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Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

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Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#51

Post by rbanffy »

hasenj wrote: post #49
rbanffy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... the maximize button continues every bit as useless as it was when introduced in System 5, IIRC. But MacOS had some very interesting ideas - they did right more-than-one-user thing (copied from Windows) and Exposé.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the "more than one user" thing is a Unix feature, OS X basically gets it for free. It's not copied from windows; if anything, windows tried to copy it from Unix, and it was horrible before WinXP

No. It's the desktop login thing. IIRC, you couldn't do that under X. Windows offered the lock screen and log-in as another user on XP. OSX decorated that with a 3D cube and Linuxes started getting it a couple years later.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#53

Post by blub »

rbanffy wrote: post #38
blub wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is a Java userspace on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn't help that most people say "Linux" to actually mean "GNU/Linux", but Android is certainly not GNU/Linux and it can't be "Linux" either, because that's just the kernel.

Shouldn't we start calling it Android/Linux? Oh, and, BTW, Java is just the language most people use to write (most of the) software for it. Dalvik is not the JVM and, in fact, the compiler people use to generate Dalvik bytecode doesn't read the Java sources - it read Java bytecode.

We can, but I don't know how meaningful that would be. When I say Linux I think of a combination of things, including the kernel, the GNU tools, a WM - i.e. a distro.

The differences between Android/Dalvik and Oracle/JVM are few and far between (that's why they're getting sued :P). The important thing is that you write your apps in Java and you run them under a VM.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#54

Post by blub »

sandGorgon wrote: post #41
blub wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is a Java userspace on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn't help that most people say "Linux" to actually mean "GNU/Linux", but Android is certainly not GNU/Linux and it can't be "Linux" either, because that's just the kernel.

nope. You have the NDK which allows you to use native code in C/C++. Python for Android is built using C/C++... not Java.

And that's one of the good parts of Android. But C and C++ are not first class citizens, everyone is expected to use Java (Google's words) and assumptions made about a normal distro don't hold for Android.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#55

Post by cschwarm »

ralfd wrote: post #42

btw: Are there any newer statistics on Linux usage available? I played with the new google correlate tool today and every search metric for Linux stuff is merely "meh". Linux is constantly falling: http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=linux&t=weekly Gnome and KDE are also getting not more popular, but _less_ (at least in Google trends). Ubuntu peaked in 2007 and is sliding sidewards: http://correlate.googlelabs.c…

Wikipedia has a page about usage share statistics for operating systems that seems quite up-to-date:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

The usual caveats apply, of course. According to the web browsing data, iOS indeed overtook Linux-based OSes, even when one includes Android.

It also has a page discussing Linux adoption:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_adoption

It lists the reasons or barriers for using Linux. When you compare these for different systems, you'll note that -- on the one hand-- the reasons to adopt Linux have become less convincing. For instance, stablility is not that relevant, anymore, since competitors are often sufficiently stable, too.

On the other hand, there was nearly no change concerning the barriers for adoption: Android made a dent in the 'pre-installed' barrier, but that was it, basically. On netbooks, Linux had a lead initially but lost it to Windows.

While the article states that Linux is on par concerning application and peripheral support, I have my doubts. It has no third-party ecosystem that is able to compete with its competitors, which is probably due to the lack of a viable business model for desktop applications, lack of a decentral installer, higher fragmentation, in general, and consequently less public support.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#57

Post by navs »

davidhollander wrote: post #56

Gnome-Do http://do.davebsd.com/ is what originally sold me on switching to Linux as my main desktop. Much quicker to open what I need than either Windows 7 autocomplete or OSX spotlight.

I must mention Quicksilver for OS X, which apparently was the inspiration for Gnome Do. I haven't had much of a chance to use Gnome Do since I'm a wmii user but from appearances it looks about the same.

http://qsapp.com/

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#58

Post by trotsky »

cageface wrote: post #35
rbanffy wrote: post #31

I still think the greatest innovation in Linux distros is package management.

Linux-style package management is a lot more useful for servers, where you have fairly tightly controlled distribution requirements. I find it an encumbrance on desktops where I often want to update individual apps or keep several versions of a single app side-by-side.

The number of people I run into with outdated 3rd party programs with security flaws under windows and os x suggests it is a pretty killer feature for the desktop to me. Some of these folks are even rather technical, but for whatever reason don't approve the updates from the variety of checkers that pop up randomly or late.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#59

Post by jerhewet »

I've gone back to the standard desktop on Ubuntu 11.04, because the Unity UI is everything I despised (and disabled) in Windows 7.

I don't want a damned cell phone UI on my laptop or desktop, and I sure as hell don't want a damned web browser as my desktop UI. My computers aren't "appliances".

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#60

Post by rbanffy »

blub wrote: post #53
rbanffy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't we start calling it Android/Linux? Oh, and, BTW, Java is just the language most people use to write (most of the) software for it. Dalvik is not the JVM and, in fact, the compiler people use to generate Dalvik bytecode doesn't read the Java sources - it read Java bytecode.

We can, but I don't know how meaningful that would be. When I say Linux I think of a combination of things, including the kernel, the GNU tools, a WM - i.e. a distro. The differences between Android/Dalvik and Oracle/JVM are few and far between (that's why they're getting sued :P). The important thing is that you write your apps in Java and you run them under a VM.

> The differences between Android/Dalvik and Oracle/JVM are few and far between (that's why they're getting sued :P)

Not really. They are being sued because it's a threat to Oracle's control of Java. Dalvik may very well look a lot like JVM, but reason alone doesn't have any influence on Oracle's legal department.

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