miguel had a pretty cool post on why the linux desktop failed.
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Will Hill+18The other factor is called anti-competitive practices, +Mirza Borogovac, and those are something +Miguel de Icaza seems to ignore because it's his paymaster that does the worst of it. Everywhere there's a gnu/linux success, Microsoft sweeps down to crush it in one way or another and they are constantly working to sabotage hardware. Take gnu/linux on desktops at Walmart back in 2006 http://techrights.org/2009/01/22/microsoft-taskforce-vs-walmart-linux/ , woops that was quick. They did the same thing to OLPC and netbooks just a couple of years later while Microsoft thrashed with Vista and Vista 7. Any company that has anything to do with Microsoft is punished harshly for working with gnu/linux. Companies that have nothing to do with Microsoft are harassed in court with bogus patents or copyright claims. These things are continuations of the way Microsoft and Apple have always dealt with their competition, and we can go back to look at horror stories from a decade ago, like SCO, Caldera, Correl, Netscape, and on and on.
Blaming Linus and other developers is a double insult. It's an insult because those developers shoulder the costs of Microsoft's crimes and it's an insult to think people are too stupid to remember the source of their problems. Way to blame the victim, +Miguel de Icaza.
Here are a few counter examples to the assertion that non free software makers can't deal with gnu/linux diversity without an ABI. Skype. Remember that? It worked great with gnu/linux and ran repositories which I know worked well with Debian and derivatives. That was before Microsoft bought it, now I hear it's broken. ID Software has always tinkered with gnu/linux and continues to do so but now we have Steam and other good stuff coming along, if things like Play Station were not good enough. I also work with a radiation therapy treatment planning system that works on Fedora while Windows systems are buggy at best. Oh yeah, CT/PET machines have also moved to Red Hat. Rock Stable. So that's a range of software from frivolous for the masses to demanding for a narrow band of technical users, and it all just works because nothing is hidden with free software. Non free developers can, if they please, make things work on a few distros and reach almost everyone interested. Again, this is something that's been going on for more than a decade, as native versions of Word Perfect and Corel Linux showed us back in the late 90s. Strangely enough, when you step away from x86, you find wild linux success in the form of Android, again without an ABI. It's the freedom that makes it work. Loading it up with buggy, non free software has a tendency to make "Linux" suck.Sep 3, 2012
+Will Hill Since when has Microsoft been +Miguel de Icaza's "paymaster"?Sep 3, 2012- Officially, for about a year, +Jeff Ratcliff.
http://techrights.org/2011/09/29/miguel-de-icaza-linux-hater/Sep 3, 2012 - +Will Hill I didn't see any official announcement in that link. An official link would have to come from Microsoft or Miguel. So now you appear to have linked to 2 conspiracy theories in the same discussion- it's cracking your credibility.Sep 3, 2012
In few years, outside of the dev community, there wont be such a thing as a consumer desktop as we know them. Projects like +CyanogenMod based on Android AOSP have a good shot at becoming the Linux distros/desktops of the future. Important for these projects to learn from past attempts.Sep 3, 2012
okay, folks.. closing comments on this. Feel free to discuss on the many postings out there on reddit/slashdot/etc.Sep 3, 2012
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