this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Linux distros are not a monolith. It's not made by one single entity, but instead assembled from various projects runs by different people and companies. All the distros do are assembling them into a single system and add their own special sauces on top. How are you going to propose to unify all those diversities? Rallying everyone behind a single company like Red Hat? We all know what would happen when one company get to control the whole ecosystem.
In my opinion, having multiple distros competing on features is the best things that can happen to us. When one popular distro lost their way and start to alienate their users, there will be other distros those users can choose from. Imagine what would happen if there is only one distro and it starts to get shitty like what windows is doing right now.
The irony of the dude failing to see the point behind decentralized distros when commenting on Lemmy, in the Fediverse. Why is he not on Reddit?
I think you're mistaken here. Getting a device hardware to work is not the distro job, it's the job of the hardware manufacturer. Even on windows, device manufacturers would submit their drivers to microsoft for certification. Some thing happen on linux, device manufacturers would submit their driver to kernel maintainer, but they must submit the source code instead of binaries so some companies that don't want to open up their source code due to misguided "trade secret" reason will never submit their driver to linux, even when the whole ecosystem unify behind a single distro. Some device manufacturers do release binary drivers for linux, but their licensing incompatible with the distros license so they can't be distributed by the distros.
Come one man, how is this strawmanning when you demand everyone to rally behind a single distro? Which distro maker got the most influence in linux development world right now? It's red hat with no close competitor in sight. Red hat's technical decisions already split linux communities. If they got even more influence, it's going to be bad for linux future. It'll going to be even more fragmented in a way that's worse than now.
Yet despite all the supposed problem you brought up, linux desktop marketshare is growing to 4% this year. Reaching 5% and beyond is not an impossibility in near future.
Again, I think you're mistaken here. The majority of linux devs are not working on reverse engineering device drivers here. They work on their own projects within the linux ecosystem. Working on reverse engineering a device is a hard work and volunteers won't do it except for a few very dedicated people like asahi linux devs. Rallying behind a single distro won't fix this unless the distro is made by a huge company willing to pay people to reverse engineers various drivers. Getting essential hardware works is important and that's where most volunteers device driver devs are working with, but I'm not convinced getting support for all devices in the market the best way forward simply because it takes too many manpower we don't actually have. Better spend that manpower on getting gnome and kde better, getting wayland better, or perhaps maintaining x11 again, etc.
Linux desktop marketshare wasn't even 1% with no growth in sight until relatively recently, so yeah, off course people are celebrating now. It's now comparable to Mac marketshare (~4%) in early 2010.
I'm just telling you that it's wrong to assume hardware support problem will be solved by unifying behind a single distro, while in reality device driver devs are already unified behind the linux kernel project (not distro projects) and there is not enough manpower because there are only a handful of devs have necessary skill and willing to donate their time to support random devices in the market (and they need to have the devices on their hands first for reverse engineering). As linux marketshare grows, device manufacturers may be willingly support linux on their own, so your future scanner might eventually work out of the box on linux.