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Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst?
El Lobo writes "For the Linux desktop, 2002 was an important year. Since then, we have continuously been fed point releases which added bits of functionality and speed improvements, but no major revision has yet seen the light of day. What's going on?
A big problem with GNOME is that it lacks any form of a vision, a goal, for the next big revision. GNOME 3.0 is just that- a name. All GNOME 3.0 has are some random ideas by random people in random places.
KDE developers are indeed planning big things for KDE4 — but that is what they are stuck at. Show me where the results are.KDE's biggest problem is a lack of manpower and financial backing by big companies.
In the meantime, the competition has not exactly been standing still. Apple has continuously been improving its Mac OS X operating system. Microsoft has not been resting on its laurels either. Windows Vista is already available. Many anti-MS fanboys complain that Vista is nothing more than XP with a new coat, but anyone with an open mind realizes this is absolutely not the case."
It is good that people are starting to realise what a joke
Linux on the desktop has always been. When there is no central
coordination to provide this "vision" all you are left with
is a mess of non-integrated applications, poorly written "standards",
no sense of usability (gnome usability study: stick a pc in a conference
and get comments from geeks that already use linux) etc etc
If anyone thinks that all the latest "glitz" in the form of 3d accellerated
desktops are going to push desktop linux he is having major delusions.
Especially when all that these technologies (in the way implemented in linux land)
represent is all candy but no depth.
It'll take more than that to be competitive with OSX and even Vista and somehow
i don't think that Gnome or KDE are going to cut it.
Ubuntu is a better desktop than OSX no question case closed don't bother to reply
Assuming KDE 4 does come out in 2007, that'll be exactly 5 years behind KDE 3, about the same time from XP to Vista. They're developing as fast as a $100 Billion corporation, exactly how much more do you want?
This has to get dumbest comment of the year award. KDE doesn't even come close to Vista in complexity or sheer number of lines of code. KDE 4 is not even competitive with Microsoft Vista in Video Support or even providing an alternative to Direct X 10. KDE also has poor Video Game support which is inferior to Direct X and doesn't even provide a competitive alternative Direct X layer cough SDL cough (Which doesn't either). KDE can't argue that Video cards are written to support KDE Direct like Microsoft can with Direct X and doesn't fully support OpenGL.
All the KDE developers have to do is create a modern usable (both of which X.org is not) GUI. KDE 4 should take less than 5 years to release more like 2 or three years. KDE developers suck. In this case closed source software really does work better in GUI design over open source. GUIs require millions of dollars in money and hundreds of professional graphics developers and better leadership and organization which neither KDE or GNOME don't have. With KDE or GNOME or X-Windows it takes a lot more than create a pretty picture there is also Video Driver support and Game support in order to compete with Vista or OS/X which is sadly lacking in X.org and KDE or GNOME. Die X-Windows.
Personally, I see more fanboyism about it here. But then again, Linux just isn't that great. The entire concept is built around a junky command-line OS that requires a three inch thick book to outline the user/admin commands. And as for "All it takes is for one Linux representative to hire one lawyer", you're assuming that the core linux community is anything but a fragmented group of geeks who refuse to pay for software and are trying to piece together a chunk of code that matches what a company pays hundreds of thousands of professional coders to build.