Some comments on an Ars review of the Eee PC note some surprise that Linux’s spread into mainstream consumer electronics is happening care of the low end of the hardware spectrum, as opposed to the high end where most desktop PC Linux fans feel it really shines.
What’s really happening is that the cost of software is being made more and more visible the cheaper the hardware gets. When you bought a $2,000 PC ten years ago, the fact that you paid another $100-200 for Windows wasn’t such a huge factor in most people’s minds. But if the cost of the OS doubles the cost of the purchase, well, that’s something people tend to notice. Note that this says nothing about the value of software in general approaching zero, or anything like that. Instead, it’s making a decision that was viewed as abstract to the point of absurdity by many, into something with real weight: how much is Windows worth to me? Consumers must ask themselves this question when considering any other piece of software, but the OS is both essential to the use of the computer, and it has been seen as a free throw-in from whoever sold the computer. Now that the OS can no longer be viewed as a freeby, historically unquantified benefits of Windows such as superior device support and user friendliness are being quantified, and a price tag is finally, truly being put on them.
So Linux’s advantages may now be nearing full operational status: you can go back and forth about device support and ease of use, but the Linux side will always have price as a kicker. A kicker that, until hardware prices dropped below a certain threshold (apparently $500 or so), wasn’t worth much, but is now worth a fortune.
Anthony Linux, Microsoft
Stephen O’Grady suggests that Google providing their own package repository may herald a future of ISV-managed repositories as part of a trend of distributing the power of the distribution maintainers. I hope not.
The problem with the strategy of providing your own repository is that you’ve lost one of the biggest advantages of a package management system.
The three main benefits of a package management system are, in short, (a) ease of discovery, (b) ease of installation, and (c) ease of maintenance. Given that quite a few applications (on every OS) come with automatic update mechanisms (e.g. “check for updates on startup”), item (b) isn’t a hugely differentiating factor. Item (a) really only exists because everything is already there when you install the OS. You don’t have to find the ISV’s website to download anything, since the package management system already knows how to find it (e.g. just type in “Ruby”)… which is not at all the case with ISV-managed repositories. That leaves you with ease of installation, and I do not think the process of setting up Google’s repository in, for example, Ubuntu qualifies as “magic.” If users start getting lots of their software from Google’s repository (perhaps even software only hosted, but not developed, by Google), then the one-time installation cost is fine. But that takes you right back to centrally-managed repositories vs. ISV-managed ones.
No, I think what Google has done here is a very practical avoidance of writing their own automatic update routines into every piece of software they write. It makes good sense, but I don’t think a proliferation of ISV-managed package repositories represents an appealing future of supposedly easy software discovery, installation, and maintenance.
Anthony Google, Linux
