Получил тут письмо от неизвестного и ответил ему.
On Jan 26, 2012, Ilmari wrote:
Regarding fixing Linux on the desktop, if you had the power, where would you funnel money? I'm especially interested in audio and who is trying to improve it at the moment.
Мой ответ:
Hello Ilmari,
Audio is not that important per se, it's less or more worked out at the moment, and in most situations it works.
My biggest grief is the absence of kernel level audio mixing, and this problem could have been solved in no time by Canonical or RedHat, but the former one thinks that PulseAudio works, and the latter one doesn't care about Linux on the desktop.
First of all I'm sorry for not answering you earlier, I've been thinking what to write to you in reply. I suppose you are acquainted with this list so you can imagine that Linux has a lot of quite serious issues.
To me the most paramount problem in Linux is the absence of proprietary applications, and one of the most important causes of that is not even the fact that Linux occupies 1% of desktop PCs. Why do I care about proprietary applications? That's because people around me cannot live without MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw, AutoCAD, 3D Max, DVD authoring tools, etc. And there's no way I can convince them to migrate to semi-working alternatives which unfortunately don't offer 100% compatibility, since e.g. OpenOffice doesn't fully support MS Office formats, GIMP is too different from Adobe Photoshop, there's no Corel Draw/3D Max, AutoCAD alternatives at all, and applications which formally support those formats are laughable at best.
Why do ISV shun Linux?
It's the fact that Linux is unstable and too variable. Kernel API is unstable, there's no warranty that new libraries won't break or subtly change old APIs, there's no warranty that your application will work on OpenSuse if it works on Fedora or Ubuntu. There's no warranty that even if you compile your application for all these distros it'll ... work on them because GCC versions are different and different distros have different GCC patches.
There's no even source level compatibility! A real WTF.
Linux cries for unification and settling down, but most Open Source developers program for fun and they too often don't care about anything other than adding new features or rewriting or breaking the old ones.
So, it's not about money. It's about slowing down, and looking back and making sure that you have libraries and things you can rely on and run for years.
As you might have noticed, RedHat increased RHEL support from 7 years to 10 years, because RedHat understands that people want to run something, not to fix things every 6-9 months (these are the usual release cycles of Ubuntu, Fedora and other distros).
Computing is not for fun, it's for work.
Somehow Open Source programmers have totally forgotten about this principle.
