Gnome 3 and Unity. The kiss of death.
What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
41–50 of 307 posts
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#42Nothing killed the Linux Desktop. Windows already won that war and it was good enough. Heck, even Apple and its billions couldn't get more than 5% market share worldwide. The next "war" moved to mobile and there linux is not doing that bad.
Windows solved many of the GUI problems 20 years ago that Linux still struggles with today. Windows was and is ahead and this is why it was and is more successful. It is that simple. I would take Windows 95's window manager over Ubuntu's Unity every day of the week.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#43[deleted]
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Microsoft's low-level HW engineering skills are underappreciated. Sure, IOS and Android rule the world, but the responsiveness of a Surface tablet kills them both on that one axis. 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 G…
Agreed on the Unity stuff. I think Unity could be fine and dandy on its own, but it should NOT be the default UI for a system designed and distributed under the auspices of being the super inclusive Linux of the 3rd world. Which is kinda what Ubuntu was trying to be.
If you want to be inclusive and spread technology to those that don't have it and can't afford it, you HAVE to support very, very low grade hardware.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#45Office. If Linux desktop had microsoft office, I could use it. Libre office is an unmitigated, ugly pile of shit.
Libreoffice meets my needs just fine. I spend a couple of hours a week in their spreadsheet and word processor, and don't really have any complaints.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#46I 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…
Like the OP, I absolutely despise Unity and tried to find a different route. I came across xubuntu - tried it and absolutely love the simplicity. It's minimal, gets out of the way when you need it; but, best of all, it's USABLE. Can't praise it enough.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#47The 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 the…
How common is this in Linux development? Is it better to have two competing solutions and "may the best one win"? Or would it be more effective for those two teams to work together on one project?
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Of course it works fine with XP, that was the target specs in 2001 when that OS was released. Maybe try a Linux distribution from 2001 and you'd have a fair comparison.
I remember how XP was received. It was slow as hell compared to Win98 and even to Windows 2000. And 256MB RAM is too little for XP, W2K would be probably fine.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#49Nothing killed the Linux Desktop. Windows already won that war and it was good enough. Heck, even Apple and its billions couldn't get more than 5% market share worldwide. The next "war" moved to mobile and there linux is not doing that bad.
Windows solved many of the GUI problems 20 years ago that Linux still struggles with today. Windows was and is ahead and this is why it was and is more successful. It is that simple. I would take Windows 95's window manager over Ubuntu's Unity every day of the week.
I think Unity (and KDE) were good enough to replace Windows but Windows won 10 years before Gnome and KDE became a thing. And yes Windows95 was not only good enough but great as you pointed.
The lack of hardware support was because it made no sense for hardware companies to support an OS with less than 1% market share and same for the gigantic ecosystem of software that ran on windows which had a very long tail.
My point is that Linux didn't lose the desktop because of any mistakes the community made (and god knows there were many), it lost because Windows had already won this platform for a loooong time and the incentives to switch weren't great (OS are boring, most people don't even know what an OS is).
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#50I'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
You've hit the nail on the head.
The lack of (enforced but painfully overrideable) standards was a fundamental contributor to fragmenting the "Linux Desktop", if there was such a thing to begin with.
This coupled with the community philosophy of "one man's turd is another's lollipop", leads to a thousand flowers blooming, with none representative of a "Linux Desktop" and thus fundamentally confusing to new users in the target audience.