> There are 18 distributions now for the PinePhone ... Still people want to create more distributions instead of actually implementing missing features in the existing distributions or fixing issues in the upstream applications those use.
If I’m working on something for fun I’m gonna choose to work on the puzzles I enjoy... if it’s work and I’m being paid I’ll probably consider your less interesting bugs:)
This in essence is the tragedy of the commons for consumer Linux applications. Contributing to complex consumer software is hard, the people who do it in their spare time are inclined to satisfy their own itch.
Linux works exceptionally well in the areas where large companies with many developers pay to make it work well.
>Linux works exceptionally well in the areas where large companies with many developers pay to make it work well.
The elephant in the room is that we desperately need better funding mechanisms. For instance, most distro repos don't support selling Free Software - either the package is available gratis to everyone, or it's not available to anyone. There are hacks to get around it perhaps, but no support at the OOTB click-a-button level.
The only way the Year Of The Linux Desktop will ever happen is if we actually make it a priority as a community to figure out ethical funding mechanisms.
Didn't Canonical try this with the Ubuntu Software Center and it completely failed? The top selling app in 2012 made $400 in one month. That's not bad for a side project, but you can't build a business on it.
The real elephant in the room is that a lot of people use Linux because they don't like paying for software, and like using other people's labor for free. The free software movement has completely failed at providing a business model for itself. This is why funding its projects is essentially charity when they're not valuable to a large corporation selling proprietary software.
I’d say it’s even worse than that. I’d be willing to pay for a Linux distro (and have donated in the past), but, in their pursuit of user lock-in and/or profit, Ubuntu and RedHat are increasingly hostile toward desktop users. Therefore, my money goes to smaller projects without many (any?) full time developers.
>I’d be willing to pay for a Linux distro (and have donated in the past), but, in their pursuit of user lock-in and/or profit, Ubuntu and RedHat are increasingly hostile toward desktop users.
It's almost certainly profit. They have a sizable user base but not a lot of good ways of getting money out of them. I would say it's a direct example of the major unsolved problem I was talking about. This is not to condone what they did, as I found the Ubuntu advertisements particularly egregious.
I'd be happy to push work to pay for a supported Linux distro, and I have had some success before in pushing companies to choose supported open source options.
I was in fact hoping that Ubuntu would be that distro a number of years ago until they pivoted away from easy, nice, clean, just works towards halfway bad copy of OS X.
Now another frustrating thing about this is that once many open source projects get to taste the sweet juice of cashflow it seems many will immediately abandon all the ideas that got me to desperately want to suppprt them and become just as hard to work with as their commercial counterparts.
That I think is almost entirely false. People don't use Linux because it is free (as in beer). People for whom cost is the primary concern can pirate Windows, buy cheap versions from online stores or install a legitimate version of Windows and never activate it(Microsoft makes it really easy these days). Heck already probably millions of people are using one of these options rather than installing Linux.
I have been using Linux for 10 years or so and a lot of my friends/colleagues use Linux and we use Linux because software for which we are paid to work - works best on Linux. I don't think beyond college students, professional programmers using Linux mind paying for software (I pay for several!). Most of us know - there are warts and all but I have also used Mac for 5 years and my wife uses Mac for her work and it does not look like fun wresting with brew everyday.
The problem isn't that people aren't willing to pay for software - IMO the problem is, Linux is really difficult to support, because of Linux Desktop being a continuous moving target. So, application development for Linux is hard because the base is continuously changing but no company has managed to invest enough money/resources to make the base stable. And given small Linux marketshare, resources required to make a stable base is astronomical (Like google did with Android).
So, It is a chicken and egg problem. Linux can't attract large install base without a wide variety of application software, but companies who have tried supporting Linux application development have burnt themselves in past (and why bother given small Linux install base) and hence nobody has incentive to make that solid base.
>People don't use Linux because it is free (as in beer).
Plenty of Linux users I know do.
>People for whom cost is the primary concern can pirate Windows, buy cheap versions from online stores or install a legitimate version of Windows and never activate it(Microsoft makes it really easy these days). Heck already probably millions of people are using one of these options rather than installing Linux.
Not if they're programmers and prefer Unix. My experience with Linux users is different than yours. Yes, many of them end up caring about free software. Quite a few also have the "why pay for anything" attitude and pirate all their media, even when they could afford it. Sometimes these groups overlap. I don't think there's one single reason people come to Linux.
If people are willing to pay money for Linux, how come companies trying to support it haven't been successful? Would you pay $150 for a copy of a Linux distro? $200? How many of your Linux-using friends would? Would you be willing to do that every three years, like Windows?
The attitude I encounter frequently among Linux users is not just that they wouldn't pay but that they don't think money is a solution to the problems Linux has. So far, the most critical Linux development has been subsidized by proprietary software companies who use it for their infrastructure. Nobody's interested in supporting it for money because nobody wants to pay for it. The whole reason it's popular is because you don't have to. Linux would be nothing today if Linus had charged for it. There's no chicken and egg problem here. The egg is a community which doesn't value software in material terms.
> Not if they're programmers and prefer Unix. My experience with Linux users is different than yours. Yes, many of them end up caring about free software. Quite a few also have the "why pay for anything" attitude and pirate all their media, even when they could afford it. Sometimes these groups overlap. I don't think there's one single reason people come to Linux.
If every one of those programmers paid $150 for their copy of Linux Desktop - do you think it would enough to fund a Company that could build/maintain a rock-solid-stable-base Linux Desktop? The problem is that developing/supporting an OS requires enormous engineering resources and you magically don't require less resources just because your install base is small.
Currently libinput is maintained by one man mostly and I have a suspicion that Mirosoft has a small team for input devices. Take X11 vs Wayland for example. What would this new distro target? If it targets wayland - users will complain about nvidia GPU support, if it targets X11 - users will complain about fractional scaling/tearing. These are hard engineering problems which require working with partner drivers and long term commitment. I personally think that - many companies have realized there is no money to be made in supporting desktop Linux(i.e desktop itself, not a cross-platform application running on top of it), even if every one of those users paid the one time fee.
>If every one of those programmers paid $150 for their copy of Linux Desktop - do you think it would enough to fund a Company that could build/maintain a rock-solid-stable-base Linux Desktop?
It wouldn't be a bad place to start.
>The problem is that developing/supporting an OS requires enormous engineering resources and you magically don't require less resources just because your install base is small.
Well, you have to narrow the hardware you support. That's the main thing that makes Linux on the desktop suck. Only Microsoft has succeeded in writing a highly compatible operating system, as you mention with a lot of resources. But there isn't the will for this, because people want Linux to run on everything. In this area, System76 are probably doing the best. But their hardware is not very good.
>I personally think that - many companies have realized there is no money to be made in supporting desktop Linux(i.e desktop itself, not a cross-platform application running on top of it), even if every one of those users paid the one time fee.
The point is that the fee is off the table because nobody would pay it. That's all I'm saying. Your argument is a non-sequitur. You say these engineering problems require hard work, and that there's not enough money in it even if everyone paid the fee. In that case, one would need to raise the fee until it can pay for the development that needs to be done.
But the market would not bear it. It already will not bear a standard operating system price.
> The free software movement has completely failed at providing a business model for itself.
Wouldn't you say the Freemium model is a successful business model for many? Or there are free software but we can do extra for you like Automatic/Wordfence etc. Ad driven 'free' software is quite common place. Also 'goodwill' supported.
Not saying its not challenging for many free software services but there are business models around 'free'.
I didn't go into the details but ads/data are a funding mechanism. It's a funding method where you pay with intangibles, and is successful because ads/data are implicitly available on literally every platform out there and is so convenient it requires literally zero clicks on the user's behalf to activate.
I didn't mention it because it's uhhhh, antithetical to Free Software. Let me explain that:
Free Software says "put ultimate power in the users' hands, so that they can call the shots" - this is why they commonly use the GPL (sorry if obvious). Ads/tracking puts the devs at the mercy of the third parties who are paying their bills, despite said third parties not giving a shit about the quality of the software. It's why ads are so often unoptimized.
A more minor reason is that it's situational. Anything offline basically can't do either. Anything like libpng just doesn't really make sense.
But fundamentally, the crux is that devs have to do what they're paid to do. There are exceptions, but those are only exceptions and not the rule.
i thought the business model was to sell professional support for companies, and it has worked very well so far. the problem is that you can't apply that business model in this case.
> the problem is that you can't apply that business model in this case
Random thought: I wonder if the problem is personal version of "selling support" is home PC repair companies, ubuntu is trying to be MS but they should be GeekSquad or geeks4u.
ubuntu's big problem is that they try to be everything to everyone.
There's room for a phone linux, a user/corporate client linux, an enterprise linux or two. It's pretty tough for a company, even the well funded ones to do all three. MS missed phone, google missed enterprise, redhat doesn't really do phone or client (fedora I guess but it's not really a paid product). Then, you got scrappy ubuntu that's gonna reinvent phones and debian and do server support, and they are kinda just bad at all of it . . ..
I've found Ubuntu Desktop to be by far the least problematic desktop Linux distro. I was a big Fedora fan for a while but the hit in stability just wasn't worth it for me, and I liked the positivity of the Ubuntu hobbyist community, containing many people who are not primarily software engineers.
It's not bad, and it's what I'd put my grandma on. It really falls down on the job as an enterprise client, shipping old buggy software like bad insecure versions of openconnect VPN and such.
If you want to set up a browsing/email machine for something it's a great choice.
This is actually where I think ubuntu should focus, the server offering is kinda meh. The upstart and unity shit was a waste of time. Instead, they should focus all that energy on being a client OS. One that can run on grandmas old machine and one that can run in the enterprise.
I know Elementary does something similar. Every time I hear about it, they make it sound like it's successful, but I've never actually seen any numbers.
The purpose of freedom respecting software is that you can take it, make it your own, and contribute back. No expectation that it is suitable for your use in its current state. But it is suitable for the use of its maintainers.
Put in the elbow grease, sponsor someone else to put in the elbow grease, or settle for non-free software where your itches seem to come pre-scratched. Personally I encourage you to scratch your own itch and contribute back.
So freedom respecting software is for people who can program or pay someone else to program for them. That's why there will never be widespread use of it?
I think the other part is that people see it as an opportunity to “make it big” so to speak. If you develop some small part of the UI or functionality for someone else’s OS you get a pat on the back and a commit message with your name on it. If you develop the distribution that becomes popular, you get to name it. You get to go to conferences and tell everyone how you started it. You give keynote speeches. You can start a company to make money off the distro. It opens a lot of doors.
So with that in mind, with only 18 distros, why wouldn’t I throw a 19th into the ring vs toiling away at fixing just my own annoyances?
Heh the first mistake they make is thinking they can make a distro by themselves. Made that mistake before before joining postmarketOS. At least I didn't make my own distro public.
Which is ok when you are frank and say you are not doing something for most people. I guess the problem is assuming that PinePhone is usable to the majority of consumers.
Sounds exactly like what happened with the Openmoko phones too. A proliferation of half finished platforms, few of which could even reliably take a call.
Yeah, though PinePhone has chosen manjaro + kde as their default moving forward. I’m guessing that’ll improve the polish for that specific combination of software, and they’ll hit critical mass. After that, having more diversity of choices would be nice, but there needs to be one working option first.
Hopefully they won’t repeatedly change their minds before then, like openmoko did.
Yeah that seemed to be the main problem, each time Openmoko released a platform, they had already announced that it was deprecated because they were working on the next one.
I think my disappointment stemmed from this - I was expecting a (perhaps rudimentary, perhaps unpolished) platform that would make a base to start developing things on, but that wasn't there.
I'll keep an eye on pinephone, hopefully they've done their historical research in this area :)
Many of those distros are just focused on making their preferred distro work on ARM, it's not like they are targeting the PinePhone. They even count Gentoo as one of the 18.
As they should- provided a strong binhost,, it's the distribution that has brought me the most joy to run on mine, and it's been a delight to see Gentoo users come together over time to make easier as it's evolved alongside other pinephone distribution c:
And there's no reason that in OSS software like this that distros can't borrow the best features from other distros. I'm sure that if, given time to mature, there will and up being a few core distros many people turn to and then a whole bunch of others that meet the specific preferences of other users.
It's not yet a mature ecosystem, but desktop linux is, and there's plenty to borrow from there.
Here we go again. App developers now have to 'define' support for a distribution target and test each of them to show it is actually 'supported' and not showing 'experimental support'.
Fantastic news for the technical consumer and the whole open-source crowd, Not so good for the app developers who need to test their apps on these numerous distros and bewildering for general users looking at this technical contraption that is likely not to have the same apps on their old phones.
If they want to solve this like it or not, supporting the Flutter ecosystem sounds like a good idea.
> Do you want Linux phones?
If it gets in the way of things and is harder to use than the alternatives, then no thanks and no deal. There is more things to consider than just 'open-source' or the 'free software' argument.
Probably close to that percentage are either better as a website or actually harmful garbage.
> Is the app ecosystem ready?
Here's the question you ask: Would you be happier if your thinkpad running Alpine Linux fit in your pocket and could do sms/calls? It has the same answer.
Unfortunately a big part of having a truly working phone is the long tail of one-off apps. City-specific rideshares and bus apps, easy airline boarding, some new chat app that your friends started using.
I was a Lumia Windows Phone user, and I loved the OS, and I'm not at all some avid app user on the phone (I don't like mobile games, I don't install random apps that are just a packaged web site). Still, every time I got out of a well-worn bubble, the phone felt second-class. I couldn't order a cab, couldn't scan that coupon, I couldn't install that dating app, etc etc. I used that phone for 3 or 4 years until the battery gave out or whatever, but moving to iOS and Android felt so empowering.
I can only imagine the experience on Linux, without any corporate pushing to get your app on their phone, would be much worse.
It sounds like a paper characterizing the problem with Lisp as being that (to paraphrase) "the kind of person who uses Lisp would rather create a new DSL than learn to re-use yours".
Sounds like linux to me!