Why Mark Shuttleworth is important to desktop Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Mark Shuttleworth is important to desktop Linux

#81

Post by muyuu » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:57 PM UTC

Raphael wrote: post #71

muyuu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud Mark Shuttleworth and his vision. Sadly we're missing "something else" other than Mark Shuttleworth. What he does, is what most others are doing in a half-hearted, compromised way: providing a "packaged" system that works without much hassle and which is based in pretty much the same interaction principles of the 70s and 80s. Being Open Source, Linux could do a lot more than that. But nobody explores these…

I am fascinated with the idea of customizable window managers. I haven't delved that deep, but the difference between XFCE and Unity is night and day. I can choose color schemes, window decorations, and make custom task bars. This should be table stakes for graphical interfaces.

Have you checked Enlightenment lately? it's a decent shot but they seem short on workforce.

Also http://awesome.naquadah.org/ and https://code.google.com/p/wmii/

And that's just windows management which is probably the most obvious advantage of an all-open approach, but there are other things like user programmed priority systems, memory management etc which could potentially do a much more effective usage of the hardware than the standard monolithic opaque approach.

Re: Why Mark Shuttleworth is important to desktop Linux

#82

Post by phaemon » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 11:14 PM UTC

scholia wrote: post #72

phaemon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and this right here...is the reason that Linux has always been consigned to the ranks of the also-rans on the desktop. Someone will always come up with a reason why flavour x is better than flavour y. No it isn't. The number of people who don't use Linux on their desktop, simply because someone else commented on a forum that they preferred one distribution over another, is utterly negligible. In fact, the theory is…

But it does impact companies that might otherwise try pre-installing Linux. Whichever distro they pick, they lose 100% of the Windows market plus the 97%* of the Linux market who bitch about not getting their fave version. * Made up number but I remember Acer shipping netbooks with Linpus Lite...

No, it does not impact companies that might pre-install Linux, unless they perform their market research by picking random anecdotes from web forums.

They lose exactly 0% of Windows market by offering another option in Operating System (in fact, I tend to avoid hardware that only does Windows as it tends to be crap, so it might actually be a gain).

If you remember people bitching about Linpus Lite because it wasn't people's favourite distro, you remember wrong.

Re: Why Mark Shuttleworth is important to desktop Linux

#83

Post by scholia » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 2:31 PM UTC

phaemon wrote: post #82

scholia wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it does impact companies that might otherwise try pre-installing Linux. Whichever distro they pick, they lose 100% of the Windows market plus the 97%* of the Linux market who bitch about not getting their fave version. * Made up number but I remember Acer shipping netbooks with Linpus Lite...

No, it does not impact companies that might pre-install Linux, unless they perform their market research by picking random anecdotes from web forums. They lose exactly 0% of Windows market by offering another option in Operating System (in fact, I tend to avoid hardware that only does Windows as it tends to be crap, so it might actually be a gain). If you remember people bitching about Linpus Lite because it wasn't p…

Actually, it does, and I know this from talking to their senior managers.

Otherwise (1) you're being illogical and (2) my memory is accurate.