What would it take for your friends who are developers to move over from
a non-free Operating System to Fedora, apart from window management
behaviour?
- Andreas
Thanks Andreas - well said, and the right question to ask.
On the other hand, it often is "death by thousand cuts" situation. A lot
of Mac users would tell you that the reason why they use OS X are all
the tiny details that make it more friendly to them. Many of them don't
even have a significant concrete reason why they use it, except it's
easier and more convenient to use. So little details in UI do matter.
But I agree if there are big gaps to fill we should focus on them.
I personally think this is the right line of questioning. But people
have been asking this for years. The thing is, now that there is a
Fedora "Workstation" focus (i.e. devs, people who are theoretically very
comfortable with Linux since everyone deploys to Linux) the question
becomes a lot more interesting.
I have a Mac laptop and a Fedora desktop, so I have spent a fair amount
of time on both. I find developing on Linux to be much more enjoyable. I
would always chose Linux over Mac, except that the Linux laptop
experience isn't quite there (I'm being polite). For example, as I
mentioned, I can see a lot more on my Mac screen running OS X than
Linux, because there is less use of gratuitous white space (sure, some
apps have white space, but the OS/theme as a whole is pretty tight -
look at the menubar, titlebars, window borders for example). Although I
disagree with some Mac design and User Interaction choices, at least
there the interface is consistent and follows its own rules. And I won't
get started with wireless (which definitely gets better every day),
power and thermal management and connecting/disconnecting external
displays/projectors.
So why did all of my friends actively switch from Linux to Mac
(admittedly, about 10 years ago)? As Alex suggested, I think that's
something that needs some research. I would be up for working on that.
But here's the thing: All of the developer tool innovation going on is
great, but that's not why people pick Mac over Linux. Mac users have
hacked clones of the Linux package managers (MacPorts, Fink, Homebrew),
they use Docker via VirtualBox VMs of actual Linux systems, and pretty
much everyone ends up deploying to Linux anyway. There may be cool whiz
bang developer oriented tools for OS X, but that's because that's where
the developers are (i.e. reality/market forces) not because they can't
easily build those same tools for Linux. Heck, look at the Atom text
editor that GitHub is building - pretty much all of its component parts
were originally built *FOR* Linux, and it can *theoretically* be built
for Linux, but GitHub doesn't even bother linking to Linux binaries
because...well whatever (but of course you can get both Mac and Windows
binaries). So there's a case where a developer tool should be available
on Linux with a trivial amount of work, and yet its developer still
doesn't care.
My theory is that people went Mac for two reasons:
1) Laptop hardware/software Just Works. Maybe Linux on the desktop was
difficult back then in the stone age, but everything is fine now. But
really, much of the world (even devs) went to laptops.
2) Mac UI/UX Just Works. Even though plenty of people don't agree with
Apple's choices, it still works and you know/learn the rules, so it's
consistent.
Maybe things like the iTunes Music Store and iPod sync were important,
but less so these days (except iOS devs which will always be a problem
with any alternate OS). It also helps that if your Mac breaks, you bring
it to an Apple store, plop it on the table, wander around the mall for
an hour, and come back to a working computer (I'm simplifying, but you
get the idea) - and there's no arguing with an incompetent OEM about why
some leenuxy thing shouldn't void your warranty and isn't the cause of
the scratching sound coming from the hard drive.
So if I had infinite resources, here's probably would I would want to do:
* Try to figure out why people went Mac, and what would bring them back
(easy peasy, right?)
* Make Fedora Workstation work great on laptops. Maybe pick a few
specific models and work with an OEM (even if the OEM won't support or
sell it, maybe Red Hat has some contacts that can just ensure that we
know what the BIOS is doing and what hardware can be expected in a
certain model)
* Make the UI/UX consistent, clear, intuitive (this is where I think we
lose from "death by 1000 cuts" - it's not bad, it's just not...quite there)
-Adam Batkin
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