There's a lot of discussion around the motivating example but the thesis is as follows:
"This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. It’s little things like this that add up. Why was there a Windows monopoly? I think it’s a stretch to just blame it on OEM bundling. No, it’s legit because there isn’t anything else."
The thesis is incorrect. There was Mac, OS/2, BeOS, Amiga, DEC, Solaris. It was the OEM bundling and the illegal anti competitive behaviour for which Microsoft was found guilty. This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop.
If it were about quality, surely everyone's favourite UX would have been dominant. But it isn't; it sits around the same usage stats as Linux.
And while bugs exist in GNOME and Gtk, I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png`
OEM bundling and Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior explains part of it, but not all of it. There are plenty of factors.
OS/2 was a mess for a ton of technical reasons, like the decision to support the 286, market reasons, like its price tag, and strategic mistakes like the decision to try and make money from development tools.
BeOS? Sure, blame Microsoft.
I don’t think I can be in a room with five people without getting five different explanations for why Amiga failed—it appeared after the Mac, competed directly with both the Mac and Atari ST, and was mismanaged by Commodore. It didn’t have much of a software library, compared to its competitors. In some ways it was seen as more of a “toy” than its competitors.
DEC’s business strategy was unsuited for the 80s and 90s. Making good processors isn’t enough, it turns out.
Solaris got eaten by Linux, if anything, not Windows.
> This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop.
To be clear, I’m not saying that that isn’t the main reason—just that there are lots of reasons to go around. Microsoft did a ton of things right. They made new operating systems that consumers wanted to buy. They kept backwards compatibility with a large library of legacy software. They ran on cheap hardware with tons of suppliers. They tried to make it as easy as possible for developers.
Like, hindsight is 20/20 and all that but Microsoft sure seemed to understand the market in the 1980s and 1990s.
The unfortunate reality is that because Windows was so dominant for so long you either have to
a) conform to their interaction paradigms to not frustrate users
or
b) create something incredibly polished and simple that it 'Just Works' how users expect it to (ie Apple).
Once you have people on-boarding to your platform you can distinguish yourself and build out your own paradigms, but it takes a long time, and users are unforgiving.
GNU/Linux is fantastic for power users, but the moment a 'normal' user has to edit a text config file, or open a terminal, we've lost them. When they try to do something that they're use to doing (see thumbnails of their files when choosing them) and it's not possible, GNU/Linux stops being a valid alternative.
> I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png`
You're uncharitably trivialising the author's point. A common user task is selecting an image file from your device (to upload/edit/share). A user will often have many images in a folder and they want to quickly select the one they're thinking of.
There is an almost universally accepted solution (or 'best practice') to this problem, which is rendering each image visually so that the user can select the correct one at a glance (either as a thumbnail view in a file picker, or a literal grid of images as in iOS). GNOME and Gtk have not implemented this widely accepted (in fact, expected) behaviour, despite it being raised as an issue nearly 17 years ago.
Instead you (and others) argue points like "well they should rename and manage their files", "it's just an extra click", "it's not that important or else it would exist already", "its just one inconvenient thing, get over it". And there are conversations to have around those points, but at the end of the day people are going to have a negative experience with the product because "it can't even render thumbnails".
And the point is that this _isn't_ an isolated issue. Every project has something like this (Apple and Microsoft still have these issues), but we're particularly bad at addressing the issue, or even admitting it exists.
The article is an essay written upside down. The thesis is that there was no quality competition to windows and that's why it is dominant. This is plainly incorrect. The era when Windows gained total dominance was when everyone was getting daily or weekly bsods.
It is a deep and complex topic and it wasn't 'heres a bug I don't like'. Microsoft had a monopoly on the sneakernet: file formats like xls, doc, and the like needed windows computers. They had an amazing sales force. They did the illegal partnering I mentioned. Loads of aspects. Quality is not a primary component here. Just like the inherent quality of javascript doesn't drive it. It's the platform and the platform effects and so on.
I don't disagree with anything you've just said. I think I'm just focusing on the present and future, while you are talking about how we got here.
I find it much easier these days to get people to consider trying a non-Windows environment but it never goes well because of these small issues.
Of course people expect things to behave in certain ways because Microsoft had an anti-competitive monopoly and most people learned about computing using their platform.
It's an unfair, shitty situation.
But the point remains that desktop GNU/Linux has a lot of these little UX bugs, and we're not even paying attention to them. The experience isn't as smooth as Windows because we don't have dedicated UI/UX designers thinking over these issues and trying to come up with cohesive solutions.
When's the last time a new consumer-facing UX paradigm that 'just worked' came out of the open-source world? Apple churns them out, oftentimes created from scratch, and it extends to their physical hardware design (ie the ipod scroll wheel was amazing for its time, airpods are a joy to use).
The open source world makes amazing things but the UX quality _is_ a major issue in the uptake of new users today.
The GUI is a chaos in every conceivable way. Have you used it in mixed-dpi fractional scaling setting lately? Even the builtin software is plagued with legacy apps that are unable to scale well and are aesthetically alien to the modern platform. Font sizes range from ridiculously small (file explorer) to ridiculously large (Edge location bar) and there is no font scaling factor that fits them all... that is when they even honor it. Most third-party apps look ancient. Installers are often blurry and unreadable. All Qt 5.x apps show scaling problems also, this is acknowledged as an important issue in Qt bug tracker. The task view (Win-Tab) has many visual glitches: it often flickers and reaccommodates itself after the initial rendering, it's not even smooth.
Some of these problems are often attributed to their compromise to maintain backwards compatibility. Well, it's just the oposite, they are mostly the result of the schism they themselves created with Windows 8 and UWP (that not even Microsoft uses for their important apps). Now they are trying to fix it with XAML Islands, WinUI 3, Project Reunion and whatnot, they throw so many names that nobody really knows what is the platform they are developing to.
There is nothing smooth in Windows 10. There are some great ideas and implementations lost in a rage of hubris and incompetence that started ten years ago and it's yet to see how much damage control they manage to do now.
"This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. It’s little things like this that add up. Why was there a Windows monopoly? I think it’s a stretch to just blame it on OEM bundling. No, it’s legit because there isn’t anything else."
The thesis is incorrect. There was Mac, OS/2, BeOS, Amiga, DEC, Solaris. It was the OEM bundling and the illegal anti competitive behaviour for which Microsoft was found guilty. This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop.
If it were about quality, surely everyone's favourite UX would have been dominant. But it isn't; it sits around the same usage stats as Linux.
And while bugs exist in GNOME and Gtk, I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png`