What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html <comment><USER3> I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2.

Couple this with the fact that for a decade, the actual GUI was tied very, very heavily to the apps. So you had to use Gedit in Gnome, or whatever the KDE version of a fucking text editor is. Seemed really, really stupid. Can't we just have a relatively standard GUI text editor across platforms? Or were we all just expected to use vi and emacs?

When the windowing layers stopped moving around so much, and Greg Kroah- Hartman and co. had gotten the driver problems under control, we suddenly had a bunch of different Linuxes that were no longer compatible with each other due to packaging systems. So, now users had to download a deb, or a yum package, or a gentoo package... It was all very confusing for desktop users, especially beginners.

My quote to sum this up would be: "Why are these packages in my repository if they won't work after I install them because I'm using KDE/Gnome/Cinnamon?"

[1]: Unity took Ubuntu from being the default Linux I could put on anything, to a bloated, slow moving sack of crap. I could put Ubuntu on a 2001 laptop and be completely fine, fast enough, usable enough to do just about everything I needed.

Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it's unusable garbage. I can't even hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig down to an absolute crawl. Like, can't even move the mouse, 5 minutes between keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for killing the Linux desktop.

<comment><USER4> _> Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it's unusable garbage. I can't even hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig down to an absolute crawl. Like, can't even move the mouse, 5 minutes between keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for killing the Linux desktop._

Have you tried Xubuntu? It fills the gap that Ubuntu used to, and it's my go- to desktop OS now (apart from on my MacBook because only OS X is usable on high DPI displays). I've also installed it for non-technical friends and family and they've found it much more familiar than recent Windows versions.

In an age when the family computer is just as likely to be running Android or iOS, I think the Linux desktop has a niche and we need to start evangelizing it again. Even for the typical home user it feels more powerful than ever when you compare it to such "appliance" operating systems, which Windows and OS X seem determined to become.

<comment><USER5> XFCE: lightweight and powerful

That's my choice as well

<comment><USER6> Good thing about XFCE is that xrdp still works when you need it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What killed the Linux desktop? Not being preinstalled. For a bit of context from PC history, this is also what killed the GEM desktop, killed the OS/2 desktop, and damn near killed the Windows desktop until Microsoft put pressure on vendors to make a 386SX with VGA the entry-level option and ship Windows 3.0 with every unit.

Preinstalls are an OS's golden ticket to adoption.

<comment><USER8> If _one_ Linux with _one_ desktop was widely preinstalled, that would help. That would have made that environment the target for desktop developers, which in turn would have added the pressure for backwards compatibility. Now, as a desktop developer I'm surely not targeting Linux desktop because it's not even a single target.

<comment><USER9> Doesn't stop Android adoption.

<comment><USER10> Um, what? Phones differ in size and power, but a particular version of Android is a particular version of Android everywhere.

Android developers don't have a debian vs. ubuntu vs. centos. vs. gentoo vs. arch type choice to make, only a "how backwards compatible do I want to be" choice.

<comment><USER11> Why do you think desktop applications have to be different for the distros?

It is rather easy to ship libraries with your package or even do static builds..

Even without that, things are relatively portable. (Steam packaged for Ubuntu works on most of the distros)

<comment><USER12> Libraries are just part of the picture, then comes the location of files, init systems, lack of standard frameworks for all layers of a modern desktop.

On OS X, in spite of CUPS, I can use AppKit Printing API. On Linux I have to resort to somehow generate PS and forward into the printer driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The people I know who use desktop Linux love their Linux rigs a whole lot more than my Windows and Mac acquaintances enjoy their computers--which in many cases just borders on tolerance, especially with Windows 10. Maybe software needs something beyond market share, sort of like what Bhutan did with Gross National Happiness. We'll rank products based on how much people enjoy them and then see who's the dominant desktop.

<comment><USER14> That's because it takes more work and knowledge to get a Linux machine running smoothly, so in the end you feel a sense of accomplishment, when in the end all that was done was just getting a local desktop OS running the way a computer should be used in the first place. It's all smoke and mirrors.

<comment><USER15> That's the whole point. You can't achieve this with windows, because it runs an update whenever it wants and will just give you a restart at a random time. Happened to me at work during a presentation when i turned on a vm after few days. And then you have same privacy settings scattered around the OS trying to scam you into giving your data to Microsoft, which turns on by default after every godamn update. I would have never moved to linux, if microsoft didn't shove their crap down the users throats everytime it updates.

I have now complete control over everything, and i feel very happy by using a fedora workstation on my personal pc/laptop. I am not into gaming, and even if i were, i would rather sacrifice my windows games just to support an OS which is more fair to the users and doesn't steal their privacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The original sin of the Linux desktop was the kde/gnome split over licensing. Had Linux had one good desktop, like the other operating systems, it could have had a future on the desktop.

Instead it has had a number of almost-good desktops that are still fragmented by hate and the desire to thwart interoperability. For instance, the GTK team won't fix certain bugs that affect running in a rootless X server because they can't stand the idea that you'd run Eclipse on Linux and view it on Cygwin/X.

<comment><USER17> And that was mainly the job of the author of this article.

Who is currently working for Microsoft.

I smell an agenda here.

<comment><USER18> I think he was well meaning. And at some point he just gave up.

As a long time Linux user I agree with him. FOSS is just not conducive to the kind of development needed for a high quality, long term stable desktop experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nothing killed the Linux desktop. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the fact that the masses only have two options: Windows or Mac. People become set in their ways using a particular system either at home or work and there is basically no reason that they will ever be exposed to a Linux desktop, and if they are, they will find it just as impossible to use as any other OS that isn't the one they've used exclusively for 10 years.

Anecdotally, prior to the ubiquity of tablets, I've observed several computer illiterate relatives thrive on Ubuntu systems (gnome 2 and unity) because they needed a PC and I passed on an older machine with a fresh copy of Ubuntu. My uncle who had never used a PC more than 30 minutes at a time before I gave him an Ubuntu laptop half a decade ago barely uses his 2015 MacBook that my aunt bought him for his 62nd birthday because he is so comfortable with his Ubuntu machine.

<comment><USER20> Not really, CS students have usually been exposed to Linux at the university and very few of them still choose it as an operating system.

<comment><USER19> To start with, CS students are not the masses.

In addition to that, _some_ CS students at _some_ schools are exposed to the linux command line, and even less are exposed to linux desktop environments because most CS students have grown up using Windows or Mac and the curriculum is nearly always structured in such a way that it is unnecessary for the student to install a linux DE in order to do their work.

Finally, I'm not willing to blindly accept your claim that "very few of them still choose it", if you have some way to substantiate that claim I'd be interested in the details, but my experience says quite a few of them do choose it, though I'd certainly be willing to yield my anecdotes to some actual data.

<comment><USER21> For what it's worth, I have a counter anecdote. I go to a university where for some computer science courses, your labs are on computers with a Linux desktop environment. Other students seem to do fine in these labs. Even so, when I look around the classroom during lectures, almost all the open laptops are Windows or Mac. Perhaps these students don't get enough exposure over the couple of courses or don't get shown enough of the reasons to switch to Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Quote from article:

"The attitude of our community was one of engineering excellence: we do not want deprecated code in our source trees, we do not want to keep broken designs around, we want pure and beautiful designs and we want to eliminate all traces of bad or poorly implemented ideas from our source code trees.

And we did.

We deprecated APIs, because there was a better way."

The Linux kernel only removes/changes _internal_ kernel interface all the time - the kernel developers take care to keep the external kernel interface (syscalls) backward-compatible.

EDIT: One of the commentators at the original article writes something similar: [http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html#comment-633...](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html#comment-633569788)

<comment><USER23> The linux kernel is hard-core into not breaking backwards compatibility. 2/3 of Linus's rants targeting a kernel developer tend to be because they broke userspace.

On the other hand, there is approximately zero chance that a dynamically linked executable from 10 years ago will run on my current system because the system libraries break backwards compatibility all the time. Drepper takes a lot of flak for this, but glibc is not even remotely the only library at fault for this.

Many core userspace libraries broke not only binary compatibility regularly but often source compatibility. Inspect a steam install sometime. It installs dozens of DLLs just so games will have a stable base to work from.

Also, have I just gotten lucky or something? This is the second time that someone mentions audio not working on linux as the norm, but from the mainlining of ALSA in 2.6 on, I've had zero issues with audio working for all but the most obscure audio devices.

<comment><USER24> DVDs, printers, and to a lesser extent graphics have more issues for me than audio.

<comment><USER23> Also my experience, but people complain about sound. I know Ubuntu adopted PA _way_ to early, so perhaps that's what some people are thinking of. Also, back in the day, dmix was not enabled in setups where it really ought to have been so you had the "some program is blocking everyone else from using the sound."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The author makes a good point, namely that the Linux desktopspace is too fast a moving target. The Linux kernel is exceptionally stable in its userspace facing APIs (the most important rule Linus holds up is "we never break userspace"). And userspace has been pretty much stable for a long time as well on the API and ABI side. But everything that's regarded with making desktop environments work, the UI toolkits, configuration APIs, essential DE programs, all that jazz is moving at a breakneck speed and more often than not even "minor" version bumps introduce regressions and subtle incompatibilites.

But this problem is not going to be resolved by coalescing all the various Linux distributions into a single vendor model. If anything that would just accelerate the troublemaking processes. What's really required is infusing a culture of high quality engineering, forward thinking and consequence estimation into the community. Focus on fixing bugs and regressions instead of implementing new features.

</comment><comment><USER26> How many Linux distros and their many different GUI/UI variations have been listed here???

No wonder the Linux desktop was dead upon arrival. Too many flavors of developers to satisfy. But it wasn't about developers; it was about end users who just wanted something simple. No matter the changes that Windows has made, from 95 to 10, for end users, the changes caused relatively minor disruption, especially with everything moving to the web. Switch to Linux? Which one? Which packages to install and why? Which GUI to use? etc, etc, etc... Linux was the beginning of developers creating something for themselves to control and expecting the rest of the world to just simply fall in love.

I say all that because I genuinely like Linux and it's purpose, but not for desktop purposes. Maybe mobile???

<comment><USER27> I'd say Chrome OS will be the only Linux "distro" that will become mainstream.

<comment><USER12> Which by being a browser based OS, makes the kernel irrelevant.

Google can even make Chrome run bare metal, no one would notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nothing killed the Linux Desktop. Windows already won that war and it was good enough. Heck, even Apple and its billions couldn't get more than 5% market share worldwide.

The next "war" moved to mobile and there linux is not doing that bad.

<comment><USER29> Windows solved many of the GUI problems 20 years ago that Linux still struggles with today. Windows was and is ahead and this is why it was and is more successful. It is that simple. I would take Windows 95's window manager over Ubuntu's Unity every day of the week.

<comment><USER28> I think Unity (and KDE) were good enough to replace Windows but Windows won 10 years before Gnome and KDE became a thing. And yes Windows95 was not only good enough but great as you pointed.

The lack of hardware support was because it made no sense for hardware companies to support an OS with less than 1% market share and same for the gigantic ecosystem of software that ran on windows which had a very long tail.

My point is that Linux didn't lose the desktop because of any mistakes the community made (and god knows there were many), it lost because Windows had already won this platform for a loooong time and the incentives to switch weren't great (OS are boring, most people don't even know what an OS is).

<comment><USER30> I agree. Many mistakes would have been fine if there was a compelling reason for users to switch. Linux has been successful when it found a greenfield space: Android, Chromebook, x86 servers. The open source aspect isn't magic, it won't make "clone knockoff in an existing space" into an interesting product.

This was the root cause, "a new desktop" presupposes the existing product category "desktop" which was a solved problem and a mature market. Runaway marketshare required NEW categories.

ABI compat and hardware support are hygiene features; they can slow adoption, but solving them doesn't motivate adoption. Linux needed the motivator; that would have then funded solving the hygiene stuff - just as it has, at least well enough, for x86 servers, Android, and Chromebook.

I don't say this with 20/20 hindsight either. I made this point loudly both inside GNOME and inside Red Hat back in the day. We even had chromebook-type proposals. But the Linux companies at that time were too small and server- focused to undertake such things, and once ipad/chromebook/android were out, there wasn't an obvious opportunity anymore for "Linux" proper.

Still, "Linux desktop" continues to work well for me and millions of other developers daily and I think it's very good for a dev workstation, as long as you buy hardware with OEM-developed open drivers (which mostly means Intel parts).

A lot of people who find it doesn't work for them are doing the equivalent of running OS X on non-Apple hardware with hacks to modify the finder, and surprise it's buggy. Granted, in the Linux world it isn't so clear what the "supported configuration" is. But think boring: default config of a major distribution with all open source drivers...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Icaza has no right to complain when he was the instigator of the DE feud with Gnome just as KDE was on the rise.

Ts'o on the other hand, in the comments, puts the spotlight on how it is userspace that is the problem. Userspace devs keep breaking APIs and ABIs at whim, effectively playing out "perfection is the enemy of good" in real time.

</comment><comment><USER32> As a programmer, I find Fedora with the Gnome Classic theme and the No Topleft Hot Corner extension[0] to be an excellent, clean, effective desktop UI. But in order to get this working properly, I had to go through package hell for a few hours to get the right graphics drivers and tweak a bunch of settings. I've heard Linux Mint is good for non-programmers, but I've never tried. Unity in Ubuntu is the worst desktop experience out of all I've tried.

[0] [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot- co...](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-corner/)

<comment><USER15> I have moved to fedora since almost 2 years now and i can't say more. It had been one of the best experiences ever after the initial set-up and learning curve. I have all my settings on git now and whenever i do a new install of any linux i just get those settings and boom.

I am very happy linux user and support the philosophy. Its way more fair than any other os where the main purpose is to rip of the people who support them by selling their private data etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't remember the details, but I do recall being flabbergasted that the latest KDE couldn't run the eclipse IDE properly. Dialogs were missing entire fields. It seemed so odd that made me doubt myself and check the same dialog on OS X to be sure.

Something to do about Gnome overhauling its style system to use CSS, which affected some other library in KDE that implements SWT via some gnome library, or ... gah who even cares.

The teams in charge of the linux desktops environments seem to behave as if backwards compatibility was no big deal.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but they do make an effort maintain backwards compatibility with some truly ancient applications.

<comment><USER34> This was probably fallout from the switch to GTK3 and is unlikely the fault of KDE (that only configures the GTK theme and nothing more). Eclipse and GTK3 was so broken (is it better now? I switched to IntelliJ) that almost everone recommended to set a flag to get back to GTK2.

But I feel your pain, it's not new - there is a name for it: [https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html) \- it's still true :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Strangely the author omits the KDE/GNOME schism he contributed to create.

<comment><USER17> May be this article was a way to signal "I have finished my job here" to his current masters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is news to me as I read on an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop

<comment><USER37> > Clearly there is some confusion over the title of this blog post, so I > wanted to post a quick follow-up. What I mean with the title is that Linux > on the Desktop lost the race for a consumer operating system. It will > continue to be a great engineering workstation (that is why I am replacing > the hard disk in my system at home) and yes, I am aware that many of my > friends use Linux on the desktop and love it.

<comment><USER38> Was the author aware that perhaps the desire to have a 'consumer operating system' was not in the hearts and even minds of many developers of the "Linux" ecosystem?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Something killed the Linux desktop? Its usage is growing, while MacOS stagnation causes people to abandon it, yes you guessed it - often for Linux.

UPDATE: Oh, after noticing the date and the author, I realized, my suspicions were right. I expected the piece like this to be written by Miguel de Icaza. And here you go, it's indeed his rant. From 4.5 years ago...

Just skip it and read something more to the point, which discusses Linux desktop today.

<comment><USER40> Pretty much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Office. If Linux desktop had microsoft office, I could use it. Libre office is an unmitigated, ugly pile of shit.

<comment><USER42> Libreoffice meets my needs just fine. I spend a couple of hours a week in their spreadsheet and word processor, and don't really have any complaints.

<comment><USER43> Agree. Libreoffice works quite well, and although their presentation software isn't as pretty as powerpoint, I actually prefer their slideshow mode on multiple monitors. Quite sexy, in fact.

There's no reason for any government office or public school system at any level to be paying for office licenses IMHO. We can communicate and teach quite well with L.O.- and donate a share of the saved budget to FOSS.

<comment><USER21> Where do you draw the line for how much you can cut costs and sacrifice a little bit of productivity or retraining? For example, I often see programmers talk about having proper tools to do their job, whether that be high quality keyboards, faster computers with more memory, or subscription IDEs like Intellij. Should government programmers be denied these things because it is possible to program quite well without them?

<comment><USER43> Great question. I was thinking of the people who use office for communiqués and presentations and such. You don't need Microsoft Word to write an interoffice memo, nor do you need it to write a request for proposal.

That would free more money so that the people who did need or could truly benefit from premium tools could get them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have just installed Fedora Linux 25. So far so good. Only thing stopping me from switching completely to Linux is MS Office. If Microsoft can create a Linux version of Office, I am switching completely. Until then, I will keep on going back to Windows whenever I want to compile documents.

I have lots of Office documents. Alternatives are just awful. If focus of the open source community can be diverted to making LibreOffice better, Linux will win some decent Desktop market. Having 100 different distros won't help.

<comment><USER45> Office 2010 works fine in Wine (and so does 2013 in latest wine release I heard). Just give it a try, I'm sure it is better than 2 reboots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> For me the question is a bit to the side of the article. If Adobe or any independent developer were releasing a Linux desktop app today, what would they target?

<comment><USER47> Debian and later rpm. Most other distros will pick one of both and build a build process around it. Not perfect butnthe way it works.

<comment><USER46> What UI? [edit]Also, what type of process goes into converting a binary shipped by someone like Adobe? We are talking just changing the package format to install the binaries correctly, right?[/edit]

<comment><USER47> No change needed. Often the file structure just needs modification and dependencies need to be installed and fixed. AUR from arch is a good example for that. UI is not relevant most machines have qt and gtk

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Quote: "The only way to fix Linux is to take one distro, one set of components as a baseline, abadone everything else and everyone should just contribute to this single Linux."

Essentially the article's point is that technical totalitarianism would make Linux succeed on the consumer desktop, using the successful models of Windows and OSX -- one source, one model, no disagreement. Hate to acknowledge it, but it might be true.

<comment><USER49> This is why systemd's natural dominance of system orchestration and device initialization, and PulseAudio's natural dominance of consumer audio configuration could not be more welcome.

The big threat right now, as ever I suppose, is fragmentation in consumer desktop systems; the worst problem being Canonical's decision to develop Mir for reasons they later admitted were fabricated. The point is that all major toolkits now support Wayland quite well, but Canonical has to fight to maintain Mir support in just a subset of toolkits.

If we can get all of the system services standardized in a way which doesn't completely alienate the community; then we can move on to having standards for consumers.

<comment><USER50> things that have caused problems on my machine lately:

1\. systemd

2\. pulseaudio

3\. avahi

do you see a pattern?

<comment><USER49> The pattern is... you edit the default configurations of system daemons until they don't work, then complain on the internet?

Wow! it's terrible that your init system has been fighting you! Let's figure out what custom unit you wrote which is causing the problem.

Unless your alsa devices are broken, I find it unlikely that pulseaudio 10 will do anything untoward; if it does, well then, time to fix a bug, good thing there are so many people working on pulseaudio.

Avahi... well idunno. Avahi tends to be true to the name of ZeroConf networking. I have never written an avahi configuration in my life, and yet it works for me. Maybe you have a malicious mDNS peer on your network? I'm sorry you have to experience that! If you could fire up wireshark and pass the hail mary instead of letting it drop to the green, that would be great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I've said this many times but the only real problem I have is the shere pain to get things to work and for uniform styling across programs.

I find myself just using terminal applications because gparted's UI is SO different from Wireshark, FireFox, etc. There is no consistancy. There is no standard written. There is nothing. It's just a hodge-podge of "this looks good to me!"

No standards = Confused Users

<comment><USER52> >I find myself just using terminal applications because gparted's UI is SO different from Wireshark, FireFox, etc. There is no consistancy. There is no standard written. There is nothing. It's just a hodge-podge of "this looks good to me!"

Then use GNOME Disks, which (if you're using a distro with GNOME) is probably already included: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Disks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Disks)

And GParted vs. Wireshark? Of course they look different, they're completely different tools - and most non-technical users never need to look at either one anyway. But here's Wireshark vs. macOS's disk utility, for comparison: [https://imgur.com/a/V9zZC](https://imgur.com/a/V9zZC)

<comment><USER51> You're missing the point. Look at that top bar. What do those mean? How do I un-gray them? What do I click to start capturing packets?

Look at these

[http://cdn2.tekgoblinmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Restore- di...](http://cdn2.tekgoblinmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Restore-disk- utility-3.jpg?d8d5b3)

[https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare...](https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/osx/preferences_overview.png)

All icons have text. There is a uniform icon for Hard Drive. There is a uniform color scheme. There is a uniform font size. There is a uniform spacing between elements.

In the macOS window you see descriptions where needed like under "First Aid"

You get human-friendly lables such as "Capacity", "Used", etc. It is all presented eligantly and simply.

On the left of your screen all I see are random strings of text with squigly lines next to them. Are those buttons? Can I click them? I know you have to from using wireshark before but the average person sees that and says "...well shit".

Presentation is a very sensative art. HCI should be much more appreciated and people majoring in it shouldn't be relegated to VR as there are still many problems in desktop UI that needs to be fixed.

<comment><USER52> >Look at that top bar. What do those mean? How do I un-gray them? What do I click to start capturing packets?

I agree, yes. But notice that my screenshot was on macOS, not desktop Linux.

My point was that there _are_ design guidelines for desktop Linux apps. GNOME has them[0] and KDE has them[1]. And then there are applications that don't follow those guidelines - like Wireshark, one of the ones you referenced - regardless of platform. It's not the platform's fault, it's the app developer's decision to either make their UI conform or not.

0: [https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/](https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/) 1: [https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/HIG](https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/HIG)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I quote from the article: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions"

I must say, this is the type of thing I have been talking about for years. Linux has always had its evangelists and champions in the Server community (I would reckon Red Het, Ubuntu, and Debian/Slackware are the root of what what upended Unix servers in the 2000s, but that is for another day at another time to get in-depth).

Yet, there was no foundation, no company, no project, until maybe in the last year or two with elementary OS and some of the standardizations coming out of the Fedora project, that you even see some evangelism in the Linux desktop space (let alone mobile. I am not counting android). The problem as I see it is Linux is the programmers playground - which is great! - but what that also turns out to be is that since you can fork, edit, re-create, spin, and otherwise modify the code as we programmers see fit, you get no level of standardization, no harmonized quality control on fundamentals, no one evangelizing the Linux Desktop as a platform that you can make apps for (which I still contend is a big issue for Linux as a Desktop for the even semi- mainstream user. I think most developers not withstanding.) It was never an inclusive platform

Some might say this was the point. They don't want, nor do we need Linux to be the same as macOS, or Windows. Perhaps the point of the communities that sprang up around the Linux on the desktop movements is that there is a ethos that having these fundamentals is bad, or that evangelizing a platform is 'selling out'. I've seen this argument many times over the years. To me, the quote from the article above, sums it all up nicely. The platform never had any fundamental evangelists pushing for a harmonized Linux experience. There is always Chaos, sometimes a little (nvidia driver breaks again because of a point update) or a lot (Well, today we have no GUI because Gnome moved to Wayland and for some reason my distro has some component it doesn't support yet so when it went to apply the update it failed).

Until idealism stops running the show and there is some consolidation in the fundamentals of Linux on mobile and Linux on the desktop, neither will be a way forward if you value access to the latest software, consistency in the fundamentals, stability, and out of the box hardware support from manufacturers.

</comment><comment><USER54> Blaming Linus for whatever personal frustration with Linux is becoming a sport. From my side, I prefer simpler GUIs, without massive bloat.

</comment><comment><USER55> <rant> Ubuntu eases the transition because I don't have to think (too much) about partitioning the disk. As a "user", I really don't want to ever see disk partitioning software, ever! Although, now I wish /home was in a separate partition -- why wasn't that the default?

I continually trip over the Super key which brings up the Unity version of Spotlight. I killed Spotlight on my Mac a long time ago. I killed whatever Unity thingy the Alt key used to do. Was it the Alt key it hijacked? I don't remember. I don't even remember what weird UI it was trying to foist on me. It was annoying.

I killed the Guest user, but it reappeared with subsequent updates. I still sometimes get logged in as the Guest user, just annoying. And why does the login screen forget the state of the NumLock key? When we type in numbers that might be in our password, we get cursor keyed to the next or previous user in the list. Fun times.

I stopped using LibreOffice. I so much wish I could kill the office ecosystem, it is dreadful. Stop sending me .doc files. My solution is to use an ancient version of Word on an old Mac, and it prompts me so that I can avoid running those Word Macros.

My production server runs Linux (for years now), and I am surprised by how robust it is. A desktop is much more complicated to do well, to satisfy everyone's whims, never mind all of my strange choices.

Not even particularly a desktop issue, but: init cron rc rc.local upstart systemd runit launchd daemontools srvscanner inetd xinetd StartupItems grub2 SystemStarter (I am sure there are many more.) Do I care? No. Ah yes Linux, all of those choices, doesn't even have to be Linux, flavor of the week of BSD anyone? And if I don't like them ... it's open source, so I can "simply" fork my own turd. Not. </rant>

<comment><USER56> >now I wish /home was on a separate partition

I feel you there. When I first started dipping my toes into Linux at age ~16, I remember the Ubuntu installer asking me all kinds of questions I didn't know the answer to, like "Would you like to repartition your disk?" "Would you like a logical partition or a physical partition?" "What disk would you like to install your bootloader on?" etc. I had no idea how to answer any of these and I just sort of went with the options that sounded safe to me.

It wasn't until several years and versions of Ubuntu later that I decided I wanted to try a different distro and realized how convenient it would have been if I had put /home on its own partition. The whole concept of "you can swap out your OS and leave your files alone" was incomprehensible to me at that point as a lifetime Windows user. Even if it had been the default to split up the partitions, I probably would have set it to stick with just one, because that's how Windows did it.

(Incidentally, I have vivid memories of my grandfather's Windows hard drive, which he had inexplicably partitioned up to at least G:\ and I think L:\\. I still don't know why he did this and since he has passed, I probably never will. Our best guess is that it was a habit he picked up from some pre-Windows OS - he was an early tech adopter, but opinionated.)

>all those startup service managers

I haven't used desktop Ubuntu in a while, but after investing some time into grokking Arch and systemd, I'm pretty happy with my idling process list. I'm pretty sure I know what each of them are and how they got there. I'm young enough that I don't miss init, though, so maybe that's just naivete on my part and malicious gluttony on the part of systemd :)

<comment><USER57> > It wasn't until several years and versions of Ubuntu later that I decided I > wanted to try a different distro and realized how convenient it would have > been if I had put /home on its own partition.

It's a great idea in theory, but my /home is full of dotfile configs that belong to specific applications - which is great, I can take my configs with me! Except that not all distros have these in the same place. For a given app, some distros will have the config in ~, in ~/.config/, in /etc/, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> You reap what you sow – in this case by having people confused over needlessly controversial choice of title for a blog post.

Personally I'm not invested in operating systems, so I do not care about their market share or anything of that sort. I have ended up using the dreaded Linux Desktop solely for the last decade, because it's what I'm most comfortable with (also, I can install it on my machine unlike OSX, which is why it never had a chance to compete).

(I can understand that people who use laptops have much more compatibility issues, but can't say anything else on that matter due to lack of experience. I've had essentially equal amounts of hardware compatibility issues with both Linux and Windows in the 2000s, adding up to very little in total indeed. For me personally, the last major issue with the Linux Desktop was purely aesthetical, and which not many found a problem to begin with, to which I found a solution about a decade ago.)

<comment><USER31> > You reap what you sow – in this case by having people confused over > needlessly controversial choice of title for a blog post.

Never mind that the author greatly contributed to the whole problem way back when...

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Nobody else seems to have mentioned it, but with 2x4K screens, Ubuntu Gnome (16.04) with it's Hi-DPI capabilities is the only thing even close to usable for me at the moment.

I've tried switching to XFCE and a couple of other light weight DEs but when I can actually get both displays to output at once, the text and UI are so tiny or messed up it's unbearable.

That said, Windows 10 does an almost equally horrific job (scaling everything up to a horribly pixelated size but at least a size I can see sitting 2-3 feet away. I only use Windows 10 for gaming so it doesn't bother me.

My go-to for both home and work is Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 right now, sadly even Kali is horrific to use when I do occasionally need it now, but Ubuntu with Gnome has worked close to flawlessly and looks stunning with its crisp clear test and UI elements at 4K.

</comment><comment><USER60> I began to read some of the comments, realized this is just a continuation of the Gnome/KDE holy wars from many years ago, and so stopped reading.

The Linux Desktop environment contributed to pushing me to OpenBSD plus cwm, or Windows for when I need to use it for work.

</comment><comment><USER61> I think one of the problems is that there's no centralized leadership from an encompassing GUI perspective. It's tribal. The kernel and RMS contributions of course has centralized leadership and are much more successful and coherent.

</comment><comment><USER62> The linux desktop was killed for desktop developers. We haved good desktops with gnome 2 and kde 3, only needed evolution (kde 4 is true that was evolution,but plasma 5 is a buggy horrible slow thing), and nerds decided that the cool thing was transparencies or twisted cubes, then came KDE4 with unstable first versions, Gnome 3 with many icons triyng look how a mac, and unity.

I was KDE user but with Plasma 5, the kde people spit again to users with a new buggy version that broke all things as with kde4.

I use MATE now, and i'm happy. Simples menus, file browser, no problems with graphic card because incompatible drivers with desktop...

</comment><comment><USER63> For anyone who skipped the comment section of the article, I found the following comment by "has" to be very insightful. Specifically the way that the community would rather divide its resources to keep multiple mediocre implementations of a given thing around than consolidate them, and how the Unix Philosophy has been ignored:

@Miguel: You are right about developer culture being a huge factor. Linux geeks all to often see the OS as the end in itself, whereas the rest of the world knows the OS is merely the means to an end. The OS is the least important component in the ecosystem: what actually matters is the applications and services they can use to get things done. Either it enables that or it obstructs it.

You also mentioned excessive fragmentation as being one of those obstructions. Now, I do believe the 'let a thousand flowers bloom' approach of the OSS world is valuable: where it completely falls down is in its abject failure to asset- strip the less successful variants for whatever merits they have unveiled, then put them wholesale to the sword. Evolution doesn't succeed by ideology or sentimentality; it works through merciless competition culling the weak so the strongest may dominate.

The best immediate remedy for Linux's desktop ills would be to put 80% of current DEs to the axe. Really you only need three mainstream distros: one to cover general users (Ubuntu; sorry Gnome 3), one to cover the inveterate tinkerers (KDE), and one to cover the reactionary conservatives (one of the Gnome 2 clones/derivatives). Retain a few specialised distros for niches such as very elderly/low-powered machines (hi, Pi!) and security work. Anything else is a research project to produce new ideas that can then be stolen by the mainstream distros, or just a leach on the body Linux that should be salted forthwith that the rest may grow stronger.

...

However, I think you completely missed one other valuable - and uncomfortable - point; arguably the most essential of them all.

While addressing the excessive dilution of manpower and message may help in the short term, there is a far more fundamental cultural problem: the Linux desktop world (and even the kernel world beneath it) has _completely and utterly forgotten its roots_. Unix Philosophy isn't merely a neat marketing phrase: it describes a _very_ specific way to construct large, complex systems. Not by erecting vast imposing monoliths, ego-gratifying as that may be, but by assembling a rich ecosystem of small, simple, plug-n-play components that can be linked together in whatever arrangement best suits a given problem.

By mimicking the Apple and Microsoft tactic of constructing vast monolithic environments and applications, you have all unwittingly been playing to _their_ strengths, not yours. Such enormous proprietary companies can afford such brute-force strategies because they have vast financial and manpower resources to draw on. Indeed, it works in their favour to do so because vast monolithic applications help to create user lock-in: look at Adobe Creative Suite; look at Microsoft Office. Nobody can truly compete with them because to assemble comparably featured applications takes at least a decade: until then, any competing applications are fewer featured and far more susceptible to being excluded by the vast user-side network effect that the big boys have formed around themselves.

Conversely, look at what has happened when the above vendors have tried to take a more component-oriented approach. For instance, Apple's attempt to implement OpenDoc failed not because it was fundamentally, fatally flawed at the technical level. (It may not have been perfect, but what is? It was still a good and promising platform in itself.) It failed because the business model it proposed - lots of small, cheap, single-purpose components from many vendors that users could purchase and mix-and-match however they liked - <USER2> utterly disruptive and utterly incompatible to the business model used by the very application vendors that Mac OS relied on to survive. Adobe's control of the market was predicated on it being the 800-pound gorilla in the room; it was _never_ going to give that up by choice.

Whereas the Linux business model has no such requirements for maintaining artificial scarcity; indeed, given its far more limited development resources, it should be pouring every ounce of its strength into finding ways to work smart, not hard, like this. Unix Philosophy was a reaction to the inescapable hardware limitations of the day; now those limitations are no longer enforced, _nix developers have gotten flabby and soft. They build these vast, inflexible edifices simply because they are not required to find a more ingeniously efficient way, and because as a short-term strategy diving straight in and copying how everyone else already does it is inevitably the easiest, laziest approach available. As a long-term strategy, however, it 's an absolute disaster. Projects like Gnome and Open Office become like our banking industries: vast, baroque, impossible to regulate effectively, and cripplingly expensive to maintain.

The result is: vast projects that are _far too big to fail _. The thought of axing, say, Gnome 3 - not on technical merit but simply because it consumes too much resource from Linux as a whole - becomes unthinkable. So rather than killing it and folding its best bits into other, fewer distros, even more manpower must be poured into keeping it going and looking like it actually serves a critical purpose instead of acting as yet another boat anchor on the whole show. Manpower that should 've been invested in finding ingenious ways to play to Linux/Unix's unique strengths, not to its competition's.

Apple didn't go from virtually dead husk to #1 in the whole damned industry by continuing to play Microsoft's game by Microsoft's rules. It did it by looking at what MS and all its other competitors _weren't* doing, or weren't doing well, in order to meet consumers wants and needs, then devising a cunning plan to do a complete end-run around the lot of them: redefining the entire game to suit their own strengths and allow them to define their own rules. Even if it meant burning their own traditional platform to get there. It was an absolute masterstroke, and a prime reminder that if you want to understand how this game is really played, you don't read Slashdot, you read Sun Tzu.

...

TL;DR: Windows didn't kill the Linux desktop and neither did OS X. The Linux desktop killed itself, by playing on their terms instead of its own. The best thing it can do now - once denial and recrimination are done with - is turn the killing process itself into a virtue, and slice not only the DE/application mess but also the cultural one right back down to the bone and start rebuilding from there.

Good luck, and apologies for length.

<comment><USER27> The comment you quoted was right; people don't care about the OS, they care about their apps. Since Windows is king on the desktop, it would make sense to have an open source "clone" of Windows that will be able to run all the Win32 apps people love. This is exactly what React OS is! Sadly, the project never got the resource and support it deserved. Instead, we have 200+ Linux distros, multiple package manager, DE, etc...

Ironically, the only "distro" that has a real chance of success is Chrome OS, because everything is moving to the web, but also because Google made it ultra simple, secure and zero maintenance. It can also run Android apps, so that's interesting.

<comment><USER12> And in both cases, Chrome OS and Android, the fact that Linux is running underneath has zero value for the Web and Java developers targeting the respective OS.

Google can replace it by something else and they won't notice.

This is just a Pyrrhic victory, but geeks haven't yet realized it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The desktop is dead anyway - people use phones and tablets now. For the uses that my son gives to the PC - YouTube, Agar.io and Counter-Strike - he uses Mac or Linux without making distinction

</comment><comment><USER65> Gnome 3 and Unity. The kiss of death.

</comment><comment><USER66> It's the difference between riding a hand-tuned motorcycle versus a car. The latter is low maintenance, always works, etc. but ask a biker, he'd say how passionate he's in maintaining his beast and how well it performs, etc. a car is no comparison to it.

Now how many bikes do you see as opposed to cars? The premium would always be lesser, only for those who want it and are willing to sweat for it.

<comment><USER67> So which is Linux in your comparison? I think many users, especially developers or "power users", feel things just work on Linux compared to more frequent twiddling required on macOS / Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I just read this on my Chromebook, powered by Linux.

<comment><USER69> you read this with chrome. they could port that to bsd or even their new os magenta and you wouldnt notice. the linux part of that is tightly constrained. honestly,thats why itworks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I liked this essay, but I also wanted to rant for a bit about how the state of the Linux Desktop is just one particularly glaring example of a bigger problem, which is that instead of building something that works for most use cases, it seems to be popular to build things that work really well for one use case and not so well for others. Which in some cases is fine, but when we're talking about infrastructure like operating systems or programming environments or APIs, it's a big problem for anyone who wants to build on top of this infrastructure because then they have to pick a technology stack that limits who will use the thing they write because it was built on top of stuff that only works well in its little niche.

I write software. Suppose I want to write a program and have lots of other people use it, and want good confidence that those people will continue to be able to use it for a long time into the future. This is a pretty basic thing to want to do; how do I do it?

The first question is what kind of software is it? If it's a desktop application, then I'd need to write it for Windows and/or MacOS. If it's a server application, then Linux would be a good choice. If it's mobile, then iOS or Android.

Writing in Java might be a good choice for OS portability, but then I'd have to educate all my users on how to run java apps on their platform.

So, what we have is a lot of walled gardens and the un-walled wilderness of Linux, and these are all incompatible with each other for various reasons and I can't really say that any one of them is what I would call a good general- purpose platform for writing general-purpose programs.

It seems like something that's missing in the open source community (and something that would combat the walled-garden balkanization of user communities in both proprietary and open-source software) is an effort to create portable, carefully designed binary formats and APIs that we intend to be stable and usable for the next fifty years or so, and that "just work" for almost any common use case, whether it's a desktop app, a mobile app, a server app, an enterprise app, an embedded systems app, whatever, and then we make sure that there are tools available on every open platform to run these portable binaries.

(Java did attempt this before, but their early efforts were slowed by being a proprietary single-vendor platform; once they opened up, Java was kind of old and less exciting. It should be possible to do better by creating a new platform that isn't part of some maneuver by one tech behemoth to take market share from some other tech behemoth, and by building from a more modern foundation.)

<comment><USER12> > then I'd have to educate all my users on how to run java apps on their > platform.

Only if you do a bad service to your users by not packaging them correctly.

<comment><USER70> You mean package the JVM with the application, in case it isn't already installed? The details of how to do that vary by OS, and making sure it works properly on all recent and future versions of Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu, Android, iOS, RHEL, SLES, Raspbian, Arch, the various BSDs, VxWorks, Hurd, and anything other platform that exists now or will exist in the next few decades isn't something I care to do. I just want to be able to write software and have users be able to use it without knowing or caring what platform they're using -- which is what Java was meant to solve, but they never had a broad enough user base that that you could truly hand someone a java binary and trust that it would "just work" for everyone.

(I admit that I'm not very knowledgeable about how Java is used in 2017; there may be some cross-platform solution for distributing Java programs to people who might or might not already have the JVM installed of which I am unaware.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> > As for myself, I had fallen in love with the iPhone, so using a Mac on a > day-to-day basis was a must.

I don't understand this. Why do you need a Mac if you use an iPhone? I have not used iTunes to manage my iPhone in half a decade I think. Is there any connection left between iOS and macOS? From a user point of view?

<comment> jon-wood The high level of integration in Apple's stack is the one thing I really miss after moving back to Linux. If you have a Mac and an iPhone the two exist almost as one thing - you can answer phone calls on your computer, have a shared message history, and these days copy and paste between devices or use the presence of your watch to unlock your computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> While I agree with many of the author's points, I don't think "lost" or "killed" are valid descriptions. It's never too late to dig in and make the Linux desktop experience better. It's not like Linux disappeared and doesn't exist anymore.

</comment><comment><USER73> Big thread from 2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4450244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4450244)

</comment><comment><USER74> Why not create a gnome equivalent of containers? It won't make compatibility issues go away in the past. But containers for Ui applications could help going forward.

<comment><USER69> thats kind of what flatpack and company are trying to do. its something that apple got right a long time ago. its also something microsoft is moving to with the .appx package format. everything should be in a bundle that is installed and removed as a unit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> That title implies the Linux Desktop was ever alive.

</comment><comment><USER76> I guess linux desktop should have a UI just like chromeOS , Period. Designing UI requires different talent , more than just blurb

</comment><comment><USER77> lol? The Linux desktop as a widespread phenomenon only started after 2012. Usually things can't die before they start.

</comment><comment><USER78> 'What Killed the Linux Desktop' by Miguel de Icaza

<comment><USER50> TL;DR: Miguel de Icaza killed the Linux Desktop

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Linux Desktop didn't die, because you simply can't kill something that never had life to begin with. Linux (as in the kernel) succeeds because it's free, flexible, stable and secure. But none of those words are "pretty", "aesthetic" or "powerful". And the DEs associated with Linux reflect this in every nature. OSX became the uber tech junkie's OS of choice, but with Apple's recent shenanigans these savvy enthusiasts and devs are also starting to use Windows again. And in the end it doesn't matter, the internet has taken over the desktop OS anyway.

<comment><USER79> > OSX became the uber tech junkie's OS of choice, but with Apple's recent > shenanigans these savvy enthusiasts and devs are also starting to use > Windows again.

I believe that hipsters/nerds migrated to Apple for two things: build quality (most laptops these days STILL are made of plastic, and well as someone who often eats near his machine or operates it with pizza-greasy fingers I can say that an Apple laptop just doesn't give a sh.t while all my Windows laptops end up looking very indecent after a year), and battery lifetime.

The latter is the most important: Apple with its ultra tight control down to the tiniest chip on the motherboard can tune the performance in ways that cannot ever be achieved by either Windows or Linux, with 6+ hour usage times being the norm. Windows laptops with this usage time usually are way more than expensive than Macbooks, are heavier than a piece of granite rock, or a combination of both.

<comment><USER80> > The latter is the most important: Apple with its ultra tight control down to > the tiniest chip on the motherboard can tune the performance in ways that > cannot ever be achieved by either Windows or Linux, with 6+ hour usage times > being the norm. Windows laptops with this usage time usually are way more > than expensive than Macbooks, are heavier than a piece of granite rock, or a > combination of both.

This definitely used to be the case (and was one of the main reasons I used macbooks over windows laptops, the other being the touchpad) but this is no longer true (outside of cheapo laptops) imo.

High quality ultrabooks like the dell xps 13 rival the macbook in build quality and battery life, and afaik are not more expensive than macbooks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Altay- The Linux Desktop was never a thing so how could it be killed?

</comment><comment><USER81> In addition to the fact that you can't attach a McDonalds drive-thru to a garden.

</comment><comment><USER82> Fedora switched to FreeBSD kernel? I better start reading release notes ;-)

</comment><comment><USER49> > The ecosystem that has sprung to life with Apple's OSX AppStore is just > impossible to achieve with Linux today.

And yet Apple breaks compatibility basically every release; and the App Store itself often fails to operate at all, even for Apple's own packages!

Also, if computing is suddenly all about _The Open Web_ ; then the point is moot since all three major desktop platforms have identical support for _The Open Web_. Then in praising the Mac App Store, Miguel goes full circle and affirms that native software is still important. I'd countenance either train of thought, but you can't multi-track drift your ideas like this.

I really don't like this new _hipster post-mortem_ style of writing which makes heaps of unfounded assertions, and mixes them in with indisputable facts. I wish Miguel would stop trying to convince people to leave the ecosystem he helped create just because _he_ no longer prefers it to the alternatives. Why drag your old friends down with slam pieces on _WIRED_ when you could just let things shake out?</comment>


Ask HN: Review my weekend project GitTwitIt - <AUTHOR> http://gittwitit.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to familiarize myself with a nosql database. So I decided to use mongohq which is a hosted mongodb.

This site lets you send Twitter updates when you push to GitHub. GitHub provides similar functionality but it's pretty lame since you have to hand over your creds. OAuth ftw!

<comment><USER2> OAuth is great, but the app doesn't actually say what it's going to _do_ with my Twitter account. Developers especially are wary of handing over access to their accounts (OAuth or not), so it might be good to summarise what your app will post before making the user authenticate.

<comment><USER3> Strongly agreed. "First, you'll need to login." Actually, first, I need to be told what this app does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, point taken. I always error (literally) on the side of conciseness. I'll add more verbage.

I added better messaging and error handling since Twitter seems to be really flakey this morning.

<comment><USER4> *err, not error

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not know that! Seriously. May I recall all the times I've misused "error".

<comment><USER4> Yep, you may :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think I'm missing something here - doesn't GitHub already support Twitter under their service hooks?

<comment><USER6> From below:

> GitHub provides similar functionality but it's pretty lame since _you have > to hand over your creds_. OAuth ftw!

<comment><USER7> GitHub's similar functionality is open source:

[https://github.com/pjhyett/github- services/blob/master/servi...](https://github.com/pjhyett/github- services/blob/master/services/twitter.rb)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fyi, as is this one:

<http://github.com/jmathai/gittwitit>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd never use it, but kudos for playing with a NoSQL database and making something neat. No better way to learn than by playing like this.

</comment><comment><USER9> I didn't get past the first page (since I can't sign into Twitter @ work), but I have to agree that some explanation of what the service is first would be a huge help for conversion. Also, as a pet-peeve of mine, if you are going to link to CSS and XHTML validation, make sure your website validates (in this case it doesn't).

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, the design of the site I got from a decent free template site. I didn't bother to remove (or check for that matter) the validation links. I had assumed they validated :).

<comment><USER9> I have done that before. Not a problem, just something I check when I see it. Like your idea though, definitely will try it out once I get access to Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> i really just want our dev email list to receive a post whenever someone pushes...

<comment><USER11> You can do that with GitHub already. Just go to the repository -> admin -> service hooks and set up the email one. Here's a pic of the screen: [http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Service_Hooks_for_kneath...](http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Service_Hooks_for_kneath_s_lighthouse_burndown_- _GitHub-20091021-110101.gif)</comment></comment>


White Empiricism Undermines General Relativity - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1203784021148340224 <comment><USER2> Wow. A PhD, actively teaching, and this dribbles out.

Such is the wharrgarbl of the far left. I bet this paper is very popular among the more woke SJWs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this parody? It reads like the kind of thing I would have written in highschool to take the piss out of an annoying teacher</comment>


A Giant Asteroid of Gold Won't Make Us Richer - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-08/asteroid-16-psyche-and-all-that-gold-won-t-make-earth-richer <comment><USER2> Hey, at least we could fix soldering. 80% gold, 20% tin is the best solder.[1] Very strong, no whisker growth. Often used inside ICs, and for some avionics boards.

[1] [https://www.palomartechnologies.com/blog/why-gold-tin-is- the...](https://www.palomartechnologies.com/blog/why-gold-tin-is-the-best- solder-alloy)

<comment><USER3> I'm sure we could come up with a lot of use cases for abundant gold. The idea that cost effectively extracting resources from space does not make humanity richer is incredibly backwards. Extracting more resources, using those resources more efficiently and offering more services is absolutely necessary to increase our economic productivity and therefore grow our economy.

<comment><USER4> Only if it's a net gain in resources. There is currently a massive cost in resources and pollution for everything put into, or retrieved from, space. Hopefully that will change, though I doubt it'll ever reach 1-to-1.

<comment><USER5> It has potential to go off the charts.

<comment><USER4> Does it really though?

I'm not a physicist yet without something like fusion as a miniaturized propellant I don't see how it can ever be wiser to mine asteroids than try to live more sustainably on Earth first.

<comment><USER6> Space economics is… counterintuitive. A while ago I read a blog ranting about how pointless it was to mine He3 from the moon for fusion. A brief summary:

* We don't have fusion reactors

* If we did, we could mine fuel from the gas giants' atmospheres

* He3 is so poorly concentrated in the Lunar regolith that the easy way to extract it also produces high purity silicon and oxygen

* Turning that silicon into ingots and firing them at the Earth, you can generate more power from electromagnetically decelerating them then you would get from the fusion of the helium, and this is a perfectly sensible way to generate power because of the relative depth of the Earth and Moon gravity wells

* You can then burn the silicon instead of coal, and this is absolutely fine because the ash is sand instead of a greenhouse gas. You can also bring oxygen from the Moon to burn it with so you won't run out of oxygen on Earth to breathe.

Unfortunately I can't find the post whenever I've tried searching for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think the author is overlooking the environmental aspect of mining asteroids for minerals. Currently huge levels of environmental damage are caused by mining for gold, platinum and other metals. To the extent that these mining activities can be moved "off earth" our planet's environment would benefit enormously. In this regard, a giant asteroid of gold would make us richer.

<comment><USER7> Maybe. Putting things into space creates a lot of air pollution.

<comment><USER8> You could launch 3 Big Falcon Rockets per day for a year and only then equal the emissions for all the air traffic at Heathrow that occurs in a month: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/8g0iaj/bfr_ai...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/8g0iaj/bfr_air_pollution/dz6uz6q?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x)

There are bigger fish to fry in terms of the environment.

<comment><USER9> Those launches would only put a few thousand tons on orbit, that is nothing for mining operation.

<comment><USER10> Getting large-scale mining operations in space, or any kind of industrial base for that matter, would require us to start fabricating things in space.

Getting something in orbit will always be expensive and prohibitive, even when space elevators are built, so there will be enough incentive to start building things in space.

<comment><USER11> I've wondered how interstellar smelting would work. There would need to be centripetal force on the foundry station to keep metals flowing. Nearby ice could provide hydrogen and oxygen for propulsion and even heat for steam turbine electricity for the plant. Certainly there would be uranium present as well so fission would be an option, albeit more complicated.

Four/eight year military service spent policing/polluting the world could be replaced by short "tours" in asteroid belt operations.

The key to all of this would be constant launches and flow of material/labor, ideally with international cooperation. The high frequency of launches in itself is a safety feature - stranded crews would be able to expect fly-bys.

It would be expensive at first because we would essentially be ejecting many resources away from the planet. But the promise of heavy-industry eventually zoned outside of our natural atmosphere could be the [non-classical] incentive.

<comment><USER12> Rotation might be done with magnetic fields instead of ejecting ionized gas (water etc). And dirty fission power is very practical in space, where the inverse-square law can make it quite harmless.

<comment><USER11> Would the magnetic field be provided by an auxiliary station adjacent to the rotating foundry? Or could the structure propel it's own smelting vats somehow via the field on arms attached to a central bearing?

It would seem more efficient with a field rather than constantly ejecting usable material.

How is the inverse squared law applied to space fission? Ease of cooling?

<comment><USER6> > How is the inverse squared law applied to space fission? Ease of cooling?

If you double the distance, the radiation hazard reduces by a factor of four. This is why the Sun — an unshielded fusion reactor — hasn't already killed everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While the asteroid will of course never be worth the quintillions it's worth on paper, there's no doubt it will be worth something. Otherwise, why are people still spending money to dig up gold out of the earth?

But gold isn't that interesting. The only reason it's valued the way it is, is because everybody has agreed it's valuable. But there are many other rare metals and minerals we can mine from asteroids that would be immensely useful. In smartphones and other electronics, for example.

At the moment, rare earth elements are often mined in terrible destructive ways, sometimes under atrocious circumstances. Fairphone is the one phone company that's trying to do something about it, but on their own, they're not going to have a lot of impact. Off-world mining would allow us to leave our Earth intact while still enjoying the smartphones and other electronics that these materials enable.

<comment><USER14> What's much more valuable than the gold is the infrastructure required to bring that gold back to earth.

Harvesting sand and helium from space might be more valuable than gold.

<comment><USER15> The sand comment had me perplexed, until I did some googling:

[https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces- global-...](https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces-global-sand- shortage)

<comment><USER14> Apparently desert sand is no good for making concrete, because it's been smoothed and rounded by the wind. I'm guessing moon sand wouldn't have such a problem. Although you'd have to solve the problem of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. How practical are space elevators?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The metal would have various industrial applications and make nice jewelry > and dental fillings, but it wouldn't spark a new industrial revolution, or > dramatically bring down the cost of goods and services, or in general make > human life much better or more comfortable.

There would be many new industrial aplications for gold alloys. I think abundance of gold could spark mini industrial revolution.

<comment><USER17> Seems a pretty big assumption. We have an abundance of silicon, that hasn't sparked any sort of revolution around silicon.

Gold has some nice properties, but I don't think it is a wonder metal.

<comment><USER18> > We have an abundance of silicon, that hasn't sparked any sort of revolution > around silicon.

...But it has? Think of all the things we make out of silicon and silicon compounds. Buildings, glass, countertops, tools, computers, etc...

If silicon were rarer we would surely not be making buildings and windows out of silicon compounds! Some of these do not have easy replacements. You can make buildings without silicon (many are made without) but without silicon we would have a hard time coming up with something like glass. Glass fueled a lot of our scientific revolutions, giving us glassware for chemistry, optics for microscopes and telescopes, etc.

Who can know how long it might have taken for us to discover the theory of gravity, cell theory, germ theory, or large chunks of chemistry without glass.

<comment><USER19> Another case in point, maybe a better parallel, is aluminum. Once it was more precious than gold and used in similar applications to gold and platinum. Then technology was developed to produce it more easily, and we started making things like wheels and then entire vehicles out of it.

So we already have the precedent of a precious metal becoming an industrial one, although I don't mean to suggest gold alloys would be good for the same applications due to its density.

<comment><USER17> The strength to weight ratio of aluminum was known long before we could mass produce it.

For example, Titanium is superior to aluminum in most weight/strength applications. If we could mass produce it, we'd not use aluminum anymore.

Carbon fiber is even better than Titanium. Again, if it were mass producible, we'd use it for everything.

I can point to materials that, if they were cheaper, we'd make everything out of them. That's because we've researched these materials and know that they have potential applications. Their availability hasn't been a factor in the research, not really.

Gold, AFAIK, doesn't have those same sorts of analogous usages. It doesn't have a "But if it were cheaper" sort of application. Maybe some electronics or nano-scale applications might benefit from it, but I wouldn't think it would be excluded from that research since you are talking about a tiny amount per component (after all, we still use gold to plate electronic leads today).

<comment><USER20> Titanium is strong but brittle, and carbon fibre (or the epoxy which bonds it) has problems at high temperatures. Even aluminium has challenges compared to steel of fatigue under stress or tension, being attacked by certain substances (especially mercury), of a lower melting point, and of bimetallic corrosion (when paired with copper wire in electrical applications: don't do that).

Abundance matters (iron, steel), ore processing (electricity and baauxite), but so too do material properties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bringing down precious metals to Earth isn't the main point of developing space mining tech, e.g. mining a golden asteroid. The mined materials would be useful for bootstrapping other space based projects. With the right mining tech in place, it would be better to build anything that's going to be strictly used in space, well, in space. Earth's gravity well is much less of a cost factor if you don't have to send up manufactured items.

<comment><USER22> Yes indeed. I can't help from thinking about the Belters in the sci-fi show The Expanse.

</comment></comment><comment> radford-neal The article's reasoning is mistaken. Nobody knows whether or not reducing the price of gold to $1/ounce would make us much richer or not - because nobody is currently spending serious time thinking of what one could do if gold cost $1/ounce.

</comment><comment><USER11> We should be more concerned with platinum-group elements on asteroids (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, platinum).

We've had to allocate agile scientific minds to reduce the use of expensive platinum-group metals in fuel cells in order to make them cost effective:

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-12-scientist...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-12-scientists- maximize-effectiveness-platinum-fuel.amp)

</comment><comment><USER23> There's loads of palladium, molybdenum and ruthenium in asteroids. Gold is much rarer. (Even-numbered elements are more common than odd-numbered elements on a celestial scale.) Pd, Ru and Mo are very useful in chemistry and industry — alloys containing less than 1% Mo go for a premium due to their improved durability. Pd is the _king_ of catalysts. Among other things, it's key to fuel cells and catalytic converters. Ru is a little less interesting, but it does improve (even more than normal) corrosion resistance in Ti and support extremely-high-temperature nickel superalloys, as might be used for e.g. exploring Venus.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just wondering which central bank is the first to conclude that it actually is useless and stupid to keep gold reserves and decides to dump their gold to the market first. After which, obviously, we see a crash in gold price rarely seen in the world history. And actually start doing something useful with the unique yellow metal that we collectively have decided that is better to be hidden and not used...

<comment><USER2> There was talk of that in the early 2000s. There's a lobby against that, the "World Gold Council".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Never mind what it's all worth. How can we get it where we can use it?

We're talking billions of miles away, with astonishing temperature variations and nearly pure vacuum. Spare parts are months/years away.

Then, it takes tremendous energy to mine/smelt. And tremendous pressures. How do you grapple with an asteroid in weightless conditions, to apply a drill to the surface? What do you hold onto? How do you generate the torque to turn the drill? Not from some kW power source such as used in existing satellites and probes. We're talking MW/GW power sources needed.

Then, drilling produces dust/grit by the ton. Where will it go? Just blow it away? There's no atmosphere to vent dust. It'll all just cling, hover and generally be in the way. Building up continuously as you drill.

There are 1000 such problems to be solved before we ever see the first ounce of gold (or whatever) from an asteroid.

<comment><USER25> Interestingly, this is the mechanism by which the Astroid may actually make all of us richer.

It will require inventions and new technologies to successfully mine the asteroid, and those will give society access to vast new resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hmm, what is an element it found in vast quantities in accessible asteroids _would_ spawn a fundamental transformation? Platinum group metals? Uranium? Phorphorus? Rare earths?

<comment><USER27> Both silver and gold would be pretty good candidates for unlocking some great upgrades to both industrial and everyday items (silver is the most conductive metal, gold is an excellent conductor that's virtually rust free).

Lithium and cobalt are a major cost for Li-Ion batteries, tanking their price could transform the world with cheap(er) energy storage.

<comment><USER17> Gold is an OK conductor, but aluminum is nearly as good while being much lighter. Corrosion isn't really a problem for it either. (Aluminum corrodes very quickly, but that doesn't impact it's conductivity or strength)

<comment><USER28> Aluminum does have safety issues in household wiring: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Best way to use asteroid resources: crash them into Mars now, while there is no hazard to humans. Then when people go there they'll have lots or useful raw material near the surface. ;-)

<comment><USER5> Hey, and the moon! The moon has lower gravity and we can more easily go pick it up there

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Surely lowering the price of precious material will make everyone better off, they'll just stay the same relative to each other?

<comment><USER31> > Surely lowering the price of precious material will make everyone better > off, they'll just stay the same relative to each other?

They won't stay the same relative to each other if anyone's current wealth is more related to the scarcity of the precious material in question than anyone else, which is guaranteed to be the case for any precious material.

<comment><USER32> That only really applies to prestige uses; to go with the De Beer analogy a 500 carat "jewel" diamond goes for $50 million, yet some researcher needing an artificial diamond optic lens the size of a dinner plate can get one made for just a couple million.

<comment><USER31> That's a special effect of the diamond marketplace where diamonds aren't really "precious materials" but _authenticatable natural_ diamonds are precious _collectibles_. (That is, it is the provenance and not the material that is precious.).

But the dynamics are the same so long as the supply glut is in things interchangeable with what is precious (e.g., diamonds that, down to the De Beers microetching, are indistinguishable from the ones that people place value on.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This has some good explanations of basic economics.

However, the real importance of mining asteroids is that it would make it possible to build colonies in space that could potentially hold far more than the present population of Earth.

<comment><USER34> Gold is quite dense, I wonder if you could use this asteroid to build shielding for long-term habitats. I imagine you'd still need something stronger to provide the structural elements, but for managing radiation aboard space stations this gold might be quite useful

<comment><USER20> Bulk rock or regolith is vastly more abundant and works well.

See O'Neill's original designs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How would this get divvied up? Someone corrals this thing, tows it into some kind of earth orbit, then auctions it off by the ton. How do they get it to the customer? Re-entry vehicle or something else like shielding ton ingots in special thermal tiles and have it crash into deserts somewhere?

Imagine if copper wire were replaced with cheaper gold wire?

<comment><USER36> Hilarious (and a bit scary) to think that in the near future a random company could haul a massive gold asteroid to Earth and completely destroy the global economy.

<comment><USER37> Why would it destroy the economy?

<comment><USER38> Probably similar to how the Spanish conquistador's precious metals haul from the New World decimated the economy of Spain: massive supply/demand imbalance.

<comment><USER39> A better analogy would be if they towed back an asteroid full of $100 bills.

<comment><USER19> "Now if they find an asteroid that is made out of Bitcoin, that will be economically significant." -Matt Levine

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The author is missing the point that many expensive things are expensive because they are rare AND useful.

The wealth comes from prices going down for useful things and new things becoming possible as a result of the lowered costs.

How much of battery costs are the metals? What about rare earths used in electronics? What compromises are made to save costs?

</comment><comment><USER41> Clearly the author has never had to arm a population with glitterguns against an impending Cyberman attack.

</comment><comment><USER42> Learning how to mine asteroids could increase the likelihood that we would have the technology to push dangerous asteroids out of earths path.

<comment><USER43> It will likely increase technology on many levels.

The technical challenges and competition will change everything. Maybe some scientific platforms could hitch a ride at a heavily discounted price, for example?

<comment><USER42> Agreed. I could imagine Darpa funding projects around this for defense and scientific goals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This would have very interesting market dynamics that the article touches on a little bit. In order to actually make use of the gold, you have to build some sort of industrial base in orbit. So while the total pool of gold within humanity's grasp would increase substantially, the availability would not necessarily increase in the same way.

If I buy gold in a commodities market, it is kept in a holding area and rarely moved, but I can for a fee have that gold shipped to me if I really wanted to. Since there is not a substantial price difference in shipping gold to one place vs another on Earth (within the same order of magnitude at least), it doesn't really matter "who" I buy the gold from, so for purely terrestrial markets, gold is gold.

But space-based gold would be much more expensive to ship back to Earth, even if gravity is generally on our side in that case, since you are subsidizing the infrastructure required to make that happen. And this probably wouldn't happen that much anyway, since the space-based gold would likely be kept in space to build more space-based infrastructure.

So would that create 2 different prices for gold? Or would space-based gold be much cheaper than terrestrial gold, offset by some coefficient that would be its relative movement cost between realms?

I am by no means an economics expert, I'm just musing. I believe I'm essentially talking about arbitrage, but need to refresh my memory on this.

<comment><USER44> There are already different prices for gold in Zurich, London, New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong, the five main locations where gold is traded electronically. There are brokers who will arrange the trade for you to buy gold in one and sell in the other, at the current "loco swap" price.

If that price moves further from zero than the cost of insuring and transporting gold bars with a company like Brinks, then someone does step in and complete the arbitrage.

If I remember right, the prices don't typically move more than about a dollar an ounce from zero, except for Tokyo where the purity rules are different so there is an extra step involved in melting down the bars and getting them restamped.

If there was some demand for holding gold in space, I'd expect roughly the same economics to apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Ok, so the PhDs at Bloomberg tell their readership not to fund this boondoggle of a space adventure, but instead to ... buy up stock certificates with debt instruments or some such ....

But Wall Street and the Fed (Bloomberg's audience) basically fund every moonshot these days (directly or indirectly) and either they or Congress get into an asteroid race, spends millions/billions/trillions of dollars but fail to recover any more marketable quantities of physical gold for Earth's surface than would an expedition to the center of the Earth (where there's also gold!) ... and instead sell certificates representing ownership shares of the asteroid, which initially trade at pairity with physical Earth-surface metal, but as it becomes clearer that this is an IOU nothing printed based on the most optimistic projections of what is contained in the space rock (and then there are the competing claims of multiple expeditions!), the paper declines precipitously in value and once again demonstrates that economic theory is fine and good, but unmoored from the discipline provided by tangible backing of gold, oil, or whatever, a system of currency and credit like ours predicably generates worthless pieces of paper from huge misallocations of resources and waste.

<comment><USER46> How could someone sell shares in an asteroid? Wouldn't it be shares in a mining operation? If another country or business finds a way to mine that asteroid then they won't care about your paper claiming ownership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> It is quite expensive to send material to an orbit around earth. A quick search says $22.000 per kilo. The price of gold per kilo is about $45.000. So wouldnt it make more sense to keep the gold in the orbit and use it to build things in space? Also the potential energy of the gold has to go somewhere when it enters the earth's atmosphere resulting in additional warming.

<comment><USER48> > Also the potential energy of the gold has to go somewhere when it enters the > earth's atmosphere resulting in additional warming.

That would get quickly radiated away. There would be some tiny increase if you had a sustained amount of it constantly coming in.

<comment><USER47> Why should it be quickly radiated away? What makes the heat different from the energy that is already stored in the atmosphere? In total it would be the energy of a large asteroid being smashed on earth. (energy conservation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> According to wikipedia, it's compsition is mostly Iron and Nickel. Gold would only be a trace. Iron and Nickel at 1/10th the current cost would have a big economic impact.

Lower prices for resources would make us richer in spending power.

An asteroid miner, just like a Bhp or Mincore, would have to take into account the effect on market prices of a large new supply.

Mass of (2.41±0.32)×10^19 kg

<comment><USER50> A ton of iron scrap is about $160, if my math is right. A ton of iron ore is $70. I do not believe that reducing that price to 1/10th of present would be huge — most of the cost now IIUC is in processing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> > Rejoice, people of Earth! News outlets are reporting that NASA is planning > to visit an asteroid made of gold and other precious metals! At current > prices, the minerals contained in asteroid 16 Psyche are said to be worth > $700 quintillion -- enough to give everyone on the planet $93 billion. We're > all going to be richer than Jeff Bezos!

No one ever thought it was going to work this way.

<comment><USER52> > enough to give everyone on the planet $93 billion

In the words of Syndrome: "When everyone's super... no one will be" Poverty is relative wealth, so if everyone's wealth increased by the same amount, the poverty line would be exactly the same.

If you gave everyone on earth 1kg of gold simultaneously, it would actually make the poor poorer since it would devalue any of their current golden possessions to near zero.

<comment><USER53> >it would actually make the poor poorer

Nope. This is entirely wrong.

Consider: You have $100. I have $1000. We both get +$50 worth of gold. So you have $150 and I have $1050. You increased your welth by 50%, but I only increased my wealth by 5%. So yes, if you had no money, you actually _did_ earn purchasing power.

Let's consider another example: The poor person probably has $0 invested in gold. So if anything, it hurts people in the middle class, who might have let's say 5% of their wealth in gold, which is suddenly worthless. So the poor person has actually increased their buying power compared to the middle class, and the rich (who probably have so much money in real-estate and stocks that any gold investment is minuscule) are unaffected.

<comment><USER34> Ah, but who would pay you $50 for that gold?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm not sure why it's focusing on gold. It's a bit of a straw man argument using gold to argue against astroid mining.

There are plenty of precious metals that have abundant industrial uses.

</comment><comment><USER55> The world is much better off without gold mining on earth. Not just for the environment but for the exploited miners as well, including children.

The Children Risking Their Lives In Underwater Gold Mines ... [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1L_pxYZVwE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1L_pxYZVwE)

</comment><comment><USER56> My guess is that few of us will live to see the evidence-based spreadsheet on this fictional venture. No doubt it would prove to be 'gold' to several earth- based corporations ... if only the _desire_ could be _whipped up_ to get the public to fall for it.

</comment><comment><USER57> They'd probably keep it a secret if they manage to succeed (and slowly dole it out as per need and sell it at high present costs); of course unless a rival manages to do so as well and threatens "publicizing" the fact.

edit: The article does seem to cover this situation kind of.

</comment><comment><USER58> How much metal will they realistically be able to bring back from an asteroid? I don't know anything about this but it seems improbable that we'd go from being able to bring home a few moon rocks right to 700 quintillion dollars worth of gold.

<comment><USER19> Quote:

"There is a lot of gold right here on Earth that has not been dug up! Because it is pretty deep underground or whatever. The relevant supply of gold is the stuff that can be extracted economically, not just the stuff that exists. The same thing is even more true hundreds of millions of miles away in outer space. You cannot just send a big dump truck to Psyche 16, shovel some loose gold nuggets into it, and drive it back to your house."

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> > _this example shows that real wealth doesn't actually come from golden > hoards. It comes from the productive activities of human beings creating > things that other human beings desire._

Value, Price, and Wealth

<comment><USER20> ???

I'd suggest a different triad: cost, price, value.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/48rd02/cost_va...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/48rd02/cost_value_price_money_and_emergy_developing/)

<comment><USER59> Good call. I don't know where I was going with that. Cost, price, value, and wealth.

Are there better examples for illustrating the differences between these kind of distinct terms?

Less convertible collectibles like coins and baseball cards (that require energy for exchange) have (over time t): costs of production, marketing, and distribution; retail sales price; market price; and 'value' which is abstract relative (opportunity cost in terms of fiat currency (which is somehow distinct from price at time t (possibly due to 'speculative information')))

Wealth comes from relationships, margins between costs and prices, long term planning, […]

<comment><USER20> _Are there better examples for illustrating the differences between these kind of distinct terms?_

For concepts as intrinsically fundamental to economics as these are, the agreement and understanding of what they are, even amomg economists, is surprisingly poor. It's not even clear whether or not "wealth" refers to a flow or stock -- Adam Smith uses the term both ways. And much contemporary mainstream 'wealth creation" discussion addresses _accounting profit_ rather than _economic wealth_. Or broader terms such aas _ecological wealth_ (or natural capital). There's some progress, and Steve Keen has been synthesizing much of it recently, but the terms fare poorly.

A key issue is that "price' and "exchange value" are ofteen conflated, creating confusiin with use/ownership value.

Addressing your terms, "cost" and "price", and typically "value", indicate some metric of _exchange_ or _opportunity cost_ (or benefit). Whilst "wealth", as typically used, tends to relate to some _store_ or _accumulation_. In electrical terms (a potentially, so to speak, useful analogue) the difference between voltage and charge, with current representing some other property, possibly material flows of goods or energy.

The whole question of _media for exchange_ (currency, and the like), and _durable forms of financial wealth_ (land, art, collectibles) is another interesting one, with discussionnby Ricardo and Jevons quite interesting -- both useful and flawed.

And don't even get me started on the near total discounting of accumulated natural capital, say, the 100-300 million year factor of time embodied in fossil fuels. The reasons and rationales for excluding that being fascinating (Ricardo, Tolstoy, Gray, Hotelling, Boulding, Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen, Daly, Keen).

You are correct that all value (and hence wealth) is relative, and hence relational.

TL;DR: Not that I'm aware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Reminds me of pg's essay on wealth: [http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> Water and industrial raw materials at the top of the gravity well, on the other hand.... would be a massive win....

</comment><comment><USER62> [http://archive.is/s74k0](http://archive.is/s74k0)

</comment><comment><USER63> yus, but a lakeful of helium would.

</comment><comment><USER64> But things would shore get purdy!</comment>


PHP 8 adds the match expression - <AUTHOR> https://stitcher.io/blog/php-8-match-or-switch <comment><USER2> It's nice to see the language design team has gotten their ducks in a row. This addition looks much more coherent and reasonable than the insanity that was almost every feature of PHP5.</comment>


Oracle should buy HP and rename itself HP - <AUTHOR>

after HP completes autonomy cleanup, Oracle/SAP should pick it up. I think it makes more sense for Oracle, from a branding standpoint.<p>(disclaimer: I was at Oracle doing M&A. these views are entirely mine and not representative of my past employers or knowledge. I do not directly own HP, ORCL or SAP stocks. I may own one or more of HP, ORCL, SAP through mutual funds in my retirement account) <comment><USER2> Uhh pretty sure owning it through your retirement plan is still illegal. Last a checked even blinded managed trading is not allowed. Of course this could be dependent on your firm.

Not sure I completely understand why Oracle would want to be in the Hardware business, then again Google joined it via Motorola.

<comment><USER3> Isn't Oracle already in the Hardware business, via the Sun purchase? [http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers/overview/index.htm...](http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers/overview/index.html)

<comment><USER2> forgot about that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could you explain your logic?

<comment><AUTHOR> do you think HP is a better brand than Oracle?

<comment><USER4> After the last two years, possibly (probably?) not - but surely that brand value is incredibly contextually relevant anyway. For consumer electronics, I probably wouldn't buy Oracle's tablet the Elisson-3000, but if I were building a server farm I'd be more inclined to go with Oracle over HP given the apparent management issues, the current Autonomy debacle, and their flip- flopping in the consumer PC space.

Irrespective of that, presumably an acquisition decision has more to it than , "HP is a better brand so we should buy HP" (this is not rhetorical)?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, especially given your background, I'm just genuinely interested as to your reasons.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Assenty – Ask and answer questions from any audience, in real-time - <AUTHOR> https://assenty.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, founder of Assenty here. I'd love your feedback on the product, it's been in development for a little over a year, but that's not to say its feature complete :) It would be great to get your thoughts and initial reactions. Would you try it an event? And why not? Thanks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Most annoying when your typos come back to haunt you: "It's been in development for a little over a year, but that's not to say it _is_ feature complete"</comment>


App passwords are here in Bitbucket Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/06/06/app-passwords-bitbucket-cloud/ <comment><AUTHOR> My own personal desire for these was oddly interacting with Atlassian products themselves!

Bamboo Cloud really weirdly required entering the user/pass for a Bitbucket account in order to fetch the code and do other things. App passwords being here are a great help!

Though.. I'm also now in Bitbucket Pipelines Beta and just finished setting up my first automated deployment through that so it's a bit "too little too late" for me.</comment>


Joining a tribe... - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/are-you-in-the.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds a bit fishy to me, although I can't really put a finger on why...</comment>