this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Linux distros are not a monolith. It's not made by one single entity, but instead assembled from various projects runs by different people and companies. All the distros do are assembling them into a single system and add their own special sauces on top. How are you going to propose to unify all those diversities? Rallying everyone behind a single company like Red Hat? We all know what would happen when one company get to control the whole ecosystem.
In my opinion, having multiple distros competing on features is the best things that can happen to us. When one popular distro lost their way and start to alienate their users, there will be other distros those users can choose from. Imagine what would happen if there is only one distro and it starts to get shitty like what windows is doing right now.
The irony of the dude failing to see the point behind decentralized distros when commenting on Lemmy, in the Fediverse. Why is he not on Reddit?
Yes, that's my point, that's why we have a fucktastically fragmented ecosystem where 95% of the time, any forum answer to a problem you are having is highly distro dependent and will not work anywhere else.
Why is it my fucking job? All I want is an OS where I can do what I want to do without spending 3 weeks getting a fuckdamn scanner driver to work. The linux community needs to collectively realize that charging in 30,000 different directions at once is incredibly harmful to any form of standardization.
Now you are just strawmanning
The ALREADY EXISTING UNIFYING FORCE should be: Making proprietary, closed source OSs obsolete.
You can't do that until you have a product that meets needs better than closed source, and that will never happen when 75% of the collective coding effort is going into 'our unique and different flavor of doing what everyone else is doing already'
On the OTHER hand, if even only 20% linux dev worked on a single, comprehensive, user friendly and functional distro, can you imagine how quickly that would have killed windows?
So you think it's wise to dilute all those human work hours on thousands of effectively similar but functionally different distros that will fall out of style and use as time goes on?
That's why it is critical to have a fucktonne of people working on the project that are actively interested in preventing enshittification. On a small dev team they can just collectively decide to go against the user's best interest. With a massive dev pool this wouldn't happen as literally no unilateral action could happen.
Look, I get biology, I know why you think diverse OS ecosystems are great, but the fact you and so many other proponents of this mess we call modern linux are missing is that such diversity drastically reduces the usefulness of historic forum support posts.
Think about cell phone chargers. Nowadays nearly everyone has a single standard they follow, USB C. It's great, I can charge pretty much any device from pretty much any USB C charger.
Do you remember what it was like before that? Having a drawer full of different stupidly designed charger jacks that couldn't be used for anything but the device it was manufactured for?
Yeah that's what linux distros are like now. A fucktonne of practically identical but functionally different operating systems with near zero assurances of interoperability or even software compatibility.
AND the devs aren't even all that good at adopting other distro's 'successes' so the biggest advantage of a diverse OS ecosystem is lost.
Face it, most distro creators just want the prestige of their name being attached to the project, and really aren't all that interested in making something useful to the wider world.
I think you're mistaken here. Getting a device hardware to work is not the distro job, it's the job of the hardware manufacturer. Even on windows, device manufacturers would submit their drivers to microsoft for certification. Some thing happen on linux, device manufacturers would submit their driver to kernel maintainer, but they must submit the source code instead of binaries so some companies that don't want to open up their source code due to misguided "trade secret" reason will never submit their driver to linux, even when the whole ecosystem unify behind a single distro. Some device manufacturers do release binary drivers for linux, but their licensing incompatible with the distros license so they can't be distributed by the distros.
Come one man, how is this strawmanning when you demand everyone to rally behind a single distro? Which distro maker got the most influence in linux development world right now? It's red hat with no close competitor in sight. Red hat's technical decisions already split linux communities. If they got even more influence, it's going to be bad for linux future. It'll going to be even more fragmented in a way that's worse than now.
Yet despite all the supposed problem you brought up, linux desktop marketshare is growing to 4% this year. Reaching 5% and beyond is not an impossibility in near future.
And we've already established that few hardware manufacturers, especially of peripherals, are interested on wasting the time to write and test code for 4% of their userbase. So if the manufacturer isn't going to do it, who will? And if your average user can't get their peripherals to work on an OS, what use is that OS to users?
Unless you have some plan to shame manufacturers into supporting linux, it WILL have to be a linux dev to do it.
Yes, because it is profitable.
With that many devs, it would be trivial to write FOSS drivers for everything, proven by the fact that this already happens for some peripherals, but again because of the fuckdamn spread out ecosystem no one can agree on any one correct way to do it so what you get is a ton of partially useful drivers where no one set supports all features, but all features are supported between all the sets. Meaning all features are possible to be implemented but no one team had the manpower or understanding to do it.
What result do you think would have occurred if everyone just worked on the same driver set till it worked?
Well fucking crack open the bottle of Chateau Le Fite' 78 linux FINALLY has about the same marketshare as web connected leapfrog gamepads...
And it only took 3 decades...
Again, I think you're mistaken here. The majority of linux devs are not working on reverse engineering device drivers here. They work on their own projects within the linux ecosystem. Working on reverse engineering a device is a hard work and volunteers won't do it except for a few very dedicated people like asahi linux devs. Rallying behind a single distro won't fix this unless the distro is made by a huge company willing to pay people to reverse engineers various drivers. Getting essential hardware works is important and that's where most volunteers device driver devs are working with, but I'm not convinced getting support for all devices in the market the best way forward simply because it takes too many manpower we don't actually have. Better spend that manpower on getting gnome and kde better, getting wayland better, or perhaps maintaining x11 again, etc.
Linux desktop marketshare wasn't even 1% with no growth in sight until relatively recently, so yeah, off course people are celebrating now. It's now comparable to Mac marketshare (~4%) in early 2010.
Ok, I'm so fuckdamn tired of this, so amazingly fuckdamn tired.
Fucking strawman
False dichotomy.
#THAT'S WHY POOLING ALL AVAILABLE MANPOWER UNDER A SINGLE DISTRO IS A WIN
Considering how long it has been around, and how many tens if not hundreds of thousands of people working on it, 5% is fucking terrible.
I mean, sure, celebrate, but it isn't even close to being the achievement to warrant it.
You bring nothing to this discussion but informal fallacies and spurious arguments, just like every other linuxbro I've had the displeasure to deal with.
Get blocked and get lost.
I'm just telling you that it's wrong to assume hardware support problem will be solved by unifying behind a single distro, while in reality device driver devs are already unified behind the linux kernel project (not distro projects) and there is not enough manpower because there are only a handful of devs have necessary skill and willing to donate their time to support random devices in the market (and they need to have the devices on their hands first for reverse engineering). As linux marketshare grows, device manufacturers may be willingly support linux on their own, so your future scanner might eventually work out of the box on linux.