Agreed. Wayland development appeared to accelerate after Ubuntu announced Mir. If the only thing that ever happens because of Mir is that it made the rest of the Linux community unite behind Wayland and speed its adoption, that's still a good thing.

And Ubuntu started Mir because their engineers seem to believe Mir has fundamental performance advantages over Wayland in resource-constrained environments like phones. It's possible they're completely wrong, but if they're right then we need Mir for Linux on smart phones.

Slash and burn farming the rainforests is not a form of modern western intensive agriculture.

It took me years of effort to become a decent software developer. If they taught swimming like most schools teach computer science, on the first day you would be thrown into the deep end of a pool filled with flaming oil and starved piranhas, and the kids that survived would be permitted to take subsequent courses. For computer science I lucked out and attended a school that let me slip by and keep trying until I didn't suck anymore. Too many people interested in the field but without an instant grasp of the fundamentals get weaned out by the introductory courses.

Giving a kid three hours with Khan Academy programming classes or the Turtle or whatever does not make them a developer. But I think most kids could get this stuff with proper instruction, including the advanced concepts.

On the other side of the coin, better education does increase competition and I don't look forward to having kids willing to work for half my pay compete for my job. But the big tech companies have already bought themselves a few members of Congress so they can get cheap technology professionals with H1B visas. I have nothing against people that are not US citizens, but if I'm going to face cheap competition for my job it might as well be from other US citizens.

Good point. I had not thought of that.

That's not infringement that is the problem for companies, it's the patent license grant.

I wish companies would use GPLv3, I think the patent license grant is a very good thing. But I can understand why they do not. I disagree with it, but I understand it.

That would be a fine argument if internet service providers were not natural monopolies. I live in a Philadelphia suburb in which my internet choices are Comcast, dialup, and wireless 3G service (no 4G towers near me). So if I want decent connection speed, I have only one choice.

Now if I could choose between multiple different providers for high speed internet, then sure - let them set their own prices for bandwidth, and competition will drive the internet service providers to keep offering higher bandwidth at lower prices in a bid for customers. But that's not what most of the country has, so if the laws don't force net neutrality, we get screwed and we have no alternative.

Lack of regulation leads to robber barons who bribe, extort, and blackmail lawmakers into doing what they want, which is just another path to regulatory capture. There has been no large scale successful implementation of libertarianism anywhere for this reason.

In 2010 Ubuntu was the best shot the Linux community had at getting serious market penetration into desktop and laptop computers. With GNOME 2 it wasn't as pretty as Windows Aero but the user interface was similar enough that the switch was easy for regular home computer users.

Then Canonical switches gears to Unity. The first few releases were very buggy, and even after it was quite stable the user interface changes annoyed people. So Ubuntu ceased to be the default suggestion for a Linux version to try to Linux newbies, and there really wasn't any new contender to replace it.

Linux Mint gained popularity rapidly from that, as it offered user interfaces and customization options in line with what dissatisfied Ubuntu users wanted. But Mint doesn't have the same chance at capturing a significant piece of the standard desktop market. Their recommended upgrade process is still a fresh re-install ( see http://community.linuxmint.com... ), which means it only works for technically skilled users.

Now, Ubuntu and Unity are open source software and Canonical is a business, so they have every right to change whatever they want for any reason or no stated reason at all. So I do not now and did not then hate Mark Shuttleworth or the Ubuntu developers or Canonical employees for the change. I just feel like a great opportunity for Linux to enter mainstream use was wasted and all that momentum that Canonical and Ubuntu built in user base and press support was splintered.

The next great opportunity for Linux to reach user in mainstream desktop computers is probably SteamOS, and while I admit that I'll probably run it myself, I am not pleased that a proprietary digital rights managed software distribution platform may be the lever that makes Linux mainstream on home computers. ( Really, I should put my money where my mouth is and support one of the Ubuntu alternatives that could become equally good for new users with some work. Fedora? OpenSUSE? Debian? )

And to be fair to Canonical and Ubuntu, I think mainstream (non power-user) computer users will be mostly on mobile in the future. So even if I dislike the Unity user interface, I can understand trying to invent some alternative to existing desktop environments that would work well on mobile devices. I understand where they're trying to go, even if I think the direction they took is a mistake.

The GPLv3 has the new patent licensing terms. I am speculating wildly, but whenever the GPLv3 is discussed a few people - and not always the same one or two - chime in and say that their employer won't work with GPLv3 for fear those terms would force them to give up the right to file a patent-infringement lawsuit under certain conditions. e.g. Alcatel-Lucent releases Plan9 under GPLv3, it grants implicit rights to some patent in source file X, and then Red Hat Linux puts source file X into OpenStack so they can use the technology covered under that patent without fear of lawsuit.

I agree with you on the rest of your comments. With respect to gaming, if we're lucky - and I'm not sure we will be, but if we are - in five years SteamOS (on top of Debian Linux, or Debian GNU/Linux if you prefer) will cover all of the games you want, and you won't need to run Windows. I run Windows at home too because of my kids' games, and because I don't want to make my wife resent me or free software by forcing her to switch. I boot into Linux when I'm using the computers for myself, and try to only get games that run well natively on Linux or through Wine.

Tell that to Google and Facebook.

https://leastauthority.com/ Distributed secure backup with the encryption happening on your local machine before hitting the cloud, so the hosting service can't release your data to Uncle Sammy, hacker X, or disgruntled employees.

It's fully open source, so you can run the whole thing yourself if you want.

This is Debian we're talking about. If they go with systemd in release Jessie, it won't go out until it's rock solid. If that takes three years, it won't be unusual for Debian.

Interesting that Fedora boots slower than Ubuntu for you. I hadn't noticed a difference, but then I wasn't booting them at the same time either.

I think in examining a next technology choice, you have to put the emphasis on "simple", as in "uses the minimal amount of complexity required to effectively complete the task" versus "easy" as in "creates the smallest learning curve for people using the current technology choice". If you're under a hard deadline, "easy" trumps "simple" because it is faster to transition. Otherwise, "simple" gives you something that takes less work to understand, requires less knowledge of the predecessor technology with makes it "easy" to bring in new talent that does not know the previous technology, and requires less work to customize because there is less to know.

Debian isn't run by a company, they have all the time in the world to get this decision right. So forget what init has now, forget that lots of current administrators know init, forget that lots of current administrators know shell scripting. What replacement for init is the simplest way to get the features they want?

I suspect the very backwards compatibility that makes the transition to Upstart easier will hurt it in the long term. Systemd's break with the past makes a transition headache but may make more sense in the long term. Or maybe there are a number of other options that are superior but not well known.

My understanding is that inter-core communications, while fast, are not as fast as the things a single core can do by itself when only interacting with the level 1 cache. Since the rings of a microkernel would be communicating very frequently and as fast as possible, I'm not sure it would work better.

But more importantly, free software is full of tens of thousands of experiments that didn't seem to make sense at a start. Most wither and die, a few become very big and hugely popular, and even the ones that never see widespread use often serve as a way their authors learn more about the problems they're trying to solve. Maybe the next major revision of the HURD will contain some architectural innovation that improves speed. Maybe some HURD developer, or even just someone reading the HURD source code, will learn something that makes them a better contributor to monolithic kernels. Any benefit is great, nobody is forced to work on it or use it.

Free software is like natural selection - millions of things come out, most suck and die. But the ones that win go big: GCC, LLVM, Firefox, Linux kernel, Perl, Python, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL.

Work on and use what you like, don't work on and don't use what you don't like.