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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

> 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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Manikmass]

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

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

[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

[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.

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!"

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.

[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.

[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.

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,

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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...

[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...

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

[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.

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.

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: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!

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.

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.

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: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: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.

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

[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

[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

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.

[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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!

Re:Question

[VortexCortex]

By removing your head or destroying your brain.

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: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.

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: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....

*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?

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.

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: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.

Three Words

[tpstigers]

Gnome 3. Unity.

The Linux desktop committed suicide.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.