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What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

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Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#301

Post by marvy »

scholia wrote: post #289
shmerl wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this is a poor excuse for perpetuating monopoly, which should be simply illegal.

What, like the Android monopoly, the Google monopoly, the Facebook monopoly, and so on? Please look up power laws... Microsoft won the market fair and square (against an even more evil and much larger monopolist), and Linux has been built on the market created by Microsoft's de facto standards and the economies of scale that Windows has generated.

Did you read the article I linked to? It wasn't fair and square. MS gave the PC makers a discount with strings attached: don't sell PCs that can dual-boot into another OS. I think you can agree this is pretty anti-competitive behavior.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#302

Post by vanderZwan »

dorfsmay wrote: post #208
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people were happy with Windows XP in 2003, why change it and install Linux? We deviated from what was good enough 15 years ago! Let's put XP back on the clients and Solaris back on the servers! /s When I started using Linux, it was about thinking out of the box and about change. It had many exciting window managers that put everything in Windows to shame when it came to customizing and style. Nowadays I have the f…

I'd use OSX if it could do focus follow mouse and had a trackpoint.

> focus follow mouse

For Windows there is Taekwindow, at least:

http://taekwindow.net/

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#303

Post by scholia »

marvy wrote: post #301
scholia wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, like the Android monopoly, the Google monopoly, the Facebook monopoly, and so on? Please look up power laws... Microsoft won the market fair and square (against an even more evil and much larger monopolist), and Linux has been built on the market created by Microsoft's de facto standards and the economies of scale that Windows has generated.

Did you read the article I linked to? It wasn't fair and square. MS gave the PC makers a discount with strings attached: don't sell PCs that can dual-boot into another OS. I think you can agree this is pretty anti-competitive behavior.

No, I certainly don't agree with that. Anybody can dual boot their PC, if they install the second OS themselves. Apple took exactly the same view of BeOS, which had failed to sell BeBoxes.

All discounts have strings attached. You either want the deal or you don't.

"Anti-competitive" in this case simply means "not giving the competition a free ride".

Companies tried to sell Linux and Unix PCs in competition with Windows, and they failed. Some went out of business. IBM tried to sell OS/2 systems and failed -- it ended up paying to have OS/2 taken off its PCs and Windows installed, even though OS/2 ran Windows. Apple ended up getting bailed out by Microsoft just to keep it alive.

You can lie to yourself for as long as you like, but it would be better to face the fact that people wanted Windows, and they didn't want the alternatives available at the time.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#304

Post by scholia »

marvy wrote: post #299
scholia wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1990s called, they want their anti-Microsoft bigotry back.

But this hasn't changed since the 90s, has it?

One of the conditions imposed by the US Justice Department in the anti-trust settlement was that Microsoft was prevented from doing separate deals with all the main manufacturers. That was probably in place for a dozen years. Did you see what a difference it made?

You didn't, so I'll tell you: it pushed up the average price of Windows and made Microsoft more profitable.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#305

Post by kasabali »

madiathomas wrote: post #205

I have just installed Fedora Linux 25. So far so good. Only thing stopping me from switching completely to Linux is MS Office. If Microsoft can create a Linux version of Office, I am switching completely. Until then, I will keep on going back to Windows whenever I want to compile documents. I have lots of Office documents. Alternatives are just awful. If focus of the open source community can be diverted to making Li…

Office 2010 works fine in Wine (and so does 2013 in latest wine release I heard). Just give it a try, I'm sure it is better than 2 reboots.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#306

Post by kasabali »

aidenn0 wrote: post #63
wolfgke wrote: post #7

Quote from article: "The attitude of our community was one of engineering excellence: we do not want deprecated code in our source trees, we do not want to keep broken designs around, we want pure and beautiful designs and we want to eliminate all traces of bad or poorly implemented ideas from our source code trees. And we did. We deprecated APIs, because there was a better way." The Linux kernel only removes/changes…

The linux kernel is hard-core into not breaking backwards compatibility. 2/3 of Linus's rants targeting a kernel developer tend to be because they broke userspace. On the other hand, there is approximately zero chance that a dynamically linked executable from 10 years ago will run on my current system because the system libraries break backwards compatibility all the time. Drepper takes a lot of flak for this, but gl…

> Drepper takes a lot of flak for this, but glibc is not even remotely the only library at fault for this.

The reason Drepper takes a lot of flak for this is not because glibc constantly breaks ABI compatibility but because he set tone of dynamic linking discussions back in the day and he is responsible for static-linking-aversiness of glibc & GNU toolchain and pure dynamic linking culture of mainstream linux distributions.

I agree with all of you've said, though.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#307

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

dang wrote: post #298
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like these really make me believe that it is people like you who are killing the Linux desktop. Of all the window managers and desktop environments I have tried the last years on Linux, Unity, Gnome3, and Cinnamon are the only ones that don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003. Those others might be enough for those people who have stopped adapting and like to be left alone under their rock, bu…

> people like you You cross into incivility when you do that, so please don't do that. I'm sure you can make your point principled instead of personal.

Sorry, I will keep that in mind.
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