How Apple killed the Linux desktop

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/27/tech/web/apple-linux-desktop/index.html

by alkasimi • 14 years ago

13 16 14 years ago

edition.cnn.com

eckyptang3• 14 years ago

Vendors + distributions are all committing suicide by pandering to the app store model, tablet interfaces and walled gardens. Noone is killing anyone.

Linux pissed the power users off (the entire market segment no less) during the gnome2 to gnome3/unity transition.

Apple are pissing power users off with their walled garden growing higher and some shoddy unreliable features.

Microsoft are pissing off power users with the same mind bending crapfest changes i.e. Metro.

It's all gone to shit actually. I really wish I did something else for a living.

I'm sitting here on a T61 with Debian on it, awesome window manager and xterms. It's the last bastion of common sense for the power user.

norswap2• 14 years ago

> Linux pissed the power users off (the entire market segment no less) during the gnome2 to gnome3/unity transition.

I think you meant "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux" here.

xqyz• 14 years ago

no? Most distributions transitioned to either gnome 3 or unity from gnome 2, not just ubuntu. And yes, Gnome 3 was part of the reason why I considered and in the end switched to OS X for my main machine (from Gentoo).

eckyptang3• 14 years ago

Nope.

Ubuntu, Redhat (which is pulling gnome3 into RHEL7), Fedora, Mint. Nothing else is of significance.

At least Debian have the balls to pick something different.

cmsj• 14 years ago

Welcome to the world where we are a vanishingly tiny minority. It's our fault, we told everyone that computers are amazing and they should buy one. They did and now we are outnumbered and not worth focussing much effort on.

eckyptang3• 14 years ago

Well not exactly - I think it's down to the fact that a couple of large corporations worked out it was an easy way to screw the shit out of people without actually having to produce anything tangible.

Lets start making it harder again and more productive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8r3tHUK6v4

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

I don't specifically think Apple has killed Linux on the desktop. Linux on the desktop, without being horrible, was a pipe dream.

I use Linux everyday for development, I'm a big supporter of the project and would recommend everyone give it a go. However I'd fully expect half the people trying it to get confused and give up, some of the interface metaphors aren't quite there, installing software can be a chore of working out how to get there and what to do, and there's still too much emphasis on command line operations.

These things are all fine (and enjoyable in their own right), but for the majority of people they just need something they can switch on, and get on with. Ubuntu has gotten closer, but it's still just not quite there, so it's not that OS X has trumped it on the desktop for people seeking an alternative but that they've hit what they can currently get. There's lots of room for winning people over, some of Apple's poorer decisions recently might actually push a lot more people into the arms of Linux, we'll have to wait and see.

gizmo6862• 14 years ago

Can you mention specifics of what Ubuntu is missing?

Installing software is easier than on Windows: it automaticly handles dependencies, and if you cannot find the program by searching in synaptic (same concept as an app store except for the lack of money), then Ubuntu is popular enough that the project likely offers their own *.deb.

As a desktop user, I never had to open the command line for normal computer configurations (until I switched to a non-standard window manager).

verroq• 14 years ago

Apple bridges the gap for fairly technical people who want a OS with the raw power of Linux but more polished.

blub• 14 years ago

The web is open when you have standard data exchange formats and control over your information. What happens most times though is that you connect to a black box that happens to use FOSS underneath - not free and not open. What Mozilla is doing is not enough, and recently I have come to think of it a complete waste of time. Web apps are not magiclly open because they're written in JS and HTML.

Finally getting back to Linux, I don't think it has lost. I am pleasantly surprised at how good the latest Ubuntu is as a desktop. If Apple continues to lock down Mac OS people will move to Linux - in my case I am investing in my Linux skills and decided not toinvest in iOS.

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

RHT deserves some blame too.

As a result of Gnome, Linux was doomed to have two half-baked desktops which would make the Linux desktop, at best, the butt of jokes.

One of the biggest problems of Linux in the 1990's was that applications wrote directly to the sound device, so that only one application could play sound at a time.

The obvious userspace answer is to create an "X Windows" for sound, and it would have been OK if there has been an "X Windows" for sound, but there was also a Y, a Z, and some letters from Suess's "Alphabet beyond Z" as well.

This was unfair to app developers, commercial or open source, and it was unfair to users. Things are better now, but there was a long stretch when I just didn't bother to attach speakers to Linux machines because it wasn't worth the bother.

Finally, RHAT's worst problem is that it was so successful -- look at this chart!

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RHT+Interactive#symbol=rh...;

RHT was successful because it sold to the corporate market, but that's a very dangerous market to aim for -- because a product that pleases corporate buyers typically causes endless misery for corporate users. There's just no reason for a company like RHT to do the slow and steady work to gradually improve a UI when it's selling lots of product to people who couldn't care less cause they'll never use it.

mseepgood• 14 years ago

Wrong facts in the article:

"Torvalds switched to Xfce"

Wrong, he didn't switch to Xfce: "And for all the people wasting everybodys time with "Why don't you use Unity/KDE/xfce/xyz" - I've tried them. They are even worse" https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDp...

"GNOME 3.6 is out"

3.6 is not out. 3.5.90 is out, which is a beta version.

klint• 14 years ago

Thanks for the info. Looks like he switched back. I've updated both pieces of the article.

norswap2• 14 years ago

To be honest, the Linux desktop killed itself (or rather, never really took off), because, well .. it sucks.

It sucks because it is fragmented. If a developper wants to write a nice GUI application that integrates nicely with the desktop, he needs to target 4 or 6 different desktops, and maybe even more variations (taskbars software, menus, whatever). So the developer makes a console application instead, and the Linux desktop suffer.

Of course, some open-source enthusiasts will cobble together some script to integrate the program with their favorite desktop software. It will work one time out of two, and will break with every update of the program or of the desktop environment.

You end up with complex desktop environments nobody understands fully except the core devs and an abysmal user experience.

gizmo6862• 14 years ago

I don't know what Linux you are talking about, but it is not the Linux I know. I started off in Linux with Ubuntu 10.04. About 4 months ago, I switched window managers from Gnome to Awesome. Awesome is nice, but pretty minimal, so I wanted a bunch of the widgets from my old gnome desktop. When I ran the widget program (IE, nm-applet for network manager...), the network manager applet icon appeared in the corner of my screen, and behaved just like it did under gnome. I use Thunderbird for e-mail. When I get a new e-mail, I still get a desktop notification under my widget tray.

One of the things that sets Linux apart is modularity and standards, so if you write a program to work with one envirement, it would almost definitively work in another envirement.

Put another way, what is a form of desktop integration that requires targeting multiple desktops.

Also, developers make console application because they are: 1) Easier to make 2) The norm on Linux 3) More developer/power user friendly 4) More compostable

I find the (mainstream) desktop envirements more understandable than Windows, with a better user experience.

imtyler• 14 years ago

"Killed" is a pejorative word in my opinion. The article itself clearly explains that Apple was able to _beat_ Linux by being better at the time, not by employing nefariousness tactics. There are better reasons to hate Apple.

How Apple killed the Linux desktop

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