What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

Good thing about XFCE is that xrdp still works when you need it.

I don't remember the details, but I do recall being flabbergasted that the latest KDE couldn't run the eclipse IDE properly. Dialogs were missing entire fields. It seemed so odd that made me doubt myself and check the same dialog on OS X to be sure.

Something to do about Gnome overhauling its style system to use CSS, which affected some other library in KDE that implements SWT via some gnome library, or ... gah who even cares.

The teams in charge of the linux desktops environments seem to behave as if backwards compatibility was no big deal.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but they do make an effort maintain backwards compatibility with some truly ancient applications.

I quote from the article: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions"

I must say, this is the type of thing I have been talking about for years. Linux has always had its evangelists and champions in the Server community (I would reckon Red Het, Ubuntu, and Debian/Slackware are the root of what what upended Unix servers in the 2000s, but that is for another day at another time to get in-depth).

Yet, there was no foundation, no company, no project, until maybe in the last year or two with elementary OS and some of the standardizations coming out of the Fedora project, that you even see some evangelism in the Linux desktop space (let alone mobile. I am not counting android). The problem as I see it is Linux is the programmers playground - which is great! - but what that also turns out to be is that since you can fork, edit, re-create, spin, and otherwise modify the code as we programmers see fit, you get no level of standardization, no harmonized quality control on fundamentals, no one evangelizing the Linux Desktop as a platform that you can make apps for (which I still contend is a big issue for Linux as a Desktop for the even semi-mainstream user. I think most developers not withstanding.) It was never an inclusive platform

Some might say this was the point. They don't want, nor do we need Linux to be the same as macOS, or Windows. Perhaps the point of the communities that sprang up around the Linux on the desktop movements is that there is a ethos that having these fundamentals is bad, or that evangelizing a platform is 'selling out'. I've seen this argument many times over the years. To me, the quote from the article above, sums it all up nicely. The platform never had any fundamental evangelists pushing for a harmonized Linux experience. There is always Chaos, sometimes a little (nvidia driver breaks again because of a point update) or a lot (Well, today we have no GUI because Gnome moved to Wayland and for some reason my distro has some component it doesn't support yet so when it went to apply the update it failed).

Until idealism stops running the show and there is some consolidation in the fundamentals of Linux on mobile and Linux on the desktop, neither will be a way forward if you value access to the latest software, consistency in the fundamentals, stability, and out of the box hardware support from manufacturers.

My productivity went up when i stopped arguing about DEs online. It is currently taking a dip, though.

What UI? [edit]Also, what type of process goes into converting a binary shipped by someone like Adobe? We are talking just changing the package format to install the binaries correctly, right?[/edit]