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What killed the Linux desktop

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Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#221

Post by scrumper »

mratzloff wrote: post #69
scrumper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much spot on. I believe that the lack of "strong-D" Design you refer to is because Linux's desktop is pretty much the ultimate committee-driven project. It's very democratic: great for preventing abuse, but rather bad when it comes to vision. Most of us here know how difficult it is for one person in a company to drive an idea through without it being diluted; countless product companies have gone bust…

Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project. The Rails community seems to manage.

Well, Rails is a web framework. It's not an end user desktop environment like Gnome, KDE, NeXTStep, Windows or what have you.

Collaborative development does rather well with developer tools.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#222

Post by Avshalom »

nirvana wrote: post #178
lttlrck wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like the Mac OS menu bar; drove me nuts stuck at the top of the screen like that, but a lot of people like it and I can understand that...

That's my point. It's not that a lot of people like it. In fact, whether people like it or not isn't really relevant. It's that this is the correct way to do it. When the menu bar is at the top of the screen, the user is much faster at getting the mouse over a menu item and clicking to open the menu. It works better. This isn't opinion, it's measurable scientifically. When the menu is on a window, you overshoot with…

Science says that it's faster to hit a distant infinite target given sufficient mouse speed vs a small but local target.

given sufficient speed.

However it says nothing about whether an application's menu bar is important enough to warrant that extra acquisition speed.

Also the mac menu bar does not present an infinite target, particularly if you have any significant horizontal velocity, which is extremely common with wide screen monitors or multiple monitors.

Also with the advent of large/multiple monitors there is the need to change where you're looking causing extra delay for refocus.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#223

Post by mbq »

untog wrote: post #36
nirvana wrote: post #25

I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point. Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. Before I go on, let me say that Design is NOT "making it look pretty". In fact, thinking that this is what design is, is what leads many linux advocates to reject the needs of design. Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to fu…

Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. [...] Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well. Actually, I'd say the same of Windows, if not more so. I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down.

There are nice terminals for Windows and you can install gnuwin32 & win-bash to get almost complete UNIX command-line experience without Cygwin burden.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#224

Post by alexchamberlain »

cletus wrote: post #97

This is the money quote: > The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and philosophy . Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need. I like OSX. Out o…

Nvidia card?

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#225

Post by lazyjones »

ajross wrote: post #147
lazyjones wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. That's precisely what Linux fails at. Most minor UI/desktop-related tasks that are hassle-free with Win7 or OSX take far too much time. Time that most people don't have and don't want to invest. Example: doubleclicking on a .ttf file in the Xfce file manager (plain Debian Xfce) does nothing. Right-clicking offers various unr…

Oh, for... Just drop the .ttf in your .fonts directory and be done with it. That you insist on mucking around in a GUI to do something as simple as placing a file in the spot where it belongs says everything you need to know about whether you belong in the "technical user who wants a system that gets out of the way" class or not.

There is no .fonts directory and this is a desktop machine - I want to install the font system-wide. Plus, the problem with half the running applications not seeing the font still exists.

So I'm not a technical user for you because I insist that such things should not require no more attention than a double click on the font file? Technical users aren't by definition masochists who take the longest route just because they can. I need to get stuff done - stuff other than installing fonts and learning the pecularities of a particular desktop Linux flavour!

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#226

Post by jcastro »

lazyjones wrote: post #111
freyrs3 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Design is about usability and understanding the user Here's the point you're missing. The overwhelming majority Linux users don't give a flying hoot about the average user or mass adoption. They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. Linux succeeds and excels at this because it is precisely designed for that niche and curated by its end-users. There are however people…

> They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. That's precisely what Linux fails at. Most minor UI/desktop-related tasks that are hassle-free with Win7 or OSX take far too much time. Time that most people don't have and don't want to invest. Example: doubleclicking on a .ttf file in the Xfce file manager (plain Debian Xfce) does nothing. Right-clicking offers various unr…

Double clicking a .ttf and then clicking the install button has been in Ubuntu's/Debian's default for years now.

I mean, you installed a stripped down desktop for some reason, of course it's going to be missing some features when you could have just used the default installation that has all of that already.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#227

Post by pswenson »

vetinari wrote: post #176
pswenson wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with the terminal? hit cmd-q to close an app. no idea what you mean by insane window switching behavior. you gave no examples of how Ubuntu/Fedora is better to rebut on UX. care to share some?

What's wrong with the Terminal.app? Except for the fact, that it does not really work? Yeah, for simple stdout/stderr output it is fine, but for medium-sized ncurses apps it is a major PITA. Even Icaza's own Midnight Commander does not work there.

no idea what you are getting at.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#228

Post by leishulang »

OSX got nice touchpad, Windows has awesome game libs, and Linux comes with shit loads of developer goodness. But yea, now OSX has home-brew so it almost like a better linux, but still forces you to buy overpriced hardwares.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#229

Post by agumonkey »

cletus wrote: post #97

This is the money quote: > The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and philosophy . Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need. I like OSX. Out o…

Maybe by designing a set of base interfaces, with extension (ala opengl, w3c)

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#230

Post by cooldeal »

justincormack wrote: post #132
_delirium wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among non-ultra-geeky Linux users I know (mostly part-time users), "Linux" does seem to be reasonably standardized as far as desktop components go, because by "Linux" they mean "Ubuntu". It's possible the Ubuntu desktop dominance came a bit too late, though, and still isn't entirely complete. My own experiences aren't great with Windows, though they're smoother on OSX than Linux. The problem I have with Windows is th…

Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed. Linux (Ubuntu in my case) and OSX just work sanely mostly, but OSX is a horrible dev environment, so I moved back to Linux.

>Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed

Without qualifiers, that statement is meaningless. Perhaps you mean it's horrible for some devs? (Millions of others are doing just fine with Visual Studio).

For regular users, dropping them to Linux will be like replacing your mom's car's controls with the controls found in an airplane cockpit(command line) or playing "who moved my cheese ?" with the Linux desktop. Granted, everything is moving to the web these days, so why not just give them an iPad or a Chromebook?

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