10.19.20
Gemini version available ♊︎Standards and Choices
Summary: GNU/Linux is a very standards-based platform; having lots of choices (e.g. distros to choose from) isn’t the principal problem — or nowhere near the extent sabotage and illegal tactics by Microsoft have been
Choice versus standards. False dichotomy? Many choices can be implemented to comply with a given standard, preventing monoculture while maintaining cooperation at some level. Having multiple measures and units (e.g. decimal/metric versus Imperial) means conversion becomes necessary. Yet the world keeps revolving and we keep trading, even with anomalies in the way we measure things.
“It’s not “hatred” to assert that secret deals (typically composed by Microsoft lawyers, often in violation of competition laws) are the primary obstacle. The antitrust case revealed the gory nature of some of these secret deals.”Proponents of a so-called ‘UNIVERSAL LINUX’ (we made a satirical post about it earlier today, using a good ol' car analogy) want us to think that having both GNOME and KDE, or Wayland and X, or many other such things (not the ‘same’ but one being profoundly outdated and broken, e.g. LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice) is a suicidal path. They blame the wrong thing for limited adoption of GNU/Linux in laptops/desktops. As if the channel ‘prefers’ Windows because GNU/Linux has inherent problems and not because of Microsoft crimes, including bribery. People who (mis)place the blame on themselves instead of those working to undermine/sabotage their efforts may be suffering a ‘self-loathing’ complex. They then reinforce the very same FUD patterns originally conceived and disseminated by their adversaries.
In the coming weeks we intend to dig deeper into the Bill Gates deposition transcripts, which include passages about “Jihad” and deliberately breaking standards (to make things like Java work only in Windows). To quote some things that Ryan said in IRC yesterday:
I’d like to see more laptops coming with a KDE distribution. It’s a shame KDE doesn’t get more attention these days. Means I’m still going to have to do something with it after I buy it. But the defaults never work out for everyone I guess. It could be worse. All kinds of shitty firmware and bugs and an OEM going “Well, we sold it with Windows 10, so….”.
The ‘problem’ with GNU/Linux isn’t that it’s doing ‘too much’ for ‘too many’ people (or only for geeks). There are desktop environments for beginners, not just for advanced (or ‘power’) users. The open standards are generally there (that’s why GTK-based applications are easy to run in KDE and GNOME-based distros deal just fine with Qt) and focus must be placed on the real barriers to widespread adoption. It’s not “hatred” to assert that secret deals (typically composed by Microsoft lawyers, often in violation of competition laws) are the primary obstacle. The antitrust case revealed the gory nature of some of these secret deals. Go tell Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation that the US government wasn’t "kicking a puppy" when it took on Microsoft. █
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