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Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Leaves Desktop Linux Behind
Linux.com's Joe Barr has an interesting commentary about the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and the astounding lack of attention for desktop Linux. Now, a great deal of the monetary support driving Linux these days comes from companies with a vested interest in "big iron" but hopefully this won't completely eclipse the rest of the community. "Before I learned that the press was not welcome in any of the working-meetings at the summit on days 2 and 3, I saw and heard rumblings of discontent from more than one ordinary Linux desktop user. One example: a top-ten list of inhibitors to Linux adoption, created by a committee of foundation members, contained nothing at all relating to desktop usage. Nothing. Everything on the list was about back-room usage. Servers. Big iron."
TFA is very sniffy about press not being allowed in the technical sessions. As far as I'm concerned they can bloody well stay away for good.
When engineers get together in technical meetings in standards groups, SIGs and the like, they have deep technical and commercial problems to solve that leads to long, difficult, nuanced discussions, all aimed at getting to a solution that will work, get implemented and be commercially feasible.
What no one involved needs is the press sticking their noses in and printing these arguments in the press, dressing them up like some narrative in a thriller. Its happened to me several times and every time, the uninvited journalist got it hopelessly wrong, presenting technical work as interpersonal bickering and being clueless on the technical matters.
Journalists are a pox on standards meetings. They can eff right off.
When the journalists turn up, propose work items on desktop issues and promise not to run away and write up events in some rag, they will have dragged themselves out of the bottom of the barrel.
Evil people are out to get you.
The Open Source Development Labs was formed by "big iron" vendors to cooperate on the development Linux for of enterprise computing, so I don't find it surprising that is where their focus is. OSDL later merged with the Free Standards Group to form the the Linux Foundation, but OSDL was the larger part of the merge.
I don't find that more noteworthy, than freedesktop.org focusing on the desktop. Different organization have different focus.
I don't really see this as a major problem.
MSFT 'attacks' other pieces of the market because of its near monopoly on the desktop and in Office apps. Linux can do the same.
Why shouldn't the Linux Foundation focus on Linux's strengths and continue to shore up that area, particularly if the people with the money have those priorities? If Linux is the major player in several segments then it can leverage that strength to gain others.
Linux on the desktop isn't going to become a winner because a technical committee somewhere listed its strengths or weaknesses. It'll take a nimble, energetic core of developers to drive and make decisions that are innovative and exciting to users. Always playing catchup is probably not the way to go.
Meanwhile, if Linux dominates at the Big Iron/Appliance/Server areas, then it will become easier for the desktop driven folks to achieve their goals. This is particularly so in a world where the buzz words are virtualisation, "in-the-cloud" etc, that remove many applications from directly being on the desktop, as application adoption and readiness for the desktop is one of the high barriers to Linux becoming a force on the desktop.
--Q
The author worries about the developers ignoring the linux desktop without seeming to realize that the kernel hackers use linux as their desktop. He doesn't mention the scheduler changes to make it more friendly to the desktop. In fact, he comes across as a pouting child who wants their desktop worked on before the servers.
Is it that hard to realize that the linux foundation is about servers and keeping market share in the area of servers while ubuntu and the kernel hackers focus on making the desktop faster? Right now server linux is a business, desktop linux is a side note. Asking them to focus on the desktop at the expense of their big platforms is dumb and short sighted.
The year of Linux on the desktop was probably 2004 or 2005.
If you're waiting for Linux to wipe out the competition, it's not going to happen. It's just going to be a long, slow growth curve as both MacOS and Linux suck up increasingly large chunks of Microsoft's market share.
Linux on the desktop shouldn't be the goal anymore - 2008 is the year of linux on the laptop.
Vista won't run well on the increasingly popular lightweight and low end laptops like the eepc, olpc xo, and what are sure to be many imitators. People have demonstrated they're willing to use linux on these machines, and Microsoft has demonstrated they Don't Get It.
1. The computer desktop is not a major source of revenue for anyone. Don't whip out Microsoft on me here because their desktop business is through resellers like DELL and HP. Their retail product is costly as hell compared to a reseller like HP or Dell. Compare Vista sales through Dell versus how many retail licenses were purchased at Worst Buy.
2. Backend/Big Iron is where the most dollar opportunity are with Linux.
3. The desktop problems are much more difficult to solve and the payoff in dollars is worth maybe a nice dinner.
There are *still* new and interesting things happening on the server side in storage, virtual machines, memory, you name it. Desktops? Not so much. What's the last legitimately different desktop environment you, or anyone else has tried?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
They said that a year ago and it didn't happen.
I'm no MS apologist, but I think you should actually try using Vista before making statements like that. Despite what you might read on slashdot, there is nothing fundamentally broken in it and most "average" users find it a step up from XP. Frankly I've had less trouble with Vista than I've had with Ubunutu on the same machine.
Plus if people use Linux at work, even if it's on a server, they're going to come home and want to use it too since it's free and they're familiar with it.I don't really understand how using it on a server makes you familiar with an OS? To most people the "server" is that folder with funny icon on it, or, for the more technical, where their web pages come from.
I run CentOS or RHEL on all my public servers and would never dream of using anything else, but I ain't about to get all my staff to install ubuntu; for one they couldn't get the software to do their jobs. I still think that if linux wants to make headway on the desktop someone needs to come up with a distro to go after the gaming market. That's the only demograph that hardware manufacturers really pay attention to and what is cutting edge now will be standard in 12 months. Unfortunately you can't even get recent games that run on linux yet, so it's no wonder the hardware guys are a bit behind.
Thats why I feel that the future of Linux in user's hands is in the form of "appliance" type machines. Things like the EeePC, cellphones, Tivos-type things... we already have, and it works quite well. Now push it a notch further... a desktop machine with everything a user need, but locked down. Can't install or remove anything, except for the SD card or USB stick to store your data. Different models with different software for different people (and maybe like the EeePC, let people hack it up, but not by default).
Linux is -really- good at that kindda stuff. Linux desktops work great when they're preconfigured and you don't change em too much (which is when, for a regular user, all hell breaks loose).
I remember at my fiancee's college, most of the computer clusters were like that. Locked down desktop linux installs. It worked amazingly well. Since you couldn't screw it up, everything just worked, Mac-style. Very clean, all your files were saved on a network drive (as opposed to USB as I said above, but still), and you could install a limited amount of non-disruptive things.. if you messed up, you could just re-init it like you would a router.
There's nothing special about that...nothing that can't be done with Ubuntu and a few minutes/hours of tweaking. But if you sell that directly to users, you'll have a winner.
You know, compared to all the time spent running apt-get to check for software updates,
Strange that's done automatically for me
running netstat to check for ports that shouldn't be open to the world but for some reason are
,This was fixed two years ago AFIK
deleting and reinstalling 50 libraries to fix a dependency hell broken by the aforementioned apt-get update,
This only happens in debian unstable. Complaining about it is like complaining about bugs in a Beta windows release
and trying to defragment reiserfs only to realize you can't, so going back to ext3, which isn't much better (or worse) than NTFS.
Reiserfs doesn't defrag because it's designed not to need to defrag.. same goes for XFS and the other more modern filesystems
I'm amazed this is the list you came up with when questioning other people's intellectual honesty
I used linux as my full time desktop both at work and at home for 4 years. And I enjoyed it mostly. I was able to do most of what I wanted to. But multimedia production (video editing, multitrack music production) was a huge pain in the ass to do and from what I've seen hasn't improved much.
Thing is, back when I used linux full time (99-2003) I didn't own a house. I didn't have kids. I enjoyed building my own computers and futzing around with configuration and getting packages to build for hours or days at a time. Now I've got kids, a house to maintain, and little or no free time.
If I have to spend a half hour on administration a month on my computer then I simply won't even turn it on, it's not worth the hassle. There's way more important things I can be doing. I can either spend the next two hours trying to figure out why an upgrade to a kde or gnome core library broke Totem or I can play with my kids. Easy decision to make.
I switched to OS X for all my multimedia production needs in 2002, and shut down my linux box permanently in 2003 as the birth of my first child approached. It does everything I wanted linux to do and I don't have to *do* anything to keep it running. My priorities are obviously going to be different from that of a lot of linux fans, but those fans need to realize that most non-fans will have no interest in linux on the desktop until it becomes less of a pain to use than Windows is.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
The next wave has begun, and that's the push to create highly market-specific Linux desktop offerings. You've already seen this in the "just mail, IM and Web" boxes that have been sold recently by large corporations. There are already offerings in the digital film-making arena, and then there's the mobile world which you may or may not conflate with the desktop world, depending on how you see things merging or not. MacOS has made great strides in woo'ing the "stylish elite", and the "wealthy cool kids". More and more, the people I see using Mac laptops are the young and upwardly mobile that fall pretty much smack in the middle of the demographic space. They're not wealthy, but they've had their first taste of financial success. This is where Mac laptop purchasing has been exploding, at least in the social circles I've been observing. but they still lack a wide selection of applications EH?! You haven't used a Linux or MacOS system recently have you? It's not the selection that limits their adoption. There's a gigantic selection, and in some domains (e.g. digital media for Mac) the selection is broader than other platforms. The limiting factor is and always has been Microsoft's proprietary application suite. If you've ever tried to get Office for Mac to read a file from Office for Windows and been thwarted, you know exactly how Microsoft keeps their market share.
People don't want "selection," they want the apps that "everyone else uses." the price-point that would convert the "average web surfer". No one avoids Linux for the price-point. There are $200, fairly nice boxes at your local WalMart running Linux.
Macs are more expensive, but they have a brand loyalty that's hard to contend with.