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

It's too bad

[gravyface]

Because nothing beats Linux for package management. Miss not having a repo of open source at my disposal; the App Store will never touch it.

Re:It's too bad

[OzPeter]

Because nothing beats Linux for package management. Miss not having a repo of open source at my disposal; the App Store will never touch it.

You mean you miss something like MacPorts?

Re:It's too bad

[gravyface]

Never found MacPorts to be nearly as friendly/comprehensive as a good ol' Ubuntu apt repository. It's also 3rd-party and at the mercy of Apple and requires a bunch of prerequisites.

Re:It's too bad

[Kergan]

You can use macports or homebrew on OS X. Both have all of the key OSS packages, and the latter additionally allows to manage your own private packages. What else would you need? OS X is FreeBSD with a fancy UI (and Obj-C)... You can shell script the daylights out of your box all you want if that's your thing.

Re:It's too bad

[jellomizer]

witch one?

That is the problem

Re:It's too bad

[gagol]

^ This

Running on Linux fulltime for 3 years and counting... I find it funny how in so many people's measure the non-commercial linux offering with commercial metrics. Linux fills my niche pretty well, employees at Google would agree with me too. The desktop is a viable alternative, I say it suceeded where it counts, to computer literate people like me and many many other slashdotters.

Market domination is not the only way to succeed.

Re:It's too bad

[jacknifetoaswan]

Agreed. I've been begging my IT department to let me run Linux on my laptop, and run our corporate Windows image in a desktop VM, but they won't let me. When I had more direct admin rights, I was running a dual boot system on my laptop, and was using the Linux side for about 80% of my work. The only time I'd head over to the Windows side was when I needed to get into Sharepoint or something like that.

Re:It's too bad

[king neckbeard]

You are an idiot. Are you saying it belongs on the server, and practically speaking, the smartphone (app stores are essentially package managers, just generally less powerful), but not on the desktop? Also, while sometimes an app may have a large amount of dependencies, on average, the install is less than the minimal install of other operating systems, and on average, it's a significantly smaller download when you want a single program. You could probably install 2 or 3 DEs with a smaller install size than Windows.

Re:It's too bad

[wisty]

I've always found getting the right version of gcc to be a little ... difficult.

Re:It's too bad

[Bill_the_Engineer]

It's also 3rd-party and at the mercy of Apple and requires a bunch of prerequisites.

At the mercy of Apple? It's amazing how much anti-Apple bullshit gets modded as "insightful".

Let's not forget Homebrew. Homebrew does a nice job of packaging programs that coexist with the versions of prerequisite programs that are included in the OS X system files.

Re:It's too bad

[Alan Shutko]

FWIW, I ran Linux full-time from 1994 through 2008. What finally did it for me was power management and the hassle it took to get laptops to work well under Linux. Linux worked well if you picked up a 1-2 year old laptop, because by then you could find support for most of the hardware, but you were in for a world of hurt if you wanted anything new.

Anecdotally, I know a bunch of people who switched to Mac for the same reason. Get a MacBook, and you had a laptop that could suspend and resume reliably... And you had your shell underneath.

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

well, on ubuntu you write "apt-get ", on mac ports you write "port ". Big difference, huh?
The only prerequisite is to have a compiler, you can start with the one shipped with xcode and then switch to the gnu one "ported" from ports, if you really want to.
Last but not least, what means "at mercy of Apple"? it isn't something that you remove or that can be blocked by the apple security features in mountain lion.

I used macports and apt long enough to say that macports is nowhere as good to manage updates and dependencies as apt.

Re:It's too bad

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Agreed. I've been begging my IT department to let me run Linux on my laptop, and run our corporate Windows image in a desktop VM, but they won't let me."

You just pointed out the only real problem with Linux in a desktop environment: Incompetent IT Departments.

Re:It's too bad

[Bill_the_Engineer]

You must be doing something wrong. I use homebrew and had no problems getting it to work. You may want to read the caveats that come up when you install a package, or run "brew doctor" to see what is misconfigured.

Re:It's too bad

[CharlyFoxtrot]

You are an idiot.

Starting off with an insult, always a good sign.

Are you saying it belongs on the server, and practically speaking, the smartphone (app stores are essentially package managers, just generally less powerful), but not on the desktop?

App stores just deliver self-contained app folders. That's about as far from the Linux definition of a package manager you can get.

Also, while sometimes an app may have a large amount of dependencies, on average, the install is less than the minimal install of other operating systems, and on average, it's a significantly smaller download when you want a single program. You could probably install 2 or 3 DEs with a smaller install size than Windows.

I dispute this and anyone who has ever installed an app knows how it really goes: you want to upgrade an app and instead of just downloading a small file, you get to upgrade half the gnome packages and assorted libraries along with them. Sure the application itself may be nominally smaller but you have to download a shitton of crap before you can install it.

Let me put it this way. Windows has "DLL hell", Linux has "dependency hell" and the mac and iOS have ... ?

Re:It's too bad

[__aaltlg1547]

Market domination isn't a goal of FOSS at all, ir shouldnt be. Software freedom is for those who want it and are willing to trade their own time and effort for it.

It's no surprise at all that a commercial UI would be more stable and maintain backward compatibility better than a free and open development project. Apple was always concerned with an easy user experience as a primary goal, and their management could and did exercise rigid control of the UI model. How can you do that when anyone can contribute? In FOSS land there is no way to enforce regression testing and when contributes give you whatever they want to make instead of that somebody tells them to make?/p>

Re:It's too bad

[fm6]

I say it suceeded where it counts, to computer literate people like me and many many other slashdotters.

If my last in-office job is any indication, that's just not true. For our job laptops, everybody had their choice of Thinkpad/Ubuntu or Mac. My aging brain has never adapted to the idiosyncrasies of Macs, so I chose Ubuntu. But most of the younger workers — the development engineers, the QA people, tech support — had Macs. And they were all masterfully adept at working with them. The fancy desktop idioms of the Mac platform seem to have been polished to a fine gleam. Ubuntu is still a work in progress; its main merit is that it was closer to what I was used to.

Re:It's too bad

[Dr_Barnowl]

I hate to disabuse you of this notion, but exactly the same thing happens on Windows ; only you have to download all the libraries your application depends on every time, even if you already have them, because they all get rolled into a single installer package.

In addition, people roll their own install modules of libraries because they are hell to get hold of and there is no central repository of standard modules, so they screw up other peoples installers with conflicts.

MS had to devote a lot of attention to this in Vista and above, which is why the system folder has become so bloaty with so many versions of the same components all installed in parallel.

The lack of package management on Windows is painful.. couple it with the Registry and it's a world of hurt. On a Linux system, I can do a fresh install, restore my home folder, do a single apt-get with my previously installed package list, make a cup of tea, and get right back on with my work.

On Windows, I have to find driver install disks, reboot for each one, find the application downloads, together with their license keys, reboot for each one (and hope that they don't have some maximum-install-count online DRM that's going to lock me out), reconfigure everything. No, re-imaging from a backup is not always an option, because you don't always reinstall on the same hardware, and Windows blows chunks when you change it's hardware (unlike Linux, which I have never seen have any serious issues bar having to reconfigure X11, mostly because of closed-source binary GPU drivers). You can't just install the drivers and then restore the applications from an archive because of all the data they dump into the registry.

A Windows reinstall leaves the operating system unproductive for a couple of days while you work at making it useful again. A Linux reinstall is something you do in your lunch hour - because of package management. Yes, that includes the commercial packages I use on Linux, which have the sense to store their license keys in your home folder, not in a binary database that also contains a vast amount of crud that is not compatible with your new hardware, etc. Anything else I install in /opt - which usually means restoring an archive and making one soft link.

Not to mention application updates. A single, standard method of publishing and providing updates, rather than a bunch of silly little applets cluttering up my toolbar and holding onto resources (ironically, update notifier applets are probably responsible for a lot of reboots when you update other applications because they hold onto libraries that Windows can't update in place because of it's choice of file-locking policy).

Re:It's too bad

[somersault]

Exceptionally well compared to what, exactly? It was crap compared to apt when I tried it a few years ago.

Re:It's too bad

[Bill_the_Engineer]

The most important question to ask is "Does it work for me?". If you answered yes, then why should you care what someone else use?

I use Linux on the server and OS X on the desktop. I like both.

I don't know why the Linux fanbois are getting all riled up.

1) We are talking about Miguel de Icaza's opinion.

2) Truth is much worse. Linux had its own desktops fucked up by their respective projects. Just look at all the bitching and moaning on Slashdot when someone brings up Unity (the default on Ubuntu), Gnome 3, or even KDE 4. (I think KDE is the least offensive).

Personally I think the reason this topic raises the noise level on Slashdot is the posers that like to boaster their "credentials" by making derogatory remarks about something they don't understand.

Re:It's too bad

[Shompol]

Because all closed code is at the mercy of whatever company owns it. Its support can be dropped at a whim of the management, thus "at the mercy" is an accurate description. In fact, all closed software meets the end of life sooner or later, and then all the users who rely on it are SOL. This is not to say that free software is immortal, but at least we are guaranteed that it will be around as long as someone capable of maintaining needs it.

Re:It's too bad

[gagol]

The point here is freedom of choice. Some prefer Ubuntu, some prefer Macs, some dont have a clue and use whatever is on the machine. The young engineers may one day choose differently, but now our youth is attarcted to bling, a real blasphemy to the whole performance per watt. Many people are superficial anyway and mostly want peer recognition and blending in, if owning a bligny apple product help them with their self-esteem, good for them. I have evolve beyond that need and prefer something I can run in anyway I see fit.

Re:It's too bad

[Ash-Fox]

Your post holds no relevance to today's Linux mainstream distros.

Re:It's too bad

[manicb]

Seconded. I take glee in the simplicity and power of apt on my netbook, whereas MacPorts is always a last resort. Too much frustration trying to track down the right package name, only to discover that I'm not getting what I expected (e.g. the MacPorts version of yafc doesn't support tab completion). Next time I set a mac up I'm trying Homebrew.

Re:It's too bad

[gagol]

That being said, my next laptop may be a MacBookPro Retina... running my favorite linux distro. The hardware is well designed but software side, I hate the speed at which Walled Gardens are getting shoved down our throats.

Re:It's too bad

[Ash-Fox]

If by "works exceptionally well" you mean "segfaults often", then yes, you are correct.

Re:It's too bad

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Because all closed code is at the mercy of whatever company owns it. Its support can be dropped at a whim of the management, thus "at the mercy" is an accurate description...

I don't know what you are talking about, but what the rest of us are talking about is MacPorts and Homebrew which are open source package repositories.

Re:It's too bad

[Gr8Apes]

Yep, Ubuntu apt repo - it's AWESOME. Needed SVN version 1.6 for a project, Ubuntu's repos didn't have it, but did have instructions for linking to another repo that did. Be very careful when you link external repos and run get-apt. Needless to say, the next reboot resulted in a rebuild. Lesson learned. But never ever ever claim that apt is the be-all and end-all of package management. It has more than one challenge to its name, not the least of which would be making selective packages out of specific repos easily configurable. I'm not sure it's even possible at this point, and don't really care, as OSX does all the desktoppy things I need during my normal day, without that specific hurdle to jump through. I still use Linux as my primary server target, however.

Re:It's too bad

[rullywowr]

On Windows, I have to find driver install disks, reboot for each one...

Hello 1994, is that you? Are you still using your 3.5"?

Re:It's too bad

[Kergan]

Market domination isn't a goal of FOSS at all, ir shouldnt be. Software freedom is for those who want it and are willing to trade their own time and effort for it.

Funny how mindsets have changed over the years...

Back in the heydays, the rage was all about how and when FOSS would eventually wipe out commercial alternatives. Pundits, flame warriors and trolls all joined forces in predicting that it was going to be a tsunami. Because Free and Open always wins.

(Some still do, mind you... eg Noyes.)

Re:It's too bad

[Dr_Barnowl]

Given that WinXP is rather old (don't laugh, our organization is still on XP until next year), it can't cope with a lot of modern storage hardware - and yes, you either have to have a 3.5" floppy disk drive (USB will work, thankfully), or you have to go through the process of rolling your own OEM install disk.

Vista and up do support loading drivers from a USB flash drive, which is a step up.

On Linux, I've never had to have any driver disk ready. Of course, when you DO have driver issues, it's a total PITA. But I research my hardware before I buy it.

Re:It's too bad

[kcitren]

If starting an install from scratch with no legacy software, I'd probably go with homebrew. But it's a real pain if you've already got a bunch of stuff installed and configured on your machine from over the years. It does not play well with other systems (e.g., fink or macports), but then again, none of them really do. I'll give it a shot on my next build.

Re:It's too bad

[gl4ss]

Because all closed code is at the mercy of whatever company owns it. Its support can be dropped at a whim of the management, thus "at the mercy" is an accurate description...

I don't know what you are talking about, but what the rest of us are talking about is MacPorts and Homebrew which are open source package repositories.

..which are at the mercy of Apple. ALL software running on macs is at the mercy of Apple, if you haven't figured that out I don't think you've been following what Apple has been moving towards the last decade - the Garden Of Apple.

right now it's still at the mercy in the way that Apple allows code outside of Appstore to run. They could alter the deal.

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, it has been known for millennia that you can be thrown out of the walled garden of paradise if you interact with an Apple in a non-approved way.

Re:It's too bad

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I put that conspiracy theory in the same category as "Linux makes you a communist".

Re:It's too bad

[StuartHankins]

I used either Fink or MacPorts (I've used both in the past and both caused issues) to install a package which resulted in a lot of new issues; things not working, crashes and lockups. XCode stopped working shortly after that; I was just beginning to learn that tool and the combination of new things and broken things was beyond my ability to resolve. I eventually did an in-place reinstall of Snow Leopard. XCode never worked right again; I'm getting a new laptop soon and you can bet MacPorts / Fink will be on my short list of software to avoid.

To give you some perspective, I work with RHEL systems for a living (and have been using Red Hat since 5.2 -- not Fedora Core, but way back when you bought "Red Hat Linux" at places such as CompUSA). I am very familiar with yum and rpm, and I can only think of one time I've ever screwed up a Red Hat system using those tools. Apparently either that knowledge didn't transfer to using and working with Fink / MacPorts or there is something wrong with them.

I'm sure Fink and MacPorts work for someone, but in my case installing a2ps and FrozenBubble2 was enough to cause havoc.

Re:It's too bad

[TheNinjaroach]

At the mercy of Apple?

Yes, 3rd party developers are at the mercy of Apple and this is not some anti-Apple bullshit. See: Gatekeeper.

Only Mac Developer Program members are eligible to request Developer ID certificates and sign applications or installer packages using them.

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

That's precisely my point. Apt-get ALWAYS works out of the box. Any fresh install of ubuntu/debian/whatever will apt-get into anything happily. Brew, in the other hand, is not supported by apple, has to be manually installed and makes you jump a lot of hoops to get anything done. After several days of suffering to install ImageMagick, I gave up and decided to run my stuff inside an Ubuntu VM.

Re:It's too bad

[TheNinjaroach]

I consider myself lucky. I'm the only guy at work who gets to (or wants to) run Linux, everyone else gets a standardized Windows 7 deployment. I run that in my VM.

Re:It's too bad

[TheNinjaroach]

I've had fantastic success with power management on Thinkpads since about 2006. Anything else is a crapshoot.

I arrived at the conclusion many years ago that it's the hardware that makes all the difference.

Re:It's too bad

[Bill_the_Engineer]

You mean the same Gatekeeper that allows me to allow downloaded programs from anywhere?

Re:It's too bad

[bbelt16ag]

well, i hate to say this, but i dont use any of those. I use xmonad and have been all the better for it. I no longer have to cycle through windows or worry about resizing them. they just go where they are suppose to and if i need to have a couple ona desktop they can be switch to a different layout. http://xmonad.org/

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

That would make sense as I've been arguing for years now that the average intelligence on slashdot has significantly dropped over the last half decade. Your post wonderfully accounts for the obvious decline in intelligence here on slashdot.

Re:It's too bad

[fm6]

When you respond to a post, you should actually read it. The situation I described was about usability, not bling.

Yes, Apple products are notorious for the bling factor and other silly branding gimmicks. But Macs also have a solid record for usability. For you to credit the choice of serious developers to "peer recognition and blending in" is superficial and arrogant.

Re:It's too bad

[jedidiah]

apt-get is more like the official app store.

It comes with the system. It handles pretty much anything. It can even accommodate 3rd parties.

So in that respect there's really nothing comparable on a Mac. Just stuff that kind of sort of partially covers what apt-get does.

Being not-quite-comprehensive kind of defeats the entire point.

Re:It's too bad

[rrohbeck]

Well you asked them. There's your problem.
My IT folks sometimes call me to "turn on" the Windows laptop because they need to update something. "OK, just a second..." Click Virtualbox, the VM I created with VMware Converter, start... "OK it's coming up."

Re:It's too bad

[jedidiah]

The ease with which Ubuntu supported a random laptop in 2006 is why I switched to Ubuntu at the time.

It's easy to do well when you restrict yourself to a very limited subset of the available hardware and then get the OS preloaded.

Re:It's too bad

[Kjella]

Market domination isn't a goal of FOSS at all, ir shouldnt be. Software freedom is for those who want it and are willing to trade their own time and effort for it.

I think you will find a lot of people in the open source community who think Linux should be used by everyone because open source software is superior and not just FLOSSies who'll take substandard software because it's GNU/free. I doubt for example that 99.9% of the Android users care about the that aspect of their phone - which is often locked down anyway.

How can you do that when anyone can contribute? In FOSS land there is no way to enforce regression testing and when contributes give you whatever they want to make instead of that somebody tells them to make?

Reject the patches? If Linus doesn't like your code, it doesn't go into the Linux kernel period. Maybe the would be contributer gives up, maybe it goes into some kind of test branch or even try for a full fork, but every project is responsible for their own quality. You can't let crap through then complain it's full of shit.

Of course if you are hardline about that, the community might turn on you and turn the fork into the more popular version but all that'd show is that people care more about the new features than any stability and compatibility. And you can't stop people from aiming the gun at their feet and pulling the trigger.

Re:It's too bad

[jedidiah]

At the time, it seemed the way to deal with a monopoly that tended to destroy everything in it's path.

Microsoft destroyed everything but Apple. Apple was on deathwatch. DeGasse couldn't even give BeOS away for free.

Re:It's too bad

[jedidiah]

> I don't know why the Linux fanbois are getting all riled up.

It's a story designed to get people riled up.

They even have a special word for that. Tended to get thrown about quite a bit on Usenet and the old Bulletin Boards.

Re:It's too bad

[mcgrew]

But it doesn't discount the fact that TFS (I didn't RTFA, because the premise seems stupid) is just wrong. Apple didn't kill Linux on the desktop. If anything, Linux took a small slice of market share away from Apple by being a second alternative to Windows. Without Linux, anyone who gets disgusted with Windows has no other choice but Apple.

Secondly, Linux on the desktop is far from dead. Linux is thriving. Nobody killed it.

Linux was never destined to be the dominant OS desktop no matter how badly many of us wish it were. It's actually cheaper for an OEM tio use Windows instead of Linux because of all the added crapware the OEM is paid to install (AV trials, toolbars, and the other gunk a computer buyer has to clean off). Windows is mostly useable, and has millions in advertising, while few non-nerds have ever heard of Linux. Nobody is going to install Linux until they're just fed up with Windows' behavior or are building a system from scratch.

Considering that, it's a testament to Linux developers competence and Windows designers and programmers incompetence that Linux has any traction at all. If Linux weren't more stable, hardware fault tolerant, less buggy, has more features and better useability, nobody would bother switching.

Now, If Apple brought their PC prices down to what a Windows PC cost, that could possibly kill Linux on the desktop, but they haven't and aren't going to.

Re:It's too bad

[StuartHankins]

Apparently you don't virtualize then. RHEL, RHEV, Parallels and VMWare all require driver installs, and in the case of at least RHEL and RHEV, using a "generic" storage device or memory driver on install is impossible to change in Windows later. In Linux (at least in Fedora and RHEL3-6) this isn't an issue.

Windows 7 is also missing drivers for Thunderbolt (Apple provides a driver). Those are just examples I thought of off the top of my head. You're just using mainstream stuff so you don't notice the gaps.

Re:It's too bad

[gravyface]

This isn't anti-Apple bullshit, it's the truth: from the MacPorts FAQ:

Will my MacPorts install continue to work after installing a new major OS release or migrating to a new machine with a different CPU architecture? In general the answer is no. See Migration for how to get things working again.

Ubuntu:

do-release-upgrade

...

apt-get install $package

There's a 99% chance that will Just Work (tm). The other 1%, well, likely something's not right to begin with (wrong apt sources, etc.) or it's an edge case.

Look, I love my Macbook, but I choose to run VirtualBox with Windows 7 and Ubuntu because I feel that while it does a great job of some things, it's poor at best at other things in comparison to other OSs. One of those things is having a core, reliable package management system: when it's time to release some new code and/or configuration changes for a client, I don't want to get burnt by a 3rd-party package system not working as expected.

Re:It's too bad

[jedidiah]

The Personal Desktop/Laptop OS needs to do the following very well.
1. Support 3rd party hardware. Apple and Microsoft are willing to let companies make drivers for their hardware and put their own license on them,

I run Linux on Macs because of better hardware support in Linux. Once you get beyond the based hardware, Apple has no advantage. Even with the base hardware, there may be some NIH issue (VDPAU) that causes MacOS to be less robustly supported.

With Linux, the community does for itself.

With Macs, you expect 3rd parties to support you. They may likely find you not worth the trouble for the exact same reason they would ignore Linux.

This is all about market share. It has been since this was a discussion including GEM. The politics of the Linux kernel and driver licensing is a big red herring.

If your intent is to "buy things" for your computer, you're much better off with the dominant vendor.

Re:It's too bad

[JoeMerchant]

I setup svn/trac servers on OS-X using MacPorts and on Ubuntu using Debian/apt-get.

Put simply: apt-get just works. MacPorts took days of research and trial and error to get a functioning system, the Debian setup took less than an hour.

Re:It's too bad

[king neckbeard]

App stores just deliver self-contained app folders [wikipedia.org]. That's about as far from the Linux definition of a package manager you can get.

Actually, a number of third party apps install mostly self contained folders with all the of dependencies that won't be on virtually every single system in /opt. That works the same way you describe. iOS jailbreaks typically use Cydia, which is a frontend for APT.

I dispute this and anyone who has ever installed an app knows how it really goes: you want to upgrade an app and instead of just downloading a small file, you get to upgrade half the gnome packages and assorted libraries along with them. Sure the application itself may be nominally smaller but you have to download a shitton of crap before you can install it.

I'm not saying that doesn't occasionally happen, but in my experience, you get a much smaller download more than 90% of the time, and when you do have to do something like install half of gnome (which, given that there are only about 3 or 4 full DEs, could happen at most about 8 times), that's about on par with HP printer drivers or iTunes. Oddly enough, the absolute worst problem I've had with superfluous dependencies was LaTeX wanting to install massive documentation packages, although everyone seems to bring up GNOME (despite KDE apps generally being worse in that regard)

Let me put it this way. Windows has "DLL hell", Linux has "dependency hell" and the mac and iOS have ...

'Dependency hell' generally refers to when resolving dependencies becomes problematic, either via circular dependencies of version conflicts, and that's something that was pretty only a problem with RPM package distros, and hasn't been an issue for years. The only time I can recall experiencing something like that was when I foolishly mixed debian stable, debian testing, debian unstable, and ubuntu repos, The word you are looking for is 'bloat.' Like I said, I can probably install 2 or 3 complete DEs in less space than a bare Windows install.

Re:It's too bad

[Nimey]

I gave up on MacPorts years ago because too frequently a package I wanted depended on another (or it would depend on another) that wouldn't compile.

Just for kicks I tried it again a little over a year ago and it still had that sort of problem.

Re:It's too bad

[JoeMerchant]

I'd say that FOSS needs to maintain a critical mass to continue operation... Market domination is one way to achieve that, but in reality, a market penetration of 1% should be enough to sustain the development community.

The danger with low market penetration is that it's more likely that people will defect in mass numbers and kill the sustainability, if Linux were in use on 20% of all desktops, it would have a much more certain future and be a bigger target for investment.

Re:It's too bad

[jeffasselin]

Fink does a decent job on OS X i use it to install all the open-source packages I like using.

Re:It's too bad

[jedidiah]

> And there is the issue of how to install anything not in the repo. For casual users, Linux is garbage for that. On Windows you download an exe and follow a wizard. OSX, it is a dmg

For casual users, it's going to be in the repository.

Your Truecrypt example has no relevance to casual users.

I have had adventures like what you describe but under MacOS. You are blaming the platform that something that depends on each and every developer doing things to your liking.

Even the one true interface doesn't ensure that.

Re:It's too bad

[fm6]

I hate walled gardens too, but nobody's getting them shoved down their throats. People choose to buy iOS devices. It may be a poor choice, but it's theirs.
'
And the walled garden issue doesn't apply here. .Apple doesn't control third-party OS X software the way it does for iOS,

Re:It's too bad

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I like xmonad, but it's not exactly mainstream. I'm mostly using CLI and I like how it automatically lays out the terminal sessions. The x-window layout is something to get used to. Thankfully the window floating mode is there to help with programs not designed for auto-layout.

On OS X, I use iTerm2 for the multiple terminal sessions, but I haven't found anything similar to xmonad for the GUI. I have made a positioning applescript that I call using quicksilver, and after a while I gotten to like that slightly better anyway.

Re:It's too bad

[JoeMerchant]

Because, if I'm not in with the popular crowd, I might get lonely.

There's actually a practical side to this emotion, if you're "lonely" enough in your OS, you're literally on your own for support issues.

As you say, if it works for you, that's great. However, some people are very concerned (even on non-analytical levels) about moving with the crowd.

Re:It's too bad

[GCsoftware]

But if you just wanted a package manager and repos, you could always use Fink (for those who don't know, it's basically apt-get for OS X and a bunch of repos of binaries), no need to bootstrap with dev tools from Apple.

Actually you could probably get a version of gcc from Fink and then use that to bootstrap Mac Ports. Not tried that myself, though.

Re:It's too bad

[Compaqt]

Well, I think it was because of the whining that Ubuntu made some sorely needed changes in Unity which have now made it into a desktop worth using.

Re:It's too bad

[CharlyFoxtrot]

iOS jailbreaks typically use Cydia, which is a frontend for APT.

Cydia IS apt, it's also a slow annoying POS that does suffer from all the problems the IOS and Mac app stores doesn't have ("Oh you want to install a new app. Let me just sit here unresponsive for 5 minutes while I download package updates and update my repositories.") . I haven't heard a single jailbreaker ever defend Cydia as a good piece of software, in fact most were pretty pissed off when Cydia took over rival Rock.

Re:It's too bad

[Dishevel]

One of the major challenges of apt-get is not typing get-apt. :)

Re:It's too bad

[swillden]

^ This

Running on Linux fulltime for 3 years and counting... I find it funny how in so many people's measure the non-commercial linux offering with commercial metrics. Linux fills my niche pretty well, employees at Google would agree with me too. The desktop is a viable alternative, I say it suceeded where it counts, to computer literate people like me and many many other slashdotters.

Market domination is not the only way to succeed.

Linux has been my desktop/laptop OS since 1999, until about a year and a half ago when I got a MacBook from my employer. OS X has been quite decent, and it's actually been nice to be able to get more commercial software for it, but I find I miss many things from Linux as well. I'm still using Linux as my desktop OS.

My irritation with Apple's courtroom antics reached a threshold last week, though, and I've decided that when my two-year laptop refresh cycle is up I'm going to switch back to a ThinkPad running Linux. I'll miss some aspects of OS X, but it'll be a relief to get back to a proper window manager with usable virtual desktops, focus-follows-mouse, etc., and a machine which doesn't hide so much of its operation from me.

The excursion into OS X land was pleasant, but it won't bother me in the slightest to go back.

Re:It's too bad

[swillden]

Linux doesn't do well as a Desktop OS.

Dang. I've been doing it wrong for 13 years. Thanks for letting me know.

1. Support 3rd party hardware. Apple and Microsoft are willing to let companies make drivers for their hardware and put their own license on them

2005 called and wants its argument back. It's not absolutely perfect, but Linux hardware support is generally excellent these days. Outside of niche devices virtually everything works great. WiFi was a particularly thorny problem for a few years, being both widely problematic and obviously very important due to the situation with a few widely-used chipsets, but that seems to have ceased being an issue.

2. Consistent UI. People get stuck, they try to find instructions the instructions need to be consistent with their system.

Meh. People who aren't knowledgeable enough to figure things out on their own use Ubuntu, and there is plenty of information out there for Ubuntu.

3. The little features matter too. Time to put your system to sleep and wake up. Does that keyboard light work, How quickly can you connect to a wireless network. Does your screen leave artifacts floating around, consistent Copy and Paste.

Umm, everything you just said works great for me, and has for many years, on many machines. And not just on the high-end ThinkPads I've always used; I've installed Ubuntu for people on low-end Acers and e-Machines, and everything just works, at least in the last 3-4 years.

Either you've had some exceptionally bad luck or your experience is out of date.

Re:It's too bad

[robthebloke]

Yes, 3rd party developers are at the mercy of Apple

So much like developing on windows then? Or for that matter linux? or PS3? or Wii? or infact any operating system on which your code needs to run?

Re:It's too bad

[nine-times]

I also had problems with MacPorts, though I don't remember what they all were. I think the packages were too frequently out of date, or I'd find that compiling a tool with MacPorts would result in something that didn't support resource forks, even though I could get a binary which did.

Re:It's too bad

[interval1066]

Been running Linux as a laptop os since 1997, and I've not touched Windows or MacOS since. Far from having problems, I've had an excellent run. Far fewer than with Windows, and as for MacOS...? Its helps if your 'book has Intel hardware, I'll grant you that.

Re:It's too bad

[TheNinjaroach]

Last time I checked, Microsoft didn't require me to obtain digital certificates for publishing code that runs in userland. If they did, there would be an outrage that nobody on Slashdot (save the shills) would tolerate.

PS3 or Wii? You're grasping at straws. Linux? You're smoking crack.

Re:It's too bad

[hweimer]

Linux worked well if you picked up a 1-2 year old laptop, because by then you could find support for most of the hardware, but you were in for a world of hurt if you wanted anything new.

If you're buying a Laptop and want to run Linux on it, you should make sure it's certified. Of course, results are best when Linux is already pre-installed.

Re:It's too bad

[SilentStaid]

Don't mistake me here - I would rather have open source any day of the week. But I'd like to see statistics showing the "shelf-life" of FOSS software versus closed, paid-for-software.. I'd be genuinely curious if more usage is gotten out of community supported tools over closed-source.

it will be around as long as someone capable of maintaining needs it.

I think that kind of says it right there... it just happens to be that money is a great motivator for people maintaining things.

Re:It's too bad

[AioKits]

"Agreed. I've been begging my IT department to let me run Linux on my laptop, and run our corporate Windows image in a desktop VM, but they won't let me."

You just pointed out the only real problem with Linux in a desktop environment: Incompetent IT Departments.

If you think this is the only issue, you've never seen an accountant freak out when you tell them, "Well, it's LIKE Excel..." Some of the tools won't work on anything else. Although I do see some of my supported software moving away from being an add-in to being a web based interface. Take it for what it is, just my own opinion formed from my somewhat limited anecdote.

Re:It's too bad

[bitingduck]

Until OS X Lion I would have disagreed, but with Lion they're making it harder and harder to use a mac as a dev machine for anything other than apple products. The command line tools are no longer even automatically installed with XCode, and they're less well behaved than they were in Snow Leopard. I'll probably still have to have a mac for some things that I'm working on, but I'm leaning towards switching to linux for non-mac development with my next machine.

Re:It's too bad

[Conanymous Award]

You are an idiot.

Starting off with an insult, always a good sign.

Could have been worse, like "your an idiot".

Let me put it this way. Windows has "DLL hell", Linux has "dependency hell" and the mac and iOS have ... ?

OS X has plist hell. It might not be as bad as DLL or dependency hell though.

Re:It's too bad

[GameboyRMH]

And even so, he's arguing for chaotic anarchy over strict organization when it has no bearing on the user experience. Look at all the stuff my package manager is doing OH NOES!

Re:It's too bad

[bitingduck]

And they really do last. I have a bunch of old mac laptops sitting around the house working as servers of one sort or another. All the way back to an old G3 300 wallstreet. They all still work, and some are still pretty useful (the wallstreet really isn't good for much anymore).

Re:It's too bad

[funwithBSD]

That is because IBM has supported Fedora, RedHat and SUSE as a corporate laptop image for many years.

In fact, if I want a laptop refresh, my refresh rate is 5 years for a Windows, 3 years if I use Linux.

I am client facing, and unfortunately they do everything in M$ so I am forced to do the same. But I do maintain a Linux boot partition on a USB hard drive in case my Windows image craps out, which is far too often.

Re:It's too bad

[beefsack]

Exactly the same story for Homebrew, I tried to use OSX for my development because there were some added benefits of OSX (ie. a moderate amount of games available), but I went insane without having a reliable, fully stocked package manager at my disposal. One you get used package managers in open source systems, it's very hard to go back.

Re:It's too bad

[Maskull]

I've been thinking for a while that, with the direction Apple's been heading recently, there is the potential for a resurgence of sorts in the use of Linux by developers. Somebody needs to put together a developer-centric distro, not all simplified and "user-friendly" like Ubuntu is becoming, but also not forcing everyone down the way of the command-line (too much in that direction is why developers initially defected to Macs in the first place).

Re:It's too bad

[jacknifetoaswan]

Unfortunately, the name of the game at my company is 'least privilege'. I don't have admin access, and don't have the ability to clone this desktop install and run it in VirtualBox. Back when I was an admin, I was running multiple virtual servers on my laptop so that I could do OE development and test software updates and security vulnerability fixes without doing it on a production system. Those were the days.

Re:It's too bad

[Billly Gates]

I hate Apple. Their business practices are much worse than Microsoft these days by far. But, package management is one thing they got right. You download it and point and click! Gee so inferior. .deb files have dependency problems as well. For example, try downloading the flash .deb from adobe's website on an older distribution? It wont run. There are other requirements that your distro may or may not support it.

MacOSX beat Linux fair and square for a desktop OS. I have a disdain for Ubuntu from bad experiences and I am a FreeBSD/CentOS guy for server use. It just is not designed for desktop usage and people who say otherwise need to leave their moms basement.

Re:It's too bad

[bsane]

Apple doesn't require it either... its required if you want a pleasant experience for the customer, but nothing is stopping you from running non-signed code.

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

. I eventually did an in-place reinstall of Snow Leopard. XCode never worked right again; I'm getting a new laptop soon and you can bet MacPorts / Fink will be on my short list of software to avoid.

Well, you fucked up, didn't you? Rest assured, it wasn't MacPorts that hurt your install, it was you. MacPorts installs all it's ports in the /opt directory... and touches nothing else. You can't just reinstall the OS over top of XCode and expect things to still work... you blew away XCode frameworks when you did that. XCode comes with an excellent and comprehensive uninstall script, you should have used that first, and then tried reinstalling XCode. Reinstalling the OS just proves to everyone you had no idea what you were doing. If you do reinstall, a clean install is always preferred, and, it goes without saying, a reinstall of XCode is par for the course.

Re:It's too bad

[Goth Biker Babe]

My Apple is for consumery things. I run Linux on it for development. My work development laptop is a nice Lenovo X220 running Linux. Its horses for course. If all I want is a way of display a bunch of shells and an IDE Linux is fine. If I want to do that *and* play World of Warcraft I use OSX.

Re:It's too bad

[Hatta]

Indeed. I have a tech coming by within the hour to install Windows on a VM for me because the IT department here is too incompetent to turn on the built in IMAP server in Exchange. WTF?

Re:It's too bad

[Gr8Apes]

typing get-apt would have kept me out of trouble! :) I freely admitted it's been a while (SVN 1.6 reference would date it, as I'm sure that's been in the official repos for a while:) Using linux for servers generally doesn't have me installing anything via apt/yum/rpm anymore since most things I need are included in the base images I have, and ops guys generally take care of the maintenance and feeding afterwards.

Side note - love the negative mods - tell the truth, get modded down, like that will make the truth go away. Some mods need a life.

Re:It's too bad

[catmistake]

Personally I think the reason this topic raises the noise level on Slashdot is the posers that like to boaster their "credentials" by making derogatory remarks about something they don't understand.

Incorrect. You must be new here, for that is exactly very the reason all topics raise the noise level on Slashdot.

Re:It's too bad

[Psiren]

As someone who manages an Exchange environment, I'd like to point out that I've not enabled the IMAP service. I have good reasons, and they're nothing to do with being incompetent or intentionally setting out to annoy Linux users (not that we have any, other than me). I'm sure if running an IMAP service was an actual business requirement, your IT department would have done it.

Re:It's too bad

[betterunixthanunix]

KDE 4. (I think KDE is the least offensive).

Calling your alpha release stable to encourage people to alpha testers is the least offensive?

Re:It's too bad

[Yunzil]

"It works for me" is not compelling. I use Linux on a daily basis at work, and I really don't like it. For instance, on Monday I locked up my workstation with a bad 'grep' command.

Re:It's too bad

[Zero__Kelvin]

"If you think this is the only issue, you've never seen an accountant freak out when you tell them, "Well, it's LIKE Excel...""

Hey! You know what else is a lot like Excel on Linux? Excel on Linux!

Re:It's too bad

[Thumper_SVX]

One of the major challenges of apt-get is not typing get-apt. :)

echo 'alias sudo="sudo "' >> ~/.bash_aliases (the space after sudo is important!)
echo 'alias ag="apt-get"' >> ~/.bash_aliases
exit

Log back in and voila; you have a short-hand for apt-get that works with sudo. You're welcome :)

Re:It's too bad

[Zero__Kelvin]

We have yet to hear the reasons for not enabling IMAP. Methinks that is because if you attempt to itemize them you will quickly realize, as will we, that they are ridiculous.

Re:It's too bad

[Hatta]

I'm sure they didn't do it to annoy Linux users, but I can't see how it's anything but incompetence. They won't even let me set up forwarding rules to send my email to a server that does support IMAP.

As for the business reason, this is a research university. Researchers need a flexible environment. Their job is to support me, and they are not doing it. Even after I get outlook on a VM, how am I going to write scripts to start jobs on receipt of emails?

I don't know how to do that, they don't know how to do that, and they don't care that I'm less effective at my job because of their incompetence. Fuck those assholes.

Re:It's too bad

[Thumper_SVX]

And the walled garden issue doesn't apply here. .Apple doesn't control third-party OS X software the way it does for iOS,

Wait.

For the record, I'm currently a Mac user (13" Macbook Pro) but suspect this will be my last Mac because I believe it's only a matter of time.

Re:It's too bad

[betterunixthanunix]

Secondly, Linux on the desktop is far from dead. Linux is thriving. Nobody killed it.

You think so? Where are you located, and where are you seeing GNU/Linux thriving on the desktop? Where I am now, I am one of a tiny minority of people who uses GNU/Linux for day-to-day tasks, and we receive no support whatsoever from the IT guys (in fact, they direct people to use for support). It's Mac OS X or Windows here, or else you are on your own.

Mac OS X is the reason for this situation. We used to have lots of GNU/Linux and even BSD users, then the university started pushing Mac OS X like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now hardly anyone uses GNU/Linux, and the university is making our lives even harder because they are operating under the assumption that we have Windows or Mac OS X on our computers.

Re:It's too bad

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Until OS X Lion I would have disagreed, but with Lion they're making it harder and harder to use a mac as a dev machine for anything other than apple products.

This is news to me, since I haven't ran into any issues that prevent me from developing non-apple software.

The command line tools are no longer even automatically installed with XCode, and they're less well behaved than they were in Snow Leopard.

To be fair that was to make the packaging more compatible with their App store. I don't see it that much of a big deal.

Old way:

Download X-Code from App store, run the installer that was downloaded.

New way:

Download X-Code from App store, click on install command line tools within the drop down menu.

Re:It's too bad

[RogerWilco]

I ran Linux full-time from 1997-2007, so my experience is similar. Getting hardware to work reliably, especially if your company is tied to a certain vendor, is quite often a problem. And then it might break if you upgrade to a newer version of the distribution.

Next to that a Linux desktop lacks a lot of applications that are needed in a corporate environment. Things like a good groupware client. (Evolution is often broken). Most things are available for OSX nowadays, including MS Office.

And more than that, if you run into a problem installing a commercial application, you can usually get support if you're running on OSX. Linux support is often limited to one flavour of RedHat, if at all.

Re:It's too bad

[swb]

I'd wager it's that it's just one more thing to keep track of.

In a small IT shop, adding IMAP support might not be a big deal, but in bigger shops it can involve all kinds of IT bureaucracy involving security reviews, training a bunch of people for support, added testing and validation, and on and on and on, and many of these requirements are not foot dragging or empire building by IT PHBs but externally imposed requirements by law (SOX, HIPPA, PCI) or by other entities (parent companies, audit standards, non-IT security, etc).

And even beyond this, technically it could involve more than just changing the service status from Disabled to Automatic, particularly in large, multisite Exchange implementations that involve multiple CAS and Mailbox servers.

So in a large shop when you add in all the overhead coupled with the usual constraints on money, time and manpower, it's not at all surprising that "IT" doesn't care to cater to people setting their own standards or deviating from standards organizationally agreed to.

Have been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, I'm not at all surprised that someone in IT said "use Outlook".

Re:It's too bad

[dbIII]

Well, Miguel was one of the ones that had a project that did some of that fucking up of desktops so that inspires a bit of a reaction. Even the older gnome that people are missing fits that - for example this morning I had three people lose all of their desktop icons and stuff from their panels just because an NFS share that they had bookmarked in their file browsers was offline. How fucked up is that? Nothing on that disk had anything to do with a single one of their desktop shortcuts, panel widgets or other bits that went missing, yet it still happened, and happens every time such a network problem occurs.

Re:It's too bad

[gravyface]

Fink could be interesting, thanks. Again, would probably not rely on that for production/client work, but could be useful for other utilities.

Re:It's too bad

[diego.viola]

I have been running Linux on my T510 and it's amazing, I'll never switch to anything else.

You won't regret it.

Re:It's too bad

[tlhIngan]

Yes, 3rd party developers are at the mercy of Apple and this is not some anti-Apple bullshit. See: Gatekeeper.

Gatekeeper merely asks if the binary you downloaded came from the 'net, not from the output of the compiler or some other means. And it only asks if the file is flagged with a "downloaded" extended attribute in the filesystem (easily cleared).

Gatekeeper isn't involved at all if you clear the flag, use a browser that doesn't set the flag to begin with (Firefox used to not do it - they were among the last to actually do it), copy the program to another location (which destroys extended attributes), etc.

And developers need to develop apps so the output of the compiler will probably never need verification (since developers need to test). Which means in the worst case, if you want to avoid the Apple taxes fo having to buy a signing cert (of which many popular open-source projects already have, both for Windows AND OS X), well, you can always release it as source code and have the user compile it.

Thus ensuring the longevity of open-source because instead of people distributing binaries, all software distribution takes place as ... source. And no BS "look but don't touch" - but buildable source. (Oddly, it's also GPLv3 compliant because if you don't provide build tools, users can't use your program!).

Hell, if the user wishes to pass on their modifications, they too have to do it as... source code.

Re:It's too bad

[Psiren]

Fair enough (I work in the academic environment myself, so I know some of the issues). You make a reasonably strong case for it. If you've discussed the issues with them, and they're not listening, then you should take it up with your manager. If your work is being affected, you have a good reason to do so.

You may be unlucky of course, and truly have a bunch of arseholes in IT. It happens. Frankly I try my best to help whenever I can, but sometimes there are good reasons not to do something that aren't immediately obvious to the end user. It's sometimes a technical one, but just as often a politcal one.

Re:It's too bad

[gravyface]

Hmm, still requires xcode and for Snow Leopard/Lion, requires compilation as no binary available. So besides syntax, not seeing how this is much of an improvement over MacPorts.

Re:It's too bad

[boardstretcher]

Thats why anyone that is educated will use Linux over Mac. Also, where the hell do they get their numbers from? How can they possibly quantify how many computers are running linux?

Re:It's too bad

[falcon5768]

How about we don't have the time or resources to deal with people who want to do things like that? Unfortunately the corporate environment is a windows world where even Mac users have a hard time despite years of plugins and solutions to integrate them. At my work we allow users to use VMs for specific cases but under the caveat that IT IS NOT SUPPORTED SO DONT CALL IF IT BREAKS. Even with that people do, and it causes a support nightmare because it may be a windows issue, but its on a mac and we have teams that support one or the other with only 2 who do both. Linux support is even worse as our only decent help staff are Windows based meaning we have to pull a system admin from the Mac or Red Hat team to help them along. While I am sure there are techs who can work a Linux client, there are not enough to warrant paying 50 grand + benefits to hire them when our Linux base outside the server realm is 10. I like Linux. Behind OS X Linux is my next favorite OS. But I am sorry its just not worth the money these days to support people who use it unless a good 25% of them use it. We opened up users to Linux, Mac or Windows last year, while we have a steady stream of Windows users moving to the Mac and growing our Mac user-base 150% within the year, we had 2 people ask for Linux. It just doesn't make economic sense.

Re:It's too bad

[falcon5768]

but its not being shoved down your throat. As long as you know the risks you can run all the unsigned code all you want. But for those of us who work in a managed corporate environment being able to tell users no is a HUGE deal.

Re:It's too bad

[Manikmass]

Definitely have to recommend Homebrew. Switched from MacPorts at last OS upgrade and haven't looked back.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

Try Homebrew.

Re:It's too bad

[93 Escort Wagon]

My old 2003 G4 Powerbook is still going strong.

Well, it's going anyway. It's a stretch to describe a 10-year-old G4 processor as "strong"... but it was still useable enough for my mom to handle her email, browse the web, and edit Word and Excel documents.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

It's also 3rd-party and at the mercy of Apple and requires a bunch of prerequisites.

So is Apt. It just so happens that the prereqs are taken care of for you.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

I'm sorry, but your post is nothing but FUD and bullshit. How some moron decided to mod you insightful I will never know.

And the ironic thing is that most of them were probably doing that from Windows boxes.

Re:It's too bad

[93 Escort Wagon]

I don't disagree with anything you said - but still, my iPhone with Cydia installed is more useful than it was without it.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

Until OS X Lion I would have disagreed, but with Lion they're making it harder and harder to use a mac as a dev machine for anything other than apple products.

No they aren't, unless you're obscenely incompetent.

The command line tools are no longer even automatically installed with XCode

So fucking what? You know that separating them like that means you can install the command line tools WITHOUT installing Xcode, right?

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

Your tinfoil hat is cutting off circulation to your brain.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

Last time I checked, Microsoft didn't require me to obtain digital certificates for publishing code that runs in userland.

Someone clearly hasn't been paying attention to Windows 8.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

Seriously? Are you fucking retarded? Do you have any idea what the context is that you're quoting? Do you have any fucking idea what MacPorts does?

MacPorts compiles stuff from source. Of course if you switch computers to a new processor architecture, there's ALWAYS the chance that something might break. The EXACT SAME PROBLEM exists for Ubuntu.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

I find it funny how in so many people's measure the non-commercial linux offering with commercial metrics.

Because that is what they're comparing them to. Linux doesn't get off free simply because it's "non-commercial". It either fits the needs or it doesn't.

Re:It's too bad

[Shadowmist]

At the time, it seemed the way to deal with a monopoly that tended to destroy everything in it's path.

Microsoft destroyed everything but Apple. Apple was on deathwatch. DeGasse couldn't even give BeOS away for free.

Actually he tried to get Apple to pony up $400 million dollars for it. For the same price, they bought NeXT and got Jobs back as a bonus.

Re:It's too bad

[tibit]

macports installs packages only into /opt. About the only things that could "break" XCode would be that non-apple gcc was selected as a default. That's what ports defaults system is for. I install macports on every mac I own and I'm yet to see such breakage. Sure individual things were often broken for a good while (wxwidgets, I'm looking at you), but overall it wasn't that bad. Sure not as smooth as with RedHat -- and I too was using redhat since even earlier than 5.2. I think I first used version 3 on a 486 machine that previously had NT 4 installed :)

Re:It's too bad

[tibit]

PCI? Email is supposed to be isolated, and if people email credit card numbers, it's their own problem. As long as you're not telling your customers to email CC numbers, and as long as your employees are educated not to ever key in, write down or fax CC numbers, things are fine (except perhaps in whatever order fulfillment / commerce system you have) ... PCI is pretty much out irrelevant to email, then.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

Everything in your comment is nothing but unfounded bullshit, and tired Apple bashing.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

Then you're an idiot.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

With Linux, the community does for itself.

With Macs, you expect 3rd parties to support you.

Unless you are one of the people actually writing Linux drivers, you are doing the same damn thing on Linux: Depending on 3rd parties to support you. If no one wants to write a driver for your particular breed of hardware, it's not getting done unless you pay for it.

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

I can do a fresh install, restore my home folder, do a single apt-get with my previously installed package list, make a cup of tea

You might want to change that to making a cake. Dependency lists can get long, and take a while to download.

Re:It's too bad

[MrEricSir]

right now it's still at the mercy in the way that Apple allows code outside of Appstore to run. They could alter the deal.

Gnome could alter their deal by changing the APIs every 6 months, breaking software for no reason.

Oh, except wait -- only one of those is actually happening.

Re:It's too bad

[StuartHankins]

It wasn't only XCode that was giving me crashes and problems, the system had become unstable. Uninstalling XCode at that point was the least of my problems. Sorry your butt hurts so much.

Re:It's too bad

[Hes Nikke]

Look, I love my Macbook, but I choose to run VirtualBox with Windows 7 and Ubuntu because I feel that while it does a great job of some things, it's poor at best at other things in comparison to other OSs.

You ser are a true computer enthusiast. You use the tools that get the job done rather than bickering that your vice grip doesn't work as a socket wrench. If I had mod points, I would spend them all on you just for this quote right here. (My other space has VMWare with CentOS and Windows 7 running so that I have the tools that let me get my job done, regardless of what OS those tools were meant for in the first place.)

Re:It's too bad

[shutdown -p now]

Last time I checked, Microsoft didn't require me to obtain digital certificates for publishing code that runs in userland. If they did, there would be an outrage that nobody on Slashdot (save the shills) would tolerate.

Win8 on ARM?

Re:It's too bad

[shutdown -p now]

Thinkpads are one of the best laptops in terms of Linux hardware support on many counts (and then of course there's http://thinkwiki.org./ They're also fantastic for getting shit done, but for many people this ain't the primary purpose of a laptop, and they want something more lightweight & less bulky.

Re:It's too bad

[shutdown -p now]

When installing a simple app requires you to download hundreds of megs worth of libraries and upgrade half your GUI environment something's amiss.

You do realize that all those hundreds of megs worth of libraries also exist on Windows and OS X, they just ship in the box with the OS?

(which, coincidentally, is why you can have Linux without any GUI at all, but not the other two)

And, of course, there are plenty of Linux distros that also include all that stuff in the box. If you install a typical desktop app from a package in Ubuntu, it's unlikely to drag in more than a couple smallish libraries - and those are usually where the core functionality lives (i.e. app is just a GUI shell over a library).

Re:It's too bad

[CharlyFoxtrot]

You do realize that all those hundreds of megs worth of libraries also exist on Windows and OS X, they just ship in the box with the OS?

Yep, and on OS X developers use mostly the OS provided libraries while on Linux they pull in all kinds of obscure stuff (how many friggin' XML parsers need to be installed on a system ?)

(which, coincidentally, is why you can have Linux without any GUI at all, but not the other two)

OSX without a GUI exists, it's called Darwin. There have been several implementations even, people just don't care about it.

And, of course, there are plenty of Linux distros that also include all that stuff in the box. If you install a typical desktop app from a package in Ubuntu, it's unlikely to drag in more than a couple smallish libraries - and those are usually where the core functionality lives (i.e. app is just a GUI shell over a library).

Until you have Gnome 3.0.1b453 or whatever and your app wants 3.0.1b567.

Re:It's too bad

[jgrahn]

Don't mistake me here - I would rather have open source any day of the week. But I'd like to see statistics showing the "shelf-life" of FOSS software versus closed, paid-for-software.. I'd be genuinely curious if more usage is gotten out of community supported tools over closed-source.[...] it just happens to be that money is a great motivator for people maintaining things.

As far as I can tell, it isn't. Based on the commercial software I see, money means Dilbert-style operations with incompetent and disinterested programmers, pushing out buggy software which doesn't meet my actual needs. (There are exceptions: the Opera browser; the Amazon web site, and ... can't think of any other right now.)

Re:It's too bad

[StuartHankins]

It's very possible you're right, in my case I found some things were available on MacPorts, some on Fink, and some were absent from both. Also as you report sometimes it was available on both, but my experience was that it was sometimes a different version which made the whole process more complicated. Installing from source was as often a fail as a success. Of course YMMV and all that.

Re:It's too bad

[loom_weaver]

I went for a MacBook for roughly same reasons. I wanted a machine where if I closed the lid I had a reasonably good chance that when I lifted the lid I could actually continue working instead of rebooting because everything locked up.

Re:It's too bad

[tyrione]

apt-get is more like the official app store.

It comes with the system. It handles pretty much anything. It can even accommodate 3rd parties.

So in that respect there's really nothing comparable on a Mac. Just stuff that kind of sort of partially covers what apt-get does.

Being not-quite-comprehensive kind of defeats the entire point.

Having run Debian [typing on it] for over 12 years, APT-GET is nothing like the App Store. In fact, the App Store doesn't have dependency issues that puke out fairly often and force one to manipulate around the bonehead mistakes package owners forget to test against and thus send out other revisions of an App all because they screwed up the packaing. APT-GET is not the end-all-to-be all and neither is Aptitude [ncurses front end], nor DPKG and anything else.

Re:It's too bad

[tyrione]

You can use macports or homebrew on OS X. Both have all of the key OSS packages, and the latter additionally allows to manage your own private packages. What else would you need? OS X is FreeBSD with a fancy UI (and Obj-C)... You can shell script the daylights out of your box all you want if that's your thing.

It's a helluva a lot more than just FreeBSD with a fancy UI, but whatever floats your boat on generalities, however false and misleading.

Re:It's too bad

[Thumper_SVX]

Truly, spoken like one who doesn't actually keep up with market trends or the news. I wish you all the best as you sit in the garden; they're already building the wall but you're obviously far too focused on your own navel to notice.

Re:It's too bad

[Rutulian]

Are you serious? You ran a command that pegged your CPU and that is a problem with linux? If you program an infinite loop and run it, is that a problem with linux too?

Re:It's too bad

[overlordofmu]

you get to upgrade half the gnome packages and assorted libraries along with them

If you didn't want to deal with the bandwidth to upgrade Gnome, then why did you install/use it?

One of the top reasons (not the first but close) I don't use KDE or Gnome is that I don't want those largish data transfers when updating the system. Openbox is my desktop environment of choice. The file size for upgrading it -> 323KB (2.2 MB installed)

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 323K 2012-05-12 03:31 /var/cache/pacman/pkg/openbox-3.5.0-7-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

Don't blame the GNU/Linux for your decision to use a bloated DE.

Let me put it this way. Windows has "DLL hell", Linux has "dependency hell" and the mac and iOS have ... ?

Mac and iOS just hide all the details from you. DLL and dependency hell are still there, they just are Apple's problem, not yours. I simply prefer control over simplicity but for most consumers they prefer simplicity. Thank the magic sky wizard there are more than two closed-source choices for those of use than want to DIY.

Re:It's too bad

[gravyface]

Odd, I had bolded the part about "major OS release" from the FAQ; didn't come through. But to answer your question: no, I'm not retarded, and I would fully expect an architecture change to break MacPorts. But as you should've been able to glean from the context of my post, I was referring exclusively to the issue of OS upgrades and how apt-get wouldn't break. Perhaps it is you who's lacking in basic cognitive/inductive reasoning abilities?

Re:It's too bad

[Urkki]

Having run Debian [typing on it] for over 12 years, APT-GET is nothing like the App Store. In fact, the App Store doesn't have dependency issues that puke out fairly often and force one to manipulate around the bonehead mistakes package owners forget to test against and thus send out other revisions of an App all because they screwed up the packaing. APT-GET is not the end-all-to-be all and neither is Aptitude [ncurses front end], nor DPKG and anything else.

...maybe I'm totally off base and out of line here, but the way you mention apt-get, aptitude and dpkg here makes me wonder, if you're really a long-time Debian user? Also, the way you don't mention if you're running stable, testing or unstable makes your above statement dubious. But if you're being honest, and assuming you're not running Debian stable, I suggest you switch to some other Debian-based distro, like Ubuntu, which provide a more up-to-date experience without the problems implied by the very names of Debian testing or unstable.

Re:It's too bad

[swb]

Fortunately I'm not in charge of handling any PCI compliance, so I don't know what's involved. I do know that I've seen PCI compliance reports with all kinds of red flags surrounding existing email services, but I'll freely admit I don't understand it.

Re:It's too bad

[hairyfeet]

How does it defeat the point? Does Apple say you can't run ports? Does Apple slap you if you don't use the appstore?

Man, you just gotta love the irony. Everyone bitched in the 90s about all you had was shitty Win9X, so Jobs brings Nextstep, an actual Unix system to the masses, and now here we are with a 300+ post just bitching away because there is...gasp!...choice in the market, because its not YOUR choice.

But you see that is the great thing about the free market, don't like it? I'm sure System76 will be more than happy to custom build you a Linux laptop or desktop, hell you may even save a few bucks and will be supporting the product you want to succeed. We've never had more choice in our lives, your average x86 unit can run anything from BSD to Haiku, even mobile we now have various flavors of droid,blackberry,iOS, and windows.

So if Apple doesn't measure up then why are you using it?

Re:It's too bad

[toriver]

Why not? Is there even an OUNCE of evidence for this direction, or are you extrapolating poop form FUD?

your-brain$ sudo port install a-fucking-clue @universal

Re:It's too bad

[toriver]

Well, beliefs are nice to have. Some people probably believe that Linux 3.2 will finally include the Communist Manifesto. It's only a matter of time.

Re:It's too bad

[toriver]

With Linux, the community does for itself

What, through sheer willpower or magic dust? You do not consider "the community" to be a 3rd party in this context?

Re:It's too bad

[Zero__Kelvin]

"How about we don't have the time or resources to deal with people who want to do things like that?"

If you weren't wasting your time and resources doing it like you do now, you'd have time to do it right.

"But I am sorry its just not worth the money these days to support people who use it unless a good 25% of them use it."

Since by your own admission you dictate what people can use, the fault lies with you, not them.

Re:It's too bad

[lister king of smeg]

posting to undo bad moderation

Re:It's too bad

[lister king of smeg]

You mean the same Gatekeeper that allows me to allow downloaded programs from anywhere?

for now

Re:It's too bad

[captjc]

Why not just run Linux 24/7 and virtualize Windows in Virtualbox or VMWare. The beauty is once everything is installed and configured, take a snapshot (or whatever VMWare calls them) and if it goes kaput, restore the snapshot. No fuss, no muss.

Best part is if you want to experiment, just clone the snapshot, play around with it and keep or delete it when you are done.

Re:It's too bad

[bdraschk]

You might want to keep an eye on compatibility here:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_mbpr_linux&num=1

Personally, paying the extra cost for anything Mac and then not running the OS custom tailored to the hardware would not cross my mind. Well, not again, not after my failed experiments with my late 2009 MacBook Pro.

Re:It's too bad

[oakgrove]

..maybe I'm totally off base and out of line here,

You are neither. The guy is full of shit.

Re:It's too bad

[bdraschk]

I'll miss some aspects of OS X, but it'll be a relief to get back to a proper window manager with usable virtual desktops, focus-follows-mouse, etc., and a machine which doesn't hide so much of its operation from me.

The excursion into OS X land was pleasant, but it won't bother me in the slightest to go back.

This.

I bought my MacBook Pro because i listened to people telling me "It's finally a Unix with a usable GUI". But apart from other problems (e.g. constant beach balling), i couldn't get myself accustomed to the OSX desktop. Window handling, Window resizing, absolutely fucked up German keyboard layout etc.

I'm back to Linux on my Dell V131, the MacBook was degraded to surfing on the couch.

Re:It's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

What did it for me, back in the late 2007 after being linux only desktop for 10 years straight was the fact that I was always wasting my time wreaking, patching, compiling something etc, and I was working for the fscking computer, instead of the computer working for me. I got a mac, and after coming home I would sit down with the remote in my hand and turn on my movie or music. Not because I couldn't tweak, but because 99% there was no need to, I was finally free to spend my time with my wife, enjoying a movie.

People have lives, live up to it (pun intended).

Re:It's too bad

[O'Nazareth]

Oh, so you can update MacOS through MacPorts?

Re:It's too bad

[justforgetme]

Ohh, it's installed by default now?

In what version did that happen? "alley siamese"?

Re:It's too bad

[Tough Love]

Based on pretty extensive observations, most of the "devs" I see using Apple as a platform are actually script monkeys.

Re:It's too bad

[justforgetme]

Yep, pretty much on the head. Mac OS is brilliant for the very undereducated use cases. Ok, it also does a good job for appdicted adobe CS users like graphics artists. If you want to tinker with the os itself or make it do something really, really bleeding edge you should be using a Linux desktop (or even a windows desktop, funnily, especially for GPU things).

Funny fact though I know some "graphics artists", but the most succesful of those actually works on debian with foss painters.

Re:It's too bad

[justforgetme]

Just stuff that kind of sort of partially covers what ...

Yep just enough for the apple evangelist (or genious) to say:
"It turns out that since the last OS release it does that as well"

Re:It's too bad

[RocketRabbit]

I've been using Fink and MacPorts for years and years, and haven't ever had a single problem. If you follow the instructions, you'll find that everything works great.

On the other hand, with Ubuntu, upgrading and pagkage management can be a nightmare. After installing MythTV, I found that I had two different versions of MySQL running, which irritated me greatly. The ultimate insult, though, was the complete borkage of the entire system after Ubuntu's upgrade in place.

Re:It's too bad

[BasilBrush]

Until OS X Lion I would have disagreed, but with Lion they're making it harder and harder to use a mac as a dev machine for anything other than apple products. The command line tools are no longer even automatically installed with XCode

There's a button in XCode that downloads the command line tools for you. You think that's a hardship? Come on, be serious.

Re:It's too bad

[CptNerd]

Isn't that really an effect of the whole industry moving away from the command line and into IDEs, like XCode but also like Eclipse? I've personally never liked IDEs, the ones I've used were always an incredible amount of overhead for the same capability as a couple of xterms/command windows/terminal windows with the command line tools.

The extra functionality of say Eclipse I've used so seldom that it is really a waste, and can be detrimental, if Eclipse happens to break while doing its thing. Fewer functions per tool means fewer things can go wrong, but I'm afraid that the "emacs" school is winning over the "vi" school, which means you'll soon have development environments that are more complicated than the OS's they're running on.

Not for nothing did they call emacs "the text editor that wants to be an operating system."

Re:It's too bad

[tibit]

I guess I'll rephrase myself: If an organization (anyone in it) handles credit cards, the conservative presumption is that personnel will treat them like anything else, and that's against the rules. They'll end up in word files in company- or department-wide shared directories (for convenience, of course), they'll email them, they'll fax them (with faxes ending up on one or more servers within the organization), etc. It's a given that those servers will get compromised at one point or another. Thus the deal is to limit the scope by training and auditing: everyone must know what not to do, be periodically reminded, and there should be a process (either manual spot checks or automated file scan) that looks for CC numbers in emails, documents, faxes, etc.

But if you properly implement things, train your personnel, and audit stuff, then email can be otherwise irrelevant to PCI, as should be normal server-routed faxes (CC stuff goes through a dedicated non-networked machine), and pretty much everything else. Things get hairy real quick if, say, your stand-alone, non-networked fax used for receiving CC numbers is routed across a PC-based PBX. Or if people phone in CC orders and you are using a PC-based PBX. Or you use your networked copier-printer to copy CC order papers. And so on. So I was, in a way, wrong saying that email is irrelevant by default. It isn't, it only is when you do things properly (setup, training, retraining and audit).

Re:It's too bad

[Vegemeister]

The lack of package management is the very reason malware is such a problem on Windows. One installs a Windows program by downloading an (often unauthenticated) executable binary file from the internet and running it with superuser privileges. Think about that for a moment.

Re:It's too bad

[DarwinSurvivor]

Hey! I'll have you know vice-grips make a DAMN FINE socket wrench. They even work on most stripped bolts!

Re:It's too bad

[CharlyFoxtrot]

No it's not. Windows broken security was. OS X hasn't got an official package manager and has had about the same problems with malware as Linux has had, that is to say close to none.

Re:It's too bad

[CharlyFoxtrot]

If you didn't want to deal with the bandwidth to upgrade Gnome, then why did you install/use it?

Classic case of blaming the user. On any other modern OS the user doesn't need to take this kind of nonsense under consideration.
BTW when I do use *BSD or Linux desktops I'm more of an XFCE man.

Mac and iOS just hide all the details from you. DLL and dependency hell are still there, they just are Apple's problem, not yours. I simply prefer control over simplicity but for most consumers they prefer simplicity. Thank the magic sky wizard there are more than two closed-source choices for those of use than want to DIY.

In OSX the details that need to be hidden are hidden because most people buy computers to get something done not to fiddle with the innards. That control you talk of is mostly illusionary. It's like muscle car owners: sure they may have "complete control" over their car's engine, being able to tweak every little thing but it comes at the expense of usability and practicality. In the end it's masturbatory, it serves no other purpose than its own sake.

Re:It's too bad

[RocketRabbit]

Used it for years, never had a segfault. Perhaps you hit the wrong button?

Re:It's too bad

[mattack2]

Your computer is at the "mercy" of having parts to rebuild it.

Re:It's too bad

[Rich0]

Well, apt-get doesn't break only because it either installs compatibility libraries for everything, or reinstalls every package on the system that links to the OS-supplied libraries (like glibc).

MacPorts works fine in the same sense, that you can reinstall everything and have it work.

Gentoo Prefix would be another alternative, and it of course has the same issue. I can't speak for MacPorts, but Gentoo at least has tools for doing all that rebuilding (since Gentoo users do it all the time).

Re:It's too bad

[Rich0]

KDE is probably the least offensive mainly because they did the tick-everybody-off thing about 4-5 years ago and they're finally back into stable operation again. I abandoned KDE 3.5 for Xfce since KDE 4 wouldn't even be functional on my computer. Now I can run KDE 4 minus nepomuk and it works reasonably well (well, for not having kdepim, which requires it).

Re:It's too bad

[Rich0]

The problem with the distros is the problem with the upstream project - people want to do new and exciting things, not boring ones. If you're going to maintain a package, are you going to want to maintain the old crusty one that is going to be abandoned, or are you going to maintain the new fancy one? The distros abandoned KDE3.5 for the same reason that upstream did - it wasn't cool. That's why in a year or so you won't be able to run Gnome without SystemD, and with that big of a change good luck running it on something like Ubuntu.

Re:It's too bad

[Rich0]

I suspect that is mainly due to having such a small install base. The OS might be secure, but many exploits are in applications (Flash, Acrobat, Office, etc). Linux is just as vulnerable to this as Windows is - if my office application has a buffer overflow, then it can execute code in my document even if it is just a notepad clone. There is no reason to expect OSX to be any better in this regard. I don't think even iOS prevents all application security vulnerabilities, but if an app does have one at least they can push out an update, since it essentially is a package manager.

And that is the lack of a package manager problem on Windows. The issue isn't that people can run executables, the problem is that it isn't possible to tell if software is out of date unless every application bundles its own auto-update service as well (and yes, I love having all of those sucking up RAM).

Re:It's too bad

[swillden]

Heh. When I mentioned "commercial software", I actually meant "WoW". However, I haven't played in nearly a year, in fact don't even have it installed on my MacBook right now, so I don't think it'll be a problem.

Re:It's too bad

[Gilmoure]

I still have a PowerBook Duo 270c I had reassembled into a photo display. It's been packed away in storage until last week. Haven't come across the power supply yet.

Re:It's too bad

[Evil Pete]

Back in the heydays, the rage was all about how and when FOSS would eventually wipe out commercial alternatives.

There was a time when the term 'global domination' was bandied about. What was generally forgotten was that this started out as a joke. But people forgot it was a joke. Global domination was never going to happen, global significance ... yes.

Re:It's too bad

[funwithBSD]

Because with 1.5gb of ram, 4200rpm drive and a 1 core CPU, it runs like crap.

The T60 was not the cutting edge when I was issued it.

Re:It's too bad

[rrohbeck]

Our company has its priorities straight and knows who to trust. We developers know more than the IT folks so they'd better not mess with us or our productivity.

Re:It's too bad

[mug funky]

implying that people posting from work have any choice as to what their workstation will run.

Re:It's too bad

[mug funky]

fair and square?

linux wasn't running a race - they were running alongside, honestly not too concerned if anyone looked their way or not.

apple have the resources of a company. one of the biggest companies. and they still got their codebase from a free project... though i applaud that in some ways, you've gotta wonder why their own (pre OSX) efforts were so poor.

apple is currently beating the tits off windows for the hearts and minds of the consumer public, but linux has never been for consumers. it doesn't have a business model, though some distro-makers do.

btw, i use ubuntu on my home machines, winXP (with msys), win7, OSX at work. years of cynicism have worn my idealism rather thin, so i just judge as i see.

Re:It's too bad

[hawk]

FreeBSD seems to have solved this in their next release :)

hawk

Re:It's too bad

[gullevek]

Please, this has nothing to do with Incompetent IT Departments, rather with corporate rules on what gets run on the Desktop.

I did work at a company where we were free to run whatever we wanted, so I run Linux. In the next company I used WinXP but then was allowed to switch to Linux, so I did too.

But over the time it showed that when you work in a very windows centric environment, running Linux is just troubles.

So at the end (after more then 10 years) I switched to OS X.

Re:It's too bad

[hawk]

And pray that I do not alter it further . . .

hawk

Re:It's too bad

[mikael_j]

It's definitely not perfect but generally you just have to remove the .App bundle and any associated files in ~/Library and /Library.

Of course, there are always exceptions, just like how Linux package management systems aren't always perfect either. Since I first started using Linux in the mid-90's I've seen plenty of "interesting" package management malfunctions, a fairly recent one which would probably have left a novice user completely stuck was when Ubuntu told me I already had the latest version of Xorg installed and that it wouldn't be upgraded, then it uninstalled my X server and told me to reboot so I had to do a console login and reinstall the package (not exactly hard if you know what's going on but for the average user that would've been a horrible situation, no web browser, no email client, no GUI, just a login prompt and a CLI).

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

MacPorts is not 3rd party, MacOSForge is Apple: http://www.whois.com/whois/macosforge.org

As for friendly it is based on a BSD ports system. Fink, (http://www.finkproject.org/) which is 3rd party, uses apt-get just like Ubuntu.

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

right now it's still at the mercy in the way that Apple allows code outside of Appstore to run. They could alter the deal.

Well that's true of all OSes. Canonical could just as easily decided to close off their system to other repositories. That being said, Apple certainly has never been anything but supportive and helpful when it comes to developers running code on iOS. They protect end users, not developers. /. people tend to fall into the end user category because they don't register as developers, but then want developer access. MacPorts is seen by them as developer oriented software not general end user software.

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

Fedora?

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

you've gotta wonder why their own (pre OSX) efforts were so poor.

IMHO two things

1) Scope creep. No one had the authority to tell various subgroups within Apple no.
2) Hardware requirements. Copeland was several years earlier and there was a much greater effort on getting it to run on lower end hardware. For example they wanted you to be able to boot the system and run 1 application in 4m of RAM.

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

I'm on the retina, its a wonderful machine and I haven't for a second questioned the purchase. But I wouldn't recommend it for Linux yet. Its too cutting edge on the video features, Linux can't drive a 5m display with a Nvidia 650M card yet. Give it another 2 years.

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

There is no reason to expect OSX to be any better in this regard

There is a big reason. Apple is moving most of their ecosystem's applications to a sandboxing model. So by default applications have very low system permissions outside their own data.

Re:It's too bad

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Please, this has nothing to do with Incompetent IT Departments, rather with corporate rules on what gets run on the Desktop."

Well, if it isn't your IT Department making those decisions then you've really got troubles.

Re:It's too bad

[Ash-Fox]

Used it for years, never had a segfault.

Aren't you a special snowflake?

Re:It's too bad

[gl4ss]

right now it's still at the mercy in the way that Apple allows code outside of Appstore to run. They could alter the deal.

Well that's true of all OSes. Canonical could just as easily decided to close off their system to other repositories. That being said, Apple certainly has never been anything but supportive and helpful when it comes to developers running code on iOS. They protect end users, not developers. /. people tend to fall into the end user category because they don't register as developers, but then want developer access. MacPorts is seen by them as developer oriented software not general end user software.

Oh hahahaha. there's plenty of software you will NEVER find from the iOS store since they don't want that kind of software there. never been anything but supportive? yeah I guess if you never intended to port a vm over. Apple has blocked quite a lot of software from their store, they're only supportive as long as it doesn't need any work from them and it doesn't interfere with their policies(which they make up as benefits them).

why the fuck do you think cydia exists???

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

You aren't reading what I wrote. You even quoted it "Apple certainly has never been anything but supportive and helpful when it comes to developers running code on iOS"

Developers can create provisioning files they don't need Cydia.

Re:It's too bad

[Rich0]

Apple is moving most of their ecosystem's applications to a sandboxing model. So by default applications have very low system permissions outside their own data.

No doubt that will help. Still, if MS Word can open TCP connections to arbitrary hosts and read word documents, then somebody who sends you a word document containing an exploit can get a copy of every word document on your system, send spam, use you as a proxy to attack other systems, and mine for bitcoins on your CPU.

That is just about everything the typical attack does these days anyway. I guess they won't be able to keylog your browser session - they'll need a browser exploit to do that.

Re:It's too bad

[AioKits]

"If you think this is the only issue, you've never seen an accountant freak out when you tell them, "Well, it's LIKE Excel...""

Hey! You know what else is a lot like Excel on Linux? Excel on Linux!

While I was not aware of this particular software, you've kinda missed the point. That point being accountants here seem to hate change, ANY change. It would be yet 'more software' I would have to convince corp. to allow us to install. Then there's the added cost of buying said software for all the accountants (Hint: This isn't a small shop). Plus, from the forums and rating system, the flavor of Office in use here (Office 2010) gets a bronze rating while Office 2000 gets a gold, understandable given it is 12 years old. The comments on using the add-ins system Excel uses with Crossover have me a little nervous given that the solution to many of the problems experienced are 'disable them'. Add-ins are somewhat vital to these accountants. There are some that actually ARE tech savvy. Then there are most of them who panic if a particular window does not look exactly like they remember it. I'm sure all this has been covered before in many many many previous posts of others who have juggled a similar idea.

I do appreciate knowing this exists though, thanks.

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

. Still, if MS Word can open TCP connections to arbitrary hosts

No reason for MS Word to have access to the network at all directly. So most likely that will be shut off. Which stops the spam problem and the proxy attack.

can get a copy of every word document on your system

Only those documents registered to Word for editing. Word documents in other applications like say a reader / viewer or a document manager wouldn't be accessible.

mine for bitcoins on your CPU.

Probably not. There is no reason that Word would have to have extensive background processes so the system would see this as a zombie and terminate Word until the next run.

Re:It's too bad

[ArsenneLupin]

Did you grep /dev/kcore or what?

Re:It's too bad

[king neckbeard]

Nothing prevents a fully fledged package manager from doing the same. Also, I don't worry about dependencies, that's what the package manager is there for.

Re:It's too bad

[overlordofmu]

I think you are trolling at this point.

Classic case of blaming the user.

Asking your motivation for a decision that you made and then complained about is not me placing blame. I was trying to get you to take ownership of your own actions. You installed Gnome and then complained about the size of Gnome. Who else could possibly be responsible for your decision to use it?

On any other modern OS the user doesn't need to take this kind of nonsense under consideration.

The issue being debated was large data sizes when updating the OS. Are you saying that Windows users don't have huge updates to keep their systems current? Are you serious?

In OSX the details that need to be hidden are hidden because most people buy computers to get something done not to fiddle with the innards. That control you talk of is mostly illusionary. It's like muscle car owners: sure they may have "complete control" over their car's engine, being able to tweak every little thing but it comes at the expense of usability and practicality. In the end it's masturbatory, it serves no other purpose than its own sake.

Most people that buy computers do want all the complexity hidden. They should use Windows and/or Mac OS. Casual users SHOULD NOT USE LINUX!

Linux is not for casual users just as custom muscle cars are not for casual drivers. I haven't used a Linux distro in the last 8 years that installed Gnome or KDE by default. If you don't use it either why did you complain about it? Were you consciously creating a strawman argument? Were you trolling?

There are many free Linux distros which install neither KDE or Gnome by default. It might sound incredible but it's true.

Re:It's too bad

[socceroos]

@Bill_the_Engineer

Really, you think its that far off the mark do you? Can you side-load an app on iOS? Are you aware of how Apple is converging Mac OSX with iOS? Is it really that much of a leap?

Re:It's too bad

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

The vast majority of users don't want Linux on the desktop because it get them nothing they find useful. That's pretty close to dead in my opinion.

The common user don't understand how to use it. They won't understand the difference between Linux and a Linux distro. They don't have anybody to hand hold them through their tasks, and most of their software won't run on it without arcane bash incantations. Plus the community in general treats them like idiots.

But that's not even the real problem. What makes it dead in my eyes is actually people like myself.

I've ran Gentoo, YDL, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, amongst other smaller distros. I used to be a fan. Now I'm completely indifferent. I simply just don't care enough to pick Linux.

Why? Because as far as it has come, Linux holds itself back. No stable ABI's? Come on, every other OS can upgrade kernels without recompiling every driver. KDE/GNOME/Unity/etc infighting and all that is ugly to watch. The last straw was Ubuntu software updates on a dev machine years ago. Bog standard Dell Precision 370. Pentium4. Intel board. No extra accessories. It's the stereotypical P4 box.
I clicked update on Ubuntu and Ubuntu made itself unbootable. (This wasn't a major update either, it was simply the typical package updates from the repos.) After fixing it manually, it did it again a month later. Then I transferred all my work to a Mac and that was that.

Since then, all my machines run OSX, OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana, WinXP, or FreeBSD. (in that priority)
Shit just works... and more importantly, stays working.

If somebody told me that Linux has fixed all that in the past 4 years, that'd be nice. But it wouldn't convince me to go back and try it again.
I feel I'd gain nothing from using Linux.

As for the people who buy a Mac to run Linux because the hardware is better supported, it's just a matter of time before they switch to OSX.

Re:It's too bad

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

apt-get is a easy way to kill my machine in my experience.

Apple's App Store has got the right idea. Carry the dependent libraries with the app that needs it. Storage is cheap, time is not. Better to not deal with dependency hell at all and just waste a hundred megs instead. All your configs are still in your home directory, in property lists. Better ordered than the old unix config files, not obscure like the registry, and easily convertible in-place into something that resembles JSON if you want to use a text editor, but also easily loadable into in-memory data structures if you want to programmatically manipulate them.

Re:It's too bad

[Yunzil]

If the OS lets me do something that prevents me from even stopping it when I realize it's wrong, then yes, that's a problem with the OS.

Re:It's too bad

[Rutulian]

It depends on what that something is. In your grep situation, for example, I highly doubt there was no way to stop the command, or that a true lockup occurred. The separation of such commands into userspace is precisely to contain out of control processes. You maybe did not know how to stop the command. That is different from being unable to stop the command.

If you are programming drivers, or otherwise tweaking directly with hardware or kernel functions, you definitely can completely lockup the system. There is no way to conceivably prevent this. Some programmers need that kind of access, and with that kind of access comes the risks of lockups, race conditions, and data corruption, if you do something wrong.

Re:It's too bad

[erp_consultant]

Yeah, I have to second that. I have Linux installed on my Macs and it runs flawlessly. On my old Dell Latitude I've got Linux Mint installed and everything works - trackpad, wireless, power managment...everything. And it worked the first time, right out of the box. Now, 5 years ago I recall having trouble with wireless drivers, video cards, etc. on Linux builds. I'd try it for a while and give up on it because something didn't work right and I didn't have the desire to fiddle with it any longer. The modern Linux builds have come a long, long way towards getting their device drivers up to snuff. Compared to Windows and Mac, Linux is the fastest hands down. The only thing that keeps me from using Linux exclusively is compatibility with MS Office for work stuff.

Re:It's too bad

[cheesybagel]

No kidding. People talking about the App Store don't know that Lindows, another Debian based distro, had a store named Click'N'Run with paid apps years before Apple "innovated" their way out of a wet paper bag.

The problem with the GNOME products are:

• C sucks : A lot of people developing applications are not interested in high performance just something that works without having to run valgrind to chase NULL pointer dereferencing issues and the like. If you want to write crapolla business apps (a significant market) you do not want to waste time debugging.
• Use OpenVG already : Hey it works in mobile devices properly. It is actually more portable than Cairo and whatever Qt is using.
• Lousy integration with databases : Crapolla business apps want to access their SQL or whatever databases. Where is the API support? Where is LINQ? Rails? Etc.
• Media APIs suck : Hooray GStreamer finally hit version 1.0. Well duh.
• Applications should work between distributions in the same GNOME platform : Use a VM and bytecodes if you want. Most people do not care about performance. But for those who do care make it easy to interface with C.
• Make applications that people care about : GIMP is great but people need office applications, video, sound editing applications as well. A desktop without applications is useless.

For desktop Linux to work however a lot more things need to happen. Namely games:

• Make a LSB standard for games : While it is understandable that people do not want to standardize on desktops do make a standard of a minimum environment so game developers can work on the platform. Games do not need complex GUI libraries but they do need robust and easy to use multimedia APIs.
• Make a sound library that doesn't suck standard : It could be OpenAL. No ALSA is not a solution. It is buggy as hell and a mess to develop for. A lot of multiplatform and Windows only developers use OpenAL already so why not just support it universally?
• Add OpenGL to the standard : It is a defacto standard as is.
• Networking : People can live with BSD sockets. Do not add unportable messes of network interfaces no one in their right mind would use.
• Gaming input devices support : Why can't I use an X-Box controller in Linux with dual joysticks without most of the applications going berserk? How about support for touch screens and the like? Gesture recognition?

Re:It's too bad

[cheesybagel]

So in other words MacOS X has the same issues with applications not working across all desktops without recompiling another binary just like Linux.

Re:It's too bad

[NickFortune]

Well, Miguel was one of the ones that had a project that did some of that fucking up of desktops so that inspires a bit of a reaction

Indeed. The only surprise is that he's doing down Linux in favour of Apple rather than Winows.

One can only assume that the promised cushy job at Microsoft failed to materialise, so now he's sucking up to Apple in the hopes of a job there.

Re:It's too bad

[swillden]

The only thing that keeps me from using Linux exclusively is compatibility with MS Office for work stuff.

I solved that by going to work for Google :-)

Re:It's too bad

[erp_consultant]

Well played :-)

Oh...there was one other item to add to my list. I haven't figured out how to get Linux to play nicely with a Cisco VPN client. Most of my clients seem to use it for remote access to Windows servers. The VPN works fine on Windows and Mac but not Linux.

Re:It's too bad

[imac.usr]

Although I presume it's too late to change your mind, you should know that you can in fact enable focus-follows-mounse at least for Terminal windows, with an app like TinkerTool. Hope it makes the last few months more tolerable at least. :P

Re:It's too bad

[s73v3r]

But as you should've been able to glean from the context of my post, I was referring exclusively to the issue of OS upgrades and how apt-get wouldn't break.

Except that's not true at all.

Re:It's too bad

[swillden]

I'm surprised Cisco would screw that up.

Re:It's too bad

[Rich0]

Think about what you're saying. Word already can open files via WebDAV, or from sharepoint sites. So, you'd have to strip out this functionality to get rid of the need for network access.

If somebody is trying to do corporate espionage then only being able to open files normally opened by Word/Excel/etc is more than enough - what do you think was used to create those documents in the first place?

And as far as bitcoin goes - it is just a program executing instructions. It wouldn't need extensive background processes, though it would likely consume a lot of CPU-time. A CPU quota would do it, but it seems unlikely that this will be implemented.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the kind of security improvements you mention are a good idea, and I've been wanting to see them take off on Linux for a while as well. (SELinux can do some of this, but nobody really uses it.) However, I don't think that they really address all the issues with malware.

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

Think about what you're saying. Word already can open files via WebDAV, or from sharepoint sites. So, you'd have to strip out this functionality to get rid of the need for network access.

No, the way this already works on iOS is Word would make a request to another service that would do this. Word would have a registered permission to request Word files of type A, B and C using protocols D, E and F from another service. That allows Word to fetch (and save) appropriate documents but not the ability to open arbitrary ports or pass arbitrary packets. You could even compound this by having the external service maintain a list of acceptable locations. This way the end user gets something like:c"Word is attempting to access hackerstore.placeinchina.ca should this be added to the acceptable locations list?"

Even if you bundle the sharepoint reader in with word, Apple is going to require the sharepoint reader not be modifiable from within Word so it never does become an arbitrary TCP hole. Getting to the other post, this is why Apple's role is so important. They can enforce good practice.

If somebody is trying to do corporate espionage then only being able to open files normally opened by Word/Excel/etc is more than enough - what do you think was used to create those documents in the first place?

There is nothing the security system can do about that. Pretty much if they person gets the infected file and then approves the transfer off their system to hackerstore.placeinchina.ca they lose their word docs.

And as far as bitcoin goes - it is just a program executing instructions. It wouldn't need extensive background processes, though it would likely consume a lot of CPU-time. A CPU quota would do it, but it seems unlikely that this will be implemented.

It would need to be consuming CPU in the background. That's the point. One of the big differences between iOS and Android is that iOS doesn't allow for programs to run background tasks. Applications can request specific background services from other parts of the system, but they themselves can't run their own code in the background.

Re:It's too bad

[Rich0]

How are you going to keep the sharepoint reader from never becoming an arbitrary TCP hole? It is just an application, and applications can contain vulnerabilities/etc.

My point isn't that added security doesn't make things harder, or that running applications in jails isn't a good idea. My point is that none of this will completely eliminate software vulnerabilities/viruses/etc.

Re:It's too bad

[jbolden]

How are you going to keep the sharepoint reader from never becoming an arbitrary TCP hole? It is just an application, and applications can contain vulnerabilities/etc.

The application has a very narrow gate. For example only taking a URL and a file name and returning a file. It doesn't offer a wide target. At the same time the sharepoint reader doesn't have all ports access to the TCP/IP system it only has a limited group of ports. Finally of course Apple can disable it on any vulnerability.

Re:It's too bad

[Rich0]

Yup, but the latter bit is only due to having a standard package management system (aka app store). My original point was that this was one of the things lacking on Windows.

It is all about defense in depth. Are jails good - yes! Do they make package managers obsolete - no! :)

Re:It's too bad

[Shompol]

Redhat says money and Free software can coexist -- you have an outdated view of FOSS. Another example: I purchased OsmAnd on Android market, but could have compiled it from source for free. It is true that you cannot charge as much for FOSS, but on the other hand you don't need to build it from the ground up, like you would with proprietary software, so you costs should be much lower as well.

In other Words

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux killed Linux on the Desktop. "I would be on the Desktop, if it wasn't for those pesky Operating Systems with their fancy backward compatibility!"

Re:In other Words

[Kergan]

Linux killed Linux on the Desktop. "I would be on the Desktop, if it wasn't for those pesky Operating Systems with their fancy backward compatibility!"

It also helps to work out of the box.

Last I installed Linux on a desktop, I spent several hours configuring it and installing a deluge of cherry-picked packages, each with its own deluge of dependencies -- which were occasionally installed two or three times with different versions in the end. Adding insult to injury, I had to babysit the box during the whole process due to occasional prompts. It left me with the impression that only the most masochist end-users would ever endure the pain to its end, and that Linux distros, installs and package management were an incomprehensible mess for the non-expert.

Anyway, when you're a passionate tinkerer, and you've plenty of time to babysit and fine-tune your box, then go for Linux on your desktop if that makes you sleep at night. Have all the fun in the world bending it to your will using kilometer-long shell one-liners. When not, then I'd wager that OS X or Windows and a handful of apps, free or not, are probably a better way to go.

Re:In other Words

[StuartHankins]

The experience has been much better within the past 5 years. At least as far as Fedora or Ubuntu goes*, it's easy enough now that inexperienced Windows sysadmins can do the install. Fedora 16 and 17 are downright easy and quick. Those prompts part-way through the install -- after packages are selected -- are gone now, unless you are using CD media (I guess some people still use it) and it needs to change the disk; I always use the larger DVD-size ISOs.

* I only mention those 2 because I have experience with them, not because other distros are lacking. Things really are much better all around.)

Re:In other Words

[Galestar]

I am currently in the process of attempting to switch to dual boot with Ubuntu from Windows7. So far had to do the following:
1. LiveCD wouldn't boot, getting screen artifacts then it dies, had to add nouveau.blacklist=1 nomodeset
2. LiveCD won't recognize my drive, had to run some obscure utility to clean up the old GPT

What still doesn't work (1 day of use, I'm sure this list will grow):
1. Fn keys
2. Screen artifacts when switching users
3. Restart button with multiple users acts as a logout
4. Whether smb works is a coin flip

So no, I don't think linux is ready for the non-geeks, unless they have a geek do the initial install and then never make any modifications to it.

Re:In other Words

[squiggleslash]

One of the reasons for the lack of backward compatibility was that the original GNOME was pretty awful and had to be almost completely rewritten.

Irony!

Re:In other Words

[mcgrew]

Last I installed Linux on a desktop, I spent several hours configuring it and installing a deluge of cherry-picked packages, each with its own deluge of dependencies -- which were occasionally installed two or three times with different versions in the end. Adding insult to injury, I had to babysit the box during the whole process due to occasional prompts. It left me with the impression that only the most masochist end-users would ever endure the pain to its end, and that Linux distros, installs and package management were an incomprehensible mess for the non-expert.

Christ, what fucked up distro were you installing??? And how long ago? That sounds more like a Windows XP install; now THAT was a PITA. Not hard, but frustrating and boring. I never had those problems in Mandriva or kubuntu. Both distros boot, ask you the questions, and it needs no further babysitting (older Mandriva distros had you change CDs since the apps and OS are installed at the same time). And everything works when you're done. There used to be driver issues, but I haven't seen them for over five years.

Re:In other Words

[StuartHankins]

Wow. Anecdotal experience is anecdotal, so please understand I'm not negating your experience or telling you you're doing it wrong. I've not run into these hardware problems so I'm little help there. Every piece of hardware -- from a DL320 to BL460CG6 to a little bitty HP 2510p sitting on a corner of my desk. They all work fine. Now that may be because HP generally has excellent support for Linux, or maybe my luck is very good. The worst I've encountered is needing to install a Linux driver for RHEL3 with an add-on FC card; RHEL 5.3 and up has support built-in. So in this particular case, it seems the make/model you're using has some major compatibility issues. Which make/model is it? I doubt I can help but I am curious.

SMB, as in SAMBA issues: Are you talking Samba3? That's pretty new and IMHO primarily intended for 2008+ domains; the rest of us are still using the older Samba 2 lineage. Depends on your needs which you need to use, and no they both can't be installed and running. You have to choose. It's not ideal but it is a major change. Unfortunately SAMBA is a rather large subject because of all the components and the particular issue you're experiencing will need possibly a great level of detail to be resolved. Personally, I have a checklist and I use that, although once you understand the settings and their many locations it makes it much easier to troubleshoot. No insult to Jeremy and the team, but simple is not the word I'd use to describe SAMBA.

Re:In other Words

[Kergan]

Christ, what fucked up distro were you installing??? And how long ago?.

It was a best-of-breed-and-user-friendliness RedHat distro, several years ago. After untold numbers of Debian and Slackware and Suze distros before it. I haven't looked back since, tbh, so possibly obsolete opinion inasfar as UX is concerned.

In my experience though, the Linux UX went from beneath zero to just above zero over the course of roughly 10 years of "the UI/UX sucks" criticism. I tried, tried and tried as much as I could hate Windows and Mac OS and BeOS for no other reason than being young. But truth be told, they were all wildly superior on the desktop back then, and -- considering friends gave me the same "what fucked up distro were you installing???" argument over and over again throughout those years -- I can only assume that Windows and OS X are still widely superior on destops today.

In fact, scratch the assumption. I had a whirl with Ubuntu recently and I was unimpressed by their petty and hugely inferior copy of OS X. It sucked, plain and simple. KDE 2.0 was WAY better and more intuitive back in the days, and so was Gnome 1.0. It was at most a notch above fwvm.

Re:In other Words

[Galestar]

I'd like to first start by saying that I did not write the AC post that is swearing at you etc.
And yes, it is anecdotal, but what else is there when talking about ease of use? I in no way mean to downplay all of the hard work that everyone involved in the community does to make linux the amazing distro it is - I have the utmost respect for these people and their hard work, but in order for linux to have widespread consumer adoption as so many people in the community claim to desire, this stuff needs to just work.

Also, this is not the first computer I have attempted to put Ubuntu on. In general I find every time I have to do quite a bit of work via terminal/config files to get things working. If setup requires use of a terminal or editing config files, it is characteristically NOT ready for consumers.

Re:In other Words

[Galestar]

please excuse my "linux the amazing distro that it is" (as if linux is a distro) I did not proof read. Derp.

Re:In other Words

[StuartHankins]

You're doing the equivalent of replacing the engine or transmission in your car (yes I know that's a HW viewpoint for a SW problem, but it's a system so there you go), which unfortunately does require some expertise. The equivalent of driving the car is using it with the OS that came pre-installed and setup for you.

Re:In other Words

[StuartHankins]

I'd like to first start by saying that I did not write the AC post that is swearing at you etc.

Thank you.

Even a Windows install is not suitable for many consumers. But your point has merit. Realize this is software for enthusiasts, and you understand the target audience more. An enthusiast will obtain the necessary skills and persevere. Even when your Linux distro is setup correctly, if you lack the skills to maintain it, or the skills to work around issues including interoperability issues caused for various reasons (proprietary software lock-in, licensing, knowledge, lack of functionality or different implementation etc), your OS will be less useful to you in the long run.

Now it's important to understand that many of these reasons are true even for Mac systems, or when you choose to use a tool that is less known than the "standard", whatever that means. An OS X user has to deal with workarounds for some things, and has easier ways to do other things, than a Windows user. The toolsets are not 100% the same. That doesn't mean Macs are bad, or Linux is bad, it means that some OSs are more for enthusiasts and those who enjoy tweaking or who prefer finer grained control than other systems. Some OSs are more for those who enjoy a wider range of COTS software. It's all for different folks.

Re:In other Words

[mcgrew]

It was a best-of-breed-and-user-friendliness RedHat distro, several years ago.

That's your problem right there, Rad hat is a very good distro for servers, but it sucks as a desktop OS. Try Mandriva, Ubuntu, or better yeat, kubuntu.

KDE 2.0 was WAY better and more intuitive back in the days

That was a good desktop, it went downhill for a while after 3, but the newer versions are more like 2. That's why I said kubuntu, I never did like Gnome.

Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh not another fucktard slashdot troll if we say it enough times it must be true post.

When did slashdot get so fucked up?

Posted from my perfectly working LINUX Desktop thank you very much.

bleat bleat linux must be dead OSX, bleat bleat Linux destroyed by Windows 8, bleat bleat APIs will eat you babies and Linux, bleat bleat TUX is a stoopid logo, Apples are better, Linux must be dead bleat bleat.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[Carewolf]

Linux desktop share is growing faster than Mac OS X is, neither is growing at any impressive rate though, but it is almost 5 years ago now that Mac OS X overtook Linux on the desktop, and more than a few years since it was growing faster.

So either very old news or yes: Troll.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[spauldo]

I'd agree, except this is Miguel de Icaza. He's not just some douchebag tech journalist or OS X shill - he was the top guy in GNOME development for ages, and is partially responsible for the lack of backwards compatability he mentions. He also headed the mono project to bring .NET compatability to UNIX.

I don't agree with his conclusion, but the guy has been involved in free software UI work for ages. His opinion should be taken into consideration.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[X0563511]

Come on. "Miguel de Icaza" is in the first sentence of the summary. You should have know to just move on if you wern't interested in some good old group-troll masturbation.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[X0563511]

He's also drunk the MS koolaid beyond recovery. His opinion has long since been invalid.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[GameboyRMH]

This story was the most popular on CNN yesterday :-(

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[M1FCJ]

How do you measure Linux share? I have three laptops here, and a Pi booted up and doing ham radio stuff, all running Linux with desktop. I didn't purchase anything from anyone, how do these get counted? Oh yes, of course, they don't get counted.

So stop making shit up.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[M1FCJ]

Yup, good ol' Miguel and his love of free software which has prevented fragmentation by backing up a sure winner (*cough*KDE*cough*) instead of slinging mud to satisfy his ego and not doing the "not-invented-here" trick... NOT!!

I take the article as dubious because it quotes Miguel.

He's a traitor to the cause.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[tyrione]

Linux desktop share is growing faster than Mac OS X is, neither is growing at any impressive rate though, but it is almost 5 years ago now that Mac OS X overtook Linux on the desktop, and more than a few years since it was growing faster.

So either very old news or yes: Troll.

Growing from a few million is far easier to grow from than over 80 million. Ask Microsoft all about growth rates.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[theshowmecanuck]

Devils advocate: People with a lot of money who have no problem spending more money than necessary to satisfy image while gaining little or nothing in functionality are not as affected by current economic times. These are Apple's main customers. Average people who normally need to or prefer to get value for their money are much more severely affected by the current economic times, and buy less expensive machines that do the same job as Apple's. These are PCs. Because they are more severely affected, they must make do with older machines and don't upgrade as often.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[spauldo]

Yup, good ol' Miguel and his love of free software which has prevented fragmentation by backing up a sure winner (*cough*KDE*cough*)

Two points:
1) KDE has never been the clear winner. Before GNOME, it had license incompatabilities. By the time those were resolved, the differences in functionality and acceptance made either desktop a viable option.
2) Preventing fragmentation was never a goal of the GNOME project. Why should it be? Most people don't see fragmentation as a problem.

instead of slinging mud to satisfy his ego and not doing the "not-invented-here" trick... NOT!!

I don't remember him slinging mud, but it has been quite a few years since I paid attention to GNOME development, so I'll take your word on it. The "not invented here" crap has been flung by both sides, mostly by people who didn't know what they were talking about.

He's a traitor to the cause.

Cause? Seriously? Dude, it's software. I can understand RMS' cause, since he's concerned with the rights of developers and users, but your "cause" is simply wanting everyone to use the same desktop environment. That's not a cause, that's fanboyism.

Go out and get some fresh air.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[jbolden]

They do get counted. There are firms that measure these sorts of things.

1) They do surveys of computer users.
2) They look at support contracts.
3) They look at secondary software like browser market share.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[jbolden]

Huh? 5 years ago OSX had about 6% marketshare, and Linux was around 1.5%. OSX overtook Linux somewhere in the OSX 10.1 days.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[jbolden]

KDE has never been the clear winner. Before GNOME, it had license incompatabilities

  I think you are forgetting the United Linux initiative and the players involved. This could have been a standard (at least for enterprise Linux). Had Gnome not happened then the Sun / RedHat push towards standardization: RedHat, Java Desktop, Progeny Linux and UserLinux... never happens and thus Ubuntu's adoption of Gnome never happens. Debian legal's issues with KDE / QT are real but I think they get resolved. Gnome was a gross overreaction to a license mess.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[Carewolf]

Growing from a few million is far easier to grow from than over 80 million. Ask Microsoft all about growth rates.

Linux and OS X market shares are similar in size around 5%.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[spauldo]

I think you are forgetting the United Linux initiative and the players involved.

Yes, I did forget about them. Not that it changes anything.

This could have been a standard (at least for enterprise Linux).

No, it couldn't. Look up OSF/1 for a good example of why. Good operating systems aren't created that way.

Had Gnome not happened then the Sun / RedHat push towards standardization: RedHat, Java Desktop, Progeny Linux and UserLinux... never happens and thus Ubuntu's adoption of Gnome never happens.

Had the sky rained caramel coating we'd all be a sundae.

Debian legal's issues with KDE / QT are real but I think they get resolved.

They were resolved when TrollTech changed the license of QT, long after the GNOME project was underway.

Gnome was a gross overreaction to a license mess.

No, it wasn't. There was no DE at the time which met free software guidelines. OpenLook was never fully implemented in free software (and was considered obsolete by many) and CDE was strictly commercial and wasn't even free as in beer. KDE could run on Linux, sure, but it wasn't free enough for the GNU project or the commercial Linux companies (since you had to purchase a license to write commercial software with it).

To a lesser extent, you also had the language problem; QT and the KDE libs are all C++ libraries, and UNIX has always been the haven for C programmers - a lot of developers balked at working with it and preferred something more traditional.

This is what I don't understand; why should there only be one desktop? Why do people think in terms of increasing Linux's market share? What does it matter? It's free software, and you can use what you want. Every major distribution carries the libraries for both GNOME and KDE, so developers can write for either one and it will still work for everyone. Rooting for one or the other is no different than rooting for a football team.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[jbolden]

This is what I don't understand; why should there only be one desktop? Why do people think in terms of increasing Linux's market share? What does it matter?

Because applications require money or money equivalents like time doing boring stuff. To get that money Linux needs marketshare. Firefox got up to about 5% share because AOL wanted a browser alternative. It was able to crack the IE monopoly because it was able to rapidly gain share to generate Google advertising revenue.

Open Office was interesting to Sun because it offered the potential to do something similar to the Microsoft Office monopoly. Its failure to gain share is why it is no longer funded and isn't advancing. KDE back in the early 2000s was getting money from the German government. KDE's success in gaining share would have translated into permanent funding.

The success of LAMP is the reason that is a Linux as at all.

Every major distribution carries the libraries for both GNOME and KDE, so developers can write for either one and it will still work for everyone. Rooting for one or the other is no different than rooting for a football team.

That's a slightly different definition of share. And no they don't work for everyone. Being a native application is really important to look and feel issues and integration issues. Particularly on a desktop where you want: cut and paste to work with complex objects all the way up to object linking and embedding. That's why Open Office for OSX had to create an entire OSX GUI layer and Open Office for Windows had to create an entire Windows GUI and that still isn't really good enough and is holding them back.

They were resolved when TrollTech changed the license of QT, long after the GNOME project was underway.

I understand what happened. The point was in an alternative history where Gnome isn't as aggressive and I think these things work out just as well. For example perhaps KDE gets control of their code base so they can relicense the code. Or they assert standing and make an explicit exception for use with QT in the license.

KDE could run on Linux, sure, but it wasn't free enough for the GNU project or the commercial Linux companies (since you had to purchase a license to write commercial software with it).

I understand the issue and why people were unhappy and wanted Gnome. Personally I thought at the time and still do that people creating commercial software being required to support the Linux widget set is a good idea. The GNU problem I think could have been solved by the KDE group if they had more time.

To a lesser extent, you also had the language problem; QT and the KDE libs are all C++ libraries, and UNIX has always been the haven for C programmers - a lot of developers balked at working with it and preferred something more traditional.

Yes but then they didn't do that. Almost immediately the Gnome people essentially reinvented a bad C++ to write Gnome in because they needed more structure. I'd consider the language issues a design flaw in Gnome.

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[spauldo]

Because applications require money or money equivalents like time doing boring stuff. To get that money Linux needs marketshare.

That's true for a few applications, like office products and the like. Linux seems to have gotten those just fine without the unified desktop environment you keep going on about.

Firefox got up to about 5% share because AOL wanted a browser alternative. It was able to crack the IE monopoly because it was able to rapidly gain share to generate Google advertising revenue.

Netscape (and then later AOL) did host and direct early development on the Mozilla team, it's true. That lasted what, maybe two years? Most of that time was spent throwing out the codebase Netscape provided and starting from scratch. Firefox is self-funding now.

Firefox broke the IE monopoly because IE was a horrible, bug-ridden piece of crap. Website authors hated it because it never moved ahead with the standards. Sysadmins hated it because every week another worm targeted it. Users hated how their machines would fill up with spyware, and the people they had fix their machines would reccomend Firefox.

Open Office was interesting to Sun because it offered the potential to do something similar to the Microsoft Office monopoly. Its failure to gain share is why it is no longer funded and isn't advancing.

I'm sure the LibreOffice people would be surprised to learn that it's no longer advancing. Seems to me that the lack of advancement under the OpenOffice.org name was due to Oracle's mismanagement. Volunteers kept improving it, hence LibreOffice.

KDE back in the early 2000s was getting money from the German government. KDE's success in gaining share would have translated into permanent funding.

Permanent funding doesn't exist, unless you have a very strong lobby group and some money to throw at the politicians.

The success of LAMP is the reason that is a Linux as at all.

Um, no.

Ask developers why they work on Linux. I doubt more than 5% would even mention LAMP. They work on it because they want to.

There are some developers who work for companies like IBM who do, yes, primarily work on it because of LAMP. Those are the minority.

That's a slightly different definition of share. And no they don't work for everyone. Being a native application is really important to look and feel issues and integration issues.

Look and feel is important for impressing the suits. Everyone else just uses whatever works.

Particularly on a desktop where you want: cut and paste to work with complex objects all the way up to object linking and embedding.

Cut and paste got figured out a long time ago, as far as GNOME->KDE goes. OLE is a nice dream, but let's face it; 1% of people actually use it. Generally what gets linked is data, not an application, and data generally has tools to work with it on both the GNOME and KDE sides of the fence.

The point was in an alternative history where Gnome isn't as aggressive and I think these things work out just as well.

GNOME isn't aggressive. It's included in distributions by the distributors' choice. Obviously, the distributors had reasons for choosing GNOME over KDE.

For example perhaps KDE gets control of their code base so they can relicense the code. Or they assert standing and make an explicit exception for use with QT in the license.

Yeah, except the KDE team chose a non-free widget kit that they didn't have any control over. KDE couldn't get control over QT, because it was proprietary software owned by TrollTech. Yes, eventually an exemption was made, and nowdays QT is pretty much free, but it took a very long time for that to happen.

Personally I thought at the time and still do that people cr

Re:Not another Slashdot Troll post!

[jbolden]

Where are you getting these numbers from?

Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[iCEBaLM]

Windows 7 was the nail in the coffin, if Windows 7 wasn't as good as it is, and another Vista stinker was pooped out of Redmond then Linux possibly may have had a chance.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't speak too soon, Windows 8 is a-comin'.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't Linux Desktop take off when Vista hit the market? The fact is that there's no big company pushing Linux desktop and running expensive ads for it on American TV. It will never be more than a niche player.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[UnknowingFool]

For consumers, Linux has never been an option because OEMs don't push it. Enterprises have now accepted Linux as servers and in some cases prefer it over Windows and Unix. Win 8 may or may bot change things. Unlike Vista, OEMs can offer Win 7 as a viable alternative as it is not near EOL that XP was. But MS didn't compete against the partners with Vista as they will with Win 8.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[Missing.Matter]

I doubt that. As bad as Vista was, it drove approximately no one to Linux. If anything, OSX would be the one to pick up the exodus, not Linux. But neither really benefited that much from Vista's blunders, because most users just stayed where they were: on XP, and if Windows 7 turned out to suck, they'd probably still be there today.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[Chrisq]

Don't speak too soon, Windows 8 is a-comin'.

Also known as "Vista II"

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[J4]

Yes, because Linux was totally kicking MS's ass before that. XP had what, 2% of the market?

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[fm6]

No, sorry. I was involved in early efforts to cash in on the move to Linux and it became obvious early on that nobody was buying what we were selling. Microsoft achieved lockin in the early days of the PC revolution, and no amount of crappy OSs (Vista being only one of many such turds) could break that lockin.

Desktop Linux's one big opportunity was server developers, because developers need a hackable desktop. Windows is too tangled up in complex, obscure APIs to rate as hackable. The same used to be true for Macs, but that changed when they moved to a Unix-based OS, making OS X as hackable as Linux, with much better standardization and support. Much more expensive, of course, but that's not a factor when your employer is paying for your hardware.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[drkich]

I ran Vista at home. Agreed, the OS needed some tweeking to make it a bit more palatable. However, I had no issues with stability, nor driver issues. Don't get me wrong, Windows 7 is a much better release, in my mind it is a point release over vista.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[lilfields]

In my view, I am perfectly happy living in a world where Linux runs on my servers and Microsoft runs on my desktop/laptop/tablet. I've been very satisfied with both of those in their prospective niches. I remember the rumors that Windows 7 would have a UNIX run-time environment (or maybe I dreamed that)...now THAT would have killed Linux; but Linux is alive and well, and very successful in the server space...which is where it makes the most sense.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[lilfields]

The failure of Vista is still being felt today, there are still millions of PCs with XP running on them at businesses across the globe. Windows 7 came out right around the economic downturn, and still the economy is fragile...so most people still haven't upgraded. This really gives Microsoft a lot of breathing room in the future, but for now it is a massive headache to any tech support person. I do think OSX benefits from that though, because for some reason, I see people constantly comparing OSX to Windows XP...as if OSX isn't going to have a massive upper-hand against a decade old operating system. It doesn't hurt Microsoft in the business sector, because Apple computers are way too expensive for any business to buy hundreds and thousands of, but in the the consumer market, you bet it hurts. The iPad/iPhone coupled with Microsoft botching Vista has dragged a lot of people toward OSX, but I do see that slowing pretty fast. I used to see kids adopting OSX in rapid pace, but now people are back to buying PCs; so I don't know if OSX was a fad or if people using OSX may have a different upgrade cycle because traditionally their income would be higher...thus making them able to purchase expensive machines even in economic turmoil. I actually see more 13" ultrabooks in the wild now running Windows 7.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[i.r.id10t]

Yup, seems that every 3rd version is good, the one after it sucks, the one after is a little better, and then you have a good version again.

95, 98, 98SE, ME, XP, Vista, 7 ...

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[jedidiah]

Linux made the world safe for Unix again. What seemed like an inevitable take over of the server room by Microsoft was blunted. Commercial Unixen continue to thrive and Linux also thrives in the same capacity.

If you need serious work done, there is a serious alternative. We don't have the nightmare scenario of the amatuers from Microsoft being in control of everything.

All around, Microsoft is a lot less menacing than it used to be.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[redmid17]

Not especially adept at counting are we?

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[jedidiah]

I have never encountered a corporate sponsored "server developer" running MacOS. I find the whole idea really quite absurd. People are making all sorts of claims that don't seem to have any basis in reality with the exception of a few very noisy exceptions.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[Conanymous Award]

Bah. Beethoven's 6th all the way.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[GameboyRMH]

Yep but there won't be another Linux renaissance this time because there's no good noob-friendly distro to accept the refugees.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[fm6]

The people I'm talking about all worked for a well-known SaaS provider. I can't prove my experience is typical, but neither can you.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[Thumper_SVX]

Seriously? You think Windows 95 was the first version of Windows? Not by a long stretch... and obviously you're missing the point that compared to anything else around at the time it WAS a huge step forward. Windows prior to Windows 95 was a train wreck... I was an OS/2 user because of it. Mac OS at the time was beginning to creak under its own weight, and Linux for a desktop was pretty much a nonentity. Oh and OS/2 was a fine OS except for the lack of application support and the feeling that IBM was doing it as a hobby. I also contend that 98 SE can't be considered an OS in its own right because in many ways it was a bug fix and feature release for Windows 98... much the way that I consider Windows 7 to be "Vista SE".

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[antdude]

Windows 9 too. :P

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[RazorSharp]

I don't think this is true at all. Ever since Apple went to x86, Apple's hardware (especially laptops) has become extremely popular among Linux users. At least, that's what I've seen. Furthermore, I've noticed a lot of people who were pure Linux users transitioned to Linux/OS X users and after a while they just stopped booting into Linux.

Before Apple went x86, I remember reading a lot of comments on /. along the lines of, "OS X looks really cool, too bad Apple uses PPC." Sure, there's always been PPC Linux options but they weren't really viable solutions for most things a typical users needs to do. Then Apple went x86 and they really blew up with developers. My guess, as seems to be Miguel's, is that those were mostly Linux developers Apple was syphoning away, not Windows ones. XCode, a *nix terminal, the ability to set OS X up as a (crappy) server, *nix permissions, etc. These were all things that appealed to Linux users but most wouldn't cough up a bunch of dough for PPC hardware unless they were getting a server from IBM. Apple's hardware became a pretty defacto standard for nerds once they went x86 because, not only was it the only hardware that could run anything, it was also the best (I'm talking things like the trackpad, not benchmarks).

This all started much before Windows 7, and even if it didn't, I can't see very many Linux geeks switching to Windows 7 because it was better than Vista. Linux geeks, by and large, use Windows 7 if their boss makes them. Or because it's the third OS on their MacBook.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[RazorSharp]

So Microsoft = Beethoven. Beethoven's odd numbered symphonies are good while even ones aren't as good. Just like Windows.

No, because with Beethoven his even numbered symphonies just weren't quite as fantastic as his extremely well known odd numbered ones. With Windows, they alternate between usable and sucking ass.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[RazorSharp]

Why didn't Linux Desktop take off when Vista hit the market? The fact is that there's no big company pushing Linux desktop and running expensive ads for it on American TV. It will never be more than a niche player.

I don't think this is true. An operating system can only do so much for your average consumer. In the long term, all general purpose software will become either FOSS or maintained by the hardware manufacturer, like in Apple's case. Advertising only does so much when you're competing with free. The most important thing for the FOSS community to be concerned about right now is a "Year of LibreOffice becoming the standard word processor." The year of desktop Linux won't happen until MS Office is no longer viewed as a requisite piece of software for most desktop users.

A lot of people tell me this won't happen but I think it will. MS Office can only play the compatibility game for so long and they won't be able to maintain the high licensing fees when their main competitor is free. Over time, all general purpose software will not only approach, but reach the $0 mark. No one's going to by Suzy's lemonade with little umbrellas in the cups for $1 when Sally gives non-umbrellaed lemonade away for free.

I'm pretty sure MS knows this, hence their focus on Surface, Nokia, XBox, and Intellectual Ventures/other patent related crap.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[shinzawai]

Don't speak too soon, Windows 8 is a-comin'.

Also known as "Vista II"

No, Windows 7 is Vista II. Windows 8 will be Vista III - Revenge of the (Flying) Chair.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[jbolden]

I remember the rumors that Windows 7 would have a UNIX run-time environment (or maybe I dreamed that).

Sort of. I think what you mean is: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc779522(v=ws.10).aspx

  Microsoft has gone back and forth several times with creating a more Unixy interface to their kernel. For example the XP version was: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=274

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[jbolden]

I agree with you there. I was horrified when DEC folded to Windows Server as inevitable. SGI and Sun continued the fight bravely but LAMP was a ray of light in some very dark days.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[jbolden]

Ignore this version.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[jbolden]

Sorry for the previous version. Should have read

I agree with you there. I was horrified when DEC and SGI folded to Windows Server as inevitable. Sun continued the fight bravely but LAMP was a ray of light in some very dark days.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[jbolden]

OSX did benefit. Apple's marketshare had falled to about 2% prior to Vista. With Vista's failure OSX doubled share to 4% in a matter of a few months.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[KGBear]

Nah. In the last 5 years I saw a LOT of people abandon Linux. I work at a research university, I'm talking people who have been running Unix for ever and Linux since the early 90s. All of them, no exception, went to OSX. I don't know anybody who just abandoned Linux and happily moved to Windows 7. Why? Because OSX has Unix underneath. It provides basic compatibility not only of software people write, but of the way they like to do things and the way they think about systems. All of that AND a GUI that just works. I have seen the latest Windows be credited for the demise of Linux on the desktop since the late 90s. During all this time, Linux on the desktop has only grown. It has been shrinking in the past 5 years, and it correlates nicely with the growth of OSX.

Re:Apple didn't kill it, Microsoft did.

[nitrofurano]

Saying that 'Linux was killed' is ludicrously stupid! - Linux is just a kernel, and it appeared based on GNU development, which started years before OSX or Windows-NT even started - GNU/Linux is notably the most popular operating system in webservers, supercomputers, mission critical applications, and the Linux kernel the most popular in smartphones and tablets. GNU, Linux, and the generality of the software libre are developed mostly on the human factor only, made from people to people, not from corporations to consumers - no money are needed to develop them. The more people and lobbies are trying to kill Linux, the more it will be stronger! :)

Shift to the web

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, focus did shift to the web. How many web apps are run by OS X? How many web apps are run by Windows? How many web apps are run by Linux?

If the browser is the desktop, it's hard to make the argument that Linux 'lost'.

Re:Shift to the web

[mclaincausey]

...especially if the "desktop" is also the "palmtop." Which I think it is. (Think Android and iOS, GNU/Linux and BSD/Mach).

De Icasa,

[BanHammor]

I can't manage to notice that Ubuntu or Mageia or Fedora stopped shipping because bam, Linux Desktop is killed by MacOS X. Can you tell us why exactly is Linux dead? (And why would we trust Icasa anyway? It's not like he actually did anything of note or made the right choices in the last 4 years or so.)

Re:De Icasa,

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux isn't dead. Linux desktop is. But Apple nor MS killed it. It was dead on birth. Too many distros. Fighting amongst distros and internal teams like Gnome's. The inability to get gaming companies other commercial industries to develop for Linux. The inability to get companies to develop drivers earlier. All these killed Linux on the desktop.

Re:De Icasa,

[Greyfox]

From a basic standpoint there were already too many ways of doing things, and everyone seemed to choose a different one. Even before Linux showed up you had two or three widget toolkits and half a dozen window managers and every app you brought up probably looked completely different. Gnome and KDE managed to bring a mostly-similar look and feel to the table, unless you still needed some legacy app which may have been done with C/Motif or TCL/TK or some other ancient thing that some developer had fallen in love with at the time. At the same time they split development resources to solving the same problems. I think in this case, the diversity made development a lot more difficult, and everyone ends up having to have ALL those libraries installed to run the applications they want to run anyway.

OSX presents a nice face -- It's UNIX and you can get a shell and above all it has a consistent interface. I gave it a try and it was kind of nice but just doesn't feel right. After a couple of decades of Linux, I just don't feel right if I don't have to beat my head against getting all my hardware working correctly for a week and a half.

Re:De Icasa,

[fa2k]

When I woke up this morning my Fedora install was wiped and an apple logo and the word "DIE!" was spray-painted on my screen.

Re:De Icasa,

[BanHammor]

Yep, that's my viewpoint. Nobody chooses to use it - so what? Every year, there's more functions, more diversity, more stability, and whatever I usually use works for me since 2008 or so.

Re:De Icasa,

[BanHammor]

So what I am saying - if "it doesn't have 5% market share" means dead to you, fine. In fact, it hasn't ever been alive by that standard. If dead means "no new releases, no developers, no community", then Linux is very much alive and well.

Re:De Icasa,

[alci63]

Really ? I just bought a brand new Lenovo T430s and everything work out of the box (Ubuntu 12.04). Previous was a Sony VPC and worked like a charm.
Previous was an Asus Timeline X, and... worked out of the box also. It has been a long time since I had to fight to get my (even recent) hardware to run under Linux. To be completly true, the Authentec Fingerprint reader on the Thinkpad does not work, but I don't care).

I also own a MacBook Pro, and it is prefectly fine to browse the web, run Aperture (but I also use DarkTable on Ubuntu, and it is really good also) and send mails.
It integrates with other Apple hardware (TimeCapsule,etc...),

BUT : there are no apps. I mean, no apt-get install openldap.
No apt-get install darktable.
No apt-cache search planetarium - eh, this seems nice, apt-get install kstars, watch the sky.
And of course no apt-get source postgresql...

Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[captainpanic]

So, the way I see it, there are 3 competing families of OSs. That is Windows, Linux and Apple. With Linux traditionally installed on about 1% of desktops, I would think that Windows is the big loser here. If OS X is nowadays installed on 6 -7% of desktops (see: TFA), then it's Windows that lost marketshare.

Sure, it could have been Linux to steal that marketshare. Linux might still benefit from it though... once the market realizes that you can switch without turning your PC into a smoking pile of rubble, they also might try Linux. I still think that Ubuntu is a very decent option.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu used to be a decent option. These days, Mint is far better. What with the working codec and lack of Unity.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[garcia]

Windows is losing marketshare, not Linux. Go to a college campus or local coffee shop and look around at those using their computers to do work. Count how many PCs you see and how many Macs you see. I was honestly shocked to see Macs beating PCs every time at many different study locations I was using.

Those people using laptops are probably not going to be using Linux to do their work and are either going to choose Mac or Windows. While I continue to use Linux on the server and have solely for the last 10 years (I used it on the desktop prior to 2002), I chose Mac over Windows for my laptop and I know many others who went that direction as well.

In another thread someone said if Win7 wasn't as good as it is, Linux may have had a chance. I disagree. In fact, using Win7 on my work desktop and hating the quirks it has was what really helped push me to the Mac.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Except that OSX "stole" a large part of Linux' target audience (on the desktop side of things) and has thus stunted its potential growth. Mac laptops are quite popular in the developer and sysadmin world.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[rsmith-mac]

With Linux traditionally installed on about 1% of desktops, I would think that Windows is the big loser here. If OS X is nowadays installed on 6 -7% of desktops (see: TFA), then it's Windows that lost marketshare.

On that you are correct. It's not that Linux has lost much in the way of market share - it's kind of difficult to lose what you don't have much of in the first place - but rather it's Mac OS X that has been eating up Microsoft's market share.

However the story isn't really about who lost market share, but rather who gained it and why. Linux could have been; it could have been right up to the point in time where Apple introduced the x86 version of Mac OS X. Once they did that many geeks lost their desire to run Linux. Mac OS X could bring all the wonderful things about *nix to the desktop in a far more refined form while offering the kind of retail software and media ecosystem that most desktop users take for granted.

Desktop Linux is still important as a new technology testbed, and of course as the only true free OS (both as in speech and as in beer), but that's about all it has going for it. I for one stopped keeping a desktop Linux installation around after 2008 once I realized that Mac OS X did all of the things I needed (or liked) Linux for. And that's the story TFA is telling: why Mac OS X has drawn away many desktop *nix users, and how the rise of OS-agnostic Web applications has drawn away a lot of the rest.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[Hatta]

Not at my institution. They are largely premed and pharmacy students, and I barely ever see an apple machine. I see more of those funky laptops with the swivel touch display than I see macbooks or ipads.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[cgt]

You don't have to use Unity just because you use Ubuntu, it doesn't even have to be installed (ever). Just use the alternative CD and Unity won't bug you, and the codecs can be installed easily in Ubuntu. Linux Mint is Ubuntu for people who don't understand how Linux works.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason that Mac laptops are popular with developers. In a business setting, one may need commercial software like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop. it can't be done on Linux unless one thinks foolishly a user would depend on WINE for this. A Mac is a great platform for web development with Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.

Macs give you a UNIX OS with commercial and open source apps. Macs also just work. There's no screwing with changing settings so you can actually see your display because the new kernel decided that ACPI video should have the backlight turned off on your POS Toshiba laptop. The sound card works. Crazy stuff like hardware just works on a Mac. Linux could be great and it could get real marketshare if people could only learn to work together. There's so much competition and reinventing ideas in the Linux community. By the time a sound system or video drivers are polished, a new API is out to replace it. It's often not even the kernel that's the problem. There is a benefit to the Linux model, but also a cost. Compatibility isn't all bad. That's why I use BSD and Mac OS X.

There are some really good, mature Linux developers, but there's also some immature folks working on key projects like Gnome, Ubuntu, etc. that think they can change everything overnight and everyone will follow. It doesn't work like that.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[gbjbaanb]

I guess it depends if you think desktop is the only computing platform around.

Count the 3 platforms you mentioned, then add 3 more for server-side stuff. How much of all that is Windows (20%?, Mac (2%?) and Linux (78%). I guessed, but I think that makes a good guesstimate of the relative overall install bases. Now, maybe all that server platform is going to be replaced with Cloud - but then, most of the cloud platforms are running linux anyway.

Ps. Mint is very good, and is nicely "accessible" to ex Windows users.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[Chrisq]

.....and lack of Unity.

How symbolic of the state of Linux

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[Celarent Darii]

It used to be that Ubuntu was for people who didn't know how linux worked.

Well, now it seems that Mint fills this gap. Seriously, if at the beginning of install you have to get rid of what distinguishes a distro from the others, there is really no point to using that distro.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[richpoore]

Many people don't want to understand how linux works. I've installed Ubuntu on my parents' computer and it works fine although it recently had a flash problem. My parents don't care how linux works. It's better for them because 1. They don't have to pay for it, 2. It's not as susceptible to malware as Windows. I don't have bi-annual calls about the computer going "really slow" and for the most part, things just work. I'm now shopping for the best light-weight (the computer's old) distro with codecs built in. I'll walk my 70 year old mother through installing linux, it'll be legally free and it will just work.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[Ash-Fox]

Why doesn't ubuntu-restricted's packages not offer the codecs for you again?

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[J4]

Not to mention the fading relevance of desktops.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[gmueckl]

Because they are not installed with the rest of the system by default. So an average user tries to play video and all he gets is an obscure yes/no prompt from the video player with some gibberish about "video codecs" and "support" and "installation". Maybe he clicks yes, maybe no. But it's a pretty random choice at this point. If the user clicked yes, a password prompt appears. "Huh? What's that? Why do I suddenly have to enter a password to play a video? Something is seriously wrong here." So our average user is likely to hit cancel at that point and be very confused.

TL;DR: It's a confusing experience on Ubuntu for solely political reasons, ruining the user experience. Linux Mint just does does away with that. That's the difference.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[Ash-Fox]

TL;DR: It's a confusing experience on Ubuntu for solely political reasons, ruining the user experience.

Clicking 'yes' to installing support for other stuff is so confusing... Sorry, I don't buy it. I'd buy the fact the user doesn't want to know and so ignores and doesn't read what was written, but confused? Nope.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[Shadowmist]

Windows is losing marketshare, not Linux. Go to a college campus or local coffee shop and look around at those using their computers to do work. Count how many PCs you see and how many Macs you see. I was honestly shocked to see Macs beating PCs every time at many different study locations I was using.

Those people using laptops are probably not going to be using Linux to do their work and are either going to choose Mac or Windows. While I continue to use Linux on the server and have solely for the last 10 years (I used it on the desktop prior to 2002), I chose Mac over Windows for my laptop and I know many others who went that direction as well.

In another thread someone said if Win7 wasn't as good as it is, Linux may have had a chance. I disagree. In fact, using Win7 on my work desktop and hating the quirks it has was what really helped push me to the Mac.

For LInux to have lost Desktop marketshare, note that I said DESKTOP, it would have to have had marketshare in the first place. It never went beyond technocrats and hobbyists on the desktop end. It's found it's niche in the server market because you need that kind of roll your own customisation on there. But as anyone knows if you want clicks out of Slashdotterati, just frame your title so that Apple becomes the blame boy for the fact that your favorite OS isn't ruling the world. It used to be Microsoft but Redmond's not doing as well these days.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[shutdown -p now]

Ubuntu was started as Debian for people who don't understand how Linux works. Now that you say it's no longer that anymore, what's its advantage over Debian unstable?

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[shinzawai]

. Linux Mint is Ubuntu for people who don't understand how Linux works.

OMG ZOMG.....That is the best line ever!

Like this one....... Ubuntu is for people too stupid to install Debian.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[cgt]

I disagree. The reason why Linux Mint is for stupid people is because it *is* Ubuntu, just with different branding and a few packages preinstalled. There is no benefit to using Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu.

Re:Linux marketshare going down? Or OS X going up?

[cgt]

Ubuntu is essentially a stabilized Debian unstable.

Actually Miguel...

[Onymous Hero]

Gnome3 has killed the Linux Desktop. Thanks.

Re:Actually Miguel...

[AliasMarlowe]

Gnome3 has killed the Linux Desktop. Thanks.

Gnome 3 and Unity collaborated on it (did some MS/Apple plant steer them into uselessness?). A pox on both of them, anyway.
All of our home PCs have migrated to Xubuntu, because xfce gives an actual working desktop. And with compiz, it's snazzier than OSX or Win7.

Re:Actually Miguel...

[nssy]

I agree. I can't stand this gnome3 madness.

Re:Actually Miguel...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that it was some sort of Apple / MS conspiracy, but a combination of developer arrogance and change for change's sake.

Totally agreed on xfce - I've been using it as primary desktop on all my boxen for years now. It just gets out of the way and balances speed, configuration and usability perfectly (IMO).

Re:Actually Miguel...

[roystgnr]

Certainly "with compiz, it's snazzier" - for a while with Gnome2 + Compiz, even non-Linux blogs were filling up with "wow, you could make your computer look like *this*!" Youtube videos. Has anybody seen videos of Gnome 3 or Unity which impress non-users?

The newest XFCE + Compiz on Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't seem to be stable enough for me, though. Not sure which of them is to blame (or if it's NVidia's drivers, something else...)

Re:Actually Miguel...

[Concern]

Gnome 3 and Unity collaborated on it (did some MS/Apple plant steer them into uselessness?). A pox on both of them, anyway.

Yes, a plant did steer them wrong. And his name was Miguel de Icaza.

Hi Miguel! I can't tell you how long I haven't been waiting to hear your employers' PR company spin pronounced by your lips.

Re:Actually Miguel...

[onefriedrice]

And with compiz, it's snazzier than OSX or Win7.

Is compiz still a talking point among people trying to promote desktop linux? Nevermind that OS X was first with useful, hardware-accelerated compositing, I guess. Maybe I've just gotten older, but wobbly windows and spinning cubes stopped being interesting quite a few years ago.

I used a Mac since 2003 and have since used predominantly Linux and BSD. Without compiz. I'm glad that my desktop environment isn't as "snazzy" as yours; any time my window manager draws my attention to itself and away from the applications is wasted time. However, I'm not way big on evangelizing--just use what works, I say--so maybe you know better how to promote desktop linux than I do.

Re:Actually Miguel...

[AliasMarlowe]

The newest XFCE + Compiz on Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't seem to be stable enough for me, though. Not sure which of them is to blame (or if it's NVidia's drivers, something else...)

Probably an issue with the Nvidia... the maker of graphics interface hardwareand/or drivers that really suck. The only one of our PCs that we don't run Compiz on is a laptop with Nvidia graphics (it uses xfce OK, just not Compiz). We're unlikely to ever buy another PC crippled by Nvidia graphics. The other laptop and both of our desktop PCs have ATI/AMD graphics, and run Compiz just fine on xfce.

Re:Actually Miguel...

[Rich0]

Not so much arrogance as self-interest. People work on FOSS because they want to - few are paid to do it. Many who are paid to do it work for distros that want to differentiate themselves, which means doing something different anyway.

So, suppose you're some guy working on a desktop environment. What would you rather put on your resume - that you fixed a few bugs in a product somebody else invented, or that you invented some new shiny product of your own?

Stuff like this happens at work all the time - whatever is the next big thing gets lots of attention, and then everything else rots until it becomes a crisis that can be treated as high-priority again.

Not so

[Smivs]

Linux is still alive and well on my desktop, thank you!

Re:Not so

[cristiroma]

Actually I think Gnome 3 and unity was a big blow in the head. I felt that on my skin when I tried to update to Fedora 17 from 15.

For desktop, I personally update the distro once every few years. Otherwise you get into mess if you want newer packages. It worked fine for the last 4 years. But at current state of Gnome, LXDE, XFCE, KDE, this is no longer possible. Updating Fedora to 17 meant to stuck to Gnome 3 which doesn't have the basic features of Gnome 2. And frankly I won't accept XFCE/LXDE as alternatives. As default configuration, look and feel, they are FAR BEYOND even Windows XP.

Should I also mention problems with ATI display, Broadcom wireless drivers and hibernation issues I'm sick of?

I don't know about Mac too much, some colleagues have and they seem happy, but I'm seriously thinking to switch.

Still, very happy user of CentOS on servers, thank you.

Re:Not so

[rainhill]

mine too..., and i love latest unity.

Switched to OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently switched to OS X for software development. After installing X-Code (a 10 minute fully automated process), I can run and compile all major programming/script languages from the command-line. I also get all the other cool stuff like diff, MD5, vim.

On Windows, I'll have to go through hell and back to get my development environment operating as smoothly as that. On Linux, it's about as easy as configuring it as OS X, but I hate having to deal with the inconsistent desktop environment and the constant driver trouble.

Re:Switched to OS X

[kthreadd]

Java 6 has always been and is still supported by Apple.
For Java 7 you just have to get it from Oracle.

Re:Switched to OS X

[Ash-Fox]

Would you mind contributing your wizard skills to make setup "just work" immediately for compiling Exodus viewer on OS X, please?

It's fairly painless on Ubuntu, installing everything through the package manager and can compile on the go, with the exception of manually installing autobuild (but that's the same on every OS).

Re:Switched to OS X

[Bill_the_Engineer]

According to the website, Geenz Spad and Mimika Oh made some fixes in the OS X build.

But since you are comparing it with installing using the package manager on Ubuntu, why wouldn't you just use one of the binaries they provide on their website? It's simply a matter of downloading the dmg file, opening it, and dragging a file into the application folder. How much "just work" do you need?

Re:Switched to OS X

[Ash-Fox]

According to the website, Geenz Spad and Mimika Oh made some fixes in the OS X build.

This has nothing to do with "after installing X-Code (a 10 minute fully automated process), I can run and compile all major programming/script languages from the command-line. "

If it truly worked, there wouldn't need to be a huge need to dick around with it to get it to compile on OS X unlike on other platforms.

But since you are comparing it with installing using the package manager on Ubuntu, why wouldn't you just use one of the binaries they provide on their website?

Because, I actually compile the builds that go on the website and OS X is not just touch and go like this person implied he could with his wizardry.

Re:Switched to OS X

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Hate to hear about people having problems with their compiler.

I have no such problems with compiling anything in particular, and I have complicated dependencies. I have to handle projects that are C based and depend on Intel Fortran, IDL, some custom perl scripts, and DISLIN. I would rank the complexity involved and the troubleshooting of the build about equal when compared with Linux. I base this on first hand knowledge of supporting RPM and APT based linux (SL & Ubuntu in particular) as well as OS X (L, SL, L, & ML).

Re:Switched to OS X

[rjstanford]

And I don't think I need to explain why "you just need to upgrade" is not a valid reply, do I?

captcha : "adopts"? kinda fitting

Depends. A lot of people do Java development just fine on Snow Leopard and other older versions. And, quite frankly, when you start quibbling over a $20 upgrade fee for a professional development environment, most just don't care. Maybe we should - but we don't (again, in general). In the real world, Java development on OSX is both common and effective.

Re:Switched to OS X

[Guy Harris]

Great! But don't forget that you cannot distribute the output of X-Code without adhering to the license; for example, any Quicktime functionality you develop is permitted to run "only on supported Mac OS X and/or Windows platforms with QuickTime installed".

Any other examples, in the Xcode license, of redistribution restrictions of that sort? The only other such stuff I see on the version of the Xcode license on Scribd is "if you redistribute the Javascript "Apple Classes" from Dashcode, follow the license", "don't use the "System Provided Images" in ways Apple doesn't approve of" ("images" here meaning "pictures", so some of that is probably trademark protection), "don't use Location Services without asking the user's permission" (personally, I rather like that restriction), and "maybe we'll add some other things in the future that have additional licensing terms". The rest is largely restrictions on modifying/redistributing/etc. the "Developer Software" itself.

desktop is thinner nowadays than ever

[mapkinase]

...so why does this matter?

At my work I do not care what desktop I am using, since I do all my development on a Linux server anyway.

Seriously???

[bgarcia]

Linux was never a competitor on the desktop.

It has very little to do with the quality of the software, or backwards compatibility. The problem is that Linux didn't have a big marketing machine pushing it on the desktop.

Re:Seriously???

[Anonymous Coward]

It has very much to do with the availability of software and poor central management. If your corporate offices with 200 desktops could run the ERP, financials, payroll and what have you on Linux and administer it like they can with a Windows network, they'd be all over it. Stop sweeping that issue under the carpet.

Re:Seriously???

[BanHammor]

And it's a catch-22 because all that software doesn't happen magically, it has to have users interested for it. And for users to be on Linux and interested , well, they have to have all that software on linux working. Loop.

Re:Seriously???

[Ash-Fox]

Could you explain to me what was wrong with Novell's offerings to resolve the problems you stated?

Re:Seriously???

[Ash-Fox]

Other than the fact Novell went out of business?

They didn't. They are very much still in business. Now back to the original question:

Could you explain to me what was wrong with Novell's offerings to resolve the problems stated?

My Linux Desktop

[pscottdv]

Is not dead yet!

It's not because of developers "defecting".

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the statement that "OS X killed Linux on the desktop", but it's not because Linux developers "defected" to using Mac OS X instead.

Rather, I think it's quite the opposite that actually happened. Designers (not developers!) infatuated with the Mac OS X ideology tried to bring that mindset over to Linux desktop environment projects like GNOME, Unity, and to a lesser extent KDE. Even other applications, like Firefox and Chrome, have been stricken by this problem.

Basically, these designers have done everything in their power to dumb down and otherwise molest the Linux desktop experience. GNOME 3 is the ultimate example of this. While GNOME 2 wasn't perfect by any means (and no software ever is), at least it was usable and predictable. People could use it to get some real work done. Then GNOME 3 came along. It was quickly co-opted and infused with the crap that's commonplace within the Mac OS X and iOS way of doing things.

Anyone who has tried to seriously use GNOME 3 knows what I'm talking about. Put politely, it's a heaping pile of shit. Usability was completely thrown out the window. The emphasis was put on making it look "pretty" and "trendy", rather than making it into a useful tool. This is, of course, a big reason why it fell flat on its face. It's now going down in history as one of the biggest open source disasters of all time.

The same has happened to the Firefox UI. It was once sensible, with the traditional menus and toolbars, and a useful status bar. Then Mac OS X started to become popular among the design community, and things went to hell within Firefox's UI. Like with GNOME 3, usability was again thrown out the window in the name of "aesthetics". Now Firefox's UI is quite awful, and requires much reconfiguration and the use of numerous plugins to restore the usability that the Mac OS X-inspired designers decided to throw out for no good reason.

The Mac OS X and iOS mentality has its place, and that's in low-end (although perhaps unnecessarily expensive), consumer-grade devices meant mainly for consuming pointless social media "content". It does not belong on Linux workstations, especially ones where usability is extremely important, and productivity is a must. But now that it has infected what were once usable desktop environments, many within the Linux community are beginning to really feel the pain of this terrible design ideology.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[BanHammor]

Firefox is still alive and well, and on my Linux installation the GUI hasn't changed a bit since the 3.6 days. The menubar is just the same.
You are also forgetting KDE, as it implements traditional desktop elements and so is inconvenient for your theory. Actually, with little tweaks it can resemble anything but Unity: MacOSX, Gnome2, Windows XP, Win7, etc.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm behind you on the whole Gnome3 thing, I'm not sure where you're coming from on Firefox. As far as I can tell the big Slashdot Freakout has been over moving the tabs from below the address bar to above it (which makes sense, when you think about it, since the address bar is tab-specific content), and removing the bar at the bottom of the screen that just said "Done" all the time (and you may have noticed that vertical resolution is becoming scarce in an age when every monitor is widescreen). That's hardly throwing away usability or whatever other hyperbole you're coming up with.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[kwikrick]

Thank you. This is the truth and no mistake. Amen.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[dargaud]

Where is +5 Speaks The Truth when needed...

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[Anonymous Coward]

I should dig up my old Slashdot account so I can mod you up. This is one of the most insightful reactions to this I've read, and is dead on.

OSX and many of the other Apple UIs are vastly overrated in my opinion, and they're infiltrating everything.

It's not just Linux, either: Windows 8 is a mess because of it. Even Windows 7 introduced some of these elements, in the taskbar for example (I do not like OSX-style docking where everything gets thrown into a single icon/widget regardless of function--it takes extra steps to perform tasks related to that program).

Design as a field suffers from what I'd call the "cleverness" problem: the tendency to value cleverness over practicality or utility. So you end up with products that are aesthetically pleasing and seem clever in some way, but in actual use are completely impractical or more difficult to use than traditional designs that are seen as less innovative. Chairs are the quintessential example: you have lots of beautiful clever modern chairs you'd never want to sit on, because they'd be uncomfortable as hell or fall apart after three uses.

Apple suffers from many of these same problems in many of their products. I'm not saying all the ideas aren't worthwhile, but people become enamored of the "elegance" of the ideas without actually thinking of whether they're actually useful or not. So, for example, you have people reinventing the keyboard as iPad covers because they've discovered that having a keyboard is useful. Apple mice historically are another example of this: "let's reduce everything to one button!" For me personally, I never stopped hating the iPod controls, where everything is on a single UI element and you have to pay more attention to what you're doing. It's like people think they're more sophisticated because they can figure out how to control the volume and position on the same dial, rather than being irritated as hell that something as basic as the volume is being controlled by the same thing that controls the fast forward and rewind, and have to pay more attention to it as a result.

Apple makes good products, obviously, but every time I use them I cringe because they inherit all the problems of the design field as a whole. It's infecting everything else, and has become irritating because it combines with this faux-status crap.

To be honest, at this stage, I don't see much difference between Windows (7), OSX, and Linux. Each of them have their advantages and disadvantages. I like Linux because it's free and fun for me. I can choose the hardware I want, without having it picked for me, and don't have to deal with feeling controlled by Windows or Apple in some way. I'm fine with the fact that some people couldn't handle some of the (mild) complexity of Linux. It's not a superiority thing, it's just there's different needs for different people.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[ilsaloving]

I can't speak for others, but I just wanted to personally refute what you're saying. I myself was a big linux fan, until I realized that Mac did everything I wanted that was *nix-y, but in a stable platform that could run commercial software. So I get to have my command line terminal AND run microsoft office on the same box without having to jump through hoops.

Add to that the fact that everything 'just works', and I'm ecstatic. I don't have to cross my fingers and hope that suspend/resume works. I don't have to carve up windows drivers and use fwcutter to get my wifi working. I got to the point where I really just wanted to get my job done, and linux was getting in my way more than it was helping me. That was several years ago. I switched to OSX, and haven't looked back.

I have parallels installed for when I have to run the occasional Windows app, and almost every linux app I could want is runnable on my mac.

And I'm not saying this because I'm a fanboi (fangrrl?). I'm saying this because I'm pragmatic. I use the tools I feel are best for the job. At work I ended up switching to a Windows 7 box because I was doing enough windows-dependent development that using OSX as my primary OS was a pain.

All that being said, I've seen how linux has been making some big strides recently. But now I have the enertia of having everything as Mac, and unless Apple does something unforgivably stupid like outright restrict what applications I can install on my computer (which I can't imagine them doing...), I'm probably not going to change anytime soon.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[RogerWilco]

I find that in a lot of cases FOSS developers, and sometimes also MS developers confuse bling with usability. Apple is all about usability. As a side effect it often looks nice, but people confuse the message for the envelope it comes in.

If anything, the FOSS community is missing usability experts, or the people leading the projects listening to them.

The design of Apple products helps in selling the items and creating the image. The loyal user base ("fanboys") exists because Apple actually creates very useful products.

Apple plays for keeps, it wants to make sure it's existing customers are happy (and a bit locked in). I see that most clearly in the smartphone market, where my 3 year old iPhone 3GS is still being supported, while much newer phones aren't.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[Jicehix]

Posted parent reply as AC, didn't notice I wasn't logged on. Must say I agree with myself.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[93 Escort Wagon]

What you just said pretty much matches my experience as well. I was a desktop Linux user from 2000 to 2003, at which point I decided to give OS X a try - and found I love it. I still like to occasionally fiddle around with desktop Linux to see what's new; but with OS X it's like I've now got Unix done right. Apple would have to do a lot to drive me away, and I don't see that happening either.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[Panaflex]

I'm with you... basic office usability was getting pretty good in 2005 on Linux - and then they tore it all apart and it got much worse. The piecemeal approach of integrating compositing into X11 was a failure to me. They ended up rewriting lots of code, over and over again to support new X extensions and such. Every project needed a new backend every 3 years. IDE projects were continually started and abandoned. GUI projects threw away perfectly good, working debugged code over and over again. So much wasted effort. I quite.

I was an XFree86 member, worked on DEC Alpha drivers and did some gnome and glibc development also in 2000's. I watched XFree86 flounder and burn. I absolutely LOVE the Unix side of Linux - it works better than any Unix ever. But the GUI stability, driver stability and API stability has always sucked.

It would have been far better to just build a compositing OpenGL based window system on FBDev, with X11 as an add-on. We could have done it in a year, as the work was already done in OpenGL anyway - but our insistance on REBUILDING the same crap over and over until we arrive at the solution WE ALREADY KNEW was asinine.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[Misagon]

I thought the same way back in 2005. I used to be a Linux / Windows dual-booter. I bought a Mac because I wanted a modern OS that would have both commercial software, free software and a good user interface, including a proper command line.

However, I got fed up with the condescending nature of Apple and with the OS. I could not get things work the way I wanted it. For instance, such a simple thing as getting mouse acceleration right. The GUI also looked ridiculously blurred.
After a month, I switched back to Linux and sold the Mac.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[rjstanford]

I got to the point where I really just wanted to get my job done, and linux was getting in my way more than it was helping me.

That's it in spades. The fact that "read the documentation" on obscure command-line commands is still (in this thread no less) used as the standard response to common tasks being impossible (sharing files from Linux OS to Linux OS using a GUI was that particular example) is huge. And yet people will continue to maintain that working on OSX (or even modern Windows) is "impossible," regardless of the fact that millions of people do so with every evidence of success and, at least in the case of OSX, happiness...

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[Shadowmist]

The fact that the community seems to think this post is insightful is the crowning reason that Linux isn't going anywhere outside of a tech maven's workshop. You see desktops as workstations. Consumers see them as places to work. You see desktops as workstations. Consumers use them as lifestyle appliances. The touches that you decry as fluff, garbage, or needless complications are what they see as essential. You see desktops as an ongoing opportunity to demonstrate your technical expertise. Consumers just want things that work. Or at least they want tech support without trauma. It's hard to define Linux support when the experience can vary widely between the dozen or more active distributions in the market, each dominated by some tech geeks from Distro X's vision of how Linux should work with very little in common with the crowd of tech geeks running Distro Y. In contrast your average urban Stop And Shop has handbills offering Mac Windows support. The massive cognitive disconnect between your perception of the desktop and the perception of the rest of the planet is the major reason why Linux was not able to pick up an intercept when Microsoft dropped the ball on VISTA, as it had on Windows ME, and Windows 98 before then.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[ilsaloving]

Blurred? O_o I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Maybe you were using a screen resolution that wasn't native to the device? :D

But yeah, if you insist on lots of customizability, then a Mac is NOT for you.

  I agree that some behaviours were downright goofy, like the mouse settings. I also found the inconsistent handling of maximizing windows to be amazingly annoying. But I was able to solve that by buying a few cheap addons. Divvy for window management. TotalFinder to give me tabs on the finder windows.
Terminal was good, but iTerm is just so much better. Etc.

That being said, you went back to Linux so none of this will help you anyway. ;)

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[mikael_j]

I think Misagon might be talking about the antialiasing used for text. I've heard a lot of Windows users complain about how text on OS X looks "blurry" since they're used to ClearType and fonts being crammed forcefully into the pixel grid with little regard for how the fonts are actually supposed to look.

And yes, I'm a bit biased here, when I first started using a Mac one of the things I loved about it visually was that it managed to not have the kerning problems I'd seen way too often on Linux and at the same time didn't make fonts look absolutely horrible the way Windows does.

Re:It's not because of developers "defecting".

[couchslug]

"Basically, these designers have done everything in their power to dumb down and otherwise molest the Linux desktop experience."

That appear to be because they resent the Linux experience and as they didn't get the chance to help tardify Windows or Mac they make do by WinMaccifying Linux.

Alternative, lighter, cleaner alternatives are of course available, and Linux Mint (for example) is doing nicely.

"many within the Linux community are beginning to really feel the pain of this terrible design ideology."

Walk away and use something different. Support and promote alternatives, and discourage new users from running evil UIs. Many people are interested in Linux, and they come to geeks for advice.
Use your influence. :-)

Apple killed the linux desktop?

[CFBMoo1]

News to me since my laptop at work runs it and I use it at meeting and other things to get stuff done. When it's not letting me do worky things I have it pumping out streaming media and video like a champ.

Re:Apple killed the linux desktop?

[Lehk228]

Read summary again, desktop not laptop

Re:Apple killed the linux desktop?

[wed128]

Is there really that much of a difference? The laptop IS the desktop anymore.

Re:Apple killed the linux desktop?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Read summary again, desktop not laptop"

Did have to pay money and take special classes to come up with that, or are you an automoronic?

Change for changes sake

[CuteSteveJobs]

Microsoft did a similar thing with DirectX for graphics: They kept bringing out new versions which were incompatible with old versions, and it kept demanding rewrites. Yes, some of the new stuff is cool, but even the object names have the version numbers embedded in them e.g. LPDIRECT3DINDEXBUFFER9 === That 9 is for DirectX version 9! Sometimes you want to write code and leave it without having to spend the rest of your life rewriting it, just because some dweeb in Microsoft gets an itch. In the end we gave up and switched to OpenGL.

Re:Change for changes sake

[Blakey Rat]

The entire point of the version number is that it'll continue to behave like version 9, even when running on DX10/11/whatever. So... you're kind of arguing against your own point.

Re:Change for changes sake

[dnaumov]

Microsoft did a similar thing with DirectX for graphics: They kept bringing out new versions which were incompatible with old versions, and it kept demanding rewrites.

...citation needed

Re:Change for changes sake

[Yunzil]

Um, so what you're saying is that you don't understand programming?

If you don't want to rewrite it, then leave it alone. I have DirectX 3 games that will still run perfectly well under DirectX 11. Or do you also rewrite your code every time a new OpenGL extension comes out?

Re:Change for changes sake

[shutdown -p now]

Microsoft did a similar thing with DirectX for graphics: They kept bringing out new versions which were incompatible with old versions, and it kept demanding rewrites.

It keeps demanding rewrites only if you actually want to use that new DirectX version, but all the old stuff is still there as well. Just yesterday I ran a DirectX 3.0 app (Age of Wonders, a game released in 1999) on Windows 8.

Infighting, not developers killed Linux

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Like many other geeks I think I looked at Linux desktops back in the Gnome 1 days and thought "Hey, this thing will be really nice in a couple of years when it's finished." Fast forward a coupe of years, a lot of infighting and a rewrite later and I was still thinking that or would have I hadn't lost all faith that these guys could ever produce anything to rival commercial GUI's. So now I'm a mac user and I get all that UNIX-y goodness and none of the open source drama queen bullshit.

Re:Infighting, not developers killed Linux

[neye_eve]

So now I'm a mac user and I get all that UNIX-y goodness and none of the open source drama queen bullshit.

True. Now Apple will take care of your decisions for you so that you don't have to be exposed to that "drama queen bullshit".

Re:Infighting, not developers killed Linux

[Type44Q]

So now I'm a mac user and I get all that UNIX-y goodness and none of the open source drama queen bullshit.

And now you're safely protected behind the walls of a demonstrably evil company's garden. Anyway, having a choice has always meant there were better as well as worse options to choose from; your generalization of the open source scene as being "drama queen bulshit" (based on what, Gnome's shark-jump?) is poor attempt at a strawman to say the least.

Hell, when I got stuck with a 32bit MB Pro (did have to love that illuminated keyboard), I made it my bitch with a quick application of Mint 12 LXDE. Garden wall, meet Terex Titan. :)

Re:Infighting, not developers killed Linux

[Celarent Darii]

Well, I think he made a decision....

But seriously, let it go. No need to insult the guy and only confirm his opinion of linux drama queens.

Re:Infighting, not developers killed Linux

[CharlyFoxtrot]

And now you're safely protected behind the walls of a demonstrably evil company's garden

*eyeroll* Ok, now we've got the zealotry out of the way ...

Anyway, having a choice has always meant there were better as well as worse options to choose from; your generalization of the open source scene as being "drama queen bulshit" (based on what, Gnome's shark-jump?) is poor attempt at a strawman to say the least.

FOSS is rife with ideological battles and personal attacks that do little to nothing for end users. Gnome 1 vs KDE 1, Xorg vs XFree86, GPL2 vs GPL3, OpenOffice.org vs LibreOffice, ... And just look at the vitriol thrown at De Icaza in the comments.

Hell, when I got stuck with a 32bit MB Pro (did have to love that illuminated keyboard), I made it my bitch with a quick application of Mint 12 LXDE. Garden wall, meet Terex Titan. :)

If it works for you, more power to you. Hell, I'm staring at a Solaris workstation with Sun's Java Desktop franken-gnome right now at work. It's OK for what it does but woefully inadequate for me for my needs and wants at home. To each his own.

Re:Infighting, not developers killed Linux

[elliott666]

That is exactly how I feel. I used a brand new Ubuntu install a week ago on a friends computer. The sound didn't work. It was like a flashback to 2005 when I stopped using Linux... it's too bad really, I did love tooling around with Linux but now I get all the Unix I want from my OS X install.

Re:Infighting, not developers killed Linux

[rjstanford]

So now I'm a mac user and I get all that UNIX-y goodness and none of the open source drama queen bullshit.

True. Now Apple will take care of your decisions for you so that you don't have to be exposed to that "drama queen bullshit".

And as long as they're reasonable decisions, what's the problem with that? Some folk prefer to spend time using their computers to do stuff, rather than configuring their computers to do stuff. There's a surprisingly big difference between those two words.

Re:The real reason

[gagol]

Try Xubuntu, one thing Linux is good at is providing enough flexibility for you to escape those dumbed down distro. Failure to recognize this will get your nerd licence revoked!

Re:Wrong answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you get any more clueless?

Yes, it did help.

[neoshroom]

It didn't help that development was 'shifting to the web,' with the need for native applications on the decline.

Yes, it did help. Web applications definately make switching easier (to Mac or to Linux). He's wrong about the web emphasis hurting Linux.

I'm also not sold on the idea that it was backward compatibility that was the problem either. Of all the options, Microsoft has the OS with the best backward compatibility.

First, Mac's consistently break things with each new version, unlike de Icaza states. However, what is brilliant about Apple is every time before they introduce a new feature or break an old feature they have a huge marketing push for it. That marketing push makes the users become interested in that new feature. The developers, who want more users and who may also themselves be excited about the feature, then implement it. This is why we see apps bragging about their Retina graphics on the App Store before Retina machines are even widespread or their notifications or, back in the day, their dashboard widgets. Mountain Lion broke lots. Lion broke lots, but the Mac developers always fix this fast because they are very aware of new software versions due to marketing efforts. Linux has nobody marketing each new feature and edition and focusing both the users and developers in this way.

Secondly, Linux is too difficult for non-computer-literate users to use. It doesn't have to be and indeed strides have been made, but until you will literally never have to use the terminal and you can put a Windows software disk into your Linux CD-ROM drive (while those still exist) and have it install and automatically use Wine with the correct settings and work on the first try without tweaks, it is too hard for grandma.

That said, Ubuntu with Cairo-Dock is a dream to run compared to any version of Windows out there and I have no idea why people don't use it more. I love it. It's not my main OS though. That would be OS X. I'm one of those people using OS X as a desktop for programming that de Icaza talks about, but I can tell you it wasn't backward-compatibility that made me choose it.

Re:Yes, it did help.

[BanHammor]

That said, any OS is hard for the computer-illiterate.

Gaming is what kills Linux desktop

[begonia]

I hear it over and over -- I'd run Linux if I could play games.

Of course, Mark Shuttleworth and Unity, Gnome3, and KDE are trying their best to kill it too. It's getting harder and harder to find a good windows manager on Linux.

Re:Gaming is what kills Linux desktop

[BanHammor]

If you are looking for a good WM in the sphere of Unity/Gnome3/KDE, you should re-evaluate what you want from a WM. If you are looking for a good DE, I find KDE more than satisfactory, especially if you start by the minimal package and only install apps you like.

Re:Gaming is what kills Linux desktop

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I hear it over and over -- I'd run Linux if I could play games.

That didn't stop OS X from growing, even though the mac is (or rather was) notoriously lacking in the games department. In fact OS X is only now getting serious attention from game studios by riding on the coattails of its more popular little brother IOS.

Re:Gaming is what kills Linux desktop

[toriver]

The Steam support for Mac is a more significant contributor - though there are indeed a few iOS ports in the Mac App Store.

broke whose code?

[NynexNinja]

Not sure why they give this guy a voice, but whose code got broken? Xlib has been around for decades. GTK has been around for decades. KDE has been around for decades. QT has been around for decades.

Re:broke whose code?

[Tubal-Cain]

Didn't KDE break for 4.0?

Re:broke whose code?

[BanHammor]

And yet I still manage to run some of the apps written in KDE3 era. (But everybody switched to Qt4 in the past 4 years anyway.) Compat libs are still there.

Re:broke whose code?

[romiz]

A single example: the "make xconfig" tool for the Linux kernel requires a specific variant of the QT toolkit to build, and the correct variant is QT3 for 2.6.32.x, while it is QT4 for the current dev branch. If the build environment points to the wrong QT version, the build will fail with cryptic messages, which means that you would need to sandbox your kernel compilation to compile both on the same machine. Of cource, most of the people in this situation uses the "make menuconfig" option, that uses libcurses in a terminal emulator instead.

I don't know whether this is a problem with the kernel's developpers or a general QT3/4 problem, but this is for sure a bad situation, and I expect that other projects have had the same kind of issues (forward & backward incompatibilities on the source level) with QT.

Re:broke whose code?

[gl4ss]

He's a Gnome guy. I think he knows a bit about breaking sw. also a MS mvp.

Re:broke whose code?

[jmv]

Xlib has been around for decades. GTK has been around for decades. KDE has been around for decades. QT has been around for decades.

Xlib is a good example of compatibility (thought you never want to code to this library directly). I can't speak for QT/KDE, but GTK/Gnome definitely broke compatible quite badly in the past. I'm no longer developing for gnome (mostly because of that), so I can't speak for gnome3, but the transition from gtk1/gnome1 to gtk2/gnome2 was absolutely terrible in terms of compatibility. The API for many gtk2 widgets changed, while gnome2 actually removed entire chunks from their API. It took quite a bit of effort to update code. Not only that but even during the gnome2 cycles, APIs would just come and go. "If you want to do X, use this library" "No actually, we have something better to do X". "Nevermind what we just said, we've deprecated all of them, you should use this new one, promised".

Re:broke whose code?

[DutchUncle]

My code got broken. And I found out that "deprecated" really meant "We took it out of the library, screw all the applications that used it, especially yours, and screw you too for not wanting to recompile your kernel every hour or two to keep up with us". So I went back to embedded systems and RTOSes that don't jerk people around so much.

Re:broke whose code?

[romiz]

There may have been other reasons for this issue, as a misconfigured enviroment, but I can assure you the I have encountered this kind of problem...

Re:Desktops are pigs for refurbs

[AdmV0rl0n]

Refurbished Pentium 4's are a terrible pair of rose tinted glasses to view your computing through. Basing that on your computational future isn't in a good boundary layer.
While lightweight OSs have a place - its not a be all and end all. New computer equipment is in relative terms cheap.

As for Linux, Miguel is right. A sea of shifting APIs might be accepted at the edge, but anyone making stuff needs stability and this is what you get on a Windows or OSX platform - to some degree. Its never total.

Is linux still arguing over the 20 ways to do sound? Still? In 2012?

Good luck to the steam guys trying to build on this sea of swirling open source maelstrom :)

Re:The real reason

[StefanWiesendanger]

OS X had already killed Linux on the desktop when Ubuntu didn't even exist yet.

Dead?

[sa666u]

The Linux desktop is not dead. I've been using one for the past 10 years. The community is more alive and vibrant than ever, there is a virtually unlimited choice. I really find these discussions completely pointless and the product of sulking disillusioned developers. For a largely free, community driven project, Linux is a wild success. I love it and will continue to use it until the day comes when we'll no longer be allowed to choose what software or hardware to use.

Re:Dead?

[Urza9814]

I know. This article would have made more sense 2-4 years ago I'd say. 2008-2010 were bad years for Linux in my book. Terrible time with hardware compatibility. Cheap wifi cards were in every computer and none of them had Linux drivers.

But today? Today you install Linux and everything just works. Running Arch on my new HP laptop is a beautiful experience.

Re:Dead?

[sa666u]

The thing is that OSX and Linux are not direct competitors. It's like saying cars killed bikes. The two are very different and they offer completely different benefits and experience.

API Changes

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because the whole NeXtStep -> Rhapsody -> PostScript -> Quartz -> Cocoa never broke anything.

I'm personally disappointed - not about linux

[moniker127]

I can't believe that in 2012 we STILL doesn't have direct comparability of software between operating systems. Wasn't this something we were going to fix in the 80s? Writing a program shouldn't be writing it for a particular OS, it should be writing it for computers in general. This is the kind of thing the government needs to mandate. (yes, I'm aware of the open source movement and have not been burying my head in the sand, I just think its bullshit that none of the big players can come together and agree on a damn standard of interoperability. Its like we've completely lost sight of that goal.

Re:I'm personally disappointed - not about linux

[ecbpro]

Totally agree with you. And now with the smartphones it is only getting worse. A global executable file compatibility would be nice to have.

Re:I'm personally disappointed - not about linux

[moniker127]

I honestly disagree. There are conventions used in programming, but there is ALWAYS a way to structure a program for modularity and interoperability. Those who don't write like this do so because of a lack time or motivation.

Re:I'm personally disappointed - not about linux

[Blakey Rat]

There are tools that do that-- RealBasic/RealStudio used to be very healthy a few years ago-- just nobody uses them.

Re:I'm personally disappointed - not about linux

[Celarent Darii]

I think VM's have made most of that effort simply not worth it. Much easier to build a VM container than linking tons of compatibility libraries.

Re:I'm personally disappointed - not about linux

[Shadowmist]

I can't believe that in 2012 we STILL doesn't have direct comparability of software between operating systems. Wasn't this something we were going to fix in the 80s? Writing a program shouldn't be writing it for a particular OS, it should be writing it for computers in general. This is the kind of thing the government needs to mandate.

Thing is those pesky operating systems refused to stay still. They got all graphical on us, added tons of different functions and system calls and each insisted on going their own way. So yes you DO have programs that you can run on multiple operating systems, bloated slowware running on Java with lowest common denominator interfaces. But people want more than that they want programs that take advantage of what the OS has to offer. Adobe does LCD which means it's program inteface is fine for windows and sucks for OS X. LCD programming might be fine for you but others have higher standards.

Re:Desktops are pigs for refurbs

[BanHammor]

So, is WASAPI or Directsound right this time on windows? Maybe ASIO? sigh.

Re:One word:

[sidthegeek]

It's a catch-22. Commercial software firms won't write consumer products for Linux because there isn't enough demand. There isn't enough demand for Linux because it doesn't run much commercial software.

If this is true, then Linux killed OSX server

[Meatbucket]

Ironic how the article claims OSX killed Linux on the desktop when OSX Server hardware had pretty much died (or maybe never really took off) almost at the same time.

COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[lkcl]

it's real, real simple. the successful OSes have, at their heart, a highly effective "Common Object Model" of some description, which provides a) fully-compliant backwards compatibility across APIs, dating back even 20 years b) interoperability between applications and application components *regardless* of the language they're written in.

every f*****g time i raise this successful strategy - deployed by both microsoft (DCE/RPC and then DCOM) *and* apple (Objective-C has an Object Model built-in to the language) - on free software mailing lists, i get shouted down. i get told "that stuff is a piece of shit, why are you even bothering to mentioning it?"

now, the linux distros are paying the price of that arrogance, why is anyone even surprised?

firefox. firefox has a "COM-like" system which was "inspired" by microsoft's COM. it's called XPCOM. what XPCOM does *not* have is the ability to merge interfaces (they're called "coclasses"). that has two implications:

1) whenever there's a change to an interface, all backwards compatibility is lost. with coclasses you can have *both* the "old" interface as well as the "new" one, supported by the *same* application.

2) if you want to have "default values"... you can't. what XPCOM has to have instead is a highly-dubious modification which adds as an *extra* explicit argument into the actual function saying how many arguments are actually used! imagine if the people who wrote the ANSI-C++ standard said "oh yes, if you want the last arguments of any function call to be optional then the very first argument has to be an integer saying how many parameters there are", there would be people laughing at them for decades.

i've raised this with the mozilla foundation core developers at least twice. the first time i was told by one of the key subcontractors that coclasses were "too complicated" for the mozilla developers to understand. the second time, that person wasn't there: i raised it directly with the mozilla foundation core developers; they didn't understand, took it as personal criticism and then later on enacted very fascist censorship onto the mozilla mailing lists, preventing any further discussion.

so, that subcontractor was indeed right: the concept of coclasses *is* too complicated for the mozilla core developers to comprehend. .... but it's not just the mozilla foundation developers.

the KDE team had an opportunity to replace DCOP with something more substantial, as part of the $10m E.U-grant-sponsored KDE4 redesign: i recommended that they start with FreeDCE and go from there.... and they didn't.

the Gnome team make extensive use of GObject, but GObject is a very very poor substitute for COM. only now with the GObject "Introspection" is it *beginning* to approach the capabilities of COM, but because GObject has no concept of co-classes, *again*, there is no way to have backwards-compatibility for APIs.

i won't even get into what happened with the webkit developers.

the bottom line is that time and time again, in every major engineering team behind each of the major projects which make up "a linux desktop" as we see it, there has been a fundamental failure to comprehend the power of having a strong base on which to create good successful software.

that success - stability of APIs and interoperability between components regardless of programming language - can *only* be achieved by using something like COM, with language bindings for every known major programming language, and support for "co-classes" that are then actually *used* - properly - by the developers.

this takes discipline, and i don't see any of the major free software projects getting this, any time soon.

miguel: i've raised FreeDCE with you, before. i know it was 10 years ago :) however, since then, i've learned that the WINE team have actually gone and made pretty much a complete implementation of both MSRPC *and* COM, including, i believe, a complete server implementation (albeit a basic one). they no longer require the installation of DCOM98.EXE for example which is a good sign. also i heard of a guy who managed to "extract" all that client-server code into a separate project: he called it "TangramCOM".

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

So your complaint is that you don't know x11 messaging and dbus?

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[gbjbaanb]

no, his complaint is that there are too many different ways of accessing different components, and that it would be really nice if everyone used a common one.

I think Linux already has this - its the file API, where "everything is a file" concept and you build your systems by piping inputs to outputs. An OO object model would be a bit restrictive and is definitely coming from a programmer viewpoint rather than a sysadmin one.

Incidentally, DCE was excellent, so it would be a good choice if Linux did decide upon a common API system, but that in itself would be against the concept of Linux. Stick with streaming data between apps.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[benjymouse]

So your complaint is that you don't know x11 messaging and dbus?

I'm fairly certain that was not what GP meant. But you already knew that.

However, it is indeed ironic how you illustrate GPs point very well by suggesting that x11 messaging and dbus are at all comparable to COM/DCOM. The problems solved by having a OS defined common object model are very real, and versioning/backwards compatibility is just one such problem.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

I'm fairly certain that was not what GP meant. But you already knew that.

His examples seemed pretty clear to me.

The problems solved by having a OS defined common object model are very real, and versioning/backwards compatibility is just one such problem.

I'm failing to understand the issue, there isn't actually that many standards. File sockets was the unix way of doing it, x11 is pretty much just the old way of doing IPC in a graphical environment, dbus is the new way that was intended to combine both graphical and non-graphical communications as well as provided methods to offer extended services for 'future technologies' created without requiring rewriting the standard.

As for versioning, x11's versioning was extremely graceful and so is dbus's, so I genuinely don't see the issue. None of these implementations suffered the faults the COM/DCOM system did with regards to reference counting, name space collisions with DLL hell (for registering a specific provider for certain functionality) - In actual fact the versioning Linux libraries use prevent this to begin with and message pumping that would cause system wide lock ups.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[lkcl]

So your complaint is that you don't know x11 messaging and dbus?

ahh, that's a fatal mistake to mention d-bus where i can hear it being said :) i'll deal with this first, then answer your question directly, ok?

back in 2005 i did a comparison of the d-bus specification and the DCE/RPC specification. the similarity was... unbelievable. i mean, truly, truly unbelievable. the people who wrote the d-bus specification could *literally* have taken the DCE/RPC specification, substituted different words and then published it as the d-bus specification. let me reiterate that, for emphasis, in a different way. *every* concept that is in d-bus is in DCE/RPC.

however, what d-bus does *not* have is the higher-level APIs. d-bus is so immature when you compare it to DCE/RPC (and then to DCOM which is built on top of DCE/RPC) that it is a child's toy by comparison. the main thing that d-bus is missing - the main benefit which you get from DCE/RPC and DCOM - is the IDL compiler.

d-bus expects you to hand-marshal all the data! you get a whole bunch of macros, and you're expected to make your own messages out of them! that's just so fucking shit! you'd actually be better off ripping out d-bus from every single application that has that piece of shit in it, and replacing it with 1500 lines of c code, implementing a unix domain socket, and a bunch of #ifdef macros e.g the SIVAL and SSVAL ones from samba's smb.h header file!

why is that?

because d-bus gives you the *expectation* that it's solving a problem, when in fact it's doing nothing of the sort. at least 1500 lines of c code and a few macros leaves you under no illusions that you still have a hell of a lot of work to do. .... which finally provides some context which allows me to answer your question. d-bus DOES NOT provide a means to make it easy to do backwards-compatible interfaces. it doesn't even make it easy to make *one* interface, so of *course* developers go and change the API and throw out all backwards-compatibility.

what i'm saying is: you've entirely missed the point of what miguel is getting at, and what i am also emphasising. perhaps this is due to a lack of concrete examples. so let's make one, ok?

what do you imagine would happen if you took some component - say... a gnome "clock" widget that plugs into the taskbar - and by that i mean you took the *binary* not the source code - from Gnome 1.0 (whenever it was written - when was it - 15 years ago, now?) and tried to use it in Gnome 3.0?

what would happen? it would utterly, utterly fail, wouldn't it?

now, what miguel's pointing out is that even if you took code from *six months ago*, you have the same problem! and that the consequences of this, over the 15+ years in which linux desktop software has been developing - have burdened both the developers, the users and the gnu/linux distros - with constant problems that they're just getting fed up with.

contrast this with the fact - the FACT - that if you grabbed a random 20-year-old Microsoft OLE (COM) / Active-X (COM) DLL from anywhere off the internet (assuming you can find it), and you tried dropping that Active-X component into I.E. 10 or into the absolute latest-and-greatest version of microsoft office, guess what will happen? IT WILL FUCKING WELL WORK. ... does that drive the point home? do you understand now that saying "you don't know how x11 messaging or d-bus work" is a) failing to appreciate that i know a fuck of a lot about inter-process communication b) entirely missing the point.

x11 messaging only works because it hasn't really changed significantly. even if you use x11 messaging for general-purpose communications, you *still* have to create backwards-compatible APIs, and i don't imagine that x11 messaging offers any significant assistance in doing that (otherwise i would have heard about it, a looong time ago).

backwards-compatibl

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[lkcl]

no, his complaint is that there are too many different ways of accessing different components, and that it would be really nice if everyone used a common one.

thank you for chipping in, here, gbj - but that's not quite it. what i was doing was supporting miguel's original assertion, that linux on the desktop has failed due to binary-level API non-interoperability (see the little example i gave about trying to run a gnome 1.0 binary widget on a gnome 3.0 system). and i describe a potential technology which, *if used*, *could* have solved that problem.

I think Linux already has this - its the file API, where "everything is a file" concept and you build your systems by piping inputs to outputs.

ah no: again, this is another example that is comparable to d-bus and to x11 messaging. files *don't* have - per se - the concept of "binary interface backwards-compatibility" built in to them. yes, sure, files can be used to transfer the messages, but unless those messages are used to ask "what version of the interface do you support?" and to go from there, it's of absolutely no real value and is missing the point.

An OO object model would be a bit restrictive and is definitely coming from a programmer viewpoint rather than a sysadmin one.

the full power of COM - when used properly - is *not* restrictive. at all. you do however have to cross a certain "pain threshold" in both your programming and also your outlook and perceptions - before being able to fully appreciate the power of COM. by the time you get to Visual Basic, for example, all that "pain" has *entirely* gone.

in fact, you end up with an entirely new problem, which is the one that microsoft now suffers from. the use of COM in Visual Basic is *so* easy and *so* transparent that not even the new developers who joined microsoft as the years went by truly truly understand - understood - it. so, they instead started talking about doing something called ".NET", and "Silverlight", entirely forgetting that the earlier success of microsoft was based on COM.

Incidentally, DCE was excellent, so it would be a good choice if Linux did decide upon a common API system, but that in itself would be against the concept of Linux.

yes. exactly. and there you have it, in a nutshell. linux on the desktop is failing... because there is no driving motivation to pull together and work together. isn't that sad? all that source code out there, and from one month to another, because of this failure to agree to use a common subsystem (in direct contrast to apple and microsoft *have* set a common subsystem), none of that code can really properly talk to any other bits of code.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[martin-boundary]

COM is a poor way of doing client/server and dynamic link libraries rolled into one. There are only a few problems solved by COM objects which already have proven solutions in Unix/Linux like systems:

1) having one COM object offering services to several applications to reduce duplication. It's a client/server design, but with nonstandard communication betwen the client and the server in the form of an API instead of a socket connection. When the connection breaks because the COM object or the application crashes, you get failures that aren't as clean to recover from as a proper socket connection. When you use dynamic link libraries, you get more graceful handling of versioning (note: versioning of DLLs in Windows is hell).

2) The Unix pipeline/scripting approach is a cleaner way to combine common functionality available on the system than combining COM objects. At the core the issue is that COM object interfaces are too diverse to be mixed and matched as easily as a collection of scripts with command line switches. In particular, it's a pain to shunt an extra middle man object between some program calling a COM object's API member function, and the API function being called, because member function signatures are too diverse. With the command line paradigm this is much easier.

3) The Unix filesystem philosophy is more robust than a special purpose registry of data. Since COM objects aren't intended to be standalone server applications, they normally have to be managed by a complex support system. By contrast, in Unix systems the applications are essentially on their own, which leads to a simpler base system, which can be optimized more readily. In particular, the system doesn't have to load a miriad of components during boot just because the shell needs hundreds of COM objects which depend on hundreds of others, all to display a mouse and some icons.

4) While you might think that 20 years is old for some COM based applications, you might like to know that popular editors on Unix like Emacs or vi for example are well past 30. It is safe to say that if their success did not depend on a system of COM objects provided by some system.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

what do you imagine would happen if you took some component - say... a gnome "clock" widget that plugs into the taskbar - and by that i mean you took the *binary* not the source code - from Gnome 1.0 (whenever it was written - when was it - 15 years ago, now?) and tried to use it in Gnome 3.0?

The same thing that would happen if I took clock.exe from windows 1.1 and tried to run it in windows 7.

now, what miguel's pointing out is that even if you took code from *six months ago*, you have the same problem! and that the consequences of this, over the 15+ years in which linux desktop software has been developing - have burdened both the developers, the users and the gnu/linux distros - with constant problems that they're just getting fed up with.

Except I have scripts that automatically switch power states, networking configurations and screen locks from a year and half ago that I haven't rewritten working today on the latest verison of Kubuntu. The fact a single application can't do it doesn't mean the entire system is broken, it just means that application wasn't designed properly and there are similar issues with older com applications when you have conflicts. Older com providers in the past typically had the same registered name despite being major version differences and if you installed an application that installed an older version of a com component, all your new applications would suddenly stop working, even if it was installed in a entirely different location because it made a new registration on the com system. The fact Gnome (which admittedly, I'm not really familiar with, so I'm just going to trust your word on this) didn't choose their namespaces properly or figure out a better plan for supporting backwards compatibility has nothing to with dbus sucking, the same issues exist in com.

contrast this with the fact - the FACT - that if you grabbed a random 20-year-old Microsoft OLE (COM) / Active-X (COM) DLL from anywhere off the internet (assuming you can find it), and you tried dropping that Active-X component into I.E. 10 or into the absolute latest-and-greatest version of microsoft office, guess what will happen?

I still have an old version of syncterm on my system that has x11 messaging support for being controlled via other application. It still works today on a modern x.org server from a perl script.

i can't.... i can't begin to get across to you, if you don't understand this by now, quite how powerful a concept this is, and it's one that, clearly, the linux community *doesn't* understand or appreciate... to everyone's detriment.

I just think you're just being selective in your comparisons. The solutions already exist on the OS.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

You realize this is a non-issue because of how you're supposed to use namespaces is identical to how you handle library namespaces on Linux?

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

Ash-Fox confirmed for ignorant retard.

u mad?

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[lkcl]

backwards-compatible APIs requires the developers to maintain a long-term discipline, committing to at least a 10-year support lifetime for any API. if the underlying technology doesn't even offer that as a feature, let alone make it easy to do, guess what? they're not going to bother!

correction: committing to at least a 10-year support lifetime for *multiple versions* of any one API.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[hannson]

Wasn't that figured out in Plan 9 using file system namespaces and 9P? I'd love to see what the Linux community could do with that.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[RogerWilco]

I think in part this is where the Linux kernel dropped the ball. Such a common layer should not depend on what desktop you use.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[tyrione]

Anyone who thinks NeXT and now Apple's Object Model is a POS is FOS. Sorry, but nothing in Linux is remotely as elegant, powerful and reusable. All everyone has been doing since 1994 is incorporating more and more ideas from NeXT and it started with Java [many of Java's architects came from NeXT].

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[shutdown -p now]

Given that the vast majority of Win32 API is not COM-based, and is in fact plain C functions and structs, your argument doesn't really make a lot of sense. You can absolutely have stable, properly versioned API without an object model.

And I don't get this obsession with coclasses. There's nothing a coclass does that cannot be done in COM with just interfaces and global factory functions (which is exactly what e.g. DirectX does).

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[benjymouse]

COM is a poor way of doing client/server and dynamic link libraries rolled into one.

Opinion.

There are only a few problems solved by COM objects which already have proven solutions in Unix/Linux like systems:

1) having one COM object offering services to several applications to reduce duplication. It's a client/server design, but with nonstandard communication betwen the client and the server in the form of an API instead of a socket connection.

It may not be *your* standard, or a Unix standard, but COM is a windows standard which is very well documented. You also conflate sockets with higher level communications. Sockets are the channels over which 2 processes communicate. But sockets does not specify how to send a datetime, a floating point number or an interface which allow remote control of an application. This is what COM is for.

You also completely ignore the fact that COM is a way to build software, where sockets are still a way to make software pieces communicate. In Word, for instance, the document model is built from a number of COM classes (paragraphs, sections, headings etc). Word itself internally uses COM - which it can do because COM itself is a binary standard for organization of virtual method tables with extremely little overhead. Thus, COM objects can be used in-process, using references, passing pointers. Not so with sockets. This just goes to show how little you understand when you compare COM to sockets.

When the connection breaks because the COM object or the application crashes,
you get failures that aren't as clean to recover from as a proper socket connection.

BS. COM/DCOM has a very mature failure model. Under DCOM objects has leases which ensures that objects are released if connection is lost. If you use a remote COM/DCOM object and the communication fails you are immediately notified. Are you just making things up as you go?

When you use dynamic link libraries, you get more graceful handling of versioning (note: versioning of DLLs in Windows is hell).

Again BS. COM has a very simple and remarkably robust versioning scheme: Interfaces are suffixed with a version. If a server extends an interface in a non-breaking way (e.g. only adding methods) the same interface can be passed to a client which asks for the "older" version. If the change is breaking the server can still relatively simple accomodate both interfaces. As for DLL hell, where have you been living? Windows solved that with side-by-side assemblies. You havent has anything resembling DLL hell since Windows XP (SxS was introduced with Windows XP). It is Linux that is stuck in the past with dependency hell. Software repositories is only a superficial solution to the problem: All software using the same libraries must still agree on the same versions. Step outside the repository and you are immediately in dependency hell.

2) The Unix pipeline/scripting approach is a cleaner way to combine common functionality available on the system than combining COM objects. At the core the issue is that COM object interfaces are too diverse to be mixed and matched as easily as a collection of scripts with command line switches.

What are you going on about? Now you are comparing COM to the CLI? COM is a way to *build* software so that the pieces can be exposed to external parties. Command line interfaces with "switches" is nothing of the sort.

In particular, it's a pain to shunt an extra middle man object between some program calling a COM object's API member function, and the API function being called, because member function signatures are too diverse. With the command line paradigm this is much easier.

You do not build applications by combining processes through sockets. Is that how you would build Writer? Sockets are used to making applications talk to eachother, not for building the internals of

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Rich0]

what do you imagine would happen if you took some component - say... a gnome "clock" widget that plugs into the taskbar - and by that i mean you took the *binary* not the source code - from Gnome 1.0 (whenever it was written - when was it - 15 years ago, now?) and tried to use it in Gnome 3.0?

The same thing that would happen if I took clock.exe from windows 1.1 and tried to run it in windows 7.

I suspect you're basically making his point - did COM exist in Windows 1.1? I wouldn't be surprised if clock.exe from windows 3 did actually work in win7, and one from win95 would be even more likely to do so. If his point is that some Windows IPC feature was key to its success, then pointing out that Windows wasn't as nifty before that feature was added is just making his point.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

I wouldn't be surprised if clock.exe from windows 3 did actually work in win7

It wouldn't.

If his point is that some Windows IPC feature was key to its success, then pointing out that Windows wasn't as nifty before that feature was added is just making his point.

His point was about versioning, however software that old did not have Windows' RegFree com technology and his Linux examples were based on developers that didn't use best practices with dbus and reusing the same name spaces for major version changes, which would be no different from a windows developer ignoring best practices and sticking with the old com registration system using identical name spaces or using a bad assembly manifest (which is more common than you'd think thanks to Visual Studio being a bit 'too' smart).

However, his clock example was relatively non-sense because the first reason it would not work is due to binary problems which the clock application from older versions of Windows will also exhibit and then clarifying that it had to be the binary, not recompiled from sources. Do you see where I'd feel this is utter non-sense?

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[DaveV1.0]

The same thing that would happen if I took clock.exe from windows 1.1 and tried to run it in windows 7.

Please post a screen shot of this occurring.

Except I have scripts that ...

Is it that you don't know the difference between scripts and complied applications or that you know the difference and are making a false equivalency or that you are deliberately extending the discussion to something not being discussed (scripts) to "score points" (red herring) or that you are extending the example beyond the original endpoint of the discussion (moving the goal posts)?

I still have an old version of syncterm on my system that has x11 messaging support for being controlled via other application. It still works today on a modern x.org server from a perl script.

How about using something from X10, assuming you can find it?

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

Please post a screen shot of this occurring.

I really can't be assed to go through the effort, really.

But to simplify it for you, the PE headers would need to be modified for it to even run on windows 3.11 due to the explicit deprecation Microsoft made for older windows applications, then you may have a problem with DEP on XP and definately a problem running 16bit applications on Windows Vista and higher, which means you'll just end up running windows 1.1 inside a virtual machine.

On the Linux side, it's a matter of satisfying dependencies from libc to a gnome 1.0 environment where you'll end up probably running it inside a gnome 1.0 instance in a Xephyr, which is only slightly better than having to run it inside a virtual machine.

Case in point: Neither will run out of the box, same thing.

Is it that you don't know the difference between scripts and complied applications or that you know the difference and are making a false equivalency or that you are deliberately extending the discussion to something not being discussed (scripts) to "score points" (red herring) or that you are extending the example beyond the original endpoint of the discussion (moving the goal posts)?

I gave adequate examples of using them with older software too on a modern system, such as when I mentioned syncterm (a mostly statically linked binary) with scripts that ran on a modern version of the interpreter that manipulated it through x11 messages.

How about using something from X10, assuming you can find it?

Back then Unix sockets were used for IPC, kind of like how Microsoft was using DDE for IPC instead of COM back then.

But, you could still communicate with a statically built application from decades ago using unix sockets just fine. On Windows, not so much because 16bit application are no longer supported (however DDE as an API still exists in Windows today).

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[DaveV1.0]

a) Pics or it didn't happen.
b) Apparently you don't know the difference between a script and a compiled program.
c) In other words, you are using the same version of the X Window System. No big surprise it continues to work.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

a) Pics or it didn't happen.

Cry some more.

b) Apparently you don't know the difference between a script and a compiled program.

Apparently you ignore the fact the interpreter is a program and using a current interpreter included with the distribution to manipulate an old piece of software still counts.

c) In other words, you are using the same version of the X Window System. No big surprise it continues to work.

Selective reading.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[wertigon]

Dude, talk about missing the point entirerly.

What the grandparent said, was this: Windows solves the problem with COM. UNIX solves it with sockets and scripting/piping. Two different methods, neither is better than the other, both have advantages and drawbacks.

So, what's the point in introducing a piece of software which does not bring anything *new* to the table, in an Ecosystem that has been established and mature since the eighties?

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[shutdown -p now]

CoClasses are COM versioning support... the same public interface/COM_Object can hide several implementations/CoClasses.

Surely you mean it the other way around? A single COM object is definitely at most one coclass (or possibly zero, if it's backed by a private implementation that's not directly activatable), but it can expose several interfaces, and you can go from one to another via QueryInterface.

. You are right that global factory funtions offer equivalent model, but not having TLB you lost systemic automatic version match integration verification of dependencies; you must code it explicitly

A coclass does not necessarily have a type library. And type library does not offer any verification of dependencies for coclasses or anything else; it's purely a metadata provider.

Coclasses have some form of versioning in a sense if you go by ProgIDs, where you can specify the generic version-less ProgID and let it pick whatever is available on the machine. But that's all very basic.

The brand new WinRT for Win8 its mostly COM under a new name, to wrap that "terse and consistent" Win32 API (resulting from short sighted or half baked api design; so maybe COM really is MS way of fixing versioning issues)

WinRT is more like .NET object model trimmed shoehorned on top of COM as an ABI. Also, it doesn't really wrap Win32 API all that much - e.g. all the new XAML UI stuff does not wrap anything, it's a first-class WinRT library.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[javagility]

Agreed. I build enterprise applications around well-understood and widely-adopted standards like SOA, ReST, SOAP, XML, etc. Without a well-thought-out set of standards and interfaces the components of any system end up tightly coupled; fragility goes up and interoperability goes down as systems grow and age. It doesn't matter if the system is a microwave oven OS or an n-tier e-commerce application; good design and universal buy-in to the design goals are important. In the early days of open source Java framework development (I pitched in on several Apache projects) there was a definite "maverick" or "cowboy" attitude afoot, but we eventually came to the realization that if we continued to build marginally usable (though innovative and well-intentioned) stuff, only a curious and determined few would get any benefit from it. The Linux desktop design/developer community will have to come to this same realization if Linux is to be anything but a curiosity; I really hope they do, and soon. I've used Linux exclusively on the desktop since 2007. I often marvel at its versatility, but 10 minutes later it makes me want to poke jagged bamboo sticks into my eyes when I ask it to do something ordinary that its creators failed to anticipate and correctly implement.

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

exactly. whereas COM has basically never changed (not at a fundamental level) since it was first deployed eek 2 decades ago. every COM object is self-describing so its functions can be enumerated. the OLE concept goes even further: there are standard interfaces (e.g. "GetData" which, surprisingly, allows you to gain access to the data of the object, and *that* is a self-describing, self-documenting interface as well)

Is this meant to matter when you still can't run the applications anyway as in the situation my quotation was about?

Or the fact that you can't have multiple versions of related software installed because you could only have one COM registered, then the workaround being a manifest file which really only helps if you did it right at compile time? (hint: Few developers ever test this)

then also COM and other COM-like systems make it *easy* to create backwards-compatible interface versioning, and, as a general rule, once one set of examples gets out there (and the MSIE IDL files are the absolute classic example) then even the most noddy programmers tend to follow suit and stick with the same practice.

Except in my other examples, I have shown modern applications communicating with old ones just fine on Linux, without any modifications on my end at all. I'd say that's pretty easy - it just requires development of the particular applications done correctly, just like on windows - I would say it's easier since it's just using sane name spaces as opposed to goofy manifest files.

the point is that both the discipline and the easy-to-use core technology are both entirely missing from the linux community.

If by discipline you mean developers doing the correct thing, then I've seen far too much shit on to believe this is common on Windows. See issues with manifest files and reregistration of components with older libraries that don't work with newer applications - versioning did nothing for it. Amazingly, if Windows developers had followed saner versioning schemes like library versions being apart of the namespace, these issues could have been avoided, even by Microsoft's own conflicts instead of inventing an even more convoluted system with manifest files.

As for 'easy-to-use core technology', I don't think you can get anything more basic as 'file sockets', sane namespaces, if you want dumb, easy technology. Or escalate up with higher level libraries that make use of x11, dbus etc.

because adding COM-like systems into kernels

It doesn't really matter if it's userland or kernel at the end of the day. If it did, Windows wouldn't be in a better position since it uses services to segregate that functionality outside of the kernel.

he pointed out that there seems to be a general ethos to follow "the leaders" such as linus torvalds, who right or wrong do *not* support the concept of binary backwards-compatibility

Honestly, I think you're mixing arguments here, binary compatibility in the kernel is different from the userland. Linux applications tend to be written against the userland libc, not the kernel. For this reason, I can get ancient userland applications running just fine by copying the old libc those applications are dependent on (if they're not statically linked - statically linked wise means they have no dependencies and should 'just work') and and other dependencies.. Prestro, they work. And usually for the most part it won't be conflicting with the rest of the system as long as the name spaces of the libraries it depends on doesn't conflict with the existing user space... But even if it did, ld_preloadpath and fakeroot are fairly quick workarounds for it.

Compare with Windows (and I'll even ignore 16bit applications this time) where you still have some absurd applications that depend on windows 3 APIs which were used in some 32bit applications since Microsoft di

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[lennier]

I just think you're just being selective in your comparisons. The solutions already exist on the OS.

No, they really don't.

About ten years ago I was thinking about dipping my feet in Linux application development and started looking at the different object models then available, trying to work out which one was going to prevail. It was madness... and the situation hasn't got better since then. Shall I enumerate them for you, hmm? Keep in mind that the root of problem isn't just that we have a hopeless mishmash of implementations, but that we have a mismash of core object semantics that don't compose well.

Linux object model roll call!

GNOME: GObject. Still the official standard, based on C and now "Vala", no persistence, no remoting, several iterations of failed C++ wrappers
GNOME: Bonobo. Based on CORBA for remoting, but used its own funky CORBA implementation, very quickly abandoned
Freedesktop: D-bus. Sort of halfway of an object model only used for IPC, requires an underlying object model on the client.
KDE: Qt. C++ library which ate the whole desktop, requires its own preprocessor for its own "extended" obejct model, so not quite pure C++. No persistence.
KDE: KParts. Object model on top of Qt's special sauce. I think it's still there in the architecture?
KDE: DCOP. Object model on top of Qt's special sauce. I think deprecated now in favour of D-bus?
Firefox: XPCOM. Cross-platform object model cloned off of MS COM. But subtly different, of course. Based on C++. No persistence or remoting, I think.
LibreOffice: UNO. Cross-platform object model I think based on COM or CORBA or something. And of course unique to LibreOffice project. Persistence built in, but probably not remoting.
JavaBeans: Hey look, we still have Java on Linux, and yeah, it's got its own object model with persistence and remoting and stuff. Enterprise users probably live and breathe the stuff, but nobody else really.
Mono: .NET clone which tried to eat GNOME and of course has its own object model, or two of them, based on .NET's assemblies and COM and whathaveyou. Subtly different to all the rest of course.
Wine: MS COM. Well of course we also have the WINE project and that's got to implement MS COM somehow. But can it map directly onto any underlying native object system? Course not!
Good old fashioned filesystem: If it wasn't in Unix 1.0 in 1969 then I don't want it on my Linux! /etc files are a good object model enough for anyone! etc. Available in a million flavours of kernel filesystem AND desktop project VIRTUAL filesystem APIs, of course. This is actually a good solution for persistence, but sadly not for remoting because Plan 9 never got adopted.
X11's.... stuff. Yep, X11 has a sort of IPC mechanism which if you squint at it a bit might looks sort of like an "object model", since there's windows that persist across multiple processes and have their own data storage and stuff, but you don't really want to do that or you'll go mad. But it's there under the hood just to make sure nothing is 100% easy.

Oh, but that's not all. We've also got various flavours of semi-official languages at the application and system level with their OWN object models, most of which live in only the one running process and evaporate when runtime ends. Mostly.

C (with or without GObject)
C++ (with or without Qt's special slot sauce and the K object models)
Perl (whose "object model" is best forgotten, but still runs most of the world)
PHP (confined to the web server, where it's the worst possible candidate for the job, and therefore used everywhere)
Python (the "official" Ubuntu scripting language), with no official persistence/remoting solution, but lots of contenders.
JavaScript (only in a web browser session, mostly). Not as bad as you might think, yet not quite usable. It's got JSON for persistence, sorta, although that doesn't include methods so you can't use it for system scripting. It's abou

Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C

[Ash-Fox]

I'm going to note that the majority of those applications/DEs exist on Windows too (I've ran older versions of Gnome on Windows numerous times), I'm not understanding how this is a Linux specific issue? If it was Linux specific, then surely Gnome on Windows would have been using COM.

GNOME: GObject. Still the official standard, based on C and now "Vala", no persistence, no remoting, several iterations of failed C++ wrappers
GNOME: Bonobo. Based on CORBA for remoting, but used its own funky CORBA implementation, very quickly abandoned
KDE: Qt. C++ library which ate the whole desktop, requires its own preprocessor for its own "extended" obejct model, so not quite pure C++. No persistence.
KDE: KParts. Object model on top of Qt's special sauce. I think it's still there in the architecture?
KDE: DCOP. Object model on top of Qt's special sauce. I think deprecated now in favour of D-bus? .....

You do know you can access a good chunk of those through dbus as long as you install the correct dbus library, like dbus-glib for GObjects, the major stuff in DEs generally has backwards compatible options I find.

Oh, but that's not all. We've also got various flavours of semi-official languages at the application and system level with their OWN object models, most of which live in only the one running process and evaporate when runtime ends. Mostly.

Again, same issue on Windows. One of the applications I do development on, communicates with a binary blob voice chat system provided by Vivox technologies, the only way to communicate with said application is via anonymous pipes instead of com on Windows, and I have no ability to use com instead if I wanted. But hey, I've also got an application on Windows that still makes use of DDE to provide music information, not com, I can't even access DDE from com. At least d-bus offers some sort of backwards/forwards compatibility here.

Linux has failed pretty badly here, and sometimes I think application developers are the worst at realising the extent of the failure. "It works for ME!" they say, not realising that it only works because they've confined themselves to a single build-compile-run environment based on shipping "their project", and walled themselves off from the rest of the distribution-wide ecosystem.

I'm doing what you're saying, taking the whole ecosystem into account now. Even the Windows' ecosystem won't deal with specific implementations that do other things any better.

Backwards Compatibility.

[Robert Zenz]

It's the sound of progress, my friend! Do you know who else is great at keeping backwards compatibility? Microsoft Windows...and that system is fucked up right from the ground. Keeping backwards compatibility just to keep software alive is like keeping dirt roads in New York City...so that these people with the horse-wagons still feel comfortable about their horses feet.

Re:Backwards Compatibility.

[DutchUncle]

Some truth in this. OTOH notice that your jazzy new cellphone still connects to phones around the world, including the people with analog lines, because someone makes sure there's a conversion somewhere. And everything is still powered out of the same plugs that are already built into the walls, and new LED lighting can still be screwed into the same bulb sockets that are already installed in the ceiling.

Maybe you can download new software and rebuild your kernel and be all up and running in a few hours. In the physical world, that ain't happening. The roads are paved because there aren't as many horses, but at some point the definition of "lane" got standardized, which means that cars can be about so wide and no wider, and the radius of a turn got standardized, so trucks and buses can be about so long or need steerable rear wheels, because we are NOT knocking down all the signs and posts and buildings to change all of the streets in a few hours.

Re:Backwards Compatibility.

[CKW]

What?

That is SUCH a horrific comparison.

Backwards compatibility when it comes to roads is:

  - keeping them straight
  - keeping them a minimum width
  - keeping them relatively flat

My car, bicycle, and horse can all travel down a dirt road, a cobbled road, a paved road, and a freeway.

> Do you know who else is great at keeping backwards
> compatibility? Microsoft Windows...and that system
> is fucked up right from the ground.

65% of the entire market, despite it's high cost and "horrible underpinnings". XP alone still commands 22% of the entire desktop market, and I can still run most software released for Windows on it, and vice versa.

The reason most techies have abandoned Firefox?

Firefox deciding AddOn "compatibility" wasn't important.

I'm a software developer, and yes getting to re-write everything and fixing past mistakes* is nice -- but the market and users do not give a damn.

We're not going to use something that keeps "breaking" every 12 months. We're not going to use something that forces us to stop driving cars and go into flight school to learn how to fly some new p.o.s. that's no better than the damn car we just had.

Instead, we'll switch models of cars.

(*) Are you in fact fixing past mistakes? Or are you making new and more horrible ones like Gnome3?

Re:Backwards Compatibility.

[Yunzil]

"Fucked up right from the ground" meaning that I can install 15-year-old software on it and have it run perfectly?

Did you every read about how they worked long hours fixing other people's bugs so that popular software packages would still run on Windows 95? Why? Because if a game worked on Windows 3.1 but didn't work on 95, people weren't going to say "those game programmers are bad". They were going to say "Windows 95 sucks".

Re:Backwards Compatibility.

[Rutulian]

You definitely can't ride your bike on the freeway, but the analogy is poor anyway....

We're not going to use something that keeps "breaking" every 12 months.

Quite a bit of an exaggeration. Thanks to (mostly) sane versioning schemes, API changes that result in breakage are usually restricted to major version numbers (ex: Gnome2 to Gnome3) not minor version numbers (ex: Gnome2.10 to Gnome2.12). Major versions are usually not rolled out every 12 months, and when they are the previous version often continues to be supported for a while as a parallel installation (Gnome being one of the exceptions). No, the breakage on linux that occurs (or seems to occur, at least) frequently is not due to a lack of backwards-compatibility. It is due to pushing out hastily developed, incomplete, alpha quality software before it's ready (ex: Pulseaudio).

Firefox deciding AddOn "compatibility" wasn't important.

Do you have a reference for that? I know plenty of techies that still use Firefox, because AddOn compatibilty is not that important. I mean, how many "Download YouTube videos" extensions do you need? If there was ever any mass exodus of techies away from Firefox, it was due to Javascript performance and memory issues (mostly solved now), not AddOn compatibility.

65% of the entire market, despite it's high cost and "horrible underpinnings". XP alone still commands 22% of the entire desktop market, and I can still run most software released for Windows on it, and vice versa.

"Fucked up right from the ground" meaning that I can install 15-year-old software on it and have it run perfectly?

Combining your comment with another in the same thread because I'm lazy. Why do you need to be able to run 15 yr old software on your computer? Certainly there are niche cases, but on my desktop machine I don't have anything more than 2 yrs old and on my servers nothing more than 5 yrs old. Quite frankly, if you're running software that old, it's most likely because it's not being developed anymore, which creates more serious issues than library compatibility.

The problem created by backwards-compatibilty, in my opinion, is that it perpetuates laziness on the part of the developer. Adobe Photoshop CS5 was the first version to actually use the Mac OS X Cocoa API, five versions and ten years after the Carbon API was officially deprecated.

Question

[Exitar]

How do you kill that which has no life?

Re:Question

[VortexCortex]

By removing your head or destroying your brain.

Brian Proffitt?

[Alex Belits]

Is it another Brian Proffitt's intellectual abortion? I think, I recognize the style...

Oh wow, it is not! But wait, this is the illustrous author of Mono and proud applicant to Microsoft Unix IE team, ex-Novell executive Miguel de Icaza!
(To be fair, some Miguel's work is not nearly as idiotic, and most of stupidity in GNOME happened after he left).

Amen!

[JHSW]

I agree, Linux on the desktop is far from dead. I know several people who use Linux on a day to day basis. At home, at work, etc. I'm not quite there yet, but I do have Arch Linux on my laptop dual-booted with Windows 7. My goal, which I want to achieve within the next few years, is to use Linux as close to 100% of the time as possible. I want to make it my primary OS on the desktop, on the laptop, everywhere.

Re:The real reason

[wed128]

or um....debian? Why all the love for the *buntu distros? Head for the source!

You are somewhat correct and yet not.

[Zombie Ryushu]

There was more to it than that. OSX was a serious problem. The Linux community was so wrapped up in competing with Windows for survival that we didn't see OSX coming.

Linux's core APIs don't change as violently as most people say. SDL 1.2 is still SDL, OpenGL is still OpenGL. At the Kernel level, there is resistance to inter-Kernel compatibility to try and prevent unscrupulous vendors from tainting hardware level code. I don't think I have seen a glibc double free error that was not caused by a real bug in the program since 2005/2006.

Package Management boils down to RPM and DEB. And those should be the only two possibilities.

So the core of Linux is like the core of the Earth. It runs, and if you have drivers for it, it's fine. The Surface of Linux is like the surface of the Earth. Utter Pandemonium. KDE and Gnome and it's various tool kits and it's extensions created a situation where endless pandemonium abound. Honestly, they acted like a bunch of 13 year olds playing with Windows 3.1. (If you were 12, or 13, you constantly wanted to re-arrange icons, change the colors, on and on and on. And people got so frustrated such that they didn't want to do it anymore. And moved to OSX.

There needs to be some iron and steel level discipline (with a lower case d) in desktop development. We need to stop creating a situation where everything on the surface is totally different every other version and nobody can find anything.

Another problem is the networking and communication issues with various networking protocols and whatnot. At the command line level, Linux is completely network transparent, even with X.org itself. But the moment you try and utilize desktop level CalDAV Calenders, or Samba shares, it takes a bunch of trial and error to get things working. An example.

Lets say that I have a file on one machine, and I want to get it on another machine via the network. I can of course use Secure shell (SSH) to do that. But what if I want to use Samba to do that. (One Linux box to another Linux box.). because Samba is supported as an overlay by Gnome and KDE. Will it work? Well if I use the command line smbclient yes it will. Under Gnome and KDE, it's a bit more complex. If the Samba Overlay was not installed in Nautilus (Gnome) or Dolphin (KDE), either one of those will throw an error. Additionally, if specific credentials are required to do such a thing, it would require they be setup in KDE or Gnome System Settings before hand. I garuntee you won't know where that Samba mount point is as an ordinary user even if it DOES work.

Another example. This one not involving LibreOffice, KDE, and evolution. We use KDE as the desktop, LibreOffice as the Office Suite and Evolution as E-mail. Why? Well, LibreOffice for obvious reasons is the most compatible Office Suite. Evolution for some rather odd reasons.

1. Evolution is the only Linux Mail and Groupware client that can be autoconfigured from our Open Directory Infrastructure. (LDAP). Only Evolution can get user information from LDAP with reguard to WebDAV, CalDAV, GroupDAV, and IMAP without having to edit it by hand.(like AD does with Microsoft Office and Outlook.)

2. Evolution is the only Groupware Client that can interoperate with eGroupware's iCal based services. in addition to Offsite Outlook Web Services. Thunderbird Lightning, and Kontact technically work, but not as bug free as Evolution does.

So, this creates the following simple problem:

I have users that are used to being able to "edit attachments" under Outlook with real Outlook Servers. (This is a functionality microsoft is getting ready to remove due to numerous security holes in doing this.) but using "Save As" is time consuming, sometimes my users don't know what directory they saved it in etc. So I introduced them to LibreOffice's "Send as E-mail feature." guess what. If you don't go into LibreOffice and over ride the defaults, it launches ThunderBird of Kontact.

Re:You are somewhat correct and yet not.

[rjstanford]

Lets say that I have a file on one machine, and I want to get it on another machine via the network. I can of course use Secure shell (SSH) to do that. But what if I want to use Samba to do that. [....] Dolphin (KDE), either one of those will throw an error.

I use 'fish' and 'smb' protocol kioslaves with Dolphin every day. Dolphin ain't perfect and neither is Samba, but you really should try reading the documentation...

I think that's the point. The idea of a desktop (as opposed to kernel-level support) was that stuff like that just work without having to read the documentation to do something as esoteric as move a file between machines. In 2012.

Re:You are somewhat correct and yet not.

[humanrev]

Totally against the UNIX philosophy - why is bash still the same after so many years?

Heh. It isn't!

Most distros don't use Bash anymore, they use Dash. It's similar but due to subtle differences it has caused hell for me when trying to run older scripts (particularly old GTK installers, not that they'll work anyway since GTK 1.2 isn't part of many repositories anymore). Backwards compatibility just isn't a high priority when it comes to Linux.

Re:You are somewhat correct and yet not.

[Rich0]

Actually, the esoteric bit about moving files between machines raises a much more fundamental issue with Linux. Suppose I have 10 computers on a hostile network, and I'd like to share /usr or /home between them, but I don't trust all of those computers fully. How do I do this?

It seems like options include:
1. NFS - which has all kinds of security issues with it.
2. SMB - which is secure, but not POSIX, which means all kinds of issues if you try to use it for /usr, though you might get away with it for /home.
3. OpenAFS - which seems abandoned and seems like it requires a PhD to set up.
4. Maybe sshfs - no idea if that would even work and it is a bit of a hack.

On windows you can just use SMB, and can set up account credentials/etc so that you don't have to trust all the individual computers to do this. Seems like file sharing is one of the simplest things to do on most OSes, but on Linux it is a real pain, and I think this is largely due to NFS which is "good enough" that nobody bothers to improve things.

Re:You are somewhat correct and yet not.

[paulatz]

I use 'fish' and 'smb' protocol kioslaves with Dolphin every day. Dolphin ain't perfect and neither is Samba, but you really should try reading the documentation...

I think that's the point. The idea of a desktop (as opposed to kernel-level support) was that stuff like that just work without having to read the documentation to do something as esoteric as move a file between machines. In 2012.

Actually: open dolphin, click on "network", click on "samba shares", browse. No need to read any documentation.

Because the UI was "meh"

[Xenious]

I promise I'm not trolling. I was very pro Linux as cool new UIs like Enlightenment started coming out. Shortly thereafter OS X really started taking off (albeit fueled by cool hardware design too) and I found that where the Linux UIs were rough and undependable the OS X UI (+look and feel) was sleek, smooth and very polished. On top of that you had all the functionality of the Linux OS underneath it. Aside from a higher cost, it couldn't compete. Temper this with the fact that I'm focusing on client use and not as much on server use.

Where I see the real value of Linux (and Android) is in embedded systems where GUI design may not be as critical.

Re:Because the UI was "meh"

[VortexCortex]

On top of that you had all the functionality of the Linux OS underneath it.

You lost me here. Did you mean POSIX?

Re:Because the UI was "meh"

[Hatta]

the OS X UI (+look and feel) was sleek, smooth and very polished.

Smooth and polished, and cumbersome. How the hell do you deal with Finder? I feel like I'm wearing shackles every time I do some GUI file management on a mac.

Re:Because the UI was "meh"

[ceoyoyo]

Linux is a unix workalike. OS X IS UNIX (to head off the nitpickers, the latest versions aren't certified). So there's POSIX, most of the command line user environment, etc.

Re:Because the UI was "meh"

[Guy Harris]

Linux is a unix workalike. OS X IS UNIX (to head off the nitpickers, the latest versions aren't certified).

Actually, the latest version is certified; Lion wasn't, but Snow Leopard was (and Leopard was, but maybe the certifications time out and disappear from unix.org after a while).

So there's POSIX, most of the command line user environment, etc.

Actually, much of "the command line user environment" is part of present-day POSIX, i.e. the Single UNIX Specification, and 1003.2 dates back to 1992, so it's been a part of POSIX for about 20 years now.

In any case, what Xenious may have meant by "you had all the functionality of the Linux OS" is "you had an OS that was another member of the UN*X family".

Re:Because the UI was "meh"

[Tom]

Same reason here. After almost 10 years of Linux, I switched to OS X about 5 years ago and haven't looked back. It simply beats Linux in every aspect but price on the desktop. My servers still run Debian.

I would think it's more iOS

[Paul Slocum]

Seems like a big chunk of that 1% would have to come from when they started selling Linux netbooks at Best Buy and it felt like it was beginning to gain traction, but I'm sure that market is out because of tablets. I looked up Linux netbooks on Amazon and they're all out of stock. So in a way, the new Linux desktop battle is fought with Android tablets, which Apple is now trying to kill with lawsuits.

Re:I would think it's more iOS

[kenh]

I know several computer "enthusiasists" that bought Linux netbooks as a novelty, played with them a while, then found them too limiting and shoved them in the closet. Of course, this was back in the 1 Gig RAM, single-core CPU, integrated graphics days - like the Asus EEE 701. (Yes you could upgrade them, but then they were simply slightly faster machines that ran none of your familiar programs.)

The new netbooks/mini-notebooks are another story - with 11" screens, 4-8 Gigs of RAM and some with quad procesors, running Win7/Win8 or even Linux can be a joy (albeit at a price twice that of the original netbooks).

Windows isn't losing marketshare on those Macs

[Sycraft-fu]

I work at a university and what I see nearly universally is that people who get Macs get VMWare or Parallels and Windows. They aren't getting a Mac because it does everything they need, they are getting a Mac because it is fashionable, and they can get Windows on it as well. While Dell may not like that, it doesn't hurt MS as long as Windows keeps getting sold.

Re:Windows isn't losing marketshare on those Macs

[ceoyoyo]

Or maybe they're getting a Mac because they like how it works and they need VMWare or Parallels because there are a couple of special purpose Windows programs they need for some backwards class.

Your bias is showing.

Re:Windows isn't losing marketshare on those Macs

[lennier]

They aren't getting a Mac because it does everything they need

they need VMWare or Parallels because there are a couple of special purpose Windows programs they need

Yes, that's what he said.

Fun fact about software lock-in: if you can't run 100% of the software you need on a platform, then that platform is 100% useless to you. 99% doesn't cut it. You either get your job done, or you don't, and look elsewhere for employment.

Another fun fact about software lock-in: that last lousy 1% of software probably was written 15 years ago, by some contractor who now lives in Venezuela, to specs which are posted in a badger cage under the eternal tyre fire in Building #12 basement. It stores its data in an obscure proprietary binary format, with dedicated DLT tape drives for backup and with no source code available. It's riddled with instant-root-on-receiving-a-packet vulnerabilities and requires a fully open non-firewalled connection to the entire Ethernet LAN (overNetBEUI and IPX/SPX protocols, of course; none of this upstart TCP/IP stuff). And it's a critical non-replaceable component of your entire enterprise's just-in-time order fulfilment system.

And it stopped working this morning, and it's your job to fix it.

Re:Wrong answer

[jacknifetoaswan]

That's funny. It's only the desktop support nerds making $50k/year that are running OS(X) in my company. The server admins ($75k - $125k/year) run Linux on their desktops, and the business folks run Windows 7.

Re:Wrong answer

[wed128]

Ummmm mods? Flamebait?

Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed itself

[petes_PoV]

For the average user, not the technical wizz-kid: the average user, Linux was never an option. Id didn't come on their store-bought PC. If didn't "just work" (ever!) and it didn't support most of the peripherals or USB devices that they had or wanted. Blaming Linux's failure to penetrate the average household on anything but it's own lack of marketing, polish, self-discipline, ease of use, support, brand (i.e. not having a million different distros: all the same, but different) or integration is simply an exercise in self-deception.

OS-X is what Linux could have been if it hadn't fragmented, if it had been properly packaged and supported, if the developers had put some emphasis on ease-of-use instead of "cool features" and obscure options and if it had worked with all the printers, cameras, phones, webcams and scanners that the average user just wants to plug in and have work - immediately and fully.

If Linux teaches us anything, it's that users will pick integration, polish and design over "free" any day of the week.

Re:Of course!

[Ash-Fox]

To counter your annecdotal evidence.

I'm one of those people who tried OS X some years ago when people on Slashdot were promoting it to be the opensource bees knees. I fairly quickly caught on how bad the operating system system was, being able to cause kernel panics through mode setting, broken forks because of the lack of proper posix compliance, where libraries are not async safe etc.

make it stop....

[jythie]

Great.. now the clusterexpletive that was the wired thread can continue on slashdot.....

It was bugginess for me

[Bogtha]

It used to be the case that even a desktop Linux system was absolutely rock solid. The quality started plummeting years ago though. I don't know why, but distros stopped caring about desktop stability. I switched not long after the KDE 4 fiasco. I tried a few different desktop distributions and things were crashing out of the box. One of the distros, the Live CD installer had a background process that crashed on startup. You had to literally click through a crash report just to get to the installer. How the hell does something like that make it into production? If you can't even boot up a clean install without things crashing, something has gone very, very wrong with your QA process. And just because I know it's going to come up otherwise: no, it wasn't hardware.

What's a Mac?

[j4w7]

Every computer in my house is running some variant of Ubuntu 12.04, even my (non-techie) wife's computer. She went from a Mac to Ubuntu and never wants to go back. I have Windows for a few games I play with friends. At work I run Kubuntu 12.04 on my desktop, as do many other people -- and I'm at a rather large multi-national company.

The rumors of [Linux's] death are greatly exaggerated.

Cheers!!

Not developers, advertising.

[king neckbeard]

I'd say the biggest detriment that Apple had to desktop usage of GNU/Linux was taking the spotlight as a not-Windows option. OS X had a lot of advertisement, so when people wanted to 'stick it to the man' and choose a non-MS OS, the first thing they found was a Mac. In the early days, Macs ran on PPC, so dual booting was not an option. They have also been priced out a truly mainstream market. Apple provided the perfect anemic competition to make the majority of people compliant with a MS-dominated desktop, and in the mind of the general consumer, made a Wintel option seem 'not so bad.' Absent Apple's presence, it's quite likely that the alternative of choice would have been GNU/Linux.

Re:Not developers, advertising.

[Shadowmist]

I'd say the biggest detriment that Apple had to desktop usage of GNU/Linux was taking the spotlight as a not-Windows option. OS X had a lot of advertisement, so when people wanted to 'stick it to the man' and choose a non-MS OS, the first thing they found was a Mac. In the early days, Macs ran on PPC, so dual booting was not an option. They have also been priced out a truly mainstream market. Apple provided the perfect anemic competition to make the majority of people compliant with a MS-dominated desktop, and in the mind of the general consumer, made a Wintel option seem 'not so bad.' Absent Apple's presence, it's quite likely that the alternative of choice would have been GNU/Linux.

I beg to differ. You people talk as if you expect end users to use machines the way you do. When OS X first came out, Desktop Linux was virtually UNUSABLE if you were not not a tech geek. If you were doing phone support for a friend and they were using a different distribution than you were, your navigation instructions could be completely useless given that from distro to distro might as well be completely different operating systems as far as the desktop experience would be, what menus would look like, and so on.

When Apple was on a terminal downslide, you blamed Windows for the lack of Linux as a consumer desktop presence. When OS X came out, you blamed Apple for stealing the opportunity when Microsoft created that opening by launching VISTA. When OS X started to attract the colleagues who worked on server programming, doing the same kind of work you're hand rolling on Linux, you went ballistic, assigning to Apple the same sins that Microsoft committed when it actively went against companies like Dell trying to provide Linux solutions. You're all adept at pointing out blame everywhere save where it really belongs... the fractured, disunited, and frequently bickering Linux developing community itself.

And a lot of it is the mentality. You downgrade Apple and Windows users as idiot minded sheep. And you talk about some standard that computer USERS should be abiding by, as if they should be practising the same kind of arcane disciplines needed to get slackware up and functional. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have one thing in common that many of you do not. They emphathise with the end user. Even Jobs was forcing users down a certain path by taking out things such as floppy drives on his desktops and Fflash on iOS, it was with that end user experience in mind.

As long as linux developers keep treating the end user as an afterthought, Linux will remain where it is. An excellent tool for uses that demand technical excellence like server based applications, and a frightful intimidating monster for people who's avocation does not involve gearhead level self programming.

Who cares about backwards compatibility ?

[bug1]

Im sure binary only entities care about backwards compatibility of API's, but its not a big issue if you have the source code and its maintained.

I think he is implying the Linux community needs commercial desktop applications to be a success.

Re:Who cares about backwards compatibility ?

[ceoyoyo]

and its maintained.

The incompatibilities he's talking about require the source code to be updated. That pisses off developers because it makes maintaining a package too much work. So then they go develop for something else, and the users follow.

I thought the quote in the summary "we broke people's code" gave that away.

Re:Who cares about backwards compatibility ?

[bug1]

I thought the quote in the summary "we broke people's code" gave that away.

If he had said "we broke lazy developers code" or "we broke ugly code that people have to be paid to work on" then i would have understood.

I still dont see the issue for open source, its mostly maintained by people who *like* programming.

Re:Who cares about backwards compatibility ?

[ceoyoyo]

"I still dont see the issue for open source"

Perhaps that's the problem. The GUI toolkit maintainers didn't see the issue either.

OSX desktop / linux backend, best of both worlds

[minkie]

This, he says, led developers to use OS X as a desktop for server programming.

I've made several attempts over the years to use Linux on the desktop. Every time, I end up running back to OSX. What I've got now is the best of both words. All of our servers are linux. I have a linux box locally I use for development. I also have a Mac Mini on my desk and use that for my desktop (and a MBP I use from home or when on the road). With a trivial amount of work, you can configure profiles in Terminal.app so you just click on an icon and you've got an ssh window open to whatever host you need to work on. I can export my linux file system and mount it on my Mac using NFS. It's all completely seamless.

The extra hardware cost is hardly worth mentioning (you can get a Mini for $4-600, depending on how you configure it). For the one or two times a year I need to get to the real linux desktop, I just hit the "input select" button on my monitor, and swap where my USB keyboard is plugged into. In theory, I can fire up X11 on my Mac to run linux X11 apps, but I can't remember the last time I bothered. At one point, I experimented with desktop sharing (Chicken of the VNC, gotta love that name), but that's far more pain than it's worth.

Evil Corporate Scum

[kenh]

So if I'm reading this right, the way Apple "killed" Linux on the desktop is by offering a quality product, with backward compatability, on solid hardware with just enough *nix plumbing to make most casual shell hackers happy?

Those bastards!

Don't they know that, given enough time, the Linux folks could have offered a similar desktop experience if they wanted to but it was more important to create dozens of competing distributions with slight incompatibilities and sublte differences between them for no earthly reason other than the whims of the distribution packagers.

Re:Evil Corporate Scum

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X is fully UNIX. It's not UNIX "plumbing". Linux is ;)

Re:Evil Corporate Scum

[Rich0]

Uh, keep in mind that the only reasons most Linux distros or Linux itself exists are the collective whims of its developers. People do things that are fun. Linux is the result. The guy building your DE doesn't care if you like it - he cares if he likes it, or maybe if those he respects like it.

Re:Evil Corporate Scum

[Fr33z0r]

What's often missed in these discussions is the rest of the software stack.

OK so all things being equal we get an Ubuntu release which works just as well as OS X, has working drivers for all hardware, is easy to use, all that good stuff.

So, now I want to make a nifty little video from various clips, where's iMovie? Oh, wait what? What do you mean "nothing like that exists on Linux," ok well surely there's a cut down version on the Android market, since it works well on iOS tablets/phones. Nope, nothing even *remotely* similar there either.

Whatever, I'll make some music, where's Garageband? Nope, that's not there either. Anything close? Let's try Audacity maybe... OK once the laughter dies down maybe I can find something similar on my android device, since again, there's a good Garageband on iOS... Nope, nothing even remotely similar, again.

How about Pages? I've given up on making my videos or music, so how about just a nice DTP app for Linux that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out? Nope? OK well Pages was implemented really well on iOS, so *surely* there's something similar on Android? Nope, strike 3.

It's hip to the max to be anti-Apple in this day and age, but what these "lol look at that herd of dummies, they don't know what they're missing" crowd don't realise is that the affordable route to the things that are *truly* "missing" don't lead through Android or Linux, they lead through Windows and OS X.

These battles aren't won or lost purely on the hardware or OS layer, there's an application stack on top of that - Apple has the creative end sewn up on desktop and mobile. Windows has the gaming end sewn up on the desktop (nobody can lay claim to dominance in gaming on any single mobile platform) OK, Linux is strong on the server side, but where does it exert dominance in the application stack? Anywhere?

Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu is my primary desktop OS, and I have an Android powered mobile. I love Linux and have used it heavily over the years, but if I want to play games I have to turn to Microsoft, and if I want to do creative stuff I have to turn to Apple. But never have I uttered the words "if I want to do ____ I need to boot to Linux..." *that's* what's missing here.

KDE vs. Gnome

[kurisuto]

In the 1990s, I wanted to get into developing GUI apps for Linux. The single biggest reason why I gave up on it was that the Linux GUI effort fractured into KDE and Gnome camps.

At the time, I figured that one of the two would win out over the other. There was no telling which might win, and I was reluctant to back what might be the losing horse. This was a serious demotivator. Of course, 15 years later, we've ended up with the worst of both worlds: many Linux installations take up the disk space for both, and we've got two unharmonized APIs continuing to fight for a following.

With MacOS, there is no question what API you should use. Apple offers a very clear path. For that reason, I feel more confident developing for that platform.

Re:KDE vs. Gnome

[RogerWilco]

My experience is that the reason you have to choose between Gnome and KDE is the real problem: They need to do a lot of things that the OS should provide.

I think the problem is that there should be a common level between the kernel and the desktop so that the different widget toolkits have to do a lot less of the hardware abstraction. In my view this is where Linux has dropped the ball.

Re:KDE vs. Gnome

[RazorSharp]

It's too bad Linus never backed one of those horses seriously (well, if he did, I wasn't aware of it). If he would be public and vocal about supporting a certain GUI, I'm sure a vast majority of the community would get behind it.

Re:Desktops are pigs for refurbs

[Ash-Fox]

Arguing? So far the dominant sound system is ALSA and has been for over a decade. Compare this to Microsoft's sound APIs in the past decade...

Re:The real reason

[jythie]

Critical mass. People like Ubuntu because lots of other people like Ubuntu... so finding community/support/apps is easier. Even when looking for solutions to problems in packages that exist in most distributions, I have found the lions share of the discussion and help out there is Ubuntu-centric, so there is a real support advantage to going that route.. of course then one gets used to the particular way it is layed out and build up personal/brand preference... most users stick with whatever they were introduced to first, and introduction often happens through other people.

Though I admit, I stubbornly stick with CentOS for many of the same reasons. At least I broke my Slackware habit....

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The real reason

[dokc]

Switched from Kubuntu to Squeeze and never missed it. Rock solid, simple to install (btw does *buntu live installer supports LVM now?) and has everything what I need and much more. (Although, for my new Desktop at work with newest Intel graphic I needed to use backports)

Re:Wrong answer

[Anonymous Coward]

A more simple answer is that OS X just has less jank than the competition.

A Linux desktop is a collection of unrelated software held together with ducttape and hope, and it shows. Because everything has to be "flexible" and "configurable" there's not enough integration and plain old polish.

Microsoft on their part suffer from chronic design-by-committee and fear of making decisions, which kills or waters down anything that might be called "innovation".

Wait, what?

[Azure Flash]

The Linux desktop has never even "lived" yet...

backward compatibility and breaking code

[Mirar]

I do believe that one of the biggest problems with Linux is that new APIs keep popping up, because apparantly the old ones aren't good enough.

This will break code.

Developers don't like to see their code broken. They/we much rather develop on a system that doesn't break their code after a short while.

Whether it means that the developers are moving to iPhone programming, or that the developers stick to old stdout/stdin programming, or that the developers just give up and write their own OS doesn't matter -

what matters here is that Linux desktop is shrugging away developers because the API isn't perceived as stable.

(It's not the only enironment that shrugs away developers. Come on, not even _autoconf_ managed to stay backwards compatible... and Windows _traditionally_ isn't a stable environment, there used to be a new VCRUN every year or what...?)

Still?

[J4]

Ah yes, Miguel "The Mouth" De Icaza. Nobody repeats ideas like Miguel.

*sigh*...whatever

[rootchick]

Despite such reports of its death, I've been using linux on the desktop for 12 years and will continue to do so. I've no plans to drink the Apple kool-aid, ever. How about /. gets back to posting actual news instead of garbage articles of speculation and FUD?

In other words ....

[sunking2]

A company that hires professionals to envision, manage, develop, and market something produced a better overall product. Apple didn't destroy anything, they produced a better product. So much better that it seems people will pay a premium to use it.

not really too bad - whole article is bunk

[poetmatt]

Linux desktop wasn't, and isn't killed by Mac. An article with quotes by Miguel should be treated as the same category as an article with quotes from Florian. aka assumed to be false and misleading.
Why haven't people realized this? Miguel changed his colors once he started with mono, and it never ended. Just like how Florian says that just because he's paid by microsoft/oracle doesnt' mean it influences his writings.

Re:not really too bad - whole article is bunk

[poetmatt]

mono was not even remotely open source.

Keeping an application deliberately incompatible while releasing older versions which are still incompatible is not an example of a functioning piece of software.

MS: "you have to have silverlight version 5"
Mono: "version 2.1, no plan to upgrade". ETC. That's not open source, that's a fraud of a statement to call it anything other than acting like they care while doing nothing. Miguel is as shill as it gets, and always has been right up there with Florian - except that Miguel is already paid by Microsoft directly. Not that hard to figure this out.

Re:not really too bad - whole article is bunk

[toriver]

Are you blaming Mono for chasing a moving target? Microsoft and their bitch HP are calling the .Net specs "open standards" because they have older versions rubber-stamped by ECMA, but they only cover a fraction of what Microsoft's implementations have, the rest needs to be reverse-engineered. And I think you overstate the relationship between Microsoft and Novell unless you feel that taking any money from Redmond make them "unclean infidels"...

Re:not really too bad - whole article is bunk

[poetmatt]

There are two groups responsible. One is Miguel, and the other is Microsoft. Considering that they're both pigs from the same trough, both are responsible for these issues. Yes taking money from MS is an issue. It pretty much specifies a lack of ethics. No major company that has ever done so ends up doing anything successfully with the partnership. see: Yahoo, Novell, Nokia, windows phone, facebook, Barnes and Noble.

The point is - mono becomes irrelevant if it's not functional. Mono (and moonlight) are not excused if they have a partnership between Microsoft and Novell that is causing a delay of multiple YEARS for implementation. That's not absolving Mono of guilt, that's the fault of Miguel. Considering it was a proprietary implementation in the first place it was almost impossible for anyone to legally work on the mono project anyway. Literally he became a willing plant for microsoft by looking to implement mono aka .net aka software microsoft stole anyway, designed in a fashion to break GPL.

Kinda suprised myself

[SmallFurryCreature]

Writing this from a Linux desktop at work (yeah yeah) and doing web development. One company forced me to use a AirBook for it and my got is sucked. Not only was it a very badly designed piece of hardware (rounded soft corners EVERYWHERE EXCEPT where you rest your palms. BRILLIANT! I found it to be a slow piece of crap that couldn't be outfitted with a decent amount of memory, something even AMD netbooks can handle (8GB) and the fucking lack of any kind (even MS half-assed version is better) of focus follows mouse makes development just that much more involved.

And those who claim macports is a replacement for aptitude need to have head re-examined.

Yes, a Macbook runs smoother then Windows, then again, what doesn't? But as a replacement for doing webdevelopment for software that will run on Linux servers? Not even close. Especially for the price. Sorry but I don't need USB3. I need a VERY fast SSD, plenty of memory and LOTS of screen space. Lighted keys? I can actually afford ceiling lights thank you very much.

Wait a minute, that name in the summary. Isn't that the mono retard? The thing that has now been completely dumped? Why should I take anyone who thought mono was a good idea serious?

Re:Kinda suprised myself

[Tastecicles]

That's as maybe, but did you miss the point of the post? I think maybe you did. I'm in agreement with the guy, by the way: Macs are badly designed, Light up keyboards? Not for me, under any circumstances - it's an unnecessary drain on battery. USB3? Not until the prices hits parity on hardware and the diversity somewhat equals USB2 gear. Memory? My current AMD laptop has 6GB upgradeable to 8GB (if someone does 8GB sticks I'd bet it'll go to 16GB - my Dell went to 4GB even though the literature says it tops at 2), I don't have such a hard time believing that Macbooks either short on memory slots or they're already maxed. My last Mac (G4 Powerbook) came with 256 and topped at 1.25GB. Two slots, 1.25GB!? I could not install anything other than a 256MB stick in slot A, how fucking stupid is that!?

Re:Kinda suprised myself

[geekoid]

"Not for you" and "Bad design" Aren't the same thing.
How is USB 3 going to hit parity without anyone putting them in devices? BTW, I think any modern MB comes with USB3. Do you think there is a change USB won't take off? IT's not like a new standard Apple is pushing.

Your lack of understanding isn't someone else being stupid.

I don't even own a Mac, but you post lacks any semblance of logic.

Re:Kinda suprised myself

[Guy Harris]

USB3? Not until the prices hits parity on hardware and the diversity somewhat equals USB2 gear.

I assume by "prices hits[sic] parity on hardware" you're referring to the prices on USB 3 support chips on the motherboard, i.e. you're waiting for machines that support USB 3 to be as cheap as machines that support USB 2, because sanely-designed machines with USB 3 support also support USB 2 peripherals. (They work Just Fine in my Retina MBP, for example; did you somehow find an insanely-designed machine, or did you just assume, incorrectly, that there's no backwards compatibility with USB 3?)

Memory? My current AMD laptop has 6GB upgradeable to 8GB (if someone does 8GB sticks I'd bet it'll go to 16GB - my Dell went to 4GB even though the literature says it tops at 2), I don't have such a hard time believing that Macbooks either short on memory slots or they're already maxed.

My current Retina MBP laptop has 16GB, which is the max.

Re:Kinda suprised myself

[RazorSharp]

Calm down before you have a nerdeurysum. Obviously the company you worked for at the time that gave you this 'AirBook' bought a fake Chinese clone. You should have been cued by the whole 'AirBook' thing considering Apple doesn't have a product called that.

Yes, a Macbook runs smoother then Windows

I would hope that Windows runs a lot smoother than a MacBook b/c Windows is software so it weighs a lot less. Neither have legs, so I imagine the competition is a bit of a standstill.

Okay, you probably don't find my little digs funny but here's some serious advice: Smoke a joint. Go to a comedy show. Go drink some beers. Find whatever you need to chill the fuck out and do it (group sex?). I geek out about all sorts of shit on /. but goddamn. Maybe it's just your writing style, but your post really made me envision some guy about to have a heart attack. The OP was flamebait (that got upmodded for insulting Apple and praising Linux).

Re:Kinda suprised myself

[jbolden]

I need a VERY fast SSD, plenty of memory and LOTS of screen space.

If you need a performance laptop you shouldn't be using the Air. Apple has never marketed the Air as a performance machine. I'm on the retina, I have 450m/sec drives, 16g of ram and 5m of screen space.

This advert sums it up

[datalife]

"Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null"
http://www4.macnn.com/macnn/articles/unixad.jpg

Re:I actually met Miguel.

[makomk]

Nope, he's a scumbag. For instance, let's talk about backwards compatibility and breaking people's code. A while ago the Mono project released a .Net wrapper for SQLite that various projects used and like all Mono-developed libraries it was designed to run under .Net as well as Mono. Then the Mono developers decided to discontinue development on it in favour of a new wrapper library that wasn't API compatible and actually broke the old library in newer Mono releases. So you could still run applications that relied on this Mono-supplied and Mono-developed library under Windows .Net quite trivially but they didn't work under Mono itself without downgrading to an ancient version which distros didn't ship anymore.

Re:The real reason

[StefanWiesendanger]

How do the fuck does a 5% worldwide market share kill linux ?

Well, even a 5% market share would be much more than a 1.5% market share and hence plenty to kill. Although in markets as the US it is probably closer to 10%.

Three Words

[tpstigers]

Gnome 3. Unity.

The Linux desktop committed suicide.

It was dumped from Ubuntu

[SmallFurryCreature]

It has been dumped by Ubuntu, nobody uses it on Linux. It wasn't needed, it wasn't wanted, it wasn't used. If that is not a failure for a product, what is?

Re:How Linux killed itself is a more approriate ti

[swilver]

yEd - runs on them all, and good enough for me

Re:I actually met Miguel.

[RabidReindeer]

Nope, he's a scumbag. For instance, let's talk about backwards compatibility and breaking people's code. A while ago the Mono project released a .Net wrapper for SQLite that various projects used and like all Mono-developed libraries it was designed to run under .Net as well as Mono. Then the Mono developers decided to discontinue development on it in favour of a new wrapper library that wasn't API compatible and actually broke the old library in newer Mono releases. So you could still run applications that relied on this Mono-supplied and Mono-developed library under Windows .Net quite trivially but they didn't work under Mono itself without downgrading to an ancient version which distros didn't ship anymore.

Hmmm. Sounds a lot like business as usual in the Windows world.

nobody cares about UIs

[tuffy]

Linux could have the best and most intuitive UI in the world, and it would make no difference in its desktop market penetration.

People use UIs to get to their applications. And so long as Linux applications are also available on Windows and Mac OS X, there isn't going to be a "killer app" that gets people to stick with Linux on their desktops in favor of an OS that runs a lot of other stuff too.

Re:nobody cares about UIs

[DaveV1.0]

I think you have that backwards.

As long as popular Windows and Mac OS X applications are not available on Linux, there will always be a reason NOT to use Linux. And, as long as one can run a VM with Linux, even a Linux killer app will be available on both Windows and Mac OS X

This may be true at the moment, BUUUUUT...

[crazy blade]

2013 is *DEFINITELY* going to be the year of "Linux on the Desktop". Just wait...

Re:The real reason

[Tamran]

OSX killed Linux on the desktop indirectly only because the most popular (to the layman) distro is Ubuntu and Ubuntu thought it would be cute to revamp their desktop into a wannabe OSX desktop, pissing many like me off in the process. A Relix is not a Rolex. A Coby is not a Sony. Ubuntu was doing just fine in making a name for itself, now it's a watered-down sissy distro which threw itself at Steve Jobs' feet rather than continue manning the fuck up.

I think Ubuntu's changes had something to do with a drop. I know this from my many IT friends who went back to Windows because they "didn't want a phone interface on their PC". That said, Windows 8 in itself may drive them back. I advocate the position that Gnome 3 (and the way it was handled by the developers) directly and indirectly (causing Ubuntu to go with Unity) caused a large fracture in the Linux community which chased many away.

What really is killing Linux (or why it's never really taken off) is the fragmentation issues. Sure, choice is a good thing but in the present implementation of these available choices full QC (the boring stuff) is rarely done. This leaves a system lacking "spit-n-polish". A good example of this fragmentation is KDE vs. Gnome(2) libraries. Although different under the hood, are they really all that different to the average user?

Where Apple comes in is that "spit-n-polish" that is missing. If you create a quality vacuum, it will get filled. It's as simple as that.

Re:what he is kidding?

[cgt]

The real problem is that linux needs Interface designers.

No, Linux needs *fewer* interface designers. Designers caused GNOME Shell and Unity.

Hardware and Software

[SuperKendall]

I arrived at the conclusion many years ago that it's the hardware that makes all the difference.

The combination of hardware and drivers.

We know the Macbooks can sleep/wake perfectly well because of OS/X.

So if they do not under Linux, that is not a hardware issue - it simply means the drivers need to be better. In that sense it's kind of a "hardware" issue wince the drivers are tailored to a device, but it's not something that Apple can improve on in later hardware.

Not shoved anywhere

[SuperKendall]

I hate the speed at which Walled Gardens are getting shoved down our throats.

On the desktop side, nothing is shoved anywhere.

Instead it's like Apple is giving you a kitchen, and then off the side a matter replicator.

Yes you CAN use the replicator to quickly get a nice gumbo. But you can always head to the kitchen yourself and make whatever you like.

Apple in the end is not forcing anything on anyone, they are simply giving you additional options that help people who need help.

Wrong

[kelemvor4]

Yes, it has to do with the technical details behind compatibility rather than having an user base that is used to paying too much for too little vs having a user base that is used to paying nothing for quite a lot. In other news, monkeys are currently flying out of my butt.

The reason is simple, and it's the same reason that 99% of everything on this planet happens. Money.

That VM gap is my biggest complaint about IT

[SuperKendall]

begging ... run our corporate Windows image in a desktop VM

That's my biggest complaint about most IT departments. This is such a perfect solution for technical users, that could really have a full system as they liked it and then a company Windows VM that was chock full of virus detectors and Outlook. When it was out of focus you could sock the whole VM priority down to something really low.

The IT users could not really stop the influx of macs because demand percolated down from above. But there is no-one to champion the idea of the company system as a virtual entity on whatever you have as demand is wholly from technical users..

Re:That VM gap is my biggest complaint about IT

[jacknifetoaswan]

Right. And it's not like I'm not a part of the IT department. I work in the Corporate Hosting Services department, and I was a sysadmin for six+ years. I'm no novice, and could build a much more secure Linux image than anyone from the Windows desktop team could do with a Windows image.

Server devs != the desktop market

[mclaincausey]

I know this may come as a shock, but the majority of the desktop market is not developers (though no doubt an appreciable percentage of Linux desktop users is, which is why his view is so skewed). What killed Linux as a desktop OS is probably a very complicated and nuanced confluence of factors, but I think Microsoft's embedded position and anticompetitive tactics have more to do with it than the preferences of server developers, as does the lack of grandma-compliant plug and play and usability.

That said, looking at things another way, as we move into device-based computing, GNU/Linux by way of Android is very competitive on the palmtop, if not the desktop, in the same way that Mach/BSD is by way of Darwin/iOS.

Java does that, at least on the server side

[durdur]

I've moved 100s of thousands of lines of code across OSs and changed practically nothing. For GUIs the portability solution is starting to be HTML5.

What does he mean about broken APIs?

[infodroid]

"[de Icaza] 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.""

What exactly are these broken APIs that he thinks are driving developers away from Linux desktop development? Taking the GNOME case. The move to GTK+ 3.0 hardly broke any API's. From an application developer's point of view, most of the widget API's were identical with the sort of minor changes to be expected from any previous revision bump. Granted, some things were deprecated in the GNOME stack, such as the system tray. But this is not the same as breaking an API.

Re:What does he mean about broken APIs?

[infodroid]

...and what's more, he claims this happened over "many years". What is he talking about? The last API-breaking change in GTK+ came with the move from GTK+ 1.2 to GTK+ 2.0 back in 2002.

Do you really know what Gatekeeper does?

[SuperKendall]

Yes, 3rd party developers are at the mercy of Apple and this is not some anti-Apple bullshit. See: Gatekeeper.

Gatekeeper is about stopping programs you have downloaded from running without your permission. You can of course simply disable it, or let it ask on a case by case basis.

But it doesn't enter into the picture when we are talking about MacPorts. They are not downloading software, they are downloading source and then compiling it. Thus your software is all local.

But even for package managers that just download binaries, you can as noted simply run whatever you want.

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[leftover]

OS-X is what Linux could have been if it hadn't fragmented, if it had been properly packaged and supported, if the developers had put some emphasis on ease-of-use instead of "cool features" and obscure options and if it had worked with all the printers, cameras, phones, webcams and scanners that the average user just wants to plug in and have work - immediately and fully.

If Linux teaches us anything, it's that users will pick integration, polish and design over "free" any day of the week.

This is the most concise statement of the problem I have seen to date. Slashdotters deride the Apple way: 1 choice, hardware and software and it just works. Also the Microsoft way: 1 choice in software, many in hardware and it mostly just works. Then there is the Linux desktop way: many software options all about 80% complete, any hardware as long as you can write your own drivers and kernel modules. The total amount of effort represented by all the Linux options is more than enough to have completed several options fully equivalent to OSX if that effort had been focused into several efforts instead of being fragmented into dozens. Why does the fragmentation occur? Because too much of the rewards for an OSS project (feel-good stuff like having fun, seeing your own name on a project) come from the first 10% of the work. Something needs to encourage people to complete the next 90%: the hard parts like actually making everything work right, accommodating all the variety in machines and peripherals. Then there is the next 1800% of the job: maintenance. These are the weak links in OSS.

Projects that work, such as the kernel and Python, have a single person who maintains the vision. This person is able to enlist the help of others to implement the vision. Notice that both of these traits parallel commercial startups. Worker bees in commercial startups are rewarded with wages and stock. What are the rewards for worker bees in OSS projects?

Client-side Linux

[SpinyNorman]

Saying that OS X killed Linux on the desktop is a misstatement at best since Linux on the desktop never became mainstream. You can't kill what's not yet alive.

However, client-side (but not "desktop") Linux is very much alive and kicking in the shape of Android tablets (Kindle, Nook, Nexus 7), and currently owns the small form factor tablet space. Apple is the one trying to play catch-up here with the rummoured upcoming iPad mini.

It's interesting to note that the success of Android is following the path led by Apple with OS X ... first on the smart phone, then on the tablet. This was an easier path to mainstream adoption since it wasn't fighting the entrenched desktop ecosystems head-on, but rather building a brand new (smartphone) market. In this vein it might be better to view Nokia's incompetence as the real killer of pure (non-Android) Linux since they were the only ones targetting a Linux-based smartphone. If Nokia had moved faster and followed a release early, release often" path (as Android did), they could well have been successful.

Re:Client-side Linux

[toriver]

I think the point is that the Linux community squandered the chance to eat the Windows market share that OS X gobbled up.

I am picturing "On the Waterfront", with Linux as the Marlon Brando character and the community as the brother. "I could have been a contender, I could have been somebody, instead of a bum, which I am"...

One word: Rosetta

[RogueWarrior65]

"OS X did a much better job of ensuring backward compatibility." Yeah, not so much. Lion and Mountain Lion no longer has Rosetta which killed off all remaining PowerPC-based apps. Not the least of which was Quicken (for a while anyway. And yes, Intuit does suck the big one). IMHO, Apple would have scored a lot of points by making Rosetta open-source. Yeah, yeah, I could run Parallels and install a Snow Leopard virtual machine but I don't need the whole OS.

Re:One word: Rosetta

[Guy Harris]

IMHO, Apple would have scored a lot of points by making Rosetta open-source.

If by "would have scored a lot of points" you mean "would have gotten a visit from the lawyers from the new owners of Transitive Corporation", Transitive Corporation being the suppliers of the binary-to-binary translation code in Rosetta, yes, they would have.

I.e., it wasn't entirely theirs to open-source. Maybe IBM could've been convinced to open-source it, but I'm not sure how interested IBM would be in something that translates code from one of their instruction-set architectures to x86, as opposed to going the other way (which is why they were interested in Transitive).

They killed it?

[hobarrera]

Damn, it's sad to know that my desktops are dead. Better give all my coworkers and friends all the bad news too.

Re:The real reason

[jedidiah]

Nope. This is just more of the same nonsense where Apple fanboys try to pretend they and their platform are more significant than they really are. They are the same underappreciated road kill that we are. No amount of kidding themselves will change that.

Their platform lost and is now pretty much abandoned even by Apple. Even Apple has moved on to the next thing where they have a prayer of being successful.

Re:I actually met Miguel.

[Nimey]

Pfft. Apple is notorious for deprecating old APIs. If you want API stability, you basically use Windows - it's not perfect, but it's the best of the three at that.

Really? Where is the data?

[aaaaaaargh!]

First, why does the poster claim that Desktop Linux was killed. How is the fact that the number of desktop linux user has been growing, continually, although perhaps not as fast as some afficionados claimed, illustrating that the Linux Desktop was killed? It doesn't make sense.

Second, where is the data? Which statistic shows that Linux developers migrated in masses to Mac OS X? Somehow I doubt that. What I am inclined to believe is that more developers write cross-platform code nowadays in comparison to 10-15 years ago.

steam

[Vorpix]

this is silly. the linux desktop is far from dead and is only going to improve when A) people become disenfranchised with the direction Windows 8 is going, and B) people can buy and play all their games (and one day, other commercial applications) through Steam. I think Valve is providing the engine that will drive Linux desktop adoption.

Call me strange but...

[JustNiz]

Linux as a desktop isn't even close to dead in my world.
I use it for just about everything, including at work as my primary desktop.

The only thing it doesn't do better than commercial OS's like Windows or OSX is gaming, which is completely an artificial restriction by the marketplace rather than a technical one, as the companies that write the games I like to play don't even make Linux versions (damn them). Gaming is the only reason I keep a windows partition and my only use for it, as windows is otherwise a joke OS in every respect compared to Linux).

From my experience, the only 2 things that have prevented most people from considering Linux for their own desktop are:

1) A lack of informed awareness about Linux (even amongst people who have even heard of it, there's way more very outdated and/or very wierd misconceptions about Linux out there than factually correct information). This is probably the main reason why Android needed to not be called Linux.

2) Most people's own sheep-like behaviour patterns. they are so mentally locked-in to what they already know (or what they've been told to think) that they wont consider even trying an alternative, even if it has significant potential to be much better.

Linux Server killed Linux Desktops

[JabrTheHut]

Frankly, the sudden focus on Linux servers in 2002/2003 killed the Linux desktop. Linux was a desktop-focused project up until suddenly it became critical to have Linux in the datacentre. Where, frankly, it initially sucked. And sucked hard.

The Linux community realized this and worked hard, from 2003 onwards, to resolve the problems. And now it's pretty good. The years of dedicated work to get a stable server OS out of Linux paid off. But it paid off at the expense of Linux Desktop.

Frankly, I would much rather have Linux desktops everywhere than Linux servers.

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[jedidiah]

> If Linux teaches us anything, it's that users will pick integration, polish and design over "free" any day of the week.

Post factum hogwash.

If anything, users pick the biggest herd. They choose what will allow them to run Lotus123 even if it is nasty and primitive and inferior to everything else on the market.

The rest will just buy what they are presented with.

At the end of the day, MS-DOS still reigns supreme. All of this talk about how nice or how pretty MacOS is or even how decent Windows is supposed to be all ultimately ignore the fact that this was all decided a long time ago.

Misguided attempts to copy MacOS or Windows ignore the real history involved with these platforms.

Re:The real reason

[GameboyRMH]

I just slapped MATE desktop on my laptop after upgrading from Lucid to Precise and kept on going like nothing happened.

It does boot a bit slower now though and I had to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox to keep it from running slow and laggy.

Re:"PC" and "Mac"

[WhitePanther5000]

Give it a rest. There was no ambiguity in his post, so no need to quibble over the origin of "PC". We know what it stands for, but he used it in the accepted convention.

Free of choice

[hugortega]

I'm very happy and productive with linux on my desktop (and dozens of servers).

I don't care if other people uses windows, mac or any other OS ... It's free of choice and everybody should have that freedom. Period.

ps. Yes, I use mac and windows on my job (yes, newest versions) but I prefer, by far, my linux with KDE desktop... for many reasons I don't want to explain, because everybody have reasons for their preferences, and that's perfectly fine.

Re:Wrong answer

[Simon Brooke]

Is a pretty naive view.

The company I currently work for turns over roughly half a billion US dollars a year, and is currently the most profitable company in our group. We've grown from a small regional business to the largest in our market segment in fifteen years. We ship goods to four thousand customers every business day in our own fleet of vans. On average we receive one electronic order every four seconds, day and night. All our business-critical systems run on Debian. In the real world, many companies are like this.

When you hit the $100k a year mark - I'm slightly above that now - you may find you're working for one of them.

Re:Desktops are pigs for refurbs

[butchersong]

Well it may be that XFCE is becoming a little more bloated but that means its also becoming the defacto replacement to Gnome rather than some lightweight alternative with a little less functionality. I just installed it on a laptop recently and launched the file manager and typed smb:///share and it worked!. This is a little thing but it's one of the many little nitpicks I had with the DE in the past. Use to be whenever I tried xfce I had to use a file manager other than the default thunar or mount my shares. If I want super lightweight I can always install some window manager and have some little panel app auto-start on login but I want XFCE to be a little more bloated now because these days I need a replacement to Gnome not just a neat alternative. I want something sane I can use and also install on my parents desktop and Gnome 3 is not it.

There isn't always a "right" choice.

[Above]

It's a simple fact that for many design decisions there is no "right" choice. There are often two, or three, or even more acceptable choices.

In closed systems, like OSX and Windows someone gets paid to make a choice from the list of acceptable ones and everyone moves on. Sure, some people complain the other options don't exist, but they get over it and move on.

In open systems, like Linux, you get forks and fragmentation. GNOME, KDE, maybe Unity is now better. Every option gets a voice, and everyone can run what they want. But there's a price. Developer resources have now been divided, and each camp can accomplish less. Fighting over which solution is "better" takes away resources from production work, and build ill will. Application developers are turned off by having to support multiple systems. Even something as simple as writing documentation with screen shots is a pain, which screen shots do you use and how much does that confuse customers?

The Linux ecosystem has been beaten by OSX and Windows using the old fashioned "divide and conquer" method. Except the Linux folks did the division themselves. If we're ever going to see Linux on the desktop be popular the community is going to have to get around one way that's good enough to do things.

Consider the source

[gavron]

On a technical basis, Linux improvements have grown leaps and bound beyond Apple's, which are based on BSD. In other words, while we really are comparing apples and oranges (no pun intended), the Linux ecosystem is an entirely different codebase than Apple's private fork of BSD.

One boring paragraph follows, then there's the part where I say Miguel is an ass and nobody in neither the Linux camp nor the Apple camp respects him.

The Linux Desktop is not one monolithic project. Instead it's a smorgasbord of choices. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, just plain X, IceWM, and many many many more. Each have their teams of coders who work on the X server, the Window Manager, the Display Manager, the interactions, overall themes, and lots of other factors that make each Linux desktop look unique. A simple KDE interface can resemble Win95 if you want it to. A Gnome3 desktop can resemble nothing useful if you want it to. Raw X11 can resemble SunOS 4 if you want it to. You can change these from minute to minute to figure out what works best FOR YOU. That's the power of the Linux Desktop. Its thousands of developers working on hundreds of projects allow YOU to figure out how YOU want to see the system. Apple, in contrast, has dozens of developers working on the desktop. Your choice is exactly what they decide. If you like it, then congratulations, you win. If you don't, you're one of the hundreds of thousands ex-Apple users now using Linux.

Miguel De Icaza has a record of opening his mouth and letting his personal opinion that contradicts fact and reason spew forth. This is no different. The man's record speaks for itself. https://www.google.com/search?q=miguel+de+icaza+traitor . I have no hard evidence that he's the antichrist, as some have claimed, and that's not germaine. WHAT IS is that HE IS BIASED and ADMITTEDLY SO when he says something you should remember this isn't your grandfather patting you on the back and saying "Apple killed the linux desktop because they are so good"... it's Miguel "Liar liar pants on fire whose paying for my opinion today I've sold out the Linux community before and I'm doing it again" De Icaza saying it. BTW, "De Icaza" is Spanish for "full of XXXX."

E

Re:Consider the source

[lennier]

The Linux Desktop is not one monolithic project. Instead it's a smorgasbord of incomplete and mutually incompatible choices. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, just plain X, IceWM, and many many many more. Each have their teams of bitterly divided coders who work on the X server, the Window Manager, the Display Manager, the interactions, overall themes, and lots of other factors that make each Linux desktop look unique.

Yes, you've neatly described the problem. The next step is to admit that it's a problem.

Re:How Linux killed itself is a more approriate ti

[BanHammor]

And where did LibreOffice go on that matter?

DeGasse couldn't give BeOS away

[aussersterne]

because an OS is not a tool unless you're a developer.

For everyone else, an OS is useless. They need applications. There were none for BeOS (I know, I had it back in the days when it was fashionable to have a bootloader with 10 different OS'es just so you could test web platforms across OS/browser combos and generally tinker with development on various platforms).

BeOS was boring because you couldn't even browse the web properly in it.

Even as a developer, who wants to spend time in an OS where you're basically facing the task of writing the entire userland from scratch?

Even devs want to check their email now and then...

It is not just about crowds

[betterunixthanunix]

My university actually hosts mirrors for Fedora, FreeBSD, and a few other free OSes. Yet students here are told that if they are not using Windows or Mac OS X, they will receive no support from the school, and some degree programs require Windows.

You see, the school does not want to maintain public computer labs that have all the software that is required for classes, and would rather offload that expense on the students. They also fired all the competent IT staff who used to work at the help desk, and now have students rely on fellow students for tech support; there is basically one admin who directs the student tech support, and he is not even going to try to support anything other than Windows and Mac OS X.

If GNU/Linux were used by 10% of the students here, things would be different.

article not very good

[AnAlchemist]

I think there's not enough quotes from Miguel, and I also think he's wrong that web apps hurt the Linux desktop. They /should/ have helped, but they didn't, and I think I have a pretty good understanding why:

- lack of binary compatibility between distros

I was an RPM maintainer for a major distro in the early 2000s. I compiled lots of apps that I felt were cool but didn't get binary RPMs out there fast enough. Then I realized the sheer waste of resources devoted to compiling source code for different versions of different distros, usually because of stupid reasons like lack of a C++ ABI or because the icons are stored in a different location. Lack of compatibility between distros (the FHS/LSB isn't as strong or strict as it should be) sucks for open source apps, but at least you can recompile it. This same issue is a total killer for closed-source apps. The Autopackage/ZeroInstall folks have tried pretty hard, but the problems run deeper.

That's why there will never be a "Linux App Store"; at best, it'll be segregated by distro, and then by distro version.

- lack of standardized DE (Desktop Environment)

I don't care much about the DE; it just needs to get out of the way. I don't use the DE; I use apps. In the interests of innovation, KDE/GNOME both changed stuff that didn't need to be changed. Changing stuff just kills productivity. Like Linus said, changing the standard font size shouldn't a difficult task. Look at the Windows Display portion of the Control Panel: hasn't changed much since Windows 95.

So even if I'm using the same apps in Windows and Linux, I'm more productive in Windows because I know all the shortcuts, and they haven't changed in 15 years! Minimize, maximize, Run, Start Menu, etc.

This lack of standardization is even harder for closed-source app developers, as they may need to develop twice and definitely test twice. Can you imagine writing and testing software to make sure that you can print properly in GNOME2, Unity, GNOME3, and KDE4?

- lack of good configuration utils

Every distro has their own utilities to configure stuff (SuSE has YaST), and they're not even very good. Forget something like Group Policy; are you installing software? That's YaST. Do you want to change your screen resolution? That's YaST too. Change font size? That's KDE or GNOME settings. What about screensaver, user account control, firewall settings, network preferences, keyboard layout, etc.? Every distro has its own set of utilities, and then the DE's have their own too. And they're not even that great!

In the hunt for innovation, the Linux world has duplicated too much.

Now that I'm a developer, I can see why it's hard to write apps for Linux: lack of good APIs. Think of how you would answer things like:
- I'm writing a CD cover printing program, and I need to find out what printers are available and what trays they have.
- I'm making a video game. What resolutions are supported? How do I change the resolution?
- I'm making a file sharing or backup program, and I want to make sure the firewall isn't set to block my port.
- What versions of Java are available on this machine?
- I'm making a video chat program. Does this machine have a microphone or webcam?

All these things have different APIs, that may or may not be backwards compatible with the best distro release, which may or may not even exist.

Why should you care?

[aussersterne]

Because "does it work for me" is a different question from "will it work for me just as well next year and five years down the road?"

The latter question is equally important for a rational platform decision, and the latter question is strongly correlated to the size of the userbase; platforms without users will lose developers, and will struggle to support the latest hardware/software standards and workflows.

It's the Amiga issue. Maybe you liked Amiga. Maybe you even liked it long after everyone left. But there was a point at which, if you look carefully, Amiga users became essentially not a part of the technology ecosystem. Any Amiga skills became worthless in the marketplace, because the population was doing something else.

And then all of your investment in hardware, software, and skills became worthless—unless you were willing to pursue those of the choice that you *didn't* make, playing catch-up all the way and having to significantly reinvest.

Hm...

[betterunixthanunix]

I just installed ScientificLinux 6.3 on a desktop today, and after about a minute of telling it what it to install and where, I walked away to have some lunch. When I came back it was done installing, and things worked just fine.

You know, the same sort of bizarre inconsistency in whether or not people have problems can be found in Windows and Mac OS X. In fact, the Mac OS X users in my group are currently struggling with subversion inexplicably hanging when they try to commit changes to their repository, while the GNU/Linux users have been unable to reproduce the problem.

The moral of the story is this: none of the operating systems people commonly use on their laptops or desktops work reliably; things are just better than they were 10 years ago.

re: need for native applications on the decline

[ibsteve2u]

'shifting to the web,' with the need for native applications on the decline."

I.e., people were voluntarily saying "Here is everything that there is to know about me - snoop away, whether you're a government or a gigantic corporation. I'll content myself with just bitching about it as you put all that is me - all that I have given you - into your databases and analyze the best way to manipulate and control me!"

People don't seem to think of consequences when they scramble to ride the newest technology wave.

Re:Desktops are pigs for refurbs

[Ash-Fox]

And yet, audio has always worked for me under Windows (and OS X), but it's always been a gamble on Linux.

Out of curiosity, did you buy your Linux system from a Linux OEM like System76 ?

IOW Miguel killed the Linux desktop

[Tough Love]

First by maginalizing the superior KDE desktop, second by screwing up Gnome development completely by being an idiot. Always thought Miguel was working for Microsoft.

News for Miguel: KDE isn't dead yet, far from it. Gnome is in a death spiral though, and good riddance.

I'd go a step farther

[aussersterne]

and suggest not only does the Linux community imagine that it has Office equivalents, etc., but that the Linux community doesn't imagine there's much actual call for Office out there (witness the referrals to OpenOffice every time an MS Office story makes the Slashdot headlines).

Basically, most of the Linux community has mistaken the server room for the entire corporation, or indeed for all of society. Who could possibly need more than Linux currently has to offer? All of those things that OS X and Windows have that Linux doesn't? Either they aren't important enough to need to be distinguishable from a free (albeit not compatible) clone, or it's just garbage and groupthink: "Who does that? Who uses MS Office? I mean, jesus, it's so bloated compared to vim! I've never seen anybody using it, and you can't do anything useful with Office anyway—ever try to edit a dotfile with Word? What was Microsoft thinking? People must be stupid." And so on...

Agreed. I was a Linux user for 16 years

[aussersterne]

on the strength of its continuous improvement and technical superiority (specifically meaning that you could make hardware do stuff in Linux that required much more expensive hardware in other platforms).

But by the late 2000's things had turned around: both had disappeared. I was struggling to do the same things with hardware in Linux that you could easily do in Windows and Mac OS for the same price, and the experience was getting worse with every release.

It was time to bail, and I considered both Windows 7 and OS X but settled on OS X.

Re:Agreed. I was a Linux user for 16 years

[gmueckl]

I'm feeling the same pain on Linux, but OS X is not appropriate for me at the moment (Apple hardware doesn't meet my - very special - requirements right now). So I'm using Windows more often nowadays because I've never run a non-multiboot system at home...

Re:I actually met Miguel.

[Hatta]

So because he smiled and shook your hand, he's a nice guy? Judge people based on their actions, not their personality.

Re:The real reason

[M1FCJ]

I hope your many IT friends don't work anywhere near my IT friends since I would prefer my IT friends work with competent people. If you don't want to use a toy GUI, Windows 8 or OSX are not the solution, KDE and many other are.

With regarding KDE vs Gnome, I think the history of Gnome must be remembered. By scare tactics, usage QT was discouraged by deIcaza himself and Gnome was founded. If there are any duplications, the fault squarely lies with deIcaza and his massive ego. Don't get me started with the Mono either.

I truly believe the guy is a fifth columnist and the evidence is pretty strong.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I actually met Miguel.

[csumpi]

I actually talked to him about linux, gnome, apple, .net. He had great ideas and seemed to have the best of intentions.

I don't remember hand shaking though.

The scales fall from my eyes!

[ThatsNotPudding]

And here I thought it was all the trolls and whores paid by Microsoft, Miguel (and Florian).

Me too.

[neoshroom]

Yes, I agree that ejecting a volume by dragging it to the trash was a weird idea. It makes a little more sense on OS X because when you start dragging the item the trash morphs into an Eject icon. Even if that particular operation is maybe an odd one, I definitely like Mac's emphasis on drag and drop operations in general. You cannot image how much time you save when everything accepts drag and drop. If I have a file I want to read on the desktop, I drag it to the application and a second later I'm reading it. If you try the same thing on Linux or Windows it often will not work or won't work consistently with every application. That extra 15 seconds navigating File-->Open-->Directories is annoying and grandma is going to understand the drag and drop operation much better because it is more intuitive.

As per your launching apps via keyboard shortcuts, I totally agree with you. In fact, I do the same thing on Mac with a little program called Alfred.

Re:One word:

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Potentially, but if you get enough people through, say kickstarter, (or some other crowd-sourcing site) to cough up enough dough, then bring that was of cash to Adobe and say "here is a million dollars, port PhotoShop to RedHat Linux" then maybe you'll have some adoption.
Money talks, everything else is a dream

Where's the hardware that just works?

[chrisxcr1]

Every time I've ever tried linux I've run into minor annoying hardware support issues that over time make it just not worth the hassle when I can easily afford a Mac. Can someone point me to any currently available, inexpensive notebooks where all of the hardware is fully supported in linux and has a trackpad that doesn't suck?

GUI Vs CLI

[freshlimesoda]

For the reason most Unix / Linux enthusiasts love CLi so much, to a point they hate GUI associated with it. While GUI is what is exactly needed to penetrate masses - reason why MS became so popular, and with steady income growth in '3rd Tier' countries more people can now afford Apple products - again GUI based (plus glamourous image of Apple" that Apple is consistently doing well. My point is, that an attractive design is to hardware, what GUI is to software. Apple does both very well. Its the late development / awakening of GUI relevance that made Linux loose out in addition to geeky image that it held for years - still does. On Servers, CLI is fine.

Free software can't do GUIs

[Animats]

Linux on the desktop failed because free software can't do GUIs. Distributed hack-and-patch development has a long history of bad GUIs. It's hard to find a single open-source desktop GUI application that doesn't suck. From GIMP to Blender to Inkscape, they're all far worse than their commercial competitors.

Open source GUI programs tend towards a collection of random graphical elements in search of an architecture. Often, they're acting as a front end to something that, underneath, has a textual interface. "Buttons and an output text window" programs, like Tortoise CVS/SVN, are common. Wrong answer. The GUI has to understand what the back end is doing.

This is what happens when there's no architect. There's no conceptual unity.

Re:I had the same experiece with Mac Ports,

[93 Escort Wagon]

I've occasionally had problems with MacPorts not correctly removing old versions of stuff.

I've found Fink to be much more robust in terms of its underlaying support structure. The tradeoff is that, for a couple packages I use, the versions in Fink are lagging what's in MacPorts.

How does a restricted OS beat Linux?

[unixisc]

First, OS-X is more BSD than Linux. Yeah, it's XNU underneath, as people love pointing out, but above that, it's FreeBSD and then the Quartz windowing system. That invites questions of TFA:

• Given that OS-X can't be installed on PC's that are not from Apple (w/o violating warranties), how would a Linux or better yet, a BSD fan install OS-X on, say, a Dell? In other words, such a laptop would be an existing opportunity for something like Mint or Ubuntu or even PC-BSD, but not for OS-X
• Given that the Mac is far more expensive than most PCs, why would people who are interested in Linux on the desktop buy it, except for OOTB usability?
• Given that Quartz is not available anywhere else and is completely closed, why would Linux fans go to OS-X?
• Given that OS-X is more BSD than Linux, again why would Linux fans prefer it to Linux? I can see them prefering it to Windows, but why Linux?

The only explanation that makes sense here is that Unix afficionados, who were considering Linux except for several quirks about Linux, saw that OS-X has not only the same Posix compliance that Linux has, but is actually officially certified as Unix by the Open Group. That, and for people who prefer to have common applications, they know they'll get it hassle free on OS-X, but may have to pull teeth to get them to work under Linux. Or even BSD.

But while Apple may have filled a crucial niche, I don't agree that OS-X killed Linux on the desktop. It could have, had Apple been interested in making OS-X popular over a wide range of configurations, but they chose not to, and given the mess MS is in while tryng to always ensure that Windows is compatible w/ past software, it seems that Apple probably made the right call. Which leaves the field open for both Linux & BSD, assuming that they get their acts together.

Re:How does a restricted OS beat Linux?

[toriver]

Far more expensive? You mean to say that there are cheaper PCs. It's like wondering how BMW stays in business when people can get cheap Fiats.

Quartz (unlike the underlying ocmponents) is closed sure, but please explain why Unity was made, a UI that tries hard to resemble the first OS X releases? I run Ubuntu 12.04 LTE on an old Pentium 4-based Dell, and I had to pinch myself when I saw how much they had copied from the Mac OS user interface. Port Unity to Darwin and you have a legal "Hackintosh"... :)

Re:How does a restricted OS beat Linux?

[unixisc]

All Macs are more expensive than equivalently configured PCs, even name brands like Dell and HP. It's more like stating that GM's On-Star system has driven out of business similar systems, even though Toyota, Honda, Nissan far outsell GM, and that none of them offer On-Star.

Unity is similar to OS-X? Not even close. XFCE is, and Comice Linux has (or had) a GNOME3 UX that was altered using extensions to look like OS-X. So yeah, it is possible to copy the look & feel of OS-X, but that doesn't mean that any Linux (or even BSD) that has that can necessarily run Mac applications.

My main point above was that Linux would have done just fine if it didn't have so many variables (kernel version, DE version, Library versions, and so on - what that does is create countless combinations that don't get tested, and as a result, a lot of stuff - even stuff written for Linux - breaks when one attempts to run on a different Linux environment. The different package managers have had varying success in addressing these, but none of them are exactly OOTB experiences for users, unlike Apple. So yeah, some people who can afford it do buy Macs to sidestep the issue, and get all their Unix stuff in a console when they need them. But for non-Apple customers, they can't switch to OS-X even if they wanted to. So they could have switched to Linux, but for all the issues that that brings w/ it.

The Real Problem

[Angrywhiteshoes]

In most trade studies its actually found to NOT be cheaper to go with Linux like most people think it would be. Especially if you're connected to any type of government agency, the price almost triples. When you buy a Mac what you got is unbelievably good hardware, a unix-like OS and enough tools to do your job.

So it's not actually a good deal to use Linux in the office. There has to be something about it that is worth while for you. It's not really more cost effective.

--- Begin Rant ---
I need to be clear, that I'm not an Apple hater, I just don't know what happened to them. I used Apple since the Powerbook G3 Wallstreet. Until this year. What drives people like me away from it, is the propriatary nonsense. I recently sold my 2011 Macbook Pro that I bought just last November. Why? Can't use my 24" LG monitor with it, well, I can, but I can't get native resolution. It isn't supported. I called Apple, they said, "Sup you broke bitch? You wanna use a non-Apple product? fuck off, we're sending the death squad to your house right now, better call your mom and say goodbye." Not to mention, Lion.... I'm going to tell you, I had to spend hours, resetting all the hotkeys that used to be default, finding out how to re-expose servers and folders in the finder and a whole bunch of other crap that they removed or hid from you.

At work, I actually ended up Opting for a Windows computer and just used Cygwin and Xming. Macports is SOOOOO slow. Why does it take 2 hours to install VIM plugins? The GUIs for it are just as bad.

Not to mention, now that I work from home, working for an open source company now and I quit my job with the windows pc. I have a slow internet connection. So, I can't even reinstall the OS. It times out. I can't install anything, because it takes decades. Why would I need to reinstall the OS? Well, I was doing an update and the network connection timed out and guess what? It crashed and I was stuck with a broken OS. No joke. I had to go to my old college, plug in on a port I knew to be open and sit there for 45 mins trying to not look suspicious while my OS reinstalls.

Also, can't play League of Legends on a Mac, LOLOLOL FFFF HoN. Can't play it on You-bun-too either though :(

Re:Desktops are pigs for refurbs

[Angrywhiteshoes]

Good luck to the steam guys trying to build on this sea of swirling open source maelstrom :)

I was under the impression they're only targetting Ubuntu. At least that's where I saw all the demos running. Who knows... super tux for life.

Real reason for the slow progress of desktop Linux

[dgharmon]

He's confusing marketshare with technological progress. The main reason Linux hasn't progressed on the desktop has been the restrictive licenses Microsoft forced on the OEMs, as in they pay for the number of boxes shifted, even if sold without Windows. They're currently transferring that revenue model to the mobile market with the Android tax.

`Microsoft's licenses impose a penalty or "tax" paid to Microsoft upon OEMs' use of competing PC operating systems. "Per processor" licenses require OEMs to pay a royalty for each computer the OEM sells containing a particular processor (e.g., an Intel 386 microprocessor) whether or not the OEM has included a Microsoft operating system with that computer', DOJ v. Microsoft

'de Icaza .. thinks the real reason Linux lost .. because the developers behind .. graphical Linux applications didn't do a good enough job ..

Ubuntu 3D Desktop | Linux Gaming: Duke Nukem3D

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[mcgrew]

For the average user, not the technical wizz-kid: the average user, Linux was never an option. Id didn't come on their store-bought PC.

So far so good.

If didn't "just work" (ever!) and it didn't support most of the peripherals or USB devices that they had or wanted.

Fail. Linux does "just work" and it supports every perepheral and USB device I've plugged into it. Take my Bluetooth USB dongle: drivers and install program for Windows and Mac, but nothing for Linux. Surprise, plug it in and it works. No programs to install, no drivers to install, no reboots, just plug it in and shoot pics to it from your camera or phone. Windows? Install program, reboot, install drivers, reboot, fiddle with it... and it sorta kinda works.

Blaming Linux's failure to penetrate the average household on anything but it's own lack of marketing

Indeed, that's the kicker. Most non-nerds haven't ever even heard of it.

polish

If you mean "pretty" you have a point. If you mean "well written and well behaved" you're wrong. For example, hardware fault-tolerance. Linux will work on flaky hardware when Windows won't even boot. And it seems that there are bug fix notifications almost every day on my W7 box, seldom on my Linux box.

self-discipline

I have no idea what you're discussing here. Whose self-discipline?

ease of use

Wrong again. Linux is far easier to use (unless you're using the wrong distro for the job, don't expect to play MP3s from a server distro). In Windows, almost every update, bug fix, driver fix, and every single software install requires at least one reboot and often more. Linux? No boots needed unless you're replacing the kernel or hardware. Shut your two computers down for the night, the next morning your turn them both on. In the Windows box, you have to log on (unless you stupidly left it without a password), then open each and every program and document you had open when you shut it down. Meanwhile, all you had to do with the Linux box is press the on button, it's sitting there like it was when you shut it off.

Installing a new program? In Linux, open package manager, enter sudo password, find app, click, done. Windows? Search for it on the web, download, double click the install exe, click "yes" to half a dozen UACs, then reboot... and probably reboot again, which of course means opening all your apps and documents all over again. How in the hell is that more user-friendly?

How is Windows more useable in any way whatever? Remember, I've been using Windows for over fifteen years and Linux for ten; I know the strengths and weaknesses of both. No way is Windows even close to Linux in useability. What Windows takes ten clicks for, Linux usually takes two.

support

True, the Geek Squad doesn't work on Linux computers. But a Linux computer, not having much of a malware threat, and lacking that god damned registry, seldom needs any support at all. It just works.

brand (i.e. not having a million different distros: all the same, but different)

That's only detrimental to someone too stupid to eat at any reataraunt but fast food, because OMFG THAEAR IS TOO MANY CHOICES!!!! You would rather Ford only carried Fusions, because having to choose between an F110 or an F150 or any one of the many sedans, or any of the many SUVs is just too much for your tiny little mind? This is the stupidest argument you Windows apologists use, and it's embarrasing on a supposed nerd site.

or integration

I prefer interoperability and industry standards to vendor lock-in. Again, that's a stupid argument.

If your comment teaches us anything, it's that Wndows is only for the learning impaired.

Now go tell Steve to throw another chair, I'm sure his office is only a few floors from yours.

Sheesh.

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[tyrione]

Linux will never be OS X. You lost the battle long ago with X11.

Re:I actually met Miguel.

[ceoyoyo]

Apple is notorious for deprecating old APIs.

Such as? Apple doesn't keep around ancient APIs like Microsoft does, but they don't break them every couple of years the way some Linux/cross platform GUI systems do. The major API Apple is "infamous" for discontinuing is Carbon, which was released as a transition from OS9, with the clear provision that nobody should write anything new in it, more than a decade ago.

Re:what he is kidding?

[maxwell demon]

If I wanted a Mac, I'd know where to get one.

I'm a little confused

[trickstyhobbit]

Maybe I'm being stupid, but my four Linux desktops seems to say that Linux is alive and well on the desktop. They all have OSs that were released within the last six months. They are consistently updated, and I can do everything I need to on them. Also, in my house anyways, OSX could never kill my desktops because it will only go on that overpriced, white plastic garbage plastered with Apple branding. Honest question: have I missed the point of this article?

Re:Thanks for your support!

[swb]

I doubt there's any IT department in a large organization supporting POP3. Any large organization is likely to be Outlook/Exchange, either supporting OutlookAnywhere (Outlook via RPC over HTTPS) or "normal" Outlook over VPN (or maybe both).

And since you're so adamant that it's just a matter of enabling a service or editing inetd.conf, it's pretty obvious your totally clueless about what's actually involved in providing highly available email to thousands of people.

you have access to physical hardware

[Chirs]

How are they going to stop you?

When I was in the same boat as you I just went ahead and did it. Of course while there's no "support" as such we do actually allow linux on the desktop for our linux developers (me, among others), so I wasn't actually breaking any rules.

Re:you have access to physical hardware

[jacknifetoaswan]

I'm in more of a design engineering role, now, designing physical and virtual architectures for corporate hosting. Because Sharepoint is our document repository, and we use CaliberRM as our requirements repository, both of which don't run under Linux, I'm stuck with Windows.

For what it's worth, though, our bios settings are locked down and password protected to prevent us from booting from media. It's really a risk/reward situation. Do I fight with the desktop team, who thinks that server admins, and the people that set their desktop policy are idiots and will fight me up the chain, or do I just deal with it and run a Linux system at home and on my phone?

worked for me in 2011

[Chirs]

I got a new Dell laptop for work last year. Everything worked fine (including the media buttons). The only problem was that the touchpad was only recognized in compatibility mode so I couldn't use the multitouch gestures or configure the scroll areas. I think that's working now, but I mostly use it with a separate mouse so I haven't bothered to upgrade distro versions.

Apple has backwards compatibility?

[fast turtle]

Hell I'm able to run programs written for Win95 on Win7. That's a span of 20+ years of backwards compatibility. Apple? Although they've been pretty decent about it with OS-X they don't have anywhere's near the backwards compatility that both Windows and Linux has and no, that's not a misstatement about Linux.

Keep in mind that in linux, as long as you can build, you have compatibility with what ever features you need. If not, then you also have the option of figuring out why in hell it wont compile and fixing the problem even it may cost more to rewrite/fix the app then to find a replacement

Re:Thanks for your support!

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Any large organization is likely to be Outlook/Exchange, "

You're not actually serious are you? You do realize that using an Exchange server is the very definition of incompetence, right?

Re:Wrong answer

[toriver]

Oh yeah, and tell me wise guy, how are those blu-ray discs coming up on OS X ?

Dunno, I never bought a Blu-ray player for the Mac (LaCie makes them) but I expect they have a player or a plugin for Apple's DVD player. Do Blu-ray discs work on my Windows laptop at work? No, it does not have a player since far from all PCs have one.

(I play Blu-rays on my PS3 since it rocks at doing just that.)

locked up as in crashed?

[Chirs]

That'd be the first time I've seen that happen. Or did it just slow down a lot due to thrashing the disk?

Did you try dropping to console and killing your grep? Or logging in from another device?

Re:locked up as in crashed?

[Yunzil]

Thrashing, and yes, I couldn't even ssh into the box.

Re:Whos desk?

[toriver]

It's a bit like my Windows PC with its godlike uptime because I never realized you needed to press "Start" in order to stop... :)

Re:osx really?

[toriver]

Unsubstantiated flamebait is flamebait. No wonder you are anonymous, giving the Linux community a bad name by acting like a prick.

Re: need for native applications on the decline

[toriver]

Why are you equating the web with Facebook or the like? If I fire up Tomcat and serve a web app, how does that get at "everything there is to know about you"?

Blame Gnome 3 and Unity

[msobkow]

I blame Unity and Gnome 3 for the death of the Linux desktop.

Both are hell bent on burying the keyboard and mouse in favour of the touchscreen tablet.

Re:How did Apple kill the Linux desktop...

[Guy Harris]

...when OS X is built on top of Unix?

They said "Linux desktop", not "desktops built atop UN*X". Presumably the argument being made is that one desktop built atop UN*X reduced the demand for others; in TFA the author says "The need to develop native applications was diminishing and at the same time OS X provided a good enough Unix-like environment that programmers could develop on a Mac and then deploy to a Linux server."

Or, to put it another way, the argument is that one reason why it killed the Linux desktop is that it's, err, umm, built on top of Unix.

Re:Dumbest article in the universe.

[Guy Harris]

There exists a philosophical computing spectrum with stable, vendor-controlled, locked down, less customizable, less flexible, more compatible user-experience on one extreme end. On the other extreme end, you have nearly infinite flexibility and user-control at the expense of stability, compatibility and vendor-support. Apple is on one extreme, Desktop Linux is on the other, and MS Windows sits somewhere in the middle.

Saying that Apple can steal Linux users is like claiming that the Republican party (for lack of an example of an extreme-right party) can steal voters from the communist party. Absurd.

And there exists another axis with "certified UNIXes" on one end and MS Windows at the other. To a large degree, on that axis you have OS X and Linux and... on or near one end (Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Mountain Lion being certified, and Linux not being certified but being extremely "Unix-like") and MS Windows at the other and, as the author claims in TFA, "The need to develop native applications was diminishing and at the same time OS X provided a good enough Unix-like environment that programmers could develop on a Mac and then deploy to a Linux server."

The web, not Apple, is killing desktops

[joeblog]

The full quote from the article that Miguel "believes that a large portion of the software developers that could have taken Linux to greater heights defected to other platforms, including not only Apple OS X but — more importantly — the web" is very true for me. I used to program Gnome apps but now focus entirely on web app development.

The modern trend is summed up nicely in a lecture by John Ousterhout of TCL fame on web application development at Stanford found at http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?course=WebApplications. The relevant one here is his first video in which he draws a tombstone on the blackboard and writes "Download Install Binaries RIP" in it and predicts the only applications anyone will be installing this way in the near future will be browsers.

My money is on Prof Ousterhout — Google's documents have already replaced MS Office for me (I work for a company where getting Excel installed on my PC was impossible, but that's no problem now since Google provides a spreadsheet via my browser which is far superior since the files it creates are more securely stored and shareable).

Now all the hassles with different operating systems and GUIs fall away for application developers who can use browsers as their universal canvas. For us Unix old timers, this might sound like an Emacs future (and recal Emacs did spawn Mosaic, the father of Netscape and grandad of Firefox), but it's now reality.

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[westlake]

For the average user, not the technical wizz-kid: the average user, Linux was never an option. It didn't come on their store-bought PC. If didn't "just work" (ever!)...

For the average user who took a liking to a FOSS app, there has always been the port to Windows or the Mac, easy to find and easy to install --- which strips away any compelling reason to migrate to Linux.

Open the Ubuntu store.

Then the Windows selection from Download.com. Finally, open the software pages at Amazon.com or even Walmart. Think like an average user and not a geek and then ask yourself where you want to spend your time and money.

Linux killed it's own desktop

[Nyder]

the problem with linux desktop was they suck. Instead of people making the best, useable desktop possible, you have 2 camps making pretty much the same desktop, splitting the camp into 2, then of course, you get other desktops thrown into the mix.

Windows, 1 desktop.

OS X, 1 desktop.

Had the linux community decided to back 1 desktop, make it fast, usable, and easy to install/configure, then maybe it would be a player. Instead, there is too many choices, split community's and it's a joke about This Is The Year of the Linux Desktop.

The Linux community hurt themselves in this case.

Re: need for native applications on the decline

[ibsteve2u]

Depends upon whether you're serving your web app up "in-house", does it not? If data - even encrypted data - exits your premises, then it becomes accessible to others by definition as you do not have physical control over the communications links.

Valve coming to the rescue

[cynop]

With Valve finally bringing Steam on Linux, how can someone proclaim the linux desktop dead?

Too bad

[rsilvergun]

there are real conspiracies out there. A conspiracy is just a bunch of people doing something together, usually something bad. The financial industry conspired to hide the worthlessness of their real-estate portfolios when they bundled them for sale. But you can't talk about that because talking about conspiracies makes you a loon...

Re:Too bad

[mug funky]

no, talking about loony conspiracies makes you a loon.

the wall street stuff can be easily and eloquently put such that a reasonable person must at least concede the possibility that it happened.

timecubers, illuminati, birthers, truthers, moon-fakers, chemtrailers, HAARPers, grassy knollers, alien autopsyists don't meet that burden.

Re:All true, but some of us don't care

[Rich0]

Uh, for that workload why even run X11? I guess it might be helpful for the paste buffer...

Screen or tmux are essentially your window managers. :)

mouse motion / acceleration is broken in OSX

[dudpixel]

I tried OSX for about a month. I just couldn't get the hang of the mouse.

There was too much difference between moving the mouse slow and moving it fast (pointer accelerates way too much).

The fastest speed wasn't fast enough. My mouse typically moves only about an inch to get from one side of the screen to the other, and that's without any fast movements.

I'm sure if you could cut yourself off from the outside world and pretend only macs exist (seems like a lot of apple fanboys do just that), you could get used to it, but I found that switching between OSX and windows or OSX and linux was just awful.

WIndows and Linux both seem to have very similar mouse handling and switching between those is no problem.

Ironically, every time I try using the iphone I have trouble with the keyboard. Maybe it's just me...

Re:And what we have recently found

[mug funky]

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.

actually, Apple has quite the proven track record of doing the exact opposite. not just in the desktop market, either.

a few (from an uninformed PC user who has been dabbling in linux for 2 years or so):

- DVD Studio Pro
- Apple Color
- Final Cut Pro (FCP-X is no substitute, and old FCP is not available for sale anymore)
- Shake
- Xserve
- Xsan

and that's just from the industry i'm involved in.

there's also the tradition of every iToy firmware breaking function from the last (why is it that we can't be allowed to sync tracks from another piece of software? what's it matter if we own the hardware, and their software is free?).

with open source, things are far more chaotic, of course. any project that lives long enough for backward-conpatibility to be desirable has treated it with almost zealous respect. of course there are exceptions, but you can't hold an anarchic community to a uniform set of standards like in a large corporation.

Re:It's not about cost. XP is better.

[toddestan]

If you assume that the P4 uses 100W more, and electricity costs 0.25/kwh, you'll pay for that $300 netbook in about 12,000 hours which is about year and half if you're one of those dorks that leaves the computer on all the time for no reason. If you're one of the types that uses it for an hour or two a day then shuts it down (which is more likely for the refurb P4 market), then the payback will be decades. Sorry, but the energy usage argument just doesn't work.

Also, as someone who has a P4 running Gnome 2 on Debian, I find it works just fine as a desktop. Better than Vista, which still ran acceptably. Keep in mind that your Atom netbook really isn't that much more powerful than yesterday's P4 too.

Apple didn't do shit...

[nighthawk243]

Linux killed Linux on the desktop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh-cnaJoGCw

Re:How Linux killed itself is a more approriate ti

[RazorSharp]

yEd - runs on them all, and good enough for me

He covered 'good enough.'

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[mikael_j]

Fail. Linux does "just work" and it supports every perepheral and USB device I've plugged into it.

Ever try plugging in a Wacom tablet? Hint: It won't work. Or rather, it will probably sort of work but not in any way the way you want it to (might get stuck in mouse mode only, or pen mode only with a whole bunch of things just slightly off making it completely unusable). Sure, if you plug it into a Mac and don't install the drivers it will default to mouse mode but at least that just requires a very quick driver install, on Linux every time I've set up a Wacom tablet it has involved quite a lot of work (including downloading and compiling 3rd party drivers and further 3rd party patches to to those, a lot of Xorg/XFree86 config tweaking and even with this there have always seemed to be some minor glitch I couldn't get rid of).

And it's not just Wacom tablets, I've had similar issues with other gear as well. Sure, it's nowhere near as bad as it was back in say, 1998, but it's still an issue that pops up fairly frequently (I'm still amazed that when installing Debian on a laptop recently I only had to install a new graphics driver and do some light configuration to make the wifi NIC work properly. Of course, that still took 30 minutes or so in total and had I been completely new to Linux it would probably have taken me days).

Re: need for native applications on the decline

[mikael_j]

So now your argument is that networks are evil?

Re:The real reason

[jbolden]

In the US it is 12% now BTW. And in terms of laptops over $1000 (i.e. usage among people that really care) it is in the mid 80s.

Re:The real reason

[jbolden]

What really is killing Linux (or why it's never really taken off) is the fragmentation issues. Sure, choice is a good thing but in the present implementation of these available choices full QC (the boring stuff) is rarely done. This leaves a system lacking "spit-n-polish". A good example of this fragmentation is KDE vs. Gnome(2) libraries. Although different under the hood, are they really all that different to the average user?

I agree with your point but just for future reference: libraries are a terrible example of where fragmentation has led to lack of QC. Both GTK and QT have rather good QC. Its the actual GUIs themselves that lack QC, because the amount of labor required for GUI QC is orders of magnitude greater than that required for library QC.

Desktop MARKET1

[DaveV1.0]

Really, people, it needs to be referred to as the "Linux Desktop Market" and not the "Linux Desktop". That way, there won't be post after post of computer geeks posting "What do you mean Linux on the desktop is dead? I am posting from a desktop running Linux right now."

At best, the market for desktops and laptops running Linux, preloaded or otherwise, is a niche. At worst, it is effectively non-existent.

News to Me

[obscuro]

I keep seeing "news & opinion" articles that either state the the Linux desktop is dead or presume it's dead and explain why. This meme has been around forever but it's gotten more popular lately. I think it's popularity is driven by developer adoption of Mac as a personal desktop.

I live in Boulder. This last month I saw linux on three different college kid's laptops. I talked to a friend at IBM who's whole department was switched to a linux desktop. I saw a linux desktop being used at the reception desk of a collaborative workspace and linux at two restaurants point of sale/service stands.

Maybe the linux desktop is dead to DEVELOPERS. I doubt it. It's clearly not dead here in my little sample set.

Re: need for native applications on the decline

[ibsteve2u]

So now your argument is that networks are evil?

It would appear to me that you said that.

I said that once your data leaves your physical control, it is available to anybody who has physical access to the hardware infrastructure of the internet and/or - dependent upon link media - the ability to tap LOS and/or satellite communications. Which includes many multinational corporations and - dependent upon endpoints - many governments. And your data is additionally available to anybody who successfully breaches the software at an endpoint, whether that endpoint software is a website or a webapp. Said breach might be man-in-the-middle or simply leeching.

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[RandomAdam]

As a daily Linux user, there is only one thing that Linux lacks compared to Win or Mac, that is third party software support. That is it, I can't go and buy (which I would gladly do, for the correct tools) software package X that works across Win/Mac/Linux.

I hope the advent of Steam on Linux causes software developers to take Linux seriously, I purchased the first Humble Bundle, and I have watched all the others, no time for gaming anymore....but I notice that Linux usually sells about the same numbers as Mac and always has the highest per unit sale price.

Occasionally (1-2 Weeks a year, when our regular CAD guy is swamped) I have to so some 2D CAD work, two years ago I was running AutoCAD 2006 in a VM on my Linux box, then this year I found DraftSight, I can't tell you how pleasant it is to use native software compared to some other solution that you cobble together just to get the job done. If I had to do CAD more often I would gladly pay for the full version to get the scripting API's.

Most Linux users are not so purist that they wont pay for software at all, given the right tools for the job they are doing they will pay for commercial software.

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[mike4ty4]

So does this mean it is essentially impossible to be able to produce a truly _good_ Free/opensource OS? That proprietary is the only way to greatness?

Surprise!

[idlehanz]

I mean, that's how my Linux desktops felt when I told them that apparently they had been killed.

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

>

Fail. Linux does "just work" and it supports every perepheral and USB device I've plugged into it.

I spent years wondering why linux people say they can do an install and everything works out of the box. It finally came to me that they're like american car buyers talking with japanese car buyers. I've owned quite a few of both, and every japanese car I ever owned went 7-8+ years without needing anything other than fluid changes, filters and tires. The american cars had a raft of small things fall off or stop working, and occasionally major issues. Yet I hear people who own american cars say "My buick never needed anything", and we'd continue the conversation until the owner revealed that they'd made 10 warranty visits for the same sorts of small things that annoyed me about american cars. The problem was they considered that 'normal', while my idea of 'normal' was zero warranty trips to the dealer.

So since I've installed linux a half dozen times in the last couple of years and NEVER had a fully running system when I was done with the ubuntu disk, I'm guessing you're extremely lucky or that you do a half dozen to a dozen things after install to make the machine work, without realizing that this is not 'normal' or 'just works'.

These were all fairly commodity platforms. In several installs, the intel integrated graphics driver was not included in the distribution, because it failed some kind of open source smell test. The audio didn't work on many systems until I installed a newer version of some code and edited a text file. My attempts with a pair of atom/ion boxes required hours to collect all the relevant piece parts and many file edits to work, and even though dozens of people made it work, getting them to share their efforts was like pulling teeth. "Hey, you should read 500 pages of stuff and work on it for 5 hours and learn it! Then you'll know!" Only thing is, I dont give a %$@#$ about knowing a lot about linux, I just wanted it to work without a lot of hassle.

Sooo...congratulations on your good luck and/or invisible linux post install work. It really DOESN'T "just work". Hell, apple crap doesnt just work either. My wife got an ipad and wanted to post a picture she took on facebook, but there was no option to do that from the camera app until she installed some extra software and tweaked a configuration. Really? Most people taking photos don't want to post them on facebook from the camera app? "Why, just go into the photo gallery and the option is right there...anyone would know that". Well, anyone who owned an ipad before and already came across this situation, found it not working in an intuitive manner, and figured out how to fix it.

As for the rest, tl;dr. Linux hasn't been adopted because its too hard to install and brings zero real benefits to most users and support people. Its a solution looking for a problem.

Re: need for native applications on the decline

[lennier]

Why are you equating the web with Facebook or the like? If I fire up Tomcat and serve a web app, how does that get at "everything there is to know about you"?

That depends. Who are you, who are your present and future commercial partners, what jurisdiction are you operating under, what personally identifying data am I entering into that app, what are your retention policies for that data, and where are you hosting it?

But if your app were an old-school non-Internet enabled desktop app running on my desktop (and especially with source code available), I wouldn't even have to begin asking any of those questions, because you wouldn't be able to see my data in the first place.

Web apps are not a step forward for privacy - and depending on the operator, they can be a huge step back.

Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[mcgrew]

Your Linux/American car analogy is apt. At one time, American cars were far crappier than Japanese cars. At one time Linux was a PITA to install and some stuff wouldn't work, some distros still are. I've owned both domestic and foreign cars, these days they're pretty much the same. My sister bought a new Lexus several years ago, I owned a Crysler (still have it), and the Crysler had more comfortable seats and a better stereo. It's ten years old now, I've only needed routine maintenance. I run kubuntu, XP, and W7. The latest upgrade did break Flash on kubuntu, but it crashes constantly in W7. I can fix the linux box by downgrading, there's no fixing the Windows box unless you know of a way to downgrade Flash.

I think the reason Linux hasn't and won't gain mainstream traction is because Widows is good enough and comes with your computer. Nobody is going to upgrade to Linux unless Windows enrages them enough, or someone shows them the advantages (which still may not be enough to make them switch).

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Re:Not Microsoft or Apple, DesktopLinux killed its

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

Nobody is going to upgrade to Linux unless Windows enrages them enough, or someone shows them the advantages (which still may not be enough to make them switch).

Exactly what I always say. "Where is the business driver for linux". Right now other than "Its free and if you live in a browser or libre office, you probably won't know the difference", and thats not much of a business driver.

The rest of it is "I hate microsoft/apple" and/or "I like complicated technology things developed by technical people for technical people, and/or I like having something that mystifies other people".

Informative

[Thoufeeq]

Nice read!