TLUG Mailing List

> From: nigel@example.com
> Date: Mon, 12 May 2014 16:44:36 +0900
> To: tlug@example.com
> Subject: Re: [tlug] What's with this anti-Apple tirade? [was: 2014-05-10 Linux Quiz]
>
> Its so liberating to be able to install the OS you want.
> Why hasn't it caught on?

In my experience, most people don't know and don't care how their immediate computer and its operating system works. It's just a matter of time and money. Time is required to learn or implement anything new, and time is money. So it's really a matter of time. This includes academics and engineers, even computer engineers and computer scientists. Their goal is to get one type of task done well with one computer, not find something "generally optimal."

If a regular computer tower/pizza box and the average bubble jet printer "just work" with Linux, try setting up your favorite distribution on a brand new workstation replacement notebook or ultrabook. I know someone who is a top network engineer who couldn't get WiFi to work reliably on a midrange HP notebook because of bugs the Linux drivers weren't overcoming.

Side rant: the hardware industry usually doesn't care about documenting products for Linux developers. There is little motivation for them to do it. Most portable computers these days are full of proprietary SMBuses, i2c busses, dedicated embedded controllers, and so on. Linux can barely keep up with mainstream models, so lid close events, brightness control, temperature sensors and whatnot are a crap shoot in terms of whether they will work 100% correctly on Linux. Vendors should be helping more, but their hardware itself is getting more and more complicated. They probably don't really understand it either. Think about dual-graphics systems. Bumblebee on Linux works pretty well, but it can be a real pain to setup. Multiple displays with the desired resolutions and so forth are usually a challenge to setup on Linux. On Windows it usually works OK if you have good components.

Choice isn't an aesthetic most computer users value because their goal is to finish what they're doing with a computer and get away from it. We in TLUG actually like computers for some odd reason, so that makes us exceptional. (Although I like them less now than I did 20 years ago.) This makes it harder for us to understand why someone would just rely on Windows for anything.

On a related note, I think this is where iOS and Android have made the biggest changes to the way ordinary people work: more people who would rather get away from a computer when they're done with a given task are carrying a fully functional UNIX-like system around in their pockets or purses and without thinking about it, liking it. This could change with Windows Phone but the transition happened without Microsoft already.

Android and iOS have all sorts of people doing things with computing devices they never would have had a notion to try before.

I think task-specific computing is where UNIX and Linux excel the most. A wildly successful iOS app usually does one thing very well. A virtual machine can provide one isolated web application and do it very well with a small footprint in many cases.

Doing one thing really well is what the world wants out of a given unit of computing these days.