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What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

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Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#141

Post by ue_ »

feedjoelpie wrote: post #137
VonGuard wrote: post #6

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…

Can someone please explain to me why everyone says that Gnome went off the rails? Gnome 3 to me was, except for leaving behind a lot of legacy systems, an extremely usable and downright pretty UI. Menu, search, windows, and virtual desktops all available from one keypress or one hotspot. I thought that was a stroke of genius myself.

I think the general reason is that it's a lot 'more' with not many benefits. Things seem to be blown up and large, almost garishly so. The window title areas are large, and on systems with bad or no graphics acceleration it will complain and make you use Gnome Shell, which is ironically, in the opinion of many, nicer than Gnome 3 default UI.

I think more than anything it's good old nostalgia. The applications menu is no more, instead it's a grid where you have to search for what you want or whatever. There's a massive screen overlay instead of a nice little dropdown.

Multiple desktops was a good feature that's come with Gnome 3, though.

If I recall, perhaps some indication of the intentions of Gnome 3 can be seen by the fact that you are prompted to drag up (really?! on a desktop?!) in order to unlock after you've entered screensaver or something. So there could be some of the same reasons why people initially disliked the Win 8 view.

But mostly, Gnome 2 was just so simple and familiar, though I don't know if that's my hindsight or whatever. Point and click to what you want to run, put things on your desktop, do whatever. No BS.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#142

Post by dfox »

jankotek wrote: post #22
phillipwills wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft specified minimum is 64MB, recommended 128MB. XP RTM with 128MB RAM was perfectly usable, obviously it was not a good idea to run lots of crap in background.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#143

Post by FireBeyond »

soyiuz wrote: post #58
VonGuard wrote: post #6

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 don't think it's the gui. I'm a relatively savvy user running Debian on a Thinkpad for more than five years now. Printing is still touch and go. I spent countless hours to get sleep working correctly. It is broken now and I don't have the energy to fix it knowing that nothing I do is guaranteed to last through the next apt update. Wifi will mysteriously refuse to connect with some routers (a daily struggle at the u…

Printing still sucks. Out of the box Ubuntu with my WF-3540...

Add Printer shows the printer. Great! I hit Add and it says "Here's the OpenPrinting driver for it". Great!

I click "Use this driver". It spins. And then acts like nothing has happened. I click it again. Same. I hit Cancel. Oh. Now my printer is installed... with the Generic Text Driver.

So I go to OpenPrinting.org directly and download the driver myself. Oh, now I see the issue. A whole bunch of dependencies that are prompted for here, but weren't prompted for or installed in the printing dialog.

Okay, let's try this again.

Printer Found. Great. Add it. Okay, my driver is in the driver list. Progress. Select, and Add.

"Success!".

I hit Print Test Page. Nothing comes out. "Processing..." Nothing.

Then I look.

And despite having found my printer on the network, Add Printer has added it "connected to localhost". WTF?

Alright. Delete printer.

Add printer. Ignore the found printer, find my printer's IP address manually, and add it that way. Go through things and now I am actually able to print, and everything works great.

But holy crap.

It's 2017.

It's Ubuntu.

How the hell is something this simple this broken?

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#144

Post by ue_ »

transposed wrote: post #47
PaulHoule wrote: post #24

The 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?

Of course it would be more effective, but it's hard to coordinate individual ambitions and goals within one project, so much so that it will cause splits or over-engineering of features just to please developers.

I don't know if GNU for example can get around that by having Stallman there to give the final say, or the Linux kernel with Torvalds there. Perhaps a similar approach would be good for DEs.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#145

Post by shmerl »

wolfgke wrote: post #126
shmerl wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days you can get computers with Linux preinstalled. If you look for them specially, and not from most manufacturers. Try getting one from Dell (any model, not one specific variant), Lenovo and etc. Good luck with that.

> If you look for them specially, and not from most manufacturers. Try getting one from Dell (any model, not one specific variant), Lenovo and etc. Good luck with that. Before you complain about that, consider that every GNU/Linux nerd has strong feelings about their preferred GNU/Linux distribution (or version (such as LTS, Stable, Bleeding Edge etc.). So they will probably not be satisfied with the distribution tha…

> Before you complain about that, consider that every GNU/Linux nerd has strong feelings about their preferred GNU/Linux distribution (or version (such as LTS, Stable, Bleeding Edge etc.). So they will probably not be satisfied with the distribution that is installed and install their preferred one

Those who have such preferences, have zero problems installing their own distro. The fact that it doesn't come pre-installed doesn't bother such users, as long as they aren't forced to pay the nasty Windows tax.

We are talking about what's slowing mass Linux adoption (by those who aren't likely to ever install any OS to begin with).

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#146

Post by ue_ »

johnchristopher wrote: post #9
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.

Was the author aware that perhaps the desire to have a 'consumer operating system' was not in the hearts and even minds of many developers of the "Linux" ecosystem?

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#147

Post by herbst »

gens wrote: post #107
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people were happy with Windows XP in 2003, why change it and install Linux? We deviated from what was good enough 15 years ago! Let's put XP back on the clients and Solaris back on the servers! /s When I started using Linux, it was about thinking out of the box and about change. It had many exciting window managers that put everything in Windows to shame when it came to customizing and style. Nowadays I have the f…

If XP was secure, performant on modern hardware, stable and supported by new programs i would still be using it. More then that the reason i quit windows98 was that warcraft 3 doesn't work on it. Windows 7 configuration menus are god awful and windows10 ones are far worse then that. You are making a fallacy in saying that old equals bad/ugly. XFCE is keeping it oldschool and can still look amazing (xubuntu looks grea…

Honestly gnome shell is the greatest thing ever. My focus and productivity skyrocketet. I see how people who would prefer to run XP dont like it. But no reason to make it bad.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#148

Post by wolfgke »

shmerl wrote: post #145
wolfgke wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you look for them specially, and not from most manufacturers. Try getting one from Dell (any model, not one specific variant), Lenovo and etc. Good luck with that. Before you complain about that, consider that every GNU/Linux nerd has strong feelings about their preferred GNU/Linux distribution (or version (such as LTS, Stable, Bleeding Edge etc.). So they will probably not be satisfied with the distribution tha…

> Before you complain about that, consider that every GNU/Linux nerd has strong feelings about their preferred GNU/Linux distribution (or version (such as LTS, Stable, Bleeding Edge etc.). So they will probably not be satisfied with the distribution that is installed and install their preferred one Those who have such preferences, have zero problems installing their own distro. The fact that it doesn't come pre-insta…

> as long as they aren't forced to pay the nasty Windows tax.

It is much simpler just not to ship any OS to customers that want to avoid the Microsoft tax (indeed some vendors sell PCs without any installed OS - in particular for enterprise customers; I also). This has the advantage that they don't have to provide support to customers that are using the installed GNU/Linux distribution.

But note that avoiding the "Microsoft tax" will save you much less money, since Microsoft has contracts with large PC vendors that gets them Windows licenses even much cheaper than the "System Builder" version. Slightly exaggerated: The Windows license that they install is "nearly free" for them. So even if they offer a PC without OS, the price will not drop by a lot (if any) for the simple reason that large PC producers hardly have to pay any "Microsoft tax".

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#149

Post by ufo »

patrickaljord wrote: post #31

Nothing 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.

The Linux kernel is doing well on mobile but GNU/Linux and open source in general is doing terrible. The status quo right now is that mobile operating systems are super locked down and almost all the software you install on it is proprietary stuff you get from an app store.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#150

Post by herbst »

pantalaimon wrote: post #102
paulddraper wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is; it's "regular" OS LTS. Ubuntu won't change the GUI during LTS (5 years).

But that means all the software on your system will be 5 years old.

Not exactly. Many patches are back ported but barely features thats true
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