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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?"
Moving the close etc. buttons, changing the piss poor default color scheme and chrome in Ubuntu. Removing shit you don't want but is extremely integrated with the desktop (e.g. evolution). It makes that I am going to move away from Ubuntu in a month or so (Hello, OS X).
Still running on 10.04. And that's another thing that I don't like of Ubuntu. You have to upgrade or learn to live with software that is a few versions behind with piss poor default settings (Hello, Evince) or other issues.
And so far, since 8.04, each upgrade is a mix of one or more of the following features.
I've been using several desktop environments (RISC OS, TOS, Windows 3.x ... Windows Vista, X, Motif, IndigoMagic and probably forgot one or more) but so far the Ubuntu experience has managed to disappoint me the most. It's like someone who shouldn't be even near fruit bearing trees has been cherry picking the low hanging fruits of several other desktops and then some.
I am all for OSS, and do support it. But Ubuntu's desktop "experience" is like programming in PHP. Or like posting a comment on Slashdot with its piss poor type HTML to keep things readable and broken RSS feeds & —
Perl Programmer for hire