Re:I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple
by simonh on Friday August 27, 2021 @06:23AM
(#28326069)
That's absolutely fine, I appreciate this view and I don't want my comment above to imply that your take on this is somehow wrong. The fact that desktop linux is this crazy fragmented anarchy of technologies and distros is fine. A lot of people get a lot of value out of it. It's not directly monetisable economic value and that's ok.
The top comment for you right now makes a snipe about hipsterism. Well yes, but that shouldn't be a pejorative. It's great that this ecosystem exists in all it's hipster geekery. It's a hobbyist community serving hobbyist and techno-geek purposes. We need that.
Where the cognitive dissonance comes in is thinking that this has anything whatever to do with mass appeal and serving the needs of ordinary non-technical users. That's a very different and in many ways mutually incompatible objective. What non-technical users need is a radically standardised, easy to use platform with a wide variety of highly compatible software and devices with solid QA, services and support. Only the commercial market has proved capable of providing these at anything like the scale needed because that means paying a lot of people to do these things every day as a job.
This is why mass market Linux projects like OLPC fail. They think 99% of the work has been done by the community already and they just need to package it up and deliver it to users. The problem is making all that work seamlessly and efficiently for users, developing a complete high quality product, delivering and selling it and building services around it is a huge ton of work. It's not 1%, it's more like 50% and you need people doing it day in, day out.
The top comment for you right now makes a snipe about hipsterism. Well yes, but that shouldn't be a pejorative. It's great that this ecosystem exists in all it's hipster geekery. It's a hobbyist community serving hobbyist and techno-geek purposes. We need that.
Where the cognitive dissonance comes in is thinking that this has anything whatever to do with mass appeal and serving the needs of ordinary non-technical users. That's a very different and in many ways mutually incompatible objective. What non-technical users need is a radically standardised, easy to use platform with a wide variety of highly compatible software and devices with solid QA, services and support. Only the commercial market has proved capable of providing these at anything like the scale needed because that means paying a lot of people to do these things every day as a job.
This is why mass market Linux projects like OLPC fail. They think 99% of the work has been done by the community already and they just need to package it up and deliver it to users. The problem is making all that work seamlessly and efficiently for users, developing a complete high quality product, delivering and selling it and building services around it is a huge ton of work. It's not 1%, it's more like 50% and you need people doing it day in, day out.