31–40 of 307 posts
The next "war" moved to mobile and there linux is not doing that bad.
And yet Apple breaks compatibility basically every release; and the App Store itself often fails to operate at all, even for Apple's own packages!
Also, if computing is suddenly all about The Open Web; then the point is moot since all three major desktop platforms have identical support for The Open Web. Then in praising the Mac App Store, Miguel goes full circle and affirms that native software is still important. I'd countenance either train of thought, but you can't multi-track drift your ideas like this.
I really don't like this new hipster post-mortem style of writing which makes heaps of unfounded assertions, and mixes them in with indisputable facts. I wish Miguel would stop trying to convince people to leave the ecosystem he helped create just because he no longer prefers it to the alternatives. Why drag your old friends down with slam pieces on WIRED when you could just let things shake out?
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…
Yes! Ironically this was what a lot of people hated about Microsoft, and why the XP->Vista and 7->8->10 changes were so unpopular. Everything moves around and works in a different way, imposing a re-learning cost. But the developers like it because they're bored with the old system and think the new one is better.
Earlier 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.
LOL, I use this very laptop with XP all the time. Yes, it is slow for modern tasks. But the XP OS is responsive! I can move the mouse, navigate menus, open the text editor. I can do this on this 2001 machine using Debian with no GUI, but not with Unity over Ubuntu. This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrive…
That said, IMO the problem is not so much that Unity exists, but that they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. To be fair, what Google and Apple do to mobile devices more than a year old or so is every bit as bad IMO so I can cut them some slack.
What this has achieved for me is a migration back to desktop machines from IPad and Android tablets. My 2013 IPad Air is now pretty much a brick with IOS 9 and my Nexus 7 from 2013 is unusable. Compare and contrast with my 2009 Core 2 Quad desktop that's still going strong.
Finally, consider the hideous electronic waste we generate by effectively forcing people to upgrade HW every year or two.
Earlier 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.
LOL, I use this very laptop with XP all the time. Yes, it is slow for modern tasks. But the XP OS is responsive! I can move the mouse, navigate menus, open the text editor. I can do this on this 2001 machine using Debian with no GUI, but not with Unity over Ubuntu. This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrive…
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…
> I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. Yes! Ironically this was what a lot of people hated about Microsoft, and why the XP->Vista and 7->8->10 changes were so unpopular. Everything moves around and works in a different way, imposing a re-learning cost. But the developers like it because they're bored with the old system and think the new one is better.
Why is there no such thing as LTS for GUI interface paradigms? There should be an LTS interface version of every GUI.
Earlier 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.
LOL, I use this very laptop with XP all the time. Yes, it is slow for modern tasks. But the XP OS is responsive! I can move the mouse, navigate menus, open the text editor. I can do this on this 2001 machine using Debian with no GUI, but not with Unity over Ubuntu. This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrive…
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…
> 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…
Essentially the article's point is that technical totalitarianism would make Linux succeed on the consumer desktop, using the successful models of Windows and OSX -- one source, one model, no disagreement. Hate to acknowledge it, but it might be true.