On 2/11/19 9:08 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
I have been told the exact same thing - and I know it was not the same people, as these do not write English, and it was face to face.
I believe you. So this seems a goal to me. There is a *huge* problem with "Not Invented Here" attitude in the FOSS community. Vi users deride Emacs. Emacs users deride Vi. Atom ignores both and makes something much much easier. Then Microsoft comes along and outdoes Atom. Red Hat fans mock Ubuntu; Ubuntu fans mock Red Hat. But apart from some really quite small technical differences (APT versus RPM) for instance, they are very similar distros. Ubuntu pioneered an idea in Linux which others now copy: there's no accessible root account, and you use ``sudo'' to temporarily get permissions to do stuff. Where did that come from? Apple and Mac OS X. Maybe not the first, but it brought it to the masses, just like Apple popularized SCSI and Firewire and USB, too. The reaction of Linux people? Mockery and scorn. Just like with text editors. These days, Microsoft has realized that the Unix way of implementing a GUI OS, with a strict separation between graphical front-ends and rich powerful console-mode tools in the background, is a good thing. It helps scripting and automatic. It aids modularity. It means you can ship much smaller server OSes with a much smaller attack surface. So it's busily doing this to Windows Server. Apple takes whatever it feels like from FOSS and builds it into its products, replacing the contested or clunky parts with glossy closed-source replacements. Microsoft now is doing the same. What do Linux communities do? Fragment. Say "we don't do it that way and that is not important to us, so we will do a better way." Result... in the RPM world alone, there is YUM/DNF, and URPMI, and Zypper. Outside of that, there are multiple reinvented packaging systems -- Arch and Gentoo and Void and Alpine and so on, all with different ones. The real bitter unpleasant truth? Packaging is going away. Containers make it obsolete. All this reinventing wheels is a waste of time and effort, because really, Linux's niche is servers, and server workloads basically _all_ run in VMs, and containers are a lighter, more efficient kind of VM. In the desktop world, there are battles over whether panels go on the left or right or top or bottom, should there be one or two, should the user be able to customize them with lots of options dialog boxes, or config files, or by writing JavaScript add-ons. And which GUI toolkit should you use? And should coding be in C or C++ or Vala or JavaScript? Google comes along, offers to sell people cheap hardware with ChromeOS, a "distribution" with fewer options than anything else ever, and within a couple of years has more users than all the other desktop distros in the world put together. It offers no choices at all. You can't even install it on your own machine. But it's simple and it works. I do not have easy answers to any of these problems. I am merely pointing them out. In general, it is good policy to: * closely watch what your rivals are doing * copy what they do right and people like * add value where you can * add differentiation where you can And one thing is very clear from the success of Apple and Microsoft, ISTM. People like easy, simple, functional, get-the-job-done products. They don't want millions of options and choices to make. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org