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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."
No one is talking about Metacity. They're talking about the GNOME Desktop Environment, a complete desktop shell and software bundle.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I have both installed. Yes, it blows them away. Its fun, stylish, and some of the features even increase my productivity. However they're both horribly unstable. Lots of blank windows, crashes, freezes, and random quirks. They have a ways to go before they actually surpass windows and mac for production environments.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
There ARE easy alternatives to "apt-get" and things of that nature. I think what people hate to admit is that in order to sell Linux to the masses, it's going to have to be dumbed down. Companies like linspire have done a great job of this IMHO, but lack the funds for properly propogating and marketing their works. Linspire is usually a great hit when newbies use it. It's got everything that all the other distros are lacking from a newbie standpoint. The dumbed-down side of it is that there is no compiler... But then again, my mom doesn't want, or need, one.
The problem with many linux users is that they fail to realize that your "normal" computer user is NOTHING like they are. Linux CAN succeed but it really needs a set of standards to follow. People don't like inconsistency. They really don't even like choice. They don't want to have to choose one of the 300 active distros. They want "Linux" and they want it to work as easily as Windows does.
2000 called. They want their complaint back. Most USB and PCI devices just automatically work not; there's no "correct path towards setting it up" since it's set up within seconds of plugging it in.
That is absolutely right.
Now we have HAL, DBUS, udev, beagle and xorg composite extension.
If you put all of this things together the desktop experience is much improved.
Also, many of this things result in the same sort of functionalities that have appeared in OSX and Vista, but they dont necessary belong to KDE or GNOME.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I have also noticed a huge improvement in KDE's stability. With the recent Coverity scans, we see that KDE is on and off the 0 defect list. KDE seems to be the most active projects on the Coverity scan, I notice more more week to week change in KDE than in any other project. In 3.4 million lines of code, Coverity has uncovered over 1,200 bugs. All bugs have been identified and all but 10 have been closed. KDE has been on the zero defect list, but there is new development going on so new bugs do appear. Not only is KDE gaining the features you mention, but they are doing it while cleaning up the code base. KDE development seems to have a great deal of momentum, especially in Europe.
Think global, act loco
That's a problem with Windows too. On a fresh install of XP I'm usually stuck at something like 640x480 w/256 color until I can go to the nvidia website and get drivers.
Certainly there are valid complaints against Linux, but in this case you'll have to do better.
The 90's called, and they want their "I tried Linux but couldn't install it" angst back.
Right now OS X isn't as good an option for a lot of people.
Of course it isn't the best solution for everyone. It is just a better workstation than Linux for most people (in my experience).
The biggest thing is that the vast majority of Linux targeted desktop software (of which there is a vast range, even if you just restrict us to high quality and Free) either doesn't work or is horribly clunky.
This is sort of amusing. The vast majority of OS X targeted desktop software doesn't work at all on Linux. So that leaves us in a situation where one OS can run both sets of software (some of it not optimally) and the other OS can only run one set. Not exactly a win for Linux.
It's better than running on top of Cygwin but really not very much and *that means it's not UNIX, it's a pretty, closed bauble that effectively hides all of the good bits*.
You ideas seem pretty slanted. OS X is as much UNIX as Linux is, they're just different, partially incompatible, implementations of it. OS has some ability to run Linux software in a compatibility mode, that is not perfect. Linux can't run OS X software, pretty much at all.
If you don't believe me go and look at every OO.o release thread and see the Apple users asking for a better native port.
OpenOffice has come along way recently, but the important thing is it is almost 100% developed by Sun, which relies upon Xwindows. How well does Omniplan or Word for Mac work on Linux? You don't hear many people asking for it on Linux though, since most people using OS X, just don't care if it works on Linux.
In the mean time Linux has graphically caught up, application wise is only missing much, and is free. Why bother to switch at this point?
I'm a Linux on the desktop user and an OS X on the desktop user. For that matter, I run Windows too. My primary workstation has been OS X for quite a while because it has numerous wins over Linux. For starters, it runs a lot of really good software Linux does not. Photoshop, InDesign, Omnigraffle, iTunes, etc. Second the OS does a better job of handling those applications. The CLI and the GUI are integrated more smoothly than any Linux distro I've ever used. If I move a directory via the GUI, terminals that navigated into that directory update instantly. Applications and the OS share services smoothly. My Web browser, IM client, terminals, e-mail, word-processor, pro layout app, etc. all access the same spellchecker and grammar checker and language translation services and scripts and statistical package, etc. Third, the benefits of OpenStep mean I can use fat binaries that work on different systems and I can IM or e-mail them to friends, or transfer them when we don't have internet access and they work without any hassle. Fourth, with an OS X laptop I can run Linux and Windows in a VM to use any applications that don't have a port, or where the port is of poor quality. This means I have one machine instead of three and I can access all the OS's when I'm using my laptop at the coffee shop because I was too lazy to go to the office. Fifth, upgrading an OS X machine is years ahead of Linux. When I switched from a PPC mac laptop to an Intel mac laptop I plugged in a firewire cable and pushed a button. Then I went to lunch. All my user accounts, settings, authorization keys, applications, files, etc. migrated automagically. Migrating to a new Linux box and getting everything in its proper state usually takes me several days of messing around. And the best part is, since Linux and Windows are now in VMs, I never, ever have to to that again on any platform. When I get a new machine, I'll be taking a full Linux (Kubuntu) and Windows (XP) install with me, pre-configured and divorced from the hardware, with one button press. Until Linux distros duplicate that functionality, they'll have a hard time winning me back.
Now I'm not knocking Linux. It is an excellent server OS and a capable desktop. It beats OS X and Windows on a number of points. I'd lo
Sun is a big company. As far as I know, OOo/StarOffice is second (though a distant second) to MS Office in market share among office suites.
"Games" is certainly an issue for the home desktop, but certainly less for the corporate desktop.
First application listed in the menu is add/remove software.The first one. There's just no way to make it much easier than that. Linspire/Freespire has click-n-run, again, pretty easy. Other major distros are similar, and it doesn't matter which package application manager scheme they use, because the newbie user will be using the one that is applicable to the OS distro that is on the machine sitting in front of him or her, they don't have to figure out whether to use a .deb or an RPM or a tarball whatever, they only will see what is there to choose from, and with all major distros having thousands of applications, the excuses are dropping down to a few propietary applications that are more commonly used in a workplace environment where professional people guide their users, and then some games, and frankly, I no longer see games as being much of an issue with the advanced consoles out there.
I'm still a CLI doofus, and it doesn't seem to matter with me running linux at all, it isn't much of an issue at all. I run stuff from cli, once in awhile, but I don't *have to*. Once a person is used to mousing around, really, desktop linux is no big deal at all, and if they are a complete raw noob to computers at all, mac, windows, linux are all more similar than not for any useability bragging rights, it's up to the new user how intutitive they are then coordinating an icon and running a mouse and you just can't overcome that without personal handholding and/or a lot of experimentation on the users part. some people are just not smooth enough with ANY operating system to use it unattended right off the bat, but most folks could get going pretty easily with any of them, at least to do some basic common tasks.
Regarding sound, these days we have the dmix plugin for alsa, which happens to be enabled by default, so any program that can use alsa can play sounds all at the same time. And if you enable oss emulation, you don't even need alsa support in the app. Its been at least 2 years since I've messed with audio servers, and I agree, its a mess, but alsa is fixed now and all that should be left in the past.
thisnukes4u.net
I don't know of a desktop Linux distro which doesn't automount USB storage devices
Not knowing something doesn't make it untrue.
Dmix only works as long as you don't have a braindead app that accesses the hardware directly. Flash 7 does this, and it's going through the alsa OSS emulation...
If you have to do a GUI app, let's call it "foo", I would suggest you spend a some time creating "libfoo" first, to get the bare functionalities in place, its unit-tests (to keep yourself sane), then do "foo", the command line version you will use yourself, and then "gfoo" (or "kfoo", if I were a KDE person), the dumbed-down versions users that can't be "smarted-up" will use.
This way you end-up with three parts - a piece that can be reused and tested in a simple way, a part you can use yourself and another part your users will be happy to use. This way you can mitigate the risk of making the GUI tool do everything you need, because you will have the command-line tool for that.
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