Most active commenters
  • jonathanstrange(3)
  • constantcrying(3)
  • bluGill(3)

←back to thread

473 points edent | 17 comments | | HN request time: 1.463s | source | bottom
Show context
constantcrying ◴[] No.43769695[source]
The EU and member states are currently putting in quite a bit of money trying to limit their exposure to US tech companies.

Looking at the list of projects you can see that they support a huge variety of projects, with all kind of different scopes and intentions.

While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.

The funding goes to many, but small projects, but this means the single biggest issue, actually deploying an open source system over an entire organization remains unaddressed.

replies(12): >>43769726 #>>43769744 #>>43769766 #>>43769768 #>>43769783 #>>43769847 #>>43770463 #>>43770538 #>>43771011 #>>43771079 #>>43773087 #>>43774240 #
1. jonathanstrange ◴[] No.43769783[source]
There is still an application barrier. If you want to make a OS that becomes popular, it needs to have better applications than other operating systems. Making the OS compatible with existing ones is bound to fail and violate IP rights. Making it Linux-based doesn't help because existing Linux applications are not competitive enough. They could be improved with consistent OS-level services and APIs but that requires developers to actually use them.

Nobody is interested in an OS without killer applications.

replies(1): >>43769812 #
2. constantcrying ◴[] No.43769812[source]
I don't think administrative work needs any killer applications. You need a complete system which actually works together and can be sourced by a single vendor.
replies(2): >>43769875 #>>43770141 #
3. jonathanstrange ◴[] No.43769875[source]
You're assuming that people want to switch but I'm talking about the incentives for end consumers to switch. There has to be some strong motivation for switching, and it's not only going to be GUI design. Something about a new OS must be really desirable, either the hardware it's running on or better applications.

I'm using Linux as my daily workhorse since 2008 so I'm not opposed to it in any way. But the fact is that due to lack of integration with the OS, every Linux application is slightly less good than its commercial MacOS and Windows counterpart. GIMP is slightly awkward to use in comparison to Photoshop, LibreOffice can replace Word but definitely isn't better, pro audio applications are virtually non-existent for Linux and work only as good if you don't need any pro plugins (very few of which are produced for Linux), Dia, Inkscape, and other vector drawing programs are far less good than e.g. Affinity Publisher, and so on and so forth. Linux doesn't even have good content indexing comparable to Spotlight. Applications don't even have consistent user interfaces.

replies(2): >>43770034 #>>43770083 #
4. constantcrying ◴[] No.43770034{3}[source]
>You're assuming that people want to switch

No, I am not. That is the stance of the EU. Switching is a matter of European security.

What "people" want is already irrelevant and whether the GUI is consistent or not couldn't matter less.

replies(2): >>43770383 #>>43770418 #
5. vladms ◴[] No.43770083{3}[source]
I would claim that many people would be fine using something else because they use 30% of the features of the respective applications.

They end up using Windows (or Android, or iOS) also because because that is the only option when you go in a shop to buy the hardware. I have a hard time buying a computer without Windows installed even if I actively want to!

replies(1): >>43770247 #
6. noirscape ◴[] No.43770141[source]
Administrative work needs 2 killer suites to work: Microsoft Office and the Adobe design suite.

Any replacement for these will basically have to be a bug for bug clone if you want them to work. LibreOffice is 80% of the way there, but it still mucks up too often to be reliable. PDF viewers are plenty, but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].

Third party vendors you have to work with for other things (ie. Printing folders) require stuff to be in the formats made by these two software suites and their response to "your printing press isn't following the PDF spec" isn't gonna be "oh sorry, we'll migrate our hardware", it's gonna be "the printer says no and my other customers don't complain so just send me the files correctly."

Since Adobe and Microsoft are the default, this is something third party vendors can say and get away with. The shoe is on your foot, not on theirs.

[0]: GIMP doesn't even come close to being a Photoshop replacement, they do very different things. Photoshop is a photo editor + drawing program, while GIMP is aimed at image manipulation. The difference comes into play with how the interface is designed and the complexity of certain actions in each program. GIMP is designed to let you do specific individual things to an image, while Photoshop is more aimed at giving the user entire workflows.

replies(5): >>43770183 #>>43770610 #>>43770625 #>>43771042 #>>43772088 #
7. guappa ◴[] No.43770183{3}[source]
> but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].

Ah photoshop. Every municipality employee uses photoshop at least 5h a day!

8. pjmlp ◴[] No.43770247{4}[source]
As the netbooks wave has proven, followed by Android and ChromeOS one, is that when you go to the shop, you will be getting a laptop with Asus Linux, Dell Linux, HP Linux, naturally branded with cool names from their marketing department, and full of usefull apps as differentiation factor, and naturally the related Linux drivers are only available from their respective support pages for the usual support timeframe.

They might eventually add support to something like Ubuntu, alongside their own OEM specific distribution, but naturally folks will complain they cannot install NixOS, and eventually they will remove those devices from the shops, as their sales become a rounding error.

However I do agree BSD and Linux distributions seem to be the only way to get independence from USA powered OSes, especially if we get back into the export regulations with the current ways of the administration in power.

9. nonrandomstring ◴[] No.43770383{4}[source]
> What "people" want is already irrelevant

This! Software is stuck in some illusory ideal from the dotcom days, a global market of meritous choice. It's long been political and about sovereignty, control and security. Some comments above sing the praises of Adobe as a "no alternative" software. So, remember that time when Trump passed an executive order banning Adobe in South American countries [0]?

The US does not get to use access to tech as a weapon, so they're not good enough by wider criteria in a changing political world. It doesn't matter how good are products by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Meta...

I also happen to think they're technically inferior to a diverse inter-compatible and free ecosystem, but that's becoming a side show.

In a way its good that there are no European vendors. The coming change cannot be mistaken for trade preference. People are being "forced to be free" of dangerous influence [1].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49973337

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/

10. jonathanstrange ◴[] No.43770418{4}[source]
Oh well, that was a misunderstanding. If people are forced to use a new OS whether they want it or not, then of course any Linux distro will do and there is hardly any need for a new OS, let alone one that the EU has developed.

I was assuming, in the context of the original post, that the EU lacks in innovation with regards to operating systems and tried to explain why it is hard to innovate in this area because of the application barrier and due to the fact that viable alternatives like Linux aren't competitive enough.

11. Tmpod ◴[] No.43770610{3}[source]
I'm not sure I agree with Adobe design suite being needed. I am a close to someone who's been through multiple different public sector institutions in my country and the only true constants is the cord Microsoft Office suite (Word+Excel+PowerPoint), Outlook and more recently Adobe Acrobat (mostly because of digital signing) and Microsoft Teams.

The core office suite is very good and people are very used to it. It also seems to be the hardest to truly replace, in my opinion.

LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are a good step forward but they're not replacements yet, for a lot of people, due to a simple fact (already mentioned somewhere here): people have been using this software for decades and are very used to the way they work, and replicating that, especially nicher things, is not trivial and takes a lot of work. Still, I'm hopeful.

Outlook, Acrobat and Teams may be easier to switch, particularly the last two. Outlook (and Exchange) has some extra nicities compared to plain standard email (from the top of my head, I recall read receipts and automatic responses for when you're away being important ones), but there are some nice projects tackling both the client and server side parts of those features. Acrobat could maybe be replaced by a reader like Okular, given a bit more polish, and Teams is so bad and often used in such basic ways that it could trivially be replaced by something like Mattermost (though I personally much prefer Zulip's model).

Again, all this is based on my experience and certainly won't apply everywhere.

replies(1): >>43772133 #
12. p_ing ◴[] No.43770625{3}[source]
The issue with the Adobe suites is that their alternatives need to be workflow-identical, it's not just how good or bug compatible the competitor needs to be.

The Affinity suite is excellent, but a heavy Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign user isn't going to want to move to Affinity due to workflow changes, and possibly plugin ecosystem gaps.

replies(1): >>43772036 #
13. monade ◴[] No.43771042{3}[source]
There are actually quite some projects named in the article that are moving in on Adobe turf:

- Typst (a new typesetting tool, previously covered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941) - PagedJS, a browser polyfill for CSS paged media - and something called "Pushing forward for CSS Print" which is also about creating professional print media with HTML + CSS

And to top it off, there is a project for digital signatures (Signature PDF) to compete with Adobe Sign...

So I would say the score isn't too bad on that dimension.

14. bluGill ◴[] No.43772036{4}[source]
They do not have to be workflow identical. They just need to be equivalent. I can teach someone a different workflow and they will catch on with time. However if the new workflow is worse (slower, worse results, or other such negatives) that will be found out.

Now it will take power users several years to learn all the tricks of the new workflow and that is productivity lost in the short term. This alone may not be worth the cost. If the new workflow is better though it will be worth it.

replies(1): >>43772574 #
15. bluGill ◴[] No.43772088{3}[source]
The vast majority of users do not use Adobe at all. The vast majority of users don't need anything complex out of their office suite. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of users.

If you are a large organization you tell the printing press manufacture to fix their bugs or you will find a different vendor. You can even do this if the bug is proved to be in your software not the press. You and I do not have this power, but governments are that big (your company also might be).

16. bluGill ◴[] No.43772133{4}[source]
People complained about the ribbon and how hard it was to learn/use when it first came out, now 18 years latter (some people reading this were not even born when it was introduced!) it is the default and nobody talks about those issues anymore. They will learn LibreOffice if they are told they must - they will complain but people always complain about change.
17. p_ing ◴[] No.43772574{5}[source]
> I can teach someone a different workflow and they will catch on with time.

And this is why a Photoshop user won't move to a new suite of tools.