> Ubuntu, however, is not playing ball. Canonical has opted to invest in its own packaging format, Snap, which no other distro is adopting natively.
Snap is a lot better then the alternatives. Snap was the only way I was able to install CouchDB on fedora.
We've been talking about The Year of the Linux Desktop for over 30 years. Now it's clearer then ever that such a year is never going to happen. Meanwhile, Linux has become the server OS of choice - and that's not likely to change for a long, long time. Linux has even become the OS of choice for embedded environments as well, so long as your runtime environment isn't too terribly constrained, you don't need hard real time, and human lives won't be lost if something were to go wrong. That's a lot of places where Linux is running. It's just not going to run on many desktops. I take that as a win.
The distro for Linux Newbies is Mint.
I never understood why some people really, really want others to switch to Linux. I don't really care if many people switch to Linux. If anything, a lot of beginner switching to Linux may well make Linux worse for me.
I see a lot of "if you want to convert Windows users, you have to...". I really don't want to convert Windows users. I did not move to Linux to please those who like Windows.
Said differently, if a distro managed to please all Windows users, it most definitely wouldn't please me. I don't see why I should hope for that.
Disagree. It is good for users of all operating systems, if Linux becomes so usable that it threatens Windows. Then Windows has to improve and we have a race to the top.
I disagree with "usability" being one dimension. I disagree with assuming that Windows is the definition of "most usable" and "Linux should move towards Windows to get more usable".
Linux is different. It's great to learn something different. I don't use Linux because I don't want to pay for Windows. I use Linux because I like how Linux is.
The more Windows people join Linux and try to make it look like Windows, the more Linux starts looking like the platform I left 15 years ago.
You are making a philosophy out of it, but I claim that usability is not a philosophy but an objective value. The more usable a tool is, without losing anything else, the higher it's value.
> I claim that usability is not a philosophy but an objective value
Counter-example: many times, what I find more usable is what others find less usable. Unless I'm objectively stupid, usability is subjective.
I hate it when people tell me "Linux should look more like Windows, because Windows is more usable. And if you don't find that Windows is more usable, then you're objectively wrong".
1. It's a moral good (free as in freedom). Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux, which (i++) attracts more users. As a corollary to #1: do you really want Billy G spying on your mom?
2. It's often better for the environment to keep old hardware running (manufacturing emissions usually dwarf operational ones for consumer devices).
And a more personal corollary to #2: I love old hardware and don't want to see it die (and I'm not talking about vintage tech). A 16+ core Haswell Xeon (that riiiing) and Polaris RX 480 (HWS, why yes) remain perfectly useful in the modern world. I like knowing both are out there, somewhere, just chugging away long after they were retired from some server or mining operation.
> Wider Linux adoption makes software more free for everyone and creates a feedback loop: more users means more engineering effort, which improves the many many projects we colloquially call Linux
I don't think it is necessarily true. More users may mean that some platform (say Ubuntu) gets so much traction that the rest becomes irrelevant. I already see "free as in freedom" projects that only support the last two versions of Ubuntu, and couldn't care less about other distros. To the point where they will have hard dependencies on things that only work on Ubuntu and are very difficult to adapt to other distros.
> I love old hardware and don't want to see it die
I have a counter-example with Android. Android/AOSP is pretty good with backward compatibility. It is pretty easy for a developer to compile an app for older devices, the OS totally supports it.
But developers/companies will just happily target newer devices and drop older ones ("98% of our users are on Android "X", let's drop the support for older ones") and tend to test their apps on recent hardware (meaning that a perfectly fine device will still be able to run the app, but it will lag to the point where it is unusable). Happened to me: I had to change my phone because random apps (like banking or weather forecast, I'm not talking high-performance like games here) became unusable. A banking app just shows a few numbers, still they manage to make it lag on a phone from 2020.
Agreed. Some degree of elitism is a force for good. I want Linux to be the programmer's system. Just enough popularity to be relevant and have people actively developing it. Never enough popularity that we have hordes of computer illiterate randoms. Linux should be a system built by programmers and for programmers.
Totally. And even for developers: many developers will happily ship their program as a docker image, just because they can't be arsed to learn how to properly package it.
And that's just one example.
Linux is cool and I want more people to enjoy it.
I see all these people suffering -- pointlessly -- and I want to tell them "come! suffer for a while! In exchange you get low latency, native docker, no ai or bing or other shovelware, being the master of your computer feels great!"
I see a difference between "you should try to learn Linux, you'll see it's cool" and "we should change Linux such that Windows people don't need to learn it".
I agree with a lot of this.
Most people want Windows to be better, not to have to move to Linux. You can't make people convert, especially people that quite frankly might not want to.
People just want the Windows they have been using to be better, they don't want to move away from it and that's perfectly reasonable.
pre installation for at least the last couple of decades, is the reason most users have no clue how to manage installation and configuration.
To be fair though, I don't think it's unreasonable for the "average user" to expect that there are sensible defaults for the things they buy / install.
Obviously, there's a huge difference between something like a car and your OS of choice (specifically noting the 'of choice' part of that when it comes to installing a Linux distribution), but I feel as though the sentiment is roughly the same.
I work with Linux every day at work writing large scale server applications.
However I choose Windows at home. It is just a much better user experience for me.
Also, Ubuntu often break badly when I try to upgrade. So I only do it as a last ditch effort when something breaks and I can't fix it. I never have that issue with Windows. It just works.
Not to mention that my favourite games are Windows only.
> I work with Linux every day at work writing large scale server applications.
> Also, Ubuntu often break badly when I try to upgrade
What distro do you use at work ? Did you tried Debian ?
Upgrading can cause problems also with Windows.
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