Linux Development Call To Arms

Hell O'World writes "This ZDNet Article points to the direction that Linux developers need to follow. Many people think that Linux needs an Office clone to gain acceptance, but the truth is that monolithic software is not the future. To get all of the functionality that anyone could possibly need in one place, the Office paradigm is to have everything there at once, and that takes a huge amount of resources to load, and years to learn. Linux will not gain converts by giving users the same thing, that they will then have to relearn. The power of UNIX is in connecting small, fleet-footed tools. What we need now is to create an environment, where users can easily create customized tools for the way they work, and developers can easily add new functionality."

Comments

Is this a battle Linux needs to fight?

[Infonaut]

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here. I like the idea of small, lightweight software components for desktop computing, but this has been tried before. Here's the only link I could find to OpenDoc.

Basically, Apple's idea was to build small software components that could talk to each other and be loaded as necessary to accomplish specific tasks.

It was a great idea, and still is. I think the problem isn't so much the technology implementation as it is getting developers to see the benefits of such an approach.

Yes, developers. If you're running a software company, creating small components allows you less room to innovate on features. This in turn makes it more difficult to market your products.

I know your suggestion was that Linux adopt such a component-based approach for productivity apps, and it wouldn't seem that the limitations of the commercial world would apply. But the dominant paradigm in office computing is still the monolithic app, because that's what commercial developers are providing.

So for now at least, Linux developers will probably have to fight this fight alone. In order to convince users to make the shift away from MS Office, et. al., Linux apps have to offer a solution that's easier to use and faster by a factor of at least two. It's been shown time and time again that in order to overthrow a paradigm, the resulting benefits have to be not just incrementally better, but exponentially better.

Finally, is it even worth the effort? See the October issue of Wired, for an article by former Red Hatter Russ Mitchell, about why going after the desktop is a bad idea.

The "I Just Want to Type a Damn Letter" test

[mikosullivan]

While Soegaard provides some interesting ideas for tools that may be useful, his analysis of What Users Want is sadly off target. He seems to assume that users want lots of nifty features and inter-functionality. My experience providing tech support and teaching computers indicates something quite different: users mostly want a few basic functionalities, and they want them Right Now.

I call it the I Just Want to Type a Damn Letter test: can the user turn on the computer for the first time, understand the basics of how to operate in a few minutes, then get to work on things they want to do? If not, we'll meet with resistance at every step.

Soegaard provides some nice ideas on how to structure the back-end, but the front-end needs to Give the People What They Want: an interface to do word processing, another to do email, another for web browsing, and a few others for other less-common tasks. That is what is going to help open source win the battle of the desktop.