Re: linux desktop in trouble

[Optikos <ZUERCHER_Andreas@outlook.com>]

On Tuesday, March 3, 2020 at 4:14:27 AM UTC-6, Leif Roar Moldskred wrote:
> Mehdi Saada <00120260a@gmail.com> wrote:
> > https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-desktop-is-in-trouble/
> > How easier would it be if they weren't using messed-up tools to begin with,
> 
> Not a lot, honestly. The problems that plague the linux desktop are
> political

Politics polices policy (both in tech and in government).  The so-called “political” trouble with Linux in particular (and somewhat so in the BSDs) is that it is difficult to herd the cats to agree on one cohesive set of •policies•.  When agreement on the fundamental good versus bad of various policies cannot be achieved, then competing political factions arise to defend their favored set of policies (e.g., systemd versus some other init; C-centric GTK versus C++-centric Qt; pacman versus apt versus snap; Arch distro's rolling release versus Debian distro's periodic release versus Yocto-primordial-not-a-distro roll-your-own-distro).  Then each faction laments & lambastes too much politics when some political movement naturally organically arises that backs a different set of policies.

> and architectural,

1) Cathedral of perhaps never-ending refinement of perfection (which risks bicycle shedding)
versus
2) bazar of perhaps the just-barely-good-enough bizarre (which risks ossifying too soon in local optima that are far far from global optima)
are 2 competing sets of architectural policies that have 2 strongly-held politics policing each of them for decades.

> not issues of functional correctness

The Linux community as a whole cannot agree to one all-the-wood-behind-one-arrow* intended functionality.  Hence the Linux community as a whole cannot enforce perfect fidelity to one set of functionality because of 2 or more competing sets of functionality.

> or bug-fixing.

In the bazar, one person's bug often can be another person's desirableness in certain use-cases.

The answer to this is of course for the cathedral Ada community eventually to have a separate cathedral OS that is separate from the Linux bazar.