Why are Free-Desktop Developers Wedded to Linux?

An anonymous reader wonders: "We have been hearing promising predictions like 'This year will be the year of Linux on the desktop' for the last decade. However, the Linux of today seems to be as far away as ever from realizing the expectations of mass adoption we once had for it, without significant growth in home usage since the late 90s. Clearly, if Linux is unable to reproduce a third of Firefox's end user uptake over a much longer time-frame, there are deficiencies with the direction the GNU/Linux/X/Gnome/KDE system has taken. Of course, almost all free software and desktop efforts and development remain unquestioningly oriented around Linux. Other free-desktop operating system projects which take different and innovative approaches like ReactOS, AROS, Mona and Syllable remain comparatively starved of developers and interest. An often cited reason for using a non-Microsoft OS is to avoid a monoculture, but free-desktop efforts have created a total monoculture around developing and promoting Linux, despite a decade of failure in supplanting Microsoft's proprietorial OSes with it. Why are free-desktop developers neglecting to consider an alternative to the penguin?"

Comments

Re:Not really

[RAMMS EIN]

I can tell you myself why I don't use OS X (even though I do use an iBook). Mostly because it's slow and because it's a hassle.

It's slow mostly because it takes a noticeable time to start processes, and this bothers me, as it's something I do a lot. Also, the GUI takes up so much memory that there is less of it left to get work done with. Once this gets up to the point where it starts swapping a lot, obviously productivity is out of the window.

It's a hassle, because, although a lot of open source software technically works on it, not all of it is readily available. At least at the time I still used it (the situation may have improved since), there were fink, darwinports, and pkgsrc, each supporting some packages but not everything I wanted (pkgsrc worked best for me, but didn't provide binaries for OS X). Having to use different package managers and having to compile things from source are terrible time wasters. The software that Apple ships is either different from what I'm used to from other *nix systems, or it's the same software, but often an older version, which caused further problems.

Also keeping the software up to date is a nightmare when some of it is integrated with Apple's updater (which keeps pushing "updates" for software I don't have or want), some of it is integrated with some open-source package manager (fink and friends), some of it comes with custom updaters, and some of it doesn't have any update mechanism at all.

The final straw was that Tiger broke the ext2 driver, meaning the end of sharing files between OS X and Linux. Yes, Linux supports HFS+, but the interaction between the Linux HFS+ driver and Apple's fsck has given me...bad results in the past, so I'm not going there again.

Of course, none of this means that OS X doesn't look gorgeous and isn't a great OS if you just want to use the great software that Apple ships with it, and maybe a handful of third-party apps. However, for a command-line junkie like me, GNU/Linux beats OS X hands down.

Re:Not really

[MoxFulder]

I could even imagine that, before Linux, Solaris was the major development platform for GNU, but I could be wrong there.

Yeah, that's probably about right. I imagine most of the GNU development was done under Solaris, NextStep, and AIX... in that order. The first time I got my grubby little 11-year-old hands on a Unix shell account, in 1993, it was on a NeXT box. Most of the utilities on that box were GNU utilities... GCC, binutils, tar, gzip, etc. I remember learning to unpack tarballs and running ./configure to build a GNU Bison package that I downloaded.

Once I heard about Linux around 1996-ish, there was no going back. Here was a Unix-type operating system I could install on my own Cyrix 486SX PC, awesome :-)

I haven't seen anything come along that's more versatile and all-around better than Linux. Sure, I think OpenBSD is great for ultra-secure servers, and they've been doing fabulous things with wireless driver support recently. Some Linux distros (cough, Mandrake, cough) have gotten way too far out on the bleeding-edge features curve and had stability and configuration problems.

But overall Linux has become everything I'd hoped it would be and more: free, good hardware support, well-documented, high performance, good community support, and UBIQUITOUS (my wireless router runs Linux, and I'm sorely tempted to put Linux on my girlfriend's iPod).