401–410 of 454 posts
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Not at all. I very much prefer vanilla Ubuntu front end of my personal laptop to MS Windows. I am still on Win 7 on my work laptop so it is tolerable but I'm definitely going Mac instead of Win 10 abomination next upgrade.
Don't forget to get a keyboard and screen insurance on top of the premium price.
Suddenly it's bad to charge a premium?
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> Linux desktop efforts never managed to get a coherent vision, as every 3-4 years somebody had the idea to remake everything and screw compatibility That's not why Linux Desktop never got traction. Linux on Server got traction because thousands of companies all around the world managed to profit from it. A whole ecosystem was created. When Linux on Desktop was born, Microsoft's platform was already an ecosystem all…
> That's not why Linux Desktop never got traction. When Linux on Desktop was born, Microsoft's platform was already an ecosystem all around the world. Hundreds of thousands of companies had developed applications for MS-DOS and were invested in Microsoft's ecosystem and users had already learnt the paradigms. Clients were already locked-in on Windows. That didn't prevent OS X, from a near bankrupt company in 1998-99…
Oh my friend you're under-selling Apple.
Apple, the most profitable company in the world, didn't get more than 10-15% of the market share. They didn't break any API's either. And they created their own hardware.
> It's not even close. MS still supports running even Win95 apps to this day, whatever they used an "abandoned API", so that's a moot point though. Old VB apps still run fine, etc.
Linux supports that too. You can still have a KDE1 app running on your Desktop.
Nobody has the incentive to do that. But it's pretty doable technically. Just like it's possible to run a Visual Basic app on Windows.
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> That's not why Linux Desktop never got traction. When Linux on Desktop was born, Microsoft's platform was already an ecosystem all around the world. Hundreds of thousands of companies had developed applications for MS-DOS and were invested in Microsoft's ecosystem and users had already learnt the paradigms. Clients were already locked-in on Windows. That didn't prevent OS X, from a near bankrupt company in 1998-99…
> That didn't prevent OS X, from a near bankrupt company in 1998-99 with ~2% of PCs in the US, to get to ~10-15% in the same timespan. And that while still introducing a whole new OS in 2000, and changing CPU architecture in 2005. Oh my friend you're under-selling Apple. Apple, the most profitable company in the world, didn't get more than 10-15% of the market share. They didn't break any API's either. And they creat…
Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improba...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan...
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I’m sorry but I disagree, Cinnamon on Fedora is as good a desktop GUI in its day as win2k was in its and imo considerably better than win10 and I started on DOS3.22 so I’ve used them all even ME. It’s fast, stable, well laid out and very easy to configure. It also plays well with both gtk and qt apps. It took a long time but Linux did catch up it’s just by the time it did desktops are less relevant to average people.
> It’s fast, stable, well laid out and very easy to configure. Only if your chance on a "good" compatible laptop. Else all bets are off. The BT/wifi might not work, the video drivers might be problematic, the laptop might not sleep when you close the lid, the fans might blare all the time, and so on. And even at that, it changes from release to release, whatever the fancy of e.g. Gnome devs strikes them for a non-com…
While I'm sure people have the problems you describe I haven't had them on laptops in the last decade at least, everything has pretty much worked out the box (except Nvidia which works but requires a kicking sadly).
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You'd need to have some damn clever and hard to copy idea to have any competitive edge. When Google and Amazon are not making their own specialized hardware (good luck implementing your own TrueTime or TPU or competing with them with ML or DB products built on off-the-shelf stuff) they get custom made chips at prices you can't by Intel et al and have things like a very sophisticated SDN backed by a private global phy…
All the things you list are not a part of the moat to compete with the big providers. They are barriers to becoming as large as them. But 10,000 smaller hosting companies could easily start to cut in on their long tail customers. Most any mid size hosting company could handle the traffic and compute of 95% of companies out there.
What's gonna be more useful CV and CYA wise? Who's ever been fired for choosing AWS? How is being expert in going to advance my career? Where do I hire people who know about ? How would I even realistically learn that might be a good fit for my needs?
The downside of this is that OSS can only be produced by people who have a sufficient degree of financial security. No matter how useful a given piece of OSS is, if the creator is not financially secure they're required to either beg for money, or beg for a job. Isn't it odd that a piece of software, could be widely deployed, forked, starred on Github etc. etc. and yet with all this infrastructure there is no mechani…
It would certainly be interesting to have some form of voluntary micropayments integrated with GitHub. Or, say, bounties for issues and feature requests, where multiple visitors can add their 2c into a shared pot (although that requires moderation to verify the result).
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I've been building & running a niche website since 2015 that requires around 20hrs/wk in support, social media, and continued software development (all code gpl on github). It's become one of the most (if not the most) used software resources in my community, and users seem appreciative of my efforts. But I very rarely get donations. Previous appeals on social media for donations have resulted in small bumps that qui…
One issue I thought of, if you're going to pull yourself away anyway, is to just put up a banner saying essentially: "This app requires community sponsorship and we're trying to raise $20k in April 2019 or there will be no new releases and we will close the project." One way to look at it is that if people can't pay or won't pay then they don't deserve it or they don't care.
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That distinction seems like a bit of a nitpick.
Say it to all my friends that make art and don't want to sell it. Their hunger is very real.
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You mean when it goes from .001% of the population to .002% of the population? I don't think there will be any time that a large fraction of the world's population knows how to program. I've even tried to get my own kids interested in learning how to program to no avail. Some of my kids don't have the aptitude for it, but those who do have the aptitude just aren't interested.
Think about how many people know how to use SQL or Excel functions. While the number of people knowledgable about writing C++ or Java won't reach this high of a level, there will be tools that are widely understood that enable people to build pieces of technology as needed beyond what is available now.