To Linux you say?
Meh. I never liked that whole concept. That’s like saying “I hate the cars Detroit and Tokyo are designing, these days. That’s why I’m going to build my own train.”
“Wait, hold on! Don’t walk away! It’s not like it was, back in the old days! With the current build-your-own-locomotive kits, you ALMOST never have to lay any of your own track, anymore!”
All along, the correct solution would have been for Microsoft to have a real commercial competitor, other than Apple.
Too late. Neal Stephenson already beat you to the punch with this analogy.
Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles–expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.
Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market–and yet cheaper than the others.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It’s a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They’ve been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.
Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.
The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it’s a fringe player.
The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers’ attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”
Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”
Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”
Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”
Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”
Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”
This is from In The Beginning… Was The Command Line. Published 1999.
You know, if I had a nickel for every time I quoted a chunk of a Stephenson book in the last few days I’d have two nickels. But it’s weird that it’s happened twice.
That’s all amusing, in its own belabored way. But think about the specifics. That little screed was published in 1999. I’m pretty sure there was no 3D accelerated GPU on the market that had functional Linux drivers, at that point. I guess that would be like the free tanks being unable to drive on many newly built roads.
I imagine the station wagon buyer pointing this out, to which the guy with the bullhorn would reply “You don’t need to drive on those roads!”
That’s always the Linux answer. Whatever it can’t do, you just don’t need to be doing. Until the driver support DOES come along, then they add it to the “see, Linux can do anything and everything” list, without feeling the slightest hint of self-awareness.
I could be wrong about the state of Linux drivers for GPUs, in the late 1990s. If I am, then fuck it. You could say I just wasted those three paragraphs. But there’s always something. Printers, scanners, webcams, other peripherals. The corner cases do get fixed eventually, and there are a lot less of them, in 2024. But in the 90s, it was a lot worse. There truly were plenty of things that you just couldn’t do with Linux. Given that, I find the characterization of Linux as an invincible supertank among shitty cars to be more than a bit stretched.
Do I have words for you about the beauty of building your own bicycle from scratch! And as an added perk you can do it in all the time that linux mint saves you by just giving you a fully functional operating system
Since Windows XP and especially since Vista/7, I spent a lot of my time with Windows re-learning how to do the same things. They kept moving controls, or lengthening the process to get to the same controls via onioneering. I switched to Linux, and it was about the same learning process as a new version of Windows. Then I upgraded to a new version of the distro I was using…and it was mostly the same, had a couple extra features and came with a different default icon set.
Result: The time I used to spend re-learning how to do things I already knew how to do was now spent learning how to do new things. Instead of treading water, I’m making headway.
Linux mint is Goooooood, man I love that OS.
If only I wouldn’t need to build my own ISOs to install Linux. If only someone could build the system for me…
Nope, the correct solution would have been for MS to compete fairly with OSS, instead of, for example, buying the standardization of its Office suite formats, and then never implementing those formats to prevent OpenOffice from being 100% interoperable.
Hmmmmmm…what force might have coerced Microsoft to behave more reasonably, in that situation? PERHAPS A SOLID COMPETITOR, WHO WOULD GAIN MARKET SHARE AGAINST THEM, IF THEY PISSED OFF THE MARKET BY BREAKING COMPATIBILITY, IN THE VITAL OFFICE SUITE SPACE?
Robust competition in the actual operating system market would be the solution, exactly like I said.
The problem with Linux is that, despite being fucking free, it’s not robust competition. It always hovers somewhere in the 1-4 percent range, for desktop users. It’s not fair or logical for that to be the case, really…but here we are.
I honestly think there’s a parallel universe, quite close to our own, where IBM made a bigger push to establish OS/2 (or something else) as a general-purpose, consumer-targeted operating system, or maybe a whole other company made a compatible competitor OS. I’m talking, like, all the way back in the early 90s, when Windows was just getting on its feet.
In that world, where Microsoft had been forced to split the market with a genuine competitor, they wouldn’t have been able to do all the crazy shit that a monopoly allows. The point is, they truly would have had to be forced into that position. No business is going to compete fairly out of the goodness of its heart, because it doesn’t have a heart. It only has predatory instincts.
Of course, to belabor the point, that’s why nobody’s high-minded philosophy about “free as in free speech, not free beer” software was ever going to be the solution. That kind of homespun cringe shit is exactly how you get 1-4 percent market share, even though your product can be obtained gratis.
It’s not my fault, but it’s the truth.
what force might have coerced Microsoft to behave more reasonably, in that situation?
Strong antitrust and anti-corruption laws. Their actions were not “unreasonable”, they were straight up illegal.
Edit: also you should read up on the whole thing. They didn’t break compatibility with their own office suite of course. What they did is lie to (and almost definitely pay off) the standardization body: “here is the spec for OpenXML, you see we’re open it’s right here in the name, anyone can implement it and be interoperable with us”. So OpenXML was standardized along with OpenOffice’s OOXML (at the start of the process, only OOXML was considered for standardization).
Once the deed was done, they of course didn’t implement OOXML in MS Office (as is their right), but they also didn’t implement their own OpenXML spec properly, which means OpenOffice still had to reverse-engineer an intentionally obfuscated and broken format to try and read/write documents compatible with MSO.
So the whole thing has been absolutely useless, except for a couple of “experts” from the panel who came out of it a bit richer.
See, here’s the thing, though:
Imagine what might have been accomplished if everyone who has ever oh-so-aggressively proselytized to their fellow citizens, trying to get them to adopt Linux had TALKED ABOUT THIS SHIT, INSTEAD.
Not as a reason to adopt Linux. Not as a way to try and grow Linux’s 1-4 percent of the market share up to oooooh, maybe 8 percent. No. Imagine if they had set that shit aside and expended all that effort, getting the vote out for candidates who would have supported anti-trust enforcement.
And don’t get pessimistic on me, now. If you’re enough of a die-hard, lost-cause enthusiast to believe Linux can grow from 1-4 percent of the userbase to somehow, some way take over Microsoft’s dominant position, one of these decades…well, you can’t very well turn around and say “nah, all politicians are the same, there’s no hope for change in that area.”
Either be a pie-in-the-sky dreamer who never gives up hope OR DON’T.
In all honesty, I think most Linux street-preachers would actually rather open source never get any more traction. At least, not in the actual desktop operating system realm. Deep down, I think most of them prefer to be the poor, noble, beknighted underdog. Always preaching the truth, always being ignored by the idiot masses. It’s a phenomenal way to stroke one’s own ego.
Yeah that’s all we talked about over at Slashdot at the time. Nobody else gave a fuck.
Actually if “windows” is “cars” and linux is “trains,” ditching windows for linux is more like selling your car in NYC and taking the subway instead because while it is less glamorous it actually works better to get you around the city and you don’t have to worry about all the extra bullshit like paying for or finding parking.
That analogy fails, because a full 32 percent of New Yorkers take the subway for their commute, whereas about 1-4 percent of people use Linux.
Go ahead and say “well, that’s because a lot of people are stupid sheep.” Doesn’t really matter. The fact is, Linux has been “just about to take over the desktop OS market and leave all these commercial-software-loving Wintel Box users in the dust” for almost as long as we’ve been waiting for nuclear fusion.
And it actually looks like we MIGHT get fusion power, before Linux can break 6 percent (edit: wait, if you count ChromeOS, I guess it broke 6 percent, at some point. I don’t know if you count ChromeOS, though. I kinda don’t, because of how much it relies on cloud shit)
If any non-windows PC-compatible operating system had ever put together a 32 percent market share, that would have made EVERYTHING better, because it would have been placing market pressure on Microsoft. They wouldn’t be able to pull bullshit stunts like we’ve been talking about.
But Linux could never actually get enough users. It just wasn’t ever meant to be.
EDIT: I actually had my numbers wrong. 32 percent is the number of commuters who use the subway to get INTO New York City, for their daily commute. Apparently, A FULL 55 PERCENT OF ACTUAL NEW YORK RESIDENTS say they use the subway as their primary mode of transportation, inside the city.
So, again, the analogy simply cannot hold. Linux will never have 55 percent of the userbase.
You probably think it should have 55 percent. And that’s fine. But a bunch of could’ves, should’ves, and would’ves taped to a $10 bill are worth one picture of Alexander Hamilton, and not much else.
It isn’t about % of users lol, that’s a fight you’re having with yourself, and now I’m wondering if you think the % of people who use their own home-built trains to get around is comparable to the % of linux users. It’s about user experience. Sure, if you NEED your car to go offroading the subway may not be the best option, same as if you NEED to play Destiny 2 you may not want to use linux, but for most people who just want to get around the city the subway is the best option, even for the people who moved from out of state and are used to their car so they don’t utilize the trains. For most people who just want to browse the internet (or a myriad of other non-windows-exclusive programs), linux is actually better than windows, even if those people are used to the OS that ships with their computer.
Analogy holds up.
Oh! And Tl;dr, jfc my guy.
Recompiling your OS kernel: “I’ll do that shit, sure. It’ll make me feel SO MUCH SMARTER than those WintelBox Sheep.”
Reading about 300 words: “Nah, too long.”
EDIT: Also, you say it’s not about % of users, but that really is just your opinion. Things WOULD be a lot different, if there were significantly more Linux users. I won’t bother to elaborate on how exactly I think things would be different, because I realize you don’t like reading.
Never had to recompile my kernel unless you mean
sudo dnf update -ywhich yeah I guess would be hard for someone like you.
Well, how is his wife holding up?
To Linux, you say?
