Re: Distros specifically designed for children

On 2025-05-29, Borax Man wrote:

On 2025-05-28, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Wed, 28 May 2025 12:34:28 -0000 (UTC), Borax Man wrote:
>

On 2025-05-27, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

>
Moral: those who are brought up under a regime that doesn’t give
them a choice, often find it difficult to adapt to having freedom
of choice.

[...]

Pointless choice can be a net cost.

>
If the gain offsets the cost, then the result is profit.
>
The Free Software world is a shining example of free-market economics in
action, in a way that proprietary software is not: the barriers to entry
are low. That’s why you have so few choices among proprietary software,
and so many among Free software. The situation of having 300-odd Linux
distros has been like that for something like 15 years, if I remember
rightly.
>
Basically, it’s gone well past the point where anybody could claim that
this situation is somehow unsustainable.
>

>
Profit for who though?
>
Fragmentation in Linux becomes a barrier to entry.  Software authors and
vendors have complained about this for 15 years at least too.  This
situation is a bit better now.

Well, choice means people are more likely to find something that suits
their needs. Someone might feel at home with something like the latest
GNOME, others may prefer a UI approach like that of the KDE3 era, others
may want just a way to display terminal emulators and run UNIX-like
utilities and a text editor of their choice.

With commercial software, at least I myself have never seen a lot of
choice. That said, my experiences have been a peek at macOS and some
usage of Windows and Windows NT.

That said, I'd say the proprietary software world can have more
pronounced differences as barriers, and be more fragmented as a
result. Why, again, did FAT become so popular for removable media,
despite its shortcomings? YMMV, but calling the proprietary world
something with less barriers to entry might be just wishful thinking?

If it weren't for the MS monopoly, I bet a lot of authors and vendors
wouldn't even bother with Windows (and now Windows NT) support, for
example.

--
Nuno Silva