[TriLUG] Steam says that two percent of its users are now on Linux

Brandon Van Every bvanevery at gmail.com
Wed Mar 6 22:53:51 EST 2013


On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 10:43 PM, John Vaughters <jvaughters04 at yahoo.com>wrote:

>
>
> >Why on Earth should one do that?  Apple may have a Unix underbelly, but
> >it's not a Linux and never will be.
>
> Apple is specifically a BSD Variant. I consider this the same Open Source
> unity in the sense that code developed by the world is easily used on Apple
> with very little differences. I can jump on an Apple commnd line and work
> just as easily as Linux without issue. Besides the occasional hiccup I
> would not know the difference. So my point is that only Microsoft is left
> doing their own Dev without help from the world. This is what is sinking
> Microsoft. It is a significant difference in software progression
> capability.
>
> I am not a gamer, so all the game references blew over my head so I will
> trust you.
>

I hope you at least have more consciousness of consumer software in
general.  Your argument would seem to be that because command lines are
nearly identical from machine to machine, the problem of making and
deploying software for various target markets is solved.  Unfortunately
that's preposterous, as command lines are a late 80's UI paradigm at best.
At least, consumers stopped accepting command lines as UIs once Windows 95
shipped, and arguably they were well on their way to that conclusion in the
Windows 3.1 era.  Apple is cleaning up precisely because they do a lot of
things that Microsoft and the Linux community don't.  It may not matter
from where you sit, but it matters to an awful lot of consumers.  Canonical
knows this as well, which is why they're attempting Mir, and why they did
Ubuntu in the 1st place.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every



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