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What killed the Linux desktop

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Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#31

Post by jrockway »

PotatoEngineer wrote: post #23
jrockway wrote: post #9

I've used Linux for years and have never had these problems. I think the issue is that getting everything working requires a deep understanding of each component and the system as a whole. If you just follow advice on forums, you will make things worse because you're doing things you don't understand to a system that you don't understand. That's not going to lead to success. You need to be able to think critically ab…

It sounds like you're agreeing with the article - things work on Linux when you have a deep understanding of them. While it's good to encourage a deep understanding, the group of people using any given OS will always follow a curve of some sort. There will always be beginners; there will always be people who know just enough to be dangerous; there will always be experts. Requiring everyone to be an expert will preven…

You'll hit the same problem with any OS. OS X will just get slower and slower, and Windows will become infected with malware. General purpose computers are not easy to use, yet: with the infinite flexibility they provide, there's infinite opportunity to fubar them. The average Linux distributions exposes the flexibility by default, making it seem hard to use. But if you switch to a less-flexible Linux, like ChromeOS, many of the problems go away. So I don't really understand what the article is trying to achieve other than trolling by stating the obvious in an inflammatory manner.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#32

Post by shardling »

mbell wrote: post #2

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.

>What killed the linux desktop? Drivers.

That seems a weird way to phrase it. This is not a new thing, and generally drivers have gotten better over the years. Saying that drivers inhibited the growth of Linux makes sense, saying that they killed it -- not so much.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#33

Post by pfedor »

Yeah, right, because OSX cares so much about backwards compatibility. They care so much that they actively go out and intentionally break APIs, like say when CGDisplayBaseAddress() stopped working in Lion, breaking fullscreen in every single SDL-based game (and by "breaking", I mean the game will actually crash when attempting to enter fullscreen.)

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#34

Post by jrockway »

hnriot wrote: post #5

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…

/ works as a path delimiter on Windows. And Linux runs DOS apps just fine too, in essentially the same manner that modern Windows does. (Emulation.)

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#35

Post by randallu »

chimeracoder wrote: post #6

> (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions. This is completely missing the point - a statically compiled end-user binary should be compatible across all distributions of Linux, using the same version of the kernel or any newer version. The only caveats to that are (a) hardware and (b) poorly-packaged software. (A) is the fault of hardware manufacturers and is increasingly not an issue these days anyway; driver…

Like libc, or libX11 and apparently ld-linux.

Why not just ship a chroot jail to run it in in case some of those statically linked system libraries read config files which might be under a different path or in a different format?

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#36

Post by untog »

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.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#37

Post by agumonkey »

Does anyone feels that linux and desktop are at odds with each other? Don't we like small components to bind together using pipes ? Desktop apps are the reverse, big black boxes that barely communicate with anything (I'll admit I don't know dbus)

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#38

Post by gavinlynch »

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…

Thank you. All too-often that entire line of thinking was minimized into simply "caring about eye-candy" and summarily dismissed. That irked me. It was like with the Linux desktop, you had to choose a side, instead of simply marrying what is great about GNU/Linux with what is great about a cohesive modern design and user experience.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#39

Post by wonderzombie »

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…

At the risk of re-igniting that flame war, I posit that this is also a cathedral vs. bazaar issue. OS X is more or less centrally planned, by one company, Apple.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#40

Post by nnnnnnnn »

An interesting observation is that tablets are becoming the new desktop and in that space linux, through android, is becoming a dominant player. In a way, the linux desktop is finally here and it's winning against both Microsoft and Apple put together.

All of the article's criticism of mainstream workstation distributions is accurate, of course. But it's important to note that those represent nowhere near the sum total of the linux user experience these days.

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