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What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

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Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#251

Post by khedoros1 »

herbst wrote: post #155
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 too am totally in love with gnome shell. Guess people just hate on new workflows because szre it takes a few hours to adapt

I used it for a few months when it came out, then switched to Mate. My biggest problem was that for a lot of things that I wanted to change or configure, the official how-to was (paraphrased) "Actually, you don't want to configure that. We designed the system not to work that way." I decided to "vote with my feet".

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#252

Post by pjmlp »

fooker wrote: post #241
closeparen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Libraries are just part of the picture, then comes the location of files, init systems, lack of standard frameworks for all layers of a modern desktop.

On OS X, in spite of CUPS, I can use AppKit Printing API. On Linux I have to resort to somehow generate PS and forward into the printer driver.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#253

Post by Zenst »

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…

I'm tending to agree for the mass's at least, for me CDE was and still is a great desktop, least for somebody who just wants to pull up lots of terminals and have multi-desktop panels - just works. Simple, basic and sure lacks eye candy beyond Xeye's but then I own a lava lamp.

Yes mass basic users like their eye candy, and the diversity which is a strength in many area's is equally a weakness when it comes to desktops. GUI's and the overhead add so much in complications to code that if they keep changing then they tend to get ignored or badly utilized and that gives the user a mixed half-baked experience.

  This and they tend to be the epitome of feature-creep.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#254

Post by pjmlp »

vectorpush wrote: post #174
hvasilev wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, CS students have usually been exposed to Linux at the university and very few of them still choose it as an operating system.

To start with, CS students are not the masses. In addition to that, some CS students at some schools are exposed to the linux command line, and even less are exposed to linux desktop environments because most CS students have grown up using Windows or Mac and the curriculum is nearly always structured in such a way that it is unnecessary for the student to install a linux DE in order to do their work. Finally, I'm no…

When I went to the university we had UNIX everywhere, not GNU/Linux, that started to be common around my 2nd - 3rd year.

We were using DG/UX and Aix before the department started adopting GNU/Linux on their recently build new department building.

Windows systems were only used for graphics programming classes and for the first year students introductory courses.

Back then our degrees were 5 years long, of daily using UNIX for project assignments, everyone had some form of fvwm, afterstep, windowmaker, enlightment, blackbox, GNOME, KDE, CDE configured as their environment of choice.

The majority of us, a few decades later, are mostly coding on Windows and Mac OS X systems.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#255

Post by pjmlp »

patrickaljord wrote: post #31

Nothing killed the Linux Desktop. Windows already won that war and it was good enough. Heck, even Apple and its billions couldn't get more than 5% market share worldwide. The next "war" moved to mobile and there linux is not doing that bad.

> The next "war" moved to mobile and there linux is not doing that bad.

Apparently the majority that express this feeling never coded with the Android NDK.

What is exposed from Linux there, means Google can easily replace it by something else and most app developers will never notice.

This is what is "Linux" for C and C++ code:

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis.html

They just need to provide this libraries, and if you try to link to some private library, like many used to do, starting with Android 7, the app will get terminated.

https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/android-...

Mobile is all about Cocoa Touch, Android Frameworks, .NET/UWP and Web Browsers, the kernels are pretty much irrelevant.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#256

Post by pjmlp »

remir wrote: post #218
killacodeninja wrote: post #113

How many Linux distros and their many different GUI/UI variations have been listed here??? No wonder the Linux desktop was dead upon arrival. Too many flavors of developers to satisfy. But it wasn't about developers; it was about end users who just wanted something simple. No matter the changes that Windows has made, from 95 to 10, for end users, the changes caused relatively minor disruption, especially with everyth…

I'd say Chrome OS will be the only Linux "distro" that will become mainstream.

Which by being a browser based OS, makes the kernel irrelevant.

Google can even make Chrome run bare metal, no one would notice.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#257

Post by pjmlp »

elihu wrote: post #250

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 op…

> then I'd have to educate all my users on how to run java apps on their platform.

Only if you do a bad service to your users by not packaging them correctly.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#258

Post by khedoros1 »

feedjoelpie wrote: post #137
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…

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.

It was a big change in workflow, and the developers gave off a paternalistic vibe (that I guess had been there in Gnome development for years, but Gnome 3 was the first time that I felt like it really impacted me).

I used Gnome 2 because it did what I wanted. Gnome 3 felt like style over substance (I'll agree wholeheartedly on "downright pretty UI"), and it couldn't be configured to act in a way I liked. I felt like I wasn't the kind of user they were targeting, so I switched to Mate when it came out.

Depending on who you ask, Gnome 3 was either a long-overdue redesign with great results or a dependable tool ditching its legacy to chase after some UX designer's dream.

It's been enough time. Might be time for me to look at it again. My patterns have shifted some, and it's possible that it would be a better fit for me now than it was then.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#259

Post by pjmlp »

remir wrote: post #215
Floegipoky wrote: post #62

For anyone who skipped the comment section of the article, I found the following comment by "has" to be very insightful. Specifically the way that the community would rather divide its resources to keep multiple mediocre implementations of a given thing around than consolidate them, and how the Unix Philosophy has been ignored: @Miguel: You are right about developer culture being a huge factor. Linux geeks all to oft…

The comment you quoted was right; people don't care about the OS, they care about their apps. Since Windows is king on the desktop, it would make sense to have an open source "clone" of Windows that will be able to run all the Win32 apps people love. This is exactly what React OS is! Sadly, the project never got the resource and support it deserved. Instead, we have 200+ Linux distros, multiple package manager, DE, e…

And in both cases, Chrome OS and Android, the fact that Linux is running underneath has zero value for the Web and Java developers targeting the respective OS.

Google can replace it by something else and they won't notice.

This is just a Pyrrhic victory, but geeks haven't yet realized it seems.

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