So with the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10, bloggers out on the net are both decrying the readiness of Linux for the desktop, and trying to figure out what’s left to inhibit it from accessing the mainstream user.

Ok lets be honest, Ubuntu is not mass market ready, but then again, there’s no such thing as a mass market ready computer.  Try to make something idiot proof and the world will build a better idiot.  Everyone who’s ever worked around computers knows the horror stories so I won’t go into it.  But how does Linux compare to commercial OS’s like Windows and OSX?  Well, it probably would work just fine, and in fact I know it does (I have my grandparents on Ubuntu), for quite a significant portion of users.

So users can use it, and its simple-ish, why wouldn’t we want it to go to mass market?  One reason, big business.  Up until this point, Linux has been a hobbyist OS, supported by some badass companies like Google, IBM, and Red Hat.  We don’t really have a mass influx of bad companies into the Linux market.

Look at this very seriously.  The Windows market is LOADED with shit software that every M$ bred moron thinks he can scribble out a .Net yet, or worse yet, C++, application in and make some money.  The Mac market is much better but they’re next for an influx of shit software.  Here in the Linux world, we enjoy relative comfort in that, while we call everything shit software, it is, on some level, good software because even though the methodology of programming may be one you disagree with, it tends to be founded on some level.

Now, Linux does dominate in the realm of the interwebs as far as servers go, and by that stance there is shit software for it in that arena, but fortunately it doesn’t usually make it that far (Rails is an exception, but Rails can be good, it just largely isn’t because they people who program on it are Jerry’s that though Python and PHP were too hard).

But lets take this realistically.  If companies started developing en masse for Linux, you’d have this big corporation come along with some damn product, and all of a sudden they decide for whatever dumb reason that they don’t like how something in a library works (say, glibc), so they fork it.  Now, you’re probably saying “isn’t this the point of open source?” and yes, it is, but this isn’t the problem, this NEXT aspect is the problem.  Say that program was a HUGE program, something tons of people used.  Like AOL for instance of yesteryear.  Well what if all the distro guys swapped over to this version of glibc that may end up having huge fucking issues with every little thing on the planet, which they then rush to fix with duct tape and superglue, until its a hotch potch of shit software left and right.

Then you can’t do ANY friggin thing in the Unix philosophy anymore, you have win32.  Not like you can really have 2 versions of glibc either (you technically can, but to me it’d seem like way more of a headache than it was worth)

Well that was just one company.  If Linux went mass market, you can imagine that big business would get in and do the library branching, interject their unwanted opinions into a large amount of projects, start buying out projects and draining them down with crap code, forking development, and all of a sudden you have the world’s biggest clusterfuck on your hands.

And then on top of it, you have shit software abounding.  Everything does everything, but nothing well.  Now it becomes an even bigger chore to find a package that actually friggin works.

I work as a Windows programmer as my day job, and I know what some of these software vendors do and it amazes me to no end, one that they did it and two that it even friggin works.  Knowing all of this, the moment the mass market starts creeping into Linux like it does in the Windows and Mac world, I’ll end up switching to a better OS which embraces its hobbyist roots, maybe FreeBSD or Plan9.  Sure they don’t have the most features, but they accomplish their damn goal and damn well, and don’t worry about become accepted on the mass market.