In a way, that’s my point. Fighting the incumbent tech is hard (although Apple / Android shows it can be done). But at the moment our Western economies are flat-lining and worse, while other places are growing. Target the new aspirational classes in those economies and you have the beginning of a much larger ecosystem, where a huge amount of the tech is built and software is written. Then you might have a chance of breaking the Western market (or the way we’re going, afford not to give a f**k about it! )
My only answer to that is “why the hell not”? I think that’s exactly how the world works. You advertise Ubuntu support rather than Linux support, and you’ll probably maintain most of your Linux user base and reduce your support costs / time. Ubuntu seems to be where the interesting game related stuff on Linux is happening right now anyway.
That’s not the problem. Windows gets popularity by being the most pirated OS.
It looks like egg-chicken thing for me,
“I don’t want use linux because no much software for it.”
“I don’t want build for linux because no one use it.”
Unfortunately that is how the world works. You advertise Ubuntu support, you get 500 emails from users of other distros complaining/threatening/telling you how they got it working just so you knew/who try it anyway and it doesn’t work and bother you with their support questions anyway. To the world at large, Linux is Linux, it’s not Ubuntu/Mint/Arch/Fedora/Suse/Mandrake/etc. Massive impedance mismatch with expectations, ideals, and reality.
That doesn’t surprise me, but then you advertise Linux support, so you’re hardly managing expectations! Why not try officially supporting Ubuntu only, telling other users if they can’t reproduce their issue on Ubuntu they’re on their own (you have a money-back guarantee and they can try demos anyway), get an auto-reply for your Linux support emails and a link to a nice friendly blog post that explains that as a small outfit you can’t do more to support other distros, and possibly a forum where others can help each other with their ‘wonderful’ suggestions.
The thing is, you won’t be the only one doing this. In the gaming sector eg. Unity3D will only officially support Ubuntu.
Oh I dunno… we’re not doing too badly on the Linux support front having worked our way through a lot of fiddly stuff. I have to say thank $deity for Java though - it’s made my life so much easier on Linux.
Well, choosing to ignore the end of that sentence , what you complaining about??? ;D
+1 to that. Though it should be just ‘deity’. $deity is the miserable demon of PHP, that is currently munching on my brain cells and defecating in my skull.
Pure nonsense. There is a good compatibility between all the distros, they use the same kernel, the same X, same libraries behind etc. In case of graphics drivers you don’t need to care about window managers, many of the window managers don’t even use 3D and the 3D managers are real 3D applications just like games.
For applications in general there is binary compatibility given by the kernel, the same goes for drivers. The drivers are also installed the same way on every Linux distribution. You don’t need to care about anything.
Development is not more difficult as for Windows. I was part of a project once where we developed a middle sized scientific software only for Linux with 3D, network, with clients and servers, and much more, written with C++ (Java is really a puppy against it). The software ran fine on many distributions and Windows (as I said the software was written for Linux) even with a lot of dependencies.
Back to X . Although X window system won’t be alone forever with Wayland coming, Wayland will have X-Server compatibility. So you will be able to use your GPU drivers written for X window system. And such toolkits like Qt and GTK don’t actually need to support Wayland (but they will).
As you can see. Support on Linux is not a dead end with many distributions. I would say, as it goes for drivers, you have more problems with Windows and drivers. For example you can’t use old drivers for XP on Win 7. In Linux you can use even really old drivers. Therefore Linux supports old hardware better than Win 7.
5.83% for Linux
4.22% for Android
That means 1.61% for all the Linux distributions.
We can also kick all the phone and tablet OSs to get the real share of the desktop OSs. And as you can think the number would grow, it will be probably more than 2%.
Sure, consumer products like Android and the Amazon Kindle and Chrome OS use the Linux kernel and various pieces of Linux internal technology, but that is totally different from the rest of us are talking about which is desktop Linux for programmers as a workstation OS.
Everything Mac, iOS, and Apple TV is (at it’s core) Darwin which is compliant with the UNIX standard. Android is a Linux-based mobile OS and Linux itself is Unix-like. Although all technicalities aside I’m a fan of the “Terminal” provided by both Linux and Darwin based OSes. As far as I’m concerned they’re a lot more powerful and easier to use than MS-DOS and a lot of the common traits among them come from the UNIX spec.
So much energy discussing 1970s tech…I would have never guessed as a kid.
As an aside…I really wish someone could explain to me MS & apple hatred. I guess alot of you never look at world news or at the kinds of stunts non-tech companies pull.
Well MS hate I can explain… at least mine. I dont hate Apple, its just way overpriced and people you have no idea about technology think its better somehow because its expensive…
As for MS hate:
Microsoft constantly steals and reinvents their own standards for everything and use their influence to push it onto customers.
examples are endless, some are windows crap phone, zune, bing, j++, silverlight…
they produce shitty OS that fail. Stuff like Vista shows their effort : at least we make money.
The console wars is another perfect example. To me microsoft has no business here, but they just came waltzing in with their original Xbox - which was just a PC and total shit.
they say there is money their - so they use their influence and force a crap product to become popular.
best example within console wars is: they released the Xbox 360 way before PS3. Why ? Money. Let’s make money and dont care at all how shitty the system is built. resulting in 8564789658 RRODs
combined with 374634648649856 BSODs that speaks quality.
They constantly release unfinished products.
They also stole most of what they did to begin with from Mac and later other software.
To quote Jurassic Park:
[quote]I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you, you’ve patented it, and packaged it, you’ve slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it.
[/quote]
If you only care about money and not the work or customers, open a fast food chain or whatever.
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