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Ubuntu, you blew your chance to go mainstream

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Ubuntu, you blew your chance to go mainstream

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rustybucket

I haven't seen my friends in so long

Joined: Thu Jun 18, 2009 5:10 pm
Posts: 5836

Re: Ubuntu, you blew your chance to go mainstream


	finlay666 wrote: For games.... I don't think it would bother me, it needs a lot of UI work tbh to be more user friendly, free may be free, but when I keep on an OS for say 5...6 years then the cost I have paid of £30 is pretty much nothing My problem with Ubuntu/Linux in general is the general snobbery. If you have a technical issue you get a load of stuff about reading and searching etc, but when I have not used a command line compiler and need to understand how to perform complex actions in the correct order and getting some rubbish about RTFM it's going to make me more likely to go back to a format I am familiar with. Ask about which IDE is best for certain development and similar to something I use I get told that the one I use is rubbish, bloated and slow. Sorry but Eclipse is FAR more bloated than VS, far less new user friendly and isn't the best of programs to be honest.

I agree

If you're going to compete you can't do it against a product that itself is very low cost. So you can make it free but if it isn't competitive on most other levels it won't get used.

The paid-for support needs to be brilliant
The free forum-type support needs to be calm, curteous, polite, heavily moderated and above all professional.
The hardware compatibility lists need to be comprehensive and constantly updated.
Linux needs an army of hackers and programmers who can be offered for little or no cost to hardware companies to help write *nix drivers and to software companies to help port their apps.

But imo *nix needs two big things in order succeed:

The GUI and look and feel issues need to be resolved. No software house has the resources to support more than one GUI per platform and definitely won't give rat's arse about the ideological fight between Gtk and Qt. *Nix needs to sort some kind of unified API where the programmer makes one interface and the Environment chooses Gtk or Qt for the implementation
Please, for the love of God, choose a package format and make it standard. One format. ONE! And please don't let it be RPM. I love SUSE to death but sometimes its RPM bakasswards-ness drives me up the frikkin pole!

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Fri Jan 22, 2010 2:35 pm

forquare1

I haven't seen my friends in so long

Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:36 pm
Posts: 5150
Location: /dev/tty0

Re: Ubuntu, you blew your chance to go mainstream


	rustybucket wrote: Linux needs an army of hackers and programmers who can be offered for little or no cost to hardware companies to help write *nix drivers and to software companies to help port their apps.

Not going to happen. Hardware companies don't seem to like open sourcing drivers. If the drivers aren't open source then they can't be licensed under the GPL, if they aren't licensed under the GPL Linux distributors can't distribute the drivers with the OS and this will force users having to install the drivers after they have installed the OS (or during install).

I do love the saying, don't license under the GPL, it's like herpes....

Fri Jan 22, 2010 2:41 pm

big_D

What's a life?

Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 8:25 pm
Posts: 10691
Location: Bramsche

Re: Ubuntu, you blew your chance to go mainstream

forquare1 wrote:


	rustybucket wrote: Linux needs an army of hackers and programmers who can be offered for little or no cost to hardware companies to help write *nix drivers and to software companies to help port their apps.

There are already scores of devs working on drivers for hardware. Many try and get onboard with the manufacturers. But most manufacturers refuse to write open source drivers, because of intellectual property that is needed in the drivers and the Linux "snobs" won't let closed source drivers interact with the Kernel...

For the Linux devs, it is about open source. For the hardware manufacturers, it is about protecting their IP and their competitive advantage. The two don't meet. OSS users blame the hardware manufacturers, the "normal" user blames Linux, because "nothing" works...

For the normal user, who just wants a working system, the politics is killing Linux (and BSD) as a choice.

_________________
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Executive Producer No Agenda Show 246

Fri Jan 22, 2010 6:25 pm

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