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."

Comments

What is this? Open source has a flaw?!

[VineyardRay]

How can it be true? I thought open source was going to save the planet and cure diseases and make a Sunni hug a Shi'a. I can't believe that there is no cohesive vision. Sarcasm aside, this is the problem with open source that no one will discuss. The notion that software is better simply because the source is open is intellectually dishonest.

Red-haired child

[Latent Heat]

That's right. Mod the parent post "Troll" because it suggests that the user experience of Unix is out of the mainstream. La-la-la-la I can't hear you!

On one extreme you have Grandma and her computer for doing e-mail; on the other extreme you have a bearded guru; in the middle you have the computing center for the engineering college at a Big-10 university 2-hours drive from the Eastern shore of one of the Great Lakes. We have mainly Windows boxes, a few Unix-y things like Solaris and others for running those Unix-only engineering packages, and some token Linux boxes that are treated like the red-haired child of questionable paternity. No, the folks running the computing center are not Linux-heads, but they are not helpless Grandma either in terms of Linux adoption.

For starters, one cannot plug in one of those USB memory sticks into a Linux PC. Forget about plugging the thing and having it auto-recognized and mounted. Forget even about shell commands to "mount" (that is so DEC 1970's PDP-11) that device. No can do. One is told to log into a Windows station, copy the files to a network share accessible from the Unix side, log out, and then access the files from Linux. No joke.

I mean for crying out loud, a USB memory stick is not like someone's wonder digital camera-scanner-PDA-coffee maker. Everyone is using those memory sticks, and that you can't just plug it into the computer and access it from Linux is completely stupid. Yeah, yeah, our computer center guys are not followers of the True Way or have the Right Distro, but we are not talking about Grandma and her e-mail, we are talking about a bunch of computer admins at the engineering college of a university.

As to the red-headed child effect, there is a dearth of applications on these things. Like why don't they have Open Office/Star Office, Eclipse, and a couple other things on them? Why, because there is no demand, mainly because no one uses these boxes for anything, and we are talking engineering college and university.

So if the failure to adopt Linux indicates stupid people, there are stupid people even in the academic environment by that standard, which suggests Linux has a ways to go in terms of adoption.

Re:I disagree

[Enderandrew]

There are several distros that are easier to install than Windows and work better out of the box.

Have fun being productive when your box is overwhelmed with spyware and viruses.

I'm not this huge Microsoft hater. Those are just the facts.