QUOTE The developers I was surrounded by aren't the same developers you'd find at a technical conference 10 years ago. They grew up in an era that's become increasingly focused on user experience, and the idea of migrating to Linux because it's more tweakable is no longer appealing. END QUOTE
This a great observation. The keywords here are "user experience". Unfortunately, the proposed solution goes straight to smoothing the UX of developers, almost forgetting that developers are users first. And as mentioned, work and leisure tasks are done on a single machine nowadays so it is even more important not to forget that.
That's why optimising developer workflows is only going to work to an extent. As another commenter pointed out, it is easy to port the advances made back to OS X.
This post makes me think of a mayor of a distraught city with no culture venues and a poor schooling system competing with an adjacent vibrant city saying "Oh there are a lot more cyclists there, let's create cycle lanes here and surely, they'll come". It may help but a cyclist is an individual first who needs job prospects, school for their children, cultural events to go to, etc. Basic needs, plus a cultural fit that probably pushed those cyclists to move to that other city in the first place. My advice would be get the basic needs right then create a welcoming culture then the cyclists will come and probably advocate for the cycle lanes themselves.
My basic needs for a Linux desktop and some thoughts on how to achieve them: - hardware/OS compatibility: pick a laptop and say it's only going to work on that, I don't care, boil down the set up to Language, Keyboard, Wifi - don't bother me with drivers ever. The hardware picked needs to be best in class though. - run commercial apps: find a solution to wrap existing Win/Mac apps and run them *seamlessly*. Plus, work hard to make commercial vendors feel at home (stable APIs, conferences etc.). - have an interface that is stylish and geared towards productivity: *work with designers*, there is a huge gap between something that does the job and something that is "designed" well. Any decision that affects what the user is seeing should be made by a designer/UX person, not the maintainer of that particular package. I wanted to cry when I so excitedly opened a link to Haiku and started looking at the screenshots. Ubuntu seems to give design some thought but only to end up with a poor man version of MacOS X. - add some polish: (notice this comes last) try to create delight.
It is hard! But I really hope something along these lines can be done so I can be a proud Linux/Unix desktop user again. :)
Me: web developer, who has tried various dual-boot/VM configurations of Linux and Windows before switching to Mac in 2008.
Basic needs first
The developers I was surrounded by aren't the same developers you'd find at a technical conference 10 years ago. They grew up in an era that's become increasingly focused on user experience, and the idea of migrating to Linux because it's more tweakable is no longer appealing.
END QUOTE
This a great observation. The keywords here are "user experience".
Unfortunately, the proposed solution goes straight to smoothing the UX of developers, almost forgetting that developers are users first. And as mentioned, work and leisure tasks are done on a single machine nowadays so it is even more important not to forget that.
That's why optimising developer workflows is only going to work to an extent. As another commenter pointed out, it is easy to port the advances made back to OS X.
This post makes me think of a mayor of a distraught city with no culture venues and a poor schooling system competing with an adjacent vibrant city saying "Oh there are a lot more cyclists there, let's create cycle lanes here and surely, they'll come". It may help but a cyclist is an individual first who needs job prospects, school for their children, cultural events to go to, etc. Basic needs, plus a cultural fit that probably pushed those cyclists to move to that other city in the first place.
My advice would be get the basic needs right then create a welcoming culture then the cyclists will come and probably advocate for the cycle lanes themselves.
My basic needs for a Linux desktop and some thoughts on how to achieve them:
- hardware/OS compatibility: pick a laptop and say it's only going to work on that, I don't care, boil down the set up to Language, Keyboard, Wifi - don't bother me with drivers ever. The hardware picked needs to be best in class though.
- run commercial apps: find a solution to wrap existing Win/Mac apps and run them *seamlessly*. Plus, work hard to make commercial vendors feel at home (stable APIs, conferences etc.).
- have an interface that is stylish and geared towards productivity: *work with designers*, there is a huge gap between something that does the job and something that is "designed" well. Any decision that affects what the user is seeing should be made by a designer/UX person, not the maintainer of that particular package. I wanted to cry when I so excitedly opened a link to Haiku and started looking at the screenshots. Ubuntu seems to give design some thought but only to end up with a poor man version of MacOS X.
- add some polish: (notice this comes last) try to create delight.
It is hard! But I really hope something along these lines can be done so I can be a proud Linux/Unix desktop user again. :)
Me: web developer, who has tried various dual-boot/VM configurations of Linux and Windows before switching to Mac in 2008.