Don't care about "Unfortunate Media Coverage" - was Re:Re: Re: : Unfortunate Ubuntu media coverage

Fri Jan 16 22:29:12 UTC 2009

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Peter <plpeter2006-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Phillip Mills <phillip.mills1 at ...> writes:
>> > I can't help but ask myself, have you or your
>> > friends ever tried a Mac ?
>>
>> If various definitions of freedom -- and applications requirements --
>> don't get in the way, then this has been my recommendation since the
>> origin of OS X.  I like the idea that I can choose from moment to
> ... <snip>
>
> One more thing: Invariably discussions around this theme lead to political wars.

It has been fascinating to see MacOS emerge as an option that people
that otherwise tend to favor Linux frequently point at as a suggested
option for the "support challenged" (or what *is* the politically
correct way to refer to a "luser" these days???
<http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_27.html#TAG1080>)

There *is* something very pointedly political there; historically, it
was Tom Christiansen's quote that got heavily used:
"Windows was created to keep stupid people away from UNIX."

When MacOS grabbed UNIX to become its underpinnings, that led to a
mighty curious change.  Even though Apple has been (and continues to
be) a mighty proprietary player, and even though Steve Jobs is one of
the few folks in computing of comparable "control freakness" to Bill
Gates, MacOS has poked a big hole in the use of Christiansen's quote.

> Beyond politics, people have a simple choice: pay for an integrated product that
> does what they need, such as a Mac, or pay very little for a bootable Linux
> image on CD or DVD and live with the tiny problems that may occur, problems
> which may require some help from a discussion group (like this one) to sort out,
> or even a paid session with a professional linux expert who will actually
> customize a bootable distribution to perfectly suit the person's needs (and I
> have done this repeatedly in the past). So there are lots of choices but
> comparing apples with prunes (full Linux distribution install vs. crippleware
> vs. boot-and-use appliance style computers like Macs) is not fair, and does not
> serve the community (ANY community).

There's a very valid issue here:  There are numerous metrics available
to evaluate the merits of varying flavours of Linux and other relevant
OSes.

For my purposes, Debian has fit well with my own personal "metrics."

The following list is a tad dated, but is still pretty accurate in
terms of "broad strokes" in describing things about Debian that are
good.  It misses the matter of governance (e.g. - Debian is a project
with a constitution, which is not a "software feature", but rather a
*political* feature, which has a lot of implications), but is pretty
useful:
http://www.infodrom.org/Debian/doc/advantages.html

For Ubuntu, one could create an analagous list consisting of many, but
not all, of the same items, and add some items, too, and get a list
that would in fact be materially different, thereby expressing how it
is useful for a somewhat different set of potential and actual users
than Debian.  There's enough in common that many users of Debian would
also find that Ubuntu matches their needs fairly well, but enough
differences that it should be unsurprising that both projects continue
unabated.

It would be interesting to see analagous lists for other distributions
of Linux and other OSes, notably:
- Fedora
- Red Hat's commercial distributions
- SuSE
- Centos
- FreeBSD
- MacOS-X

The differing sets of purposes of the respective sets of producers of
these various systems means that the mixes are sure to vary.

I'm quite comfortable with the notion that not everyone's goal is to
"support all people."  The following, deployed almost ten years ago,
is entertaining, a bit insulting, but despite having a bit of
Tom-Christiansen-style unfriendliness, has a very valid point...

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/03/msg02288.html

The abstract and introduction:
------set phasers to cut here -------

Letter to Debian about Friendliness
===================================

Executive Summary
=================

	1. Stupid Users are Bad.
	2. Stupid Users are Bad for Debian.
		therefore:
	3. Stupid Users should be ignored.

Introduction
============

	I'm writing this letter to the Debian community in what is
undoubtedly not a very warm view but one of my stronger opinions about the
Linux community. My first installation of Debian was a migration from
Slackware, synchronized with a fellow slacker (vermont-vLP2nKBMwiY at public.gmane.org), and was
incited by a third coworker (donr-vLP2nKBMwiY at public.gmane.org). To be quite frank, the
installation blew goats. No if's and's or but's. It was difficult, and I
loved it that way. After getting over the enormous and difficult mountain
called installation, I stood atop its peak and looked down at a beautiful,
green valley where the goats frolicked and the hackers played. It was a
promiseland of customization. Those packages which were trivial and not
worth maintaining were done by a single person. Instead of 1000 hackers
worrying about whether their installation of 'less', or 'as86', or 'grep'
was the latest, one hacker worried about it on behalf of the rest.  This
was a wonderful place after the dreadfully satisfying land of slacking.
Many people still complain that Debian is difficult, if not impossible, to
install and I poo on them. If they can't persevere the mountain, they
should not enjoy the fruits of the valley beyond it.
------set phasers to cut here -------

Now, I think this fellow makes some "unfriendly points" that go beyond
what I'd go along with.  He suggests that no attempt should be made to
make a "newbie-friendly Linux", and I actually don't have a problem
with that.

There are things that MacOS makes "trivial" which Linux *can't*, by
nature of some of the design choices.

Evan recently mentioned ALSA configuration as being troublesome, and
while there's a point to agree on, in that ALSA is a pain to
*everyone*, knowledgeable or not, there is a contrast to be made with
(say) MacOS.

Apple has a simplifying assumption that they make by virtue of them
picking what hardware you'll run their OS on.  They have *complete*
access, at design time, to all the hardware that will be using their
OS, and Linux has a much bigger challenge in that for any given piece
of hardware (aside from virtually standard things that come on EVERY
motherboard, irrespective of manufacturer), it is quite likely that
MOST kernel/driver writers do not have access to that piece of
hardware.  Each sound chipset is different, and people have this weird
expectation of getting uniform behaviour for sound on ANY chipset.
Trying to coalesce the varying sound features into a single API is
nontrivial, and ALSA is definitely nontrivial :-).

I'm not quite sure what to suggest for the "naive,
unsupported-by-smart-people" would-be user of Linux.

a) Tom Christiansen would point them to Windows, but Windows has
gotten increasingly awful in various ways, so I'm not sure that's a
good recommendation still.

b) I'm quite sure I wouldn't recommend Debian to Maureen, and that's
not intended as any sort of insult, no not in the slightest.  It
wasn't meant to be suitable to novices, and while some descriptions of
that unsuitability are a tad unfriendly, I don't think it's fair to
assume it to be a suitable choice.

Debian fills an extremely meaningful niche both politically and
technically, and the growth of more "newbie-friendly" derivatives
makes it irrelevant whether or not Debian is itself "newbie-friendly."

Debian can "offer support for free"; there is a crucial difference in
that there are enough obstacles between would-be users and support
that:
  a) Only those that *are* able to cope with it being a relatively
"difficult, complex, cryptic, command line driven,
undocumented, labyrinth of an OS as it's *nix predecessors" (in the
words of Pablo Averbuj), and
  b) Only those that are able to figure out the culture of how to deal
with the community of other Debian users can do so.
As a result...
  c) Those that made it through those two narrow passages are likely
sufficiently technically knowledgeable that helping them is likely to
be helpful to that same community.

But this particular support will NOT be of much use to "novice users."

c) Ubuntu tries to do more "newbie-friendly" packaging, which seems a
fine thing to me.  I think there's a support mistake there, somewhere;
my suspicion is that if there were meaningful *paid* service offerings
for Ubuntu, that might make it really materially more suitable for the
technically unsophisticated that really need to have a human being to
help.

Note that having human help would mean that a "well supported Ubuntu"
would need to cost hundreds of dollars, probably per year.  I don't
think that naive computer users can live without having that sort of
"support offering," and I think that when we think as hobbyists, we do
a disservice to people that we ought to be pointing to *PAYING*
support offerings.

You can't have support for free for anyone that might come along and
expect that to scale.

d) MacOS is "more politically palatable" to a population of people
that have a propensity to hate Microsoft than Windows, and, as I
previously mentioned, has other advantages:
- Since Apple determines the hardware, they can code to the hardware,
avoiding a lot of headaches that attends support of "whatever wacky
hardware anyone might have around"
- Since Apple collected a bunch of money from you, they can afford to
provide some human support
- Apple Stores are readily available with human "Apple Geniuses"

The Apple option costs enough that this pays for a moderate amount of
human support.  If people were prepared to pay $200/yr for some
analagous "Ubuntu support," there might be something more
"Maureen-friendly."  But it's not enough for there to just be Maureen
ready to pay...
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
Robert Orben  - "To err is human - and to blame it on a computer is
even more so."
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