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A Glimpse at the Linux Desktop of the Future
hisham writes "Every now and then we see articles pointing out "what's wrong with Linux on the desktop." This one gives a nice overview not only of the problems we all know, but also where to look for solutions (app dirs, smarter filesystems) and what's out there (projects trying to change the face of Linux, like Klik, Zero Install and GoboLinux). Still, it usually boils down to things that Mac OS X already has or that are/were touted for inclusion on MS Longhorn. Fortunately, the major desktops stopped playing catch and are focusing on forward-looking Linux projects, like KDE Plasma and Gnome Beagle. Interesting times ahead."
Am I missing something? How can it be forward looking when its already integrated into Mac OS X (Spotlight) and an add on for Windows (Google Desktop search)?
is that they do not want something that is like windows, they just want windows. I've seen people that prefer to do very complicated things on windows rather than running a couple of unix commands. Most people do not "choose" to use linux, they just learn one way to do thing, and this will be "the way" to do things. They are more sure to use windows than you will ever be to use linux, as a superior entity (the computer seller) imposed it to them. Instead you choosed to use linux, you know that there are many OSes, so you'll never be 100% sure that linux is the right choice over all other OSes. How strange is world we are living...
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
For projects that use it, one click installs do exist on Linux, via the autopackage installer. And they are actually one click too (well, OK, two clicks) because there's no Next->Next->Next style wizards involved. Why not watch the Flash demo to get a feel for how it works (it's a bit out of date now, things are slightly slicker these days).
One of the biggest problems autopackage has is simply that developers don't know about it. Whereas every Linux developer has heard of RPM, virtually none have heard of autopackage because it's so new (it only went stable in April).
If you like what you see there, spread the word or even better, write patches! The best kind of product is the one that sells itself, after all, and whilst autopackage is already quite nice for the end user we're still busy untangling the ball of wool that software distribution on Linux has become.
Sound chipsets often don't work in windows. However, I've found double clicking a setup.exe file and clicking a few dialog boxes is a bit faster than going through the configurations on various Linux distributions.
With that said, however, things with Linux distributions that aren't SuSE or Fedora seem to be coming together fairly quickly. The last time I had a Linux system running in my house was about 8 months ago (Gentoo), and I did have sound problems (the Gentoo documentation wasn't updated, and the method they have for installing emu10k1 with the 2.6.x kernel is flat out wrong - but I wasn't aware of that at the time). I spent a few days working on it. That's a few days vs. a few minutes (including downloading the right drivers from Creative (in my case)). It's alot "slicker" on Windows, but, again, things are getting a lot better in the Linux world. I have faith they'll eventually catch up. But not unless people honestly admit there are flaws and they need to be rectified. Too many fanboys are zealously arguing that any criticism of Linux is amounting to blasphemy. How can things get better if any criticism is immediately denounced as FUD? Just because something works fine for them doesn't mean it works fine for everyone.
I want my Linux desktop to get away from the focus on "applications". I want to deal with my data, not the tools I use to deal with the data. I want to open "documents", or pages, or multimedia collections of data. I don't want to have to remember which applications I use to edit or view them. I don't want to have to pick one tool, and exclude the rest. If I need to edit the text of a page, retouch the images, then upload it to my server, then serve it, I don't wnat to have to open the page in a series of different, mutually exclusive contexts. I want to open the page, and have combined menu items (or other GUIs) for all the operations from which I'll select to work on that collection of data. Or add new data. I'm really tired of feeling like I'm the janitor for a bunch of applications, finding/opening them in the right sequence, having to choose which app I'm working in, with its shortcut keys, default window positions, and exclusions of operations I'll have to do "later", when I open the other app to do those other operations. Then return to this app when I need to do these kinds of operations again. I can't even keep a single document open in multiple apps, alternately using them on the single doc, because each doc has a single datatype that's tied to a single app (or a few), and each open doc has its own saved instance - which doesn't refresh the open instances in the other apps.
Linux uses apps which mostly have three tiers: storage, engine and UI. They've got lots of IPC, mostly standardized. The desktops have more IPC options, too. I want a desktop which lets me find multimedia documents by bookmark, metadata searching, or virtual hierarchical views of my storage. When I open a doc, it can include live data, including data updated in realtime from distributed storage (or generation, like web services or streams). I want to work from menus (or other GUIs) that contain all the valid operations for all the valid datatypes in the doc. When I want to add new datatypes, I want to add from GUIs integrated with the doc scope in which I'm working. When I want to store my doc somewhere on the network, either as a resource, or a person, I want to merely send it to that object name, with its default transport (SMB, NFS, email, WebDAV, FTP, HTTP-PUT, SMS/Content-Disposition, whatever) automatic, unless I select another. I want to subscribe to versions of multimedia docs across the network. And I want to diagram how data flows through my document components into each other, including filters and logic, with dataflow/workflow templates that are just other docs that people with whom I work send around.
No more "apps". The Mac paradigm that Jobs swiped from Xerox PARC was supposed to be "doc centric". Apple and IBM started a grand partnership, Taligent, to put "OpenDoc" on every desktop, but they gave up when HTML and the Web supposedly offered a simpler, more popular way to do it. But it's 2005, and I'm more expert in operating a stable of complicated apps, each its own little world (with rickety bridges to some, but not all, other worlds), than I am in my own data. Let's slice up the apps into their features, each with their GUIs hanging out, then rebundle them into a desktop "meta-app". Which is the sole context, representing many different nonmodal contexts, in which I have to work on all my data.
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make install -not war