Fragmentation

More evidence of cluelessness. In a weird late night rage, against my better judgement, I found myself reading this article over at Phoronix, about how Ubuntu is thinking about an SDK.

A proper Ubuntu Software Development Kit would be nice for developers targeting Ubuntu SDK with a standard set of libraries/interfaces that are stable, but this isn't likely to please non-Ubuntu Linux users. This SDK that Canonical will look to push to application developers will likely be centered just around Ubuntu's needs and not the Linux ecosystem as a whole with other Linux distributions not being a focus, which could potentially lead to greater Linux desktop fragmentation.

Anyone who's been around long enough knows that any time some one of people tries to move the ball forward by doing something different, everyone thinks it's their right to crap on them. Worrying about fragmentation is the fucking dumbest thing you could do at this particular moment.

Desktop Linux is already heavily fragmented. The benefit of potentially getting major app developers to sign up far outweighs any incremental fragmentation this might create. In fact, if this actually works, I predict that suddenly every other freetard distriution will offer SDK compatibility, and then spew on about how open source is great because it allows all kinds of variation while keeping compatibility. In other words, you will see someone writing a blog post about how you can run Steam in XMonad. Because that's totally relevant, and it's the one thing that desktop Linux is missing.

It's not about how many incompatible choices there are, it's about how your users are distributed. Nobody gives a shit about how Ubuntu creating a stable SDK makes life harder for some crack-laced minty fresh Ubuntu derivative. Ubuntu already has a lot of users, if not the majority of desktop Linux users. That means this move could make desktop Linux better for the majority of users. If some big ISV signs on, it could mean that there are now 5x more Ubuntu users, making it by far the biggest majority. When Ubuntu grows the market by 5x, and owns 80% of it, the Linux desktop userbase is now less fragmented than where it started.

Fragmentation doesn't mean shit when the market is so small. Freetards argue about how things are fragmented for the 1%. Well, when you only have 1%, the problem isn't that you're too fragmented. The problem is you're not doing the right things to grow beyond 1%. Fragmentation is a problem for Android. Not desktop Linux.