Well said, Michael.
On Saturday, 20-07-2024 at 20:19 Michael Grant wrote:
> My opinions only...
>
> 1) MS Office (Word/Excel/PPT/etc) has never been available for
> Unix/Gnu-Linux. Word and Excel have long been 2 apps users require.
> Not OpenOffice. While OpenOffice is quite featureful, it is not 100%
> bug for bug compatible with real MS Office products. Similar for
> Outlook vs say Thunderbird with respect to the way Outlook is integrated
> into the MS universe.
>
> 2) Windows vs Unix/Gnu-Linux, Windows is a single operating system.
> Whereas on the Unix/Gnu-Linux side you have so many choices it's
> overwhelming. Different distros, you have several pure Unix variants,
> multiple Linux variants for the underlying OS and then you have
> X-Windows with it's myriad of choices. There is no clear single choice.
> And then there's the different packaging systems...
>
> 3) X-Windows, though as cool as it is to be able to run things remotely
> and display them locally, this is rarely used--most individual users
> will never use that functionality. Aside from that, X-windows is an
> unmitigated disaster from a UX perspective. X's original underlying
> programming interface left it up to the programmer to do everything.
> This caused every early programs to look and work differently without
> any consistency. To fix this, toolkits came along and along with the
> toolkits came the toolikit wars and then the window manager wars and
> then the wars between Gnome and KDE and other desktops (desktop wars?).
> Even multiple ways copypaste works. From a user point of view nothing
> is consistent across all apps on Unix/Gnu-Linux and X-Windows. All of
> this has kept Unix/Gnu-Linux and X in the "geek space".
>
> 4) I've not see a single X-windows based desktop that looked as slick
> and as polished as modern Windows or MacOS. Everything seems to just
> look and work more clunkily and a bit slower. This is very much my
> aesthetic opinion, I know. Things like consistent font sizes and icons
> and their proportion and slickness. All very subjective I realize but
> in my opinion, this too has made the difference. The "wow" factor just
> isn't there. There isn't even a single approximate "look and feel" to a
> graphical UI on top of all Unix/Gnu-Linux systems that one could point
> to, though some are more popular than others.
>
> There have been efforts to standardize things in the Unix space like
> Posix and The Open Group but again, without a single consistent user
> paradigm. The people in this space have rallied around choice and not
> trying to get programmers to write to one standard but let programmers
> create. I have sat on Posix committees and the standards that got
> written were to include everything rather than narrow it down to the
> best thing to do. Many people have told me over the years that they
> really appreciate the diversity of the way applications work under X
> windows, that each one has a different UX, some with scroll bars on
> left, some on right by default, some square buttons, some rounded,
> nothing the same from one to the next. This "wild wild west" approach
> has kept Unix/Gnu-Linux from being more mainstream.
>
> 5) There is less main stream software available for Unix/Gnu-Linux. As
> mentioned above the MS tools suite. Most of the Adobe tools like
> Photoshop. Financial tools like Quicken. Some of these things have
> moved to online web-based tools. Web based MS Office tools are
> definitely not the same as the real ones though. You can argue that
> there's a replacement for almost every tool like Gimp for Photoshop but
> it's not Photoshop. Most photographers have heard of or used Photoshop,
> but not many know or know about Gimp. These are just a few examples,
> there are many others. This effect has a knock-on effect of lower
> uptake for Unix/Gnu-Linux.
>
> 6) Support. Who does the non-technical user go to for tech support?
>
> Since the Unix/Gnu-Linux OS and windowing tools were developed all over
> the place, not in some walled garden of Microsoft or Apple, this is why
> all this competing and inconsistency has occurred. It's great that we
> have Unix/Gnu-Linux don't get me wrong. I'm just giving you my opinion
> of the history of why a single Unix or Gnu-Linux system has never had
> the same uptake as Windows or MacOS has.
>
> So some mainstream things ARE Unix/Gnu-Linux... MacOS is Unix based, or
> at least Mach which has it's lineage from Unix, so there's a mainstream
> Unix based OS. But you can't just run MacOS things on anything other
> than MacOS (not easily anyway). Android is Linux based and you can get
> Android "chrome books". There is Ubuntu and a few other packaged Linux
> based OSes (Ubuntu mostly but probably also RedHat) that sometimes ship
> on computers but they're never nearly as popular as Windows. Why?
> Mostly see (1) above in my opinion. And also you have sheer momentum
> behind Windows and MacOS which is hard to get traction foothold in.
> Unix/Gnu-Linux (mostly Gnu-Linux as far as I'm aware) is used behind the
> scene of many many hardware devices.
>
> 7) Once most people buy a computer and it's shipped with an OS, not very
> many will wipe it out and install a different OS. MS knows this and
> they get hardware vendors to ship Windows.
>
> I think Unix/Gnu-Linux with all it's diversity and openness is great!
> Without some unifying force, I just don't see an easy way a fully free
> and open system is going to become a mainstream OS used on
> desktops/laptops, though Google has managed to do this for phones,
> tablets, and some "chrome books", so maybe that's the future, who
> knows.....
>
> These are my opinions of why we haven't historically see Unix or
> Gnu-Linux running on more computers sitting on mainstream
> laptops/desktops. I'm sure some people will disagree with me and will
> correct me if I've gotten some of my facts wrong above or forgotten
> something important, so feel free to add/correct.
>
> Michael Grant
>
>
>
