I love this though, finally the GNU/Linux crowd that has been giving money to Apple for convinience, instead of sponsoring Linux OEMs gets the message.
Wouldn't you rather they give money to Apple, so there's an alternative OS to pure UNIX/Linux conformance (with Mach, file hierarchy changes, and tons of added stuff), Swift, and so on? That puts some actual pressure to those Linux OEMs and distros...
With sponsoring Linux OEMs instead we'd still have more of the same beige boxes, no new major architecture like ARM on the desktop, a Windows-2005 state of desktop environments (Linux DEs and Windows have both not just copied but dragged behind OSX/macOS changes ever since Aqua, like adding compositors, expose view, and so on, instead of coming up with their own ideas, GNOME/KDE advertise and redo on every new release stuff that was already in Windows in 2002), and so on.
I buy into Apple ecosystem for what it is, the progression of NeXTSTEP ideas (whose I came in touch with during my thesis), where UNIX compatibility was only used to bring stuff into the platform and have a place at the 90's workstation wars.
That is what Apple platforms are all about, an alternative OS design, where UNIX compatibility is good figuration, but will never get a main actor role.
By sponsoring GNU/Linux OEMs I mean paying companies like Tuxedo, Asus, Elementary, System76,..., just don't pay someone else to develop on their OS expecting to improve GNU/Linux ecosystem.
WSL is going to be the same, Microsoft just discovered that there is this crowd that cares more about POSIX tools, keeps calling them "Linux", but what they really want is anything that seems like UNIX, so out of the ashes from Project Astoria and Drawbriges, WSL got born and advertised to the masses unhappy with "GNU/Linux" on macOS.
As for the lack of creativity you point out, I fully agree with you, GNU/Linux desktop experience feels like those guys that buy a Fiat Spider and then stick a Ferrari logo into it.
>As for the lack of creativity you point out, I fully agree with you, GNU/Linux desktop experience feels like those guys that buy a Fiat Spider and then stick a Ferrari logo into it.
Yeah, could not put it better.
The sad thing is there are tons of things they could do to differentiate from macOS/Windows and build something better, but the only thing they do is "copying the same" + "more customization" but with lesser production values (due to less resources, more fragmentation, more customization meaning less coherence, no unified vision(s), etc).
Fucsia is the only alternative OS project (real in the sense with money and a player behind it, there are tons of academic toy OSes that ultimately wont matter), trying to do something at the 2020-level, but knowing the attencion span, lack of vision, and culture of Google it wont go anywhere, or just end up as a ho-hum replacement for Android.
There's lots of resistance, cargo cult, and ceremony, at the Linux distro level, and some things need a big player with lots of resources to push them. Canonical is not that big, and doesn't really do that well anyway (even assuming it's interested). And because Linux is mostly hardcore devs and enthusiasts, it's difficult to sell them any major change to the way things have always been.
One idea for example that sounded like a move forward is something like GoboLinux fs structure. But of course that will get ridiculed by most Linux greybeards because it's not like things have always been. Some for something like NixOS. And that's just of the FHS layer -- imagine the resistance to changes to more classic layers (e.g. the hate something like systemd still gets).
Apple can change things more easily because they can do it end to end, and millions of consumers don't expect things to stay like NextSTEP forever, or care about strict POSIX adherence), but they still get all the hate on HN for many moves.
And of course nobody appreciates the hard work of moving e.g. 500,000,000 devices or more (iOS + macOS) to a new filesystem you have developed in the span of 5 or so years - but they notice all the baby issues that pop up (while similar issues to e.g. fs changes in Linux distros, with all the fragmentation, and "DIY" go unnoticed, or pinned to the user as responsible who switched from ext4 to something else etc.).
I love this though, finally the GNU/Linux crowd that has been giving money to Apple for convinience, instead of sponsoring Linux OEMs gets the message.