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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."
When you say "Linux" I think Linux kernel.
But that's why he didn't say "Linux". He said, "Linux Desktop", which I take to mean the entire software ecosystem based on Linux on a user's desktop. It's an appropriately apt description.
It's not a misleading title, if you accept the premise that "over-innovation" is what is causing the disjoint between developers and users. I think it's just more likely that developers don't really understand the users, and for all the merits of free software, there are some things that centrally-managed, proprietary software does better, because the non-programmer professions involved in product development expect to be paid for their services, and most open source projects do not have a workable way to monetize the overall project to cover those costs.
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
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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.
It's not necessarily a misunderstanding. I, and most of my friends and colleagues, use "Linux" as shorthand for "Linux-based operating system". We are fully well aware what the Linux kernel is, and what the operating systems consist of. However that usage is both concise (no, I will bloody well not say "GNU/Linux" every time, andy more so than "Linux-based operating system") and understood to a sufficient extent by non-techies as well as IT people. By all means try and earn nerd-cred by complaining about it if you want, but I view that behaviour as pretty much on the same level as the grammar-nazis here on slashdot - they may be technically correct, but they are annoying and unproductive, and we could get by with a lot fewer of them.
Oh no... it's the future.
This is very true. Having worked at a large software company writing developer tools, we had HIE (Human Interface Engineering) people evaluate everything with a GUI that was shipped to customers. Mind you, this was software written by and for developers so the rules were a bit relaxed but, I have never been so close to committing homicide as I was when I would get e-mails like this in my inbox:
- The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be 1 pixel closer to widget foo.
- The black line between widget foo and bar needs to be color #111111 instead of #000000
- The splitpane between widgets foo and bar should default to 437 pixels wide and not 450 pixels wide
- The vertical scrollbar should scroll 5% slower
- The hotkey for menu item foo should be Ctrl-baz and not Ctrl-bar
Etc, etc, etc.
It took me slightly longer than normal to implement all these changes because I was distracted trying to decide a fitting way to end the e-mail authors life but, in the end I implemented all their "suggestions". I'm ashamed to say that they were right. The product was far more polished after I did all those seemingly pointless things.
To summarize: Developers shouldn't be in charge of GUIs. Even if those GUIs are only intended for other developers.
In English when a misunderstanding like that becomes "general" or "prevalent" it stops being a misunderstanding and starts being correct. Kleenex and Xerox are the most obvious examples.
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.
Just out of curiosity did you notice that the product was lacking some polish before you made the changes?
No, the product seemed pleasant looking and very usable from my standpoint. After implementing the changes HIE suggested I was blown away at how great the shipping product was. In fact, that single experience probably changed the way I write GUI applications and, 10 years later, I think if I were to write a GUI application for the same company, HIE would be sending me far fewer e-mails about mundane details.
"Human Interface Engineer" sounds like a bullshit title but, if you get one that actually knows what they are talking about and you listen to them, it can drastically improve the quality of your software. I think the point of the GP was that open source software often doesn't have the level of strictness where a non-programmer can say, "No, it's not polished enough to ship". When you know that the final judge of whether your software will ship or not comes from someone that cares more about presentation/interface/usability than the technology behind it, you write your software differently.
Don't feel ashamed.
It's been said time and time again, but it bears repeating - developers don't understand how important a GUI is to the end user. All those little things you mentioned were an annoyance to implement, and yet had a cumulative effect that even you could appreciate. The problem is that you had someone to kick your ass and tell you what was necessary to implement for the GUI, and since it was your job and you were being paid to do this, you obviously had to implement the additions. Developers for OSS unfortunately do not have such motivation and do not have an external force to push them into improving the GUI in such subtle ways, and this is why OSS tends to (but not always) have a far less slick interface than their closed-source counterparts.
The iPhone has a slick interface. This is noted by virtually anyone who uses it, but this interface wasn't an accident of design.
I'll dive right in because this story popped right after I've reinstalled my main console, and I had to reinstall exactly because of my desktop getting "innovated" so much it was crippled. Maybe all these complaints of mine have already been covered elsewhere. But Linux GUI desktop developers had better get their stuff together and start thinking about how to make the GUI desktop quickly navigable for the full range of everyday work. (Not just for simple tasks, and not the new interface idea the GUI developers invent each month after a round of 'shrooms.) Between the Gnome Project's obsession with castrating its core programs' options, and KDE's obsession with making a new KDE app for every single type of application yet not being able to get its desktop and window decorations to be intuitive, I'm looking back at svgalib days with fondness. Or maybe Windows 3.1 days. Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe I used to have more time for this kind of involuntary "adventure" than I do now. Right-clicks and resizing task bars should not have to be treated as uncharted waters for a user at this point.
On my main console machine, I've had Kubuntu 8.10 for a few months, "upgraded" from 7.04. It was clear that 8.10 had damaged the configs unsalvagably - it still refused to mount USB drives so that the normal user could read them. I always had to remount manually on the command line. Yesterday I just wiped the whole OS off my machine (except for moving my old home directory out of the way) and installed Kubuntu 9.04 clean. We'll see how it goes. If this doesn't behave like something other than a damaged system within the next couple weeks, I'm switching to Xubuntu or something - at least it resizes and moves almost anything when you click on the edge, instead of having windows do one thing, tool bars do another, the "desktop" box another. I switched away from Ubuntu to Kubuntu because I couldn't stand Gnome apps censoring any option that didn't fit an 8-year-old kid's reading level. (Fortunately Gimp and Pidgin ignored the the rules. They were hard to learn for their own reasons anyway, so what did they care? At least they could be learned though - Pidgin only played moving-target once when it switched from Gaim.) Now I'm thinking of dumping Kubuntu because there are hundreds of options somewhere, but I can't find them. Xubuntu (what little I've used it) seems to behave very politely on my dual-boot laptop.
Kubuntu 8.10 should never have happened. KDE 4.0 should never have happened. KDE 4.1 shouldn't have even happened. Plasma (KDE's new desktop interface) is too clever by half. It is extremely non-intuitive. I've dealt with Apple II Plus system monitor prompts through ProDOS with AppleWorks, through years of custom BBS menus in ANSI, then Windows 3.1 through 95, 2000, XP, and Vista, with a liberal helping full-screen DOS apps, OS/2, and old X display managers whose menus only appear when you hold down Ctrl or Alt. Yet I still can't figure out how to get the KDE 4 taskbar to form 2 rows of tasks instead of just growing enormous icons for no reason when I change the size.
Anything non-KDE inside KDE is, of course, not quite equal. Firefox has "nice" rounded GUI element emulation in Kubuntu 8.10 but hides things like window tabs under other things (like the web page) when I launch it directly from the menus - but has simpler buttons and works fine when I run it from a shell prompt inside Konsole! How come Firefox has a different skin from Konsole than directly from the KDE menus?!
P.S. while I'm ranting: Why does the KDE "Utilities" menu have an icon that looks like a console prompt, then Konsole isn't in that menu?! Konsole is hiding in System, among the control panels. And how come KDE 4 sometimes does the same thing with right click as left click? If I right-click, it's because I didn't like what the left click did and I'm looking for some other option! Argh!