- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
And Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.
…
That’s why I’d love to see more developers take another look at Linux. Such that they may develop better proficiency in the basic katas of the internet. Such that they aren’t scared to connect a computer to the internet without the cover of a cloud.
Related: Omakub
Lol IT person here, so many developers barely know how to turn there machine on
As a developer, I have met developers that don’t understand file systems. They could write code and not find it. Like wtf?
Not directed at you specifically, but it’s the same with IT and dev people but with security/privacy.
If it came preinstalled it would overtake Windows
This is the answer! Most people will not ever install a new operating system.
What about ChromeOS?
It is Linux, but the machines are low apec and depend on cloud based google stuff for storage etc. Not quite the same as Desktop or powerful laptop
I have never bought the idea that free/libre SW in general is just not as easy, including GNU+Linux. I’ll leave out open source initially, and come back to it later, not because it doesn’t experience the same, but because corporate wide it doesn’t suffer the same fate. And linux itself is one of the most widely used kernel if not the most, it happens similarly to openssl, and so many other open source components. So I see no issue with linux adoption, I can’t think of any kernel more adopted than linux…
To me what has really affected free/libre SW is the monopolistic abuse of the corporations, plus their ambitions, and how in Today’s world, they have created the illusion that being a technologist is the same as being a technology consumer, which gets into the hearts of governments and education systems (more hurting, public education systems). Let me try some practical examples:
- Educations systems translate the need to educate students about technology into making them familiar with MS different SW, like the windows OS, MS outlook, MS office, MS project, MS visio. Even on the higher levels of education, colleges and universities prefer to use matlab over octave for example, even for just matrix operations scripting. Office covers spread sheets BTW, so people specialized on accounting know excel, but no other spread sheet.
- On public education systems, where one would be inclined to think it might get more interest on developing the expertise to not depend on proprietary SW only, it’s where corporate reach deeper offering “cheap” educational licences.
- From the prior two keep in mind that educational licenses from proprietary SW usually means future professional and people depending on proprietary SW in general. They are meant not to educate, but rather generate the future dependent population.
- Governments, whether local or nation wide, instead of adhering to open standards, for any kind of form submission, and even further to adhere to use of free and open source SW, to build the technical and competency expertise required to have a criteria about different technologies, about SW, infrastructure, DBs, and so, they prefer to require citizens to use non free or open source SW to create required forms, and prefer to pay for SW solutions which totally lock in the entire solution, usually coming from big corps, or other companies actually making use of SW and technologies coming from big corps.
- In their effort to discredit free/libre SW, the idea that the fundamental principles behind free/libre SW hurt the SW industry, or that are irrelevant to Today’s world or even worse than that, there were claims that the GPLed kernel was a great threat and GPLed SW a cancer. Now that open source usage has totally overcome free/libre SW, there are no such claims, but the damage is done. There’s nothing wrong with people wanting some compensation from corps, when developing SW, and thus not using free/libre licenses like GPL-3+ or AGPL, but in the end that eventually might hurt the users rights protected by such licenses, which such corps don’t really care that much (their profit has higher priority for sure), and experience shows that just because SW is licensed open source doesn’t guarantee any compensation for the development whatsoever, so if volunteering SW, doing so as open source is not even close to get every developer a decent income out of their contributions. Well, except for the big corps backed SW, linux included, but that’s not the majority of open source SW.
- The discredit of free/libre SW, which allowed the eventual creation of open source, is such that the banning of individuals ends up being an attack to the organizations behind it and even their principles and motivation.
- Moving away from the free/libre SW observations, even now with open source, from the big corps, which barely compensate the open source developers, complain about the open source supply chain, campaigning against not well maintained SW and such, there’s the famous image of a complex and heavy structure depending on a weak and deficient leg. Whatever truth around that figure, it of course hides the overall picture of the developer of such leg not ever being compensated (not to mention paid) for his library or SW component, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons the project got even abandoned, but now it’s easy to blame such situation when talking about FOSS in general.
Paid SW might be more intuitive to use at times, I can understand that. There are paid developers making the UIs more intuitive and attractive, in the end it needs to be bought or massively consumed to get earning through its use. But if you look deeper, perhaps it’s not just that free/libre or open alternatives are non intuitive at all, perhaps people gets used to that UI when attending basic or high school, or college/university. Perhaps even when exposed to mobile devices even when they can barely walk. Everything else, different in nature, will look alien to the future “technologists”…
On a sad (lacking hope) note, I don’t think there’s any indicator of things changing. My only hope is changes in educational systems, which are nowhere happening, and not the parents, as mentioned they are already convinced that using google, ms, apple, oracle or whatever prepare their kids for the future and will make them the technologists of the future.
On a funny note, I would answer the motivating question with: Linux is so good that it’s actually most probably the most used kernel world wide, :)
Ok but why my graphics driver act up?
If talking about non proprietary kernels’ drivers, such as linux, then again, profit is what regulates it. No wonder why now nvidia finally cares about linux, being the most used kernels behind the cloud, behind servers of whatever. Meaning, it’s not profitable not to support linux now a days for Nvidia.
The other fundamental factor is lock-in, which is abused by some big corps, such as MS.
But the profit idea es even wrong, but it’s what we have been educated with. For an OEM, providing FOSS drivers or FOSS FW doesn’t mean to have less profit, but somehow it’s interpreted as such. And there’s also our culture, backed by corps again, that tends to make us believe that everything profitable enough has to be corporate secret, and if not, others would take advantage of you business. That way of thinking really prevents for more FOSS adoption at the OEMs level. I don’t agree with it. It might be the presence or lack of some HW features might be inferred by the drivers/FW, but it doesn’t mean your competitors will know how exactly you provide such feature, and even less how to make it with the performance you do. And usually once released, you really want to show off your features, your innovation and so on, not keep it secret. So in general, really see no issue for OEMs not to offer drivers and FW as FOSS, even as free/libre SW.
I can imagine OEMs offering FOSS drivers and FW, but that not being as convenient for the major players in the market, since that would risk their position in the market. Just a thought…
Remember the lock-in mechanisms by the corps that feel being threatened if open sourcing dirvers… Some of which no longer say it out loud, but still think GPLed licences are a cancer…
On Windows or Linux?
Hey just so you know in many people’s minds SW doesn’t stand for software.
Sorry about that. I was not aware of other meanings. I’ll try to remember to use the complete “software” word instead of its acronym I was used to since the 90s… Hopefully under the context what I wrote doesn’t get misinterpreted. Thanks !
There’s some really high quality GNU software, like LibreOffice. Though, recently, when searching for a git client, I found it funny that some of the most frequently recommended git clients for Linux are proprietary, (GitKraken, Sublime) and that I couldn’t find a GNU version that works as well as it’s Windows counterpart.
I’m also not convinced the GNU license held up fully to it’s promises, Android is also open source but took 50% of the mobile market. (And companies like Amazon [outside of Google] have used it for their own devices, like the Kindle)
That’s why I’d love to see more developers take another look at Linux.
I’d love to see more developers taking a look at writing portable cross-platform code.
Super easy to do nowadays, everything I write is cross platform just by virtue of every programming language I use being that way provided I’m somewhat mindful about it
every programming language I use being that way
Are there interpreted languages?
Python is the gold standard for cross platform interpreted languages
If what you meant was are they all interpreted, no C# rust and python are the main 3 I use rn and are all cross platform
It’s because they’d have to install it to use it. I put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME over a year ago and there hasn’t been a single Linux-related issue since. Most people use their computers as Facebook and YouTube machines and Linux doesn’t make that any harder than Windows/MacOS. It’s not like it’s 2010 where you’d need to install some desktop app that doesn’t have a Linux version and you’d have to fuck around with WINE, which was a massive pain in the ass and often buggy even if it did work. Now in 2024, those apps are in the browser (barring more niche use-cases) and we have access to Firefox and Chrome like everyone else. If Linux shipped on most pre-builts, then I think the average person would be fine.
Because people are not willing to do more than the bare minimum for most things.
totally honest, I had MUCH more trouble with windows AND Mac.
First off, Linux is so easy to install, while Macos and windows have all that unnecessary stuff, like iCloud and one drive (don’t even get me started on one drive, its awful, nobody wants to use it, and where do you disable it? and why did it enable itself again?) Then theres the thing where you can’t install anything on Mac without having to change about 500 permissions. And the main reason why I switched, customization. Windows has none of that, you can change the color and that’s it. even the cursors often get reset when you restart. Macos is even worse in this regard though.
I think the main reason, why people don’t switch is because our generation of teenagers is lazy, or they’ve always been, I don’t know.
I know from friends, that they just don’t care about privacy or functionality and think I’m a conspiracy theorist. And generally they make fun of everything I say regarding this topic and don’t take it serious AT ALL.
When using Windows, I occasionally encounter this weird phenomena that I never experience using any other type of OS, whereby it generates a problem that’s so stupid on such a fundamental level that there’s no way to really work around it.
Like when I recently tried out Windows 11, I made a manual restore point in case it fucked itself up doing a big update. Which it did, and then when I tried to restore it I found out that it only keeps one restore point, and that after it broke itself doing the update it overwrote my manual restore point with its own automatic restore point, ensuring that the fuckup it just did was the only thing to restore to. I tried restoring it anyway to see what would happen, and it said it couldn’t do it but didn’t explain why.
Like when an allegedly modern OS so utterly misses the point of both system restore and basic error messages, I don’t know what to do with it really.
Windows is not difficult to install, it’s just tedious and full of anti privacy options most people don’t care about
Also don’t think 90% of people will ever install an operating system in the first place anyway
Teenagers are not lazy and are definitely installing it have you seen the hyprland discord
have not, have only seen dozens of actual teenagers in real life.
I’ve seen maybe 4 people using Linux in real life and 2 of them are friends/family
If you’re in any of the Linux related discords for long enough to pick up on it you’ll realize there are a lot of kids there
the only people I know, that “use” Linux, are those Instagram hackerman type of persons.
Pretty sure a lot of the people here are deathly allergic to anything meta. I know a couple people irl who just get on and use it also
DHH saying something not ridiculous? What is today, April Fools Day!?!?
After some encouragement, I’ve been making an effort to switch much of my computing over to Fedora (at least, on weekends until it’s got everything I need on it).
My (Framework) laptop fully supports the OS, and even booting it up on an external SSD has been easy, and it works fast and smooth.
But, it’s absolutely not as easy to settle into compared to windows.
With Windows, the only “tweaks” that a user might make is installing a different browser, but everything else will work as it should.
Power Windows users will spend more time removing bloat and ads, I won’t deny that!
But on Fedora, I had to scour the internet to find out how to get a minimize and maximize button on a window (had to install another utility, then an extension…). Then I had to do the same to move things down to a dock.
Annoying, but it wasn’t a huge deal. These small add-on, tweaks, and personalization options all require that you know where to look and how to actually apply these fixes. Thank god I didn’t have to fuss around with device drivers.
Then, as I happily watched the Para Olympics while multitasking, my screen just went black. No warning, no way to recover it. Hitting my laptop’s power button throws up a series of errors and !!! “FAILED TO EXECUTE SHUTDOWN BINARY”.
If this is the equivalent to a BSOD on Windows, then it would be my first BSOD in many, many years.
Now I need to figure out how to get some Windows-only software to run, if that’s even possible, which adds another layer of time and aggravation.
If I were a novice computer user, I wouldn’t even bother with any of this and just stick to Windows. Hell, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with any of it!
But I’ll see how long I can ride this out, and perhaps I’ll be a full-time Linux user some day.
I want to point out that the changes you are talking about, minimize/maximize buttons and docks, are actually big changes to the workflow of a desktop environment. How hard would it be to remove those buttons and the standard dock on windows? Harder than it is with gnome I think. Gnome isn’t windows and it’s used differently from windows. It shouldn’t be expected to accommodate windows’s workflow.
That is a fair point. I don’t expect every feature to match 1:1. But minimize and maximize window seems to be a no-brainer for basic use. At least, how I use floating windows.
But… I’m glad that there are options to bring those features (and more) back if someone chooses.
The working out analogy is great, everyone with a technical job involving computers probably should keep a Linux machine, switching to it has skyrocketed my knowledge on computers in general
It’s difficult though, I would compare daily driving it with cycling into work instead of driving, it’s fun and good for you but constant effort
Because they prefer to use something else.
Why don’t more distro use LibreSSL? Why don’t more distro use mandoc? Why don’t more distro use clang?
Linux sucks
I’ll let myself out
Watch out, using the door requires you to be in wheel group
On desktop, Linux isn’t the best choice.
People use Linux where it’s the best, servers!
Hardware and software Compatibility . Which in Linux mostly relies in free collaboration work and cannot match what money can move.