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Linux Of the Future May Be About Which Environment, Not Which Distribution
itwbennett writes "In its 2012 roadmap, the Mozilla Foundation highlights plans to create its own soup-to-nuts mobile platform, known as Boot to Gecko. With this move, the Mozilla Foundation 'is finally shaking off its dependence on browser revenues and treading where Google, with ChromeOS; Canonical, with Unity on Ubuntu; and (most recently) the Plasma community's Spark tablet have already started: the creation of standards-based platforms that rely on robust web applications (in varying degrees) more than native-run apps to provide the user experience,' writes blogger Brian Proffitt. 'I very much think that we are heading for a time when Linux flavors will be identified by environments, not distributions.'"
I've been really unhappy with the major linux desktops environments since last fall.
I'ts bad enough I've been debating switching to a lesser platform that has a more usable interface.
With Google making up about 90% of the Mozilla revenues these days, I've been worried for a while that they were going to kill off Firefox in the face of Chrome. Nothing against Chrome, but the add-on community for Firefox is by far the best. And it's particularly robust when it comes to add-ons for script-blocking, downloading videos from Youtube, etc. (all of which Google has a vested interest in stopping or trying to suppress in Chrome). Giving up Firefox means going back to an era where only the big corps control the browsers. And I don't like the thought of Google killing off Adblock and other extensions the second there is no alternative (except Opera I guess).
So here's to hoping that this move isn't a foreshadowing of a time when Mozilla does everything BUT Firefox.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It seems like everyone is wanting to ride a new 'tech wave' again like it was in the 90s, since what we have has become saturated and stale. But arent they exaggerating it, all of them going nutso and mobile in full force ? (does not only include linux - everyone)
Wont it probably be like pcs ? once they pass a certain hardware strength and software feature set, people will just skip on going on the 'next big thing'. like how endless legions of people has not upgraded their xp, or, how people just skip on upgrading their hardware since what they have is enough.
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This mobile stuff's old, can we have our command line back please?
The purpose of existence is to make money.
... stop telling me how I should run my computer by trying to lock me in to their "vision."
The "vision thing" didn't work out in the dot-com bust, and it's not working out for Unity, or Chromebooks, or anything else. When it gets to the point that Apple and Microsoft are starting to look more open, "Open Source" has a problem.
Shouldn't it be 'Linux *mobile/desktop* of the future'? I certainly don't want a html/css/javascript based set of back end servers, thanks.
how are they shaking off browser revenue dependence? Are they gonna try extracting licensing fees from this platform? If they do, do anyone honestly think companies would bother licensing this? It would be extremely difficult to get companies to adopt this even if it was free. How many countless times has we seen endeavors likes these?
Some people just don't "get it." It takes alot more then a good platform to get it reasonably adopted. You must have a incentive (in the manufacturers view) over current offerings, the project must has major backing for trust issues, issues of liability and support, etc. Just look at how well firefox phone builds have done. If it does take off, it won't be any time soon so while it's an investment for hte future, it's hardly shaking off dependence from firefox and hence Google. This platform would have to have major benefits for it to be adopted over current offerings as it's hard to compete against android which is most similar but have added benefits like major backing and and established market.
My impression was that, already, identifying linux-by-distro was largely the domain of geeks and server jockies, while the majority of the world's linux instances toiled silently either in various plastic boxes with a few blinking lights and a web interface or in assorted phones and consumer electronics behind some interface that hides essentially all the guts.
If anything, public visibility of these 'nontraditional distributions' has increased because of competition in the consumer electronics area. Heck, you can find $50 routers that have their WRT compatibility printed right on the shiny package, and distinguishing between 'devices that will run cyanogenmod' and 'devices that won't' has brought distro-war enthusiasm to the phone geek scene...
I wonder if the software vendors realize that this obsessive focus on platforms has just as much potential to hurt the Linux ecosystem as to help it. Differentiation has a lot of upsides, but when you move yourself too far apart from the rest of the community you lose the network effects that helped make Linux great.
Remember when Steve Jobs came out on stage and told everybody the iPhone was going to have these great web apps you could write and download?
Under the original plan for web apps under iOS, how would a web-based barcode scanner application have worked? Such an application needs access to the image from the camera in order to extract a UPC or QR matrix from the image. Yet years later, there is still no widely deployed API for a JavaScript program to (ask the user for permission to) read a device's camera and microphone.
Bullshit. It is much more than that. It is about how often do you like your updates, how close to the bleeding edge do you want to be, which package management system do you prefer etc.
I've been reading Slashdot for over 12 years now, and I still don't understand the obsession with Linux being on the desktop.
...since Chrome OS and netbooks are all the hype these days. ;)
When you say Slashdot (or other web boards) "works fairly well," it just shows you've never used a decent Usenet newsreader program. A threaded newsreader blows away by far even the most "advanced" web boards I've ever seen.
I don't know the answer to your question. But I think there is reason to suspect that Linux on tablet will rock. If you make a tablet meant to run on Linux, you have no driver issues since you don't much upgrade tablets. Also, with Boot2Gecko running Javascript, there is great reason to suspect that it will have great compatability. I think it is clear that mobile/tablet apps will largely be made with Javascript with PhoneGap. This way, they can be Boot2Gecko and Metro compatible. They can also run well on Android and iOS.
Desktop is so last century. In the 21st century mobile computers and entertainment center computers will rule. Desktops will just be for work and
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
It's the old reliable.
It's not the nerds who bring this up. It's not the real unix programmers and sysadmins. It's not the people who have been unix die-hards for 15 years (me).
It's the johnny-come-latelys who constantly want to compare linux to consumer desktop operating systems. People from outside the open source community, or even outside the tech industry. Why? Because the consumer desktop is all they know, and they "need" some kind of benchmark comparison. To point out that linux dominates in both the server and embedded markets, and has for years, is utterly pointless. The consumer desktop is all they know and want to compare it with.
But it hardly matters anymore. Consumer-targeted computing is quickly moving away from the traditional desktop and laptop model and towards the handheld touchscreen tablet model. In time, only professionals will have (or need) traditional desktops and laptops, and the consumer market will be almost exclusively dominated by tablets.
I hope they go with Wayland .
ayottesoftware.com
But found two deal killers.. in general:
1) No Power Management application. I see some tutorials on manually editing conf files to tweak power settings, but why not install DOS 6.22 while I'm at it. Ubuntu 10.04 has a Power Management tool that works well, and allows me to choose how I want my system to respond, rather than having someone else dictate power configuration that does not fit my needs.
2) No way to add application icons to the desktop. At least not easily.
3) No way to add/configure upper panel (that I can find).
I tried the Gnome "2" fork MATE, but still no power management tool, however I was able to add shortcuts to the desktop (which were retained when I logged back in under Gnome 3). I couldn't find how to add a top level panel (as I have in Gnome 2), and the menu grid seems like a copy of gnome 3.
I looked at a few screenshots of Cinnamon but it looked a lot like Gnome 3 as far as the menu grid goes. I don't want to have to type names of applications I may not recall off the top of my head. That is one reason why graphical menus exist in the first place.
Right, Mozilla is going to compete with Google's Android resources.
I love Firefox, and they have one fabulous engineer working on memory leak problems, but just one (he should be managing a team by now).
They don't have the resources to compete or out-do Android, so any resources they spend on this project will essentially be wasted.
Here's a suggestion: allocate these resources into Mobile Firefox (is it still called 'fennec'?). Make that awesome. Make me want to run Mobile Firefox instead of Dolphin HD (a small independent browser).
Then, and only then, will it be worthwhile to start working down the stack. Replace the runtime next, then the subsystems, then the kernel. It just might wind up being excellent. Meanwhile, Android is OSS and there's no reason to re-invent that wheel at this time.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Desktop environment != distribution. It never has. Even Unity can be run on other distributions. This means we've ALWAYS been there. I don't know anyone who associates what distribution is being run to what KDE, GNOME, XFCE, OpenBox all ring a bell? They're DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS, not distributions. You can hop on your Unity Ubuntu and install KDE, or Debian and install Gnome3, or Arch and install Unity if you so want! It has NEVER mattered what distribution someone runs, as it has never been synonymous with what DE they use, or apps they run for that matter.
www.susestudio.com
I know y'all have issues with Novell, but this concept has been around for ages as part of the openSuSE community.
The phrase "soup-to-nuts" sounds like a category of porn based around a genital scalding fetish.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Ten years ago by a company called Liberate Technologies. (The company that Larry Ellison's NC morphed into) Their application area was set-top boxes and they built a number of embedded software stacks that were Netscape (licensed) and Mozilla (OSS) based (Browser sitting on Linux or vxWorks) that booted straight into the browser where everything lived in the browser. (the whole UI was HTML/Javascript/Flash, and all interaction with the underlying hardware was done through a Javascript API). There was no native code, everything was the browser.
But then nobody really cared about iTV, the company folded and I think the remaining shell company got into the trucking business (no joke).
Hey, stop it!
I don't care about your always online, don't need a desktop or desktop apps way of doing things
I like my desktop and apps, and I would hate to own a ChromeBook or Book to Gecko or anything like that.
There are still people that enjoy not having to be connected to the internet in order to run their apps/games/etc.
I am tired of this social mobile always online vision that all of these companies are trying to push nowadays.
Just give me a desktop and the ability to install apps and I can do the rest.
The Mozilla people have this strange desire to turn the browser into an operating system. Unfortunately, they're not very good at it. Firefox is still single thread, and the effort to run add-ons in separate processes, a basic part of being an operating system. (the "Electrolysis" project) has been indefinitely postponed. XUL seems to be more trouble than it's worth. As someone who has developed add-ons for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, I can say that Google Chrome works far better from the add-on standpoint.
So trying to turn Gecko into an OS might not work out well. Owning the original Netscape code base may not be a win here.
And performance will always matter. C was deliberately left unsafe because that extra 10% or so of performance gained from not checking array bounds mattered. Safety still takes a back seat to performance today, or we'd all be using SELinux or equivalent. Didn't help that MS confused the issue with Vista and Windows Genuine Advantage, mixing "safety for users" with "safety for MS against pirating users". True, many users are saddled with virus checkers that make Windows computers run very slowly for the first 15 minutes, after which the experience improves to slow. And nobody likes that. Nobody likes knowing their computer could be a lot faster if not for that necessary evil. Computers are still for the most part unable to boot up instantly, another source of complaints about the general slowness of computers. The GUI had to offer a lot to compensate users for the massive performance hit-- it's one of the few performance killers that was accepted. For that matter, the OS itself was once suspect. Were the services of an OS worth the speed hit, or was it better to run on bare metal? That's been pretty well settled in favor of the OS, particularly with parallelism and speed increases reducing the OS overhead to nearly nothing.
So we are to trade "up" from native apps to dog slow, interpreted web based apps? Maybe the cloud will be like the GUI, offering enough compensation to be worth the loss in performance? I doubt it, especially since it's possible to have the advantages of the cloud (primarily data persistence, and more capacity) and the speeds of native apps at the same time.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
My impressions of Lubuntu 11.10 LiveCD (Please add a clipboard manager!)
Pros:
1. I enjoy it, I like openbox! I like LXDE!
2. LUBUNTU appears to be the BEST *buntu distribution yet! Good job and thank you!
In my opinion, Kubuntu is a steaming pile of excess and always reminds me of Microsoft Windows, Xubuntu isn't as light and feel good as Lubuntu (my feelings), I hate the evil rodent in red choice in wallpaper (lol I had to mention it, why is THAT there? It smacks of illuminati business), Ubuntu's new desktop look and feel is HORRIBLE! Puke all over yourself with a fist down your throat horrible. Users should not have to figure out how to switch to an older version of Gnome, even with the abundant information @ ubuntuforums.org, help.ubuntu.com, and so forth. With the older version of Gnome chosen in using Ubuntu 11.10, I receive .gvfs ???? question mark errors and have to unmount it manually and restart and I see the same problem occur again and again. What is that all about? And I have to install a tweak tool to show system desktop icons on the desktop? Software Center without Synaptic? MADNESS! The Software Center in Ubuntu reminds me of Lindows' GUI package manager, gag me with a giant spoon!
3. Thank you for retaining Synaptic
4. Thank you for retaining nano, but can you ditch the vi(m) packages?
5. Thank you for choosing Pcmanfm vs. Nautilus
6. Thanks for choosing the Chromium browser (but does it have the correct codec package installed for Youtube HTML5 enabled playback?) re: http://www.youtube.com/html5 & see bottom of page for opt-in option, I haven't tried it with Lubuntu.
7. Thanks for being light on the games section
8. Great choices in Sound & Video
9. Graphics section is fine, though could use a lightweight viewer (unless I missed it!)
10. Accessories is good
=
Cons: (not limited to Lubuntu, many *buntu distros bear the same or similar issues)
*constructive ideas here, I'm not bashing, really!*
1. Strange python errors during boot, decided to boot without acpi and selected only free software, still had errors, they flew by too quick to capture, didn't seem to affect performance but I wonder why they're there. I verified the checksum prior to burning the .iso and I verified the CD using the LiveCD Menu verification option.
2. I notice, like with likely all *buntu distributions, there are extra modules such as ham radio modules generated in the /lib/modules/kv/kernel/net and /lib/modules/kv/kernel/drivers/net directories. These include but aren't limited to the following module directories: ../../../../net: appletalk, ax25, can, ipx, batman*, netrom, rose, x25 and also in ../../../../drivers/net: appletalk, can, hamradio.
* - (not sure if it's ham/packet radio related, but wth is it for?)
I don't feel ham/packet radio modules should be generated at all. These should only be generated by the tiny segment of ham/packet radio users. I've read of abuses of these drivers over wireless and ethernet, so they are a possible security/privacy violation waiting to happen behind the user's back. Don't kid yourselves, you don't *need* special ham hardware in order to abuse these modules.
Apart from those modules, there appears to be a ton of other modules, many have no alias or description within them, what's with that? Unless a module can clearly be explained what have and what for, it shouldn't be included. A trim down here in the modules areas is suggested.
3. GVFS - is it really required? I uninstalled all gvfs files and deleted the user's .gvfs directory, and my system hasn't been worse for wear, though lsof | grep gvfsd shows gvfsd processes with errors (since I nuked the other system wide gvfs directories). Is there a safe way to remove gvfs so no gvfs related process will run?
4. Some type of cryptboot/cry
I don't want any progarm to be connected to the web unless I'm uploading or downloading. That includes BitTorrent, too. And anything else I forgot about.
Free Martian Whores!