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by lj3
3555 days ago
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> Drivers on Linux have always been like this, that's not the issue. What are you basing that on? Drivers on Linux have always been like this and Desktop Linux has always been DOA. OS X is a Linux based operating system that fixed this issue and linux users went to it in droves. You don't see the correlation? > The real issue is that modern line-of-business application development (which is where the money is) has left the desktop for good. I agree, the shrinking amount of money that can be made in the Desktop space is an issue. Or at least it's an issue that that's how people see it these days; microsoft is doing just fine with enterprise software licensing and I know more than a few $1M+ revenue line of business software businesses that are not saas based. In any case, there is a solution for that: go the apple route and make the Linux Distro specifically for a new laptop. The state of laptop hardware these days sucks. It's all commodity junk, even the Thinkpads. Trying to push commodity hardware when the commodity crowd has gone to mobile is a losing strategy, as evidenced by decreasing sales year after year. There's space for a high quality PC laptop that caters to the power user crowd, including a linux based OS with working drivers and a pleasant UI. |
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OSX (which btw is based on BSD, not Linux) has been around for ages, but it wasn't that popular among developers until Apple moved to Intel, released the iPhone, and changed the laptop game with the MBA. That was the combo breaker, not the desktop.
> it's an issue that that's how people see it these days;
I agree, there is still good money in the desktop game; it's just that the margins on web are so eye-watering large, the market can't resist the temptation.
> go the apple route and make the Linux Distro specifically for a new laptop.
That would be nice, and it was sort-of tried by various entities at some point (Canonical + Dell, RedHat + IBM...), to be fair only with the commodity plasticky shit. Someone is trying it today with what are basically last year's MBPs (https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-15). The problem is that both Linux and hardware move so fast and so chaotically, long-term support is always an issue; today's graphic drivers might not be good enough for next year's chips, and tomorrow someone at RedHat might decide the audio stack should be rewritten for systemd, and so on and so forth.
And to be honest, the margins in the laptop game are clearly very thin. There is a reason Apple treats OSX as second fiddle to iOS and can't be bothered to refresh their MBPs as they used to.