GitHub.io killed the distro star: Why are people so bored with the top Linux makers?

Hard drive searches?

Exactly how does visiting google.com perform a "deep invasive search of your hard drive?" Maybe if you have a Google toolbar installed, but people who deliberately install a search toolbar deserve whatever happens to them.

I can certainly see avoiding google.com to keep them from collecting even more information on you, but Google certainly has no idea what is on my hard drive, nor will they ever.

DDG?

You mean Bing, as that is where DDG pulls its results from.

Just like F/OSS, DDG is having to piggyback off MS's hard work and innovation.

Ah, that's what the skin-crawl I get after using my linux box(en) for even a few minutes is. Thanks for the explanation.

Re: The other thing is...

"That most of the time, the new releases of the likes of Fedora 'just work'."

You've not really used Fedora soon after release in quite a while have you?

Normally takes them a few months after a new release to have most things working ok... :(

(not just new device hw, but end user software too)

Re: Awww, the good old days...

"Gone are the days when I would download a new distro about every other week and try it out"

I think the only reason people did that is that up until maybe 5 years ago there was a real improvement on the previous/other distro versions. Ie better OS perfomance/facilities and/or a better front end. These days Linux is pretty mature even on the desktop and any changes are simply small incremental changes that really don't warrant the pain of a re-install especialy since updating individual components is usually a fairly painless process (gcc excepted).

I'm currently running Slackware 14.0 from 2012 on my laptop (and that was only to update a Slackware 11 install) and I have no intention of even thinking about an update for another couple of years because It Just Works. It does everything I need and has never had any kind of fault. Why would I?

Not licensed!

"Restrictive licenses don't fit with our view of the world ... most GitHub aren't even licensed!"

If you don't like restrictive licences why are you even more restrictive?

You automatically have copyright with all rights reserved. A licence (look it up in a dictionary if you don't believe me) is a grant of freedom to do something. So unless you apply some licence to your GitHub project you're effectively saying that nobody else can do anything with it. And that's a good deal more restrictive than the GPL.

Use the BSD, DWTFYW, explicitly say "anyone is free to do what they want with this at their own risk" but don't assume that just because you say nothing freedom is implied. It's not; just the opposite.

Also, get a disclaimer in there.

Syntax has it right, the GPL grants a standardised range of rights over a code base that otherwise you'd have no rights over. Without the licence, nobody knows what they're able to do without violating the rights of the project owner

"The third is a generational thing, in two parts. Simply put, most new developers Don't Know C."

So learn it then. Its not hard especially if you already know Java or C#. And the sort of people who say "but, like, pointers sooo are hard" really shouldn't be doing programming in the first place and should go off and do an arts degree.

"but our languages of choice these days are more likely to be Java/C# or Javascript or Python or Ruby or whatever."

No offence, but Python, javascript, ruby and similar scripting languages are training languages. They're the 21st century equivalent of QuickBasic. They do the job - up to a point. But eventually you need to take the training wheels off and learn a proper language that has full access to (almost) all OS resources. ie C/C++/C# or Java and gives you total programming freedom on the platform.

We no longer equate the GPL with open source. Restrictive licenses don't fit with our view of the world. It's no longer necessary and often outright toxic to a project.

I do have to agree with you on this point. The GPL is, in my opinion, long winded and nearly as restrictive as a proprietary license would be. My license of choice these days is the BSD license when I decide something done in my free time is worth licensing at all (if it's not in my free time I don't own it - pretty standard when someone pays you to code). Really more often my free-time projects end up getting thrown out to the wild with a public domain release. But then they tend to be dinky little things because, who wants to code for 8 hours on someone else's pet project and then come home and code some more on another big project?

I think the language question seems far more likely to be relevant than the source repository. When software was on Sourceforge, we could download it and attempt to compile it. Now that software is on Github we can download it and attempt to compile it. What's the difference?

But when most open source software was in C, figuring out the dependencies and getting it to actually compile was hard work and it was nice to delegate it to the distro. Now that so much open source software is in other languages which have their own package mechanisms to manage dependencies and don't require you to work out the best compiler flags, there's less reason to involve a third party.

@AC - re Community spirit

"Getting into Linux development is not only technically challenging, but dominated by corporate, salaried developers who are (rightfully) protective of their domains. There's little of the old community spirit there."

If you're interested in the storage side of things, you'd be welcome in the GlusterFS Community. Many of us are salaried developers (paid by Red Hat), but many people aren't, and we're very _not protective_ of our domains. We take a "the more the merrier" approach, and are very newbie friendly. :)

Re: Booths?

Agreed about the availability of information on the web.

But a day away from being stuck behind the computer at the office, with a pub lunch followed by collecting nonsense freebies for a few hours?

Not to mention the ultimate work week : attending a conference. Top notch hotel in Paris, in June, champagne receptions with tech legends, company credit card paying for posh nosh every evening......

Don't argue yourself out of a freebie, for goodness sake!

(OK, I learnt some interesting stuff too which I used in subsequent projects, so it wasn't a total skive)

Re: Booths?

I'm pretty sure that the only reason for trade shows anymore is as an excuse for people to not be at work.

Re: Gnome? Unity?

I agree that Mint is pretty popular, but for some reason I've just never been able to grow to like it. The first impression always draws me in but after a few weeks I get frustrated. I can't even put my finger on the reason why, it just feels a little bit scratchy.

By the same token I don't find Unity hideous at all these days. It's pretty good on large monitors and while the workflow is quite different to the old Gnome 2 interface I find it very efficient. It's also very stable.

That said everyone has different tastes and it seems these days we are all spoiled by lot of very good choices out there. So much so that most folks just go grab their favourite distro, install it and then get on with life. It's rare to have to search for help to get things working now. On that basis I think the only way to really get some good stats on Linux adoption would be to somehow track hits against all the repository mirrors out there.

Re: Maybe the answer is that people are moving from base linux flavours

Distrowatch currently shows Mint as the top distro & also places Mageia above Fedora and openSuse, neither of which are in the graph.

But as others have said, I think the main factor is that most users have found that Linux has progressed from "only just works" to "just works" and have less need to conduct searches.