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Does the Linux Desktop Innovate Too Much?
jammag writes "The Linux desktop has seen major innovation of late, with KDE 4 launching new features, GNOME announcing a new desktop, and Ubuntu embarking on a redesign campaign. But Linux pundit Bruce Byfield asks, do average users really want any of these things? He points to instances of user backlash, and concludes 'Free software is still driven by developers working on what interests or concerns them. The problem is, the days when users of free software were also its developers are long gone, but the habits of those days remain. The result is that developers function far too much in isolation from their user base.' Byfield suggests that the answer could be more user testing."
Does the Linux Desktop Innovate Too Much?
I think your title is a bit misleading. When you say "Linux" I think Linux kernel. Like the Linux operating system itself. What the blogger goes on to talk about are just GPL software projects that are intimately tied to Linux. That said, I could install slackware, damn small linux or any number of flavors of Linux that have none of the projects being discussed.
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... ad infinitum. Even kernel development is done this way I believe. So you know people like Shuttleworth are trying hard to make this work. I think the last bit of criticism that's going to help them move forward is "You're innovating too much."
You can chat all you want about Gnome vs KDE and which one is bloating--trust me, that is not something I'm ever going to take a position on. I value my life too much.
I might have missed it but I didn't see anything about people wanting their changes to be seen. That's probably a big problem and you could spend days optimizing the kernel for a better experience but the average user doesn't see anything. Or you could add this awesome UI functionality to some windowing framework (compiz fusion?) and suddenly everyone's seeing it. Pretty obvious what some people might aim for
Lastly, I've noticed that some of the more mature products like to move in a even/odd fashion where one release is to stabilize things the next is to add new features the next to stabilize then new features
My work here is dung.
All they want is something that will be stable and get the job done, in a consistent manner. Often times the bells and whistles for the sake of having htem just get in the way, and damages consistency making things confusing when they don't need to be.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
all the average user wants is to chat via live messenger, check their hotmail account, look at facebook, and check how badly their ebay listings are doing... they generally couldnt give any less of a toss about everything else that is going on
portfolio
Most people -- except tech geeks -- do not want to learn a new way of doing things once they learn a particular way that suits their needs.
Moreover, learning takes time and money. If your company has 100,000 employees, then training them to use a new desktop can cost millions of dollars.
If GNOME developers want Linux to take a significant share of the consumer market, then they must ensure continuity with the past. Before they embark on the next super-duper upgrade of the desktop, they should spend some time in asking their grandmothers what they want in the next super-duper GNOME desktop. Grandma's advice could help a lot.
The essential problem with free software is that most of it is written to scratch someone's itch. Usually, the ones who start off coding to fix their problems are the developers. Over the last decade that I've used linux (and other f/oss) on my desktop, I've seen a radical shift in how the developers are influenced to do what a user wants. More so, I've seen the system favour the ones who have user focus rather than dictate from their ivory towers and yell back "sure, send me a patch & we'll talk about it". You did your bit and the others stepped on those to get where they want ... and with GPL in place they didn't really step on your toes.
Essentially, you didn't owe the user anything for real. The user paid in attention & respect. The developer did what the user wanted as long as he (or she) wanted the respect. Over that, it was just about fun when it was Y2K days.
It'd be vastly different if someone paid me for it. Well, yes ... someone does pay me to churn out F/OSS code, I deal with vastly differently from my other projects.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
When I think of Free Software, I generally think of the community were the developers are the users are the developers. "Open Source" still smacks of the buzzwordism of the late-90s, getting corps. to invest in opening code under the assumption that they'll be able to get free work out of some sort of "community" while lowering their development costs.
What's wrong with the developers working on what the developers are interested in? If I (the royal 'I' here), am not being paid for my time or more code, then "users" should just be glad that 'I' have decided to make the fruits of my labor available to them, too. Perhaps I just don't get this mentality that it's some sort of competition between 'Linux' and Microsoft and Apple, and that we have to compete for desktop marketshare for some stupid ass reason. I just don't really see it as that big of a deal. Maybe for a company like RedHat, it is, but that's not me.
The concept that the developers are 'innovating too much' and 'alienating the user base' just seems akin to someone crashing a frat party and then complaining that all they're allowed to drink is the Beast.
Oh yes, another self-righteous rant attacking the directions of free software projects just because they have the audacity to venture far beyond where windows stagnated a decade ago. The article's author doesn't say much besides criticizing projects such as KDE, GNOME and even Ubuntu for their ideas regarding the desktop. And he does a bad job at it, to boot. For example, the author criticizes KDE for the audacity of thinking about implementing social networking features into the desktop. Is that supposed to be a bad thing? I mean, what's the difference of having an application such as windows live messenger constantly running and implementing some sort of widget that performs the exact same task? At least with KDE their implementation follows standards which are open and it doesn't force plenty of ads down our throats. What's wrong with that sort of innovation? Absolutely nothing. And his criticism of GNOME is pathetic. I mean, he criticizes GNOME not for innovating but for rewriting it. He hasn't absolutely any detail to grasp on and in fact the only thing he can muster about GNOME is "its final form at this stage is anybody's guess". Is that what the author perceives as innovation? And more to the point, who exactly is the author to make authoritative judgments about what the users want or don't want? His he a psychic? In fact, where was the author on these past dozen years of the desktop windows? I mean, after all these years windows is incapable of offering extremely basic stuff such as the ability to set any window the user wishes for to be always on top. And what about the ability to scroll a window without changing the focus to it? And what about getting rid of that really annoying bug that, when a user launches an application, keeps the focus on the former application while the newly launched app is placed on top of every window on the desktop? Fixing those bugs would also count as too much innovation? The article isn't worth the read. Nothing to see here, move along.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
The best of the Apple experience is polished, user-oriented, and "insanely great" because it takes a Steve Jobs to set the vision and make every component answer to that design. That's hard to do in the FOSS world.
So I, for one, am glad Mark Shuttleworth is attempting to put some top-down focus on a user-oriented set of goals into the Ubuntu desktop. Linux has not lacked for technical innovations, it has lacked for a unified vision that elevates the end-user and a chief to get developers to sign on to that vision. Go Mark, go!
In the end one has to have a system where best practices win over bloat. Where things that aren't that useful are removed so they do not involve recurring resources at every release. For instance, i know that egos are tied up in the multiple *nix desktops, and all desktops have a right to exist, but significant progress could be made if the community could select on desktop to develop towards, even if means that the solution is imperfect.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
nor does he refer to any change to the linux desktop in specific.
Well, I, for one, migrated from KDE to Gnome precisely because of this "innovate at any cost" philosophy in KDE. KDE4 was introduced far too soon in the major distros and even promoted to the "default" Desktop Environment in some of them, while still being horribly buggy and crashing all the time. The haste to make the GNU/Linux desktop look cool just made it look bad.
If I could sort of understand this innovation hype while I was a Windows user (novelty sells), I really wish GNU/Linux developers would slow down "innovation for innovation's sake", and invest their energies in making things work smoothly first. Personally, I'd be more than happy with a Desktop Environment that was, say, 5 years old, without bells, whistles, or Compiz, but was *maintained* well -- nay, maintained *aggressively* -- in order to have almost every bug squashed. The only time I'm glad to see innovation is when it's related to new devices/hardware support.
That's just my opinion, of course.
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
When you break compatibility with everything that currently exists just for the sake of being new and different, that isn't innovation. Unfortunately many times when this happens it ends up getting called innovation because nobody has the guts to call it what it really is. Oh, but we have to scrap the old design because it wasn't forward thinking enough. Then in two years time, scrap the new one for the same reasons.
Thus "innovation" get a bad name, particularly among those on the receiving end who never asked for it to begin with.
Then you get articles like this which assume that it is even possible to have too much innovation because of the false connection between innovation and breaking things.
UI and workflow design and project management aren't glamorous or interesting so they don't get done.
I don't really think it works like that. It's 2009 and by now I'm sure everyone understands the value of good UI and workflow design, but it's quite difficult to do well and I'd be surprised if either GNOME or KDE don't often find themselves without the time or expertise needed to get usability up to the desired standard. Of course I would argue that there are several apps on the Linux desktop with great usability - I personally like Firefox, Dolphin and Okular, just to give a few examples. But I would agree that usability isn't as consistent across the platform as it were when compared to say Windows.
Cowboy coding only gets you so far.
Oh, okay, so the basic gist of your comment is just that the free desktop coders are a gang of useless cowboys hacking together a bunch of buggy, improperly documented crap for the riches and renown which will obviously be forthcoming from such an endeavour. How about you go and read e.g. some blog posts by KDE or GNOME developers, because you will discover that a lot of the people working on such software are passionate and proud about what they do and put an awful lot of thought and effort into trying to do quality work. Granted there are some bad apples in the bunch as usual, but I think that the majority of problems these projects face are down to lack of resources, above anything else. But hey, why not throw around inflammatory, pejorative terms like that.
Last I checked, Linux desktops were loaded with exciting new innovative features but failing on extremely basic tasks.
Perhaps the community should be asking whether it's more important that we add a fun new Swirl effect to switch to another desktop or if people would rather have a sane and complete GL API. Do we need the entire desktop to be rethought or should we simply settle for having a sane and unified sound solution?
I would have to agree in saying that the desktop linux community is getting way too ahead of itself if they think they're innovating themselves away from the mainstream. Read the NYTimes article on Ubuntu Linux and tell me whether or not they even mention innovation- They viewed it as a free but lower quality alternative to commercial systems that was very attractive but failed during basic maintenance tasks.
Why create an Earth-shattering new desktop-web interaction paradigm when users would probably rather have sane and cohesive documentation?
Here are some no-brainers, if you want to see linux improve:
* Now that OSS 4.1 is open source, drop ALSA. It is a proven failure. PulseAudio obfuscated the problem to the point of ruining audio in linux, specifically when low latency is required.
* Support forward-thinking projects like Wayland instead of putting another car on the fail-train that is X. X is architecturally inferior to WindowServer and Windows' display layer for desktop-oriented tasks. A simplified windowing system that puts graphics first and drops the cruft would go a long way in making linux seem modern and easy to maintain.
* Write documentation sometimes. Format it well an ship it with your projects!
Or, if you're really clever:
* Realize that open source != linux. Look at desktop-oriented free software sytstems like Haiku and imagine a world where Linux can be built into an excellent server (or mediocre workstation) and desktop users can have a system purpose built for their priorites! There is no rule that says that linux needs to be the only free system. With the magic of things like POSIX, we can write software that runs on either!
The strength of open source should be versatility, not futility.
Dream big.
BINGO!
You just nailed the flaw in the original article. The author seems to think that FOSS developers somehow need to remain responsive to anything beyond the particular itch they want to scratch. FOSS doesn't work that way. Developers do what they do. If their output is sufficiently interesting, distro-makers package, polish and bundle their work.
See what I did there? I allowed for diversity and division of labour in the FOSS ecosystem. Imagine that! Developers doing what they do best and distro-makers preparing that work for public consumption.
Do poorly-socialised package maintainers sometimes drive their users away? Damn straight. Are there flaws in Linux distros? You bet your boots. But if we're going to criticise them, couldn't we at least point our critiques in the right direction?
FOSS development, packaging and polishing is a decidedly human process, with all the inefficiencies, redundancies and illogical acts that all human processes entail. One can argue (though I never would) that commercial software designed and developed by customer-focused companies is inherently better. In my opinion it just trades one set of problems for another. (If I had to generalise, I'd say it's the difference between often useful but unpolished software and often useless but highly polished software. There are notable exceptions to each case, of course, but statistically, they are exceptions.)
At the end of the day, the FOSS ecosystem has differentiated roles and responsibilities, and the least we could do - if we really want things to improve - is to direct our criticisms to the right people. The folks at Ubuntu are devoted to the goal of making their distro 'Linux for human beings'. I know that when I bitched to them about certain shortcomings, I got a reasoned response from none other than the CTO himself. And given the improvements since that time, it's clear to me that they've taken such critiques to heart.
Linux distros are all decidedly imperfect. But they're a damn sight less imperfect than the alternatives.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Yeah, hence "cat-herder" vs. dictator. I don't know anything about Shuttleworth's management effectiveness, but we agree that an actual Steve Jobs style could not work in FOSS.
But in FOSS-land, Shuttleworth seems to be in the best position to put out a distro unified behind making the end-user experience great, which is what Jobs clearly aims for in his products.
And personally I think Fedora is already shifting some of its focus towards more end-user happiness in response to Ubuntu, where Fedora developers once made manly sport of scoffing at end-user concerns. (Having said that, I'm obliged to point out that Fedora devs have made huge pre-Ubuntu contributions to stuff that "just works" for users, like NetworkManager. Ubuntu has a long way to catch up to contributing actual lines-of-code, but they are ahead in setting the direction and thus gaining users IMO.)
That is a very valid viewpoint to hold. You can most certianly say "I don't owe the user shit." It is your software and you are nice enough to let others use it. Thus they can use it on your terms.
HOWEVER, when you do that you lose any and all right to claim that your software is "better" for the user or "what they should use." If they have objections to the way it works, you need to be graceful and say "Ya, my software doesn't do that well, I don't care to fix it so if something else works for you, go to it."
The problem is that there seem to be a number of OSS types that want to have their cake and eat it too. They evangelize an "OSS for everyone," position. You should use all OSS all the time, it is the One True Way(tm) and gives you better software because everyone collaborates. However, when a user then says "Hey this doesn't work as well as my commercial app," they get angry and say "You didn't pay me, I'll do what I want, fix it yourself if you don't like it."
Sorry, can't have it both ways. If it is a situation where you think your way is the best way and you want everyone to use it, then you've got to work to accommodate users. You need to make it do what they need as good or better than their old apps. On the flip side if you want to offer it with no support, you then need to offer it as is. Don't push it as being things it isn't and won't be.
This is a problem I've run in to with people trying to covert me to Linux. I tell them the things I want to do, but can't seem to. They then give me things that aren't real alternatives. When I say "This doesn't do what I need," I get told that I either "shouldn't do that" or that I "should write it myself." Sorry, those aren't legit options. If you want me to use your stuff, it needs to work for me. If you don't want to make it work for me, then don't push it as a solution for me.
Making everything into desktop widgets (including social networking fads like facebook) isn't a bold new vision of the desktop environment... it's glitzy eye-candy.
I'm not sure where the criticism is with this statement. Widgets are bad? Are you suggesting that the goal of making it easier to add features to a desktop is not worth pursuing? Because as far as I can tell, that's what the project is after.
Maybe they don't have widgets you like, but I'm not sure where you get off dumping on a project that cost you nothing. You know, there's a bug list among other ways to communicate with the developers.
Seigo peppers every idea he has with colorful language like "new paradigms" but his ideas so far are hardly innovative.
Uh huh. I see. Get back to me after coding something as big and complicated as a desktop that _actually_ works and attracts users/contributors. I'll be sure to criticize your efforts.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
> No, the product seemed pleasant looking and very usable from my standpoint.
Yeah that's the problem, many OSS developers will just say "WORKSFORME", or not even bother marking it as "WORKSFORME", just go off and do something else "more important".
See: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50457
Or: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99905
Yes, what they do decide to work on is more important in some ways. But I daresay adding that little extra can be just as important if not more so in other ways.
Apple understands very well how the perception of "insanely great" can cover a multitude of problems under the hood.
There's a vast difference between the users perceiving your product as "oh well it works", "this is nice" and "hey this is sooooo coool! (must have ASAP!)".
Whereas KDE says:
"Kicker is currently unmaintained, you can look to your distribution for help, however."
Look to your distribution for help? A lot of people might just look to (or stay with) OSX/Windows for help instead. And tell the Linux Desktop Zealots who try to "convert them" that OSX "WORKSFORME", or Windows "WORKSFORME", and who the fuck cares that it's not OSS and it's an "evil proprietary OS".
As for innovate too much, a lot of what they do is not innovating at all. For example: "wobbly windows"?! How the heck does that help? If I want to play with stuff that wobbles, I load up World of Goo or something.
Without a good Human Interface Engineer or someone who understands that stuff with a lot of say, they'll end up producing tons of "innovations" are not actual innovations in UI. Stuff like initially attractive cutscenes in a game, that the users eventually try to skip because they end up being annoying or getting in the way.