Not only that tom, I remember someone trrying to marry windows
emulation with a linux distro calling it lindows.
Ms felt threatened by using something almost the same as windows and
so did what ms likes to do when its threatened.
the result was the name was changed but aparently the os then took a
downward trend and within a few months went off the radar entirely.
Linux well unix has been a server and dev os its never been meant for
a home user mainstream os at least not if you have big comercial
stuff which is not opensource.
Now if we were all poor and helpless like india then its not so bad
but we never started with linux, and the comercial companies and in
fact market have grown round a windows based environment.
Its why I havn't gone full bore with linux, while I will eventually
possibly have a device dedicated to doing so, with the nature of my
work I physically can not go linux and ditch all my windows stuff.
I brought for the windows market back when I was yunger.
If I wasjust starting out, it would be the mac and linux market and
not the windows one, but most of my stuff in fact just about
everything I own requires that windows and only windows is used.
At 12:12 a.m. 27/10/2014, you wrote:
Hi Josh,
Sadly that is not going to happen. While I am a big Linux proponent I
also realize the majority of the world's developers won't touch Linux
for a number of reasons. Some of them are down right due to licensing
issues that essentially bars commercial developers from the platform.
For example, the GPL is fine if a developer is willing to develop his
or her software as free and open source, but if not the GPL because a
cosmic pain in the butt for a commercial company. Let's say a
developer wants to port some commercial program from Windows to Linux
and sell it. However, a number of the libraries he or she needs to use
are licensed under the GPL. They either have to release their software
as open source, the same as the libraries, or have to write commercial
libraries free of the GPL. Since nobody wants to do a lot of work
rewriting libraries and if they are in the business to make money they
won't release their software as open source. So right their Linux has
shot itself in the foot by attracting commercial developers just by
having too much of its libraries and core dependencies under the GPL.
Another key problem for developers is market share. There are many
people world wide running Linux, but they are fragmented, not unified,
because they all use different distributions of Linux. As it result it
makes it painful to create and distribute any piece of software that
will safely run on all distributions of Linux. If a developer says he
or she is only going to support say Ubuntu they are ignoring
potentially millions of potential consumers by not supporting Fedora,
Arch, Slackware, and so on as well. It makes it very impractical to
market a product when one is dealing with upward of a hundred
different versions of the same operating system.
Fortunately, for a target group such as the VI gaming community it
isn't quite that bad. I already know that most VI users are probably
running Ubuntu or a Ubuntu derivative like Ubuntu Gnome, Vinux, etc or
they have Arch or Fedora. That helps narrow the field somewhat and it
would be possible to develop audio games for the majority of blind
Linux gamers. Not so if one is a big company selling to the
mainstream.
The point here is that we are dealing with fragmentation and that is
generally bad when a company is trying to develop software for a large
number of consumers that could be running one of potentially hundreds
of distributions of the same software. Its impossible to test them all
or directly support them all. That is why a lot of Linux software
comes in source format so if there isn't a specific build for your
platform you can create a build yourself. If there isn't source
available it puts the onus on the developer to create builds for a
specific Linux platform if problems are encountered with the generic
build.
That said, I have been looking at this problem, and there may be a way
to minimize the problem. by using something like Mono it might be
possible to have a .NET application for Linux that is a build once run
everywhere type of product. However, I have no idea how reliable that
is across multiple versions and distributions of Linux since I haven't
seen a lot of software for Linux actually use Mono.
Bottom line, if you think everything is going to switch over to Linux
in our life time you are dreaming. I don't believe that is going to
happen because it is not in the best interests of most companies.
You'd have better luck betting on Apple's Mac OS X being the next big
thing.
On 10/25/14, Josh k <joshknnd1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ok then if ms won't do those things then I hope everybody and all
> developers will start switching to ubuntu gnome. NVDA for ubuntu gnome
> or a better orca and more voices available in its app store. and if I
> want to run windows I'll run windows xp or windows7 in a vm on the
> ubuntu host until everything is all switched over.
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