2017 Survey

Walt - KZ1F

Neal_K3NC

Walt, was this a StackOverflow survey? If so, I am not surprised at the amount of Linux respondees!

73

Peter K1PGV

OK!  I'll be the first:  I have NO idea what this post means.

Assuming I'm reading this correctly, among respondents on StackOverflow, 41% say they most commonly use Windows (duh), followed by 33% saying they use Linux.

OK! Tequila for everyone on me!

It's not like you can generalize this to the world of ham radio users.

I mean... LOOK at the rest of the responses in this survey!  "Move loved languages":

- Rust (73%)
- Smalltalk (67%)
- TypeScript (64%)
- Swift (64%)
- Go (63%)

And those are the TOP FIVE "loved" languages.  Note that Java ranks 9 places BELOW C#... below such monstrosities as F#, Haskell, and Julia.

This survey is very, very, narrowly focused and the results are MUCHO weird.  Look at the salaries!  Down right funny.  DevOps is, apparently, the highest paid specialty.  Right...

It's a web survey of a narrow population, but it sure isn't generalizable to the general population. Heck, I'm on StackOverflow twice a week at least and I didn't even KNOW there was a survey ;-)

Peter
K1PGV

Neal_K3NC

Peter, you know that Rust Never Sleeps!
http://www.allmusic.com/album/rust-never-sleeps-mw0000104616

Peter K1PGV

So Neil Young taught me.  My my, hey hey...

K1PGV

Ria

Hmmm Stackoverflow probably doesn't have the average Windows user...

I am on there myself but mostly use mac.

Neal_K3NC

Seriously though, Peter, as one who I respect deeply, how do you see the development of Linux desktops in the general sense and specifically the ham community? I sense a corrolary with the Flex/SDR world in that there has been a small (but growing) community of very rabid (and loud) users extolling the domination of both systems.

Every time I personally have investigated the market for writing ham-related software for linux, I never found 10 people who would pay for it.

Ria

DevOps does indeed pay well.

Neal_K3NC

As do so many flavors of the month! I was devops before it was cool (or called devops!) I hope that the Ops side of that equation are getting what they want out of it.

Peter K1PGV

@Neal: My impression is identical to yours.

Linux is popular in the server world. There are a few desktop users, but they are a very distinct and active minority.

Because the ham radio community tends to span lots of "technical" disciplines, the percentage of Linux users in the ham-radio community is greater than that in "the wider world."  I wouldn't be surprised to find that 20% of the ham-radio community users would "prefer" a Linux solution.

Please bear in mind (as Walt will be along to remind us in a few minutes): My take on "the wider world" is definitely biased.  I *live* in the Microsoft world... so, I talk to Microsoft people all day.  All our clients come to us because they need work done on Windows.  So, mine is a self-selecting subset of the user base. But what I hear everyday, all the time is, "Our stuff works on Linux -- because that's what my dev team knows and understands" but our customers really need this to work on Windows.  Who ya' gonna call?  My company!

@Ria: Anybody who works with Jenkins and git all day should get paid a lot of money.  Now, having said that... look at the salaries reported. This survey is *not* in any way reflective of the salaries I'm familiar with in the industry... at least not on either coast.

Peter
K1PGV

Neal_K3NC

So, Ria, same question (and status) as I wrote to Peter, do you see the future for Linux desktops in general and for the ham community?

Walt - KZ1F

And Yes, StackOverflow/StackExchange does, indeed, do Windows.

Ria

I find that "ops" is less and less these days as more companies move to AWS and the cloud. Instead we do CI/CD and different kinds of automation and monitoring. Puppet and splunk, primarily. Before it was running down to the server room to replace a bad drive or doing weekend software upgrades and installs.

Ria

First of all I see the desktop going away and replaced by smaller appliance type devices like the smartphone and tablet. With this the OS is transparent to the end user. However, chromebooks and similar could boost the desktop/laptop count for Linux but I think the future is definitely in appliance/App Store type of computing. In the ham community I don't see us moving away from windows unless there is more mainstream software for other OSes.

Peter K1PGV

Mr. Walt is being *highly* inscrutable in this thread.  An international man of mystery, I'd say.  Behind mystery, there is power ;-)

Peter
K1PGV

Walt - KZ1F

And use cobbler, conjure, juju, EPuppet, other RH devops software plus CI, CD. DevOps is not sysAdmin.

Walt - KZ1F

Peter, did you realize .NET now natively runs on Linux? I'm guessing​ yes. But, just in case.

Neal_K3NC

Walt, I am guessing Peter might have heard something about it somewhere.

Walt - KZ1F

That does not carry to MPF however.

Peter: Mr Walt?? Desktop on Linux is actually becoming very popular, exp in VDD and DaaS environments.

Ria

True but there is a lot of cross over.

Walt - KZ1F

I know alot of very good sysadmins clueless of and not up to DevOps. To your point Ria, some certainly are.

Peter K1PGV

> .Net natively runs on Linux Oh, yes. Absolutely. > does not carry to MPF That's an acronym I'm not familiar with, sorry. "Mr. Walt" just seemed fitting for an international man of mystery. No disrespect, certainly. You're a man of few words in this thread. Perhaps you're mind is mind occupied with learning how to program in Rust? It IS the most-loved language in the survey. > Desktop Linux is actually becoming very popular Either we have vastly differing definitions of "very popular" or you're basing your statement on statistics like those from the StackOverflow survey. I like Ria's comments, implying a pending paradigm shift. Unfortunately, nobody's seen what the new "thing" is yet. In the office, you need a big screen. A keyboard is efficient. Plug your phone in and go for it? Hmmmm.. doesn't feel right. Did you know you can write code in Rust that runs on Android? You can even build it on Windows. Peter K1PGV

Doug Hall

Earlier K3NC said:

Every time I personally have investigated the market for writing ham-related software for linux, I never found 10 people who would pay for it.

I agree, only I think Neal is being generous. I have never determined that there was a viable market for Linux application software (software aimed at the end-user on a desktop) at all, whether it's ham radio or games or any other area. And mind you, I'm not anti-Linux. I develop products that use Linux as the embedded OS, and in that space Linux has been good to me. In places where people don't know or care what OS is running (such as servers and embedded products) Linux wins big. But I don't see anything that leads me to believe that Linux is gaining significant ground on desktop platforms, at least not in such a way as to create a market for Linux software. For at least the last decade, every year was going to be "the year of Linux on the desktop." I think even the Linux diehards have stopped saying that.

Doug K4DSP

Walt - KZ1F

Mr Peter, not familiar with rust. Microsoft Presentation Framework. Not oh yes absolutely...Fairly recent development RH did it for Microsoft or in conjunction with.. I am certain the people that post was aimed at got that.

Walt - KZ1F

And why that's important is for Microsoft's entire existence they have said nothing else is even relevant which includes Linox so this move by working with red hat is capitulating that no, Linux actually is relevant especially in the desktop environment because Linux has for a long time owned the back office environment.

Peter K1PGV

MSFT open-sourced .Net Core back in 2014. No news there. RH smelled the coffee and did the work to make it run in RHEL. MS recognizing the import of Linux in the desktop? I don't think so. RH recognizing the preeminence of C# and .Net in LOB apps, and the vast superiority of the Visual Studio tool chain? That's what it looks like to me. Seriously, who would ever have thought Visual Studio would turn out to be a major strategic weapon? If your reference to MPF was meant to be relevant to SSDR, I think you meant WPF... which is what SSDR uses. I'm not sure what cross platform GUI frameworks are supported by RHEL, actually. Does RHEL support UWP? Peter K1PGV

Walt - KZ1F

Awww, you sound like a Southern Conservative espousing the virtues of Donnie Trump. That isn't what happened. The joint project was announced Dec 2015 and not announced as part of RHEL until June 2016. Trust me, RH didn't smell any coffee. What I've heard from the responses over the last 12 hrs is best described as willful ignorance.

Look at both pages of the survey again.

No, don't assume everything is about FRS or SSDR. Although I suppose on here it IS all about the FRS and SSDR echo chamber, which is why I haven't been on here except to drop those two pages.

Honestly it's not (about ssdr)  but, yeah, southern rep and FRS Elmers...same starry eyed allegiance.

I'm not sure what cross platform GUI frameworks are supported by

Peter, of course you are. Or, maybe I've been giving you too much credit.

Probably has a lot to do with that is not the world you work in. I, on the other hand... Universal Windows anything...no, probably not. However Windows, the exact version eludes me now, does run Linux natively because Microsoft has smelled the coffee.

So, I felt it was time to drop those two pages. If people relegate them to #FakeNews <sigh> again, why I am not on here any longer.

Peter K1PGV

/rolls eyes A wise person once told me: "What you see is a function of where you sit." One of the most insightful comments I ever heard. Of course, ones view can be made deliberately more narrow by wearing blinders. Peter K1PGV