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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."
Are gnome and KDE -really- the only choices? XFCE? ICEwm? Hell, CDE even?! ... or dare I suggest ... Bash ?
The voice inside my head tells me that it's wrong to make inferences and predictions on the general trend of desktop Linux based solely on the development of the WINDOW MANAGER.
"Many anti-MS fanboys complain that Vista is nothing more than XP with a new coat..." Ridiculous...It's nothing more than OS X with a new coat...
On the surface, one may look at GNOMEs development model and believe it to be nothing but random additions by random people. To me, I can see some method in it. When you have such a level of openness taking place, you will end up with a system that's completely reactive to additions in commercial products. GNOME is not stagnant, but simply reactive to changes in the major desktop systems (Windows, OSX). Yes Microsoft has "already" released Vista -- it is a matter of time before those in the GNOME community see things they like in Vista, and incorporate their favorite ideas into GNOME.
In the interests of continuity, could someone please retitle this story as, "Could 2007 be the year of Linux on the desktop?".
The change in emphasis shouldn't be a problem, by now we are all experienced enough to know the answer.
What a pointless article. It's entirely emotional and opinionated. It has nothing to say besides "Linux Suxxors". What the hell?
I don't think there's any point to responding to this, but I feel compelled to put my two cents in. People like to complain about something being "user friendly". I'm actually really tired of that phrase. I don't think Microsoft's stuff is very user friendly. I keeps making me do stupid repetive tasks that cause me carpal tunnel syndrome (from repetetive mouse clicks), keeps making me answer the same stupid questions over and over again, keeps reinstating the stupid sample photos and subdirectories into the one part of the OS that should ostensible by mine (the "My Documents" folder), keeps forcing onerous, impossible to read EULA's on me, keeps preventing me from doing legal things I want to do because they don't want me violating their copyrights... the list goes on.
What most people mean when they say "user friendly" would be better called "newbie friendly", or "neophyte friendly", or maybe "diletante friendly". I use Linux on my desktop becuase it's more friendly to the stuff that I want to do, and for the most part lets me do thing the way I want to do them.
Oh, and nice job calling linux on the desktop a "bubble". As george orwell statet, a writer mixing their metaphors is a sure sign that they aren't actually thinking about what they are writing.
A big problem with GNOME is that it lacks any form of a vision
Actually gnomes have the ability to see in the infrared spectrum, and get +2 to constitution / -2 to strength.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
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
"Linux on the Desktop", to me, is like the "Global Domination" slogan that Linus used a few years back. It's a nice slogan, but we are not there yet. Maybe never. But who cares, as long as people are having fun getting there? I have been interested in, and using Linux since, well, something like 1995. It was a perfectly acceptable desktop then, and it has only improved since.
This article is FUD, pure and simple. "Linux is Dying", "Linux is Insecure", "Linux is a Toy", "Linux is for Hobbyists" and "Linux is a Rabid Communist Terrorist Cancer that will steal your money, destroy the economy, kill your cat, burn your house down and crash your car" are all pseudo-ideas that came, were disproved and disappeared.
These days it's "OMG! Linux is Not Ready for the Desktop!!!". This, too, shall pass. Remember: even Mighty Microsoft, the saviour of the American Economy, has a finger in the Linux pie now. Soon, they will stop screaming and throwing feces at Linux and admit the inevitable: they don't stand a chance.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Hey here's another example - what if I want a fricking kernel dump when my system crashes? What, I can't dump it to disk like Solaris and every other enterprise UNIX does? I have to send it over the network (which comes to a host of problems which I won't go into here)? Yes, yes, I know about the problems of doing this for a variety of hardware, but this is the sort of thing I'm talking about
Linux is not there yet for high-end enterprise, although it is getting there. Linux should concentrate on that, which it has been doing, which is good. Trying to crack Microsoft's desktop monopoly while the high-end is up for grabs is dumb. Take the high-end and then go for the low end. Of course, people are free to work on the Linux desktop if they wish. But I'm glad the core team is concentrating on making Linux a real enterprise UNIX system.
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.
Fuck you Slashdot
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
The Calgary Unix User's Group got a great lecture from Aaron Seigo of KDE last week,
7 .html ...during which he either lied through his teeth about easily checkable claims for the near future, or KDE 4 is coming out in 2007 with significant improvements, and not just "chasing the taillights" of Mac and Vista, but leapfrog improvements upon them.
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/past-meetings/meetings.06-0
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?
The headline on this article is certainly senseless - in a "market" overwhelmed by a monopoly provider, there can be no bubbles to start with, at best you can incrementally develop a market share in small fringe areas where the monopoly's hold is weak. Mostly meaning non-US regions concerned about a lock-in by a foreign provider, especially governments. Also, particularly poor customers that can't avoid the $50 MS "tax" by piracy, because they have to play honestly, like educational institutions.
And in those areas at least, there's been slow but encouraging growth through 2006 and prospects for more. That's only a "bubble bursting" if you were deluded into imagining some take-off point of explosive growth was coming.
Up until now there has been no need for a big leap.
Can you really have a "big leap" with the Linux development model? With Windows, Microsoft can develop an OS for 5 years and keep lots of things under wraps. When it finally hit's people's desktop, if people like the improvements, there's a big "whoa" factor. There are a whole lot of changes.
But if Windows was open-sourced with no secrets, and had a 6 month release schedule, I suspect it would all feel like a whole lot of little incremental upgrades and bug fixes. There wouldn't be much anticipation or many surprises. The upgrades feel more mundane. Like you said, though, there have been substantial improvements to desktop Linux distros since 2002, but when all those improvements are trickling out every 6 months over a 5 year period, they just don't feel that big.
To be blunt, most of the linux community are geeks, and geeks basically don't like non-geeks. Linux developers are uber-geeks, and uber-geeks don't like anyone, not even other uber-geeks.
Yeah, that was a bit harsh, but someone had to say it.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I disagree with you. The "dumbed-down" environment is pretty much a solved problem. It is not difficult for even a newbie user to accomplish basic tasks in, e.g., Ubuntu. The real issue is that unlike Linux developers, average users don't give two shits about "software freedom" and are not going to tolerate excuses as to why this software doesn't run or that hardware device isn't supported. The users don't care whose fault it is that their hardware doesn't work. Either it does or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, they'll look elsewhere. They don't care why they can't play their games or run Microsoft Office. The only reality that matters to them is, they can't. So they'll look elsewhere.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Nonsense. The real issue here is not that Linux desktops need to progress anywhere. I use both Windows and Linux for hours a day and they both have their share of frustrations and joys. Your Quake example is a joke, since most people don't care about playing games like Quake on their computers. You might have a point if you use a more realistic example of software that simply is written to run on Linux at all. But so what? There's lots of great Linux/Unix-only software that I can't run on Windows. Although, I must say that I think the free software aspect of most Linux software makes it much more likely that a Windows port exists for good Linux software than a good Linux port exists for good Windows software.
The problem for Linux on the desktop is not usability or availability of games or a host of other problems at this point. It's things like lagging support for new versions of ubiquitous software, like Flash. It's the non-existence of any Quicken products for Linux. It's the fact that OpenOffice is a relative new-comer and MS Office/Works products have been around since the 80s. At most major computer retailers, the only operating system you can buy pre-installed on a machine is Windows. The average user never installs an operating system. Mac has a devoted base of people willing to pay a premium price for Apple products, why I'll never know, since Apple's offerings have been an inferior price-to-value proposition since at least the release of Windows 2000.
Apple is able to be profitable by serving a niche that is almost more fashion-driven than anything else. For the rest of the world there is only one choice: Windows. Linux isn't on the table. Not because of any real reason why average folks couldn't be just as happy with it, but because the perceived cost of a new computer doesn't include a component for operating system and applications expense. The bundling is the problem. The fact that MS has overwhelming market share is the problem. The fear of trying something new is the problem. People are already scared of their computers--even many IT professionals I've met seem to have limited understanding of how computers actually work. People know Windows, so they stick with Windows.
Until the consumer is informed that their hardware purchase includes a hefty charge for a Windows license and is offered Linux as an alternative (presumably at a different price point), they are not going to know or care about Linux or why they would want to consider it. They're already paying for Windows so they have no incentive to care about anything else.
I do not have a signature
For example 1959 was the peak of streetcar use in America. Ford+General Motors+Firestone+Standard Oil formed a cartel to buy and shutdown every streetcar company in USA to increase their sales. Sometimes they were secretive. Sometimes they were brazen as the "motorized" America. Fast Forward Sixty years we have, urban sprawl, decaying urban centers and extrodinary dependance on imported oil. When oil and energy consumption was synonymous with economic growth, when "what-is-good-for-GM-is-good-for-America we let the monopolies run rough shod all over us.
Now information is power, we are in the information and communication age. And we are letting information/communication monopolies run rough shod all over us. And we called those dissenters luddites/poverty-lovers/socialists. We call these dissenters geeks/uber-geeks/out-of-touch. History repeats itself.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I think that's a gross oversimplication of the issues concerning geeks vs. non-geeks.
First I think part of the problem, is your average geek would prefer speed and efficiency over simplicity while non-geeks prefer the opposite. Personally I spend most of my time at the command line so I think things like apt-get install are great, however most non-geeks get worried as soon as you tell them to open up a terminal window.
I'm sure you were trying to be funny but really, geeks don't hate non-geeks, they just don't see the problem and thus no reason to fix something that isn't broken. They would rather focus on developing something cool.
This is also why I tell people who are looking at new computers to buy a mac. This way, they get an easy to use computer with all the nice GUI elements that apple provides, and when I have to use their computer, I still have access to the terminal and all the UNIX goodness that is under the hood of OS X.
Personally I would love for Linux to come up with a GUI that is as easy to use as OS X. (Yes, yes, Ubuntu is easy to use but it's still not on par with OS X... some people can be really dim) However, I think most developers don't really know how to solve the problem.
Oh, and you got it wrong, most uber-geeks hate non-geeks trying to be geeks...
Plus they almost destroyed Toontown!
The 90's called, and they want their "I tried Linux but couldn't install it" angst back.
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.
I don't think usability and power are diametrically opposed. You don't need to "dumb down" Linux to sell it to the masses, you just have to make the workflow easy by default.
The dumbed-down side of it is that there is no compiler... But then again, my mom doesn't want, or need, one.
Not having a compiler doesn't directly make Linspire any easier for your mom. The only thing it does is theoretically make developers that want to reach that market provide a binary, but I'd not wager even many of them to that, rather than let the distro do it themselves.
I'm not bringing this up to "bust your balls" but because I think this is a really important consideration that is often overlooked. You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see compilers used to improve the usability of Linux, rather than be removed to "dumb down" Linux. Here's my ideal software install/management system. Take a nice, package manager and integrate it with the OS. Have it set up with at least one nice repository of software by default, with the ability for users to add more repositories. This provides for finding and downloading a lot of software and keeping that software up to date. Combine this system with OpenStep so that all normal software is a contained package that can be installed globally or within a user account and can be installed and uninstalled via drag and drop. More than that, it is easy to store and move applications via thumb drives, CDs, e-mail, IM, etc. Augment OpenStep by adding repository information to it, so that even if you only have an application on a thumb drive, the next time you use it the system can look for updates. Further augment OpenStep's existing set of binaries for different platforms with a subdirectory for source code, licenses, and build instructions that let the OS build a customized binary at its leisure and without the user having to do anything. Use the compiler to make it faster and easier, rather than removing it. Build your toolset with an official software registration service to make ACLs a practical security solution.
So where does this get you? If you're thinking of Linux strictly in terms of a server OS, this gets you unnecessary bloat. That is why this will probably never happen. If, however, you're thinking of Linux as a server and desktop and possible embedded OS, then it gets you ease of use and flexibility. Disk space is cheap these days and the ability to drag and application onto a shared server, or automatically upgrade to a new laptop with a different architecture, or IM a program to a friend who uses a different OS, and have it just work... is a huge win, in my opinion. For servers or embedded applications where disk space counts and optimization is more important than ease of use, this same system can work fine and nothing stops the OS from stripping out and discarding unused portions of the package. There are already tools on OS X that go through and do just that for people with disk space constraints that want to recover the space taken up by Intel or PPC or 32 or 64 bit binaries. Even then, since it references the repository in the package, making a shared binary work is easy (but a bit slower) so long as you have an internet connection.
The problem with many linux users is that they fail to realize that your "normal" computer user is NOTHING like they are.
Actually, the majority of Linux users and contributors are pretty focused on Linux on the server, and are not all that interested in it on the desktop. Of the 20 or so regular Linux contributors in my office right now, only two I know of are running it on the desktop. A few are running a BSD, a couple are running Windows, and the remaining majority are running OS X. And that is one of the reasons I see Linux on the desktop having less support than it used to. While there are some great, motivated projects, like the OLPC project, a huge numb
Oh boy, are linuxers naive...
n tExpress&file=index&func=display&ceid=29 so their kids can play games. You are not allowed to do that, because Microsoft has you under a draconian contract. You do that, you're dead meat.
Let me paint you this very real picture (someone I know): you own a computer store. You do have Linux on some machines. Customers come in, they look at it. They're curious. Oh, so this is "Linux" (notice? they've heard of it; they might even know it's open source - the term free software, in English, I'm not so sure is a good one - it sounds unprofessional.). They want to know if they can still have MS Office. Can their kids play games? Windows games?
But here's where things start to go wrong: you are not allowed, for instance, to install CodeWeavers http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/ for them to see MS Office inside Linux, or Transgaming's Cedega http://www.transgaming.com/index.php?module=Conte
There's no way you can prove to Joe Dad that he doesn't need Windows, but that he can still have the Windows software he needs. That he will save money, by not having to pay for the expensive MS OS, and that he will gain in security, and save in antivirus software. In fact, your deal with Microsoft may even specify that if you even suggest that, you'll be in breach of contract.
To make matters worse, Microsoft (and Intel, BTW), will shove you a lot of money to promote your store (as long as you flash their brand names), even give you money for advertising.
So, you see, this is not such a simple world where "the best technology wins" or "as long as we have standards." This is much more than that, it's a marketing game. Linux, PC-BSD, etc, will have to start with the corporate desktop, where money matters. Unfortunately, Windows users are in a deadlock, because the FLOSS community has not been able to come up with competitive Office solutions (please, do not say OpenOffice.org is that solution - people who say that have no idea what they're talking about), including integration with the said hypothetical suite.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
"What's for dinner honey?" - "Caterpillars and worms...
Hey there is hope for the Linux desktop yet! For a few years now Microsoft Windows users have been fed a very steady diet of worms. Lots and lots of worms. Thousands of different kinds of worms. And Windows has been able to serve them up faster than McDoe's could ever hope to serve up a Big Mac!
Really, MS and the Linux desktop are simply leapfrogging over each other...in 2001 we got a prettied up desktop in XP, in 2002 GNOME and KDE leapfrogged over them with a major version, in 2007 MS will bring Vista to the unwashed masses and I imagine in 2008/2009 Linux will get more greatness from GNOME and KDE.
This is a pretty lame indictment of the Free software community if you ask me. The author of the article makes a great deal of noise about there being six or seven years between major releases of GNOME and KDE, and seems to have glossed over the fact that MS went over five years themselves, despite having thousands of developers and billions of dollars to throw at it. Furthermore, calling XP a major release is questionable...it was by and large window-dressing to Win2000 (and technically it WAS a point-release from 5.0 to 5.1 wasn't it? I think the SP2 upgrade was probably almost as significant as 2k-to-XP too...). Really, MS will have gone almost EIGHT years between major releases.
Besides, I question the focus on the numbering system as a measure of progress--I've found that historically Free software products progress faster and have more significant changes between major releases. Nobody would say that from kernel 2.0.x to kernel 2.6.x there has been a lack of progress due to the fact it'll be something over a decade after 2.0 before a 3.x.x release. Projects like the kernel and Apache (and, yes, the desktop environments) have reserved the major release number for very fundamental, architectural overhauls. If Windows was a Free software project I do not think it would be numbered like it was--Windows 2.x would've been 1.x releases, 3.0 through Me would've been 2.x and NT 3.1 through XP would've been 3.x releases. For what its worth, I think that although Apple has been the pacesetter that Linux is still easily out-pacing Microsoft in terms of modernising the desktop overall, despite the whining about lack of "major releases".