Why did I know it would happen? I got some of my views on rolling release published on a webzine. Immediately, comments began to appear, as I had hoped. That means people are reading it and thinking about it.
Except, they aren’t really thinking about what I said. There is this mental block in the mass of hobby users who just assume everyone in the world will want improvements, and improvement can only mean more features. They are utterly cut off from the world of everyday folks who use computers, even use them a great deal, but don’t want changes in the underlying operating system. They want to use it, not play with it all the time. For the hobby folks, there can be no using it without playing with it.
So ingrained are these differences, I am not surprised to see the comments from the hobbyists who just cannot understand the point I was making. Let’s assume for a moment there was no Microsoft, and just to be fair, no Mac. All computers are limited to the Open Source operating systems like Linux and BSD. Let me assure you there would be far fewer computers in the world, and they would be a darn sight more expensive. However, let’s start from where we are, and MS and Apple just evaporate, along with every copy of their products. The world is forced to turn to Linux, BSD, etc.
Very quickly, after a the first couple of months, you would have angry users seeking to choke some developers to death. They would be yelling, screaming and rioting. They would tell anyone they could catch: “Stop changing it! Leave it alone, and just make it work!” After just two to three months of automatic updates, and the gentle nagging this or that is insecure or broken, but the only fix offered is a newer version which, in the eyes of the user, is significantly different and requires running through the setup process again — you would have people throwing their computers away.
For the average user, constant change is not fun. For the hobby user, lack of change is no fun. If the Open Source community only reaches out to the hobby users, they will have nothing to offer the average user. It’s not a matter of which user type is right or wrong, but whether we can accommodate both.
Addenda: I don’t take myself too seriously, but I know what I like. The last time I really enjoyed using KDE was 3.1.5. It was stable, everything worked, and it needed no improvement. The last time I really liked GNOME was 1.x with Enlightenment. The one best release of RedHat in terms of how well it actually worked underneath was 7.3. For FreeBSD it was around 4.8, and SuSE around 8.2. The best word processor was WordPerfect 8. The best X server release in terms of snappy response on current hardware and stable operations was around XFree86 4.2.
In general, I haven’t been too happy with Open Source as a whole since those experiences. What I have now is pretty good, but it could be better. It could be simpler. As a philosophical statement, I would say we have gone past the point of diminishing returns in computers, both hardware and software. It won’t die for a very long time, but it will never be that good again.
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It’s a real catch 22. If you don’t innovate you fall behind and people see no reason to use the product. If you are constantly changing things another section of people will complain as well.
As for your favs, I’m like that with XFCE, I use to love it but then it went the way of Gnome ala X, which I can’t stand, and that was it for me. So I get your point, as always, but then again one of the great things about OSS is the ability to just get what you hopefully need at little to no expense when compared to MS and that fruit company.
I agree with the need for innovation. In Open Source, we do that all too well. So well, in fact, we exclude those who don’t need it. All I’m seeking is a morsel of accommodation for those who don’t need innovation, which (so far as I can tell) is the dominant form of life on the keyboard. Too many Open Source projects treat that majority with contempt.
Indeed, it need not be a Linux distro which stands still for long periods of time completely. It needs only to limit the impact of innovation on that majority user base. Somehow, I can’t believe that’s an impossible dream. But it seems a majority of projects are run by developers who won’t consider that possibility, to the point huge swaths of the software feeds off each other’s innovations, pushing each other ahead and nobody seems to care about the common user. I want that Linux freedom, both liberty and gratis, for common users, too. They cannot live with constant innovation.
“If the Open Source community only reaches out to the hobby users, they will have nothing to offer the average user. ”
The average user has nothing to offer the Open Source community. This doesn’t mean we have to be hostile or unwelcoming to them, but it does mean that focusing on the “average user” is a mistake.
I believe it’s a major mistake to say they have nothing to offer. If the user base of Linux expands to displace a bigger chunk of the Windows user base, a huge number of things change. I am utterly certain the world would be a better place if a bigger portion of computers on the Net were running Linux, instead of some virus magnet. I’m not in this for myself, because I’m doing just fine with Linux as it is. It’s my nature to share something which does me so much good.
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