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I switched to OSX for exactly the reasons the author mentioned. The fact that I have an awesome UI + ability to use the shell all day is a huge win for me.
Arguing about the niceties of the UI is all well and good but the actually problem is far more fundamental. What killed the linux desktop? Drivers. Mostly graphics drivers but some others as well. Who cares if the UI isn't ideal if the damn thing can't sleep and wake up properly, or if it spazs out every time I plug in an external monitor.
Stupid jokes aside, I always had a feeling that the Linux desktop was actually gaining users in the last couple of years, especially since Ubuntu came along and truth be told it's still the best operating system I've been using but that question is largely open to taste anyway.
For the last couple o' weeks I had to use Windows 7 at work and oh my god, what a pain in the bottom it is! I've had a couple of looks at OSX and never liked it either. Then again my linux desktop isn't exactly standard either - but that's what I like about it: customizability. I'm the kind of guy who likes to tinker with the system until it's just about right for me. The last time I set up my laptop it took me 3 or 4 days to finish but it absolutely paid off. The result is something I find aesthetically pleasing and extremely usable.
Linux has a couple of show-off features and facts 'n' figures like running most of the Top 500 and second-to-none package management but it's real power is that it can very well be all things to all people. It's been said a million times but Linux gives the user a choice, and I honestly value that a million times more than any nice OSXesque UX or Windows-esque games support.
The catch is that I'm definitely not the average user who wants things to "just work" (although they rarely do).
funny; I am using a linux desktop right now. not dead yet.
I think some of this is perceptive. It's true that the attempt by both Canonical (Unity) and Red Hat (Gnome 3) to sort-of-incompatibly break away from the so close to standard that it hurts to type this Gnome 2 environment did a lot more harm than good, at least as far as platform adoption goes. And clearly OS X is an extremely polished Unix and is going to appeal to the more UI-focused of the hacker set. And Miquel…
Oh, but it is. Because it has lost a lot of momentum that it had, momentum that was coming from the "we're gonna overtake MS and win over the Desktop" feeling prevalent at the time.
Heck, the guy behind GTK complained recently that he is just one man taking care of the project. The full GUI foundation for Gnome, and one that is far from feature complete at that, and it only has one guy working on it.
It has also lost a lot of people and companies associated with it at the time betting on this possibility [of it winning the desktop]. Most companies nowadays support Linux development only for the server stuff, but it wasn't always so. Miguel moved on, Ximian moved on, Hazel moved on, Rasterman moved on, etc etc. Even Adobe quit developing Flash for it.
And it also lost a lot of "alpha geeks" to OS X, which wasn't even commercially available at the time (1997-2001). This "desktop UNIX" come out of nowhere and it was it that did what Linux was supposed (and expected) to do, ie eat into MS market share. Well, even OS X didn't eat that much, but 15% is still a lot.
>He's also an inconsolate "platform fan". Much of his early work was chasing Microsoft products and technologies, of course; now he's an iPhone nut apparently, and that doesn't really surprise me.
You're saying it like it's a bad thing. Gnome (or Linux for that matter) are also platforms.
And to be frank, his early work was not "chasing Microsoft products and technologies". His early world was Midnight Commander, Gnome, Gnumeric, and Evolution.
He indeed like the component model (not the Window platform itself) when it was presented to him at a Microsoft visit, though (the story of this visit should be up there somewhere). But what's not to like about it? A good, clean, component model of sorts was also needed for FOSS, maybe still is.
The phase you describe, IIRC, was several years _later_, when he saw the .NET platform and got hooked.
Speaking as someone running a Linux desktop (and am writing this on one) there's not much to say other than I agree. I run linux because work gave me a PC and there's no way I can write software on Windows. Of course we all have servers managed off in the corporate cloud somewhere that run ssh/vnc etc, but there's no way I wanted to install putty again or miss out on the unix commands that make (work) life more enjoy…
Arguing about the niceties of the UI is all well and good but the actually problem is far more fundamental. What killed the linux desktop? Drivers. Mostly graphics drivers but some others as well. Who cares if the UI isn't ideal if the damn thing can't sleep and wake up properly, or if it spazs out every time I plug in an external monitor.
absolutely agree. I love linux, its a great os but drivers are a nightmare, honestly, I've never had any linux distro, where I could comfortably buy an IO device and not have to worry about compatability issues. This to me is the biggest problem by far with the os(s) in their current state.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Also, part of what killed the Linux desktop was Miguel and his total lack of understanding of the unix philosophy which drove him to create abominations like BONOBO. D-Bus is not much better either.
That he fell in love with an iPhone goes to show he didn't fully appreciate the value of open source either.
We were just yesterday commenting with some friends in #cat-v how Evolution is one of the worst pieces of software ever created, and Evolution is supposedly considered by Miguel and co to be the epitome of the Linux desktop.