[mVChr]

And not being able to play A-grade games is barely a rounding error in the pros and cons of why most people use Linux, especially in the workplace.

[OskarS]

For workplace, sure. But the only reason I don't run exclusively on Mac or Linux is gaming. I've spent a lot of money and time in that ecosystem for that single reason.

There's a lot of people that care about gaming, even if you don't.

[pjmlp]

This will hardly change, back on my hard GNU/Linux days I came to realise that the gamer/demoscene culture and UNIX culture are totally opposed to each other.

The gaming and demoscene cultures don't care 1 second how much their tools cost, the openess of hardware and software tooling, rather the achieved results and getting their stuff on the hands of users, regardless how.

The GNU/Linux culture is all about the ideology of having stuff for free, replicating a desktop experience as if CDE was the epitome of UX, fulled with xterms.

Of course I am generalising and might get tons of counter examples, just noting my personal experience regarding friends and co-workers.

[coldpie]

> The GNU/Linux culture is all about the ideology of having stuff for free

Uh, no. It's about having the freedom to fix, improve, or otherwise modify the software you use. Being free-as-in-beer happens to be a requirement for that, but it isn't the goal. Think about it this way: free software developers get paid to do work, instead of getting paid for having done work like proprietary software developers. You pay me to implement feature X, which is then released to the world for further improvement in the future.

[pjmlp]

Why should I bother to pay you, if others do the work for free to build portfolio for job interviews?

[0x6c6f6c]

To get whichever offers the best experience? Seems like a pointless question, functionality is a large deciding factor.

When they're equivalent products there's really not much to pay for though. That should push the costly product to improve more or else lose sales.

[pjmlp]

Hence why most business rather get themselves busy with Mac, Windows and app stores in what concerns desktop and mobile software.

[coldpie]

Well, do you want the work done or not?

[pjmlp]

The point I was trying to make was why the culture of free-as-beer doesn't lead to successful commercial desktop software on GNU/Linux.

[palunon]

>the ideology of having stuff for free,

Yeah, no. Having free stuff (as in speech), yeah. Having stuff for free ? That's not the UNIX culture...

[pjmlp]

That is why there are so many successful commercial applications being sold on GNU/Linux.

[wolfgke]

If the desktop APIs break all the time and there are lots of incompatibilities between distributions, it is really hard to sell commercial applications on GNU/Linux.

[xorxornop]

And it is also why it will continue to be marginalised, and have generally shit, inconsistent UI.

[foepys]

I feel that any KDE distribution has a more consistent UI than the monstrosity that is windows 10 with their Metro/Ribbon/Windows 7 UIs.

[andromeduck]

consistently bloated, yeah

[scythe]

Lol KDE has many flaws but bloat isn't one of them, I get the feeling sometimes that the presence of several ultra-ultra-light "desktop environments" on Linux causes people to think the major ones are "bloated" when in fact they're much smaller than the DEs on Windows/OS X. FWIW "slow under certain circumstances" does not necessarily imply bloat b/c a single badly implemented feature can cause slowness but that's not the same as bloat; try enabling compositing in some old versions of Xfce (basically right after it was added, maybe Xfce 4.2?) and you'll see what I mean real quick.

[krylon]

It is a matter of taste, of course, but compared to Windows 8 and Windows 10, common Linux/Unix desktop environments like MATE or Xfce are very pleasant to use.