Slashdot Mirror
The Linux Desktop and ISVs/OEMs
olau writes "Michael Meeks, who's worked on GNOME and LibreOffice integration for many years, now for SuSE, has some really interesting thoughts on the recent Linux desktop debate and suggestions for possible strategies. He points out that regarding independent software vendors (ISVs), the real issue isn't actually the quality of the tools but the size and attractiveness of the market, and perhaps that a solution could be lower barriers for paying or donating. Regarding OEMs selling hardware with software preinstalled, he points out that while a free OS + software sounds good for consumers, it's actually a problem for OEMs on razor-thin margins, since they lose the cut they get from the preinstallations. A possible countermove could be nailing robustness and hardware diagnostics for good, lowering OEM support costs."
At the end of the day, it's a lot easier if Grandma has an OS that other family members can help her with.
No matter how much I like my Linux Desktop, I don't want to be responsible for bringing non-tech-savvy people along. The rest of the family is fully capable of troubleshooting basic windows problems, more or less.
You have a sales team, you are trying to sell your product. That is hard enough. Now you need to push Linux too on their existing Windows infrastructure too...
Companies like consistency. Linux is a perfectly good OS. However we are a windows shop here, and don't want to support two platforms.
Companies will pay more money to keep a consistent environment. Those Linux servers will need to cost $500 less then their windows counterparts. You need to be less then the OS cost and less then the Its different cost, then you will need to deal with people who will just get the lesser cost system and put their own OS on it (legal/illegal/let the courts decide if they find out)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"family is fully capable of troubleshooting basic windows problems"
tee hee
... when you have children to feed and a mortgage to pay ... ... and the users expect all their software to be free?
Better off spending one's time addressing a market where people expect to have to pay for stuff, no?
What linux users expect all software to be free?
I guess I did not pay for all these steam games.
Where did you get that idea?
The internet before those hordes was the internet without wikipedia.
There are immense benefits to growing your community.
Ah, Slashdot. You've entered a new age when anti-FOSS/anti-Linux trolling is marked as "Insightful."
In fifteen years, I've purchased ONE application. It wasn't very good and since it wasn't open source I couldn't fix it. So I guess I'm one who expects all my software to be "free". (I contribute code, bug reports, etc., not cash) Funny thing is, I make a living mainly by SELLING software for Linux, but I never BUY software.
Yeah, we really need a new old slashdot.
Oh well, all good things ....
Isn't TurboTax all on the website now?
I know I paid to use it last year.
More software a linux user paid for!!! SHOCKING NEWS!!!
I'm a die-hard Linuxer and I also pay to use TurboTax online. I doubt if I'd buy the Windoze edition to run at home but running in my browser is just fine and there is the presumed added advantage that the on-line edition is up to date.
The quoted poster's implication is correct. Linuxers don't want everything for free; I pay for lots of value-added services, such as the aforementioned TurboTax, membership on a chess site, etc. I'm even going to BUY--- that's right, I said BUY--- the Linux edition of Scrivener when it comes out of beta.
That said, I do enjoy and benefit from the many free options I have such as LibreOffice, TaskJuggler, etc. etc.
I can think of 5 reason why (in no particular order):
1) Your company pays you to write software for linux
2) You have fun writing application for linux and do it part time (everyone needs a hobby, right?)
3) The software is good enough, that people donate money to help you work full time on it.
4) You sell support (or special edition cds or whatever) for your software, but your software is free.
5) You sell a commercial version of your software, that has additional components that are not included in your free version.
I am surprised you been on slashdot for so long, and still did not understand this.
I got my mom to use linux, and she's a Grandma. I got sick of having to re-install windows so I left for linux*, then told her that I wasn't really doing windows anymore because I no longer learned anything when i fixed problems on it. So she switched, loves it, when it has issues...at least I learn something.
*not having internet explorer is a feature!
Unlike Windows, when I install a fresh copy of Linux on my laptop, all the hardware works out of the box. Shit, I can't even get internet out of the box on Windows without using an OEM-supplied disk that already has drivers pre-loaded...
Windows isn't more usable than Linux -- OEMs MAKE Windows more usable than Linux. Would you expect Windows to be easy if you bought a computer from Apple and a regular Windows install disk from, say, Amazon.com? And even with these massive advantages, I've still always found Linux to be easier to get working from a fresh install than Windows...
Face it, if you don't run windows, you'll never, never, never ever have 100% office compatibility. Never. .
If you run Microsoft Office you've never had 100% Office compatibility. Open a docx document with Office 2003. You can look at it ( with a helper program), but you can't edit it unless you save it as a .doc document.
and the users expect all their software to be free?
Interesting contradictory fact. Scroll down and look at the payment statistics. Linux users evidently pay about twice as much as Windows users when given the choice. I have bought two bundles before, and both times the pattern was the same as with the latest bundle.
Artificial scarcity. It is the backbone of the American economy as well as many other corporatist nations. Since you can't make money off free stuff, stores won't carry it. Even when selling hardware, if they can make more money selling restricted software along with it, they will. Before if you got a discount from buying a pre-built computer with crapware on it, at least you could wipe it all and install whatever you wanted. Now with “secure boot”, they can push control onto the software level and control the entire software stack if the wanted to. Don't like that Windows 8 Crapware Edition on there? Too bad, you're stuck with it, and the Crapware Edition won't allow you to remove the crapware on it either, plus it comes with adware and spyware (when you purchased this computer, you automatically opted-in to provide us with “information for marketing purposes”) pre-loaded which you also can't remove. I can also see this entire system pushing out build-it-yourself computers since the pre-built one offers more money. Even if some semblance of DIY hardware is still available, at the very least the pre-built systems will ultimately cost less because the hardware vendors will get a cut of the marketing and data mining profits.
I just figured I would share the future in advance with everyone so that the reality would set in sooner: Start supporting vendors which sell pre-built computers that aren't locked down as well as standardized DIY hardware. Also, start supporting home fabrication projects which will soon be able to create primitive computers, because ultimately unregulated capitalism will always find some way to fuck you otherwise. DIY hardware is already horribly unstandardized and consumer-raping. If you live in a country which is regulated so you feel you don't have to worry - just wait, you will. There is meaning behind the saying with the roots and the evil. No, not the recipe for making evil root beer.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Linux desktop, with browser, backed by web applications.
Five OEM systems and counting.
%s/[sS][^ ]*[uU][^ ]*[sS][^ ]*[eE]/SUSE/g
It actually turns "superuser" into "SUSEr". I am thrilled!
The biggest problem w/ Linux is that requirement of CLI knowledge. The only ones who have managed to completely eliminate that requirement has been Apple. NEXT had proven in the 90s that it could be done, and Apple continued the trend. Forget about the XNU kernel for a bit (Apple could have used FBSD completely had they so wanted), but Apple putting Quartz on top of FBSD userland demonstrates that it can be done.
So, given that KDE has tools by which one could alter system configurations and do just about anything, why isn't it automatic? Very often, solutions involve going into an editor and editing /etc/ files. Not acceptable. And then again, there are all those 'nuanced' differences even in the CLI - in RHEL, 'system-config-network' and 'service network restart' work, but not in other (non-RHEL) distros. Locations of configuration files are altered, and one has to either look for them, or know where they are, and how different they are. Even if someone was a CLI expert, distro-hopping can be a nightmare. At least, the BSDs have this one right.
Then, there are the software packages. Extracting tarballs can be hairy, and there are now 5 packaging standards - .rpm, .deb, .pac, .txz (for Slack) and ports. So when one visits sites that host Linux software, one either has to download tarballs, or one finds that a software is not available in a particular package. And then there are the package dependencies that can break, depending on which library version it may be using. Why can't Linux have ONE package management system similar to PC-BSD's .pbi, and then have that as standard, across distros, sorta like X11?
About the graphic drivers, I think that Wayland will be an improvement, but introducing another transition point will introduce one more variable in the equation. However, since open drivers have not worked for X11, it's worth trying both open and closed drivers for Wayland. Hopefully, in Wayland, we won't see too many releases that throws in a new variable, since all that is needed there is to bring the compositor front & center, and allow applications that depend on other X11 services to continue to use X11.
The QA issues listed above are a result of the mix/match b/w different combinations of different versions of a kernel and a library. I once replaced my RHEL5 w/ another RHEL based distro which had a whole range of software available, and found that the ALSA driver I had previously downloaded didn't work. I had to go back, download about 5 or 6 versions, and experiment w/ which one did, and finally got one working. You can't have this in something that's supposed to challenge Windows. Again, BSD apparently does a better job here - they do not allow compatibility breakages b/w generations - something that Linux would do well to learn from.
I am unaware of the mess about Qt, but the KDE project at least attempts to address the availability of applications, from simple configuration tools to elaborate ones like Calligra. But they often have a plethora of choices in one type, such as text editors or music players, and a real dearth of applications, such as, say, tax software. I have no idea whether Skrooge or GNU Cash are anywhere near Quickbooks, but it would be nice if it was there.
One last thing - given everything that doesn't work in the FOSS world, toning down the zealotry would be a good thing. BSD - FBSD in particular - doesn't have a problem using open software when possible, and closed when necessary. That is how it should be, until open alternatives to the closed parts can be duplicated. At one extreme, you now have the libre-linux guys stripping their distros of all closed blobs. Well, good luck w/ that. Actually, given how BSD rarely breaks things, it would be a good idea to prefer BSD to Linux, where one
I get paid major bank to work on software for Linux. That some of it goes out to be free is no skin off my teeth.
See free software isn't "I'm gonna write some POS and hope someone buys it" development model. Those days are dead mostly anyway. Its "Some guy wants these features put on that 'free' bit because he actually has a use case, and he's gonna pay me to meet his needs then give it away so neither of us get stuck paying upkeep and he can have me do something newer and better".
Who want's to spend 40 years doing maintenance on a some accounting or word processing software anyway. There are people who are writing better gear because they need to process words and account for money. And since they really make their money counting money and processing words, giving the bycatch code out as the "whole cost" of getting the whole pre-mod app is a huge win.
It just won't lead to "another microsoft"
That closed source model was a fluke anyway, the preceding 40 years were open source. The next twenty five or so was a grand experiment that largely failed except for a few really unexpected cutthroat operators, and now its back to the more natural state of only paying for what you need.
In a current version of word I don't use 90% of it, and I'm a technical writer and novelist, but I paid for it all back when I was that foolish. Same can be said for any person or company that has ever bought that slag. So now there is this free stuff that was made by someone who actually needed it, so it's not so much slag, and given away to others who _might_ need it, and then gotten back greatly improved by the supporters and the adders on.
That's lots of money feeding lots of people, and nobody is wasting their time or money playing the "trade secret" and "big P.R." games.
What's not to love?
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press