[deleted]
What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
21–30 of 307 posts
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
2001 laptop? Even contemporary systems (Win XP) would be slow on that. > Inside, it had plenty of power, an 850MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of RAM, and 802.11b for wireless networking (if you could find a wireless network, that is). Plus it had 20GB of storage, FireWire and even one USB port.
Also, XP was released in 2002, so it should work rather well on the previous year's hardware...
Wiki: General availability October 25, 2001; 15 years ago.
General minimum recommended for XP was/is 512MB.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#23I just read this on my Chromebook, powered by Linux.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#24The original sin of the Linux desktop was the kde/gnome split over licensing. Had Linux had one good desktop, like the other operating systems, it could have had a future on the desktop.
Instead it has had a number of almost-good desktops that are still fragmented by hate and the desire to thwart interoperability. For instance, the GTK team won't fix certain bugs that affect running in a rootless X server because they can't stand the idea that you'd run Eclipse on Linux and view it on Cygwin/X.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#25The desktop is dead anyway - people use phones and tablets now. For the uses that my son gives to the PC - YouTube, Agar.io and Counter-Strike - he uses Mac or Linux without making distinction
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#26The people I know who use desktop Linux love their Linux rigs a whole lot more than my Windows and Mac acquaintances enjoy their computers--which in many cases just borders on tolerance, especially with Windows 10. Maybe software needs something beyond market share, sort of like what Bhutan did with Gross National Happiness. We'll rank products based on how much people enjoy them and then see who's the dominant deskt…
Part of that comes from the sense of ownership and the love that a tinkerer has for their projects. Not that it's a bad thing, but I think it's easy to see how that love would arrive.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#27As a programmer, I find Fedora with the Gnome Classic theme and the No Topleft Hot Corner extension[0] to be an excellent, clean, effective desktop UI. But in order to get this working properly, I had to go through package hell for a few hours to get the right graphics drivers and tweak a bunch of settings. I've heard Linux Mint is good for non-programmers, but I've never tried. Unity in Ubuntu is the worst desktop experience out of all I've tried.
[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-co...
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#28lol? The Linux desktop as a widespread phenomenon only started after 2012. Usually things can't die before they start.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#29I 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…
> 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.
Have you tried Xubuntu? It fills the gap that Ubuntu used to, and it's my go-to desktop OS now (apart from on my MacBook because only OS X is usable on high DPI displays). I've also installed it for non-technical friends and family and they've found it much more familiar than recent Windows versions.
In an age when the family computer is just as likely to be running Android or iOS, I think the Linux desktop has a niche and we need to start evangelizing it again. Even for the typical home user it feels more powerful than ever when you compare it to such "appliance" operating systems, which Windows and OS X seem determined to become.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#30I've said this many times but the only real problem I have is the shere pain to get things to work and for uniform styling across programs.
I find myself just using terminal applications because gparted's UI is SO different from Wireshark, FireFox, etc. There is no consistancy. There is no standard written. There is nothing. It's just a hodge-podge of "this looks good to me!"
No standards = Confused Users