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What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

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Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#241

Post by fooker »

closeparen wrote: post #127
lumberjack wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't stop Android adoption.

Um, what? Phones differ in size and power, but a particular version of Android is a particular version of Android everywhere. Android developers don't have a debian vs. ubuntu vs. centos. vs. gentoo vs. arch type choice to make, only a "how backwards compatible do I want to be" choice.

Why do you think desktop applications have to be different for the distros?

It is rather easy to ship libraries with your package or even do static builds..

Even without that, things are relatively portable. (Steam packaged for Ubuntu works on most of the distros)

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#242

Post by int_19h »

raarts wrote: post #231
CaptSpify wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people often forget: Do what works for you. If XFCE+ is good enough for you, then great! stick with it! But if you want to try a different experience, or if you think that setup is inefficient (as I do), then try moving to something else! What works for one person likely won't work for another.

And this is what killed the Linux desktop. 99% of the population does NOT want to try a gazillion desktops (of which the installation is error prone), just to find out what 'works best for you'.

You don't have to if you don't want to. Any sensible desktop distro has a DE configured for you out of the box, if you want to just start using it.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#243

Post by int_19h »

alkonaut wrote: post #118
bitwize wrote: post #115

What killed the Linux desktop? Not being preinstalled. For a bit of context from PC history, this is also what killed the GEM desktop, killed the OS/2 desktop, and damn near killed the Windows desktop until Microsoft put pressure on vendors to make a 386SX with VGA the entry-level option and ship Windows 3.0 with every unit. Preinstalls are an OS's golden ticket to adoption.

If one Linux with one desktop was widely preinstalled, that would help. That would have made that environment the target for desktop developers, which in turn would have added the pressure for backwards compatibility. Now, as a desktop developer I'm surely not targeting Linux desktop because it's not even a single target.

For all practical purposes, desktop Linux is a single target. Use Qt, statically link everything or install to a folder in /opt, and then the only thing you depend on from the OS is libc... which has been plenty stable for a very long time.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#244

Post by scholia »

pinum wrote: post #203
vacri wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it. I much prefer the repo system to the Windows "I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe, and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad?" > it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate,…

>I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe Your first point is only applicable if you are downloading unknown, untrustworthy software from tophotfreeawesomedownloadsnow.com. >and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad I agree that this is a severe problem for non-technical users. For those users, there is a lot to be said for a walled-garden app store (which co…

There are some known-good sources of Windows software, ranging from Major Geeks to the Windows Store.

You can also use the Chocolatey package manager for Windows.

https://chocolatey.org/packages

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#245

Post by jon-wood »

ue_ wrote: post #141
feedjoelpie wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think part of the issue with GNOME 3 is that the instructions on screen for how to use the UI hide the most efficient ways to do so.

The application launcher for me is universally used by hitting super, typing what I want, and hitting enter. I never actually click on anything. Same with swiping up on the login screen, you can do that on a touch screen, but you can also just start typing your password.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#246

Post by Twisell »

bitwize wrote: post #115

What killed the Linux desktop? Not being preinstalled. For a bit of context from PC history, this is also what killed the GEM desktop, killed the OS/2 desktop, and damn near killed the Windows desktop until Microsoft put pressure on vendors to make a 386SX with VGA the entry-level option and ship Windows 3.0 with every unit. Preinstalls are an OS's golden ticket to adoption.

I work on Win 10, I run Ubuntu Server and some Desktop VM, I have an iMac at home.

Due to recent lifestyle change I'll soon buy a laptop and I was highly considering buying a Linux laptop because I will mostly use it for coding.

After a few search I noticed that the most cited laptop choice was an ugly old Thinkpad. I really don't want to spend 200 hours checking if hardware and drivers will behave rightly and still end up in an energy efficient result. So guess what I'll just go for a MacBook and run Linux in a VM if needed...

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#247

Post by scholia »

wolfgke wrote: post #148
shmerl wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "Mi…

An extra point is that OEMs charge to distribute third-party software, which is usually called crapware. If you install a lot of crapware, you can reduce the cost of Windows close to zero. That's why OEMs do it even though users don't like it.

If one of your users subscribes to the bundled AV software then you can make a recurring income from Windows that can be larger than the profit you made on the hardware.

Offering Linux as well as Windows just increases costs. There's the extra hardware qualification, sourcing drivers etc, extra stock-keeping and distribution costs, and extra advertising costs. You may have to do that across dozens of languages for over 100 countries.

Ad costs can be significant because Microsoft and Intel provide advertising support, discounts or kickbacks for including phrases like "MightyCorp recommends Windows 10" in your adverts. Microsoft isn't going to pay out if your ad includes Linux.

If you survive that, you have to survive the cost of support and/or returns. When your user base has a vague idea how to use Windows, and zero idea of how to use Linux, that's a killer. One "support incident" kills any profits from at least five sales.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#248

Post by khedoros1 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #190
vacri wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a counterpoint, I use Debian on a Thinkpad as well, and while I don't print, wifi and sleep work without problems, and so did a SIM card I put into it for 3G - it 'just worked', and the only config I needed to do was pick which one of my ISP's "AP" names to use. That was surprisingly easy.

As another counter-counterpoint: I use Debian on a T460, and sound and wifi don't work out of the box. While it may be OOTB for some people that doesn't mean it's everyone. I think I've only had one laptop in the past 10 years (~4 laptops) that has worked OOTB with Linux.

I've had an IBM Thinkpad (2003-2009), a Lenovo netbook (2009-2011), a Sager-branded Clevo (2011-2016), and an HP Envy 15t (current). The Thinkpad...well, 2003 was still a rough time. Especially early on, the basics worked, but everything else was a fight. The netbook had to be connected to ethernet to grab the Broadcom wireless firmware. The Sager had Intel+Nvidia dual GPUs before that was a well-suported use case. The HP is the first machine I can think of where everything "just worked". I improved battery life by tweaking some things, but it was a longer fight to get Windows 7 working on it.

Comparing those to Windows installs on the same hardware at the time I bought them, the HP was lovely, the Lenovo was about equivalent, and the IBM and Sager stank (it'd be cheating to say that loading modern distros on them would be much nicer ;-) )

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#249

Post by michaelmrose »

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…

Your post is a whole bucket of wrong.

You have always been able to mix and match apps from a different desktop.

Vim and emacs are awesome.

Package formats have never ever been compatible, not even all distros that use the same format are compatible in fact. For open source software this is less of an issue than it seems basically the production of a package is 1/100000 of the effort required to produce the program itself and can even be done by individuals far less skilled than the original dev.

This means with only a relatively tiny additional input of labor a program can be packaged for all the most common distros.

I don't prefer unity but I think you bazaarly overstate the case.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#250

Post by elihu »

I liked this essay, but I also wanted to rant for a bit about how the state of the Linux Desktop is just one particularly glaring example of a bigger problem, which is that instead of building something that works for most use cases, it seems to be popular to build things that work really well for one use case and not so well for others. Which in some cases is fine, but when we're talking about infrastructure like operating systems or programming environments or APIs, it's a big problem for anyone who wants to build on top of this infrastructure because then they have to pick a technology stack that limits who will use the thing they write because it was built on top of stuff that only works well in its little niche.

I write software. Suppose I want to write a program and have lots of other people use it, and want good confidence that those people will continue to be able to use it for a long time into the future. This is a pretty basic thing to want to do; how do I do it?

The first question is what kind of software is it? If it's a desktop application, then I'd need to write it for Windows and/or MacOS. If it's a server application, then Linux would be a good choice. If it's mobile, then iOS or Android.

Writing in Java might be a good choice for OS portability, but then I'd have to educate all my users on how to run java apps on their platform.

So, what we have is a lot of walled gardens and the un-walled wilderness of Linux, and these are all incompatible with each other for various reasons and I can't really say that any one of them is what I would call a good general-purpose platform for writing general-purpose programs.

It seems like something that's missing in the open source community (and something that would combat the walled-garden balkanization of user communities in both proprietary and open-source software) is an effort to create portable, carefully designed binary formats and APIs that we intend to be stable and usable for the next fifty years or so, and that "just work" for almost any common use case, whether it's a desktop app, a mobile app, a server app, an enterprise app, an embedded systems app, whatever, and then we make sure that there are tools available on every open platform to run these portable binaries.

(Java did attempt this before, but their early efforts were slowed by being a proprietary single-vendor platform; once they opened up, Java was kind of old and less exciting. It should be possible to do better by creating a new platform that isn't part of some maneuver by one tech behemoth to take market share from some other tech behemoth, and by building from a more modern foundation.)

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