Slashdot Mirror
How Not To Sell Linux Products
An anonymous reader writes "Roblimo looks at why so many Linux products fail in the marketplace, and decides it's not because Linux users want everything free, but because most products they're asked to buy are either poorly marketed or don't work well. He has some good advice for anyone trying to sell stuff to Linux users, except it really applies to *all* computer products, not just Linux." (NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.)
It's so true! All the linux products I know of (and I don't know of many.. hence the marketing problems) are all targeted at the geek community.
This is not a very large market, and we're the pickiest of users, mostly because each of us thinks we can do it better.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
"because most products they're asked to buy are either poorly marketed or don't work well"
Christ, that's usually why ANY product fails.
Is a lame product like Walmart's Linux PC it?
Or is TiVo it?
Linux products are all over the place, usually concealing the fact that they are based on Linux. Just because Linux and its standard UI are not popular in consumer devices doesn't mean that Linux itself is not used and the products based on it aren't successful.
I have been pwned because my
....his experiences are common to *most* products sold, regardless of underlying OS. The thing that is specific to Linux/geek is that we see no docs and poor installation setups as a fun challenge and brag about it when we conquer it.
....because no apps have ever sold well for linux, as it holds a tiny share of the desktop, there is no incentive to make the apps of the highest quality.
One thing that may change this...I wonder how different OS-X applications are from gnome/KDE apps. Certainly if the vendor uses Qt there is not much difference, but what about using the native toolkits?
The reason I ask is...so many multimedia apps are being ported to OS-X, and Mac users (especially multimedia types) demand stability and dependability.
As more windows apps are ported to OS-X, many by vendors who swore they would never port to unix or linux, is there any chance of these high end apps migrating the extra step to Linux?
Yeah, I'm definitely with the author in saying that companies think they are doing you a favor by porting their software to Linux. I think that people could easily fall into this in the past, but not so today. I guess the free programs are just too good. The payware programs have to not only meet the challenge, but will have to receive rave reviews (like here on slashdot) before people will buy it. I guess that's how I am. Maybe that's why Codeweavers is successful.
One thing I learnt from working (as opposed to freelancing) is that you need to take into account business value of a product, otherwise it is next to useless.
Most self-inspired products are too heavily biased towards technology, but not enough in the business sense.
I'm curently researching this spam filter, it may sound like a good idea, maybe it even works, but I have yet to see a business sense in it, i.e. how to market it, brand it and add value to the users. Please note that by business sense, it doesn't necessarily mean profit, but a sense for users to actually use it.
I guess what I am trying to say is, most geek-based products are developed based on the developers' vision of the world, but they hardly have a chance to meet up with potential project sponsors, and consumers (focus groups) who are really the persons to tell what should be developed.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I use Linux and don't believe everything should be free, I believe the best way to make money off of Linux is to blend both closed source and open source products kind of like Apple does with OS X(the GUI is proprietary but the core of the OS is open sourced). If someone made a really killer X implementation and a good GUI even if it was closed sourced I think it would sell. Linux operating systems are not real moneymakers, the applications that run on top of it and the Linux support services is where the real money can be made.
Hell, you can't even get a lot of linux users to buy a commercial distro, much less any software that runs on it. This isn't flamebait, this is the sad, cold truth. Note I didn't say all, but wayyyyy too many.
At work I'm doing an embedded linux system. I've got a nice little board which has an XScale processor and some other goodies. It's my job to program it to do various things. The embedded linux system that came pre-installed is taking up too much room. I need a cross-compiler so I can build a new kernel and new system for it.
So I take the dev kit cd that came with it and try to install it by following the directions included. No go. It wants an LSB distro and I use gentoo. I hack the perl install scripts, still no dice. Apparently the install disc has rpms debs and tars. And it installs by converting them all to one of the 3. So if you use debian the install scripts converts the tgz and the rpm to deb then isntalls them. Too bad the conversion program doesn't work. Their tech support didn't help much either.
What did I do? I went online and searched for arm linux. Got arm-linux-gcc from an ftp and patched up the 2.4.25 kernel. When its easier for me to do things myself for free than to use your product what am I paying for besides the hardware? Technically I paid for that support and that software and I got jack. Just too many free and non-free linux things do not work. Sure, there is plenty of commercial software that doesn't work. The odd game here and there and such. But if the company behind it isn't fake you can bet that it is going to work sooner or later. With linux stuff sometimes you just don't know.
This is the opinion of a gentoo user, so I'm not bashing linux as a whole. I'm just saying that if you're going to make something, make it work. Just because a geek is going to use it doesn't mean they want to have to go through more effort to make it go. They just want to go through a little effort to make it go better.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I don't know. After all these years there are too many distributions of linux wearing the OS too thin.
The penguin has been a good symbol, but how the hell are you supposed to use one symbol to market for 40 distributions? You can't. The only thing that came close IMHO was the redhat symbol. Suse and debian are great distros, but it's marketed like a good singer than a superstar. Christ, SCO has done more marketing for linux in general than any distro.
t's hard to say: Are the free programmers gifted coders, or are the commercial coders just REALLY bad ..?
First, lets ignore the fact that there is not a clear disctinction between free and commercial programmers. Much of the free work is done as charity by commercial developers donating their time or organizations donating their commercial developers.
Free programmers gifted? No more, no less than any others. What they are is free. Not "free" as in speech, not "free" as in beer, but "free" as in not answerable to anyone else. No boss screaming about deadlines, no my company is screwed if we don't ship by this date, etc. They are free to take whatever time they need, their customers have no financial control over them. Ironically this control often leads to rushed jobs and lower quality.
I'll emphasize
A N D
the dopey stuff of Basics:
Installation Testing
Feature Testing
Usage Testing
If you can't install it striaght off, and start working (either straight away or doing the tutorials... and YOU DO HAVE TUTORIALS... DON'T YOU?) right then and there, you've just blown thousands of man hours as thousands of users bblow their time trying to puzzle out your spaghetti code - and it doesn't matter if it's running in Linux, Windoze, or OSx or whatever. Either it works straight up or it doesn't.
The problem is, WAY too many shops see QA as a an after thought if it is thought of at all, and given the geek-centered history of Linux, it is (sadly) far too common in Linus ware.
One of the main differences between really stunning software and crapware is that the stunning software has a crack QA team running a tight shop with the engineers, and the engineers accept and respect the opinions and findings of QA, just as QA knows the exigencies and limitations of the coders. The crapware has zero QA or the QA consists of the programmers doing basic unit testing, which is too often close too useless due to external dependencies and doesn't address anytihng about UI design...
I did blackbox QA for a very long time, (and still occassionaly do with a good offer) and I have Zero Patience for software that isn't properly tested. Unfortunately, it seems that blackbox is striaght up ignored or sent to India for "chimp testing" (blackbox done to testcases and matrices only) or automated versions thereof, is never brought into the specification process, and in the meantime, it's all gone to whitebox or greybox - which rarely addresses more obvious and critical issues that question basic assumptions in a program, as the lead programmers are too often thin skinned, under served in the social skills dept, and overly identified with the project.
And it has nothing to do with Linux: but the workers in Linux too often have a variable sense of what is an appropriate amount of effort a user should put forth in using a given application or system.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
And why does a soccer mom want Office when she gets Works for free? What soccer mom needs Excel? Or Powerpoint? And even if she did, OO has a Windows version. lol. Come on, let's put our thinking caps on people!
The retail marketing of Linux and Linux applications sucks. Of course, all the naysayers are going to declare the retail marketplace dead, but for the general public it's still an important venue.
Walk into any store that carries Linux products. You see some out of date distros. Then you see some new RedDrakE boxes. But what's the difference between the purple Enterprise, magenta Professional and red Desktop editions? There's also FreeOffice in two different packagings, one seemingly generic for a variety of operating systems, and one specifically for RedDrakE which is more expensive. Then you see a copy of FubarOffice 2004, packaged in a tiny DVD box. What the fsck is that? Obviously it's not big enough to have included a manual. Along side it you see FubarPaint and FubarPro. To add to the confusion, there will be the obligatory "UltraLinux Toolkit" containing nine CDs of nine obsolete distros.
And not to pick on Linux, but if you look closely enough, there will be a FreeBSD and NetBSD, each with two different packagings from two different distributors, but containing the same software version.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Forget marketing, it is the install/config process that makes Linux products hard to sell. Let's face it, Linux assumes that a reasonably skilled sysadmin is sitting at the controls. Windows assumes that the sysadmin can be relied upon to click "Yes", "Next", "OK", and "Finish".
Package installers go only so far. Progress has been made regarding dependencies and cascading installations, but I see room for improvement. I find many products still require the "./configure ; make ; make install" method.
The people who write the code are hard-pressed to consider every possible Linux distro or hardware/software environment. Poor documentation doesn't help. We get away with it on the server side, but this will not work with embedded systems or desktops, where you don't have a sysadmin ready to hack the install. If I am buying a product, I expect the install to be smooth and trouble-free. If I have to sit and hack, I might as well stick with free stuff or write it myself.
Don't get me wrong, Linux products are great, once they are installed. Proprietary products are easy to install, but it's all downhill from there.
Will Linux ever get past the 'figure it out yourself you l00ser syndrome'. I use Windows products precisely because I don't have to 'read the fucking manual'. (RTFM) Micro$oft based products generally work intuitively, most Linux products don't. It was only because Red Hat 5.1 installed in an understandable manner that I took up Linux at all after buying serveral distros over a period of a few years. Now I make a living on the Red Hat Linux platform, but I still use Photoshop and Illustrator on my other PC's. Not much has changed in 7 years.
"LIVE GNU OR DIE."
Ok, die then. You obviously have no intention of living GNU. GNU is about free like speech should be, not free like people wish beer was. Yes, there are free beer versions of most open source software. However, these mostly come from pay software: Linux (Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, et. al. are all pay software primarily); ReiserFS (Hans collects enough from support and alternate licensing to live reasonably); MySQL; etc.
Promoting a refusal to pay for software has nothing to do with GNU or open source. Read http://www.tlug.jp/docs/rms.html to see Stallman take to task someone talking like you. The issue is not to get software without paying for it. The issue is to be free to modify the software afterwards. You can get binaries without paying for them, both legally (freeware) and illegally (warez). However, they will never be free software in the GNU sense of the word, as they are unmodifiable.
Living GNU means refusing to use software that you can't modify and redistribute. Refusing to pay for it? You are just leeching off the system. Money is the contribution of those who can't code. Money is also the way that those who can't code can influence development. Thus, paying for software makes it more inclusive by including non-coders in the process.
Rest assured they're both being worked on concurrently. They actually play off each other. While it currently works (imho), it can be much better and is being developed to be much better.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Perhaps there are many outfits out there run by geeks with big egos? They believe that they are center of the world and think that anyone who can't install/use their functionally perfect software don't deserve to use computers in the first place.
The cold hard fact is that many average comsumers have problems installing even simple Windows programs and they are the majority, not us geeks.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
"What really stimies me is the difficulty in getting USB devices to work (uncommonly used things like Palm Pilots...) and the general difficulty in either updating or adding new programs to the system once installed.
Want to make Linux sell better? Stop developing the latest/greatest KDE, and start working on fixing these areas. Once fixed (and idiot proofed), you will have a distro that costs $50 instead of $39, but the added cost will be worth it."
Amen man. I would much rather go to my Linux desktop of 3 years ago, without all the bling bling eye candy and CPU guzzling...If only I could get todays (or hell even yesterdays) hardware working. I know that the hardware makers don't always help out very much...But it sucks not to be able to Sync my USB Palm (very well) or use my Hauppage USB PVR (at all) in Linux, don't even get me started on my 802.11G cards that may be working sometime when my kids go to college in 15 years and 802.11G is irrelevent.
Heck -- I would even go back to TWM if the hardware would just work.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
>>And why does a soccer mom want Office when she gets Works for free?
perhaps soccer mom is real estate agent or involved in some other business, and her clients or business associates are trading word and excel docs. Open Office would cut it, Microsoft Works would not.
>> STOP MENTIONING BLUE SCREENS! DUDES! That's so old!
why? they still happen. maybe not to you, but to others yes. and sure while your infamous bsod is rarer in xp, there's another phenomenon I've seen...that didn't used to happen with NT or 2k, and that's a "spontaneous abrupt reboot", that forces a file check.
>>And even if she did, OO has a Windows version. lol.
we're talking potential here. no one said linux is ready to be the perfect desktop TODAY.
what were talking about is what linux _can_be_.
Open Office on XP only solves a small fraction of the problems for your soccer mom. I know, I constantly fix systems for them.
After you install OO you think you are done? What are you gonna do about the spyware, adware, viruses, trojans, keyloggers, drive by installs, and software updates?
It's to the point that your average person has been so inundated with wizards, pop-ups, configuration prompts, etc...many are on the brink of defeat. They have no clue what the constant barrage means or whether it's a legit system prompt or not.
hence the user choking their pc to death with crapware. and poor configuration.
with all the variations in distros, i wouldn't be surprised to see a soccer mom distro. perhaps it's a live based one, you just boot it and work. maybe an online subscription will use any internet connection available to save documents to a central place. also to save preferences (almost like mounting your home directory remotely, or perhaps mirroring at the end of a session).
you'll never see that in windows. longhorn is destined to be the biggest windows yet.
We can chose if we want to buy a power pack, professional, server, etc of (Your Favorite Distro here) or we can just spend time downloading it and hunting arround the net for the ad ons we want
I've used a number of Distros Slackware, Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, for Redhat and Mandrake sometimes I've bought the boxed sets and other times I installed the downloadable editions (purchased for $5-15AUD from a local CD seller (I dont have broadband 8( )) and I must say I haven't really gained anything out the boxed sets and I don't read the Manuals (Maybe it is because sometimes they are not very readable).
In the past, before I saw the light I used to buy lots of M$ software, but still thought it was porly written, but I didn't think I had any choice. In my work place we buy a lot of poor software, but there are no open source competitors to those packages, so we buy it because we have no choice (except write our own)
So with open source software unless you really think you are getting something more out of the "pay for" than the "free"(as in beer) why are you going to buy. I remember that my powerpack of Mandrake 8.2, was more buggy that my download edition of 8.1! That put me off box sets forever, but the download editions of Mandrake got progressively worse with 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 (haven't tried 10.0 yet).
-Jasa -- Linux - The SOURCE will be with you, ALWAYS
I hate mowing my yard so you should mow for me for free. I WILL NOT PAY FOR YARD MOWING. Yard mowing should be available for free for all people. And I'm driving a 10 year old car. It's not fair that there are people with newer and nicer cars out there. Mod me down, but I WILL NOT PAY FOR A NEW CAR, and you shouldn't either. New cars should be available for free for all people.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
So, on the one hand, you have OSS stuff that works *great* but takes *forever* to make and isn't exactly what people (think they) want at any given moment.
On the other hand, you have salespeople feeding people crapware produced over the course of a few months to satisfy the latest buzzword-driven market-craze.
And, suprise suprise, the buzzword-laden focus-group-created crapware wins in the marketplace? This doesn't sound like anything new to capitalism, or anything unique to the computer industry for that matter. It sounds like a *much* larger problem.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
And why does a soccer mom want Office when she gets Works for free? What soccer mom needs Excel? Or Powerpoint?
Because every file she gets from someone else is in Word or Excel or Powerpoint. Office is even more of a monopoly than windoze is, since they have the Mac market as well. The fact is that Word, excel and powerpoint are the lingua france of information. If there is one thing that needs to happen in our industry, it's making these file formats open standards. Let 100 applications open and save these formats, so they are just as much a standard as HTML is,
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
The major "selling" is of the technology to Upper Management rather than from vendors.
The first time this became critical was when the Intel 8086 came out, and Intel started selling based on management commitment to Intel, not on technical grounds. A competing processor - the Z8000 - won just about every technical analysis, but Intel sold to management and that's what made them kings. It's a critical concept. Engineers think the best solution wins, but the best business decision isn't always the best technical solution.
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
On the flipside of this, I know someone with ZERO IT experience who had apache with ColdFusion, PHP, and Perl working in less than 30 minutes by using the documentation alone.
You have two sides to the zealotry: 1) Linux will never be ready for prime time until grandma can install every package and use it effectively and 2) If you can't install it from the docs and user community then you don't need to use it. Both of these sides are flawed. Consider this:
Point 1 is what I like to call the "grandma whine" and it's nearly totally invalid in both the Windows and Unix worlds. There's a LOT of software that "grandma" can't install and, guess what? It's not marketed or targeted to her because she really wouldn't have much use for it. Web servers and databases are excellent examples of this. How many "grandmas" do you believe are going to even have a NEED to install one of these? And you can bet those that do are going to either already have the requisite tech skills to do so or are able to acquire them. This isn't just a Linux problem -- or a problem at all. It's a marketing reality. You don't focus your marketing or target those who are the lease likely to use your software.
Point 2 is just as flawed as the first point. Sometimes users, even experienced users, do need a little handholding. Nothing wrong with that and it is no reflection of their technical skills or their intelligence. It's YOUR software. What might be painfully obvious to you is a complete mystery to others. And saying "well they can always look at the source code" is a cop out. Being a programmer should not be a prerequisite to using open source solutions. Not everyone who needs the software needs to understand the code. This, IMHO, is the worst marketing nightmare facing the community.
The solution? I don't know. I know part of it will involve the dissolution or lessening of egos. It's also going to involve moving beyond the common vision that "open source MUST be free or it's corrupt!" This is hurting the movement. Open source is NOT great because it's free. It's great because it's open. Plain and simple.
A lot will have to change before Joe User adopts open source across the board in their daily lives. Can it happen? Yes! But it's going to take a revolution in the rank and file of software developers and an all-out intellectual redesign of the way developers look and think about their users and their own software.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
Maybe I'm not a real linux geek, but...
I *hate* when something is difficult for no good reason. A 'monumental effort to get where others have gone before, and anyone with enough time can get' is a monumental waste of time.
RANTThis isn't like the NYT crossword puzzle. The point of the install is not to just have done it. What's so fun and challenging about wasting orders of magnitude more geekhours installing than the documentation/packaging would have taken?
It often seems that developers are masochists. It is not reasonable making people play Where's Waldo with the source just install stuff.
While it's not cool to complain that your free widget wasn't a good enough free widget[ unless you're gunna do something about it]- That only works for those already invested in it.
On the other hand:
1. There are negative consequences to crap doc/packaging. Make it clear that it's less probable to get this thing running than your '64 Fiat "thats been sitting a while." 2. If nothing exists that installs reasonably easily, on most new base-distro installs, then 'Linux' doesn't really "have it" yet. If most people that want "those features" can't get them, you're gunna turn off more potential friends that simply didn't have the time 'you' wasted, than fans who will pick up the reigns. 3. Developers should put a little more effort into doc, maybe cut that 2 day install down to 4hrs. It's far more likely that fans would contribute to building the doc that brings it down to 45 minutes./RANT
Finally, a heartfelt THANK YOU for all the great and not so great FREE software. And, oh yeah, I still brag about it...
No, it's because so many developers (and this applies to small/amateur developers on the whole) focus on skins, supporting skins, creating ghastly skins, skin ranking systems, user-submitted skins (often even more ghastly), and anything related to skins, all of which are entirely irrelevant for almost all software.
Case in point: SpyBot -- brilliant piece of software that I downloaded recently. However, why should there even be "new cool Skins" for a little application that removes spyware from your computer?
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
I think the main flaw in most OSS projects is that they don't have a financially motivated boss directing the development resources. Therefore, the developers persue the path that produces the best technology, but not always in a user-friendly or marketplace-friendly way like all commerical software has to be in order to sell copies.
Just consider Bill Gates as the PHB-in-chief. An OSS project needs to focus on what the users want to see, rather than what the programmers want to develop, in order to gain widespread distribution. A totally buggy and insecure program can still be sold to a user if it does the things the user wants it to do. Sure, the user should know better, but they don't, and that's why PHBs can be so stupid but connect with the marketplace so well...
How is Cocoa and .NET "Storming the market" when both are essentially tied to specific architectures and is the case of Cocoa, tied to aspecific hardware vendor?
Cocoa is a great tool for building applications for OS X but unless your a software development house targeting a niche market, OS X is out of of the question.
I guess thats why Java has been "Storming the market" for quite some time.
He didn't say he will not pay for learning how to program, he won't pay for the software product no matter what. Beside, free information for building a car is not the same as a free new car, nor does information on programming same as a software product. If someone wants to charge for their software, so be it (even GPL allows for charing for software). If they want to give it away for free, more power to them.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
I wouldn't have spent 40 minutes on hold waiting for your support tech, Kishore, to answer the phone in Mumbai, and I wouldn't be angry now.
Please do not racism. My family work very hard coding and building web site. We earn every rupee we take home.
I've got news for all you anti-suit types: Marketing isn't trying to BS someone; it's explaining what your product does, who you've designed it for, and what unique qualities make it better than other choices.
*Amen*. I have never been able to figure out why, the more companies deal with large clients, the more they feel that an obscure description is necessary. I've started to form a theory, however. I've noticed that vendors that work with large clients *always* want to get the large clients on the phone, talking to a salesman, so that they can figure out how to maximize the amount of money they're sticking them for. My suspicion is that vendors feel that if their website's product description is unclear enough (if it has "solution" or "enterprise class" in it, I'd be uncomfortable already) potential clients will call their sales department. I have been in the position of doing purchasing recommendations for two companies I've been at. Perhaps I'm just younger or like using the Internet more than the other people there, but I don't take the approach of "get a salesman's phone number and sit through his schtick" that a lot of other people do. If I can't figure out what a product is or what someone's pricing scheme is in ten minutes from their website, it goes right to the bottom of my list. I'll call someone as a last resort. It's just not worth hassling with the huge quantities of bullshit that salesmen throw at you, having to worry about jotting down anything important they say instead of having a nice textual record to look at, etc.
It's really funny to look at product descriptions on Freshmeat -- the descriptions for commercial products are almost universally worse than open-source projects, probably because commercial types are worried about accidentally limiting their product's capabilities too much. Compare two Freshmeat-listed backup systems -- the commercial Arkeia and the gratis/libre Unison. While each system is related to backups, after reading the Arkeia description, I have a large quantity of bullshit couched in nice adjectives in my head. Despite the fact that Arkeia does a much simpler set of things than Unison does, I have less of an idea of what its capabilities are than of Unison's, partly because Unison's developer didn't waste time with flag-waving.
May we never see th
Its commercial software like this that makes me try to stick to free, mainstream alternatives.
The main point of the article was not that Linux sucks, but that many companies "do not get it". I.e.
- they take any old trash,
- port it to Linux,
- hope that it sells just by virtue of it running on Linux,
- and if it doesn't they go back and wine in their corner about the cheapness of the Linux users (rather than looking at their own mistakes).
- ===> it's almost as if they wanted to have their Linux product fail, so that they can go back to Windows, and tell management "see, Linux is not yet ready for prime-time"
Yes, the article stated several times that often free Linux products are better than some of these commercial "Linux" "products". This is hardly a "Linux suxors" message, on the contrary.This is a good idea, and both Windows and to a lesser extent OS X have it already.
Please explain how Microsoft Windows has it to even the slightest extent.
As far as I can tell, each Windows application comes with its own custom installer/uninstaller (except when they don't). You can't say "Windows has it" when the feature isn't supplied by the OS but by each individual app.
The only minor amount of support Windows gives is a list where "installed uninstallers" can register themselves to show up in Add/Remove programs.
standardised method of package management that at MINIMUM can support the same features that Windows XP/2000 has today.
Again, I'm completely at a loss to find any package management features in Windows. Is this something new for XP? To me it looks like installers just copy whatever files they need to C:\Progra~1 and C:\Windows\System32 and be done with it. (It's really a little more sophisticated, as there's a level of indirection to allow for i18n and drives other than C:, but thats barely notable).
The reason Microsoft Windows often doesn't exhibit the symptoms of poor/nonexistent package management is there's only one provider for the OS, so the layout differences between two Windows installs are trivial compared to how a SUSE and Gentoo box might differ (while both being viable Linux desktop systems)
The problem is that you are operating under the assumption that the same programmer who is willing to spend time fiddling with the UI in KDE would also be good at (and willing to spend time at) fiddling with the hardware drivers in the kernel. It's not that simple. People do what they like to do, and what they are best at doing. Pull people off the KDE project and that won't cause them to start working on more USB driver support. Those things are being worked on in parallel by people who aren't just interchangable parts.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
almost trumps location in this instance.
most of us aren't interesed in learning how to compile 'packages' with missing parts. the 'joke' in the 'community' is: 'they'll have to learn something, sometime'. chuckling into obscurity in this case.
there have been improvements, a ways to go yet. see you there?
Windows does not have a unified package management system. The installers you mention have too much control and -- WORSE -- Windows installers do not handle dependencies (they can't since they only know what they have installed and that they should increment a counter for shared libs!).
I have worked months on attempting to rebundle dozens of custom applications to do exactly what you say and to force Windows clients to deal with dependencies consistantly. (Part of the issue is also bad habbits by the admins so it is a social issue mainly...though Windows does not prevent or even discourage those bad habbits.)
It's particularly frustrating, if at the same time the company does a halfway decent job with their Windows offering. Take Realtek for example: the bundled Windows drivers with their Wifi card at least load into Windows, and allow to get on the net.
However, on Linux, it's fumble, dead-air, crash, burn, unless you have the single one kernel that their binary crapware drivers have been written for. And you can't even hope that they'll go Chapter 11 over this incompetence, as, like I said, their Windows drivers are halfway decent :-(
Catering for a marginal market makes it so much easyer to get away with gross incompetence: just blame the customer or the OS platform!
The idea that a vendor will do a crude port of a product to Linux, then abandon the market because it doesn't sell also applies to Mac software. There have been pretty good ports of Windows software to Macintosh that bombed because the Windows products that were ported were junk to begin with -- it just didn't make any difference in the Windows market because people bought them anyway.
Oh, yes. There are lots or products for Windows, but how many of them are better than very poor? Perhaps ten percent?
It's crazy the amount of stupid mistakes just get by if you don't ask anybody (who has not worked on your project preferably) to review your stuff. The stuff that works perfectly for you will segfault right away when a colleague does something slightly differently. End-users can also be fairly creative at crashing a piece of software.
While it's all right for a business to make good and fast money on their ideas, most lack the discipline to get things reviewed before release.
My Karma is so low that even my own postings are beyond my current threshold
> On the other hand, you don't get support from Microsoft when using WordPerfect on their system either. It's difficult to support every single piece of software there is for Linux.
True, but last time I checked I couldn't download Wordperfect off of Microsoft's web site. Even if they put packages in an "unsupported" section it would be better than what they do now, which is tell you that it's outside the scope only after you download and (try to) install it. It's not that I expect them to support everything, but a warning about what they will and won't support is very difficult to find.
Virg