How Apple Killed the Linux Desktop

An anonymous reader writes "Klint Finley discusses Miguel de Icaza's thoughts on how OS X killed Linux on the desktop: 'de Icaza says the desktop wars were already lost to OS X by the time the latest shakeups started happening. And he thinks the real reason Linux lost is that developers started defecting to OS X because the developers behind the toolkits used to build graphical Linux applications didn’t do a good enough job ensuring backward compatibility between different versions of their APIs. "For many years, we broke people’s code," he says. "OS X did a much better job of ensuring backward compatibility."' This, he says, led developers to use OS X as a desktop for server programming. It didn't help that development was 'shifting to the web,' with the need for native applications on the decline."

Comments

And what we have recently found

[aussersterne]

is that the Linux desktop was at the mercy of the GNOME and KDE devs.

What, you can write any code you want to fix what they have done?

Guess what? Macs have Xcode and gcc as well. You can do just as much hacking to "fix" what you don't like there.

The non-ideological facts are:

1) Most users use software written by others.
2) Most users will never modify this software, either at the system or userland level.
3) Most users want this software to work indefinitely so that they don't have to change data stores and/or workflows.
4) Apple has been much better at this than GNOME/KDE/Linux.
5) The market tells you so.

Of course, Linux users will continue to try to tell Grandma and the boss that the reason it's so important to use Linux is so that they can become hardware and software hackers and build their own userlands from the ground up.