Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop

> He basically wanted to upgrade just one (obscure) app, and the process triggered the automatic removal of Gnome2 and installation of Unity. Just _IMAGINE_ how nightmarish this must look for normal users. You simply dont remove somebodys installed desktop sneakily from under their feet. You simply dont. That feels like the total loss of control over your computer.

Hmm, that's not exactly what happened, according to the link: "I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons."

Your overall point is well taken, but I wonder how much it affects what I think of as "normal users", who don't care so much about upgrading to the bleeding edge of scons. Consider a hypothetical user of Hardy, so they've had it for four years: what are they actually missing if what they do is web surfing, email, and maybe document editing?

> And I don't see what's wrong with requiring users to have an up-to-date system.

The problem are not the forced invisible security updates, the problem are forced user-visible upgrades.

When you want to upgrade one app, you maybe dont want to simultaneously upgrade another app or even the whole desktop. With the distribution model, theres no way to avoid this forced interdependence.

The Linux desktop is dead. Face it. Accept it.

How do I know this? Go to a developers' or tech conference, and what is the prevailing OS? 9/10 times these days, it's MacOS.

As much as Apple may be control freaks, they did desktop UNIX right and developers have flocked to them.

Meanwhile, the Linux desktop community is still having the same debates, the same difficulties it had back in the mid-90's. Dependency issues. Lack of compelling use case software; and that which does exist is versions behind current. Fragmentation.

The only areas in which the Linux desktop has moved forward is UI and user-oriented management, and Ubuntu deserves much of the credit for the latter.

Add to this the gradual movement away from the desktop paradigm to mobile. The desktop paradigm will still be around for several years (especially for creators--developers, media folks, etc), but the end-user is moving more and more towards smartphones and tablets for consumption. Extend those with external keyboards and monitors (think docks) for light creation work (documents, spreadsheets, etc), and you've the future.

Nope. The Linux desktop is dead.

But what's the problem with sources.list, as long as the user doesn't have to manage or even know that it exists?

Provide a .deb from your website, use the install script to add your repository to the sources.list. There, the user doesn't have to know or care about that file. And this is all possible - no, easy - to do right now.

This is how it must work:

I disagree, having to run apt-get is too cumbersome to a regular user. But a better way already exists in the form of apt-url. Click a link, have the package downloaded and installed automatically.

This can (will and does) co-exist happily alongside the centralized repositories. Someone just needs to implement it and push it through the glacial Debian processes.

But my point is that most of the infrastructure (support for multiple repositories, one-click installation of third-party packages) already exists. That's why I don't agree that this is the problem with Linux.

And while we're at it, there's no reason 'apt-get install github://foobar' can't be made work.

I don't see how - there's no standard on GH projects for installation; some projects are installed by simple make/make install, others with easy_install/gems/npm, etc.

UNIX in general never transitioned well from single binary applications that could just be placed in /bin /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin as appropriate to multi-file applications that needed an array of libraries, resource files etc. That coupled with a file system layout that nobody could ever agree on made it a mess once UNIX moved outside the curated environments it was typically found in prior to Linux.

NextStep made a good stab at the problem with bundles (.app .service .framework etc) but once you moved outside of the abstraction layer you were right back into the mess. Most Linux distributions seem to want to emulate SunOS circa 1992 and any attempts to "improve" on the solution in drowned out by fundamentalism.

I actually though the author nailed it in the last paragraph of part 2 of his post. The free software movement needs to start looking forward and not try and emulate what worked 20 years ago. There is definitely potential for a brave organization that is willing to try and tackle the challenge.