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What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

tirania.org

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Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#3

Post by anbende »

labrador wrote: post #2

This is news to me as I read on an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop

Agreed. Reading this on my Ubuntu 16.04 laptop. I may head over to my office and read it on my Ubuntu desktop later!

(That said, I may in fact be part of the "developer culture" that surrounds desktop linux according to the article)

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#4

Post by baobrain »

labrador wrote: post #2

This is news to me as I read on an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop

Agreed, on opensuse 42.2

Granted, the state of linux on desktop was much different in 2012 than it is today. Back then UEFI support was garbage and you had to fiddle around and use things like rEFInd to get it to even boot.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#5

Post by YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 »

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

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

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

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#6

Post by VonGuard »

I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2.

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

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

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

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

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

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#7

Post by wolfgke »

Quote from article:

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

And we did.

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

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

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

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#9

Post by johnchristopher »

labrador wrote: post #2

This is news to me as I read on an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop

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