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Top-level
smxi
@aral Standard desktop #Linux just broke 3% global market-share. Almost nobody pays a cent for their non-commercial Linux. There is a constant theme I find that "oh they should do this or that", as if there were thousands of developers just itching to donate time worth often north of $200 an hour for a lifetime payback of often 0, or very close to 0. Because of this reality, free desktops (free as in liberty) remain largely engineer built and oriented. Not right choice for everyone. Can't be. 7 comments
smxi
@aral Every Apple and MS user pays for the base OS install, usually as part of a hardware bundle, always in the case of Apple. This is what pays for the features and development. You have to wrap your heads around the fact you are NOT comparing apples to apples, I have never paid more than 0 for any Linux or desktop or window manager. So I contribute what I can back to the larger free software ecosystem as my way of doing my part. Free desktops don't have the luxury of dropping millions on x, y
smxi
@aral when I was doing active #linux forum and IRC distro support, there was a specific type of user, who never stayed, never contributed anything, yet was the most loudly vocal in demanding x or y feature, with a certain sense of entitlement that could only come from using apple or MS products their whole lives, never realizing the true cost they were paying. Chromebook similar issue re google. I no longer do that type of support, thankfully. Ask yourself: what did you pay? who did the work? 
Aral Balkan
@smxi You’re going to have to ask that question of Red Hat and IBM’s enterprise customers, among others – I believe they pay quite a bit.
smxi
@aral That's why I specifically excluded those. That constitutes I'd guess a tiny fraction of 1% of real world desktop installs. But IBM's Redhat division probably uses 99% code that they did not write, despite their absurd complaints about people using their code for free. The closest you'll come to significant numbers of realworld RHEL users are Fedora users, who pay nothing. In #FreeSoftware, real question is what have I done? Not they, or you, or someone else, but I. Confuses consumers.
Aral Balkan
@smxi I don’t know, man, I just work on free software all day every day and I don’t have any enterprise customers and neither am I a ~$200B corporation like IBM that profits from Linux because I’m making tools for people not corporations or governments. So maybe, just maybe, folks have a valid reason to ask why something is inaccessible with corporations are making billions with it. Anyway, have a good day.
smxi
@aral I wasn't saying it would not be nice to have a good solid native screenreader, but that 'would be nice' isn't magic, it has to be built by people who are either willing to fund it, or do the work. And it may not be possible if it requires certain APIs that are simply not there, which means integrating the work with other projects, which is not easy. I make tools for free as well, but not for the money, it's just to give back, and help fill needs I found in support and sys admin, eg #inxi |
Gregory's Server
@aral vast bulk of funding goes to server #linux kernel features, which is why the kernel is incredibly robust compared to in particular OSX's kernel. Right now, for example, #Pop_OS is building their new #Cosmic desktop/compositor, with a team of 7 developers. MS, Apple, Google field 10s of thousands, and can assign any group of them to any feature, that's their job.
I'd say if you interact with Linux, desktops, compositors, tools, and go YES!, it's for you. If not, maybe not best fit.