Improperly aligned incentives? Who gets to say what that is?
Is it "improper" to maximize profit per their own board's guidelines?
I have a feeling OP has some predefined notion of nobility they expect people to somehow operate under.
From the standpoint of the end user the incentives are improperly aligned. If they had made hammers they would have included licence agreements for their use with specific types of nails and actively prevented users from using competitor's nails. They also would have made sure yesterday's hammer would not be sufficient to hammer in today's nail, they would have added camera's to observe what the user was doing so as to sell 'targeted' advertising - during which the hammer would not strike any nails but would sing like the singing sword in Who Framed Roger Rabbit - and they would have made sure that no matter how agile the user was with his hammer the thing would never be 100% reliable.
Of course hammers are far less complex than computers and operating systems. Maybe this is because they're made by tool manufacturers and not by tech companies, maybe it is because they're old tech. A modern hammer is what Ford would have produced if he had listened to his customers who asked him for a faster horse so maybe there is a whole world of construction efficiency waiting for the Henry Ford of Hammersmiths. Or, maybe - probably - sometimes it is better to get that faster horse, that titanium hammer or that free software operating system which works for you and nobody else.
Anything by Cory Doctorow usually is.
Anyone worth calling human.
> Is it "improper" to maximize profit per their own board's guidelines?
If to the exclusion of all else, then yes, wildly so.
> I have a feeling OP has some predefined notion of nobility they expect people to somehow operate under.
Having a set of values is what separates Man from (most of) the other animals.
HTH!
Linux has appimage, it's already capable of running "loose" native executables like Windows does. Flatpak, Snap and Docker all break the "distro repository or compile from source" model. The primary method of playing video games is installing Steam and running Windows software inside a container. This purist vision you have of Linux doesn't exist.
It does on my computer, and I suspect on a lot of Linux users' computers.
Or you mean desktop Linux users, though there aren't "a lot" of those. There's the business/corpo/science deployments but I don't think we're talking about that, but rather specifically home use. So we're talking mostly enthusiasts. I'd imagine many of those and perhaps even most at least lightly game and Steam is effectively the default place to purchase games on Linux. Do you run anything in an emulator? Impure! Purge with fire!
The software repository+compile from source paradigm isn't "Linux", it's not even "desktop Linux". Linux can execute software in a myriad of different ways, what makes Linux Linux is that it's infinitely flexible.
> > > This purist vision you have of Linux doesn't exist.
> > It does on my computer, and I suspect on a lot of Linux users' computers.
> Linux users? That is, people who use a device that runs Linux? Like Android?
I'm fairly sure the overwhelming majority of Android users only use binaries from "their distro", i.e. from the Play Store.
> The software repository+compile from source paradigm isn't "Linux", it's not even "desktop Linux".
Hey, you were the first to drag Android into this. By your own measure, the overwhelming majority of "Linux" users follow exactly "the software repository+compile from source paradigm" (albeit the "+compile from source" term equals zero in their equation).
Obviously, since that's what the article and this discussion is about.
> there aren't "a lot" of those
Depends on what you consider "a lot", I guess. The article that this discussion is talking about apparently thinks there are enough to make its proposal for "converting Linux to Windows" worth an effort.
I was just making the point that Linux isn't any one thing, it's everything. You want an OS handles things the way you want? Well, you do, and others should be given the same privilege. It's silly to stamp your feet about certain implementations or features existing within the Linux ecosystem, the whole point of FOSS is that they can all exist.
> The article that this discussion is talking about apparently thinks there are enough to make its proposal for "converting Linux to Windows" worth an effort.
From the article: "Imagine we made a new Linux distro. This distro would provide a desktop environment that looks close enough to Windows that a Windows user could use it without training."
It isn't proposed as a distro for people who use Linux, but for people who use Windows but may want to move to Linux. I was one of those people, I switched my gaming PC from Windows to EndevourOS last year, though I've been using various distros for the past 20 years on other devices. I switched because Windows is becoming a shit show. I know my way around Linux, I use Blender, Krita, Gimp, Inkscape and Reaper, all native apps, but sometimes I just want to install a Windows application since the functionality I require makes it's simply necessary. Dual booting is a massive hassle, VMs fuck up productivity workflows and while I can sometimes get it working with Wine it's a hassle. I might not use the proposed OS, but the components that would allow for seamless installation of Windows software? I'd love for those to exist.
Centralized package management is a curse. Apps should be responsible for their own updates, not the OS.
So I would rather the app authors just focus on perfecting their apps, while said apps can then be packaged and distributed in bulk by different sets of people trained to handle those challenges.
What I very certainly do NOT want is:
* Apps automatically checking for updates on startup — since they can't check while they are off — leading to needlessly leaked data crossing the network about exactly when I'm starting up exactly which apps (since they dial home to predictable locations regardless of TLS usage)
* Apps constantly filling systray with their own bespoke updaters (and "accelerators" which just means the app is running 24/7 but minimized to tray ;P )
* App launches updater, updater window says "can't update because app is running". Close app, wait for update, now I have to go hunt down the document I had originally opened the app with. Next time an app launches an updater, I leave it on its splash screen and go to close the app.. naturally that also closes the updater since this time around the one is a sub-process of the other. (I recall earlier versions of Wireshark causing me much grief on these fronts, for example)
* More diverse attack surface area for hackers to infect my PC: instead of trying to juke a distro who has at least some experience and vested interest in defending against poisoning, just juke any single software author less specialized in distribution security and take over their distribution channel instead.
Distros are not quite "the OS". You don't need a distro to run Linux.
The role distros play as far as Linux applications are concerned is more like an app store in the Windows (or Mac) world. Of course Apple has locked down their smartphones that way basically since their inception, and their desktop OS has been becoming more and more like that. So has Windows.
Is that where we want desktop Linux to go?
However, Linux distros, while they play an app store-like role, are still very different from the Windows or Mac app stores. First, they don't restrict what else you can install on the system; you don't have to jailbreak your Linux computer to install something that the distro doesn't package. Second, they don't insist that you set up an account and hand over your personal information, or nag you constantly if you don't do that.
Windows Store is most similar to Flathub in that regard.
It's pretty funny to read a critisism of linux s/w distribution along the lines of the dificulty of distributing binaries.
This is one of the biggest security vulnerabilities of windows. 3rd parties distributing binary executables.
At least in a typical linux distro the binary is built by the distributing org, with some review of where the source comes from.
Downloading a windows app from the internet one has no idea what source is included in that binary.
I'm also not a fan of non-distro based systems such as flatpack. Again, I would prefer my binaries built by the distribution, or if need be, locally.
This "feature" falls apart for nonfree software, which most commercial apps are. You can use Spotify and Steam's PPA but will similarly have no idea what source was included in them.
In fact this is the way 3rd party windoze executables are typically distributed.
Nobody's stopping you...
p.s. The above seems like a trolling reply, but I always play the straight man...
... which often patches upstream code in ways that upstream neither approves of nor wants to support. And then, when things break, the user can't go upstream, and the distro package maintainers simply don't have enough time to deal with all the user reports.
That's what billions of people do. :)
"We should"? Do you mean me? I have a ton of my own projects I'm busy with.
Why didn't you say "I should create..."? There's nothing stopping you implementing this if you think it's a good idea. Do the work yourself.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...
I return to that game for a few quick sessions every couple of months.
Personal computers are for persons. They don't view their use of their own systems through the lens of an imputed purity test.
> I would rather prefer OS devs not wasting time maintaining legacy cruft and evolve with the times.
Then don't support those who do with your dollars. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the market shows it disagrees with you.
Businesses run the old stuff.
There's a whole world out there of legacy software that is happily churning along, and doesn't need to be updated.
Great game.