Improving The Linux Desktop? Why, It’s Elementary

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7811

by linuxmag • 16 years ago

31 33 16 years ago

linux-mag.com

jcromartie• 16 years ago

The answer to the desktop Linux usability problem used to be: "we should look more like Windows!"

Now it's: "we should look more like OS X!"

Where's the innovation? Why is an exciting new desktop just another imitation?

> /opt? /bin? /sys? dll files? What is all that?

Most users have no reason to even wonder, since they are already tucked away from them. Stuff like this just shows that the project is out of touch right from the start. Linux desktop projects constantly misjudge their audience. This one is no exception.

someone_here• 16 years ago

This is not innovation; it is an improvement. If you want innovation, look at Gnome-do, rhythmbox, gimp, and any upstream project. The purpose of elementary is simply to improve usability and add small usability-related features.

nickd• 16 years ago

Isn't Gnome-Do just a Quicksilver clone? Rythmnbox just a take on iTunes for Linux? Both are great applications, and arguably an improvement on the projects that inspired them, but I wouldn't say they great examples of innovation.

wmf• 16 years ago

Innovation is really risky. If they aren't even competent enough to clone OS X, trying to innovate past it sounds like a recipe for failure.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

Actually, I think the trick and the challenge is finding places where open source can innovate effectively.

An application like MS Office or Photoshop or OS X are huge and monolithic and thus don't lend themselves to dispersed development.

What would be good is finding innovative interfaces that allow presentation and data to be separate and thus developed separately - #1 huge example, the web. Making the desktop like the web makes huge sense.

amttc2• 16 years ago

Maybe. It depends on if we're talking about individual applications or just the desktop experience in general.

The thing about people using applications like Photoshop and Word is that they have established workflows that its users have come to expect. From a design perspective, they're pidgeonholed because any significant UI change means that they would have to retrain the vast majority of its users. So Adobe and MS make minor tweaks to its UI instead. Admittedly, MS made a big change with the ribbons ui element, but you get the picture.

Open source stuff has the advantage (I guess you could call it that) of having a much larger volume of new users and a much smaller volume of old users, so there's more room to experiment with different UIs to solve the problem of getting people to interact meaningfully with the programs. I'd say for the vast majority of the projects, the UI is an afterthought so it ends up being poorly designed. Even so, the opportunity is there.

The desktop is a little different though, there's already a load of user expectations that you have to live up to. The space for proposing solutions is a lot smaller. Riding on the coat tails of OSX may not be a bad idea so long as the developers understand the reasons why Mac made the design decisions that they did and adjust accordingly.

At least that's how I feel. Trying to innovate isn't a bad thing, it has to lead to failure first before you get it right.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

  Where's the innovation? Why is an exciting
  new desktop just another imitation?

Where does this obsession with innovation comes from? I will choose the thing that just works without getting into way over the innovation for the sake of innovation anytime.

I'd argue, that there is little left to innovate within desktop, there is only room for relatively small improvements — and that's natural course of thing in maturing media.

Take paper books: there was almost no innovation for hundreds of years: I say that's because their current form is optimal within constrains imposed by media.

With computers we have less mature media and different set of constrains, but eventually it will settle down and the only innovation will be possible outside the desktop, like some next big thing that will replace it.

orblivion• 16 years ago

You should look into Gnome Shell. It's not copying anything I've heard of.

mhd• 16 years ago

Heck, Windows looks more like OS X nowadays. And even in the mid-90s, Linux desktops wanted to look like Nextstep, so the Mac envy seems a logical succession (let's better forget the CDE phase).

But the whole design space is really, really small. You're mostly making a distinction by a subtly different look and some procedural differences. This is true for every desktop since the 80s, whether it's System 6, OS X, RISC OS, KDE, GNOME or WPS.

That is what the audience wants. The amount of developers isn't that influential anymore, and even they are most likely to use Windows 95/Nextstep style interfaces since they started out using computers. The old Unix greybeards (and their spiritual successors) populate a very small island with weird palm tress.

There still are about as many, if not more people who use their DE as a glorified terminal multiplexer (or Emacs life support). But for them, "Linux on the Desktop" never was an issue in the first place.

I seriously doubt that anything really new will come on the desktop. Everything that tried failed (mostly integrated systems like Oberon, Smalltalk, Plan 9) for the "common user", or got integrated in the normal desktop (web apps, terminal emulators). Everything new seems to happen on different devices (mostly mobile), and even there I don't see a different frontier, it's mostly a mash-up of traditional desktop GUIs and web apps, adjusted for the limitations on the devices.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

I'd be ok with a linux based desktop that was functionally identical to Windows 7 or OS X. I suspect a lot of people would be.

asdflkj4• 16 years ago

Here is the real problem with desktop Linux: nobody wants to take the only thing that Linux is good at, and make it better. I'm talking about hackability. Ubuntu and similar systems make it worse. There is too much ugly, incomprehensible and plain unedifying kludge between the neat Unix core and the whatever shiny crap is in fashion this year. If a minimal distro is a pool with no shallow end, then Ubuntu is a pool with a shallow end, and barbed wire between it and the deep end. It's hard to make a pool with a shallow end that gradually gets deeper, but as far as I know, nobody is even trying.

Not every potential user is an idiot. There are plenty of people who would learn, if the learning process felt more like lifting weights and less like having drain cleaner poured on your face.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

  Not every potential user is an idiot.

Sure. He may be very smart person—just in the different area of expertise. For him computer is just a tool. Like not everyone wants to learn about shifting gears, tuning carburetor or operating the choke just to be able to get from point A to point B by a car, not everyone wants to learn hot to tweak a computer.

asdflkj4• 16 years ago

Here is why this common metaphor is wrong: the only useful thing cars do is get you from point A to point B. Mucking around with the innards is pointless unless you like doing it. Hacking a computer could be both fun and useful for a great variety of smart people. Furthermore, a car is a physical thing with rigid physical constraints on its design. If you want to tweak your car, you need to do a lot of stupid busywork with your wrench before you get to anything interesting. You need to have a wrench, and a garage for that matter. With an operating system, there are basically no constraints beyond the imagination of its makers.

kiba2• 16 years ago

Of course, only those with a programming skillset have any chance in hell in realizing the benefit. The marketeers, the doctors, and the mac artist would care less. All they want is a shiny UI with their inefficient workflow.

I suspect Usability designers would probably only care about easy to learn interface over the hard to remember but extremely efficient keyboard commands.

Emacs is a perfect example of this. Extremely efficient and very good at what it do, but it requires a lot of learning for the user. However, the benefit will paid off for the learning curve thousand of times over.

asdflkj4• 16 years ago

Programming is only an impressive-sounding "skillset" and not a simple skill, like riding a bicycle (at least in its rudimentary form), because of how awful the interfaces are between simple code you write and things happening that make a difference in your life. Maybe this problem will eventually be solved not by a better Linux UI philosophy, but by things like Heroku.

"A better UI philosophy" wouldn't even have to be anything new. It's just the classic modular Unix way--the thing that makes shell scripts so easy and satisfying. It should have been extended to GUI. I would guess that someone tried, but it didn't catch on. The idea is too obvious.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

The real problem with desktop Linux is that people don't care. They use Windows because they have to. They use Windows because everything works with it and everything comes with it preinstalled. Everything works with Windows because people make sure that their things work on Windows because that's what everyone uses.

I don't think anyone interested in "hackability" feels like it's analogous to having "drain cleaner poured on your face". There may be ways to make cool scripting more accessible, but there's nothing particularly contrived about it IMO.

The bottom line is that people don't care that much about computers. If Windows lets them do everything they want to do, then there's no problem. And all most people want to do is use Facebook, Excel, the proprietary program needed for their profession, and email. All of these work fine on Windows and everyone knows how to get to them from the Windows interface. They know the ins and outs of Excel and for most Excel jockeys, OO Calc isn't going to cut it, because they have to relearn some shortcuts, button locations, etc. to use Calc, but they already know how to use Excel and can hit the ground running, so they prefer Excel. Same with almost all other software.

So the real reason the Linux desktop isn't going anywhere is because nobody cares. If you want Linux desktops to proliferate, you have to give people a reason to care; something new and specific that a normal person would think is cool and buy-worthy. For most people, technical arguments like "The TCP/IP stack is great!", "iptables is great!", or whatever, they don't care about that.

asdflkj4• 16 years ago

I'm not talking about "most people". I'm talking about some significant subset of smart people who would love hacking, but don't know what it is yet because they weren't given a proper opportunity. "Most people" will follow when programming literacy becomes the new math literacy.

amttc2• 16 years ago

I think that this has to do with flaws in the UIs themselves though. Having one sellable point is a great plan, but not if the rest of the user experience is poor. People should never have to open up the command line, yet you have to do it all the time in order to get any use out of a distro even like Ubuntu.

vault_• 16 years ago

Everyone seems so concerned about the Linux desktop. I don't see the problem with Linux as being the dekstop itself. Coming from using only OS X, think that the problem is the applications available to run on the desktop. In my experience, there are no Linux apps that match the ease of use and well-designed-ness of whatever the closest analogue would be on Mac.

ekiru• 16 years ago

The article seems to indicate that a large focus of elementary is improving the UI of individual applications(it specifically meantions the Nautilus file browser and the Midori web browser).

tung• 16 years ago

Maybe I missed it, but did the article say anything about the differences of the Nautilus file browser compared to Ubuntu's?

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

This isn't a software problem as much as it is an OEM/hardware vendor problem. How many "normal" people get a computer and are then like "oh shucks, let me install that Windows software!" ? None really. They buy the computer and Windows is there. Microsoft has the deals with tons of OEMS and local whitebox vendors. Ubuntu has pretty much close to zero. Dell made a half assed attempt with ubuntu offerings from comments ive read and guys like system76 are an okay start for a boutique. If Ubuntu or whoever the hell wants to make linux popular on the desktop, they need a quality OEM strategy. From there, improving the software continually and making it usable is very important, but I think Ubuntu is at a point where many people would be happy with it.

Improving The Linux Desktop? Why, It’s Elementary

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