What killed the Linux desktop

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html

by foolano • 14 years ago

344 378 14 years ago

mbell5• 14 years ago

Arguing about the niceties of the UI is all well and good but the actually problem is far more fundamental.

What killed the linux desktop? Drivers. Mostly graphics drivers but some others as well. Who cares if the UI isn't ideal if the damn thing can't sleep and wake up properly, or if it spazs out every time I plug in an external monitor.

jfaucett3• 14 years ago

absolutely agree. I love linux, its a great os but drivers are a nightmare, honestly, I've never had any linux distro, where I could comfortably buy an IO device and not have to worry about compatability issues. This to me is the biggest problem by far with the os(s) in their current state.

chimeracoder3• 14 years ago

What do you mean by 'an IO device'? I can count on one hand the number of driver issues I've had, and none of them qualify as IO devices.

tsahyt4• 14 years ago

Hmm.. Drivers seem to work just fine here. Actually up until now I didn't even notice the Linux desktop's supposed to be dead. Looking at it right now it seems very much alive.

Stupid jokes aside, I always had a feeling that the Linux desktop was actually gaining users in the last couple of years, especially since Ubuntu came along and truth be told it's still the best operating system I've been using but that question is largely open to taste anyway.

For the last couple o' weeks I had to use Windows 7 at work and oh my god, what a pain in the bottom it is! I've had a couple of looks at OSX and never liked it either. Then again my linux desktop isn't exactly standard either - but that's what I like about it: customizability. I'm the kind of guy who likes to tinker with the system until it's just about right for me. The last time I set up my laptop it took me 3 or 4 days to finish but it absolutely paid off. The result is something I find aesthetically pleasing and extremely usable.

Linux has a couple of show-off features and facts 'n' figures like running most of the Top 500 and second-to-none package management but it's real power is that it can very well be all things to all people. It's been said a million times but Linux gives the user a choice, and I honestly value that a million times more than any nice OSXesque UX or Windows-esque games support.

The catch is that I'm definitely not the average user who wants things to "just work" (although they rarely do).

3JPLW• 14 years ago

That's exactly what TFA says! Indeed, it points to something even more fundamental: the APIs (both userland and kernel driver space) move too quickly and are fragmented. That's why both drivers are difficult and why desktop apps are difficult to support.

shardling• 14 years ago

>What killed the linux desktop? Drivers.

That seems a weird way to phrase it. This is not a new thing, and generally drivers have gotten better over the years. Saying that drivers inhibited the growth of Linux makes sense, saying that they killed it -- not so much.

kmm2• 14 years ago

When have you last used Linux? Drivers haven't been an issue anymore for years now.

I don't actually see any problems with Linux. It's just not meant to be.

mbell5• 14 years ago

As a desktop OS, tried it again 3 weeks ago. Fairly standard setup, Asus motherboard, core i7 3770, 32GB of ram, one dell display@ 2560x1440 one at 1920x1200 in portrait, base AMD 7xxx series gpu, newest ubuntu with AMD binary drivers. First the graphics driver locked up on rotating a screen, that required reboot, even switching to a non graphical tty didn't work, then it took but z-sync was completely disabled on the portrait display and by completely i mean it was unusable with 2-3 inch tears on moving content. This of course is a known issue with Xorg being archaic.

I'm sure you'll blame this on AMD's drivers or shoot out some other random technical reason. While i understand the technical issues, I just don't care, I have far better things to do than care about this shit. It flat out doesn't work and I don't care why.

petitmiam• 14 years ago

I can sympathise with you about external monitor issues. In my office, we all have laptops with external monitors. When we have meetings, all the Windows/OSX users simply unplug the external monitor and take their laptops into the meeting room. The linux users normally just take a pad and pen, as it's too risky to attempt unplugging the external monitor while linux is running.

brianobush2• 14 years ago

funny; I am using a linux desktop right now. not dead yet.

hnriot2• 14 years ago

by choice though, or out of work necessity?

pook1e• 14 years ago

Do you really think there are no people that use Linux by choice?

tsahyt4• 14 years ago

By choice here and have been using it for about 6 years now on the desktop and I have no plans of migrating anywhere else.

bundyo• 14 years ago

Choice here too - have been running Linux at home for almost 10 years and I never regretted it. There are almost no downsides, except careful choosing what hardware to buy and the lack of Photoshop (though Wine helps with that now).

jlgreco4• 14 years ago

Both.

I need it for work, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

pnathan• 14 years ago

I have a Linux desktop at work and one at home. I actually see the modern Linux desktop as absolutely amazing compared to where it was a decade ago.

I also have a Mountain Lion MBP, but AFAICT, I will be leaving the Apple cart after it dies and I'll be 100% Linux.

antihero5• 14 years ago

I use Linux as a desktop OS out of choice. Originally, no - because I couldn't afford a MacBook, but I've learned to love it and I don't have any need to switch.

Linux desktop is an OS for people who are willing to invest time to get an utterly fantastic, fascinating experience. It doesn't suit modern instant-gratification culture, no, and yes, it takes experience and expertise to get the most out of it, but once you get there, it's bloody amazing.

I'd recommend having it as a small hobby as well as tool, so you can spend time learning and figuring things out and broadening your knowledge.

Disclaimer: Using Arch Linux with the i3 window manager. No, it's not for everyone, but I absolutely love it.

OriginalSyn• 14 years ago

I use Windows out of necessity at home to play my video games. I use Linux as choice as my IDE at work.

brianobush2• 14 years ago

actually both. home and work. my children's friends think I am a hacker since my console looks like a hacker's computer.

loboman• 14 years ago

I am using it too, because I like it. I didn't like Unity nor Gnome Shell 3 though; and as Gnome Classic lost support it became uglier. But now I found Cinnamon to be a better alternative to anything else. I am very happy with Linux on the desktop right now; I don't think I'd be happier with a Mac or with Windows, not at all.

ajross5• 14 years ago

I think some of this is perceptive. It's true that the attempt by both Canonical (Unity) and Red Hat (Gnome 3) to sort-of-incompatibly break away from the so close to standard that it hurts to type this Gnome 2 environment did a lot more harm than good, at least as far as platform adoption goes.

And clearly OS X is an extremely polished Unix and is going to appeal to the more UI-focused of the hacker set. And Miquel is definitely among the most UI-focused of the hacker set. He's also an inconsolate "platform fan". Much of his early work was chasing Microsoft products and technologies, of course; now he's an iPhone nut apparently, and that doesn't really surprise me.

But at the same time the Linux desktop was never really in the game. I use it (Gnome 3 currently) and prefer it. Lots of others do. For many, it really does just work better. But in a world where super-polished products are the norm, a hacker-focused suite of software isn't ever going to amount to more than a curiosity. (And again, I say this as someone who will likely never work in a Windows or OS X desktop.)

So in that light, I think the idea that the Linux desktop got "killed" is sort of missing the point. It's no more moribund now than it was before. It's more fractured in a sense, as the "Gnome" side of the previous desktop war has split into 3+ camps (Unity, Gnome 3 and Gnome2/Xfce, though there are other spliter camps like Mint/Cinnamon too). But it's here and it works, and it's not going anywhere. Try it!

batista8• 14 years ago

>So in that light, I think the idea that the Linux desktop got "killed" is sort of missing the point. It's no more moribund now than it was before.

Oh, but it is. Because it has lost a lot of momentum that it had, momentum that was coming from the "we're gonna overtake MS and win over the Desktop" feeling prevalent at the time.

Heck, the guy behind GTK complained recently that he is just one man taking care of the project. The full GUI foundation for Gnome, and one that is far from feature complete at that, and it only has one guy working on it.

It has also lost a lot of people and companies associated with it at the time betting on this possibility [of it winning the desktop]. Most companies nowadays support Linux development only for the server stuff, but it wasn't always so. Miguel moved on, Ximian moved on, Hazel moved on, Rasterman moved on, etc etc. Even Adobe quit developing Flash for it.

And it also lost a lot of "alpha geeks" to OS X, which wasn't even commercially available at the time (1997-2001). This "desktop UNIX" come out of nowhere and it was it that did what Linux was supposed (and expected) to do, ie eat into MS market share. Well, even OS X didn't eat that much, but 15% is still a lot.

>He's also an inconsolate "platform fan". Much of his early work was chasing Microsoft products and technologies, of course; now he's an iPhone nut apparently, and that doesn't really surprise me.

You're saying it like it's a bad thing. Gnome (or Linux for that matter) are also platforms.

And to be frank, his early work was not "chasing Microsoft products and technologies". His early world was Midnight Commander, Gnome, Gnumeric, and Evolution.

He indeed like the component model (not the Window platform itself) when it was presented to him at a Microsoft visit, though (the story of this visit should be up there somewhere). But what's not to like about it? A good, clean, component model of sorts was also needed for FOSS, maybe still is.

The phase you describe, IIRC, was several years _later_, when he saw the .NET platform and got hooked.

ajross5• 14 years ago

I really didn't intend it as a swipe against Miguel, but I think it does inform his perspective. And I meant "platform fan" in the advocacy sense: he has a tendency to "fall in love" with favorite products. That's not uncommon in the general population (it's pretty much the norm at HN!), but it certainly is among core Linux people who tend to prefer doing new things in different ways.

> His early world was Midnight Commander, Gnome, Gnumeric, and Evolution.

Clones of Norton Commander, Windows, Excel, and Outlook. To be fair, Gnome 1 wasn't really a "clone" (though it did mimick more than innovate) and mc was chasing a Symantec product, not a Microsoft one.

But to claim that these were innovative new projects is silly. Miguel's career has been one of seeing something he loves in an existing product and duplicating it in his preferred free software environment. There's no shame there. But it's absolutely the same thinking that drove the Mono project.

wpietri3• 14 years ago

So in that light, I think the idea that the Linux desktop got "killed" is sort of missing the point. It's no more moribund now than it was before.

I strongly disagree. It is losing exactly the sort of person that the author is: developers who, all else equal, would rather use Linux. But who eventually get tired of the BS and just want something that works and you can actually get software for. I have a lot of sympathy for that.

I write this from a Linux laptop, but that's more out of mulish stubbornness and 15 years of accumulated irritation with Steve Jobs and his dickish business practices.

The last time I got a new laptop I knew I didn't have time to screw around for days with X configuration files. And so I paid a vendor several hundred dollars over list to give me a laptop that JFW. And despite that the sound is still way too quiet. After a few time-boxed 2-hour excursions into whatever sound system they're using this week, I still can't fix it. I've given up.

The only legitimate reason I have for staying on desktop Linux is that I code for Linux servers, and I think it's impossible to really understand system performance if you're not running the same OS. But even that seems shaky to me; hardware keeps getting cheaper and developers keep getting more expensive, so it just doesn't matter as much.

One day some bright Linux spark is going to "innovate" again in a way that I'm expected to put up with their rough edges for 6 months (hello, Unity!) and I'm going to say fuck it and buy a Mac because I just don't have time to screw around right then. Or maybe I'll just want to watch a Netflix movie without hassle, or play the video game my pals are all talking about. And maybe by then it will be a fancy dock for my 8-core Android phone.

Overall, I agree with his point, except that I don't think Linux on the desktop is so much dying as cutting its own throat.

learc83• 14 years ago

Many of the problems people have with Linux have nothing to do with Linux itself.

When I first tried to use Linux about 7 years ago, wireless drivers were a huge problem. Manufacturers didn't provide assistance--not much Linux distros could do about it at the time.

These problems are simply inherent to Linux being a minority platform.

graue4• 14 years ago

When you write "whatever sound system they're using this week", I know what you mean. There's terrible fragmentation, and buggy libraries get rewritten and replaced by some other buggy thing instead of fixed. That's definitely a pattern. From 2007-9 I even fled to OpenBSD on the desktop to get a more stable OS.

But for the past two and a half years I've used Ubuntu with Xfce, and those problems have become a distant memory. Nothing breaks, nothing gets changed on me (Xfce has moved a few things around, but nothing too terrible). No one forced me to switch to Unity, so I didn't. For me, Linux is more usable and stable than it's ever been. I also seem to see more people running it on the desktop than ever before, and in fact stats from Net Applications show a 50% rise in market share in 2011: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/is-the-linux-desktop-a...

Inside the Apple-centric echo chamber of HN, it's easy to believe that all the developers have moved to OS X and desktop Linux is dead, but I disagree. Despite its problems, desktop Linux is secure in its (small) niche.

antihero5• 14 years ago

What are you using for sound? I use Pulseaudio on my desktop (custom built with a M-Audio Delta 2496 Pro soundcard) and on my laptop (crappy Lenovo G575) and I don't have any problems at all.

All I do is have this line in my .xinitrc:

   [[ -x /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 ]] && start-pulseaudio-x11 &

And it works perfectly! If I want to change my volume or manage which device it outputs on, I just run pavucontrol

hnriot2• 14 years ago

Speaking as someone running a Linux desktop (and am writing this on one) there's not much to say other than I agree. I run linux because work gave me a PC and there's no way I can write software on Windows. Of course we all have servers managed off in the corporate cloud somewhere that run ssh/vnc etc, but there's no way I wanted to install putty again or miss out on the unix commands that make (work) life more enjoyable, so I installed Linux, because I write server software, and client sometimes, but browsers make the operating system moot pretty much. There's more variation between browsers than between operating systems - mobile aside. And when I need to try something on Wintel I spin up a cloud instance and use vnc.

When i'm not on Linux I run OSX everywhere else (and IOS) because its unix-like (is) and because it works so well. I am sure Windows 7 and 8 are great, but I doubt they have gotten rid of c: or \ as path delimiter or any of the other nonsense that DOS introduced (copied from PIP) back in the dark ages. why should they, MSFT still runs DOS apps so they aren't going to change and choosing between OSX and Linux on a non-work desktop is a no-brainer, Netflix, Photoshop etc etc etc...

jfaucett3• 14 years ago

you took the words right out of my mouth - ahh putty what fun :)

jrockway3• 14 years ago

/ works as a path delimiter on Windows. And Linux runs DOS apps just fine too, in essentially the same manner that modern Windows does. (Emulation.)

josephcooney• 14 years ago

Why is / inherently better as a path delimiter than \ ? DOS was built to be compatible with VMS and other DEC OS's, which used / as a switch character.

sixbrx• 14 years ago

Because nearly every programming language uses \ as an escape, which means in string literals that you have to double escape the \ which is error prone and ugly.

keeperofdakeys• 14 years ago

If you could arbitrarily pick any character, both are as good as each other. However '\' is currently an escaping character in nearly every program that needs such a function, so as things currently are, '/' is better. This begs the question of when '\' as an escape character became mainstream though.

chimeracoder3• 14 years ago

> (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions.

This is completely missing the point - a statically compiled end-user binary should be compatible across all distributions of Linux, using the same version of the kernel or any newer version.

The only caveats to that are (a) hardware and (b) poorly-packaged software.

(A) is the fault of hardware manufacturers and is increasingly not an issue these days anyway; driver issues are becoming increasingly rare.

(B) is easy to solve for any open-source software, as it is the responsibility of the community for that distribution to provide the appropriate packaging. They prefer to do it themselves. And they're good at it - it gets done!

If you want to ship a closed-source binary on Linux, just make sure you don't dynamically link it against any libraries that you don't also ship with the binary. Problem solved.

Honestly, I can't remember one single instance ever where I have run into end-user software that will run on one distribution of Linux and not another, as long as that principle was followed.

migueldeicaza4• 14 years ago

Many sophisticated libraries on Linux uses dynamic modules or require components that are configured as part of the system.

Consider D-Bus, if you statically link, but the system changes the format or location of D-BUs configuration files, all of a sudden your app no longer works.

So in theory, yes, this could solve some of the problems. But it requires a massive effort to make the Linux desktop libraries static-linking friendly, which they are not.

randallu• 14 years ago

Like libc, or libX11 and apparently ld-linux.

Why not just ship a chroot jail to run it in in case some of those statically linked system libraries read config files which might be under a different path or in a different format?

scrumper3• 14 years ago

There's room for many approaches, of course. While the perfectionism (or is it lack of pragmatism?) of Linux and its developers may well have held back its wider adoption on the desktop, there's a lot to be said for the its development community's single-minded pursuit of quality and correctness.

As well as Linux's presence in the data centre, witness the success of 'embedded' Linux: many TVs, routers, set top boxes and other bits of sealed-box electronics all run on it. It's broad in its scope because of the large team of divergent interests working on it, and it's able to support those systems because it's been well made as a direct result of that team's philosophy. Is it really so bad that the average Facebooker does't want to use it?

It really is very, very hard indeed to be all things to all men and no single system around today can make that claim. Linux has its place in the world of computing, just like Android, Windows, OSX and everything else.

jrockway3• 14 years ago

I've used Linux for years and have never had these problems. I think the issue is that getting everything working requires a deep understanding of each component and the system as a whole. If you just follow advice on forums, you will make things worse because you're doing things you don't understand to a system that you don't understand. That's not going to lead to success. You need to be able to think critically about what's wrong and what needs to change, and then execute those changes. No, that's probably not worth doing if you already like Windows or OS X. If you don't, though...

(And, there are of course Linux-based systems that were built by someone controlling the whole experience, and those work really well. Android and ChromeOS come to mind, though those aren't really desktops per se.)

The other day, someone here was complaining about udev. It has ruined Linux forever, or something. I have a different experience: udev has made my life very easy. I have a rule for each device I care about, and that device is automatically made available at a fixed location when it is plugged in. For example, I have a rule that detects a microcontroller that is waiting to be programmed with avrdude in avr109 mode that symlinks the raw device (/dev/ttyUSB<whatever>) to /dev/avr109. I then have a script that waits for inotify to detect the symlink, and then call avrdude to program the microcontroller. A few lines of shell scripting (actually, it's in my Makefile), and I can just plug in a microcontroller, press the programming button on it, and everything just works. No screwing around with figuring out which device address it's assigned to. How do you do that in Windows?

PotatoEngineer• 14 years ago

It sounds like you're agreeing with the article - things work on Linux when you have a deep understanding of them. While it's good to encourage a deep understanding, the group of people using any given OS will always follow a curve of some sort. There will always be beginners; there will always be people who know just enough to be dangerous; there will always be experts.

Requiring everyone to be an expert will prevent Linux from being a dominant OS, because most people do not care enough to gain a deep understanding of any OS, so they'll pick one that's easier to learn the easy bits.

jrockway3• 14 years ago

You'll hit the same problem with any OS. OS X will just get slower and slower, and Windows will become infected with malware. General purpose computers are not easy to use, yet: with the infinite flexibility they provide, there's infinite opportunity to fubar them. The average Linux distributions exposes the flexibility by default, making it seem hard to use. But if you switch to a less-flexible Linux, like ChromeOS, many of the problems go away. So I don't really understand what the article is trying to achieve other than trolling by stating the obvious in an inflammatory manner.

brigade• 14 years ago

So... one of his key problems is that when (not if) things break, you need to learn more than you ever wanted to know about the low-level internals of an OS to fix it. And you say you've never had that had that problem; you should have a deep understanding of each component and the system as a whole in order to be able to use Linux.

But that's exactly one of the major problems he's complaining about!

acomar2• 14 years ago

It's a different philosophy. Some of us come at it from the perspective that we want to know how our machine works. And when something goes wrong, we want to dig into it and fix it ourselves. The monolithic and opaque OSs that "just work" aren't for us. Oddly, the only place I've seen this attitude described/explained is in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

keithpeter3• 14 years ago

"I've used Linux for years and have never had these problems."

Agreed. That is two desktops and four laptops worth in a decade.

"I think the issue is that getting everything working requires a deep understanding of each component and the system as a whole. "

Not so sure. I'm an end user and tend to just shove the CD-ROM in and cross my fingers. Most 'stuff' works. My stuff is simpler than yours however (audio interface, cameras, keyboard (musical) controller)

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

IMHO; Android and to a lesser degree ChromeOS (as well as other similar platforms) don't quite count as "Linux" for purposes of "the Linux desktop" as they've replaced nearly everything above the kernel with their own stack[0].

[0] Last time I used ChromeOS it was still mostly in line with ordinary Linux (thought it might have been partially Gentoo based?); but a rather impractical one as it's less than simple to run [things that aren't Chrome]. Heard about Xorg getting replaced at some point, I'm unclear on if that actually happened.

jsnell2• 14 years ago

I have used Linux as my main desktop and laptop OS for 17 years, and see these problems frequently. It used to be a system I could keep completely in my head, and understand what was happening and why. But from maybe 2005 onwards there has been a persistent and accelerating trend of replacing the old working and transparent (though possibly a bit baroque) infrastructure with fancy new components that are completely inscrutable. And the lack of transparency gets worse and worse the thicker these layers of garbage get. It's mostly fine as long as things work. But things never seem to work if you have a configuration that differs even a bit from the default.

Want to log in from a terminal and start X? Well, too bad there's some new infrastructure this month that makes sure you'll only get access to the sound device when you log in from a properly configured gdm. Want to modify the keyboard layout? Whoops, the xmodmap format that had been stable for a couple of decades now changed for the third time in a year. Want to add a tmpfs on /tmp to fstab? Well, too bad. Some implicit and undebuggable circular dependencies in systemd will make the system unbootable.

And the sad parts are that the problems this new infrastructure is supposed to solve never actually existed. "Great, now audio doesn't work at all. But if it worked, it would have full support for network transparency". It's easy to understand why the problem exists - creating something new tends to be more rewarding than working on the old stuff. It's much harder to see how to fix this madness.

acomar2• 14 years ago

Move to a simpler distribution that won't bother you. I've been on Arch for the last few years because once I set it up, new updates won't add new "functionality". It isn't perfect, but I can keep the entire system in my head. Nothing opaque, nothing inscrutable -- the design philosophy is KISS. It won't hold your hand, but it also won't get in your way.

luriel3• 14 years ago

All the problems with Linux over the last five years can be summed up in one word: Pottering.

aaronmhamilton2• 14 years ago

PulseAudio doesn't depend on GDM, you just need to create a config for it; What I do (on fedora) is move the default.pa from /var/lib/gdm/.pulse/default.pa to ~/.pulse...

You can't expect everything to work when you tear out components then fail to configure things properly...

Devilboy• 14 years ago

CLOSED: Works on my computer

stevencorona• 14 years ago

In like 2006 I switched from Windows XP to Linux. This was before Ubuntu was what it is today. I learned using Slackware and eventually switched to Gentoo. It was cool and gave me nerd cred when I went to college.

I switched to OSX for exactly the reasons the author mentioned. The fact that I have an awesome UI + ability to use the shell all day is a huge win for me.

darkstalker2• 14 years ago

I don't get all that OSX "awesome UI" everyone talks about. With my previous experience on Windows/Linux, everything seems wrong and backwards, and there is no way to configure or change it. Also the shell looks like a crippled version of unix.

j-kidd2• 14 years ago

As someone who uses the shell all day, I found that there is no alternative for portage and Konsole.

And since most things are web-based now, a vanilla KDE setup + Icon-Only Task Manager is awesome enough for me.

slogdrat• 14 years ago

The machine that ran Windows XP can run Linux (http://wiki.debian.org/Hardware). So you can switch to Linux any time.

However, people cannot switch to OSX. The machine that ran Windows XP and Linux WILL NOT run OSX. So, no, you didn't switch to OSX, you purchased new hardware that is strictly controlled (motherboard, video card, etc).

Then, in an incredible blunder, de Icaza said, "Many hackers moved to OSX... working audio, working video drivers, codecs for watching movies..."

Uhhhh, yeah, if Linux gave up on supporting scores of hardware platforms and hundreds or thousands of hardware components, OF COURSE it would have working audio, video drivers, and codecs.

to3m• 14 years ago

I installed this thing called "EEE Ubuntu" on my little EEE PC a few years ago. That "EEE" in the name meant, or so the website very strongly implied, "specially designed for the EEE PC". I think there were just 2 fundamental models of it at the time, both very similar in terms of underlying hardware.

Needless to say, the sound didn't work. And the wireless didn't work. When I clicked "suspend", it said it was out of swap space. When I closed the lid, it crashed.

thiderman• 14 years ago

I never understood this. Why would market share of Linux on the desktop matter? I've always viewed Linux on the desktop as something for power users and developers, and thousands of said power users and developers are continually developing and maintaining multiple distros and thousands of applications. It's not like it's a stale and abandoned paradigm that's left to die.

darkstalker2• 14 years ago

Was gonna say exactly the same. People thinks that if it's not popular among the masses it's "dead". Totally wrong, since it covers a completely different niche.

The author seems to forget that some people actually enjoys configuring and hacking their systems in detail. Also there is the people who hates using the mouse, and wants to do everything with the console and keyboard.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

I think it's because even power users enjoy doing "regular user" stuff sometimes and it's nice to be able to do it all on one machine without resorting to dual boots or VMs.

Having a bigger market share means that hardware/software vendors are more likely to consider supporting Linux to at least some degree.

For example I like to listen to music while programming, so it's nice that Spotify is available on my dev machine.

shmerl3• 14 years ago

Linux by no means should be limited to power users. It should be (and is) a universal OS.

luriel3• 14 years ago

JWZ identified the issue Miguel discusses in this post ten years ago, he even gave it a name: CADT

http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Also, part of what killed the Linux desktop was Miguel and his total lack of understanding of the unix philosophy which drove him to create abominations like BONOBO. D-Bus is not much better either.

That he fell in love with an iPhone goes to show he didn't fully appreciate the value of open source either.

We were just yesterday commenting with some friends in #cat-v how Evolution is one of the worst pieces of software ever created, and Evolution is supposedly considered by Miguel and co to be the epitome of the Linux desktop.

Argorak2• 14 years ago

How does falling in love with an iPhone show that you don't fully appreciate the value of open source? Tell me about any good open source handset that came out before the iPhone. OpenMoko? I mean, you really had to love open source to put up with it.

Yes, there is still Android but, given how modified the usual handset is, you can't buy a free and open Android on the market as well.

So, where is the problem in using a closed device when "open" just doesn't deliver?

luriel3• 14 years ago

There is a big difference between using and loving.

lttlrck5• 14 years ago

Thanks for the link!

jeremyjh4• 14 years ago

That you can't understand a love affair with the iPhone just means you don't appreciate good design.

I'm not a fanboy but I did envy my wife's iPhone for years. I like my Android better today but what choices did you really have when the iPhone came out? It was the only game in town. I was chained to a Blackberry is the only reason I didn't have one.

billswift• 14 years ago

Linux is too hard to configure; if the distro gets it right out of the box it's fine, but not otherwise. I started with Windows 3.1 in 1995, mostly used Slackware, and some Windows 95, from 1996 to 2000. Slackware and Windows 98 from 2000 to 2004. But from the time I got on the Internet in 2004 to the present I have mostly used Windows (98, XP, and Vista) because I have not managed to get any version of Linux that I have tried to connect through a dial-up modem. I have to admit I have only tried sporadically, since Windows just works, and my efforts to get some Linux distro to work have been so frustrating. (Note that though a frequent user, I am not a programmer or professional sys-admin.)

ADDED: jrockaway's comment, added while I was writing this, hits it just right: "I think the issue is that getting everything working requires a deep understanding of each component and the system as a whole." Which is what makes it so frustrating, even to very intelligent people who have other interests than computers in and of themselves.

nirvana9• 14 years ago

I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point.

Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it.

Before I go on, let me say that Design is NOT "making it look pretty". In fact, thinking that this is what design is, is what leads many linux advocates to reject the needs of design.

Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.

Design is about usability and understanding the user and making an interface for the user that works well according to the users understanding, perspective and needs.

Design is an engineering discipline.

Seriously.

The Linux community hasn't had that, and I've seen many of them reject it. In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example. You see it all the time in lots of contexts. Look at the UIs of Linux... they didn't design one, they just copied windows.

Literal copying is about as far from design as you can get.

Sure, over the years, designers have taken cracks at bringing design to linux, including the work of Ubuntu, but it is rejected by the community.

Rejection of design is a cultural trait of the linux community. They reject it as a discipline, doesn't even see that it exists. (broadly speaking, of course.)

But as users, they have been influenced by it and many of them have switched to OS X because it is the best designed operating system.

And then they write long blog posts about how its wrong that OS X does things a certain way ... based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way.

Its ironic.

But its fine- if you want to run a linux desktop and don't value or care about design, more power to you. Won't ever fault someone for making that decision. We should all use the systems that we prefer.

But the culture that doesn't value design, and can't even see it as an engineering discipline, is going to have a great deal of trouble making something usable by the mainstream.

untog2• 14 years ago

Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. [...] Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.

Actually, I'd say the same of Windows, if not more so. I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down.

batista8• 14 years ago

>I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down.

I'm not sure. Windows has some overall design, but also has tons of design neglect.

One example: due to static compiling and linking, you often get programs (and lots of them) that still use Windows 98 like Open/Save File dialogs, instead of every program automatically getting the latest OS standard widget with late binding.

Or things like the Metro/Windows dichotomy in the latest version.

Windows always feels design by committee to me, and one where some manager can have idiotic ideas and no developer/designer can shoot it down.

Derbasti4• 14 years ago

I absolutely agree. I actually prefer the graphical shell of Windows 7 to the one of OSX Lion. But Windows does not have a Unix terminal.

And I think that is the main point here: Linux might lack design graphically, but the Linux command line is about the most beautiful thing out there. There is an abundance of elegance there is probably only rivaled by some Lisp machine.

Who knows, maybe, I will switch from OSX to Linux because of that at some point. It is certainly tempting.

tsahyt4• 14 years ago

I heard Windows PowerShell was decent. No first hand experience though

mbq• 14 years ago

There are nice terminals for Windows and you can install gnuwin32 & win-bash to get almost complete UNIX command-line experience without Cygwin burden.

gavinlynch• 14 years ago

Thank you. All too-often that entire line of thinking was minimized into simply "caring about eye-candy" and summarily dismissed. That irked me. It was like with the Linux desktop, you had to choose a side, instead of simply marrying what is great about GNU/Linux with what is great about a cohesive modern design and user experience.

wonderzombie• 14 years ago

At the risk of re-igniting that flame war, I posit that this is also a cathedral vs. bazaar issue. OS X is more or less centrally planned, by one company, Apple.

spiralpolitik2• 14 years ago

There is nothing stopping people sourcing the parts from the bazaar and using them to build a cathedral.

After all it's exactly what NeXT (and Apple) did.

tristan_juricek• 14 years ago

I would think so, but OS X has had several great or important applications within it's ecosystem, that break UI conventions.

Twitter clients used to be a playground for new UI concepts, none of which came from Apple. The Sparrow mail client was a good example of something probably more influenced by Tweetie than anything else.

Even Apple doesn't have a ton of consistency. iTunes continues to baffle me with random changes things like what resize does. The App Store app shifted the window management buttons.

So I don't buy that the OS X ecosystem is a "cathedral" at all, just a bazaar with better taste.

What's interesting is that I noticed the standards of design for Mac apps were significantly better than Windows apps when I "made the switch" several years ago; and these are for apps that were not coming out of Apple. I could never entirely figure out why; the ecosystem was just more attuned to details.

I posit that Apple was helped by having the right people excited long enough to get a great ecosystem going.

Linux didn't die because it's a bazaar; every modern app ecosystem (OS X, iOS, Android, the web) functions like a bazaar. Linux just made it absolutely painful to set up shop.

batista8• 14 years ago

>I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point. Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it.

I'm not sure he is missing it, even if he doesn't name it explicitly on the post.

For one, he was always pro good design (and trying to get the good design parts of other systems), but also, when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side, he is essentially lamenting the lack of a central design authority.

alberich• 14 years ago

> when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side

Maybe that is what really makes Linux struggle as a desktop. Fragmentation. It really sucks to have to install hundreds of libraries to run an app because you run Gnome but it was made for KDE. It's always unconfortable to change environments because it's not just different looks, it is different ways of doing things.

Some users and hackers do like choice, but most common users don't, because it is reduces the number of things to learn. You don't have to copy MS Win or OS X to be good, but consistency is good, and unless you select a subset of Linux desktop (and its related apps) you will be missing a more consistent user experience.

scrumper3• 14 years ago

This is pretty much spot on.

I believe that the lack of "strong-D" Design you refer to is because Linux's desktop is pretty much the ultimate committee-driven project. It's very democratic: great for preventing abuse, but rather bad when it comes to vision.

Most of us here know how difficult it is for one person in a company to drive an idea through without it being diluted; countless product companies have gone bust over the years because of committee-induced paralysis. It's much worse when you have a distributed group of volunteers who rarely, if ever, get to meet.

Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project.

mratzloff4• 14 years ago

The Rails community seems to manage.

SCdF• 14 years ago

So I enjoyed using Ubuntu w. Gnome2 more than any other OS/window manager that I've used, which includes Win 98-7, and Snow Leopard->ML.

I thought it was designed well. So what does that make me then?

"if you want to run a linux desktop and don't value or care about design"

But I do care about design, it just sounds like you and I like different kinds of design.

freyrs32• 14 years ago

> Design is about usability and understanding the user

Here's the point you're missing. The overwhelming majority Linux users don't give a flying hoot about the average user or mass adoption. They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. Linux succeeds and excels at this because it is precisely designed for that niche and curated by its end-users.

There are however people who do care about mass adoption, i.e. Canonical, "Linux Advocates". Generally they're either emotionally invested in Linux for some reason or they get a paycheck for their work. These people are the minority of Linux users.

Saying the culture doesn't care about design is absurd, it's the non-technical user we don't care about. Let's not conflate the two. Looking at a piece of software like XMonad or TMux it's hard to not appreciate the elegance in it's design. It's just different form of design that say iTunes or Photoshop.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

I actually ditched Linux as a primary OS as it didn't get out of my way, I had to spend way too much time burying into the system to get the results I needed. That can in a few cases be attributed to poor design, the thought process seems often to be "I get this piece of design fine, everyone else will".

lazyjones3• 14 years ago

> They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks.

That's precisely what Linux fails at. Most minor UI/desktop-related tasks that are hassle-free with Win7 or OSX take far too much time. Time that most people don't have and don't want to invest.

Example: doubleclicking on a .ttf file in the Xfce file manager (plain Debian Xfce) does nothing. Right-clicking offers various unrelated applications. Copying the file to an appropriate font directory does not "install" the font so it is visible to applications. No, I have to shut down all terminal windows and restart them to be able to use the font. Do you see an advantage in this? I don't want to spend time doing (or even researching) this when I could be developing instead (with the best console font known to mankind please!). Desktop Linux just lacks basic functionality and wastes people's time.

Sure, I was fine developing with fvwm2 or twm 15 years ago and did not mind using xfontsel and "xset fp rehash" back then, but today it feels like an unproductive waste of time when Win7 and OSX (esp. OSX) do not "get in my way" in any conceivable meaning of the phrase when I just want to develop stuff in an environment that I can adjust to my liking.

If you think Linux on the desktop hasn't failed for and abandoned by most technical users, you're delusional.

rotskoff• 14 years ago

Agreed. I do a lot of scientific computing, and many of my tools simply don't exist in OSX compatible builds. While the majority of the work that I do is remote, on servers running Linux, tools like Xmonad and aptitude are basically indispensable for me.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

The last time Linux on the desktop looked and felt good was when Enlightenment DR16 came out. When I installed Ubuntu last year I felt like I was using something for children.

misnome2• 14 years ago

I completely endorse this, and wish I could hit the "up" arrow hundreds of times over. It's also refreshing to see a comment like this that isn't immediately shot down. It's hard to overstate the importance of actually having things written by someone with at least a sense of what it takes to make an intuitive and pleasant-to-use interface.

The problem that linux seems to have, is that everyone wants everything and so everything gets thrown in with configuration options to change absolutely everything.

I don't think, however, that lack of good design - or even seeing the need for it, is isolated to linux - in a very real sense, I think most of the population is usually oblivious to it - they just know whether something is easy to use or not.

rufugee• 14 years ago

I'm sorry..I strongly disagree. You have me on the video support...OS X does a much better job there. You even have a point on audio drivers...they can be a pain at times. But design? Gnome 3 and Unity to me are FAR superior to OS X in terms of UI experience. YMMV of course. I bought a Macbook, gave it a fair shot, and it ended up being a dust collector simply because the desktop experience was painful compared to Ubuntu or Fedora (well, that and the fact that I got maybe three hours of the supposed 7 hour battery, and the fact that I can't upgrade it past 4 GB of ram o.O). Perhaps I'm set in my ways, but the absolute insanse window switching behavior, the piss poor excuse for a terminal, the fact that apps continue to run in the background after you close the last window, and the general SLOW performance made my $2500 investment one I'll regret for very long time. Switching to a Lenovo running Ubuntu was a far better (and MUCH cheaper) experience.

thornofmight• 14 years ago

"Perhaps I'm set in my ways" -- I think this pretty much says it all.

sjs3• 14 years ago

It sounds like you expected a clone of Windows and were predictably disappointed.

> I got maybe three hours of the supposed 7 hour battery

You should have taken it back. Seriously.

> Perhaps I'm set in my ways

You hit the nail on the head here. There's nothing wrong with that but most of your complaints amount to "this is not what I am used to".

> the absolute insanse window switching behavior

On Windows and Linux I cannot switch to an app bringing all windows to the front, I have to do it one at a time. Anyone used to one behaviour could claim the other is insane just because it is different.

> the piss poor excuse for a terminal

What on earth are you talking about? The Terminal app? Get iTerm2 or something else then. If you don't like gnome-terminal you don't whine about it, you just install urxvt or whatever.

> the fact that apps continue to run in the background after you close the last window

The fact that you have to have visible windows for an app to run on Windows and Linux could be perceived the same way. What if I wanted to switch back and use that app again?

pswenson2• 14 years ago

what's wrong with the terminal?

hit cmd-q to close an app.

no idea what you mean by insane window switching behavior.

you gave no examples of how Ubuntu/Fedora is better to rebut on UX. care to share some?

mindslight2• 14 years ago

You're conflating design with the marketing and support that convinces people to open themselves to learning a new system design.

Linux copied the Windows interaction paradigm (and everything else too - fvwm95/afterstep/olvwm/cde/etc) because the goal wasn't to create a new method of interaction and suffer from two adoption battles, but to appease people complaining about how Linux wasn't intuitive (after they'd already gone through one UI learning curve). Ubuntu will never ship with a default tiling window manager (certainly not the "best" design, but it's a novel design).

> based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way.

If a user desires for their operating environment to function in some way, they should be able to develop that customization, full stop. I use 24 virtual desktops with windows generally maximized, switching between them with [Alt+]F1-F12. Is this good design, especially for the average user? Hell no. But it fits my desires and is quick enough that I can't understand why people desire multiple monitors. The idea of someone saying my setup is 'wrong' from a design perspective is laughable, and only serves to illustrate the bounds of the field.

> This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them.

Sigh, back to this again? Nope, what's being rejected is the idea that engineering an implementation of a concept should get you the rights to the entire concept through a "concept plus computer" patent. Where's the novel signal processing algorithms to clean up capacitive touchscreen input? Instead, we get descriptions of straightforward processes in terms of vague programming idioms.

nirvana9• 14 years ago

>You're conflating design with the marketing and support

No, I'm talking about knowing that users are faster and more efficient when the menu bar is at the top of the screen rather than attached to windows. Design makes people more efficient. Undesigned things, or poorly designed things don't care about these factors, or do them half assed.

> The idea of someone saying my setup is 'wrong' from a design perspective is laughable,

This is because you reject design. You claim it is marketing. You reject it as an engineering discipline. That's my point.

>Where's the novel signal processing algorithms to clean up capacitive touchscreen input?

Patented, and you guys claim that the patent is disproven by the existence of "touch screens" in the past that worked by pushing one layer in enough that two wires touched closing a circuit.

> should get you the rights to the entire concept

The only people claiming that the rights to an entire concept are involved are those who are trying to claim that these are bogus patents... which is either profoundly ignorant or completely dishonest.

zerostar073• 14 years ago

I would bet if you ask people what they don't like in their linux setup design would come last. The main issues i hear seem to be compatibility and missing obvious functionality (oh clipboard). In fact , most desktops are so configurable you can actually make them look great.

If you want to make a system popular, start with the people who are actually using it. Linux is used by technical people, so why are they putting us off with silly animations and glossy layers that will break in the next upgrade? OSX is not easier to use either, it has many nonintuitive quirks but they stick to their design and improve it instead of overhauling it.

nirvana9• 14 years ago

Right, because the people who use linux don't understand what design is.

Look at the responses to my comments-- almost all of them defending linux make comments that show they don't understand what design is. They think it is how it looks.

>OSX is not easier to use either, it has many nonintuitive quirks but they stick to their design and improve it instead of overhauling it.

I suspect you simply haven't used OS X much. It was designed correctly and is intuitive. The reason you think its "unintuitive" is likely you've been trained to use a broken system that was not designed correctly and thus what feels "natural" to you-- which is actually learned behavior-- feels wrong on OS X.

Meanwhile, Apple has continued to improve their design, and in the rare case where they got something wrong, they fix it -- for instance, they reversed the direction of scrolling to make it more intuitive... move the finger up on the trackpad and the page moves up on the screen.

They don't need to overhaul it because they have been improving it for 3 decades....

They've done such a good job at it, that you think they havent' done anything!

JoeAltmaier2• 14 years ago

Maturity is the driving factor. Linux has a lot of immature attempts at a desktop. OS X has one but not a lot of time or manpower spent perfecting it (XCode sucks, Core APIs are weak/incomplete, OS support lacking for fundamentals).

Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools.

derleth3• 14 years ago

> Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools.

And yet it still BSODs on me too often to be actually usable.

derleth3• 14 years ago

> Apple's work looks pretty

To you. Not to everyone.

> Look at the UIs of Linux... they didn't design one, they just copied windows.

Yes, because ratpoison looks just like Windows 95. Just like.

lallysingh• 14 years ago

Linux never got usable enough for design to matter.

The process of getting linux to boot, and then run usably -- with wireless networking and sound -- was too hard. If you got as far as being able to actually get work done, you claimed victory and used your machine as a continuing monument to your success.

In 2001, when I switched from Linux to OS X, the mere fact that I could go buy a machine, turn it on, open a terminal, and type 'ls' was enough to make me switch. It still took hours to get a portable machine working reliably with linux -- and it took 2 machines if you wanted wifi to work at the time. One to get wifi working, and another to look up the documentation and download whatever you needed.

Even as I'm back on Linux, I don't think of buying anything other than a ThinkPad, for the fear of returning to that worthlessly hellish place.

joe_the_user3• 14 years ago

Design is important, really. However I find it disturbing that such a self-righteous rant has crawled up the rankings in this thread...

Design is an engineering discipline.

Design isn't engineering discipline. It is certainly a discipline and deserves respect but the reason software engineers fail at design so often is that it is different discipline with a different mindset.

Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.

Here I simply disagree. Apple's look pretty because they are designed well. I don't find that they function well in terms of usability - that I have to use the mouse for nearly everything is a usability nightmare. The way they've hidden file system is also a usability nightmare. But enough prettiness and responsiveness, Apple can still feel enjoyable to use without being more useful or even as useful as Linux or Windows.

In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example.

Wow! Holy leaps of logic, here we've got the disingenuous conflation part of the rant. For the sake of argument, the particular way iOS or OSX is designed might indeed be a work of genius but the patents Apple is hurling Samsung are not for that unique approach but rather are a disgusting grab of the right for anything vaguely like iOS or OSX, which would include really badly designed things.

Jeesh...

agentultra2• 14 years ago

This mythical user must also be the bottom of the barrel. I don't think the Apple designers ever consulted me when they designed OS X. Who were they designing for? Everyone? How can they possibly conceive of what every user wants but me?

This "design," argument is a floppy, magical, hand-waving fish. I know what design is. I design software all the damn time. I am sensitive to interface and expectation. I want as little friction between my tool and the thing I am creating.

In that regard, as a software developer, OS X is a piss-poor experience. Using emacs on the thing is ripping years out of the cartilage in my fingers due to the masochistic meta-key layout that I've had to accustom myself to. It's terrible.

The eco-system of package management systems on OS X is infuriatingly shoddy. Between macports, homebrew, and fink -- none of them can seem to get it quite right. They have to compete with the user-land eco-system that Apple ships. Half the packages are broken. And I can never bloody well find any configuration files anywhere once it has installed something. It's ludicrous how much time I've wasted trying to figure out how in the seven hells you're supposed to get MySQL or Postgres to run on the damn thing (there are half a dozen ways at least by my reckoning and google's).

Their /design/ isn't the best design there is. They are designing for someone, but it surely isn't me. If you happen to fall into their mold then I'm sure you're as happy as a clam but don't think the entire world of people are just like you.

nathanb2• 14 years ago

I think the article does a great job of explaining the problem, but doesn't explore the ramifications far enough.

Let me give an example: a few months ago, a new version of Skype was announced for Linux. I was excited, since I used Skype 2 for Linux but then it stopped working for me and I couldn't be bothered to fix it. But if you go to the Skype for Linux download page, you will find a few downloads for specific distros, then some tar files which are, statistically speaking, guaranteed not to work.

Long story short(er), I still don't have Skype working on my desktop, because my distro isn't in the list, I can't get one of the other distro packages to work on my system, and of course none of the statically-linked binaries work.

(I could almost certainly get it to work if I was willing to install 32-bit binary support. But it's 2012. If your app requires me to install 32-bit binary support, I don't need your app that badly.)

Steam for Linux, recently announced by Valve, will run into the same problem. I suspect it will actually be Steam for Ubuntu and Debian, possibly with a version for Fedora, assuming you have the proper libraries installed and are using the right sound daemon and graphical environment.

But if big-name software comes out for Linux, hopefully distros will get in line. Do you want to be that distro which can't run Steam? Doesn't really matter if you think that OSSv4 is superior to ALSA and PulseAudio...if Steam requires the latter, you will toe the freaking line, or disappear into obsolescence.

jvm2• 14 years ago

What distro are you running? It must be sort of out there that you're having such difficulties. I'm running Arch which is not widely supported, but user submitted build recipes (think brew on OSX but with way more options) work 95% of the time (e.g., no trouble with Skype, Spotify, etc.)

nathanb2• 14 years ago

I'm running Arch as well, though I don't use the AUR. Stuff tends to crustify too much and too easily in there.

xradionut• 14 years ago

Back in the day, before setting up Linux was a breeze, I got tired of mucking around with configuration and such just to get a usable Unixy desktop and environment. So the day OS X Jaguar was released I purchased a Mac.

Now if I need to fire up Linux for a project, (usually for a microcontoller or such hardware that needs C), a virtual machine or appliance that I can launch from Windows 7 does the job. This is also how I keep Windows 8 contained, safely in a virtualized box that I don't have to deal with it, unless I need too... ;)

pfedor• 14 years ago

Yeah, right, because OSX cares so much about backwards compatibility. They care so much that they actively go out and intentionally break APIs, like say when CGDisplayBaseAddress() stopped working in Lion, breaking fullscreen in every single SDL-based game (and by "breaking", I mean the game will actually crash when attempting to enter fullscreen.)

agumonkey2• 14 years ago

Does anyone feels that linux and desktop are at odds with each other? Don't we like small components to bind together using pipes ? Desktop apps are the reverse, big black boxes that barely communicate with anything (I'll admit I don't know dbus)

nnnnnnnn• 14 years ago

An interesting observation is that tablets are becoming the new desktop and in that space linux, through android, is becoming a dominant player. In a way, the linux desktop is finally here and it's winning against both Microsoft and Apple put together.

All of the article's criticism of mainstream workstation distributions is accurate, of course. But it's important to note that those represent nowhere near the sum total of the linux user experience these days.

eropple• 14 years ago

In no way is that "the Linux desktop" "winning" at anything, because (at long last) the navel-gazing of the Linux community has been pushed aside in favor of one group saying "this is how it will be" (and then some OEMs scribbling a little on the walls, but not much).

Android is only "Linux" when it's convenient for Linux advocates, but it's never "the Linux desktop".

wheels3• 14 years ago

I'd agree with a whole lot of what's said here, but also add:

One of the big thrusts of the Linux desktop wasn't simply dominance itself, but for it to simply not matter what you were using on the desktop. The Linux desktop fought to produce the first cracks in Windows hegemony a decade ago, but the final push came from the rebirth of Apple and the rise of the smartphone.

Today people happily do their normal productive or recreational tasks from a variety of computing environments: Windows, GNOME, Unity, KDE, OS X, iOS, Android, et al. Probably the majority of (Western) web users use at least one non-Windows internet device.

During the golden age of the Linux desktop everything seemed predicated on reaching exactly this point -- that you wouldn't need Windows, and then, by virtue of competing on a leveler playing field, the Linux desktop would ascend.

But the Linux desktops didn't "scate where the puck is going" -- or their attempts at such missed the mark. By the time we reached the era post-Windows dominance, the Linux desktops weren't positioned to take advantage of the new playing field dynamics. The rest of the industry isn't even all that concerned with the desktop wars anymore. It stopped mattering very much -- and ironically, that came around to bite the projects in the ass that first got the ball rolling.

spiralpolitik2• 14 years ago

Largely the same issues that killed UNIX as a viable desktop alternative are the same issues that are killing Linux as a viable desktop alternative: Fragmentation and lack of consistency across different distributions.

This is compounded by most distributions having a lack of centralized vision on how everything fits together. They are merely a collections of individual parts rather than a collection of parts that are designed to work well together and they lack the polish as a result. While the lack of centralized vision was fine for SunOS circa 1992, it simply doesn't cut the mustard in 2012.

Ubuntu seems to be trying to push such a centralized vision with Unity, but I fear they lack the clinical editorial willpower to make the hard decisions required to see it through to its ultimate conclusion.

patrickaljord2• 14 years ago

What killed it is that it didn't have a huge and multi-billion dollar company betting on it (on the desktop) like Microsoft and Apple had, even Apple with its billions is still around 5% market share worldwide so having 1% is still a great accomplishment when you think that it had no support from huge corporations.

Now take the mobile world for example, Linux on mobile had been around for a decade but it never really took off until a huge company like Google decided to throw its billions of dollars and its great ingenuity at the task. Getting an OS to be popular is just incredibly difficult and it needs way more than just good driver support and/or good software. It needs marketing, talking to manufacturers, dedicated and well payed devs, designers, UI and UX professionals, sales, R&D and so on and so forth.

Focusing on the technicality of drivers and API is typical of us devs, but it has nothing to do with why Linux didn't take off on the desktop, sure Linux did fail because it couldn't do any or some of that well, but why couldn't it do any or some of that? Because it didn't have a huge and focused company pushing for it. How many popular desktop OS are there? Only 2, I think that's enough to show that it's incredibly hard to get into that market and that only a huge company can make it. Also, let's not forget that Windows was good enough and there was not much Linux could do to attract users, in fact this is still true and probably why even OS X is still at 5%: Windows is good enough and it's the de facto standard used by +90%. Having the best UI and UX in the world like OS X doesn't help that much either.

alpeb2• 14 years ago

Redhat and Canonical are big companies that did bet the house on Linux. A few years back I was confident Canonical was what desktop Linux needed to get its shit together. And today I'm typing this on a Zareason laptop that's supposed to provide 1st class support for Ubuntu (even has an Ubuntu key), and the mic doesn't work, Fn keys don't work, youtube videos appear in monochrome blue, and it likes to boot itself up randomly from time until the battery drains...

mekoka• 14 years ago

You're one user. I've been using the same System76 laptop at work and at home for 3+ years. Still works flawlessly (fn keys and all).

patrickaljord2• 14 years ago

> Redhat and Canonical are big companies that did bet the house on Linux.

No, RedHat bet the house on server Linux, never on desktop. Canonical did bet the house on desktop linux bit it's a tiny company that has yet to turn a profit (or a significant one).

coffeeaddicted2• 14 years ago

To fix the blue youtube videos: Create a file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and put the following 2 lines in it:

EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1

OverrideGPUValidation=true

Some people will probably tell you all kind of reasons why this is bad, but it works.

jcfrei• 14 years ago

in a q&a round at aalto university in finland linus adressed the question why linux never took off on the desktop: the lack of being a pre-installed os. he mentions that without preinstalled operating systems there's now way to gain a significant market share in the desktop segment.

the whole talk by itself is very recommendable: http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=23m45s

aj700• 14 years ago

1. If this is true, and it seems right to me, maybe some of the massive effort put into designing new GUIs for Gnome/KDE/etc should be put into hacking the look and feel of the OS X desktop?

Unsanity ShapeShifter hasn't worked since OS 10.4

and I know about

http://magnifique.en.softonic.com/mac - 10.5 only

http://www.marsthemes.com/crystalclear/ 10.7 support claimed, but it's not very radical. I'd love xfce's window look controls or a Stardock windowblinds.

I know Apple don't want anybody to do this. I know they will deliberately introduce changes that break hacks. But as I said, how can it be more effort than Linux?

-----

2. To try to prevent OSx86 hacks, DSMOS.kext uses crypto to prevent the system running essential UI elements like Finder, SystemUIServer, etc. Can't we build our own versions of those parts? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectur...

-----

3. Is this true?:

Linux desktop - dying, dead

Windows 8 - trying so hard to copy OSX/iPad/Springboard/Launchpad that everybody is gonna hate its TWO UI's! (dying?)

Mac - winning, won (by default?)

brainsqueezer• 14 years ago

I both use KDE and OS X. Some details are different but the ideas behind are mostly the same.

tzs• 14 years ago

Ingo Molnar has some interesting thoughts on this subject: https://plus.google.com/109922199462633401279/posts/HgdeFDfR...

aartur• 14 years ago

> In my opinion, the problem with Linux on the Desktop is rooted in the developer culture that was created around it.

This developer culture DEFINES Linux. A fruit is either an apple or an orange. I couldn't have an OS with wonderful package management, developer tools, endless configurability AND a desktop Miguel de Icaza dreams of.

j-kidd2• 14 years ago

But I can have an OS with wonderful package management, developer tools, endless configurability AND a desktop Aaron Seigo and friends created.

fosap• 14 years ago

The desktop wouldn't be configurable. Or not much more than Channing the background image.

gvb• 14 years ago

I'm typing this on my work laptop running a linux desktop (Ubuntu FWIIW). Our engineering servers at work run linux and, as a convenience, have the desktop installed. As many of my co-workers run linux desktops as OS-X desktops (and the engineers running OS-X or Windows have VMs running linux... desktops).

When I go home, I'll be using my personal laptop running linux. My wife and kids run a netbook with a linux desktop.

The linux desktop may be dead to Miguel, but it works just fine for me, a lot of other people in my life, and a lot of people in the world.

<shrug>

diminish3• 14 years ago

Optimistically speaking, i moved from mac/pc to linux 9 years ago on desktop dragging dozens of people with me. My experience so far is everything gets better year by year. Yes, Apple took away some shine out of Linux since a couple of years, but I see this as a gain, because those people will be unixified and will be better adapted to Linux setups in the next decades.

I never consider OS/X despite some fanciness; it is limited in choice of hardware, it is totally dead on server side, its unix-ness was/is crappy, despite being developed by the (the most valuable) cathedral in the world. its support for open source dev tools is miserable, despite some recent improvements, its game support is miserable (compared to windows) and it goes worse in openness day by day. Just a crowd of ordinary users, waiting to be sold trivial app store apps maybe an appeal to some developers, but OS/X appears like a toy casio personal organizer OS from 80s to the DIY/Linux developer desktop users.

imperialWicket2• 14 years ago

This flame ignites periodically, and I'm always left wondering when exactly the Linux desktop died? Some have noted similar aspects already, but here's my 2 cents:

I'm on Linux now (GNU/Linux, maybe lump BSD in there too, I'm using "Linux"). I know plenty of users on Linux. I know plenty of users of Windows and OS X who run virtual Linux Desktop distributions for testing/development/security. I'm sure some of HN are running Linux.

Does Linux have the potential to enter the market as a third core option for desktop usage - not really. But why does it matter?

The problem with Linux is that there are too many choices. People who like technical choices and options trend toward Linux (needs citation).

John Q. ComputerUser isn't going to use Linux unless his geeky son or nephew installs it for him AND provides support. He can't get support anywhere else - because there are too many possibilities for it to be fiscally effective.

If/When something gets confusing or broken on Windows/OS X, you call JoeBob's SuperDuperPuter, and say it's broken. JoeBob asks, "What Windows version?" While he might need to poke and pry a bit to get the user to tell him he's running Millenium edition, once he gets that data, it's a pretty straightforward troubleshooting effort and fix.

If you call some mythical Computer Service group that actually supports Linux, and say your machine is broken, they would need to know a LOT more about your system just to figure what they need to do to start.

Distribution? Parent Distribution? Shell? Window Manager? Hardware? ...

I find generic computer service companies to be extremely expensive. To be able to provide even basic service for Linux in general, your techs need to be very familiar with more operating systems (emerge, apt, yum, zypper, pacman), and more core applications. Each service effort inherently takes longer. These factors pile up and everything becomes necessarily more expensive. It's downright impractical to support Linux generically. The support costs for one or two issues on Linux would far outweigh the cost of an upfront OS license and cheaper support for the end user.

Linux has (and will likely continue to have) a comfortable hold on the technically-capable DIY market. It may not be on track to step beyond that market in the desktop arena - but that certainly doesn't indicate it's time for a toe tag.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

As someone who previously worked doing Windows support, actual "troubleshooting" on desktops is pretty rare apart from a handful of common cases.

Most of the time all that happens is virus scan -> backup -> reinstall.

imperialWicket2• 14 years ago

Exactly - that's much more succinct than I put it. Comparatively, it's not often that a Linux issue is solved by those same steps (or any given set of steps - there's just more variation).

antihero5• 14 years ago

It's still very much alive if you don't give a shit about normal UX conventions or popularity, and there are hundreds of thousands of excellent 3rd party applications that run perfectly.

It's getting really irritating when someone who's jumped ship to OSX declares it "dead" because they have a shiny iDevice and an expensive laptop.

zerostar073• 14 years ago

Could it be that the main issue is the lack of leadership? We don't have many linux kernels yet we have dozens of incompatible desktop configurations and the list keeps growing. I think if there was a clear winner in the desktop wars, desktop apps would be of much higher quality.

And also the horrible aping of other environments and stupid UI eyecandy. Given that the majority of linux users and developers are technical, that's surprising.

cletus• 14 years ago

This is the money quote:

> The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use.

Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and philosophy. Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need.

I like OSX. Out of the box it's fine. That's what I want. I don't want to dick around with Windows managers or the like. Some do and that's fine but almost no one really does.

Whereas Windows and OSX can (and do) dictate a topdown vision for the desktop experience, Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows? Whatever the case, this really matters for a desktop experience.

I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. Or I guess I should say it moved to the center of the two screens so is unusable. I have no idea why. It could be an update gone awry. It could be corp-specific modifications. It could be anything. But the point is: I don't care what the problem is, I just want it to work. In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work. In many others too.

I can't describe to you how much torture it always seems to be to get anything desktop-related to work on Linux. I loathe it with a passion. I've long since given up any idea that Linux will ever get anywhere on the desktop. It won't. That takes a topdown approach, the kind that anarchies can't solve.

_delirium• 14 years ago

Among non-ultra-geeky Linux users I know (mostly part-time users), "Linux" does seem to be reasonably standardized as far as desktop components go, because by "Linux" they mean "Ubuntu". It's possible the Ubuntu desktop dominance came a bit too late, though, and still isn't entirely complete.

My own experiences aren't great with Windows, though they're smoother on OSX than Linux. The problem I have with Windows is that stuff does break, but it's inscrutable how and what to do about it, whereas at least on Linux there is usually some way to do something about it if you're tech-savvy. If anything gets borked in Windows, it's wipe-and-reinstall time; back when I used it full-time I probably did that once a year on average.

I find OSX to be poor for package management, though. I've gotten so tired of headaches with installing and managing updates of stuff, and badly interacting upgrades of the OS and separately installed packages and system versions of python/ruby/etc., that I do most of my dev work in Debian in VirtualBox now. In that aspect, it's Debian that's centrally managed with real release-engineering and integration tests, whereas OSX is an anarchic mess of 3rd-party software that nobody's responsible for integrating and testing.

theatrus2• 14 years ago

There was always a dominate player it seems. Most people used RedHat (before Fedora) over Ubuntu.

justincormack2• 14 years ago

Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed. Linux (Ubuntu in my case) and OSX just work sanely mostly, but OSX is a horrible dev environment, so I moved back to Linux.

hollerith5• 14 years ago

>badly interacting upgrades of the OS and separately installed packages and system versions of python/ruby/etc., that I do most of my dev work in Debian in VirtualBox now

Well, sure, but (unless I am mistaken) that is no longer on the topic of the Linux desktop.

lazerwalker• 14 years ago

I really haven't found that that be the case at all with package management on OS X. Homebrew is almost always a joy to use, and on the few occasions I've had build errors using it I've found the Homebrew community connected to the official GitHub repo issues page to be one of the most responsive, friendly, and genuinely helpful open-source communities I've ever encountered. I agree things were a lot rockier back when the only package management choices were MacPorts or Fink, but Homebrew's a monumental step forward.

I can't say I've really touched Python at all, but as a relative newcomer to the Ruby world I found getting RVM set up and functioning properly on my Mac to be a complete non-issue.

roblev• 14 years ago

One significant difference between linux and windows/mac is the planning around features and the outreach. I work for a large organisation. The number of times a linux group has come round to our office to discuss what features are up-and-coming, or should be developed? None. The number of times Microsoft staff have done the same? Some.

Now I don't really expect linux volunteers to do this, but equally I don't really expect any linux distro to provide a coherent business desktop because they are not talking to their "customers" in the same way that their competition is. And the business desktop is a large market, if a bit unsexy.

wheels3• 14 years ago

> I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. [...] In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work.

Just because it's never happened to you on OS X or Windows doesn't mean it doesn't happen. OS X 10.6.7 broke the output on my 13" Macbook for either of the two external displays I own. Both worked fine previously, when booted from the install CDs, or from Linux on the same machine.

Plugging in my Firewire audio interface on the same machine spun the CPU up to 100% and kept it pegged there. A lot of good having a nice mic pre-amp does when you get a high pitched fan whir added gratis to all of your recordings.

It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters. In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all. And with Linux you have some hope of finding a solution, whereas for OS X you're pretty much hosed.

diminish3• 14 years ago

To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see what I mean..

sjs3• 14 years ago

> It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters.

Straw man. Nobody said OS X was perfect.

> In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all.

I used Linux on my desktop for several years and have now used Macs as well for several years. I won't say this is bullshit because I don't think you are lying about your experience, but I think you are extrapolating way too far.

> And with Linux you have some hope of finding a solution, whereas for OS X you're pretty much hosed.

Forums and mailing lists are "hope for a solution" while the genius bar is "pretty much hosed"? How on earth did you arrive at this conclusion? That just doesn't seem reasonable.

subhro• 14 years ago

See, according to me, you don't get the point. Things DO break in OSX as well. Just that its a bit less. Apple has the liberty to control both the (primary) hardware as well as the OS which runs on it. Therefore it has an edge over Linux in terms of compatibility.

Having said that, barring a few "recent" desktop distros, as they call it, like Ubuntu, Linux has always been a bottom up approach. You need to install the base, then the userland and so on. For someone who is looking for ultimate customization, Linux makes sense.

But when I am running a notebook, I seriously want everything to work, albeit at a lower performance/customizability.

I always run either FreeBSD or Gentoo on my servers. But my notebook/desktop continues to be OSX.

lttlrck5• 14 years ago

I had a similar 100% CPU issue with an ExpressCard on a MBP... it was even labelled Mac Compatible.

joe_the_user3• 14 years ago

Two years ago, when it was experiencing a considerable upswing in use, Canonical was in the position to at least partly dictate some standards. And an Ubuntu install also would "just work" (and still does in my experience).

Unfortunately, I think they kind of snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by attempting to go to a "modern user interface". The big problem is that neither designers nor programmers really enjoy incremental progress (designers want a big canvas and programmers want clean code). Gnome2 really was/is good enough for most people use easily AND it was/is simple and powerful not to stand in the way of the existing users (programmers, Linux Geeks, Linus himself,etc). Whether Unity and Gnome 3 work for average people or not, they certainly alienated the existing Linux desktop users and that is an important segment.

jebblue• 14 years ago

Yes, yes that' is it right there, Unity and Gnome 3 both are terrible compared to Gnome 2. I wish the Gnome 2 team would re-materialize and come out with Gnome 4, just Gnome 2 with a higher version number.

squidsoup• 14 years ago

I'm experiencing similar frustrations after having returned to using Linux (Ubuntu) at work recently. I've spent a fair bit of time having to customise a window manager (awesomewm), just to get a somewhat usable desktop environment. I work at a university with centralised mail handled by Exchange and struggle every day with flaky, buggy mail clients Evolution/DavMail+Thunderbird. Under linux my macbook air only sleeps reliably half the time, and occasionally I find that unbeknownst to me some process has woken the laptop (with lid closed) in my bag, with the battery near critical. The latest apt-get update broke my sound. Empathy hangs for a good 2-3 minutes on load, but eventually recovers. Something mysteriously reverts my xmodmap keybinds mid-session. Other little things such as LightDM not starting until I hit enter at a black screen post boot contribute to an overall experience that feels frustratingly incomplete.

I know that many of these are trivial complaints and that all of these things can be fixed. I no longer want to have to do this however. In my teens I loved tinkering with the linux desktop, designing 'awesome' Enlightenment themes and enjoyed tracking down and fixing these little problems. Now in my 30s I really just want the OS to get out of the way and let me code. OSX does this well, linux really does not. I say this with a fair bit of sadness as there are many things that I like about linux a great deal - the cli, the excellent package management, the ethos behind the OS and the open source community.

nvarsj2• 14 years ago

I had nothing but trouble w/ Ubuntu when trying to use anything non-Canonical tested. I suggest using something like Archlinux where you're not forced to stick with buggy software for a 6 month cycle.

And I've been really, really impressed with the latest Thunderbird/Lightning releases (14-15). Haven't had any problems at all, like I had with the older releases from several years ago. I used to be a Mail guy, but Thunderbird blows it out of the water these days.

alexchamberlain2• 14 years ago

Nvidia card?

agumonkey2• 14 years ago

Maybe by designing a set of base interfaces, with extension (ala opengl, w3c)

mbell5• 14 years ago

Coming from the perspective of a developer:

I used linux as my only OS sans VMs from roughly 2008 till 2011. I finally gave up because it handled monitor switching, multiple monitors so poorly (using Nvidia GPU). I begrudgingly switched to windows because I owned the hardware already, and it was the only option. Windows sucks, the lack of a usable shell kills it, full stop, nothing else windows does matters. And no, cygwin doesn't cut it.

Fast forward to now, the only computer I manually interact with is a macbook air. The old desktop hardware became my file server(running FreeNAS) despite being many times faster than the air.

Through this experience I realized what I actually cared about...I run four 'apps' 99% of the time: chrome, sublime text(everything non java), iTerm and IntelliJ(java). That is really all I care about, anything that prevents interacting with these applications as quickly as possible fails. The support stuff, git, a database, a message queue, etc. Runs anywhere. I _rarely_ interact with the 'OS' in ui terms. I rarely use finder, I only use the dock to empty the trash (launch everything through Quicksilver). At the end of the day I love OS X not because it has 'awesome' UI paradigms, but because of all the options I see it the least, it may as well not be there.

OS X is the only OS i've ever used that I just don't think or care about. It sleeps, it wakes up, it deals with new screens, it does all the OS shit so I can just use the apps i want to. Thats why I am hooked using it as a dev machine.

sirmarksalot• 14 years ago

As for the "lack of a usable shell" part, have you looked at Powershell? It comes bundled with Windows, and has a lot of the features that are missing from the command prompt.

It does have some rough edges that may cause you to dismiss it as unusable, but it offers tab completion, colored text output, and a real scripting environment (not DOS batch scripting). Every serious Windows developer I've talked to nowadays uses it exclusively.

madprops• 14 years ago

I usually have firefox, a terminal, sublime text, ftp client, irc client and a file browser open. All I use is openbox for a windows manager, tint2 for a task manager and dmenu for a launcher. I very rarely have problems with my linux computer.

fuzzix• 14 years ago

"using Nvidia GPU"

Yup, still no xrandr support which makes any on-the-fly monitor config changes very difficult or impossible.

Sometimes, if you use twinview and nvidia-settings from the start and if the moon is aligned just right, you can dynamically configure monitors / video ports. Sometimes.

ironcladlou• 14 years ago

Your needs are strikingly similar to mine, down to the choice of apps and launcher. What I noticed after a week of full time Gnome3 Shell use was that it was similar enough to OSX (but with the niceties of a proper window manager) that I'm finding myself hooked. Makes my ThinkPad a reasonable facsimile of my MacBook from a keyboard-nav centric, "keep out of my way" perspective. I love OSX on the MacBook, but hate it when docked. Gnome Shell gives me a reasonable OSX-like Linux experience on the laptop, but with a great docked experience to match.

Can't speak to the seamless suspend/resume support, etc on your choice of hardware, and I acknowledge that if that kind of stuff doesn't work, it'd be a dealbreaker.

Just saying, Gnome3/Shell is at least worth checking out if you like the OSX workflow and use just a few apps day to day for development.

Thanks for the writeup of your experience!

rjbond3rd• 14 years ago

> I just want it to work...

We must be doing different things, because I've been on Linux desktops with zero-to-minimal effort since 1999.

einhverfr• 14 years ago

If that was the only problem though we would have expected FreeBSD to overtake the desktop. the larger issue, unfortunately is just that people are afraid to switch from Windows to anything other than Mac. Android is helping there, but it will take time.

Never underestimate the fear of the consumer that they will break stuff on a computer they are unfamiliar with. The fact that Windows is actually getting better may actually be a good thing regarding other possibilities of desktop software.

canadiancreed• 14 years ago

As a FreeBSD user since 2007 I found the desktop options to be just as clunky as Linux if not more so. It was the only part of the OS that didn't just work when I used it in my travels, so it's stayed as server duty. If there was an open source windows managing system that was on par with Mac's version...whole new world. (There might be, I havnet' looked since 2009 so)

espeed• 14 years ago

I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. Or I guess I should say it moved to the center of the two screens so is unusable. I have no idea why.

Is this in Chrome on sites like YouTube? If so, I believe it started with Chrome 20 when Chrome switched to its native Flash driver (see http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/Mi-YgjN...). This happened to me too, and I still haven't resolved it.

dumb1232• 14 years ago

"Every engineer I know... They also have a distorted view..."

cletus you are one of the few people with enough karma to always grab and hold a top post spot who _actually says things worth saying_.

Right on.

As for "someone with the gravitas", never say never. But they might not use the Linux kernel and GNU as their "clay" or "base material".

I've thought about such a person and one thing I believe is that they would be foolish to try to "sell" such a simple to use system to Linux users (and many of those users would, alas, include engineers like the ones you describe: set in their ways) nor to those engineers who worship Apple, with their belief in some mythical "user experience" [translation: _their_ experience]).

In my opinion, a person with the gravitas would also need to the vision to see that the target user base who is open to change lies elsewhere. The users need to come with an open mind.

I don't know what will happen to Linux. But the binary blob problem keeps getting worse. Too many Linux users are happy to accept the blobs. They don't want to read source code. They just want working devices. That's understandable. But in my opinion it's not a small problem in the long run.

Apple, on the other hand, is flat out abusing its power. Not only over end users but over developers (who are of course just a particular class of end users). They are standing in the way of people's general education about computers. Keeping everyone dumb may give some developers a warm, fuzzy feeling as they watch their bank accounts grow to new levels, or dream of it, but I do think Apple's conduct, seen for what it is, will trickle down past just us fanatics on HN and elsewhere on the web. People are going to figure it out.

If I was a monopoly-lover, if I loved to see "winner-take-all" in IT, as if that improved the lot for any of us (I am not and it doesn't), then my money would go on Amazon. They seem to be making the fewest mistakes. Great things will come from AWS. It is the democratisation of hosting - a sharing of power, risks be damned (unfortunately, it may also mean the monopolisation of hosting as we've never before seen). In "Dropbox", we are only seeing the very beginning of what's possible.

In my view, Apple is a "disabler" (everything they introduce is restricted) while Amazon is an "enabler" (generally: they open many more doors than they close).

wmwong• 14 years ago

Agreed that things should just work. In case you're still looking for a fix for the dual monitor full screen issue. I had the same problem on Chrome. It was when they introduced built-in flash. You need to disable Chrome's built-in flash and everything is back to normal.

heyrhett• 14 years ago

relevant (and funny cause it's true): http://xkcd.com/963/

zanny• 14 years ago

> Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows?

I say Mark Shuttleworth is doing this, and no one is paying attention. Unity was a unified vision, it was just different and no one wanted different. And that is fine for a new target audience he wanted for the OS, which was everyone else in the world. Look at what they are doing now, Ubuntu on tablets, Ubuntu TV, they are pushing a unified vision, and nobody is getting behind it en masse in the Linux community because it isn't everything they wanted. They want Cinnamon, they don't like Gnome 3, where is my Gnome 2, etc. The inherent strife is the proble, not a lack of visionaries.

jeremyjh4• 14 years ago

Yes but most of the people who are "leaving Ubuntu" are just switching the desktop environment or using a system downstream of Ubuntu. It makes for a lot of drama but it doesn't much hurt Ubuntu community support (which is their greatest strength, and why I use Ubuntu) because so many of the packages remain the same.

ps20002• 14 years ago

Linux on the desktop suffered from weak developer and industry support. It was until some years ago, Linux sound system latency was as powerful as Windows 3.1's. Using proprietary drivers for X or even worse for the Kernel is a mess.

So obvious... Linus promised Linux on the desktop 2000 or so. The reality was different: influential groups just ignored the desktop. Now it's too late, web is becoming the predominant platform, Operating Systems are just commodity. For me it's no big difference whether I use Linux or OS X (with coreutils etc. installed). In fact I wouldn't even mind working on Windows, unfortunately I don't have the patience to setup a reasonable Unix-like dev environment.

The irony is: it has never been less painful to switch to Linux.

nvarsj2• 14 years ago

> The irony is: it has never been less painful to switch to Linux.

This is so true. Linux has a bad rap. I gave up on it a couple of years ago due to the infamous "hidden cost of linux". I switched back a couple months ago and have been pleasantly surprised how smooth things are now. A lot has improved in the last couple years in Linux land.

dchest• 14 years ago

Software compatibility in OS X?

A lot of applications break on newer versions of Mac OS X. That's why there are websites like http://roaringapps.com/apps:table

Also, there are a lot of "transitions" that Apple loves doing: PowerPC -> Intel. Java -> Objective-C. Carbon -> Cocoa. 32-bit > 64-bit. Access everything -> Sandbox.

See also Cocoa docs: "method X introduced in 10.5. Deprecated in 10.6".

I have a few devices that don't work in 10.8.

Basically, what I'm saying is that OS X is a bad example for backward compatibility. Windows is much better at this. Open source software is much better at this.

macco• 14 years ago

The Linux desktop never got killed! It never was really living. As long as Linux is not sold on computers, it will never spread. Maybe things change in the future, Canonical is doing an insanely great Job bringing Linux to the masses. But personally I think Linux will take of in new markets (China, Brazil, etc), not in allready established ones.

By the way, in my oppinion only a small fraction is buying Macs because of OS X, it's the Hardware. Design and Usability of Ubuntu is a lot better than OS X at the moment.

pavanky• 14 years ago

Not this post again. Those who thought Linux can compete with heavily subsidized windows on Laptops or OSX with Apple's flashy interfaces are dreamers.

Linux has been for those that like to get dirty and it is doing that job quite well. Canonical came a bit late to the party and wasn't large enough to matter. RHEL just went after the servers. To make a fair comparison, Linux should have had a big player backing it strongly on the Desktops / laptops 10-15 years ago (like Google is doing now with Android). HP and IBM did their half assed attempts, but they were never really behind it completely.

scoith• 14 years ago

Apple builds fancy gadgets and gathers a fan-boy population, and eventually starts selling more. This really doesn't say anything about Linux desktop.

This whole thing about backward compatibility and the discussion that surrounds it is just vague. Here's a practical "true story" for you: I'm using GNU/Linux for more than 10 years now, and it is still alive.

Never had any vague binary compatibility problems either, because I'm not strangely expecting to use an ancient binary version of Gimp on my current system. That's because FOSS is source oriented, not binary. I'm not suddenly trying to use a 15 years old graphics card whose driver is longer in the kernel either, because I don't use a 15 years old graphics card.

diminish3• 14 years ago

well said; the linux user is mostly a diy developer like me; I enjoy the fact that what I am running on my laptop runs on my servers and everywhere.. Windows can't do this, (So I was using windows server on desktop), OS/X is dead on server.. Linux is pretty much the only sane option for independent developers.

kingmanaz• 14 years ago

I'd say it was the lack of a standardized install convention for "guest" (non-nix) software.

What to do about it? Couple golang's preference for large statically-linked binaries with a one-folder, one-executable install convention and Linux may become more inviting for non-nix apps.

For example, imagine "/outside/myapp/myapp" is a large, unix-unfriendly, statically-compiled binary placed in it's folder by a OS-provided install utility. "Myapp" was probably developed for Mac or Windows and by design does not give a damn about /etc, /lib, /var, etc. These app should just be allowed to crap their configuration files into the home directory into which it has been placed ("/outside/myapp"). If one no longer needs the app, the folder is deleted along with everything else the app created while it was being used. Tidy. Behind the scenes such an app would be compiled to call the standard Linux APIs, yet it would probably avoid any dynamic dependencies. Disk space is cheap. Just bundle it all together and throw it somewhere where it can run in peace.

Amiga's icon files are another approach. Rather than a large, monolithic registry tracking everything in the system, executables exist in tandem with an "icon" (.info) file. This file is generated by the OS and tracks the executable's location and other settings in the workbench (desktop). A modern reincarnation could potentially track anything. Instead of accumulating registry filth with every uninstall one can simply remove an executable and its associated .info file. Instead of adhering to the heir convention, the app plays nicely in its own folder with it's own registry. By using an ".info" file, portable non-nix installs could reside anywhere, and not in a prefabbed "/outside" folder.

The smartphone penchant for portable installation should come to nix, particularly with non-unix software. It should be encouraged, and that's coming from an OpenBSD user. Unix needs a playground for non-unix apps.

expaand• 14 years ago

I love Linux, and as a developer, use it as my main os (ubuntu). It is so easy to develop on, and it's package management is superb. I don't use the desktop per se, that much, and am usually command-line driven.

I have a Mac, and use it for some things, at times. It's nice, for sure, but I love the openness of Linux, even though, of course, there can be many very painful hardware issues (video, sound, etc), all of which I have experienced at one time or another.

I am wondering - I hear Google is working on a "Android desktop". Would that perhaps maybe change things regarding the "Linux desktop" a bit?

kwijibob• 14 years ago

Android desktop might be excellent. However alot of the Android stack is not open source or free software.

An Android desktop will be a proprietary desktop built on top of an open source kernel.

It might be terrific, but it won't fulfil the dream of a free software OS and desktop.

davidw2• 14 years ago

I used to be really into the whole free software thing, but have mellowed with age.

However, no way in hell anyone will get me to switch to Mac OS. I am simply too enamored with having an environment that I can hack on if it strikes my fancy, as well as an environment that I can customize how I want it. Despite all its flaws, it still does focus follows mouse pretty well, and not having that would drive me batty.

Also, Apple is an 800 pound gorilla that has always been about Being In Control. The Samsung lawsuit wasn't anything new:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...

I just don't want to be part of that kind of walled garden.

brudgers• 14 years ago

>"is not a sexy problem."

This pretty much describes the root cause of nearly all the impediments to the adoption of FOSS in general and GNU/Linux in particular by the general public. It touches everything from backwards compatibility to documentation.

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

The first comment explodes this piece:

"I mean, look at OS X itself. Sure it's doing fine, but powered by iPhone and iPad, not by people wanting a new desktop. And it still has minority marketshare despite being from one of the most profitable companies on earth and despite Microsoft's repeated weird Windows-rethinks."

Basically, path-dependant lock-in means we're lucky not to be using x86-based wPhones that don't even have web browsers. The linux and open web communities have achieved amazing things, enabling Apple's comeback along the way.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

This article hits so many sore spots right on a pustulent scar tissue.

I had run a Linux desktop (a Debian build mostly w/ KDE) for a while and kept getting hammered with random stuff breaking for random, and often poorly considered, reasons. I gave up and went back to running a Windows deskop with a X-server to pull up windows on my Linux box.

Then I went to work for Google and they did a really good job of running Ubuntu as an engineering desktop (calling their distro Gubuntu of course) and I thought "Wow, this has come quite a ways, perhaps Linux has matured to the point where there is at least one way to run it reliably. And so I installed Ubuntu on my desktop and tried that for a while.

For "using" it, it was for the most part ok if once every few days I did an apt-get update/upgrade cycle. For developing it was a real challenge. Pull in the latest gstreamer? Blam blam blam things fall over dead, update their packages (sometimes pulling git repos and rebuilding from source) to get back working, and now apt-get update/upgrade falls over the next time because you've got a package conflict. It is enough to drive you insane.

greedo• 14 years ago

OSX didn't kill the Linux desktop, Office and Photoshop did. Just as it killed the *BSD desktops. Lack of high-end applications that were compatible with what the business world was using doomed anything that didn't have at least a tacit blessing from Adobe and Microsoft.

farinasa2• 14 years ago

When the iPhone 3GS came out, battery life tanked on my 3G. They fixed that, after some period, only to break the reporting in the firmware. Now the device thinks it's dead after a few hours. Replace the battery, same life time. At this point, I'll never expect and apple device to last longer than a year and therefore will not buy one.

Additionally, OSX is no linux replacement. Bash is completely different except for cd, rm, and ls.

mistercow• 14 years ago

>And you can still run your old OSX apps on Mountain Lion.

Having been a small-scale Mac developer for many years, that really made me chuckle. Not since OS X 10.2 did Apple release a major upgrade that didn't break my apps and make me struggle to push an update out as quickly as possible to fix all the things that Apple broke. Apple has heard of deprecation, but they don't seem to really grok the concept.

If I had been developing for Linux, I could have simply tested on pre-release versions of the distros I wanted to support and would have been ready when the new versions were released. On OS X I would have had to have paid a prohibitive fee for that privilege.

In any case, this article made me happy. You see, for so many years, I used a Mac, and everybody said "Apple is on its last legs; the Mac will be dead in a few years". Apple had to scramble to compete, and that drove them to provide such a good product. But I knew that situation might not last forever, and I was right. After seeing the turn that Apple had taken over the last few years, I switched to an Ubuntu laptop six months ago.

It's refreshing, once again, to be using an OS that people are calling "dead".

lobster45• 14 years ago

I would have to say Apple killed Linix. As many others have noted here, OSX has improved to the point where many Unix admins run OSX and it runs the tools they have for their work. Also Mac hardware is better than PC hardware so you buy a macbook with OSX and you are happy.

tylermenezes• 14 years ago

Way too true. I ended up going back to Windows, because the audio would frequently (3-4 times an hour) stop working on my laptop until I restarted pulseaudio. And that's on Ubuntu certified hardware...

Not to mention the problems we had with our streaming servers and ffmpeg. It turns out that there was a big flame war on libav vs ffmpeg, and someone from the libav camp managed to get the ffmpeg package marked as deprecated (it's not) and redirected to the libav package on Ubuntu's apt repo. So we're stuck either compiling from source or running our own repo. Seriously? (fwiw, the rationale is that libav pushes new versions more frequently)

radley• 14 years ago

Linux desktop will rise again as Android PC.

shmerl3• 14 years ago

No Android please! Linux desktop is shifting from X.org to Wayland, and Wayland is making inroads into mobile as well. Android is really a completely side thing for conventional Linux.

programminggeek• 14 years ago

Lack of killer apps?

pixelmonkey• 14 years ago

First of all, the Linux desktop is not dead.

As I wrote on my blog recently:

"In the [past three years], Linux has grown — albeit slowly — in desktop usage. After nearly 2 years of no growth (2008-2010, lingering around 1% of market), in 2011 Linux saw a significant uptick in desktop adoption (+64% from May 2011 to January 2012). However, Linux’s desktop share still about 1/5 of the share of Apple OS X and 1/50 the share of Microsoft Windows. This despite the fact that Linux continues to dominate Microsoft in the server market."

It may be in third place in a desktop market with primarily three OSes, but usage has never been higher.

As I discussed in this article, most of the original reasons that stopped Windows / Mac users from using Linux years ago are no longer valid. However, the irony is that it's easier than ever to get by with a Free Software desktop, but harder than ever to avoid proprietary software and lock-in, thanks to the rise of SaaS and the personal data cloud.

I agree with de Icaza that the "Open Web" is more important these days than a Free Desktop. But the linked Wired article's conception of Open Web refers to things like HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. These aren't the problem. They are an open delivery mechanism, yes, but usually for proprietary software.

Modern SaaS applications accessible through the web browsers using open web standards are the modern equivalent of an open source Perl script wrapping calls to a closed-source, statically-compiled binary.

You can read more about my thoughts on this in "Cloud GNU: where are you?" http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/08/18/cloud-gnu

giulivo• 14 years ago

Compare Linux to OSX makes no sense to me. Linux has always been missing features when compared to alternatives; the GNU system was actually written to emulate the alternative.

But the GNU/Linux project had a very different objective. Fighting for freedom. If it is still freedom the driving force, then we should encourage the enthusiasts and get back to work on improve Linux, as it has been done for the past years. By doing so Linux already reached the excellence in some fields.

If you're just competing on features, you'll be missing some great benefits and enjoyment. And to be honest, in terms of features OSX isn't that good either as Windows is still used by the majority for one reason or another.

Apocryphon• 14 years ago

You really have to wonder if the advent of Windows 8 and disgruntlement with it from Valve, Blizzard, etc. might have repercussions on this whole situation.

rjzzleep• 14 years ago

i guess if you don't mind that osx used 5% active cpu just for flashing bubbly buttons that's alright.

i like osx, I think it does have a good ecosystem for GUI APPS. but at pretty much everything it fails. It's a performance nightmare and the filesystem makes me want to punch a kid in the face(yes sorry, I also don't think you should be doing opengl in javascript, but hey) everytime it kills the cpu.

Now, with all the mentioned above I do wish there was a better ecosystem for app development. I mean something like xcode 3 not 4. Yes we have QT, yes we have glade, but build an app with the interface designer and bindings, mvc concepts and it just helps a lot.

You can do most of it with Vala, granted, it's just shittier documented and not as "round", there are no standard concepts to follow, etc. And yes, I do like my linux customizability, but we have stuff like CERT best practices for secure C coding. Why can we not get something like that for linux gui programming.

ps. gnome3 can go right where it came from

dumb1232• 14 years ago

There never was a "Linux desktop". Linux is a kernel. GNU is a set of utilities. And X11 is a mess.

Did you know that X11 is why we have shared libs (the UNIX version of "dll hell")? If not for having to run X11, shared libs really would not have been needed.

There are many window managers. Maybe too many. Too much choice for a noob. That selection or the pre-selections Linux distribution people make does not equate to "the" Linux Desktop. It equates someone else's configurations and choice of applications. It equates to having to fiddle with X11, whether you are just configuring it or developing programs to run in it. And that has always been extremely frustrating for too many people- constant tweaking; it never ends. This is like a brick wall to people who might want to try Linux, coming from Windows. You are inheriting a system that's been configured to someone else's preferences. (Same is true with Apple, but they have a knack for making things easy.)

I skipped Linux altogther and went from using Windows to using BSD. I've also been a Mac user. And BSD is way better than OSX, or any of the previous MacOS's for doing most everyday things: email, internet and secure web (ramdisk). Moreover it's flexible - you can shape into what you want - without this being an overwhelming task of undoing someone else's settings.

If you want a citation for the shared libs thing I will track it down, but honestly anyone can do it on their own. The historical research will do you good. Educate yourself.

Nux• 14 years ago

Please ignore Icaza. As for the famous death of Linux on the desktop let me tell you something: IT NEVER HAPPENED. What are those people smoking?

I've been using Linux for the last decade and every year it gets better, more polished, more integrated, featuring a better design; I hear more & more people talking about it and using it. Linux is more alive than ever on the desktop!

Depending on your needs, Linux can make an exceptional desktop. Yes, true, it is not for _everyone_, but then again neither are Windows or MacosX.

TheRealDunkirk• 14 years ago

The Linux desktop never did any better -- RELATIVE to the rest of the market -- than Ximian Desktop on Red Hat 6.2. If de Icaza wants to blame someone for the failure of the Linux desktop, I would point the finger back at him. He's the one that dropped out of the effort, became a Microsoft shill, and continues to push (the speciously patented) Mono to this day. Also, I don't know why he's lamenting a strong leader casting a clear vision on the desktop these days. Canonical is doing EXACTLY that.

jfb• 14 years ago

Nothing "killed the Linux desktop"; it still thrives for those that want it, and it's steadily improving. It never came to dominate the market, and one can argue about the reasons it never displaced Macintosh (still less Windows). It probably has a lot to do with lack of a single, unified vision, and the market fragmentation caused by the different distros, and the lack of market pressure to ship, as it relies on volunteer labor, but I'm not going to presume.

Personally, I've been primarily a Mac user since the Mississippian superperiod, but I used an X-11 Windows(™) environment (on top of FreeBSD) for years at work. I don't miss it, even one iota, but I know plenty of smart people who prefer that sort of thing. De gustibus non disputandum est and all that.

shmerl3• 14 years ago

Ask Mozilla how they manage to distribute their tarballs which work on all major distros.

leishulang• 14 years ago

OSX got nice touchpad, Windows has awesome game libs, and Linux comes with shit loads of developer goodness. But yea, now OSX has home-brew so it almost like a better linux, but still forces you to buy overpriced hardwares.

Xyzodiac• 14 years ago

I'm in the same boat as the author, I really have few complaints after moving full time to OS X from Linux.

fdr• 14 years ago

I more or less disagree. My main frustration with Linux For Personal Use is that I can't buy a piece of hardware that I know won't regress with new versions of a distribution for three plus years or get any service if it does. My reference for the importance of this is a perfectly usable 2008 refurbished Macbook. I upgraded the RAM once recently for a bit more snap, but otherwise have no complaints over the three or so Macintosh releases since then.

Could the UIs and third party application situation be better? Of course. But considering all the garden variety crash bugs, power management bugs, lockup bugs, video driver misbehavior, hit and miss peripheral support, and in general just analysis paralysis about what hardware I should buy, and even then there is a less-certain future with regard to regressions.

Even given Windows's monopoly power in the commodity desktop and laptop markets, its reputation for dealing with sleep and drivers is only so-so compared to Apple Hardware and Software. If Window's monopoly power -- which buys you full attention from hardware manufacturers and their driver divisions -- only gives you mediocre results, what are the odds that a bunch of kernel hackers who receive almost no continual consideration from hardware vendors have a chance? To me, it looks like absolutely not a chance of becoming stable over time. I have completely given up on Linux laptops for this reason: by using desktops with Linux only I have cut out a lot of the problems, but not all of them. It's a kind of medicore that I can bear.

I want someone to sell me Linux distribution on a laptop that simply will not break over in its kernel-oriented features in five years of upgrades. I want that distribution to stop-ship if it a new version introduces a power management bug to an old laptop, and do whatever it takes to work around some lousy hardware bug or whatever. I want them to do whatever to work with Skype (such as statically linking whatever libraries, etc) and test Google Hangouts to make sure the webcam and microphone works. And it they don't work, they absolutely cannot ship. Until that day, I use Linux -- and I do mean the kernel in most of these cases -- as my personal operating system most of the time in spite of these problems because of my professional and philosophical needs, and not out of preference in any other dimension.

ikawe• 14 years ago

Is there anything like a hardware regression suite for testing new kernel features? or what about distribution features?

I don't even know what that would look like. Does anyone else?

Maybe a registered farm of devices that test distribution release candidates.

sjtgraham• 14 years ago

I dislike titles such as these that beg the question.

alpeb2• 14 years ago

The concept of Linux on the desktop is as aberrant as the concept of Windows on the server

bobbles• 14 years ago

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

What? How? I've got an iPhone and have never felt like having a Mac was a must. Am I missing some major parts of the system that don't work if you don't have a Mac?

richardk• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, GNU/Linux never really was about some desktop conquest, so this whole discussion "What killed the Linux desktop" is quite absurd.

That aside, what we have here is a thread apparently devoted to shitting on the work of people who built something for fun and gave it away for free.

Good job folks!

agentultra2• 14 years ago

I'm writing this from my laptop which is running Ubuntu as its desktop.

I don't really see how the Linux desktop is dead. I've been running the same OS on this same laptop since 2007. The only upgrade I've added is an SSD and an extra gig of memory. It's still pretty speedy and I've never had any problems.

I use a Macbook Pro with OS X at work because that's just what I was issued by default. I hate it. I hate the over-reliance on the mouse, on gestures, the abundant and tedious animations; I hate the crappy ecosystem of package repositories and how most of the packages are broken or completely mess with the system; I hate never being able to find where any of the configuration files are or where something is installed; I hate the plethora of ways you can start and stop services; the confusing GUI; the masochistic meta-key layout; the awful full-screen support; and the complete lack of customization options.

I've had much better experiences with the Linux desktop for 95% of the things I do.

Now before some OS X fan-person decides to point out how woefully misguided and ignorant I am, my point is that there are different folks out there who want different things from their desktop experience. Apple gets to decide top-down what that experience is all the way down to the hardware. I prefer a little more flexibility. I like being able to swap out my own battery or adding a new memory module when I need one. I like being able to switch from a GUI desktop to a tiled window manager. Some folks don't -- there are Linux distros that hide as much of that as possible. Either way there are plenty of options and I think that's a good thing. Competition breeds innovation and even though I don't particularly like Unity I am glad to see people trying new things.

The Linux desktop isn't dead. It may just smell funny. You may switch to OS X and wonder why anyone could possibly want anything else. I just gave you a bunch of answers.

jeremyjh4• 14 years ago

Its strange for me to read something like this since I have recently switched back to Linux and I've never been happier with it. I've been a sometime user of it since around 1997 but it could never survive long as my primary OS. I bought my Frankenputer parts from Newegg without checking on hardware compatibility for any of it and it all worked great. I had only one problem which was wake from USB keyboard and I googled it down pretty quick (was a new issue with Ubuntu Precise it seems).

I like OS X too and had a Powerbook for years but all other things being equal I'd prefer to develop and deploy on same OS and Linux is just fine for development so far.

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

Linux isn't dead in the desktop because it never was a product in the first place.

The first attempts were Mandrake and Conectiva. Canonical has been doing a good job lately, the problem is that the platform is now beyond hope on the desktop, it simply doesn't gather traction from 3rd party developers - the most important thing for a desktop OS. You're pretty much limited to the FOSS utilities that exist on the repositories.

guilloche• 14 years ago

The Linux desktop is not killed and will be more prosperous with Windows 8 and secureboot shit.

chanux• 14 years ago

In a comment Miguel says,

Because the developers have moved on to greener pastures.

Of course, it all boils down to green at the end of the day.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

Seriously... Is this discussion still relevant?

Anyway, my bet on what "killed" the Linux desktop would be the Windows OEM licensing terms. Nothing really killed it because it was always a very specialized product.

Do we always have to see a problem when someone doesn't make the same choices we do?

option_greek• 14 years ago

I hope we won't see a "what killed the android phone" post sometime in future :(

ilaksh• 14 years ago

Proud Ubuntu user here. Ubuntu 12.04 is not bad at all. Supports the fancy font he used on his blog. Flash is working. WebGL is working. LibreOffice opens Word docs when I need to. Audio is working.

I have Windows 7 on the other partition mainly to play games.

There was a minor issue with Ubuntu trying to melt the CPU in my laptop the other day, but its not so bad since I upgraded, and I found this powertop thing that also helps.

charlieok• 14 years ago

"Miguel de Icaza — once a central figure in the development of the Linux desktop environment GNOME — says the open web is now a greater concern than free software."

I was kind of hoping those two things would each help drive the other forward.

jawr• 14 years ago

Since when was it dead?

buntar• 14 years ago

Miguels affection towards his iPhone is a bit unconsidered and superficial.

But anyway, a more interesting question could be: What does it take to bring an ex-linux user and now happy OSX user back to linux?

I used Windows for 3 years, then linux for 2 years. During that time I did a lot of installations (mostly ubuntu and debian) on a lot of different devices. During this time, while fighting with drivers, minor display problems, and spoiled windows users I lost my faith in linux as a desktop os and switched to OSX.

I can just speak for myself, but this few points would bring me back to linux in no time.

Presenting Distribution "Utopia"

1. No X11 based display stack, it is replaced with something conceptually simpler (like cocoa).

2. (Multiple) monitor recognition 100% accurate. (Probably connected to Pt. 1)

3. The audio setup is not much worse then the one of OSX.

4. Throwing Gnome and everything that is based on Glib out. It's 2012 there alternatives to faking oo with C. Qt isn't allowed either.

5. Throwing APT out. No more dependency management for a desktop OS please. Then kill Perl as requirement for running an os.

Ahhhhh, I feel better now :-). This is the opposite of what Miguel demanded, he cares for backward compatibility.

When I think about it. "Utopia" would be similar to Android. No fear to throw old stuff out.

Android as a foundation for a new desktop linux?

zwdr• 14 years ago

Thats just bullshit. The Linux desktop maybe isn't broadly accepted or mainstream, but I dont see the Problem in that- after all Linux remains a system for power users, even if some Distros want to change that. And there really is no better desktop environment for those people than the Linux desktop. Windows is shit incarnated, so lets not even begin to talk about it. What remains? Mac OS. Sure, it has a more accessible GUI, but not a more efficient one. I cant think of something more elegant than a tiling wm, be it awesome, wmii or xmonad. Everything based on moving a cursor just feels awkward in comparison to the simplicity of ~5-10 keyboard shortcuts. And tiling also means that I always have everything in front of me. Fumbling around to find some window is HORROR.

I think the Linux desktop simply has more options for experienced users. I simply see no way how I could be more productive with a GUI designed to cater to lusers.

What killed the Linux desktop

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