Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

Linux as a desktop has come so far, KDE is great for people who prefer the windows-like workflow, and Gnome for people who prefer a mac-like workflow.

(Keyword there is like, for everyone who is about to nitpick)

The dumbest thing is as you said the infighting over the same things.. that and the "This is better because it's harder, and thus I'm better than you because I'm using the harder option". Those need to go away. Like Arch could offer the user a choice at the start.. do a manual install or use arch-install (the guided option).. that would go a long way.. also put the AUR helpers in the main repo... Why i have to manually install Yay every new install... It's beyond me.

Flatpak is amazing, Gnome is amazing, Linux app support now is amazing. Proton is amazing.

Seriously it's just remove the two barriers of entry 1. The "Linux is hard" rhetoric which turns users away 2. The easier install of applications (this is happening with flatpak and other things)

Linux did not proactively foster standards on anything beyond the kernel.

Sure many would shout "not their job!" but here we are in 2022, every disagreement in an obscure chat channel or a forum only 500 people on the planet know exists leads to a new distro, or a fork of a high-profile library, or yet another pre-built KDE/GNOME configuration claiming usability / accessibility and whatnot. Fragmentation abounds, egos are flying around. Feels like a kids club arguing with another kids club about which Transformer toys are the coolest.

Like, come on already. Agree on a common goal and start pursuing it. Moderate aggressively -- if somebody is being a dickhead just boot them out. Done. (Would have saved at least 17 people no less than 10 hours each, judging by several random encounters I witnessed some years ago.)

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Non-exhaustive list:

- We need strong schema for cooperation between tools. A tool like `jc` that strives to parse various UNIX tools outputs and convert them to JSON shouldn't even exist yet I find it indispensable for most of my throwaway scripting or homegrown data-science needs.

- We need less copying between user space and kernel space.

- We need to start moving away from "everyting is a file" and have some standardized SQL-like interface to the OS (or any other query language that makes sense for the task; people will adapt).

- We need less Python scripts being responsible for, well, almost everything. It's collectively embarrassing and makes a ton of distros very brittle (upgrade from 2.7.X to 2.7.Y and hilarity ensues).

- We need to start bundling more things into the OS by default. People love standards and that's the (apparently inconvenient) truth. Endlessly parroting "freedom!" has gotten us nowhere as it's very clearly visible by the state of anything non-kernel related in Linux land.

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A lot of things from the 70s and 80s still make sense today. But some no longer do and we should recognize that and start moving forward because that old way of doing things is actively hampering progress of the entire IT area.

And no I truly don't care if I get automated out of my job as a result. At one point the area has to progress further. We are in an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

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It really does seem that non-kernel Linux work is mostly picked up by very immature people who don't seem to be professional programmers at all.

`jc` is trying to parse some UNIX tools' output and turn it into JSON but that's a hack (though a very useful one).

We shouldn't still be parsing plain text in 2100. Tools must speak a common language.