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Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Leaves Desktop Linux Behind

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the time-to-push-back-on-corporatization dept.

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."

1 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Linux needs to stop being elitest by vallef · · Score: 1, Troll
    Shame about the lack of Linux emphasis on the desktop. Linux has tried to catch up with AIX, Solaris etc. But still ZFS, Dtrace and many other innovations forge ahead and leap ahead of Linux, Linux still struggles to keep up. Linux being Unix should have been the desktop Unix, it warped into a market that already had good Unixes. After 9 years of Linux laptop useage I hate to say it I am using Windows more, XP that is. Expectations were high were are we with desktop Linux now, Linux power management is no so good. Why all this emphasis on the kernel.

    Please, make Linux the Unix desktop environment, don't bother re-inventing what AIX and Solaris do better. It is such a pain going from the various Linux flavours, Mandrake, Red Hat, Suse. There seems to be no commonality between them. This is a Linux promise/hope that we have lost. Not the first time in the industry.

    The challenge is make Linux the best platform for the desktop. Linux for the server is not adding anything we could not do before. Actually makes it more complicated, any large corporates done a Linux migration from Red Hat to Ubuntu, or Suse to Debian. The cost to migrate from one Linux to another is as big as Win to Mac. Actually, I would call all these distributions proprietary as the are so different, it is in the interests of the distributions that people to not migrate to another Linux. Once you are tied to one Linux, there is near lock-in. Not what I expected in the early days of Linux. Make me a desktop linux with good power management and driver support, drop this server development, help the world.