Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

I really don't understand the drive to make GNU/Linux a "consumer operating system." The consumers don't care and are happy with absolutely awful software. Shiny GUI toolkits that are a huge pain to develop for, and non-free software gos against what the people who use GNU/Linux now want. That's why ubuntu's unity stuff failed, because they chased after users who don't care and alienated the only ones that might use their product.

> Shiny GUI toolkits that are a huge pain to develop for, and non-free software gos against what the people who use GNU/Linux now want.

This is a yuuuge generalization. There are many Linux folks who want a slick consumer experience and there are many that want ratpoison and vim. :-)

This idea doesn't take away from the requirements that people have for a non-consumer desktop.

It is foolish to pursue consumer space in this age. The muggles want mobile.

This is a wonderful opportunity for us original computer nerds... with the mainstream leaving for their terrible mobile devices computers can finally go back to being tools for power users. The appliance-like expectations of the mainstream was the worst thing that ever happened to traditional computing.

I still think the whole Linux Desktop problem can be summarized in one sentence:

There is a lack of a simple desktop app development environment.

Yes there is GTK and yes there QT. But regardless of how much people may hate Xcode, it allowed people to create solid desktop applications in a fraction of the time that was needed to do the same in either GTK or QT. It's better documented, it's smoother, it's easier to structure your application in terms of the framework rather than programming language.

The whole thing is a little like the Rails vs. Flask or Go argument. Yes Flask is really cool, and in Go you can build really cool stuff and it's modular, you select a muxer and stitch it together, it does more requests per second, but if you just want to bash out a quick web application you're better off picking the first option.

The app store is hard argument is so far down the line... If you look at all the things Apple did before they pushed their app store it almost doesn't matter.

That looks like glib. Which is kind of nasty in my opinion. At some point they pushed for Vala, it makes the whole thing a bit more pleasent. But personally I had a feeling it was on life support the entire time. Some bindings were plain broken and impossible to fix, interop had really crappy documentation. At some point I just gave up.

(I'm mixing IDE with language/lib right now, but for Gnome it does go hand in hand IMHO)