and has adopted an "enterprise-first" strategy for the node.
The focus on cloud and enterprise will rob the PC platform of what is was meant to be, free and independent. You will be enslaved into subscriptions and cloud connectivity in order to do most of the things on a PC we could do ourselfs. Cloud streamed software will put an end to modding/tweaking and customizing, you will be totally reliant on official support for any fixes and workarounds, you will have no say in the matter. Little by little, service by service, component by component, middleware after middleware, driver by driver, string after string, the PC platform could stealthily be rendered practically useless when this is done and will turn into a corporate controlled console.
Ofcourse the offline-mode capabilities and options to install other OS may still be there, but the power, the processing, the features, will all be inside clouds and enterprise solutions which would only provide that via the always-online subscription. You wanna play the latest Flight Simulator with "earthshattering" terrain graphics, you are forced onto a particular OS with particular conditions and a service to use that. The ordinary PC people will be reduced to script monkeys in mother's basement playing pong on a subset of linux or something, as if this is largely not true already, this is ridicolous.
So it turns out that most serious linux users and developers are various business and enterprise employees because their management obviously wants to save operating costs any way possible and they figured out it's cheaper to pay a few of their own devs to do work , that's why you see linux historically was not benefiting for the advanced home user nor the average public as much, because more than half of the development effort went and probably majority still does go into the tools and features that the corporates need. That's why the obsession with security and server, an average person is more interested about practical advantages.
The next big group of linux users are the college-kids, this is again not geniune grassroots, this spills into colleges and is basically equally enrooted there because it's the corporates who want to hire linux experienced people, but it's done in this semi-secret or stealthy way that to an outside person it seems as if it's an original idea that the college kids had, it's pushed and a cult following has formed around it, and the tasks and jobs and things these people do in linux is narrowed down, focus is made onto things that the corporations want, so this specialization robs the college kids of independent thinking of how linux should evolve, what things could be done, what's missing, the larger scope is missed, the whole thing ends up running around in circles of this small tasks that don't fundamentally help much, most of the college-kids run little tests and small programs and nothing serious or practical ever comes out of it, it's just for grades, it's all wasted effort IMO, and all obsolete, new version, new HW, new stuff somes out and you have to do it all agian, yeah there's space research, wireless, health, machinery, I know there ARE great uses out there, but it's all very niche, and one has to spend bazillilion hours just dealing with terminal to do anything with it, the majority is dibbling at never ending security holes forever, it feels like a sabotage, but the whole thing has this presigious-looking perception to it so you have these college kids running around like japanese cartoon characters with their little laptops thinking they are "advanced" and "smart" if they have a few linux terminals opened up doing some worthless number crunching.
(I know it's not necessairly ALL like that, this is a very critical opinion piece on purpose, in an effort to try to prevent such an extreme)
The third group, I'm going by popularity, is the research and scientific group, now this one is the first that's more genuine, the OS and the tools are still not directly benefitial to the advanced home user but they're doing something with that which benefits everyone else. Still if we're strict about things directly benefiting the OS code for power user use cases then it's not, you can run the scientific tool but without equpiment that works with it what's the point.
Only then the at 4th place, in this limited chart I did on the fly, the genuine linux advanced home users, the grassroots, harder to find people, but there's many, because they're independent and don't usually flock into cults the perception is that there's not a lot of them, they're forced to adapt and do things themselfs and for themselfs so not as much fundamental stuff gets to then benefit to everyone else, but not because they don't want to but because it's just not possible with the more power from other groups, some respond to criticism as "not being advanced enough", so in one way they defend some of the ways which I think (as a biased windows user) are just archaic ways that some when everything was beginning and those early fundamentals don't mean they're the most optimal, I do respect retro stuff, but only when IT'S GOOD, what if some other better way was done from the beginning, yes then I would say let it stay, the way linux does some things under the hood is just weird to me and it doesn't mean it's the only way to go.
So the point is, if you are an ex-Windows advanced home user, who would want to recreate your workstation environment in Linux, it's hardly an easy/great alternative, so many things that are 1-click operations on Windows are sometimes multi-hour hunts for finding the way through the horribly outdated or nonexistant documentation, or simply don't exist at all. I right click on a desktop to try to make new folder and the option does not exist, wha that kind of joke is that, what kind of crazy advanced home user would think that benefits multi-tasking? That's because it's not developed by proper advanced people, but by college kids. But I get it, it's some distro and some GUI, there's many more options, fine, but it's all under the "Linux" umbrella, or wait, isn't Linux technically just a kernel? So if we call the OS Linux we're all wrong then right, as it's not the kernel we should be calling this OS with, so they're all independent, but no they're not, they're all limited because if some do something fundamentally it's going to have breaking effects on others, so while they're flavors, it's still all narrowed down, I get the idea of distros and freedom, but freedom to change desktop color and icons, come on, there really is no fundamental evolution in the kernel, or the major components, so there is fundamentally little different between most distros, as much as they appear different. So as much as I keep dissing on Win10, and all the genuine Win10 hate, when I tried linux, I found myself even more frustrated so the idea to an outside person that Linux is this big supar-dupar anti-corporate competitor is a total and utter joke, it never was, it was all a perception generated by the college-kid cult following. And not because I don't know, don't get me wrong, I know learning a new OS takes time, I'm talking about the frustration AFTER I learn how it's been done, after some analysis, then I see the whole flow, I'm not talking about stuff not being put onto my plate, I'm not saying it has to be the same as Windows, more about the things that are different but they're not done right IMO. Ofcourse this whole post is very "my 2 cents" kinda, I would need to go a lot deeper for a proper and more fair analysis.
I'm excluding the the general mass of users from this chart, ofcourse they're the biggest, but those people are only there looking at the most basic features that are possible anywhere, pure consumption of corporate material (entertainment/movies/music) is available anywhere else and this is not the point of advanced home power user use case.
The GUIs don't focus on anything other than mainstream usage, every time I see changes in whatever distro it's about "favoruites, clock, menus, notifications, music list, bla bla" ... what, you spend 20 years writing kindergarden features and you're still not done?
What are those fundamentals that I'm talking about that would benefit the advanced personal user, it's all those things advanced windows users had a taste of and MS is robbing them away little by litte with the "OS-as-a-service" model of Win10. Many good tweaking, servicing, repairing, maintenance, multi-tasking and such capabilities are being removed from Windows 10 as it moves to a new GUI, which means users become more reliant on official support and become also more stupid because there's no self-taught skills anymore as everyone just pings the customer support for it, or will be forced to, yeah you can still open up registry, but this is the stealth lockdown, they are physically removing the effects behind those registry keys, so the tweaks that worked on early Win10 version will not work anymore. The developer of Classic Shell has called it quit, this rapid updating and major changes scheme is totally unnecessary, for 20 years we lived without the crazy always-on updated and we enjoyed, the golden years of the PC were in the Windows XP days, everyone had more enjoyment in their homes with the use of the PC.
And just as the rest of the industry, on this "As-A-Service" model, this fanaticism about cloud computing is surely not a coincidence, it's some kind of a multi-corporate agenda and it feels suspicious, aren't corporations usually competing against each other, why are they all moving into one very specific direction like that, who's really running them? Way back long ago Steam/Valve head, you all know him, said "we're moving into an era of games as a service rather than a product"
Product = Personal Power
Service = Corporate Power
Let the fiddly diddly college kids diddle and dribble on their silly laptops running sissy penguin console apps with an anime background thinking they grabbed gods balls, while we the master-race enterprises hoard all the quantum power for ourselfs and run giant simulations inside a large hardon collider powered cloud-farms and forever charge premiums on the subscriptions. Muahahaha!
We must save the PC platform from being controlled like this, it's not only about hardware, the freedom of combining hardware is only one thing, what about the rest, and it never fully was freedom to begin with anyway, the standards were never done, it happened by accident actually, changing a CPU requires changing the motherboard so there was never freedom there, now with proprietary PSU cables is another one, at least DX12/Vulkan have ability to mix different GPUs but the practical use of multi-GPU is fading. Same goes for personal transportation, they talk about how it is for safety, but there is zero need for all kind of cloud integration and remote control. If you purchase a physical thing it is your property and you should have the right to use it as long as you don't harm others, well, now they just want to abolish any personal product and just have everything tied with a service, what's next, a subscription for toilet paper?
So majority of the post was about why Linux isn't really enough to save PC, it's not an alternative to Windows, it has it's own weird things that are sometimes even more stupid. Most of the linux devs including the heads have seemingly no idea about the whole aspect, they are pure coders with little natural hobbies and human life outside of the dark rooms, they were never advanced home users that had to deal with workstations, they aren't PC gamers either, they aren't , they're too superspecialized in the raw code and basically live inside a git repository. Why should we rely on these people that were NEVER part of the advanced windows user groups?
Remember, for example from PC gaming, with the last big one being Crysis and all the modding and tweaking, what a great community that was and Crytek's stupid owners had it all destroyed because they wanted to drive ferraris all day, fuck them, yeah sure the irrelevant kids complained about the game not running good, but it was fun times better than now, I take 40FPS Crysis over 90FPS Modern Warfare any day, thank you very much and have a nice day. Yes, that's the kind of gameplay that I wanted, no, it was not boring, it was closer to reality, a great change to all the overload of fantasy out there, step into the real world for once, get some fresh air.
What are we going to do now, all this bling, all this PR spin about the "great new era", about the fast new CPUs, about the fast new GPUs, you
'll be able to do stuff you never could, oh it's going to be so great, only for the men in black suits behind clouds counting those dollar bills right, subscribe to this, subscribe to that, and the only thing a non-corporate person would be able to do is play 10K pong in a 100% secure and bug-free polished terminal and show middle fingers to MS? GREAT JOB LINUS !!! WERE THE BEST !!! It won't be the browser anymore by then, they will take the absurdity a maginitue higher,
oh why do highly-complex 3D engines in JavaScript in the browser, we could just do it all in the terminal !!! HORAAAAY!
