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Are Open-Source Desktops Losing Competitiveness?
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Penz has been a user of KDE since version 1.2, and he led the development of the Dolphin file manager for the past six years. Now, he's quitting KDE development and handing off Dolphin. His reasons for quitting KDE development are described in a blog post. Penz speaks of KDE losing competitiveness to Apple and Microsoft due to increased complexity and other reasons. 'Working on the non-user-interface parts of applications can be challenging, and this is not something that most freetime-contributors are striving for. But if there are not enough contributors for the complex stuff behind the scenes and if no company is willing to invest fulltime-developers to work on this... well then we are losing ground.' Are open-source desktops losing?"
So that settles that !!
*nix users have been moving to OS X on the desktop for a long time. If you defend the X desktop in a lot of circles where it would have been popular in another time, prepare to be mocked, ridiculed and told to just "buy a Mac".
Under these conditions it doesn't surprise me that KDE is stagnant. Fewer people are interested in it these days.
- Still an X11 user when I have the choice.
You guys really do live in basement caves with little to no grasp of reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
This is a really bizarre troll-baiting headline, and based on sample size of 1? By an "anonymous reader" nonetheless. Y U NO require a pseudonym, at least?
Peter's just getting old. That's ok, though; it happens to all of us.
I've been using virtual window managers since the late 80's. I don't want my UI changing just because some young dev wants to force some "feature" of the week on me. Or they don't care if they break my config preferences, etc.
For the past ten years or so, it's been Enlightenment. Shrugs.
My productivity has never been higher using "awesome" at home and work
http://awesome.naquadah.org/
Installation was quite painless, apt-get install awesome and its all done, pretty much. It is... awesome
Oh wait, were they talking about those gigantic slow clunky things that include a kitchen sink and everything? Yeah, those can just go away... please.
I kind of liked xfce4 also but thats getting a bit too desktoppy. Too much extra junk I'll never use. I want my apps not the desktop environment's selection.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Rest assured anonymous writer, Open-Source Desktops are staying just as competitive in their constant fight to make your favorite GUI just as unusable and obtuse as those produced by Microsoft or Apple. I am confident that, be it KDE or GNOME, you'll have just as frustrating of a time using the latest versions as you would using Metro or OSX.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Is this a serious question?
But I spent a bit of time delving into this interface, and I have have now given up my Windows unless I absolutely MUST use it. No more hunting through menus looking for files or software functions. One hot key, followed by a few letters in the name, and up it pops. Wonderful!
Now that Microsoft has thrown sand in the face of their OEMs, perhaps the OEMs won't be so afraid of pursuing and investing in non-Microsoft operating systems. Microsoft may have a legacy, but much of that legacy could be emulated or relegated to VMs if necessary. And here's a perfect example of such an opportunity.
If anything, now's the time to do it as Microsoft won't be able to punish the OEMs without being blatantly anti-competitive. And it'd breathe some life into the stagnant PC space.
Of course, by "yes" I mean, "never had a prayer."
I love Linux. I have a great life thanks to Linux. But Linux on the desktop is complete shit and always has been. Especially now with Gnome 3, Unity and KDE 4 giving the finger to users and designing craptastic interfaces.
I'm using Cinnamon at the moment just for a semi usable desktop experience. XFCE is also good. But by and large, desktop environments on Linux are a disaster and it's only getting worse with Gnome pushing systemd on us and Fedora fucking everyone by forcing restarts all the damn time.
I'll stick to server OS's with crappy window managers that I can tweak myself from now on and keep a Mac around for anything desktop related I really want to do. I'm tired of fighting with the fucking desktop environment. I have real work to do.
Gnome devs and KDE devs pissed away promising interfaces and aren't even taking community feedback into consideration anymore. The best thing anyone says about these environments these days is "It's not as bad as it used to be." or "It doesn't crash every 15 minutes like it used to"
People like me moved to Linux because we were sick of Windows 95 crashing all the damn time. We laughed at Bill Gates when Windows 98 crashed during a live demo presentation to the world. Now suddenly we have desktop environments that are worse than 95/98 ever were and we're expected to stick around for this shit? Fuck no.
He goes on to explain how the user interfaces are becoming simpler while the functionality of the applications are increasing without an effective UI, increasing complexity of non-UI elements of applications, etc.
Yes. And it's a Good Thing (TM Some Slashdot guy).
UIs have gotten so complex that the learning curve of an application has gotten to be almost like a programming language.
Good Grief!
That's where Apple's current theme of KISS has been winning and F/OSS needs to keep up or get out of they want to "compete".
And how many of you Linux guys just chuck the UI and go for the command line because it's actually easier? *raises hand*
Go online, google the problem you want to solve, copy and paste the command line instruction and away we go!
UI? Bring up the instructions. Click on some menu item and then a sub menu item and then click on attributes" brings up dialog that has a bunch of tabs, GO to the tab that says Advanced. Click on button that says .... you get the idea.
I've have been working on a desktop app BUT I am making the UI like a phone/tablet/whatever app. Just two menu items and some entry fields.
That's all - and it's still too much!
UNIX once had this them of simple small apps to do one task. That's all the phone/portable/tablet guys are doing - aping the original UNIX paradigm. It wasn't until Mac (1980s - 1990s) and Windows that we got this UnHoly mess of overly complex applications and the subsequent UIs.
Car rental joints still use ye olde dotte matrixe. At least Enterprise as of about 6 months ago. Supposedly a really high speed dot matrix with carbon paper is still, even in 2012, faster than than printing 6 copies or whatever on a modern laser. Also you only have to sign once instead of all six copies, or doing the signature capture hardware, etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I mean, really, there are like 8 competing standards for open source desktops now. The division of labor cannot be helping. Merge. Or park the current desktops at their current levels, and converge to create one new master desktop. All new technology that people can get really excited about. And aim the new one higher than where the corporates will be in 10 years.
Yes, I love my Win7 laptops at home, but at work we're all still very comfortable running XP. I have less than no interest in adopting Win8, or even The Ribbon. Meeting increasing challenges of hardware, web standards, etc. is necessary (maybe,) but the thing that XP-7-8 has taught me is that needless complications are needless. Maybe it's time the open source community starts asking *why* a particular change is desirable or necessary to the userbase. (Are you listening, Mozilla???)
Honestly, probably 80% plus of my Word Processing work I could still do in WordPerfect 5.1, if only there were an OS that could handle it.
I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using LInux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it, but OS X was a revelation.
I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.
Getting FOSS developers to merge projects is like herding cats. The vast majority of it is ego driven, merging and potentially taking a backseat to someone else is rarely an options.
Apart from drivers/compatibility issues, sucky desktops are what's keeping me away from Linux. Not only are they not very good in theory, they are mostly buggy and not.. play-tested. Honestly, the next-to-latest Unity, KDE, and Gnome were unholy horrors that, as a user, made me not only not want to use them, but also lose confidence in whatever governing bodies are driving features and validating code. My next Linux desktop will probably be lxde or xfce.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
In the past week I have used GNOME, KDE, Win7 and OS X. I found KDE so far ahead of the other three for usability that it would be hard to tell who came in second, the difference was so amazing. KDE was faster, far more easy to configure and had less annoying notifications. Obviously this is subjective, but I would say open source desktops in general and KDE in particular are doing just fine.
Two relevant sayings:
1) You can't fall off the floor
2) You can, however, hit rock bottom and continue to dig
maybe start his own window manager, i prefer the lightweight window managers and no longer use Gnome or KDE, and i dont even use XFCE anymore, i tend to bounce around between icewm, openbox, dwm, and sometimes windowmaker, yes windowmaker is not dead anymore it seems to have picked up active development again :)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Why did they feel the need to reimplement a fraction of Konquerer over again in Dolphin? Konquerer is a more feature complete program, and no harder to use. The purpose of spending huge amounts of development time to recreate PART of it again was what exactly? All it does is confuse people and create a bunch of programs to pick from for the same task.
The philosphy seems to be, "Instead of one program to do a thing very well, we'll make 30 programs that all do it poorly".
I don't see there being a need for competition amond DE/WMs. Alot of people say "OS X is the best." Perhaps, but I want a system and a DE/WM for which there is no hegemony. I want to have a free license and the ability to customize how I like.
I use FOSS for a reason. It's not always "best" technologically, but it's best morally and free from hegemony, which these days is a dying thing. Supporting these small developers who make cool stuff is always a nice thing to do.
Am I the only one who loves KDE? I like the desktop. I like Dolphin. I think kio_slaves (if they are still called that) provide enormous out-of-the-box connectivity to nearly every remote system I need to connect to.
And KWrite rocks.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
The linux desktop experience has always been an interesting beast. It's always been great in a professional and development environment where power users can get a level of configuration and customization that you can't find with a commercial OS.
Linux never "won" the desktop because, really, Apple and Microsoft really stepped up their game. OSX, XP, and windows 7 are good products and the market has proven as such. Linux has always had some great options, but lacked the untold millions of man-hours that Microsoft and Apple put in to R&D, and product testing.
There was a point, in the bad old days of Win 3.11, 95, NT, and classic macOS where linux/unixlike/X11/wm of choice was looking to be a real contender. Linux was stable and had rich features and you could do things that were amazing.. And you would not crash while doing it!
Linux almost certainly would have taken over if Microsoft just sat around and apple didn't get Jobs back.
On the other hand, Microsoft strongarm PC vendors in to excluding competitive OSs. Maybe the pushed Linux out of that space at a crucial incubation stage, cementing windows on the PC desktop.
Gnome 3, for all of its detractors, is pretty nice... but Windows file dialogs and shell explorer dialogs are simply miles ahead of it, and the gap seems to be widening. I mean, simple things like rename a file within a file save dialog, let alone copying files, seem to forever elude Linux desktops, and on Windows I take it for granted. Gnome has a pretty rough story when it comes to fonts, for sure.
And yes, not only is Windows 7's U/I more stable than Gnome 3 or KDE (would you like to send us a crash report ) 4, but Windows 8's latest preview is as well.
This is my sig.
KDE tries to be too much like Windows and actually does it. There are soooo many services, extensions, config files, dot directories (aka crap strewn all over the place) that it's simply become a bloated buggy mess. Gnome/Unity did some really strange and confusing things but in the end ended up being railroaded into the Mark Shuttleworth Agenda and is pretty much a tablet UI on a PC desktop now.
This is the evolution of FOSS. Things which start to suck tend to get replaced by things which suck less. The open source desktop isn't losing, it's just KDE has jumped the shark and Gnome (Unity) has gone insane. Two of the earliest game changers of the FOSS Desktop. Luckily, people with more time than I have saddled themselves with the task of changing what sucks (Thanks guys/gals) about these two Desktops and we've got some alternatives. You can't do that with Windows or Apple. You get only one and if it sucks, too bad. Buy the next version and hope.
PS: have a look at LXDE or Cinnamon for something similar, yet different.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I think it's a pity if FOSS desktops really feel the need to compete with Microsoft and Apple. Those companies need to keep "innovating" in order to drive sales of their latest products -- something that FOSS is unhindered by.
Instead of bounding towards some super-slick desktop nirvana, more emphasis should be given to settling on a familiar and stable working environment.
People are adaptable and they can be extremely productive using systems with which they have grown familiar.
The qwerty keyboard is nothing like the perfect layout, but it is familiar. Imagine if every time you upgraded your PC you were forced to learn the latest "ergonomic" keyboard layout. It may be progress, but I'm happy with what I've got thanks.
The same goes for desktop environments.
KDE losing competitiveness to Apple and Microsoft
With the introduction of Metro, the competition from Microsoft will be gone. The new 'desktop' looks plain ugly (obviously done to make Metro look more attractive in comparison). Apple people should be left alone anyway, they pay through the nose but get a nice, slick system.
cwm(1) !
why would you need more? too used to the microsoft windows paradigm?
Like the herd of wandering drunken sailor-cats we call "open source developers" could agree on anything more meaningful than that the analog clock app should have a hundred dozen different skins so you can always find one you like.
/Rant over. ps, love you xfce, you saved me from the horror of kde4
Everyone critisizes the horrors of proprietary software development where some dumbshit schizophrenic customer jerks your chain around constantly and you can't actually write good code as a result. Or your idiot boss gives you half the time you would've needed to do it right at the start, then changes course halfway through and shaves several weeks off the due date along the way. Unfortunately the Linux desktop environments have gone the exact opposite way and it's just as bad - now with no one to make difficult decisions, we get horrible interfaces that stay horrible forever because there's no one to tell the developers (who of course don't see what's wrong with it, they fucking wrote it) "this piece of shit interface needs to be completely rewritten" and no one to make them actually do it, no matter how badly it needs to be done.
So you get these little groups, disconnected from reality, floating along in their own virtual stasis (try playing bzflag and suggest after a while that tanks should have hitpoints. Just try) having no idea that no one outside their little in-group who isn't a masochist can possibly use their programs. And just wait, I promise you I'll get a "Well you should be thankful for whatever they give you" response from the same group who complains so loudly that people don't use FOSS... Well which is it:: Do you want to do your own thing or do you want to write software people will use?
if they were, the headline would say Open Source Desktops Are Losing Competitiveness
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Desktop environments in general are losing ground aren't they?
In favor of cloud-clients and tablet-specific os's, no?
Apologies for going slightly off topic, but I think I've a personal anwser to all this desktop dystopia discourse. Like a lot of others, I really liked gnome 2. And I find Unity and Gnome-Shell a step back (despite at least 5 months of perserverance). I've tried XFCE, and was planning on giving KDE and Cinnamon a good go, until I installed gnome-session-fallback in Ubuntu 12.04, which is, as far as my testing so far has seen, almost identical to gnome 2.
Is this a proper 'destop environment'. Is it even gnome3? Can it be used on other distros? Does it have a future?
I can at least anwser the last question, which is that from now on, it will be the 5-year future for anyone asking me to install linux on their computer.
Given that KDE and its applications are written in and married to C++ (and QT) I'm not surprised that few people want to contribute.
I know that C++ is the Big Thing and Right Thing in mainstream industry, but it is extremely complex with an enormous learning curve and huge demands on development resources, and developer time.
I, for one, certainly wouldn't contribute to a C++ project for fun. I only do it when I'm paid, and only if I can't avoid it.
Stick Men
create one new master desktop
That's the mistake. There is no one master desktop. Its like convincing a bunch of book authors instead of writing a bunch of pulp, they should all cooperate to write the one great american novel.
10000 religions all claiming the other 9999 are wrong? Eh, they should give it up and all cooperate on the one master religion. (with our luck, unrestrained crony capitalism?)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Carbon Paper copies.
When signatures are required in triplicate all forms of printing that are not dot-matrix lose. This particular purpose is essentially the entire reason dot-matrix printers still exist.
It is hard to be competitive without funding... We need a yearly funding drive effort like NPR. The biggest problem (and strength?) is that we have a lot of duplicate solutions. We are a large fragmented democracy fighting a well-funding dictatorship with a great PR department. If only we could elect a leader for 2 years and unite against Apple and MS. The irony is that we can't beat them without becoming them...
Exactly who were they competing against in the first place?
Were they competing against Each other on how bad they can make the experience?
The best desktop experience I ever had was with fluxbox but it took me too dam long to tweak.
I've run X11 since 1989. I started with TWM, then CTWM, then KDE.
KDE2. was great, KDE3 was fine, KDE4 is bloated. I don't care about eye candy. I don't care about UI guidelines thought up by some hipsters. I don't want widgets. I don't want spinning 3d cubes when I change workspaces. All I want is a desktop env. that works. What I care about:
- The ability to customize window the window manager enough to map Alt-mouse-1 to move, Alt-mouse-2 to resize and Alt-mouse-3 to iconify. These are hardwired in my brain after 23 years.
- The ability for the icon manager to work vertically, so I can stick it on the side of my workspace, rather than the top or bottom. Today's stupid widescreen monitors are too cramped vertically, and I begrudge any pixels taken away from my applications
- multiple desktops
- multiple monitor support
- no fancy GL stuff that screws up VLC or mplayer playing hardware accelerated video.
That's it. That's all. I could give a flying you now what about file managers, widgets, etc.
...the answer is no.
it's just the honeymoon with open source shit is over. all the people that were fanatics during the rise of linux have grown up, graduated and been in the real world long enough to realize Apple's UNIX desktop smokes anything these asperger open source cranks could produce. In the grown folks world you want shit that works not shit that wastes your time.
Some 10 years ago, the Linux desktop was The Challenger. The first alternative to Microsoft. The cool OS to use for all the cool tech headed people. All people I knew working in academic research in 'hard science' fields used Linux.
That moment is gone.
All the younger cool tech-headed kids I know use Macs. Most people that I know that used Linux in the late 90's early 2000 years have migrated to Mac computers. Actually I can say that with one or two exceptions everyone migrated to Macs.
[...]
Personal annecdote:
Started using Linux in 1995. Worked as a Linux sysadmin when I was a student. Use Android phones and installed OpenWrt in my router (previous one ran Tomato). Own a Linux NAS (Debian based). I have a LWN.net subscription. My work computer runs RHEL. My parents computer (I bought it and maintain it), runs Ubuntu.
When my wife needed a new laptop, I bought her a MacBook Air. Not a chance I would inflict Gnome/KDE/Whatever on her.
I have a kid, little spare time and a fair amount of disposable income.
With the Linux desktop:
- Do I have a polished, easy to use, easily discoverable video editor? No.
- Polished, high quality photographic manager and processor for Linux (Like say, Adobe Lightroom)? No.
- Something easy to use for creating good looking family photo albums for printing? No.
- Decent priced PDF editor for filling in PDF files? No. (sorry, I am not buying Acrobat for that).
- Does my kick-ass Lenovo work laptop running certified RHEL has the fan on at all times? Yes.
If I went out of my way to find sort-of-good-enough alternatives for these things, could I do it? Probably.
Do I want to spend my time doing that? No.
The question on my mind right now, is which configuration of the new Retina MacBook Pro to order.
Considering that every time i have to do something which involves more than a single full screen window on Windows or MacOS feels like typing with my feet I'd say no.
I'm happy with Kwin on my desktop and awesome on my netbook, thank you.
I dabbled in Linux for awhile, then switched full time to Ubuntu some years back. I wanted to run some specific games and switched to Windows 7 for awhile, until the hard drive crashed and am now back on the latest Ubuntu. I went from Unity to plain Gnome3 and now am on Cinnamon. And yes, I think the open source desktops are losing competitiveness. I personally think at this point in time OSX is the only one keeping things together. Windows 7 is actually very nice but Windows 8 looks like a train wreck. But for Linux it seems like your choices of desktop environments are either stuck in Win95-era or prior feel, or you have a "modern" DE that's half-assed at best and takes a ton of work to make it usable.
Speaking mostly for Gnome, but the colors, themes, icons...they always feel like they're missing that extra polish or something that you get from the commercial OSes. Everything just feels...clumsy. It may work, but it just isn't polished. And while I appreciate pushing new innovations both Unity and Gnome3 seem to be halfway there at best, leaving sort of mostly working setups.
Thing is, with Compiz and the wobbly windows stuff, it actually looked pretty sharp. Honestly, I think the more things I try the less I know what I want, just that what I have isn't exactly what I'm looking for!
Just my $.02.
"You betrayed the Duke. You stole his wife. You took his castle. Now no one trusts you. You're not the one."
As far as the desktop goes, the problem is not what they lack but what they've added. Bloat.
Unity, Zeitgeist, Popularity Contest = dog slow RAM hogs.
QT4, Gnome3 = broke program and use compatibility for little or no reason. All improvements duplicated existing pagages in an incompatible way.
We've always had problems getting gfx drivers. Now they split it 4 incompatible ways. New drivers don't support existing hardware that old drivers did.
The only things that have honestly improved is Firefox and Calligra Office. Everything else is slower and uses more RAM.
I haven't seen anyone mention Enlightenment. Enlightenment is pretty good. It's quick, pretty, and themes are streamlined only requiring one file.
Oblig:
http://xkcd.com/927/
I actually came back to Linux under this Gnome 3 controversy and really don't mind it. The reactions to this post are as predictable as the post itself, a developer gets sick of providing something for nothing and has a public rage-quit, the self-hating Linux users cry out "why do people hate Linux".
None of it is true!
I formatted my Windows 7 laptop and joyfully have Ubuntu 12.04 on it. My son's Window 7 netbook was running slow and as an experiment I put Ubuntu 12.04 on that , he loves it. He has less problems than he did under Windows 7. Everyone is accustomed to an "app store" in their phones and Linux is the only OS out there that really has the same type of resource.
There has never been a better time for Linux on the desktop! With Windows 8 about to mess everyone up and a leaderless Apple (let's face it)... Ubuntu, Mint and a dozen other distros are fantastic! Ausus' latest EeePc netbook is currently shipping with Ubuntu because of Windows 8 being a mess.
Linux on the desktop is the best option right now.
Thank you Peter for all your hard work.
IMHO: this is a perfectly nature evolution of the Linux desktop. None of us are happy with the current stage in the desktops as a whole. They all suck, but at least the open source choices suck a little less then MS Metro or OSX because you can fix them.
The competition is all the cool things that anyone with coding interest can get into now.
Linux /was/ a cool thing to dev for. It was pretty much the biggest shiniest project available to the amateur coder. But there's a hell of a lot more you can dev for now than x86 boxes. That's where we've lost our pool of sharp backend coders. (Different breed from the UI types.)
Aside: Aw dangit, and /thank you/ for everything Mr. Penz. You're going to be missed.
you can't lose what you've never had.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't need a searchable desktop or any other of the amazing abilities of KDE. I just want something that works fast. The people building KDE are divorced from reality, and I don't blame the article's author for throwing in the towel, even if for the wrong reasons.
I think Soulskill might be looking for a word like uncompetitive. Just a thought.
Pedantry aside, what does being competitive have to do with anything? The big pull of Linux is that you can roll your own. Why does open source have to meet this arbitrary yardstick set by large for-profit companies? Surely the point is that you develop whatever suits your needs, and then share it. It doesn't matter whether it's competitive. Everyone's needs are different after all. Hell, even Window Maker is still around and kicking. Is that a bad thing?
Dolphin 2.1 will be released as part of KDE applications 4.9 on the first of August and to me this is a very special release: After 6 years of development, around 2700 commits and a lot of fun I'll be forwarding the maintainership to Frank Reininghaus. Frank did a great job during the last years to improve Dolphin and I'm really glad that he accepted the maintainership.
For me forwarding the maintainership also means that I won't provide any bugfixes or features for Dolphin anymore. Probably this step is quite surprising for most readers and I think I owe an explanation. Before going into details it might be useful to first describe the reasons for developing Dolphin at all.
THE FIRST STEPS
At the beginning of 2006 I wanted to gain some experience with Qt and I've been looking for a small project. I liked the functionality of Konqueror but was not happy with the user interface - I thought that writing a small and fast file manager fitting just for my own needs and to learn Qt should not be that hard (if somebody would have told me that I'll be spending at least 6 years on this project I probably would have given up immediately). Thanks to some great classes in kdelibs I was able to browse through directories only a few hours later and my (wrong) assumption "this should not be that hard" got tightened.
Around mid of 2006 I've released the 0.5 version of Dolphin at kde-apps.org. Making a long story short: Matthias Ettrich called me and asked whether I want to help contributing to the filemanager for KDE 4.0. David Faure was very busy with porting parts of kdelibs to that time and more interested in doing the tricky and challenging parts instead of the "boring user interface programming" (I cannot remember anymore the exact words Matthias has used, but it was something like this). Well, suddenly I was part of the KDE community, got great support from Aaron J. Seigo and it started to get a great experience for me to contribute to such a large project. Learning Qt was secondary then, it was more about learning how the whole development for such a big project works and how decisions are made.
It is quite interesting to compare a screenshot from Dolphin 6 years ago to the recent version:
WHAT HAS CHANGED SINCE THEN?
The KDE community is still great and there are enough things left to make Dolphin better, so what has changed since then for me?
One thing is that the time required to keep Dolphin in good shape increased during the last years. I'm doing this project in my spare-time and usually have spend around one evening per week on Dolphin. Especially during the last 2 years this time has increased. In the longterm especially the (for me absolutely necessary) step to port Dolphin to QtQuick2 is something I won't be able to do within a sane timeframe. The interesting thing is that porting the new view-engine to QtQuick2 is probably the easiest part: There is a clean seperation of the representation and the model and exchanging the representation should be doable within a reasonable amount of time. I guess with Qt 5.1 or 5.2 (I don't know) there will be desktop-components for QtQuick2 and porting Dolphin to this components will be a very timeconsuming and boring task: All the settings-pages, the URL-navigator, the information-panel, the search-interface, the tooltips, ... - this is just not doable anymore in my spare-time.
Of course you might ask whether a port to QtQuick2 is really necessary. But to me in the scope of KDE QtQuick2 is the only solution to be able to compete with the other big desktop environments out there in terms of a responsive and beautiful interface.
So would it help if other developers would join the Dolphin project and take care for doing the QtQuick2 port? Sadly for me this still would not be enough to keep on maintaining Dolphin, as there is another reason to quit contributing: I'm using KDE since version 1.2 and I never cared what market share KDE or Linux on the desktop has. However to me it was important t
Linux will always be behind for this reason. Noble ideals and good intentions will only get you so far when money makes the world go 'round.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
By competitiveness I assume you mean "crappier with every release", which seems to be the philosophy driving Windows, GNOME, Unity and KDE development. Apple are slowly heading that way too (did you get media with your OSX Lion? No? Okay, then how to install xcode? With iTunes? wtf?).
At present the usable desktops seem to be XFCE and LXDE with efforts from the likes of Cinnamon and MATE for as long as they're around.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Are Open-Source Desktops Losing Competitiveness?
You can not compete by copying and being years behind in your attempt to copy and working on developing a copy.
When accused to copy windows, KDE developers answered: no we are no longer copying windows we now copy the Mac.
Sorry, copying
Windows 7
will get no one every where. ... ' ... there is no standard UI in the OS to do it. And frankly: how many things do you want to enter? Name of the network? Assign IP adresses? Register MAC adresses? The encryption method? The password, ofc. So what is left? ...
Copying Mac OS X might bring KDE into "competition" however it is not inovation.
Further more: 'Working on the non-user-interface parts of applications can be challenging, and this is not something that most freetime-contributors are striving for.
This is utter nonsense. Non UI stuff is the easy stuff. The UI is the challenge. Not the "look", but the interaction. And that is where Microsoft is bad, OSS is bad, linux is bad and only Mac OS X right now is somewhat ok.
Ever tried to configure WiFI on a couple of Windows boxes? Every box is different, depending on the WIFI card
And why do you need dozens of tabs for that in windows? Why can you not connect to a WLAN network in windows without knowing wether it is WEP/WPA or WPA2 protected? While the Mac always knows on what encryption level the desired network is on? (I mean this: I want to connect to a WLAN network with a PC. The PC has a drop down box where I can chose: WPA, WPA2, WEP, etc. and a password text field. Now depending on what I chose in the drop box I have 6 or 8 or 20 letters/digits free to enter in the text field [obviously depending on encryption schema] . However, how the fuck should I know how the WLAN is encrypted? The only thing I know is the password. So, attempting to log on fails until I chose the right option from the drop box. That is ridiculous. MS Paint still is not able to adjust its resolution when you paste a screen shot into it.)
Sorry the last examples where MS centric. However when I look at Firefox, Thunderbird etc. I don't see anything better than decades old Ms failures copied
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
fhdfgh
That's a fascinating insight.
As for me, I'm just going to sit back and watch the fallout. This is gonna be fun.
For me the Linux desktops were competitive with windows and Mac until 2005 or so when spotlight desktop search came along (followed by its windows counterpart). In GNOME (and hence in Ubuntu) there was never* a stable, solid search function that would search inside all file types and index the results for instant retrieval. For me that is now the primary way I navigate the OS, and it wasn't until 2012 that Ubuntu had anything even remotely similar (and I don't think that searches inside files instantly yet).
So yes, Desktop search was the killer function that Linux could never get working quite right. I could have totally put up with a lack of prettiness, but the desktop search mess was what made it clear to me that windows and Mac had surpassed the Linux desktops in terms of relevancy of goals for the non-immature power user. Yes the kernel rocks but GNOME and KDE lack a philosophically mature developer base.
*yes yes I know about beagle tracker google desktop and all that. These have always been in various states of disfunction or non-support and are frankly a mess.
There would be enough resources, if desktop developers stopped throwing everything away when everything starts to get stable and usable.
And we see the same here again, the dev will stop his work because he doesn't have enough time to port Dolphin to yet to be released version of Qt5 using another gui framework QtQuick.
Amarok WAS one of the most loved music players. Everyone recommended it, a lot of Gnome users used it. But when KDE4 was launched, they thought they had to change everything and use every single tech that came with KDE4.
When I started using KDE almost ten years ago, I've never imagined that years later it would have be less functional, stable and productive.
create one new master desktop
Firefox?
I tried Gnome3, KDE4, Mate, & LXDE. Each and everyone, on Fedora 17, has given me major WTF? moments. Evolution only seems properly to work on Gnome3, and I HATE Gnome3. Don't KDE4, Mate, & LXDE teams expect us to use Evolution?
I guess that they never got that e-mail.
And why do they all try to steal my mouse and move it to the Upper-Left Corner. WTF? I'm trying to access the File menu, but NO, Gnome3 and LXDE think that I want my mouse mysteriously zapped to the corner. How f#$%ing dumb is that!
Linux desktops are dead because the new generation of programers don't beta-test and they never bother checking on user feedback. AND, because they have No F%cking common sense. IF they did, then we'd still be using the mature, featureful, and emminantly usuable KDE3 and Gnome2.
WTF!
That question assumes they ever had a chance of winning. Desktop *nix is where it was a decade ago: lagging behind commercial OS's.
As far as I can tell, the developer calling it quits is just about KDE, not open source desktops in general. I never really warmed up to KDE, both because it was mainly written in C++ and because it seemed unnecessary complex from a user's point of view.
However, so are the commercial alternatives.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think that part of the underlying problem with GNOME and KDE is that they are vertical, and because they are vertical, they have grown to be too big and too bloated.
Each environment (and now, each major version of each) has its own manager, handler or subsystem for this or that and they are all interconnected -- but only within the same desktop environment.
What I think that the Linux desktop world needs is to go back to what people used to call the Unix philosophy: more small programs where each program does less, but does it well. One of the best things with Open Source used to be that there was breadth: there were many different window managers, tools and utilities out there to choose from to use on your desktop, and if one did not work well for you, you could find another one on freecode.com to try.
What I hear (read) about new versions of GNOME and KDE is that new versions are broken in one way or another. A new menu system is not as easy to use, or a feature that used to work in the previous system is broken or not implemented. Well ... it should be a simple matter of reverting to the previous version of that program and it should still work. People should be able to mix and match the best program launchers and managers from both Gnome and KDE.. But sadly, that is not the case. The developers are instead trying to make the next MacOS X, Windows Metro, or whatever from the ground up.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
My KDE desktop worked great "out of the box". No tinkering required.
That's funny, because just yesterday I installed Linux Mint 12 KDE edition (KDE 4.7.x) and found that there was definitely some tinkering required out of the box. The most recent annoying thing I bumped into a few minutes ago was having to dig and search through Dolphin to find the screen where I have the option of adding the Configure Dolphin button to the toolbar, so that I then can click OK, and then click the Configure Dolphin button to configure it. Only to find the configuration option I wanted does not exist, because this is a half assed joke of a file manager.
I hate windows, osx, kde and gnome. I use exactly the same ratpoison setup on my laptop and on my desktop. Its not for everyone, but i think the core principle of having an window manager that is almost invisible could be taken MUCH further, and provide a great window manager that techs and non-techs would be happy using. People dont actually need to USE a window manager, they need to use their applications, the WM is just the middleman. The problem is that a gutted out highly optimised WM is not be very desireable to the majority. They dont pick WM because they are easy to use, they pick largely based on 'bling' (if people see my windows flipping about doing summersaults they will think I am l33t h@x0r!!). So perhaps they get the WM's they deserve.
Open source desktops certainly aren't loosing. They have grabbed a solid userbase, however; many of the features only found in open source solutions are now being implemented in the commercial ones. In the case of like Windows vs Early KDE / Gnome, KDE/Gnome both had many features and control that was completely nonexistant or not as powerful. Over the years windows and other commercial systems have adopted many of the features that the open source community has thrown into its own software. This hasnt hurt the open source desktops but they dont have as much appeal as they used to if your looking for something thats just mindblowingly awesomer than windows.
http://interserver.net/
There seems to be so much time and effort being spent on the user-interface and it is consistently being broken and completely redesigned.
How much more garbage are we going to paste on top of more garbage?
Simplify and just make it WORK!
Get on with the more important things such as what computers were meant to do in the first place; tools for training, education, communication, and just getting work done.
Two good examples are Firefox and Ubuntu.
They have both gone through some of the most UI changes in the shortest period of time I have ever seen.
But more importantly, whoever is doing this is so utterly incompetent and ignorant of how these changes affect people, both old and new.
How is someone supposed to know what a new icon represents? Even worse is when this information is so amazingly hard to obtain.
One icon representing multiple functions AND being an active one. So I click on icon, something refreshes, I click it again, oh WAIT, it changed, I didn't want to click it, too late.
Right click should give me some options or information about what this is right? ?! One word? or no information at all? No options?
How about keyboard shortcuts?! Where do I get information on that?!
Do I need to buy the new "Software Expert 101" book that just came out just to learn this stuff?
Why can't it all be integrated into the software? Why are we wasting paper for these books? Ok electronic. So why am I wasting time looking for this information in a separate source?
There is so much wrong with software it isn't even funny.
But go ahead, worry about how that new interface is going to "look" and how it "competes" with the other garbage out there instead of getting real work done.
Trying to compete, you already lost.
99% has been done, people are just wasting time rewriting it all and doing a very bad job at it.
...are Microsoft, Apple, GNOME (GNOME3 and Unity), and others copying KDE 4.x? KDE is leading the edge of desktop development right now.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
My computer is a tool. I have no desire to spend any intellectual energy whatsoever in making my computer work. I have work to do, both at work and at home, and I would prefer my computer simply never stand in the way of getting that work done. (At work, my job is protocol-level network equipment diagnostics, at home it's your typical surf, e-mail, light office work, games, etc.)
Just like I am mostly ignorant of the metallurgy and exact mechanical parts of the torque wrench I used to change out my brakes today, I have no need nor desire to understand the inner workings of my operating system. I understand the knowledge I require to do my job, just as I understand how brake calipers, pads, fluid, and rotors interact to stop my car. Knowing the secrets of torque wrench construction or OS operation is not something I have or want. While knowledge is a good thing, I have limited hours in my day, and do not have time to learn everything.
To be blunt, I have better things to do with my time than to use it making my computer work properly. I spend all day, every work day, making enterprise computer equipment work, and I do not want to dedicate any resources there, or at home, making my personal computers work properly also. For all its many faults, Windows works well enough to get my jobs done. Linux, with the tweaking, endless GUI "wars" (HOW long has the Gnome vs. KDE thing been going on?), driver morass, and stacks 'o Googling required for general operations, does not. The cheap Windows laptop I'm typing this on has never required more than occasional reboots for updates or crankiness. It has not required one iota of tweaking or a single download of some obscure driver or utility, nor the editing of a single configuration file, to make it work.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever to wanting something to "just work." Knowing HOW it works can be a valuable and enlightening process (there is a reason I have a degree in Computer Engineering, and I DO largely know how it works on a low level), but it should never be required, unless it is your job.
X and the current event subsystem designs render all that is built upon them uncompetitive in the current climate. We need a new graphics layer optimised for local graphics, with remote stuff added via a different layer. Much novel stuff can be done with events handling from devices. But so long as we stick doggedly with X, that won't happen. We need to move on, and have needed to do so for a decade or so.
John_Chalisque
Losing? Open-source desktops were never in the game to begin with. For some reason, at one point in history, someone decided it would be a good idea to try and replace commercial desktops out of the market by trying to emulate them. What happened then? Oh right, existing users started complained, and potential users never really picked up.
You don't stop feeding meat to the lion just because the bulk of the animals in your zoo are vegetarians.
Stop screwing with the recipe, stop trying to make money with it, get it working for the power users, and fuck the market. The open-source desktop will remain in use as long as programmers will prefer programming over sleep.
... just looks like an asshole.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I just don't get what everyone has against Unity. It's fantastic, and greatly improved in Ubuntu 12.04.
And if you really want Gnome 2 back, just use Mate or the slightly trendier Cinammon, courtesy of Linux Mint if you can't be bothered installing them on top of Ubuntu.
It's all very well to say OS X is the answer, but the hardware comes at a huge premium. A cheap PC with a great Linux distro is a beautiful thing. Pouring money into Apple's coffers is not good for the soul!
Don't forget daisy wheel printers. (o;
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Should an editor who headlines an article with a question mark be impaled with a pine cone?
Just asking a question.
--
BMO
And continues as Haiku.
http://haiku-os.org/
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
When signatures are required in triplicate all forms of printing that are not dot-matrix lose.
Depending on my mood and the phase of the moon, I use any of a daisywheel, teletype or chain printer for all my carbon-based triplication. You can remove your new-fangled dot matrix from off of my lawn, thank you very much.
Compete with what? Did anyone notice that about 1/4 or 1/3 of all computer users still use XP? So XP is still "competitive", whatever that means. Large part of the remaining users will run whatever is installed on the computer they buy regardless of how "modern" the UI is. Most people are using the computer to do something else than play around with their desktop. Just because a few geeks apparently can't work without wobbly windows and new window decorations every week, doesn't mean that the rest of humanity cares about those things too.
Everybody is always switching over to the mac for the past 10 years or so. One would think that over that time period, somebody would have actually switched over.
BTW, does anyone else feel like "modern" is such a stupid concept? Modern doesn't mean good. Modern doesn't mean better. It simply means different from before. I don't want a "modern" desktop. I want one that works well enough so that I can happily totally ignore it and get on with whatever I actually want to do.
I worked on the overhaul of a marine vessel a couple years ago. Going in for the log printers were brand new Okidata dot matrix printers WITH USB capability.
It is not about innovation and features. It is about human rights in computing.
The pox on both your houses, KDE and GNOME. I run ICEWM with my most-commonly-used apps in the launch bar. KDE jumped the shark when Kmail started requiring an effing SQL database!!! KDE and GNOME have the Microsoft disease... every year or two "everything you know is wrong". You have to unlearn navigating/using the desktop and learn a whole new paradigm. Having *ONE* learning curve to get into linux is bad enough. Having to repeat it every 18 months is insane.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Thanks to X, you can kill the desktop, window-manager and taskbar, and start another WM/DE without even closing your applications. X makes this really easy. (For example, "metacity --replace").
Fortunately, you don't have to stick with a single DE. For example, start with xfce (window manager and panel), then mix-and match GTK/QT/other applications (kwrite + firefox + vlc), add extra services (xscreensaver), and configure the rest with xbindkeys/xinput/xmodmap. All window-managers work the same way (you can even script with devilspie). Most panel applets are interchangeable.
But I do wish that the desktop developers would get version N working perfectly and polished before starting to work on version N+1 (which is completely unrelated).
Whoever wrote this article must be smoking carpet or some other funny stuff. It is not the presence of windows or mac that is giving a bad name to Linux but those who are trying to destroy Linux from within like the people from Gnome 3 and Unity. Fortunately if you upgrade to Scientific Linux or Centos Linux you can still have a decent gnome interface.
I had a daisy wheel printer through high school and college because I couldn't afford a laser printer, and dot matrix print was not accepted. In some cases, the use of a computer was "not allowed", but how can you tell the difference between what is typed and what comes off a daisy wheel unless variable spacing is used?
I even wrote software that would use the period and micro-spacing to generate headline fonts and line graphics. It was slow and hard on ribbons, but it worked.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".
And so it is with this article. Must be a slow news day, or perhaps the slashdot editors are desperate for a few extra clicks, and they knew all the paid Microsoft shills and OSX fanbois would dutifully come out and talk about how much teh Linux desktop sux0rs.
The Linux desktop is doing just fine, thank you. Innumerable satisfied users use it every day to get things done. So quit your whining.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
KDE3 is alive and well in the Trinity project: http://www.trinitydesktop.org/
"That's either incredibly asinine or the most brilliant troll I've ever read. Not sure which." -Anonymous Coward
Open source's character is fundamentally at odds with the precepts exemplified by Apple. The Open Source movement is one of, by, and for developers -- programmers who primarily want to make things easier on themselves by developing rad tools. On the other hand, Apple's philosophy has always been "make it hard on the programmers, to make it easy on the users". The APIs are highly abstracted, the human interface guidelines are extremely complex and precise, and the walled garden concept is taking it all to the next level.
I'm inclined to believe that each side has its merits and drawbacks, and that neither is the overall better choice in any universal sense. With that said, I'm glad there's as much competition at the OS level as we have these days.
As a long time linux user, I lost interest in KDE almost from the very beginning. I totally agree that KDE is unnecessarily complicated. I am going the route like KDE->gnome->openbox->dwm. Now I am very satisfied with dwm with dmenu and no interest in microsoft and apple at all.
Sounds like you just didn't know what you were doing, because scanners and lm_sensors work perfectly for me in Linux. Then again, I use Fedora, not a shitty distro like Ubuntu.
I'm a long time linux user since 1993, met Linus, used to compile all my kernels by hand. I'm now an Objective-C/iOS developer. Who wants to program in C++? nobody. Its an awful language. Anyway even if you run Linux desktop you have gnome2, gnome3, kde theming. I have THREE freaking themes to worry about which is crazy. Half or more (it is sad) of the KDE/Gnome apps are basically "abandon-ware". Linux Desktop is a mess. I got into the Mac because I wanted to do HD video. I still use Linux servers for things but no way would I ever use it on the desktop. It is a complete mess. Its only getting worse (Unity/Gnome3). Nobody wants to program in C++ or half-assed python scripts. The future is C# and Objective-C. Not desktop apps in python, perl or C++. I'm glad to use iWork and not have to deal with KOffice or whatever. KDE built its whole paradigm on plasmoids which is sort of like the OS X Dashboard. Get a clue KDE, Mac users don't even use the Dashboard widgets and most people disable the dashboard daemon. We use real apps like Final Cut Pro X, iWork, iLife suites, etc. The problem with the desktop people is they have never programmed in a real IDE like XCode or VisualStudio or used ANY high-end software like Final Cut Pro, etc. so they have no idea how to make anything good. They are like 10-15 years behind on their designs. They are constantly fighting X vs Wayland. Unity vs Gnome3 vs XFCE vs Gnome2 vs KDE4 etc its crazy. How could a group of people that have such limited resources as the Linux community have the energy and stamina to run several parallel competing desktop designs... Even a moron could figure out that its better to pool your resources together and have one unified vision on the desktop. Oh no not Linux. Look at all the times Linus has complained too. Linux is really better suited as a Server.
Just start from the basics and fix hibernate. Stuff is generally broken for most new laptops/desktops. Empathy can't resume from normal use cases such as sleep. Surprisingly the nerds/geeks can either say "use Debian" or try avoid sleeping. Rest of the people switch to Windows.
If you like KDE 3.x (and I do) then just use it! Boycott this half-a**ed semantic desktop cr*p!
http://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php
When claiming all sorts of things about Unity, please consider that they have a professional design team that does usability studies and stuff:
http://design.canonical.com/theteam/
Also, if you are one of the countless people here claiming that all open source desktops lag decades behind commercial ones, could you please specify in what way? After reading that for the tenth time still without any explanation I got really tired of the comments. It may be news for you, but I am not interested in your opinion. I am interested in your arguments.
a) I'm using Fedora 16 with KDE4 on 3 different laptops, one is a Asus Nettop. From my wife or the friend of my wife I do not get any complains. If I look to my friends with Windows 7 how sluggish their desktop is I feel only pity and sadness. At the same time Oxygen looks sexy and stylish compared to anything I saw from Microsoft or Apple or other desktops.
b) I'm using present all desktops and present all windows in a regular basis. Also the switch windows in a sexy and fast cower switch. It is fast, it is very useful. If you want it fast, just set Animation Speed: Instant in Desktop Effects. I don't like any animations, so yet again I'm very very glad that KDE lets me disable them.
c) I can define shortcuts for any KDE application in a central way as well as for KWin. Alt+Tab to switch windows, Win+Tab to switch desktops, Win+Left/Right/Top/Bottom to go to the desktops. Win+V for Klipper, Amarok Key Bindings, etc. Easy set the caps lock key as an extra Ctrl key.
d) I can Keep Above Others for any windows, set transparency, KDE has a smart window placement. I can set what window go to what monitor or desktop. I can show a window on all desktops.
e) Kate, KWrite, Amarok, Kile, Dolphin, and many more. No other desktop or system have them and I miss them because no other is feature complete and useful and sexy and sleek as them.
For me KDE4 is light years ahead of other systems or desktops and probably will be always my number one choice. Of course it would be better if some commercial entity would pick up KDE and deliver a good desktop experience. But now all they do is this smartphone and tablets nonsense like Unity and Gnome3. Like the multi-billion PC and laptop market disappeared or will disappear in 5 years. But of course the entry in the desktop market is so much harder, thanks to the Microsoft stranglehold.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Frankly, I love my Linux desktops better than any Mac or Windows nonsense. I find Windows's gui insanely bad and frustratingly limited. You guys who don't like 'em can go away if you like, no one will miss you anyway. I like all of them, Unity, Gnome3 and KDE4 just fine. I think they are different but all great in their own ways. Gnome3 and Unity might not be popular with some people but they are innovative. Whether you like that innovation or not is your own opinion.
KDE4 gets solidly better and better with each release. So some Dolphin developer decides to throw a hissy fit and leave, honestly, whatever. I personally have not seen this great exodus of Linux users to OSX, nor do I hear "normal" non-fanboi people fawn over OSX all that much.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaqY3C7to4U ?
KDE 3 is still the best desktop on Linux. I hope that Trinity will get more attention from the Debian community in the future.
KDE4 is just a huge step backwards in day-to-day productivity. Same for Gnome3, and Unity is just a total desaster with its own tragic dimension. It's a great mistake trying to copy Apple or Windows 8. These are consumer devices for people who don't understand computers and who don't know to work most productively.
Linux need to care for productive people first, and should not abondon already achieved usefulness for being a poor copy of Apple. In this way, KDE4, Gnome3, Unity go just totally into the wrong direction.
So... what remains is the desktop, not enough..
Yeah, because to any question, even though it is pertinent to billions of people, hundreds of thousands of cultures and millions of use cases, there's a "correct" answer.
Gnome 3 and Unity are two of the most breathtakingly BAD user interfaces I've ever seen. They're not just different, they're a disaster. They destroy decades of workflow and cognitive task mapping for -- well, nothing. They're clumsy. I'd add FireFox to this, too. Why does FireFox shuffle menus that have been the same for a decade? These user interface disasters are just change for no reason. They're not improving anything. People who use computers have muscle memory and cognitive processes that enable them to get work done. When you change for no reason, you're just messing up the lives of people who are trying to get their work done. Inexperienced users don't really matter, since they'll have to learn something new anyway.
I've gotten to where I ignore the GUI as much as possible and just use the command line and GNU Emacs - because I figure the GUI will be shuffled, jumbled, and screwed up before I could learn it anyway.
Note that I'm limiting this rant to Linux - the same arguments could be made about the absolutely atrocious Mac interface (someone really thought it was a good idea to put the close-max-min buttons on the LEFT so you have to drag the mouse completely across the screen to use them?) or Windows 8 which is so utterly unusable that even the mighty Microsoft isn't going to make it fly.
No, I DON'T need my desktop to look like a tablet interface with big shiny fisher-price buttons, obviously positioned to sell applications in some sort of online marketplace..
I'm perfectly happy with a little bit of "complexity" as it helps me to position my work online in a productive manner. I tried the RC for Metro and I could easily tell that my desktop PC was obviously missing the "Home" or "Close" hardware button or whatever it is on their latest tablet..without ALT-F4 I couldn't figure out how to close an app - heck maybe they're all supposed to keep running?
Frankly the whole experience sort of reminded me of the type of thing we used to do with DOS applications back in the 90's, on a 486 with a VGA card ...
Can it be? they are actually trying to GET RID OF the "Window" ? Windows really actually suck very much in the current implementation. I don't need a stupid modal dialog box popping in front of my face when I'm trying to concentrate on my work..not only that but it uses an sickeningly sweet *Bonk*! sound - so that way I get conditioned just like pavlov's dogs to whince every time I hear the noise.
A touch sensitive keyboard sounds like a good idea, but I'll reserve judgement on the ZunePad for a later date - for now leave my f'king desktop alone.
unklown armani jeans
What happened then?
Oh, you used a different frigging tool? Well, why not here too?
FFS you whining arseholes are just trying to piss on anything you don't understand.
OK, here's a piece of advice.
If you demand CMYK and GIMP doesn't give it to you, DON'T FUCKING USE GIMP. Now, not using GIMP, SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT.
Right?
At work I've got the same theme on Enlightenment16 that I've been using since 1997, and it still has some features (eg. window snapshots as icons) that only recently turned up in MS Windows7.
I'm using E17 at home (and have tried a pile of others too to see what to recommend to users), but the point is that is that you don't have to even put up with the amount of change that even the slow changing Microsoft systems have if you don't wan't to.
It's been done. It was called CDE. Common Desktop Environment. While there was nothing inherently bad about it the only people that really liked it were a few guys at Sun that were in full control over it. We'd get a similar problem with any other master desktop.
I'm not suprised you haven't heard of this because you'd need an attention span about five times that of the computer industry in general.
First, there is a dramatic drop in the use of Desktop PC's and Laptops in favor of Tablets and Phones. Linux has lost out big time as the big tech companies transition into closed garden platforms. So yes, there is less interest in Linux on the Desktop because there is less interest in the Desktop.
Second, Linux for the Desktop has never been overly competitive and has always trailed. Its no surprising that there is not enough interest in keeping Linux "competitive" with products like OS X or Windows because after 20 years of failure its hard to get excited and stay motivated to contribute to a failing product.
I am not saying there is no room for Linux in the world, but the era of the idea that Linux will "eventually" become a true competitor to Windows is over. Linux lost on the desktop, period.
What needs to happen is for the Linux community to realize this and shift towards making Linux relevant again. Stop trying to "Beat Windows" and instead find new markets where Linux CAN be competitive in. For the most part I have found that the Open Source community is not shifting into the mobile device market fast enough. Sure Android is *nixy, but its not Linux and Google is pulling the strings pretty tightly (Android is NOT a community project, period). Linux has been shut out of a new generation of mobile devices.
The bottom line is there is a general lack of leadership in the Linux camp. Linus Torvalds is an idiot, period. He has delusions of grandeur and is still stuck in a reality where he is trying to "Beat Windows". The shame is that Linux is an OS that can pretty much run on ANYTHING, and would have been ideal if he started focusing on creating an excellent mobile/consumer electronics OS 5 years ago rather they trying to make an "awesome" kernel for the Desktop. While Linux might pepper a handful of TV devices, its still not a prominent player in a new generation of living room products, where again companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft are making a massive push.
Linux is proof that design by committee fails. Linux needs a leader to define the next 10 - 20 years of focus rather then dozens of hap-hazardously planned projects that go nowhere.
Linux is excellent, but it lacks excellence in its leadership.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Does anyone see CDE, or IceWM as recommendations in the comments? No: because they are arguably "worse" than the others. KDE, Gnome, and Unity are recommended along with xfce because they are relatively "better" than most of the rest. Expectations change. Devs try to keep up.
You see comments about the Windows 7 interface sucking, and whining about the osX interface as well. From the view of the people who don't like them, it's because there are bad things there. (God forbid a 'nix user open up a terminal interface on a mac, or powershell in winblows...) Hell, if you want, you can run the interface you want via cygwin on windows (if you build from source probably).
Perhaps Linux as a desktop will take off if webmail takes off in the enterprise. But probably not. Outlook-Exchange has always been driving Windows sales in the US, and that lockin will probably be kept via SharePoint if hosted email takes off. If SharePoint does not keep lock-in, I would not be suprised if some sort of tablet took over. Why hasn't Open Office taken over? Because of Outlook-Exchange (in large part). If you get a good word processor, and a decent spreadsheet with a hosted email client - then why not a tablet with a dock (to use a keyboard, mouse, and large display)? It won't work for heavy lifting, but we have servers for that.
I agree, but I must admit that it is rather funny to have someone who's slashdot username is inspired by "Master Control Program" to speak out for the "Users"
Are there any desktops other than CDE that let you define multiple actions for a given file type and have those actions be scripts? For example most desktops let you define what application to open a file type with, but CDE lets me define as many open actions as I want, and allows me to have shell scripts perform those actions.
So instead of a text file being restricted to only canned Open and Print actions, I can define OpenReadOnly, Edit, SpellCheck, SpellCorrect, PrintEnscript1Col, PrintEnscript2Col, Encrypt, etc.
I actually like Win8 better than 7. There are things I don't like, but I'm so happy to get the up button back in file explorer I can overlook them.
If you don't run metro apps you can pretty much just ignore the metro stuff and the only thing you notice is the start menu is now full screen instead of just a menu. It still works about the same, and the old one was too small anyway.
Of course when the best new feature of an OS is they put back something they removed from the last version then there's something wrong.
One thing that did make me really angry, though, was when I accidentally opened a metro app. (I'd forgotten to install my own pdf reader) There's no obvious way to close the app! I had to google how to close the program. So yeah, I don't see many businesses installing this one.
Free and Open Source software has one advantage to offer: that it's free or open source. The problem with the current desktop systems to me is they don't use that advantage. The hierarchy of C and C++ libraries constituting Gnome or KDE are large and complex enough that it might as well be proprietary software as far as I'm concerned (not that I've tried to get into how they work all that hard -- maybe I'm wrong on this point).
There are other free software systems that do use the fact that they are free software to their (and their users') advantage:
The first is emacs. You can get to the source code implementing the command you're reading help on by following a link. You can change the code or copy it somewhere else and evaluate it with your changes very easily. It being Lisp, there are natural ways to change the program as it runs without it coming crashing down.
The second is the Unix command prompt itself. The commands are each relatively simple programs that you could go and change fairly easily if you wanted to. I'm not sure why you'd want to change ls, but you can.
Perhaps we would be better off with something using the Smalltalk environment as the jumping off point. That's as close as I can think of something offering a Macintosh-like UI, but that could let you in to understand how it works and make changes to it as it runs.
In the end, of course, the free software desktop will have the overwhelming advantage of lacking inline advertisements, so I don't know what you people are so concerned about.
Microsoft and apple need to head to court again for anti trust violations.... Itunes doesnt work on linux nor does silverlight (at least not the DRM netflix version). How can linux OSes like Ubuntu (my favorite) gain tracking in its user base when the giants say it aint happening. Valve claims to be releasing a Steam Client for linux. When? Bottom line is that linux does a lot of general things very well but if it doesnt include the full package, users like myself will continue to be force into using microsoft or apple products in dual boot configs or virtualized so as to have access to the mircrosoft/apple dominance that is their IP.....
It's not just the herding cats problem, part of it is a fundamental disagreement about philosophy. Look at GNOME, for instance: their whole idea is to dumb everything down as possible and remove as much configurability as possible, because some "usability experts" and "usability studies" say this is a good thing somehow. Then look at KDE: it's completely the opposite, with as much configurability as they can pack in there, and also different UIs for different devices (plasma-desktop for desktops and laptops, plasma-netbook for netbooks, plasma-active for phones and tablets). There's no way to make two groups of people with such diametrically-opposed philosophies agree to merge projects, when they can't even agree on such fundamental items like whether users should be allowed to configure things or not.
Or maybe we should get rid of separate countries, and all cooperate on having one master country? We can even let Ahmadinejad or Kim Il (new guy, can't remember his name) lead it!
There's a reason people splinter into different groups: it's because they can't agree on things. If you can't agree on things, and can't agree to a compromise, the only two solutions are violent conflict, or going your separate ways.
I have tried to embrace *nix desktops and laptops in the past and my major set back has always been Adobe and MS Office. You could not run say Abobe CS 5.5 Master Collection or other variant, thus I drift back to Windows hoping for compatibility with Adobe. With OpenOffice or like programs, they are good and do the basics, but they simply are not MS Office and the lack of compatibility out of the box was my second set back. Once Adobe runs with no issues, I am going to try again as that was my major sticking point.
It's all I ask. It's the only thing holding me back. I have Ubuntu on my machine right now. I just need my programmable Trackball to work.
On a purely technical basis, maybe But the sheer number of apps for Windows and Macs that don't run on open source desktops, makes the question a nobrainer. Take fro instance the chrome PC. Where is it now? Counting Androids on tablets and phones may tilt it towards Open source a few years on. OK
after the n^xth comment: What about all those who can't afford (or don't want to pay for) OSX/KDE/Gnome + Unity spec hardware? The above kernel/shell/DE packages (or, in the case of OSX, a more integrated approach) is great for those who have the wealth to shell out $$$ on an overpriced intel Mac box or hackintosh a still moderately expensive PC clone box. Also, not all of us have corporate swag accounts. What about those who run older gear simply because they're cheap or poor? The i386 Linux kernel allows me to use pretty much any intel or intel-clone box manufactured in the last ten years. My main computer is a six-year-old Pentium D (xfce, 2 gb) which I got for free and spent $40 on for minor improvements. My favorite laptop is a nearly ten year old Celeron running lxde w/ 512 mb. A while back a coworker gave me the laptop because she thought it was "broken" (XP bloat, hardware's fine). So what if the ancient laptop is little more than a glorified typewriter and email client? Not all computers need to have gee-whiz desktop enhancements. Yes, desktop Linux will never fly with the majority of the market, especially because many chipsets do not have kernel support (this has changed _significantly_ over the last few years) and because bash is still required. Still, if you scrounge the bottom of the PC food chain like I do, 32-bit kernel linux is still the only way to fiy.
Well, the real problem for Linux on the desktop is simple: All desktop environments suck. Point. You have GNOME Shell, which is quite goodisch but bloated like hell (it takes with a minimal[!] install already 3,4 GB) and relies on to much shit to work. KDE is a lost cause beacuse of the lack of a decent browsers (chromium and the majority are written in GTK+ regarding to the GUI), only Opera uses QT. Konqueror is just fucking old (but good), reqonk is well, just crap. So are the other desktop environments, who the fuck wants to work on a desktop with openbox etc.?
You know what 99% of the users do? Checking E-Mails, surfing the web and watching porn. And that fucking shit cannot be done be Linux without a hassle at the moment. Like Linus said in the "fuck you Nvidia" interview: Linux will not become popular when it does not come preinstalled on a maschine.
And that from a guy, who used almost every operating system there is in the past 10 years.
Users -> MBA -> Developers in Proprietary software
Users -> Developers in FOSS
Casteism
Lol, it was meant to be exactly "master control program" and I only discovered afterwards that usernames are truncated to 20 characters.
/. to its knees...
Because of course, letting all the usernames registered to date take a total of a few extra MB of disk space by letting it be 30 or 40 max would've brought
I don't think open source desktops are losing competitiveness at all. Just KDE.
Personally, I've had more bugs and issues with come up with KDE than with Gnome, Blackbox, and Fluxbox
So I only use it when I have to do certain things (usually system settings) that I have had good experiences using KDE.
But then I quickly switch back once I'm done with those short tasks.
KDE may suck, but Gnome 3 is every bit as good as OSX, in some ways better, and vastly better than windows 7.
Linux desktops will stay around because 2/3rds of all business servers run Linux, and sometimes it makes sense to have a windowed environment around. Serious network people run Linux because it plays well with anything. Apple? That's for consumers that never have to work with other systems. You can't even mount common file systems like NTFS without altering your default install, and most of their 'innovations' are rebranded, proprietary hacks of functionality invented for Unix or Linux. Windows? What do they play well with again? Wizards make administrators stupid.
Unity is a wayward Canonical (Ubuntu) project. Gnome 3.x is called Gnome Shell, and it's excellent. I wish that people that were turned off by the first version came back and see how much it's improved.
At this point it's better than a tired OS like OSX, in my opinion. That means Linux is not only better for technical requirements, vastly better for OS level innovation, and better in the UI department. Sure, there's no one to call up when someone screws up and breaks and app, but that gets fixed pretty quickly, and There's Always Another Way To Do It (tm) until the patch comes through.
Linux is not going to merge. It ain't gonna happen. The desktops are getting further apart not closer together in the last decade. Linux offers choice not consistency.