The Biggest Problem For A Linux PC Vendor

[curaga]

Does it matter whose fault it is since people just want to work with their OS? I really cannot understand why people always want to find someone to blame for.

Implying you're not?

Do you know why ISVs shun Linux? That's because Linux is the area of total instability and lack of any guarantees in regard to APIs and libraries versions. And that's where Linux sucks. Strangely RedHat with their RHEL does understand that.

So, instead of changing development policy people keep on shouting out loud that it's not Linux, it's ISPs that don't want to release drivers/software for Linux. They really don't want to, because they don't want to employ dozens of programmers just to make sure their software keeps working years after its initial release date. ISVs cannot afford such luxury (in fact they can, but they don't want to make the money fly). In Windows, once released, you are pretty much guaranteed that your application will work for at least 6-10 years.

You really should take a look at the Mac. They have forced deprecations of APIs every few years, and it's bitten at least Adobe hard. I'm willing to wager that it takes only one person, part-time, to keep a linux build going. Whereas the Carbon/Cocoa transition (latest big switch) forced them to rewrite a big part of their UI layer.

Yet Photoshop continues to be available on OS X. Is it because it's easier to keep running on the platform? Hell no. It's because Adobe wants it there, costs be damned as long as there's enough profit.


If we're going to compare this to linux, in the same situation they would just ship their own copy of the toolkit, and ignore say gtk3.

[birdie]

You really should take a look at the Mac. They have forced deprecations of APIs every few years, and it's bitten at least Adobe hard. I'm willing to wager that it takes only one person, part-time, to keep a linux build going. Whereas the Carbon/Cocoa transition (latest big switch) forced them to rewrite a big part of their UI layer.

Yet Photoshop continues to be available on OS X. Is it because it's easier to keep running on the platform? Hell no. It's because Adobe wants it there, costs be damned as long as there's enough profit.

If we're going to compare this to linux, in the same situation they would just ship their own copy of the toolkit, and ignore say gtk3.

We aren't talking about Mac here, but you've just shown that the breakage of stable APIs can bite even such monsters as Apple. And BTW Carbon/Cocoa transition, if I'm not mistaken, happened many many years ago

Your last sentence just proved another point from that list - Linux has no good stable APIs for GUI development. Which means every ISV, according to your own words, have to create a toolkit just to run their software on Linux. Big companies can surely perform this feat. However a lot of small development teams and independent software developers (the ones who develop miscellaneous utilities and games) aren't in position to do so.

IMO, Linux without commercial proprietary software will likely never become popular enough to even match MacOS market penetration and before it can pull this trick off it needs to guarantee at least some sort of stability. Alas, Open Source developers' stance in this case is, "We don't give a flying f*" (Google for e.g. stable API nonsense).

I will be happy if everything that's written in this list is wrong or/and doesn't matter. Alas, I know some serious developers from the Windows world and they can put their names to the problems outlined there.

That all means my viewpoint is probably not entirely unbiased, but Linux market share has remained flat for the last decade which probably means there's something very terribly wrong with the Linux world.

[curaga]

We aren't talking about Mac here, but you've just shown that the breakage of stable APIs can bite even such monsters as Apple. And BTW Carbon/Cocoa transition, if I'm not mistaken, happened many many years ago

It clearly shows it's not changing APIs that makes Windows more popular with ISVs.

Your last sentence just proved another point from that list - Linux has no good stable APIs for GUI development. Which means every ISV, according to your own words, have to create a toolkit just to run their software on Linux. Big companies can surely perform this feat. However a lot of small development teams and independent software developers (the ones who develop miscellaneous utilities and games) aren't in position to do so.

I said ship, not create. It takes very little effort to do that (copy some files), but for an even easier solution, they can link a toolkit in statically (see fltk, a toolkit meant for that).

[JohnXfce]

Why all those dudes of Xorg and nuveaou and others combine their effort to actually support nvidia and amd properly without intel. So that we can have completely tearing free desktops and completely tearing free video playback with real sync to vblank. None of the drivers from nvidia or amd provide tearing free desktops and completely tearing free video playback so the whole discussion of dma buffer or other switching is completely pointless as none of those companies provide any working linux drivers whatsover. So switching between one non working shit and another non working shit is not an issue. The issue is a LACK of tearing free desktops and LACK of completely tearing free video playback and LACK of real sync to vblank in any configuration. Period.

[JanC]

I'm glad that other CAD solutions exist, but AutoCAD is by far the most popular and used one. It's de-facto for many applications and industries and there's no way you can avoid DWG in certain situations. Does it work under Linux? No.

There is partial support for DWG in open source libraries, and more complete support in commercial applications for linux. There has been renewed work on open source libraries recently.

OTOH, linux really *owns* the high end movie/video production market, while at the same time many people complain about the lack of video editing software on linux (I guess they refer to simple consumer and semi-professional/prosumer applications then, although e.g. Blender can probably do what most of them want).

I expect that as Ubuntu/linux becomes more and more popular with "simple" consumers, more and more software companies will provide linux versions of their software, but that will take some time & patience...

[JanC]

You really should take a look at the Mac. They have forced deprecations of APIs every few years, and it's bitten at least Adobe hard. I'm willing to wager that it takes only one person, part-time, to keep a linux build going. Whereas the Carbon/Cocoa transition (latest big switch) forced them to rewrite a big part of their UI layer.

Several "recent" Adobe applications have been using an (open-sourced!) GUI abstraction layer, so the porting effort would have been mostly difficult to applications that didn't move tot that yet.

[yogi_berra]

My games seem to work fine. Just saying...

Bullshit. Screenshots of all the Loki games running in Ubuntu 12.04 or it didn't happen.

[Qaridarium]

Why all those dudes of Xorg and nuveaou and others combine their effort to actually support nvidia and amd properly without intel. So that we can have completely tearing free desktops and completely tearing free video playback with real sync to vblank. None of the drivers from nvidia or amd provide tearing free desktops and completely tearing free video playback so the whole discussion of dma buffer or other switching is completely pointless as none of those companies provide any working linux drivers whatsover. So switching between one non working shit and another non working shit is not an issue. The issue is a LACK of tearing free desktops and LACK of completely tearing free video playback and LACK of real sync to vblank in any configuration. Period.

dude i get tear free desktop and tear free video with the radeon driver for years ?

i do have a hd4770. i play games like hon in wine and baldursgate in wine ans stuff like that.

[curaga]

Several "recent" Adobe applications have been using an (open-sourced!) GUI abstraction layer, so the porting effort would have been mostly difficult to applications that didn't move tot that yet.

Link? My googling only found that Photoshop Elements apparently uses Qt.

[Thaodan]

Bullshit. Screenshots of all the Loki games running in Ubuntu 12.04 or it didn't happen.

Neverwinterknights run fine without problems on my Arch (x86_64) , ok its no Loki game but it has nearly the same age of the old Loki games.
When you have the Loki Compat Librarys you can run every old Loki Game i got even the old beta version (0.9.12) of World of Warcraft runnung.
For sound i used padsp when the game dont used OpenAL like, with Simcity 3000 or World of Warcraft.