(NOTE: This post is getting hits almost three years later. Many Linux fans still don’t get it. More explanation can be found here.)
Context: I use Linux. It’s the best there is, particularly for the way I work. I thank God for Linux every time I put my fingers on the keyboard, even though I know a huge number of Linux developers and packagers don’t care about God. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, but I’m not in a position to say. What I know is the folks behind Linux are quite elitist in at least one sense of the word: They are only interested in dealing with their own kind, and have no interest in what most computer users want.
Jeremiah T. Gray says Linux is not elitist. However, he refuses to actually answer the question. Linux as a community is exclusive, though not uniformly be intention. If it were a conscious choice it would be easier to prove it, but I believe we can make a case for disputing with Mr. Gray. As my friend, Jonathan Brickman says, Linux is elitist because the Linux community refuses to acknowledge the vast majority of computer users want something a little different than Linux people want. So much so that trying to adapt Linux to serve that market is a major problem. He should know; Jonathan has been working very hard at finding a way to make a Linux distro which actually meets that demand, and the existing corpus of Linux product is fighting every step of the way.
I’m not in a position to prove this by massive user surveys. I’m not sure that would serve any purpose, since it would surely result in skewing the sample, as the subjects would have to be self-selecting. Rather, I base my argument on the only thing I have which no one can attack: My experience serving hundreds of clients who are running Windows, and a few running other things. They all know I prefer Linux, and most of them probably understand why, because I’ve advocated for Linux since I first began using it. The one thing sticking out in my mind after the last decade or so is my clients’ lack of interest in upgrading. The first response spilling out of the brains and mouths of the Linux community is how wrong this is. Fine, make all the technical, or even moral, arguments you want about how wrong it is for people to avoid change. That’s a good excuse for refusing to deal with the very real human race out there who need you most. I contend, from the billions of folks out there who actually use a computer, it’s a tiny slice who are willing or interested in upgrading and changing what they use. Sure, they may wish for this or that small feature change, but if that change came at the cost of having to learn it all over again from scratch, most would say, “No.”
My friend, Mark Falcon, lays out an example of breakage typical with Linux upgrades:
[Y]ou can imagine my frustration when I found out that my VectorLinux of 5.9 will be replaced soon by the latest and greatest update. Now I will give them an A for effort because they provide a program that allows you to save your “stuff” to be used after you reinstall but that doesn’t cover all the customization you do. Things like background pictures, number of desktops and their names, iptables changes you have made to get things like VNC and file sharing working, and on and on the list goes. I’m sorry but I’m tired of updating.
This seems to be the norm for Linux distros, not just Vector. I can’t say what response Mark may have gotten from his complaints on the VectorLinux forum, but I’m willing to bet they were unsympathetic. Indeed, when I have broached the idea with various other Linux distro representatives, and folks who spoke for various projects used by just about every Linux distro, it ranged between, “Sorry, that’s the way it is,” on one end, and words of hostility unprintable on the other end. There is no room in their minds for the concept of a stable release, with some maintenance to keep it working and secure. There is no maintenance at all. There is only the push to the next version.
The next version is seldom a trivial upgrade. If only a couple of projects here and there did this, no one would complain much. Instead, it seems there is no project doing it any other way. Worse, a vast sweep of product which is called “Linux” is all so deeply interlocked, you rarely ever get to upgrade just one thing. This is the source of the phrase “cascading dependencies.” Every project is related, and all are moving forward. To update any single element of the whole requires updating almost the entire system itself. Every fix is rolled into an upgrade, but God forbid anyone should ask for a fix to be applied to a previous release. If you aren’t mentally programed to upgrade continuously, either from the source or through the packagers for your distro, you aren’t part of the community — you don’t belong.
The vast majority of computer users can’t fathom such a mindset, and can easily explain the problems with it. They want something they can install, run for as long as the hardware works, and only apply a few patches and updates. They don’t want to upgrade, and I believe they shouldn’t have to. There was nothing inherently broken on some really good releases of certain Linux distros back in 2000, for example. There are machines which kept running those distros for a good long time. In fact, so powerful is this concept, the two largest commercial Linux firms (RedHat and Novell) focus their sales on releasing distributions they support for seven years. Because this is where the mass demand is, those two go through the hassle of hiring developers who will work out how to apply patches back to older versions of software so it won’t disturb a working system. This is what most of the world expects.
Does the Linux community want mass adoption? I have to wonder if that isn’t just an excuse to whine, and I consider Mr. Gray’s piece dangerously close to that. If the folks developing Linux aren’t going to meet the masses where they are — it’s called “serving the customer” — they can’t pretend to offer them anything. Linux will remain an exclusive club of snotty elitists to the extent they refuse to consider stable releases and long-term support.
I have to disagree with the upgrade thing. Nobody is forcing your friend to upgrade to a newer version. There are thousands of Slackware installs out there that don’t get upgraded to the latest and greatest. They don’t need to be. For one, Pat issues security patches all the way back to 81, which is astonishing for a six year old release. For many users, upgrading a package is as simple as using the original build scripts to compile it themselves. The reason upgrading binary packages is discouraged is simple: Library incompatibility. Using a package that was compiled against a newer version of glibc can break the software completely.
So, let’s compare this to the Windows world. Can I use software from XP on Windows 3.1? Heck no. How about 95? Maybe. 98? Occasionally. 2000? Most of the time. And why? Because they include a backwards compatibility layer. Software developers are encouraged to provide their own copies of dlls, so that they don’t have to worry about newer dlls changing their system version. And while you can certainly pull this off in Linux, it tends to clutter up your system, which is why it’s not very common.
Linux releases are meant to be experienced and used as a whole. While a community distro like Debian or Ubuntu may be able to backport newer releases of software, distros like Slackware or Vector Linux just don’t have the support staff. And for the record, either of those is very easy to repackage software for, so the user community is encouraged to fend for themselves in those cases.
Interesting article, i agree there is a level of deserved elitism within the Linux Community. As a user of over 7 years of Linux, i’ve seen the system change, the hardware support improve, and the general Linux landscape get better and better.
However I also see a number of Windows users jumping ship, but trying to steer the lifeboat back towards the sinking hull they just jumped from.
There are a large number of users out there, who seem to think Linux is Windows, or at very least should be. and i have a guess, this drives some people just a little elitist.
Part of me thinks, if the masses wish to stay on the ship, let them.. however if they wish to come aboard the lifeboat.. they have to be aware.. its not heading back to pickup left luggage..
I would like for both of you to notice I didn’t compare Linux with Windows, but with general expectations. We can’t possibly make Linux like Windows, nor should we. God forbid. But we should make some effort to come closer to what people can tolerate.
Mr. Wood, my friend Mark probably is forced to upgrade, in the sense that VectorLinux likely does not support older releases. I’ll be glad to retract if someone will correct me, but I don’t like anything related to Slackware, so I don’t know. I agree Slackware itself does this one thing right, and to some degree, so does Debian. My complaint takes into account the issue with Glibc and Gcc. Sorry if I didn’t make that more obvious. However, you and I both know most common users would never touch Slack, nor should they. It’s not packaged for them.
I don’t have a problem with each distro and each release being a thing unto itself. Nor do I concern myself with Linux distros refusing to staff a backward compatibility effort. What I am complaining about here is the disconnect when Linux hobbyists refuse to understand this means they have closed themselves off to the vast horde of regular, ordinary users. There simply is no distro for those ordinary users. Nothing. The closest to their needs are those derived from RHEL, which releases very infrequently, supports their releases long enough to actually get some use out of them, and even staffs the backward compatibility issues. So CentOS and Scientific Linux are reaping the fruits of that stability. Yet neither gives much attention to the more common home user desktop stuff. It can be added by third party repositories — thank God for Dag Wieers and friends — and so those two are the only viable options for ordinarly users. However, ordinary users can’t navigate the process, which requires some research just to know it exists.
Putting my money where my mouth is, I am working with some volunteers to create a single-disk installer based on CentOS, or at least some of the ideas behind it. It would serve to combine that longevity and stability with a default inclusion of third party upgrades.
Should any other distro want to compete with that vison, fine. What I will loudly reject is the notion Linux as it now exists in all its forms ought to be accepted by the hordes. Just saying something like that is incredibly arrogant, if not simply clueless, so long as there is no effort to understand just what those people want. Most distros and broader projects have no clue, and may be hostile to the idea. They only know what they want, and what they hear from the echoes of like-minded elitists.
It has to install better than Windows, and we are almost there on most hardware. But it has to be ready to go with almost no detailed configuration — none of this hunting down obscure commandline fixes, added packages, etc. I will allow for the problem with codecs and copyrights, but we can make that pretty easy, too, such as the way openSUSE has their “one click” community “multimedia upgrade.” Never mind that process if broken for 64-bit machines; it’s a good idea.
If you want to call it “elitism” then fine, I feel that the current way of doing things NOT by the lowest common denominator is the very thing that makes Linux better than rest of the systems. I like that the OS does not treat me as an idiot who needs to be guarded and limited to the “safe things”. I know it does make the learning curve a little bit steeper, but most of us managed to get through it. Linux is not for everyone, and in my honest opinion it should never be. You choose to call it elitism, I call it progress đŸ™‚
There’s something to be said for that position. Why spoil the party?
I seriously doubt this will bring unwelcome gate-crashers. I wouldn’t ask any existing distro to change what they are doing, so you won’t lose anything. I’m just trying to create something we don’t already have. While I have to admire the penetration of Lindows/Linspire, I want to remove the profit motive. I feel certain it will end up somewhat more of a “do-it-yourself” distro than simply spoon feeding anyone. I’m just trying to make it as easy as it honestly can be.
I’m going to argue there is at least one real benefit to lots of ordinary folks running Linux, and here I am forced to compare with Windows. Of the current machines on the Net, the more of them converted to Linux, the fewer bots we’ll have to worry about. Fewer bots means less mischief we have to endure, and less useless traffic. It also would pressure webmasters to stop building sites for IE-only.
It’s not a panacea, but it can’t see how it would fail to be better than it is now.
First may i say, its great to have agrown up conversation, with valid points from all.
To comment on the IE only websites.. I have to say, since the release of firefox, the number of individuals who are writing IE only stuff has dramatically decreased. to the point, i’m pretty convinced, its only the small corners of the web, these people are a dying breed.
Have you heard anything about Ubuntu’s LTS (Long Term Support ) releases? Sounds like they fit exactly with what you’re asking for.
Sure, but three years isn’t “long term” in the mind of average consumers. It’s more like CentOS and their seven year commitment.
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non-linux users deciding for themselves what they want in a computing environment is like 5 year olds making dietary decisions for themselves. hope this isn’t too vague for the MCSA’s around here.
Good show, Bob. You make it sound like you belong to that hard core of Linux fanatics who demand all humanity remake themselves to fit your image of computer user perfection. Sorry Bob, but we don’t worship at the altar of the computer gods. We simply want to get some work done; if it takes too much away from our work to use computers, then computers are wrong. More to the point, if Linux computers don’t help people get work done, Linux is wrong. Or at least, Linux propagandists are lying when they claim Linux is the best answer to what computer users need. As long as people like you can’t be bothered to care what the mass of computer users want, you don’t have a competing product, you have a cult.
I am a Linux user, I think ideals are great yet, not if they turn new and old linux users away from using it. I think there is no future in only following one ideal but, which one we follow should help us arrive to our goal not force people to only use linux bill gates probably wanted people to only use windows cause it helps him profit he was promoting it in an aggressive way with the end user agreement and he did not stop there he made contracts with schools to use only use Microsoft on those computers. I see Linux as pro choice. I started using Linux cause a word looked up while I reading an Apple website they mentioned Unix kernel which later ina wiki I read about the open version of unix by Linus Trevald. I think the apple system is simple and productive in their approach to accessing files or programs and the names are simplistic unlike Linux which use to be complicated to understand what a program is used for. Now, they are better but, still need some work on names and documentation that is straight to the point not a story how you come to Linux or who created it, just the facts keep it simple stupid is my motto.
Thanks, Robert.