I’m all for open source, but most of the crowd is anti making money. Thus, they often fail when it comes to user experience. Case in point, having to use terminal to install software. Surely using terminal is the l33t and objectively correct and better way of installing software, but that type of thinking is what’s keeping [edit: many] noobz/etc. from switching from Wintel and Apple.
You’re talking about the software, so by ‘crowd’ you must mean the developers (as opposed to the users).
The Linux kernel development is done for 75%+ through commercial interests. All major application development is done by communities of usually some commercially backed programmers and the rest volunteers. Almost without exception, they accept donations, and many ask for donation subscriptions.
A nice example is Ardour (‘digital audio workstation’). They currently have 254 people with a donation subscription. They also have ‘bug bounties’ where people can pledge money to have specified problems fixed.
Some users may be anti making money but it seems to me that by far most of the actual development is done with direct commercial interest and that the developing community is aware of the value of it.
In the Linux Reddit, when companies join the open source club, it’s accepted and understood as beneficial. The only time when it gets negative reactions is when it involves companies that historically acted against the interests of the community, and not because it’s commercial per se.
As far as installing goes, most of the big distributions comes packed with software, enough for a lot of PC users; it’s Windows that doesn’t ship with much. And most of the big distributions have large repositories allowing people to install all of the popular free software with a simple UI.
So I don’t see how there’s any truth to your statement that hippie anti-money programmers purposely try to keep things difficult.
Could some open source projects be more user friendly? Sure. But this will be spurred foremost by having a larger community.
I wasn’t making a blanket statement, but I certainly was ranting. I’ve admitted earlier that using Linux, as a desktop OS, has gotten better. Also, my rant only pertained to desktop, not server or other non-desktop applications of linux. Desktop linux distributions are definitely getting better with regards to user experience.
I use Linux: Fedora. Bleeding edge with great security. Gnome 3 is a step forward in user interfaces.
I’ve recently been using Fluxbox for a GUI, which is extremely lightweight. I think I’m going to give Slackware a go next.
I use Windows for email at work (the email is on a MS Exchange Server without POP or IMAP turned on). I also run an engineering analysis program called ANSYS on Windows, because the company bought a Windows license… but, I use Linux for basically everything else.