I'd love to see a history of FOSS in its "golden era" (early aughts) to the early teens. There was this great momentum at the time, giant advances in the Linux desktop and server, and a large focus worldwide on open standards (XMPP became, briefly, the standard chat protocol).
This progress stalled. My theory is that it's in large part due to OSX convincing FOSS developers "it's UNIX" and with FOSS devs on Macs, Linux desktop advances slowed down.
@kyle I wonder if some of the stall wasn't also from the constant forking and fracturing of core areas different FOSS contributors couldn't agree on. That may also tie into your theory though as OSX said "you want to make sounds? do it this way", but early aughts Linux said "you want to make sounds? there are 6.02E23 ways to do that. 0 of them work together".
@ajmartinez @kyle It wasn't as much the variety of options as it was the variety of versions:
"Dependency X broke your app in their version V? Fine, just freeze it on V-1 and if Debian can't package it like that who cares, your dev env is in a venv/bundle/docker on Mac and your DebOps/SRE will have to deal with that."
That's where most of incompatibilities originated: the distros were supposed to make it all work together, but were instead mired in the dependency hell.
@angdraug @kyle A good chunk of the pain 20yrs ago, IMO, was from finding one application that was great for the task you needed it to do only... it was then the ONLY app you could use that made sounds (to call back the pain of having 9000 different sound layers possible at the turn of the century). Things are much better now, and I seldom find myself deep in /proc trying to figure anything out anymore. I'm glad I had that experience for when truly outstanding problems do crop up today.
@ajmartinez @angdraug I think a lot of folks on other platforms still assume Linux on the desktop is the same as it was a decade ago when they switched to OSX and aren't aware of all of the advances.
@angdraug @kyle It was circa 2.4.late/2.6.early when things were half OSS / half ALSA. The worst was having a laptop that would occasionally have the hd at /dev/hde instead of /dev/hda where was when the system was installed. Probably not actually Linux's fault, but fun anyway.
Now I never have an issue with a machine working. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Tails, Kali, whatever. My windows machine is reqd by work. I use it to change my password every 90 days.
@kyle @angdraug heh I remember having the FujiP out in public circa 2007 running Debian w/ XFCE and having someone want to know which Mac I had and how much it cost...
I never feel "held back" by LoTD. It's generally that I feel constrained to the point of being unproductive if I find myself in the unfortunate position of having to actually use my work laptop on Win10.
@kyle @ajmartinez I've been a desktop Linux user exclusively (with one exception of a dedicated gaming Windows PC) since 1997. I never had problems with sound. Yes, BlueZ still needs a kick once in a while. Buggy proprietary NVidia drivers? Sure, once. Mismatching Intel WiFi firmware? Minor inconvenience. But I always wondered what it is people to do to mess up sound on their Linux systems. Even that once when I played with Ardour and Jack, it just worked for me.