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by Anon84·18y ago·view on hn ↗
This is why Windows or OSX beat Linux on the desktop. Practicality beats philosophy. There's also another consideration, incentives. Compare Apples incentives with, say, Red Hats.

Apple makes money selling overpriced hardware with extremely user friendly software. If the software causes problems, if it doesn't make their life easier, users won't pay the premium for the hardware, Apple has every incentive to invest heavily on GUI-candy and ease of use in general.

RH makes money providing support for their software. If the software is too easy to use, nobody will by the support. They have every incentive to keep a certain level of complexity.

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> RH makes money providing support for their software. If the software is too easy to use, nobody will by the support. They have every incentive to keep a certain level of complexity.

That is basically incorrect in terms of their business model: in order to have Redhat Linux, you have to pay money for it, and pay it on a subscription basis, so it's not "call support when I need help", it's "pay for it on an ongoing basis and call support when I need it", so really it's in their interests to make it simpler and easier.

Also, OSX is built on top of a number of open source products, including GCC, created a number of years ago by one Mr. Stallman, back when he still wrote code.

so really it's in their interests to make it simpler and easier.

It's more subtle than that. RH (et al) need to maintain a reputation for complexity amongst the people who make purchasing decisions, and they also need to discourange the users (e.g. sysadmins, developers, etc) from doing things that would make support difficult. So if you have RHEL you can install a certain limited number of packages on it and connect it to a certain limited number of devices (etc etc) or you're outside the support arrangement anyway.

If you follow the rules, you might as well be using CentOS because you won't need support, and if you step outside the lines you might as well be using CentOS because you won't be supported anyway.

> amongst the people who make purchasing decisions

I think those sorts of people care about many other things more than complexity, first and foremost: ass covering, and being able to call someone if something goes wrong. That's the kind of target they're aiming at. The period when people bought servers because of bright, shiny, 'uncomplicated' guis was relatively short lived, in the late '90ies with Windows NT.

Well, they don't care about complexity per se. But Red Hat wants, when the geeks say "let's just use Debian" for the suits to reply "no, it's not Enterprise enough".
Debian is probably more complex in some ways, but in the end, it's all Linux, so I would more or less reject that line of reasoning as inaccurate. People pay for the Redhat licensing because they want an official, supported system that comes with some guarantees and the promise that problems will be looked after.
Having actual experience of Red Hat support, I stand by my assertion that if you need a RH-like system you might as well be using CentOS.