You say you see excuses that “ultimately argue that this isn't Linux' job or any specific distro's job”, but that’s not quite correct: it’s not that it’s not Linux’s responsibility to fix those issues; rather, that it’s not something Linux can do at all. For example, consider TiLP, software written to communicate with Texas Instruments graphing calculators. It replaces the TI link software available for Windows and MacOS. TiLP is honestly pretty bad at managing files on the TI-Nspire line of calculators. It can’t display nested folders in the filesystem (so files can only be transferred to/from the root directory) and it’s also somewhat slower than the official software. The TiLP developers have no way of fixing those issues, though, because the protocol through which the calculator communicates with the computer is proprietary and undocumented. TI could easily fix the issues by releasing either the protocol documentation or the official link software for Linux, but they do neither, because… well, who knows? They just don’t.
On the more positive end of things, Brother releases Linux drivers for their printers which could hardly be easier for users to install, so it’s clearly possible for manufacturers to make their products work for users without forcing people to write obtuse technical workarounds. It’s in consumers’ best interests for manufacturers to use open protocols in their products (even consumers who don’t use Linux), so the solution is really to start holding manufacturers to higher standards.
It has been many years since I've had a driver problem on Linux. In fact, it's a dream compared to MS Windows, honestly. I've also been using Linux as my workstation OS for just over a decade now....
It has been many years since I've had a driver problem on Linux. In fact, it's a dream compared to MS Windows, honestly.
I've also been using Linux as my workstation OS for just over a decade now. Even for productivity (It was on my primary work laptop until some unfortunate political decisions at my employer). But, now, I run MacOS to be an expensive SSH/NX terminal to my cloud linux server for work.
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm There is not a "fight for market share", outside of Redhat, Canonical, SuSE and other commercial distro providers. That is not ever what the Linux community...
So I think posts like this are an absolutely vital message to anyone still idealistic about Linux making a dent in the PC operating system market.
There is not a "fight for market share", outside of Redhat, Canonical, SuSE and other commercial distro providers.
That is not ever what the Linux community has been about.
That being said, my entire household runs Linux as their OS, and I am the only technical person. And they do everything they need to get done, and I don't field tech support issues anymore since converting them.
My elderly aunt also uses Linux.
98% of the consumer market uses a browser, and an email client. Most don't even use the email client. Most work just fine with just a tablet, even.
What I miss on Linux is a true plug and play workflow. Not much for me, but for my parents and relatives. I don’t push Linux on them because I know they won’t find support were they live. A stable...
What I miss on Linux is a true plug and play workflow. Not much for me, but for my parents and relatives. I don’t push Linux on them because I know they won’t find support were they live. A stable focused distro breaks less than Windows, but they can easily find Windows IT guys anywhere in the world. Macs are definitely superior in that regard.
[...]
This baffles me. Why do we need a centralized authority to dictate what can and can't be installed? The main benefits of an app store are monetization, advertisement, etc, which are not benefits to the end-user. The walled garden approach shuts out independent developers by imposing hurdles to distribution. Many of the best developers don't have or don't want to spend a hundred bucks a year rent to be in the apple's app store. Having to cover that cost imposes a perverse need to monetize your software, which is the antithesis of the FOSS philosophy. Ubuntu's "app store" is just a frontend for their repo, which is pretty much debian's repo, which is one of many you can choose, which is a concept that's been around for 25+ years. It really bothers me that a gnome developer is saying "You absolutely need an app store or you can't call yourself an OS."
The author is saying that in order to be a platform you need to have an OS along with an app store, dev tooling and design language. They aren't saying you need one for an OS.
It's almost like the author has never seen, nor used, KDE.
Can you point me to KDE/Qt's design language? Qt applications have very little cohesion to me.
Also, it would be nice if you didn't try and denigrate other people based on their experiences.
https://hig.kde.org
Again, it's like the author has never heard of, or seen, or used, KDE. It's not denigrating their experience, when pointing out the massive blinders they are wearing.
This is sadly, endemic to the Gnome developers.: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#comment:4
"And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry."
XFCE is just one of the oldest, and one of the more common DEs in the Linux world. If you don't know what it is, or does, you probably shouldn't be working on a DE's design team. It shows you don't actually know what works, or what has been tried in the past.
Are you implying William Jon McCann and Tobias Bernard are the same person? I mean, they're not and I think obviously so. It's also kind of shameless of you to base your opinion of someone on a comment on an issue tracker they did 9years ago, it shows you have a good memory- Ah, wait, It's just one of those often linked messages that people like to bash the GNOME team with. Please reconsider how you judge people.
Not only that but to add insult to injury, Tobias, in the same article above, talks about how he not only knows but has talked to KDE developers about KDE Neon since he believes it's a step in the right direction but they only consider it a developer product (source : https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linux-platform-1/#comment-18265)
No, they are not the same person. They are two separate people, and it indicates a problem endemic to the project developers.
And 9 years ago was when GNOME 3 was being developed, and apparently, the attitudes haven't changed much. I mean, look at some of the comments from your link:
"Agree.
Gnome OS has to be built as a unified source code platform with all companies work together in cooperation at the same code."
"Gnome really needs to control the full stack, "
If Tobias has spoken to the KDE team, perhaps he already knows there's an app store, and he is purposefully leaving that out?
How so? Tobias hasn't said anything that would indicate that he doesn't know what XFCE is like McCann did, I really don't see what you mean regarding Tobias' apparent ignorance
Woah there, not only is that not Tobias speaking in those quotes but that's a totally different thing than ignorance, it's simply a wish for gnome to try and integrate more of their platform together.
If you mean KDE Discover, no, that's not a store just like GNOME Software is not a store. Both are simple clients that interact with repositories set by the distro or user. Not only that but the article never states the only requirement is a store nor does it even mention KDE. Probably because Tobias wanted to talk about what he was most familiar with and didn't wanna write about all the environments which exist on Linux which only makes the problem talked about in the article even more obvious.
https://hig.kde.org/
I see, that's nice. Do you think that people who work on Qt applications respect this HIG? I mean, from what I can see, there's some guidelines but they're quite loose and vary quite dramatically?
I've personally not found much in common in terms of design and placement between KDE applications, they tend to very much do their own thing how they want but maybe that's my ignorance and lack of exposure to KDE applications speaking.
The only people forced to work and design in respect to this HIG are people paid to do so.
Most apps are not developed by people paid to do so.
I mean, independent gnome application developers do usually follow the HIG, that culture doesn't seem present on KDE is what I meant.
https://kde.org/goals
In 2020 KDE is making consistency one of its main goals.
I hope they succeed. Wonder how they'll try to achieve that and how exactly that will end up looking.
Linux already has an "app store" in form of package managers. They just suck at delivery apps to average end users (ie people who want to install word and don't care about libaio-perl being installed or not).
I mean, package managers are app stores, it's just distros do a poor job of showing them and the application process is not really made easy on someone who knows little and well, differ from distros to distros because they don't offer the same things in most cases which causes issues.
Flathub imo does a pretty good job at marketing itself and making it fairly easy to distribute applications compared to the traditional repositories. Also, the integration in GUIs is fairly good whether we're talking Gnome software or KDE's store application which I can't for the life of me remember the name of.
Sure, there are different solutions favored by different distrobutions, but I don't think that it's that much of a problem with most 'user-focused' distros. I haven't used it in a while, but I know Ubuntu does a great job of making sure that Ubuntu Software Center is visible on a fresh install. And using Discover with KDE-based distros gives users an experience very similar to the Mac App Store. The biggest problem with linux package manager frontends tends to be the package metadata itself; descriptions typically aren't well written and don't have helpful screenshots.
Well, yes they do integrate but the issue is that if a developer actually wants to modify the listing or have a listing that they maintain themselves then they have to do it for every distribution on earth which is... basically impossible, there's no middleman in those cases which can just serve you up to more than one distribution. So, what happens in some cases is that they'll release for only one distribution and the community will try to make it work elsewhere so then they also have to deal with those issues meaning even if you setup for only one distribution, you'll be forced to support most other distributions if you don't want to be despised by the community.
It's why in my opinion the flatpak solution is so good, you ship it there and you're done. You don't even need to use Flathub, make your own repository if you want and it'll still work on all the distributions.
No, they really don't. A RPM and a DEB is really all that is needed. And, neither are very hard to do.
A RPM and a DEB mean nothing at all.
An RPM could be used inside Fedora, OpenSuse or whatever really. A Deb could be used in Debian, Ubuntu Linux Mint, ElementaryOS, etc. The packages only state their dependencies, they do nothing of the versions, of the differences between distros, nothing at all. If you try to use a Deb made for Ubuntu on Debian or vice-versa, you will not have a good time.
If it was that easy, flatpak and snap would've never been thought of. Please don't think people are stupid.
Is use redhat rpms on centos all the time, along with debian debs on ubuntu...
There is also alien that allows use to transform rpms and debs, with pretty good success.
RHEL and Centos are exact copies of each other, that's not a fair showcase. As for the debian debs, do you actually know they were made for debian? .debs can be made for any distribution but I mean, it is possible but you're bound to fall into issues since the packages it expects and those it needs may be different.
Alien is an hit-or-miss tool which suffers from the usual issue of versioning and package name being different in distributions.
I built many of the debs I used, so yes. They were built for debian. And installed them on Ubuntu as well...
Well, that's nice. It's still not something that can be assured to work because of their differences. The binary will expect certain things and if they're not there or different from what it is expecting, it will cause issues.
Say, for example, that the binary expects to be able to use package Xyz version 10.0 and another distribution uses 11.0 which has breaking APIs changes or that 10.0 in a distro is actually using 10.0 + patches that break the API in some ways to fix another problem, it would cause issues. Of course, it could work in some cases depending on what it needs but it's not something that can be easily scaled to include all distributions.
That's why the concept of runtimes in Flatpaks exists, it allows you to have one set of packages that you can reliably use and that will allow your application to run no matter what's on the user's system since it doesn't rely on it.
There's a reason there's no "Linux Platform".
Linux is designed using the bazaar model, and has worked fantastically well. If the author wants a cathedral, they should be looking at any of the BSDs.
There's a huge culture split between the BSD and Linux community for this very reason.
What is being described here as a platform is not about the development method but how integrated the end result is. There is no reason a platform cannot be developed with a bazaar model and is what the article is advocating.
You will never be able to get that tightly integrated in a bazaar model. This is why you've never seen such a thing.
And, having one tightly integrated platform is not a guarantee for success on the desktop. If it were, True OS is already there. I don't see too many people talking about.
If BSD had Linux hardware support it would be the best of both worlds.
I'd hazard if people thought that model was better, it would have better hardware support, but that's just my opinion of the lay of the land.
I think most desktop Linux users are satisfied with their distros. I value stability more than anything, and that’s something BSDs seem to take very seriously.
I would agree that most desktop linux users are quite satisfied with their distros, and how things work (As are BSD desktop users). Which is why this article is just ridiculous on it's face.
The Gnome team wants to enforce on Linux the same uniformity of Apple. Cohesion is not a bad goal in itself, but failing to acknowledge the great difference between a for-profit closed platform and a largely non-profit FOSS enterprise is either ignorant or dishonest. Most Linux distributions and packages are maintained by volunteers. And if you’re not paying for their services you cannot expect them to abide by your idiosyncratic demands.
Agreed, 100%
BSD is designed, and distributed in a Cathedral model. Linux is done using the bazaar model. This is pretty commonly accepted as the main difference between their development process.
It's why you have FreeBSD 11: The entire system was architected together. You don't upgrade bash on FreeBSD, you upgrade FreeBSD, for example.
Yes. GNU as a whole was considered the bazaar model when ESR wrote it, as were the BSD projects.
I think I just said that...
EDIT: Crap, I reversed the original. GNU was considered the cathedral model. My bad /u/bloup, I suck at reading, and writing, apparently.
It's okay that Linux is its own thing, aimed at tech enthusiasts who mostly want to work in terminals. But it's just a reality that, if there should ever be a serious (in terms of market share) Windows and macOS alternative, Linux is our only chance. Nobody can force anybody to make it so but it's just how it is. I can understand excuses that ultimately argue that this isn't Linux' job or any specific distro's job. That is disappointing but fair and realistic. But the frustrating part is that I see people who genuinely are enthusiastic about the prospect of beefing up Linux as an open, mainstream alternative, who maybe even are willing to put in thousands of hours of work into the technical side of that but who get dismissive and defensive when it's pointed out that Linux, as a platform, absolutely sucks.
It's great that an idealistic college student can set up an Ubuntu desktop for their parents and they "totally don't complain" but that's not enough. Linux has the equivalent of a multi-billion-dollar company's work put into it but even the most user friendly distros have an UI that’s wonky as hell and constantly breaks. Drivers are a nightmare. It is expected that, if you want to do anything more complex than open a browser (though sometimes even that!), you have to spend an afternoon reading poor documentation and vague forum posts to get it to work. Support from major hardware and software companies is poor, because of all of the above and more, which is a bit of vicious cycle but these companies have zero incentives to take the first step.
So I think posts like this are an absolutely vital message to anyone still idealistic about Linux making a dent in the PC operating system market. But I can already hear the excuses.
Nice way to reduce anyone who disagrees with what you wrote to a whiny fanboy.
Isn’t it? If a (presumably) technologically inept person can make an operating system work for them without complaint, I’d call that a success. That they need someone more technologically literate to install the OS is irrelevant because that type of person wouldn’t be installing Windows or MacOS on their own either.
Can you give an example? Ubuntu’s (using it as the example here since it’s pretty much the de facto “easy Linux”) DE is straightforward enough for a beginner to navigate. Considering Windows 10’s UI (referring specifically to the systems settings menus) is a cobbled mess of new menus and reskinned inherited menus from 7 I don’t think a perfectly clean UI is even necessary for wide scale adoption. People learn to use whatever’s placed in front of them. That happens to be largely Windows. If Ubuntu came preinstalled on computers, people would use that too, despite its imperfections (which do exist – I certainly don't mean to imply the desktop Linux experience is perfect).
Not sure which distro you’re cherry-picking here, but Firefox comes pre-installed on Ubuntu. You can be surfing the web with literally a single click after the OS is installed.
Agreed, particularly the “vicious cycle” part. It’s important to note, though, that the community of Linux users is great at finding workarounds to make products work on Linux even when hardware and software companies don’t natively support them (see Wine, nouveau, CUPS). Those workarounds generally require a higher degree of technical literacy to use than would be possessed by a standard user, though, which probably contributes to the perception that Linux can only be used by tech enthusiasts. You say you see excuses that “ultimately argue that this isn't Linux' job or any specific distro's job”, but that’s not quite correct: it’s not that it’s not Linux’s responsibility to fix those issues; rather, that it’s not something Linux can do at all. For example, consider TiLP, software written to communicate with Texas Instruments graphing calculators. It replaces the TI link software available for Windows and MacOS. TiLP is honestly pretty bad at managing files on the TI-Nspire line of calculators. It can’t display nested folders in the filesystem (so files can only be transferred to/from the root directory) and it’s also somewhat slower than the official software. The TiLP developers have no way of fixing those issues, though, because the protocol through which the calculator communicates with the computer is proprietary and undocumented. TI could easily fix the issues by releasing either the protocol documentation or the official link software for Linux, but they do neither, because… well, who knows? They just don’t.
On the more positive end of things, Brother releases Linux drivers for their printers which could hardly be easier for users to install, so it’s clearly possible for manufacturers to make their products work for users without forcing people to write obtuse technical workarounds. It’s in consumers’ best interests for manufacturers to use open protocols in their products (even consumers who don’t use Linux), so the solution is really to start holding manufacturers to higher standards.
It has been many years since I've had a driver problem on Linux. In fact, it's a dream compared to MS Windows, honestly.
I've also been using Linux as my workstation OS for just over a decade now. Even for productivity (It was on my primary work laptop until some unfortunate political decisions at my employer). But, now, I run MacOS to be an expensive SSH/NX terminal to my cloud linux server for work.
This actually looks great, I might give it a try!
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm
There is not a "fight for market share", outside of Redhat, Canonical, SuSE and other commercial distro providers.
That is not ever what the Linux community has been about.
That being said, my entire household runs Linux as their OS, and I am the only technical person. And they do everything they need to get done, and I don't field tech support issues anymore since converting them.
My elderly aunt also uses Linux.
98% of the consumer market uses a browser, and an email client. Most don't even use the email client. Most work just fine with just a tablet, even.
What I miss on Linux is a true plug and play workflow. Not much for me, but for my parents and relatives. I don’t push Linux on them because I know they won’t find support were they live. A stable focused distro breaks less than Windows, but they can easily find Windows IT guys anywhere in the world. Macs are definitely superior in that regard.
What plug and play workflow is missing?