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Ask Slashdot: How Would You Fix the Linux Desktop?
itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers are familiar with the Torvalds/de Icaza slugfest over 'the lack of development in Linux desktop initiatives.' The problem with the Linux desktop boils down to this: We need more applications, and that means making it easier for developers to build them, says Brian Proffitt. 'It's easy to point at solutions like the Linux Standard Base, but that dog won't hunt, possibly because it's not in the commercial vendors' interests to create true cross-distro compatibility. United Linux or a similar consortium probably won't work, for the same reasons,' says Proffitt. So, we put it to the Slashdot community: How would you fix the Linux desktop?"
Seriously, you need to work to either 1) get Visual Studio working and fully supported in Linux or 2) develop as good IDE as Visual Studio. For that matter the whole Linux API needs work. It's simple and elegant under Windows and Mac OS X, but not under Linux.
Btw, if you need a great programming IDE, then download Visual Studio 2012. It's just released now and it's free! MAKE SOMETHING SIMILAR!
I've been using Linux on my desktop for 13 years now. It works just fine for me.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I would shut linux down and give the money back to its shareholders.
Put Linus in charge of everything.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Fix all the drivers for basic stuff like WiFi and graphics cards FIRST. I'd rather have a desktop with little bugs and more basic features than a laptop with only partially-functioning WiFi and reduced battery life due to a poor graphics driver (as I do now).
By adopting the Android desktop.
Remove the terminal and bash from the distros and make it hard to install them. :)
Would force the developers to make stuff more GUI-friendly which the average user wants to use.
It's the only way to be sure.
will fix the desktop.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
how would you fix the Linux user?
Someone who understands things like "less is more", "restriction leads to freedom", "one shall rule them all", and "human factors design matters".
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Here's how to fix the Linux desktop:
Those are just some minor suggestions.
what is fundamentally wrong with the desktop? and what would "the fix" result in?
What, that's not the right answer?
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
There is absolutely no need for any OS to have drivers. Move them to UEFI and expose standard APIs that are completely OS independent.
The Linux desktop is far better than Windows used to be.
But we already know ways to make every desktop, including OS X, far better than what we have today.
The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin gives good ways to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface
I don't see why anyone would want it. I would rather lag behind with open source application support and have security knowing that my apps are not working against me. I want to know that my softwares motives are my motives. So much commercial software now is about artificial limits and openly working against the owner of the PC. Either to sell functionality piecemill or because they are under the thumb of some watchdog like the RIAA or MPAA. I'm not a programmer, but I would hazard a guess that 50% of the coding done in todays software is to LIMIT you in some way, not to enable you to do all you can do even/and especially if it wasn't planned for by the author of the software.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
Make it so I NEVER have to touch the CLI to do anything on the OS. Install drivers, games, applications, tweak the GUI, configure system settings, etc. I'm not saying get rid of it, I'm saying make it so I don't HAVE to in order to do any of those those things.
If all of the stuff to do Ruby 1.9 and ruby-gtk+ apps was loaded up and ready to go on all Linux distros, then application development on Linux would be really easy.
There are only options and configurations. Each linux desktop user pretty much has their own desktop environment given that it is infinitely more configurable than windows or OSX. The "problem" with the desktop is the same "problem" with linux itself: It's not user-friendly. The high learning curve and amount of options can be overwhelming.
I know I'll get flamed for this since it goes against the Linux philosophy, but how about getting rid of competing Gnome and KDE (and now Unity) desktops and agree on one standard desktop with a single API for everyone to write to. And maintain backwards compatibility for the API so an application written for GnoKDE 2.0 still still run unaltered on GnoKDE 3.0.
I know that having multiple desktops gives users choice, but there are many talented developers on the KDE, Gnome and Unity teams, and it seems like they could make a much more polished and usable product if they worked together instead of coming out with separate products. Oh, and stop pushing out alpha releases (I'm talking about you, Ubuntu/Unity) as the default desktop and telling users that it's for their own good.
But hey, don't trust me, I use Xfce since it does everything I need in a desktop.
by buying a Mac.
I really like using linux for day to day things, or would like to more, if the things (read: games) I want to play were supported better on it. Maybe with Steam taking an interest in it we'll see that shift in the years to come, but for now I dual boot it with Windows.
I had a list of what should me better on the Linux Desktop. ... or a Linux/GPL project do it better like Gimp/Photoshop duo
Now, I don't see nothing.... maybe more games in store...
Wine get every MS shit working on Linux.
Must of the Third Partie developer have a Linux version
Better color management
More Photo oriented software
Normal people don't care about the OS, the "desktop environment," the openness of the kernel or its ABI stability. They don't even know what those things mean. People don't use computers for the sake of computers, only nerds do that. People use computers because they do things like write documents or fix vacation photos. If Facebook only worked with Linux, then everyone would use Linux. Writing some killer app and only ever releasing it on Linux is the only way a programmer can get people to switch. Otherwise your best bet is a businessman like Steve Jobs to come along. Look at all the people using iOS. Do you think people are buying iPhones because OMG iOS!!! No.
I have been using linux ubuntu/gentoo/redhat/centos for years as my main os. Heres one thing I always see with entry level users they cant simple connect their network drive and access it easily. My parents have a network drive for all their photos and of course they can find it on the network but cant have it mount at boot without scripting/editing and once its connected they mainly use firefox so attachements and downloads cant save from firefox to the network drive if you simply connect to it, it has to be properly mounted. This isnt a issue for me but for them they dont know how and want to know how to just in case.
Good UIs, professional applications, UNIVERSITY ones too, I used Linux for around 6 years as desktop but when I came to university it was just impossible to continue (mechatronic engineer), I have to use many tools for electronics, physics, etc... that are just not available on Linux.
Besides that I think Linux is very mature for desktop, at least talking about the suc*y distros but friendly (Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu(F*CK UNITY), etc). Linux actually got the best music player (amaroK), great IM's (Kopete for example). ... Yeah, I'm a KDEfag.
Agreed. But distros and Gnome devs are hard at work breaking it, as anyone using Gnome 2 to get things done can tell you.
Braaaaaaaaaains!
But I'd give up and buy a Mac. I can run most of the open source software and still have the commercially supported software titles.
If I were to fix linux on the desktop, it would have to center on a single distribution and get commercial support behind it. That will never happen because Microsoft will use their influence to thwart any efforts. Maybe instead of linux on the desktop we should focus on linux running in "the cloud" that we can connect to using any distro of linux, a Mac, iPad, Android device, or even Windows. It cuts down on the hardware support if you're only targeting a vm platform. Not great for gaming on linux, but that's what consoles are for.
I love my linux world. The only part which I would appreciate is more polish in the software. Most software has a great set of features but it seems that all these suites are always missing the last 5% of development (e.g. making the application feel very polished).
To me it seems that the only way we can fix the desktop is to throw money at it. The last 5% of development work is usually boring (finding and fixing all the corner cases, etc...). I think that the only true consumer ready desktop right now is Ubuntu (yes, with the Unity interface). It has become a very polished and stable package with a lot of focus (maybe a bit too much?) on the right things. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge KDE fan (I contributed code), but to me it seems that it is missing the last 5% of development work (e.g. Kwin crashes occasionally, the panel wont stick to the top and will sometimes be in the center of the screen, Kwin seems to be slower than compiz...).
Canonical has the resources to provide a really solid desktop experience (and it already does) for most average users. For the rest of us, there is still Arch, Mint, Fedora, etc which allows for more customization. The problem is, that most people want their machine to just "work" and not tinker with the OS to just get it perfect.
Good job Canonical!
How about trying something that other people are not really doing? Let's get radial menus (there was one WM that had this, but I forget the name) instead of continuing to cling to inefficient linear menus. Let's find a way to make arbitrary compositions of GUI applications, the way we can arbitrarily compose applications in our terminal (KDE3 was a step towards this, but we could have done a whole lot more).
In other words, let's take a risk and try being innovative. What is the point of copying Apple? Let's do something that Apple will want to copy.
Palm trees and 8
I would trick Microsoft into releasing Windows 8.
Linux Desktop gets more competitive overnight.
It is not "We need more applications" -- that is easy enough.
Getting people to create hundreds of (cr)applications for Linux is trivial and is not a solution and may in part be one aspect of the problem.
A somewhat more accurate strawman would be "We need more *good* or *compelling* applications" -- that's challenging. Still only a part of the answer, but closer. It requires answering "What does 'good' or 'compelling' mean in this context?", etc.
The one thing Linux does not need is more applications - how many DVD rippers or MP3 players does one desktop O/S need (BTW, the answer is: just 1. But it needs to work intuitively, simply and flawlessly - not attributes Linux apps are known for).
What Linux needs is professionally designed and written apps. Ones that preserve a "look", a common and familiar set of controls and deep, deep integration. It would also be nice if there was documentation, starting with an idiot's guide and going all the way up to "this is how to modify the automated test suite" (and to actually HAVE an automated test, and acceptance suite).
However, we'll never get to that level while the distributions are reliant on hobbyists writing code because they like to, then tossing it over "the wall" and calling it a Linux application. That's what distinguishes Linux and the apps it comes distributed with from commercial operating systems and the apps people are willing (and, admitttedly, have to) pay for. The old excuse of: hey, don't complain, it's free! is no help whatsoever when the time-cost of getting some downloaded junk to work is far higher than the price of a piece of commercial quality software.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Equip it with a gun turret to neutralize anyone who starts blathering about linux on the desktop.
You've had well over a decade to get used to the idea that it works just fine for some people (including me), and that changing it for the other 90% just pisses us off, and doesn't actually make them adopt it. Find some other thriving ecosystem to "help" them "succeed" on the desktop; you cunts have outstayed your welcome here.
I have everything I need in LInux now. Openoffice (or libre office is you prefer) is mature enough to handle all my word processing / spreadsheet / presentation needs. GIMP and Inkscape do all my graphics. Flash finally works (and even better might finally go away).
The times I need Windows are so rare as to be almost unimportant. It has been so long since I booted windows I might need to do a password recovery next time just to log in to my own system.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Problem solved.
If it's about packaging for each disto: create some generic format that defines the dependencies. /opt/ -> Done.
Feed it to the package manager, once done install to
The hardest part will be agreeing on what format these deps are in.
Also LSB is no option: it drags it more dependencies then it needs!
If Red Hat relaunched a consumer distro and put substantial resources behind it, it would immediately be in the top two. With a couple innovative features, they could easily be #1.
Users, developers, and OEMs would notice.
Fix the damn audio and stop shoving a new sound daemon/system down our throat every year.
Android (or more likely some variant) on the desktop in a big way ftw by 2020.
expandfairuse.org
How would I fix it?
Simple - there needs to be a baseline version, a common version accessible to everyone and used as a foundation. Applications are easier to develop for Apple and Windows because the architecture there is relatively static, Linux/Unix actively invites almost anyone to come in and customize the software, change how it works.
If someone says "I want to use linux" there has to be a single version people can point to and say "here, this is a good starting point", and it needs to be relatable. Not versions whose descriptions are relatively obscure notes about computer functions that might as well be in Klingon for the average user. Something well documented, user friendly.
I think this is what is also killing the android phones - too many versions, not enough standards. You need a standard for drivers and applications or everything has to be a custom job. Reduce the linux stereotype of "I don't know why this isn't working on your machine, it works fine on mine" when that could very well be because the two machines have other fundamental differences.
Basically - get organized.
...but apps, apps, apps: imagine wanting to do something like video processing, where there are tons of good tools for Windows there are only a handful for Linux and most of them well... do not meet expectations. I am using a Linux desktop for several years now, and I am very happy with it, but there are times I need to run Wine or VMWare just to do certain stuff in a way that is more simple and more productive than if I had to do the same on my Ubuntu installation.
It can be improved, but I think it will not be only a question of looking at the community (although that is my biggest wish: community driven FOSS software for all our needs), but also at the large corporations providing software for e.g. Windows. Once competition comes in from that side (large corporations), I think there will be more community projects taking up the same quality level of software, simply because the demand is there at that point. Now the demand somehow is not big enough to raise the quality level of the community driven software to the level that is seen on Windows, where it pertains to these apps for things like video editing (and perhaps also the same for games, but Steam could change all that nicely).
Office, web, mail: already covered by Linux very well, as well as a decent UI (although people may disagree). Now it's ready for the next level.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Also, some developer writing oodles of Python code is not going to write drivers. The kernel people is doing a bang-up job; it is not perfect, but it is good. The UI people are not doing a bang-up job, and in fact, they seem to be doing worse and worse with each passing year, trying harder and hard to copy Apple and Microsoft. We do not need copies, we need innovations -- not just new ways to display grids and linear menus, but new approaches entirely.
Palm trees and 8
The problem here is the assumption that something is broken.
Generally, the Linux desktop is fine. There is a choice of UIs, sure - and recent developments in KDE then Gnome haven't helped much. Big changes made people say it was broken - but over time, it seems to settle down.
And with the competition (Apple and Microsoft) also making changes to their desktops, Linux is hardly unique here. We seem to be in a time of change, where people have been challenging the old paradigms. Apple are being the most conservative, Microsoft the most radical, Linux is somewhere in between.
Hardware support? Not necessarily a desktop job, but I'll address is anyway. Linux can't do jack here without more support from manufacturers. When I installed Windows 7 on a (then) new Sandy Bridge motherboard, it found NOTHING. It literally booted into a low res desktop with no sound or network. Only the large collection of driver CDs saved the machine - Windows had nothing to do with it.
Support of Windows from the manufacturers was the key factor.
So let's not bitch about Linux's support of hardware - let's get it right, and bitch about hardware manufacturer's support of Linux.
Apps? We've got plenty, and are getting more. Some commercial apps (Corel Aftershot Pro, Sublime Text 2, VMware are ones I personally use) support Linux as well as Mac/Windows. It gets better every month, when it used to get better every year.
And I guess that's my key message. "You've never had it so good". You may not feel that way, but Linux is on a roll right now, and the question is not whether or not it becomes a 'usable second option'. It's already usable.
The question is whether or not it becomes a SUPPORTED second option - by OEMs, hardware manufacturers, and software companies.
And the signs are getting more positive as time goes on.
Look, if you want as united desktop, use Windows or Mac. The beauty of OSS is that you can choose. If you don't like the desktop you are using, try another one, etc. until you find one you like. If you don't like any of them, you are probably so anal retentive that you couldn't write on that would please you. Shutup already....
By which I mean, instead of the sort projects have now, that say "I am a ux expert, and I like [insert totally unintuitive feature in the name of "prettiness", or "looking like [Apple|chrome|a phone|whatever]", so that is what it has to look like"... instead the real kind, that goes and does useability tests with a wide range of its potential userbase, and then designs based on that.
Once you have a great product that people actually want to use (and yes, I know Linux is technically the kernel, not its window/file managers/etc., but the UI is what people actually -see-), more people might actually want to use it (I am aware that this is a tautological statement, but shut up.) More people using it = more desire for programs = more better. At least assuming some of those application developers also go the route of doing proper useability testing.
Not strictly (well, at all) GUI related, but I'd love to see something more like Windows Powershell in Linux.
I love the Linux pipeline and being able to pipe text streams between tools is very powerful, but the more I get into Windows Powershell, the more I like it. The ability to pass objects through the pipeline and operate on those objects can be much more powerful than processing text streams.
Try XFCE
Improve the open source video drivers for nvidia and ati so that they are at least as fast/stable as windows drivers. This would make gaming on linux much more possible.
If you want to compete with a Windows OS, you need to look and feel similar. None of the current Linux desktops even work like a Windows OS. LinuxMint is the only one I have found that comes close.
People are not going to switch if:
1. They cant get the apps they can for Windows
2. The desktop is completely unfamiliar and works totally different than Windows.
The second issue listed applies to Windows 8 as well im afraid. M$ is shooting themselves in the foot and bringing the same issue Linux desktops have into their own house.
You DON'T completely change a Windows users desktop experience just because you THINK they will like it better. The head of M$'s desktop team should have been fired when he first thought up the metro UI.
Redmond has gone absolutely insane in attempting to push Metro on their user base for the sake of innovation and gaining tablet market share. I don't understand how so many Linux devs are following in their footsteps i.e. Unity, Gnome Shell. My primary Linux desktop will never be a tablet and I refuse to allow anyone to turn it into one. I used to tolerate instances where the Gnome devs removed configuration options and features from Gnome 2 siting simplicity because most things just worked. Gnome Shell is an absolute disaster mainly because if I am simply unable to configure it to work for me. My hat is off to the developers from Linux Mint (Cinnamon) and the Mate devs for working to correct this.
I can still recall when it was described as being the graphical environment for GNU software.... lost a lot of interest when that went away.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I have been installing linux on the desktop for the last 12 years and some things are just as broken now as they were then. For example: I have never, and I mean never, in the last 12 years had the mic work after initial install of any distribution on a laptop. This wan't such a big deal 10 years ago but these days it is a deal breaker. I should never have to edit my xorg.conf file in order to get my desktop working properly. The number of times I have updated a Linux OS and it broke what ever graphics driver I had installed and I am dumped at a command prompt on reboot. The graphical desktop needs to always work.
To make Linux successful on the desktop:
- make sure there actually is a product to be called Linux. don't fragment over several "distributions" but create a single product that everyone agrees is Linux.
- establish support for the released installable versions that lasts at least 5, but better 10, years.
- establish some binary compatability and stability, so that application developers can distribute binary applications and have them work OK for several years.
- standardize on a single desktop environment for all end-user systems. individuals can opt to install and use another desktop, but they should not expect support from application vendors.
- stop abusing/blackguarding developers and vendors who decide to release only binary code and no technical documentation or source code. it is their decision, respect it.
- develop a unified system management (settings, software installation, etc) for desktop systems in a company network.
You either need cross-distro compatibility or you need the number of "distros important enough to care about" to shrink to one or two. Then you just develop and test on those one/two.
For it to take off you need the masses to accept it. Windows has that through usability, brand recognition, and being everywhere. You are familiar with it. Apple, in its comeback, did it by becoming the chic OS. In other words, Windows is the four door coup and wood paneled van. Mac is polished corvette. Linux, however, prides itself on being usable anywhere and workable on everyone. In other words, that thing built on weekend in the garage.
Now it might work great, and does work great. There is one key problem to it. There is a guy I know who is really gung ho linux and open source. Was bashing M$ left and right in how inferior their product was. He needed a keyboard and mouse because in his rush he forget his behind. I offered him what I had on hand as a spare, a wireless keyboard and mouse with a fob. I had used it just fine on Macs and various windows machines from XP to Win 8 preview. He froze for a moment with dread/fear in his eyes.
"You don't have a wired keyboard and mouse?"
"Somewhere maybe, this won't work? You don't even want to try?"
"It will eventually, but it's Linux. Unless I have the driver's on hand it might take longer to check and double check, find, and finally get that working than to do what I need to do."
That's the problem. The people you need to get to use a Linux Desktop for it to take off are the people who are an anathema to what Linux stands for. Linux by design is meant to be fragmented, tinkered with, altered, improved. You need to hook people who barely want to be bothered taking a car to get an oil change, let alone changing oil period.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
The things keeping Linux from going mainstream are also some of its greatest strengths, so "fixing" the Linux desktop for the mass market would also break it for many people. Linux survives and grows because of its diversity, its wide range of choices, its flexibility. That is the opposite of what attracts commercial developers and consumers. Developers and consumers want an easy to use, stable, standard base that can be targeted and works the same across the board. Linux works by providing a wide array of customized solutions.
It's like asking "How would you fix the Swiss Army Knife to be a better hammer?" You don't. They are two different tools. They have different strengths and target different people and tasks. Now, there are things you can do to improve both. You can give the hammer a better grip and you can make the Swiss Army Knife more durable or better organized, but one should not be changed to be like the other.
I'd threw it on the GROUND!!!
Have a universal installer format that will install and run on everything. On all Linux, all BSD, all Windows. A single install file that will go anywhere means developers only need to code once. For a new version of windows you just re-install. Done with full compatibility. If you support all versions of Windows fully then developers will love you.
How about whatever the fancy desktop UI you make you have an option to have a gold old Applications/Places Menu. No search, no frequently used apps display, just a list of whats there where you can select it. After that would be a user configurable bar where they could put in what they want.
I find most of the grief in the new UIs that have come out is you cant get to what you want quickly. Sure floating lists and poofing icons are cool but when I wan to get to synaptic package manager, or qavimator, I don't want to search for it. I just want to quickly launch it - most people have the same thoughts.
Should not have a fancy search up-front for installed apps, that is only useful for the first time you are looking for something, once you are there and decise to use it, all you want is to quickly launch it. The fancy searches should be part of help not the major application launching component of a UI.
Lastly I want user configurable boot animations and startup sounds like the computers hackers - that would be awesome!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
1) It needs to support the common hardware people have
I know this is mainly an issue with manufacturers not providing linux drivers, but there really needs to be a crack team of developers ready and willing to make things work with Linux in a seamless way, ensuring drivers are baked into the distros as soon as possible.
This is especially important for connectivity devices. Broadband suppliers, Mobile phone companies etc. like to supply various USB dongles to let you access your wireless connection, my overwhelming experience is that linux has no plug-and-play support for these which alone is enough to put most people off, if they can't get online it's a complete non-starter, they can't even begin to look for help with their other problems. On windows it's easy, because the devices often act as virtual drives, on which there is the setup program to install the drivers *easy* Of course linux can't benefit from this so you end up stuck in a loop of not being able to get drivers (if they exist) because you're not online. Dare I suggest the Linux desktop needs some sort of compatibility layer with Windows drivers for such devices? I can hear people cringe already but if you want normal people to be able to use it then it's going to have to work with such things with minimal issues.
2) Easier side-by-side installs, adapt it so it can install and work on an NTFS partition, alongside Windows. If it feels just just another program, rather than something which requires you to allocate large chunks of your drive to, with what a regular user would see as a risky procedure of repartitioning a drive then less people are going to be inclined to try it in the first place
3) 64-bit/32-bit issues. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems 64-bit distros can't run 32-bit applications, so if there is no 64-bit application you either have to compile your own (not always possible) or you're SOL. I noticed this with Firefox, the 64-bit distros come with a 64-bit FF build, except most of the plugins didn't work with this, and it seemed impossible to install a 32-bit build.
4) Dependencies. They're enough to make a regular user's head spin. when X won't work without Y, but Z won't work with Y because of various dependency issues you have a problem, a real problem, a problem big enough to drive users away and back to Windows where for the most part they just click 'yes' and everything works. Sometimes self-contained applications are better, especially for non-technical users.
5) Standardization. Too many distros, too many desktop environments, too much incompatibility between them. Choice is good, but at the point where it just looks like fragmentation it becomes bewildering. With Windows you really don't have to care, most stuff that runs on XP will run on 7 and vice versa, no issues, even a lot of 95 / 98 stuff will work just fine. With Linux you have so many different distros, builds, incompatibilities that you lose that and to your average user it's more like having to care if you have a Dell, Acer, Sony or whatever else Windows box, rather than just a Windows box which you know is going to run any Windows software at the double click of a setup program.
Now you might want to mark me down as a troll for this, but this is all based on genuine feedback from users who have tried to use linux, but given up in disgust. It has the potential to be a great desktop environment, but with so many people pulling in different directions and ignoring the basic issues which are keeping so many people out at the gates I don't think it ever will be one for the masses.
Sean
It has nothing to do with apps or lack thereof, nor bugs, nor UI, nor adding more, nor cutting back.
Existing desktop distros suck. Things don't work without significant tweaking. Then you get an update, and stuff breaks. Then support for your major version ends, and a full reinstall ensues. More shit breaks.
Give me a damn rolling distro that actually tests their stuff, with magical one click updates that don't break my video driver or wifi.....
Hopefully we will be able to come up some good suggestions. I'm sure there will be many who will say it works fine for them, so nothing should be changed. Or claim Linux is already 1000x better than Windows and OSX. We need to be realistic and look at Linux's advantages as well as where it can be improved.
Technical Improvements:
1. Single app store that works across all distros containing opensource, free, and non-free software. It should have a built-in, one click payment system. Similar to Android market where software may not have to go through an approval process, but can be pulled if it's found to be malware/spyware.
2. Stable C/C++ system and GUI APIs that allow binaries to work across distros and across versions.
3. Just my opinion here, but I think X needs to be tossed and a new graphics system built with a clean architecture and APIs.
Non-Technical:
1. This is a double-edged sword, but if desktop Linux had a flagship company and distro like one from Google, that would make a big difference. That would get Linux in the news, in stores, and put it in the ring against Windows and OSX. Canonical and Red Hat have a desktop Linux, but they just can't compete with Microsoft and Apple. Sure, that would give Google a lot of power over Linux, but as long as it stayed open source, it could live in both the commercial and community world at the same time like it does today.
IMHO, I've not seen a better desktop for my needs than Ubuntu with gnome-shell 2 (not Unity). There's always room for improvement for certain kinds of apps (like compatibility with MS Office apps - and even those have improved by leaps and bounds in the past 5 years), but I'm certain I'm in the minority who feel that UIs have become too complicated and involved. Everything's automatic now, there's a widget for everything - the last thing I want is Desktop integration with Twitter and Facebook. No thanks, I'll take a nice clean desktop that works well, open source, and reliable.
... I use a surprisingly small number of applications. In the last decade the types of applications I always run on my computer are one each of the following:
Having tried this with Windows, Linux, and MacOS I can say the solution that works out-of-the box for me is MacOS. I'd rather use open source software because I like donating money to software I use rather than paying for a silly license that puts a smile on the face of an attorney somewhere.
When I tried this with Linux I have to do a lot research to make sure the phone works with the OS and the software available for the OS. I've tried using Songbird and Lightning/Sunbird as well as the full suite of Mozilla-based applications. Inevitably something I use a computer for is not available in a single Linux distribution. If the phone works the calendar is crappy or Songbird doesn't sync with that phone.
So for me it does boil down not just to the software that's available but to device compatibility. I'm sure it's possible but computers are less hobby and more appliance for me. On an odd notes I was able to do all of this on an older MacBook I didn't know what to use for. So with the exception of the OS, obviously, I had all my music in open source applications: OpenOffice, Songbird, Thunderbird, Instantbird, Inform 7, Sunbird and a small handful of text editors. I couldn't find the right Linux counterparts.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
First of all, for myself there is no linux desktop problem. I always have used a lightwight desktop manager (blackbox) which has everything I even need. What would be nice for the general public is a desktop manager which is flexible enough so that it can be tuned so that it behaves exactly like OSX or be tune so that it emulates exactly windows. Such a desktop might also not be vulnerable to patent claims because it is essentially the user who tunes the parameters. There just happen to be parameter files around which make the desktop look and feel like other operating systems. Somebody might even build a parameter set so that it looks like unity.
So, we put it to the Slashdot community: How would you fix the Linux desktop?
Well, that all depends; by what metric are we describing "fix?" What's broken? Is it buggy code, or just that it's not, market share wise, where Linux gurus thought it would be at this point in time? And what, precisely, is meant by "the Linux desktop?" The interface? Software offerings? Distros?
If you want a straight answer from this crowd, myself included, you should probably rephrase the question.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Actually, the Zorin distribution already has a very nice Windows 7 like interface, with Wine, pre-installed.
The real problem is the Linux community attitude. Linux users like to solve problems and know how things work. Everyone else wants to think about their computer in the same way they think about their toasters (i.e. Not much as long as they work). They want it to turn on immediately without a log-in, work, connect to the internet reliably, not shove message dialogs in their face, run everything, including their Windows programs and shut down immediately.
Linux tends to serve its own user community at the expense of regular (i.e. nontechnical) users. Many Linux users have contempt for non-technical users and/or people who do not have an "always on" internet connection.
So Apple wins, in the long run. They serve users, not themselves. Jobs enforced that maturity on the Apple ecosystem and it paid off. I doubt that anything comparable will happen with Linux.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Its fixed, use this to distribute programs.
http://www.pgbovine.net/cde.html
A successful computer needs SUPPORT from the manufacturer.
The users NEED a place where they can get their problems fixed.
This is why Apple succeeds, despite their prices. They provide clear avenues for help and assistance, both hardware and software.
Linux has no such support from manufacturers. If you put Linux on your computer, they will void your warranty and/or find reasons to avoid dealing with you, if you've installed Linux on their hardware. Their tech support people are not trained to deal with you. You are a total money sink as far as they are concerned, because every support call must be escalated.
OSX is stealing away the desktop by nothing more than basic competence.
When I fire up my Mac and run software updates, I am confident that my system will keep running. When I have Linux on my desktop, software updates are always frightening. Will my wi-fi adapter still work afterward? Will the VMware drivers compile? I've lost many hours of work, backing out linux software updates that trashed my ability to get work done.
For another, every single terminal program on Linux is just crapola compared to OSX terminal. Really even the old-fashioned shell users are much happier on OSX. Try developing on OSX for a few weeks, gnome-terminal seems little better than xterm.
Until these problems are fixed, linux on the desktop is doomed.
Not gnome and not kde its own you can use others or the one that comes with it or none at all like me.
I would do what I did since long before "desktop" was a concept people spoke about in the *nix world. I would install a decent window manager, and leave it at that.
The desktop nonsense only makes things more complicated, and harder to understand.
My choice is dwm, but there are dozens.
May we live long and die out
...its applications that are easy to use and useful.
I am a gamer lets just get that out in the open now. I know a ton of other gamers out there now. As such my views are on things that make ME want to run linux. Codweavers doesnt cut it. VMWare although great, doesnt give me the framerate I want. Even some of the native ports of games are quite useless. If you want adoptation though you have to face it that games are the ones to be looking at in a large degree over things like Office.
Why?
Home users dont buy computers for themselves, they buy them for the family. Of the family unit, normally 50% of the people in the family are minors. Do you really think the minor cares rather or not Microsoft Word works? All they care about is getting their homework done so that they can go play video games on their XBox or chat with friends on Facebook. Occasionally they will head out the door to do something fun in the real world but most of their time today is spent behind some kind of social media. What do they need for that?
A web browser. Well we have Opera, Mozilla, Chrome, and a billion other web browsers. Most of which work "just fine" except when Flash isnt installed by default (see Firefox, and Opera not to mention the distro specific crap). Youtube is a GOD!!!! Without flash youre SOL. But that is easy to make work.
What do they want next? They want to play a damn video game. Tux Racer was fun... for 30 minutes. World of Warcraft was fun for 8 years. Bad odds on the linux gaming scene there.
Games drive kids to play with computers. Kids drive parents to be on computers. Parents drive corporations to make computers function "Just like it does at home" (dear god please without the viruses).
So if you want to see linux on a desktop, make games work. Office (Libre, Open, Gnome, KOffice etc) work great. Hell they are even interoperable in most cases. Get games going and youll get the desktop share to jump. Get them going well and the next time that a Windows 8 type OS comes out costing the consumer another couple of hundred (if they dont just buy a brand new PC all together), you will see the number of Windows based PCs decrese. If Apple keeps up with the "Its our way or go buy a PC" attitude, then youll see them demnish too.
Installation has been made easy. Great first step. Thank you very much to Stormix (whom I consider to have been the pioneer in the GUI installation but that is up for debate).
Applications are looking great thanks to Star Office/Open Office and about a billion other pieces of software.
Shortcuts are smiple ctrl-c ctrl-v for the most part now and the same as Windows so thats been taken care of.
We cant claim stability anymore since Windows has become just as stable for the most part. Same applies to updating and security though they still need work there. The only thing left is to make the desktop desirable.
Key to this post, make the desktop desirable. If people dont care how it functions, they want it to look pretty. Lets make it so!
If a company could do a vendor-supported version of Parallels for Linux that let Windows apps run seamlessly with nothing more than having to buy a Windows license and of course buy Parallels itself, that would go a long way.
Why? Because it would open the Linux desktop up to vendor-supported applications that many people already know how to use and it would greatly lower the risk that next year's hot desktop-pc app - which will likely be a Windows app - won't run on in the OS/Desktop environment that is pre-installed on the computer you buy today.
Bonus points if their product let you do the "triple play" of Linux, MacOS X, and Windows apps in a seamless, vendor-supported environment. Of course, that would require not only buying a legal copy of MacOS X but likely Apple re-doing their business model to allow MacOS X to be sold for use on non-Apple hardware. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
BTW, it would be nice if a Parallels-like tool was available as FOSS, but the question is "How would you fix the Linux Desktop" with the implication of making it more attractive, not "How would you fix the Linux Desktop without compromising ideological purity."
Disclaimer and a true-life story:
Many years ago I worked for a store that sold computers to the masses. Almost all were Windows, some were Macs, and we had a few low-end, bargain-basement Linux machines. We had a high rate of returns on the Linux boxes. Why? Because most buyers didn't see past the price-tag and didn't realize they were NOT buying a computer that had Windows on it. When they discovered that the apps they bought or downloaded from the Internet wouldn't run, they returned the computer.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Don't require someone to be a compiler or makefile or package expert to "install" an app, get X to perform decently on a heavily loaded system, get power management/sleep/hibernate to perform decently/reliably, and don't make it a pain to do basic configuration changes like change screen resolution. Also stop thinking that having so many distros doing things in different ways is a good idea. I prefer MSFT's one set of rules over the chaos and disorganization of Linux.
1. Ban all commercial vendors. Force them to support their own shit.
2. Get real community UI/IDE development going, and make goddamned sure they can STAY committed to the project.
3. Ignore Microsoft and Apple. Start from scratch and THINK about what you want your future desktop to look like, as that is going to inevitably set the standard.
4. For the love of god tell nVidia and AMD to either step up with the drivers or go the hell away. Their driver crap is another thing fucking up the 'Linux Desktop.'
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Dump Linux and join Haiku if you really want a desktop focused os. Linux isn't and will never be focused on the desktop market. We can complain as much as we want , it will never change. So if you are so dissatisfied with Linux just focus on something aimed more towards the desktop. That's the hole point of freedom , if the Linux community overall doesn't care about this market nothing we will say will force them to care. Just focus on an open source os that actually has desktop use as is target and invest your resources there.
One of the biggest misfeatures carried over from the original Mac OS
And check all the config files.
... and then I erased it, because I don't feel like having this same discussion that I've been having since 1998 again.
Short version: make refinements--not drastic changes--every year. But that's boring, so no one will do it.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The problem with Linux on the desktop is seen in a microcosim with the question asked. The post suggests that we need more apps and that we should make it easier to build them. That is only half right. Sure, more apps would help a lot. Sure, making them easier to build would be nice. However, even if they are enormously hard to build, developers will flock to Linx in droves if it is PROFITABLE to build apps for it.
So, does making it hard to build apps cut into profit? Sure. But what really cuts into profit is the fact that there are so many different versions of Linux out there. Think back to the bad old days of CP/M. There where lots of flavors. Then along comes MS and creates DOS, of which there was essentially one flavor. The functionality of MS-DOS was not a lot greater than CP/M, but it sure garnered a lot of interest from developers.
So, to make people write apps for Linux, thereby driving the adoption of the Linux for the desktop, you must solve the economic problem. Making it easier is a small component of the economic problem, but making Linux uniform is the bigger issue. If you make Linux simple to install, and uniform from a developers point of view, then it has a chance. If you have a million different libraries, you are dead in the water.
I can't count how many desktop environments are out there now. And none of them works flawless. Stop forking if you don't like something, but try to contribute in a cooperative manner.
There's nothing wrong with existing desktops per se. What's wrong is that new users are often directed to use the command line when they run into a problem.
In that respect most Linux users will never be happy with a proper "desktop" OS that relegates command line usage to extreme cases.
Business already has Windows app with a lot of data in data files. To advance Linux desktop, you need apps that do exactly what those Windows apps do, that you can migrate the data over the weekend, where employees and boss don't see any difference come Monday when they get to work.
Can't be different due to huge cost of re-entering data by hand, as most business these days can't afford to pay for that cost at all (medium, large, or small business is just getting by in most cases, so will pay for Windows app support and Windows OS upgrades as that is cheaper over short and long term). If they could just step into LINUX shoes without any adjustment, then they would use it, but the can't in almost all cases. It's not the OS, it's the applications (something that MS has known for a long long time...and, will keep MS profitable for a long, long time).
You need to be asking this on some other board. Slashdot users are power users and thus cannot bring themselves to get into the 'everyday' user experience. I know they use systems other than Linux, but it's the mindset that is different. I teach this very thing at a University and it is extremely difficult for developers to get into the 'user' experience. That's not a bad thing, it's just a different animal - most users don't understand the things that most Slashdot users will take as common knowledge. If you really want to know then take a survey on a more general site.
They're the only ones significantly investing in Linux desktop development. Even if it's just games for now, it will set a lot of groundwork to build on top of.
Linux Bob
Maybe create a browser based desktop that interacts with the operating system as a web server? Applications can then be written using web pages as their interface.
If that didn't make it absolutely clear, I am not a techie. But it seems to me that the desktop is dying in any case and a easy integration of remote and local resources would make Linux useful for people who mostly interact on the web anyway.
I'd love to see PCs sold with the option to have Linux installed. Of course, it'd need to be supported which is probably where being open-source could pose some difficulties (e.g. where's the motivation to support an OS a developer doesn't make money on). I think Linux has been mature enough for everyday use for years now, it just needs better support and a push into retail outlets. Right now it's a hobbyist and server OS.
I have three ideas. two are organisational / psychological, one is technological.
historically, linux has always been second place, behind microsoft windows. i think linux should stop to emulate microsoft. we linux users and developers should boldly develop our own paradigms and concepts. originality trumps emulation. when you emulate you automatically frame yourself as a contender to the no. 1 and you are always judged as no. 2.
then i think why not conquer the desktop in a piece-meal fashion? pick a small number of professions and develop tailored distributions / software mixes. linux software is of high quality usually and when tailored to specific audiences it could soon become the no. 1 in particular fields.
then i think we live in a networked world, but the user interfaces don't reflect that. we do copy and paste, we juggle with files, while we could easily do the same by manipulating links.
applications that work together could be connected by links such that the desktop starts to look like a tube map. the command line is not very different: the user combines simple elements to create a functioning new whole. it should be fun to extend the pipeline model of the command line to a new graphical user interfaces age.
How do I mark this article as trolling?
I'm sick of all these bogus FUD articles targeted at Linux and the Linux desktop. I've been using Linux and work and at home for over 7 years and it works perfectly. All these "Year of the Linux Desktop" articles are just FUD and trolling.
How would you fix the Linux desktop?
That depends on what you mean by 'fixing the Linux desktop'.
If you mean turning Linux into a serious competitor to Windows and OS X on the consumer desktop market then I can really only see one way to do that. Hand it to Google and ask them to do for Desktop /Laptop linux what they did with Android. That's probably the best way to get a commercially competitive Linux desktop OS that you can hand to an average consumer without him having any more problems than he would on OS X or Windows.
If you mean simply ironing out the gazillion minor bumps, scratches, bugs and general annoyances that I have to iron out every time I install linux for desktop use and usually also whenever I upgrade to a new version of my chosen distribution (Ubuntu and variants) then the answer is even simpler. Dig up somewhere a whole bunch of SQA people and convince the FOSS community that 'untested==unfinished'. I have not tested every distribution in existence but the people who administrate the distributions I have tested extensively: Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora don't seem to have gotten this message. The reason Windows and OS X have a superior user experience than Desktop Linux does has a lot to do with the amount of usability research/testing and SQA Microsoft and Apple pour into their OSes.
It's possible to turn a Linux box into a pretty decent desktop box that might even be consumer proof if you are willing to pour way more time into it than you have to with OS X or Windows.
Just my 0,02€
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Holy crap I'm tired of seeing this crap on the front page. The Linux desktop isn't broken. I type this on my work machine (a Thinkpad), running the full KDE4 suite.
I'm currently connected to our webserver by SFTP, our Windows network share by SMB, a remote Windows server by RDP and our SQL Server using SQL Studio in a Win 7 VM running on VirtualBox, and our AS400 using Squirrel. This is all through VPN that I connect to using the same single widget I use to adjust Wifi & Ethernet settings.
I've not typed my root password in once all day, because KDE provides connectivity to all of these services through the very slickly integrated file explorer.
Linux desktop isn't broken and I'm sick of hearing from anyone who says otherwise.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Make it so that any windows user wouldn't know they weren't on Windows other than the missing Windows icon in the start button. Integrate Wine so it is seemless.
Make it so if I know how to use Windows, I can know how to use a Linux desktop.
There will need to be a classic mode for those like me who prefer the clean classic Windows 98 desktop, as well as one for those that like the Aero Glass or whatever that pretty mode is. (I don't like pretty mode, when I want to see the window behind my primary, I'll give it focus! I don't need to watch my window minimize, just get it out of my way!)
If you want to switch a desktop user, make it so the user doesn't have to know they switched.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Gnome3/gnome-shell now allows for a huge amount of customization with plugins, which really aren't that difficult to develop. Whatever "vision" you have about how the desktop should behave, why not simply implement it as a Gnome3 plugin?
With carefully selected, already available, plugins, you can more or less turn Gnome3 into the look and feel of Gnome 2, if that is what you really want; so I really do not understand what all the "Gnome 3 is so bad compared to Gnome 2" comes from. It seems all that is needed to solve that problem is for someone to prepare and maintain an easily installable "plugin cocktail".
The only major "desktop problem" I currently see is the duplication of effort between Unity and Gnome 3. I hope someone re-implements the Unity panel + dash as a Gnome 3. I would love to run Gnome 3 with dash.
Open Materials Database
Stop copying Apple and get back to being creative and innovative. Why make a (polished) copy of a (polished) copy? Let's do our own thing, let's do it well, and let's stand on the merits of our own ideas.
Of course, we have a lot of people in the user and developer communities that surround GNU/Linux who grew up thinking that the goal was to get away from Windows. Now everyone is seeing Windows in its decline...but the users are switching to Mac OS X and iOS, and so naturally, we need to give users something like OS X and iOS. We built a movement on the wrong premise (that the enemy was Microsoft) and now we are suffering for it.
Palm trees and 8
"The problem with the Linux desktop boils down to this: We need more applications, and that means making it easier for developers to build them, says Brian Proffitt"
Brian, you have several hurdles to pass before you can use that to persuade anyone.
Prove that having more applications will "fix the linux desktop" (which you'd have to define because there's fuck all about fixing the desktop in having 100,000 crapapps for Android/iPhone, is there). You have to show that this requires it to be easier to develop on.Then you have to show that the actual problem with the desktop is that it is hard to develop for.
The real question is how do you keep Linux from eroding in the server market?
In 5-10 years Windows will have displaced Linux in most (all?) the niches where it currently leads.
Linux is destined to return to its hobbyist roots/scale.
I'd hate to be the one to tell you this, but outside of media player apps, the RIAA and MPAA don't give a shit about what's running on your computer. They're extremely tiny organizations representing relatively tiny business interests.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
To be honest, I've never found myself caring.
I've installed debian squeeze on some of my mates laptops, they are mostly happy. Main downside is that there is no photoshop - see, we Russians are mostly unaware that photoshop is not free. Debian is great because it does not update much so it does not break with the updates, downside is the same - squeeze is outdated. So I guess what most users need are something like debian, but with optional full system update once a year to a fresh version, and with MATE or similar familiar and easy to use desktop. And without empasis on free as in freedom - i.e. firefox, not iceweasel, all codecs installed, etc. And contary to local beliefs - by my experience most people don’t care much about eyecandy.
How would you fix the Linux desktop?
Write the desktop environment to not only look and act as much like Windows as possible (offer a choice between classic, XP, and Win7 appearances), but also have the desktop environment natively use and support the Win32 API via an embedded installation of Wine. Focus obsessively on fixing the API compatibility issues, so that as much Windows commercial software as possible runs on it. Encourage the deprecation of custom toolkits (especially those of very poor quality, like GTK) and instead try to get developers to target everything towards the Win32 API and test against both Wine and Windows. Like it or not, without binary compatibility, Linux isn't going anywhere.
Also, throw away X11 and run the window manager right on top of OpenGL or DirectFB.
I wouldn't. It's not broken. Seriously.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Unless you define success as having happy users, in which case Linux is doing quite fine already, having success means getting MacOSX and Windows users to switch.
Absolutely nothing that would make Linux "as good as" would work, as if there people would care about freedom, they would have switched already (maybe keeping a guilty "gaming machine"), so they will only switch if they see that Linux users are doing things they care for and cannot do on their own machine.
So what Linux needs is one or maybe two "killer apps" that absolutely blow the competition out of the playground.
It could even only be useful for a specific "niche", visicalc pushed the Apple II, paint kept the mac alive and word+excel sold the "PC".
It could be a "presentation tool" that would help you bind together heuristic trees and presentations, and provide an easy way to make "brillant" presentations that are also flexible and interactive, where you can "move" in your presentation in real time depending on your public's feedback.
Or a desktop tool to grock huge amount of data and find some trends in them.
Or a "curl wizard" that enables you to become spam kind on all dating sites without getting found out (ok that would be real evil, but kind of cool).
Or .... you find it.
But in a nutshell, the issue is that about anything you can do with Linux you can do on a Windows platform, and unfortunately unless you care about freedom it's easy to "just not change"....
Linux on the desktop will be successful when "though leaders" will tell others, well I use "foo", so if you can't it's your problem.
Till then I'll go on happily hacking on my Linux laptop, and tell myself: Of course it's again the year of the Linux Desktop (for smart freedom loving people, wish there where more of them....).
Now get of my lawn :-)
GNOME vs KDE. They were needed at one point (were they really?) Xfce? Nevermind you can install all of them and run all the apps from each.
Then the toolkits were crazy. Tk, Qt, GTK, and other.
The competing platforms Windows, and maybe OSX (but only recently) all had defacto standards for development. For windows it was the Win32 API, MFC (wrapping the API), then .NET. Developers want to know their stuff will run on everything. Adding to this, they aren't in control of the libraries and there is no central authority. So if they make a GTK app, then someone changes the library, they are potentially on a course for disaster. There's no guarantee they'll get the outcome they need. They either need to patch the library or patch the application. MS would provide a central authority, but there is none for linux and it's many libraries.
Consider this: Adobe has Qt apps, but has not ported Photoshop to Linux. So Linux got GIMP, which is jarring for people who know photoshop. Linux has enough "me too" apps but they all are inferior copies. Which is its own chicken and egg.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
1. Re-write Linux to remove 9/10 of the BS startup procedures, the 1000's of different files that are needed, and the hours of configuring BS that keeps 99% of the market away from Linux.
2. Include a GUI, scratch that, re-write linux BASED on a GUI say... like Mac OS 1-9.X IE.
3. Work with vendors to build "WORKING" drivers and software that doesnt have to be compiled. IE, every other OS in the world other than UNIX/Linux
4. Just make it simple to use...
If the kernel drivers can't be written because of trade secrets, patents and copyrights, then it's hardly the fault of Linux that the hardware manufacturers are being arseholes.
Do you complain that IBM are crap because OS390 doesn't work with your PCI wifi card?
Do you complain that Windows is crap because the NVidia GeForce2 card doesn't work in XP?
Or do you blame the manufacturers there?
You know what they say, Write Once and Run Everywhere (meaning Gnome, KDE, XFace, etc).
I know Slashdot hive mind thinks M$ is evil (i think it too), but even Microsoft knows it's not about the OS, it's about developer tools (developers, developers, developers).
Unix API is nice. Sockets? include sys/socket.h plus a couple of other headers and you are fine. Graphics? include opengl/gl*.h. But how about other things? Playing sound? Choose between OSS, ALSA, JACK or dozens of sound servers. KDE x GNOME war? Both lost.
I love linux, but it's truly is a PITA using and programming for it's desktop environment.
Install Windows
how to get linux widely adopted as a desktop solution.
i have been using both windows and linux for some time and i have to say im not ready to switch 100% because of the lack of quality apps but also that linux just can't match some of the things in windows that are very handy and very easy: such as remote desktop. its so easy to use and so handy. with linux, i still struggle getting a vnc connection run smooth, stable and easily. also, linux just isn't as convivial. windows and linux are exact opposite: windows is a gui first and a patchwork command line second. linux is a solid command line first and gui second. so long as people still HAVE to know about manually editing the configuration file and such you know that linux won't be going mainstream. its getting better though. so, how to fix the desktop? well, to begin with, make the desktop itself a managed experience that doesn't require the least bit of command line.
second, in my opinion, the way to fix the linux desktop is by making people want to switch to linux, use whatever mcguffin that works... gaming is one of them, get good games on linux and not thru wine! once people (young first) starts spending $$$ on linux games, the rest of the industry will follow, they just go where there is good money to be made after all. facebook and smartphones have this in common that they benefited from games to expand. perhaps linux could have a unique twist on its app store?
Third, make it clear that not all software on linux needs to be open sourced. Free (and more importantly, open) just isn't a model that works for most private companies yet, so if they cannot sell their software on the linux platform, they just won't go. Most people associate linux to free and open source, so if they want to develop a software they intend to sell, linux is not the obvious choice.
Fourth and not least, stop the elitism. Granted, Linux communities have evolved but it is at least still composed of 50-50 between genuinely helpful people and those thinks newbs are simply intruding on their turf, are clueless and stupid - even on help communities. Because, again, not everyone has an interest in getting up close and personal with sudo, nano, ls and chmod many help request end up with very common replies such as "Search the forums" or "man up".
On a closing note, given all this, i think the linux community needs to answer this question: do you really want to be mainstream? Is it in Linux's best interest to become even more popular /user friendly, going this road obviously leads to a heavier OS, more complex, more bug-prone... I think linux's popularity to those that can handle it is the level of control it provides and inherent's security model. As linux works toward mainstream acceptance, its going to have to let go of some control precisely, to the detriment of its original user base. is this what linux wants?
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
Eh...
Follow that logically, and what you see is that the RIAA and MPAA really do care about everything that runs on your computer, from the moment you boot up. Yes, at the end of the day, they only care about their specific copyrights; but to enforce those copyrights on your computer, they need to ensure that your kernel won't allow some program to read another program's memory, and they need to ensure that your bootloader won't allow you to run a modified kernel, and they need to ensure that your BIOS won't load a modified bootloader...
Essentially, they want to rewrite the rules, so that PCs are just fancy televisions, devices that are useful only for consuming entertainment but not for creating it. Sure, you can run whatever you want...as long as it is approved by someone who will make sure that your software is not going to violate the RIAA/MPAA/etc. copyright rules and edicts.
Claiming that someone only wants to ensure that some particular class of software is not run on a computer is just a complicated way to say that they want to control all software that runs on the computer.
Palm trees and 8
port it to BSD...
make the Linux distributions come out slower* with less version changes but still have big updates that are SP like.
also maybe have just the core system under that system with other apps are part of faster update system.
Tear it down and try again. But this time don't embarrass yourselves.
There needs to be a "Constitutional Convention" of sorts for the almighty Linux desktop. Basically, take all the major Linux players and lock them in a room until they can come up with a defining/governing set of rules for a unified Linux desktop. Just get the basic rules, regulations, and best practices in place. Then allow it to be amended by the individual major distro creators, or open it up to the Linux community at large.
Make sure to wire said room full of Linux awesomeness with webcams, so we can all watch as tempers flair and chairs start flying!
The real question should've been "What would you do to IMPROVE the Linux desktop". The original question just starts a flamewar while the latter, revised question would foster innovative thinking and insightful contributions.
...because Gnome 3 sucks. Seriously. What were they thinking?
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
This will be done after Agenda Item #1: Unifying Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism. They've all preliminarily agreed Scientology has got to go, so the rest will be smooth sailing.
I'm talking about applications and especially binary firmware blobs in the kernel. Also, less clueless users who don't know what GNU is. (such as apparently the submitter of this story)
You can help.
Different user interface configurations such as the standard Unity, Gnome, or KDE desktops, should be relegated to some sort of theme file that describes what assets to load and where to put them. Plugins should be used to supply the various functions. That way if you want a lightweight desktop that loads fast like XFCE, you can have one. If you want a more full featured desktop, or one designed to make the best use of screen real-estate for touch devices, you can have that too. I think E17 actually covers most of this, and it is highly optimized, and doesn't rely on 3D for fancy effects but can still take advantage of it.
But the important part is there will be one environment to target, and eccentricities/nuances won't vary like they do between the desktops we have now. The same should go for the file manager/Open dialog/etc that is used, it should be standardized and support plugins/theme descriptions as well. If I start typing a folder name in the window, and then enter a folder and back out of it, will I still be highlighting the folder name I started typing or will I be brought back to the top of the list again? As the directory is read, will the window dynamically display as it is loading in, and jump around when I am typing said folder/file name, or will I stay focused on that area?
I just want this to be the same on every desktop I use, so that I don't have to second guess myself if I'm using a QT or GTK or whatever else app. There can still be different toolkits, but if they are all targeting the same environment, they will behave the same and it will only be the developers that see the difference. If I want to open files with a single click, everything should pay attention to that preference, etc.
Maybe the solution is to extend the reach of the free desktop initiative. But we should be able to mix and match any desktop component, and every toolkit should pay attention to the preferences we set and be able to behave the same if it is specified.
Twinstiq, game news
Preinstallation, preinstallation, preinstallation. That's all that matters. Preinstallation with icons already on the desktop. Why do you think Microsoft fought so hard and long to keep anybody else's browser icons off their precious desktop? Why is the stupid desktop icon worth any price to companies who want their commercial crapware pre-installed?
People will use whatever is in front of their faces. Linux is never in front of their faces. It's not commercial, there are no kickbacks, so it's never going to be in front of their faces. Business IT departments want an 800 number they can call and scream at when things go wrong. Linux has no 800 number. Business IT depts aren't going to demand it, no matter how much sense it makes for the business.
So is it all hopeless? I don't think so. The only thing we can do, you and me, is hold installfests. Help people over that initial hurdle. I've gotten about ten people moved over to Linux (ubuntu) in the last four-five years purely by doing installations for them. And they're thrilled. No more virus problems. Everything works. They're not worrying about the artwork or whether it's a "modern" interface. If we could propagate the get one - install one meme, you can calculate how long it would take for every desktop and laptop to run linux.
The problem of every single version of every single distro having its own package hierarchy system is and has alway been an insane idea--as much as it was louded and heavily defended by so many.
The Problem:
1. Installing a program that is not in the package repository for the specific version of the specific distro you are using is often a very painful process. Consequently, we really don't have so many applications (in practical terms).
2. Figuring out how to do things is difficult. Instructions and How-To's for nearly everything under the sun are littered across the Internet but usually for the wrong version of the wrong distro.. The situation is sometimes worse than having no documentation.
3. Application maintainers often point to the distribution maintainers when problem occur with their application on that distribution. This is because the application maintainer didn't package it, the distro maintainers did. And they very often screw things up in the process.
Summary: If it relatively quick and easy to make work, it is mostly going to just make us frustrated. This is the same for end users and for software developers, like me. The general Linux landscape is a mess. Even under a single distro, it's a mess. I recently gave up just trying to get nvidia drivers to work on Ubuntu, even.. What in the world have they done to X11?
The Solution:
1. We need a distribution neutral packing solution that is relatively quick and easy to use that works. Perhaps the remnants of Autopackage could be revived. It was relatively quick, easy, and worked mostly well. The many variations of how dependencies were compiled was certainly a problem. It failed because the lead maintainers refused the idea of building packages for maintainers as a bridge to becoming popular enough that maintainers would use it on their own (in my view and the view of many others I talked with back then).
2. Develop a standard dependency base, annually. Select the dependencies most used by most applications and compile them with the broadest possible set of compile options. Also, mark each (either by file name or extended attributes) as to which compile options each has.
3. Start maintaining all Linux applications possible and using this to woo over maintainers. One idea is to build a portal offering a git repository, blog, documentation and other resources for software application projects--be they open source or closed source.
4. Another good idea is that the local package installer can check the local distro to see what dependencies do or do not exist then auto-compile and download a package inclusive of all dependency files... keeping downloads as short as reasonably possible. Or else, one could download and install the annual dependency base... and even for previous years, if their apps require them. Either way, you've got a leaner and heavier on disk space and download time option. And documentation in one place, tagged for its version.
5. Focus first on porting developer tools to the new package system.
Most software developers do want their software to run on all distributions. It's just not easy to make that happen, much less to continuously maintain it and to help users with every version of every distro. I've been advocating this solution since the early 2000's.
Also.. Imagine the improvement in quality of individual distributions if all they have to maintain is the Linux distribution itself and not the extra work of as many packages as they can. Consequently, imagine the increased quality of support for each application when it works the same and includes all the same components, etc. on every distribution. As it is, you never know what feature set you are going to get with an application on one distro verses another...
Matthew C. Tedder
All modern desktops are more or less equivalent. What matters more is software compatibility (can I run app Y and game X on my OS?), hardware compatibility, and support/user experience (bring your Mac into the Apple Store and get a replacement the same day). Even if you made the Holy Grail of desktop UI/UX perfection, no one would care, because your Linux OS won't run Call of Duty 5 (or whatever they're up to now) and doesn't have an associated store in the mall.
Stop alienating power users. We're not the problem. We're the beginning.
If I and hundreds or thousands of others tell you that your desktop doesn't provide the configuration capabilities we need then listen and provide the configurability we're asking for. If we tell you your crazy bloated akonadi/nepomuck/whatevertheflip is too big (a mysql instance in my home directory??) then listen and rethink your design. When we complain that your latest major release is a fabulously buggy mess (KDE 4.0) then listen and don't do that to us again. When you hear from people that want a regular orthodox file manager then listen, provide one and don't deprecate it in favor of some granny-safe photo album browser.
It's not hard, really. It just isn't a lot of fun. Which is why it doesn't happen.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
What we need is software with as few bugs as possible. I have tried out everything from Slackware to Mint/Ubuntu and KDE/Gnome/Cinnamon/Xfce in the DE section. The more popular the distribution, the fewer bugs. But I am yet to find one where I can install the distro and a DE and everything actually works. Often I find myself googling or creating forum threads to find workarounds/fixes for this annoying bug or another one. And instead of fixing the existing bugs and making truly stable and good to use software, the focus is on development of new features. This applies pretty much to all categories of Linux software.
There are four things at issue that need to be dealt with:
1. A Linux distribution that is a doddle to set up and manage and comes with tools to manage everything from a single PC to ten thousand assorted PCs and laptops. "Boot everything off the network" fails horribly when you're dealing with laptops that are only sporadically connected to the network; cfengine and puppet are noble ideas but they're designed by people who only have the vaguest idea of how GPOs in Active Directory are used (clue: virtually every conceivable thing you could ever want to configure in Windows can be set up by ticking the appropriate box and assigning the result of this to a group of users or PCs. Whether you like it or not, there's an entire army of Windows admins out there who can't or won't deal with anything drastically different from this and "I can set this up for your company and the licensing is cheaper. But if I get run over by a bus, there's probably only about two other people in this town who can help you." is an incredibly poor selling point).
2. A means of dealing with existing Windows-only software. Virtualising this onto a genuine Windows system is clearly the way to go; the only question is do you run it on the host PC or from a server in a datacenter somewhere?
3. A sensible way to deal with the enormous number of organisations that provide solutions to narrowly defined problems that assume a Windows-based PC sits on the person's desk. There's an enormous number of these out there, they mostly deal with relatively small things and each on their own is probably of little consequence - but you add it all up and it's a death by a thousand cuts.
4. A whacking great dose of humility. Nobody buys a computer because they want a big box on their desk that churns out indecipherable error messages, they buy it to carry out a task. It's a tool. And every time it gets in the way of carrying out their task and instead churns out an indecipherable error message - or worse, doesn't churn out any error message but just sits there not doing the task - it's a Problem and must be seen as such.
You ask how to fix the Linux desktop when none of the vendors will agree to adhere to the "agreed upon standards".
The simple answer is that; it is impossible to fix it with a standard when no one will follow the standard. LSB is out(?), but you think some other desktop environment will fix anything/everything? Not going to happen.
United we stand, divided we fall. Notice the ground rushing up towards you?
We need a better, less-fragile set of configuration tools for video, and a better system from the bottom up for audio.
First, it is far too easy to swap a monitor or something and end up with some unusable set-up which can't be (obviously) fixed. This needs to never happen ever. And if it does happen, it needs to be easily and obviously fixable. It is so fundamental to getting the experience right that it needs to be flawless.
Second, Pulse Audio introduces terrible amounts of lag and makes the experience feel slow. Don't make my
The biggest problems with the desktop experience are things that make it feel slow. I don't care how many features it has if they don't work well. The Linux desktop really needs to prioritize performance over feature-set.
As someone who wants to jump to linux but always ends up going back here's what I think
One freaking desktop style stop jumping between gnome...and the current flavor of the month.
A set of rules needs to be created so there some uniformity for example gimp is "doing it wrong".
I have no idea how you go about bring in these rogue programmers but until that happens its going to be sucksville for the Linux Desktop.
Here are some more ideas:
From Android's side:
Android has great apps, but suffers from an OS problem (limited hardware, OSS compatability, Dalvik-only ecosystem) that others (Ubuntu) cover. Make Android work on Wayland & use a good sound server that offers ALSA APIs (at-least), V4L2, standardize other hardware APIs similarly. Upgrade Ubuntu notifications to full Android notifications. Result: Ubuntu runs Android's apps. Android runs Ubuntu's apps.
To HW Vendors:
- Go Pre-installs! Microsoft's picking winners in the Laptop vendor front with Windows 8. Lets sell them on freedom from being left out.
- Hardware will soon lock-out Linux entirely if they've never heard of us. Send brochures around introducing ourselves: kernel code compatibility written helps work out bugs, Linux as fallback to Microsoft lock-in. Encourage Linux verification to get a Linux sticker on their box.
Unify: (you have not read this one elsewhere)
- Easy way to jump in: Give me 2-3 steps to get a good IDE running with the latest code. Give me a 1-button way to suggest my code changes to the author via his preferred method (git, cvs, bazaar, email list), and an IRC client to the team that informs me of their typical schedule. This means standards & development, but make it public because Apple & Microsoft can't follow this one!
- It's hard to make an RPM or DEB, but easy to make an APK. Lets get IDEs that spit out RPMs & DEBs. Use Android's strengths too.
- Lets get a common, easy, unified filesystem: 1 bin folder, 1 lib folder. Metadata to present it as your menu & link it to man pages
- More Weston developments that connect it with above new standards.
- LXC to switch between Ubuntu, Android, and more today
Image:
Linux is the Apple alternative for the safety-minded, the price-conscious, freedom enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those browsing software (repos). It excels in Android compatibility and built-in free, safe apps. It excels in the web. For Windows software, some works. Like a library OSS is a public resource. It's what you make of it, so hit the button to jump into the IRC for some app & have true freedom to improve.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Beginner should use forums and search engine while advance users shall reporting bugs at bugs.debian.org and self research, wait for next release and self compiling. I had battery icon display problem (resolved my self), clamped polygon display problem (not resolved), session restore after suspend in gnome shell (not resolved), low fps in glxgears (resolved), no desktop environment after fresh installation in debain (resolved), out dated packages in debian cut (not resolved) and license issues of canonical for unity (resolved after shifting to debian).I want to make linux the system of choice for engineers. I found and compiled many engineering packages for cad, gis, project planning, and cae. There are many preloaded cae and gis distro but I want engineering packages right on debian main sources to be part of great community.
Hit it with strategic nukes from space...
Linux is stable, it's easy to get, it has a couple pretty large and big names behind it (Red Hat for example) and it's got a modern and decent UI (Either KDE or Gnome). It's easy to install and it's easy to install apps on now.
So why doesn't it get more love from bigger developers? Linux has everything that the big names (Windows and OS/X) do... Except big developers getting behind it to develop applications that would drive a wider acceptance of the OS.
1. There's a really old (10 year) bug:
If you set single-click behavior in the file browser (Nautilus), the File Open dialogs don't also go to single click. They're still on double click.
The reason? One is provided by Gnome, the other by GTK, supposedly. Somehow, Windows and KDE manage to get this right.
2. Network fileshares in File Open dialogs.
In every organization with more than 2 people, you've got network file shares. So, let's say you want to save a file to the network. OK, File Save. Oh, wait, there are no network file shares in that dialog.
Actually, it varies from application to application. Real nice.
What are you supposed to tell people? Save locally and then use the file manager to copy stuff over?
3. They should also have a Recent section in Nautilus.
4. That said, some things that Linux does right:
-Unity is miles ahead of Windows8.
-It's nice that in the latest Gnome, they also include recently used folders in the Recent list. Sometimes it doesn't work, so they should look at that.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The main thing linux needs to do is pretty much across the board get rid of the GPL and go to an anyone-can-use, any-way-they-like, without-having-to-give-up-own-source code license. Next, it needs a *common* set of routines that are the same on all platforms, and KNOWN to be the same so that making an app run on distro X when it was built for distro Y doesn't require a recompile, assuming only that it's the usual Intel CPU architecture, in which case, if the developer wants to support another binary, *they* do the recompile. Once.
If that was done -- you'd have a landscape at least nominally attractive to commercial applications, leaving aside concerns about piracy.
Without these things, it's geek heaven and it will stay geek heaven, which may be fine with linux folk. Personally, I'd like to see it become competitive in the general commercial space; otherwise, again speaking only for myself, it's a non-starter for anything other than use as a server platform.
Add DirectX
This thread is a good example of why Linux is going not where
Too many Linux is perfect the way it is... GET OFF MY GRASS
Fix wireless and scanners. Two functions that rarely work smoothly, if they work at all. I don't know much about the architecture for scanners, but wireless requires the configuration of about 4 or 5 tools. The wrappers around these tools don't always work. Combine wireless into a single unified service or driver so that there is less chance of weird misconfigurations.
Linux suffers from diversity... Seriously - it's a bad thing sometimes. If you want Linux to succeed on the desktop then take one distro and kill the others. It won't matter which - just so long as there's one. People will bitch and complain but it would simplify *everything* (package management, sound systems, GUI layout and functionality, etc.).
When sound isn't working you shouldn't first have to figure out which of the myriad sound systems you're using. When you want to install an application from a site you shouldn't need to figure out how to convert RPMs to .DEB or tgz's.
The community can't consolidate around a single path forward. This is what happens when there is no clear leadership. And this is exactly the way the community likes and it and why it will continue to be third-rate as a desktop platform.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Remove the bloat. Don't imitate Windows or Mac. Make something sleak and fast that works and is stable. My favorite is KDE3, in terms of functionality and productivity.
kBKbxzAv
Beginner should use forums and search engine while advance users shall reporting bugs at bugs.debian.org and self research, wait for next release and self compiling. I had battery icon display problem (resolved my self), clamped polygon display problem (not resolved), session restore after suspend in gnome shell (not resolved), low fps in glxgears (resolved), no desktop environment after fresh installation in debain (resolved), out dated packages in debian cut (not resolved) and license issues of canonical for unity (resolved after shifting to debian).I want to make linux the system of choice for engineers. I found and compiled many engineering packages for cad, gis, project planning, and cae. There are many preloaded cae and gis distro but I want engineering packages right on debian main sources to be part of great community.
A friend of mine uses Ubuntu & his wife has a Windows machine (just married). She bought an all-in-one for its scanner. After hours of both of them fighting Windows drivers, they were out of time so the plugged it into Ubuntu, opened "Simple Scan" and hit scan. It worked of-course.
Plug-in a new mouse while you're in a game on Windows 7? It won't work. Works fine in Linux (for any game ran in any way).
WinTV card? I have my choice of apps to use it with in Linux that cut commercials, reencode, etc. In Windows it's WinTV.exe (worthless) or nothing. (and most of those cards work despite being obscure hardware).
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
OEMs hold the keys here. They'll sell anything they think people will buy. But the problem is that Microsoft basically owns the OEMs. At least for now. Looks like Ms is working incredibly hard to alienate everyone.
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There are some simple things that might improve things a lot! But simple is not necessarily simple. HOWEVER! Just look at the 3 most used applications by us; the power users, and veterans: Terminal, Firefox and LibreOffice. Look at the shortcuts of COPY, PASTE. Yes. Copy/paste. In these main 3 applications they are different. For over a few decades it's like that! WTF The Linux Standard Base, can start out with a simple thing like this. It would be nice if they could pull it off. Start out small and humble, and improve things. That's what can make things better. But neither Firefox nor LibreOffice nor terminal emulators will change this without proper motivation. Yet it isn't difficult to realize the necessity to get these thing right...
(Sigh) I guess I'll just have to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up. I'll just avoid making any bugs or bad design decisions, and make sure everything loves all aspects of everything I code. I'll just write a new bootloader, kernel, drivers, utilities, compiler toolchain, windowing system, desktop productivity software, and some cute cat apps.
Should take a week or two.
The license you speak of exists on *BSD. Still waiting for commercial apps there.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Volunteers view their time as hobby-time, which means they want to work on what interests them.
Paid employees do that, and also the un-interesting stuff, like documentation, drivers, non-critical bug-fixes, interface standardization and so forth.
If you want to fix Linux on the desktop, imitate those who are succeeding (Microsoft and Apple): be customer-driven, not developer-driven.
Work on what the customers need. To do that, you may need to make the volunteer community a paid one, or at least one where there are consequences for not doing what is necessary, and leaders to implement those strategies.
Heresy, I know. But heresy that works, and would have avoided the absence of market share that Linux desktop solutions now experience.
For a little bit of background:
Futurist Traditionalism
Somebody has to do this.
1. Torvalds
2. de Icaza
3. ???
4. Proffitt
Preinstallation, preinstallation, preinstallation. That's all that matters.
That's not all that matters. Until people can go to apple's website and download iTunes or go to steam's website and download steam, linux isn't going to get much traction in the general population.
The computing world needs an easy to use - quick and not so dirty gui to automate so many things that just takes too much time. Too much hassle with the incompatible, incomplete gui systems for the programming languages out there. Hypercard fit the bill, and its amazing how nothing better has come along since. Thanks Steve Jobs for killing what was one of the simplest programming innovations in history.
An open source version for Linux would be of great benefit, along with LESS desktop windowing choices.
I found out yesterday, install xubuntu 12.04.1.
every five years, freeze a set of "extremely important libraries" and "critical interfaces" and what have you (stuff named like libc, glibc and any libgrujdsrfr01 that 0.01% people know they exist but are needed for common applications ; and whatever kernel features). maybe some toolkit version and stuff. support them forever, even if that needs some kind of chroot or wrappers or something.
that way commercial software, unmaintained or dead software, and software made by a single person, often good games and unique or nice freeware, can be run on linux. the show can go on for high profile maintained open source and server stuff, these things can still chase the permanent upgrade treadmill if they can afford to.
one of my first experiences with tinkering under linux was trying to get ttyquake running. needless to say I was pissed when I found out it was totally incompatible because it was 7 or 8 year old. try running a Loki game, those games were a classic argument to make people believe you can game on linux : every single one of them is probably dead, forever incompatible.
a good example is console emulators. there are some under linux, mainly zsnes. 95% other ones are for windows and are small program made in 2004, 2007, 2002 or more recent. most linux versions have sound glitches or no GUI.
the same set of things I suggested above. Kudos to you.
I started using Linux in '93 but stopped in 2009 because, frankly, I was exhausted. I had forgotten that in 1993 I started using Linux because it let me do the things that I wanted to do at a cost (free) that significantly beat ($thousands) what was on offer in the Unix world at the time.
In 2009 when KDE took a shit on everyone and news that GNOME was about to do it, too, hit the netwaves, I suddenly realized that the situation had become inverted. Now being a Linux user kept me from doing the things that I wanted to do—not in theory (in theory, everything is possible—hell, you can design and fab out your own damned CPU and architecture and create a platform port for it if you want), but in practice. I was spending 10 percent of my time re-learning every major subsystem in Linux that changed every 6 months to 1 year, and another 20 percent of my time constantly fighting to get apps installed, keep them installed across distro releases, support my slowly evolving hardware (which required upgrading to new distro releases or doing backports by hand), and getting those apps to do the things that commercial apps could do easily.
Linux was no longer saving me many $thousands, since consumer-level OSes were now adequate to my needs and the applications I needed to use were only in the $hundreds camp. The capabilities that I wanted—working multimedia, powerful apps that shared file formats with the rest of the world, set it and forget it tools that I didn't need to build myself and that could manage my data—were right there, on the shelf at affordable prices, in every way that they weren't in 1993.
It was like a light bulb went on over my head—and I suddenly realized that Linux was holding my real career back, rather than enabling it as it had done in the early '90s. Bye-bye, Linux.
The culture of Linux remains the culture of 1993 mid-range computing—but we no longer live in a world in which CS students can't afford the hardware/software they use at school and mainstream OSes can't do the fun stuff. Quite the opposite. It's funny to think back at how thrilled I was to have X11 on the desktop (compared to Windows 3.1) versus how I feel now, twenty years on, comparing KDE or GNOME on Fedora or Ubuntu to OS X 10.8. The tables have been exactly turned. Linux is still essentially the same in architecture and philosophy, while the rest of the world has moved to a completely different paradigm in which computing is essentially appliance-driven. In 1993 Linux was ahead of its time. In 2013 Linux is a decade behind.
These days, I want an complete, polished, turnkey appliance at low cost and with no labor time investment, not a set of building block. Today's appliances are fast, intuitive, stable, durable, powerful, and integrated like the iPad (which I do, yes, use for serious work about 5-6 hours a day). For most users (which is where I have always ultimately fallen), Linux is solution in search of a problem that no longer exists.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
With a learning curve like that, why would anyone want to run Windows?
Because most users don't install Windows themselves?
And here we have it: the simple answer.
The way to have more people using the Linux desktop is to HAVE IT PREINSTALLED by vendors, because most people are unwilling to install an OS themselves from scratch, no matter how incredible it is. Of course, this is much easier said than done, but I think that blaming GNOME/KDE/Unity for Linux's 1% market share is missing the point by a mile.
Buying pre-installed linux is possible already, especially in the US. I just bought one of these: https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/lemu4. Everything pretty much just works, and they support future releases of ubuntu as well. Another old laptop I have is a dell inspiron 1501. It didn't come with linux pre-installed in the market I bought it in, but I knew the hardware was supported because the same model was sold with linux on it in some markets. A linux install is actually quite painless nowadays if all the hardware is supported. If you like an ultrabook you can try the Dell XPS 13: does not come with linux preinstalled yet, but they will in the future so everything should be well supported.
Taking a step back one could ask should Linux be on the desktop?
It gained a lot of popularity as a server OS and a OS for embedded devices like Android.
Stop naming it after hotdogs.
The main problem is, microsoft put a lot of time and effort into making sure the desktop environment is more or less the same, visually, to the end user from version to version. In the last 2 years, ubuntu has gone through at least 3 different desktop versions. Stop trying to be "not windows" and accept the fact that microsoft have put a lot of effort behind the desktop being the way it is.
Standardize a basic layout and design and stick too it.
Also, GUI needs moving to the kernel, or at least it needs to be a kernel driver, GUI in linux os's at the minute is slow, even hardware accelerated GUI is slow in linux.
portfolio
When did /. get so, um, like, emo about "linux"?
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Wine.
Get Wine (and a distro tailored specifically for it) up to a point where you can take any windows program, stick the CD in the computer, and get it to install properly and run.
You accomplish that and you'll have Linux on the desktop. But probably nothing short of that is going to make it happen.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
it's why I don't use it, very hard to figure out drivers. Impossible for me.
that Windows does: run Windows software. So it was, in fact, completely different.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It would help if there were an independent organisation who standarised a set of interfaces that contained the description of the ABI interface.
For instance: A program would require a standard Perl 5 interface vs perl-5.15.1.
It would make much easier the collaboration between pakage management systems and ISVs.
Why hasn't anyone written a book about how to program Linux Desktop Apps? Because the APIs change so much and the "right" way to do something like playing sound is not really well defined. If you could get things to settle down API wise someone could write these books and then that would bring the developer community along.
1. There is no singular "Linux Desktop" as posted by many others already, there are multiple competing desktop environments, package managers and distributions.
2. Desktop computers have now been surpassed by mobile devices in usage for things like Facebook (http://allthingsd.com/20120508/average-facebook-mobile-use-beats-desktop-access/) and email (http://www.returnpath.net/blog/intheknow/2012/05/email-in-motion-how-mobile-is-leading-the-email-revolution/). You know, those things that most people use the Internet for.
3. Android is the successful Linux Desktop with nearly 40% market share on mobile devices - almost twice its nearest competitor (http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/gadgetbox/android-market-share-surpass-40-percent-year-122857).
4. Supporting Windows and Android apps natively in Linux distributions is an important way for distro projects to remain relevant for those who prefer to use Linux, but who need to interact with the rest of the world or share experiences with them.
5. This whole conversation is beginning to sound like a greybeard echo chamber. I must be one of the greybeards, because I'm posting from a Linux desktop...
Push Wayland all the way until it's a working display server, capable of supporting X fully as it was intended by Kristian et al, and provide a Wayland native toolkit - e.g. Qt, and let the porting games begin.
Ensure that Wayland is GL-based all the way, by using the latest Linux kernel graphics capabilities (KMS, etc).
Plug it into a popular distribution, two or three - starting with Ubuntu, Fedora/RedHat, Suse, etc.
Then build a little, test a little, until you have a solid desktop. Advertise it, get corporations to support it - e.g. Intel, which can then sell more chips than before.
Position it as an OS X/Windows alternative. With a sharp GUI like that, Linux can vanquish both OSX and Windows.
There's probably more that can be "fixed"... this just off the top of my head.
Most nerds are only interested in making a desktop operating system for their own use and amusement. Ergo, what they make is unusable and unsuitable for non nerds, and frankly my dear, they don't care a damn.
Users, clients, consumers, whatever you want to call them, do not buy features.
The only ones that do so are the geek 1% of the population we belong to do.
This is why we will be the only ones to adopt a linux desktop platform.
Users buy benefits.
To a user, there is no benefit to using a Linux desktop.
The benefit to using windows is that it's the least-brainfuck frugal way to get started using a computer, and it's the same set of computer skills they usually need at work.
The benefit to using OSX is that it's the least-brainfuck way to use apple hardware.
To the non-geek, Linux has no benefit. There is *NOTHING* that that desktop will do for them that Windows, OSX, or OSX with Windows in fusion/parallels won't do equally well, with less effort, upfront and ongoing, capex and opex.
And no, in the case of most people, the brainfuck, time & opportunity cost of learning a new OS far outstrips the $100 of OEM Windows 7 license fees it has the potential to save (and in the case of macs, the 2-figure OS cost is silently lumped into the 4-figure cost of what is essentially a luxury computer).
The Linux desktop is not broken per-se. It's simply an also-ran that didn't reach escape velocity with the large market, and has no benefit-driven propulsion system to ever help it reach that. No, I can't think of what benefits it would bring. I can only think of a lot of features that any lean-startup-driven process that looks at what's been happening there over the past 10 years would identify as waste (e.g. stuff that fails to get more people to use the platform) in 20 minutes flat.
It's like "Ever since the invention of the car, we use less horses, and therefore need less whips. Quick, everyone. Think of ways to get everyone to buy whips again! What can we do to 'fix the whip'?"
In the absence of benefits, you can't "fix" it.
Benefits, people. Either think up of some, or stop wasting everyone's time with this stuff.
All the talent that is going into this /dev/null would better benefit us all if it went to solving real problems, bring people real benefits, and help the universe go forward, not back for the sake of some anachronistic religious goal (which this is, to some). We've gone from 10% of the world consuming like Americans to nearly 50%. Every natural resource in the world is under supply stress. India, China, SE Asia and Brazil gave birth to middle classes. There are so many real problems out there to fix.
-
it needs more desktop applications that have well designed UIs and that WORK RIGHT.
All the apps in the world won't matter if Microsoft Office and Adobe Pagemaker aren't included in the list. While there are good open source alternatives available, nobody is going to risk their company's future without access to what is considered industry standard applications.
Want Linux to be more acceptable on the desktop, first I would work on Libre/Open Office. User's don't care whose fault it is that documents don't convert perfectly, they want the documents to convert perfectly (nor does it matter that there are imperfections between various versions of MS Office). While it is nice that Ubuntu provided some development time to get a patch into LibreOffice that will use the unified Unity menu, that time would have been better spent making powerpoint transitions function the same way as under Windows.
Pagemaker is another must have for businesses. Yes Gimp does wonderful things as does Inkscape, but neither help Pagemaker users transition to Linux. How many Windows only companies allow Macs in for the marketing department? They do it because they few the Mac as the specific tool needed. Likewise, even if there are alternatives, Pagemaker is the tool needed and if it isn't supported under Linux, it is a show stopper.
Finally, there needs to be good general ledger accounting software. Businesses aren't going to install linux everywhere but in the finance office and the finance office isn't going to offer a go-ahead opinion if their stuff won't work.
If all of this sounds business-centric, well, it is. As much as home users may adopt or want to use linux, it is business users that will drive the desktop. It is also business users that will be able to pay support fees, etc. that would keep open source companies in business. That is why companies like Redhat focus on the data center and not the desktop. The data center already has the model of paying for support and therefore Redhat can build a sustainable business model.
It isn't that desktop linux is dying. It hasn't been born yet. For linux to be successful on the desktop, the first thing to realize is that it has nothing to do with window manager or desktop environment. It has everything to do with applications. If you don't have the applications that people need to do their work, it won't be adopted.
Linux is fabulous as a sever OS at almost every scale.
But most desktop users don't care about running their own servers, and those that do can generally get the few services that they want in a set-it-and-forget-it appliance from the Best Buy or the Apple Store. And even Windows and Mac OS offer much easier-to-manage implementations of (for example) Windows file sharing and web services. Why would I want to install and configure Samba by hand when I can just check a box to enable file sharing in OS X? Even better, why do either when I can get a router with a USB port and a file server inside it for just a few dollars, stick it in the corner, and forget about it.
Back in the day I had a Linux box running (I forget which) minimal Linux distro as a file server, print server, DHCP server, and NAT/firewall box on my LAN. It was diskless and sat behind my couch and did its job very well for years. Now I just have an Airport Extreme. Uses less power, was infinitely easier to set up, and makes no noise.
You can see where Linux is great by looking at where its marketshare is. You can see where Linux is lousy (e.g. the desktop/laptop everyday applications user space) in the same way. People aren't dumb—they do actually tend to use the right tool for the right job. Right now if you want to set up a departmental server, Linux is a prime choice. If you want to equip your college freshman with a general purpose homework computer for school, it's not even on the radar.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The problem is that there's no money in Linux. Let me put it this way...if someone obtains an OSS OS which is "free" then why would they pay for any software that runs on said "free" OS? They most likely won't. Also how many developers write code for any OSS applications that may be out of work? What percentage of the market does Linux comprise of? Not very much, so you will get a handful of users using something that you've spent lots of time creating. Another issue is who is going to maintain support for an application that an enterprise or many people depend on when the orignal creator begins work on something else? Who do enterprises turn to when something that was "free" no longer has ample support? Do they take over the project? If they do does the license prevent them from creating proprietary modules by forcing whatever has been created to be available to a competitor? While Linux itself is a fast and durable OS there seems to be more bickering about what the latest distro has to offer than using that energy to create some sweet applications/services. Last time I checked people couldn't survive by eating bytes of code so until there is some sort-of "killer" app that only runs on Linux then it will be a hard sell...and then there's another problem. What can be created by a handfull of developers that can't be completely blown away by a company with deep pockets? Linux needs to harden itself and use the combined energies to produce a cohesive value proposition that is simple, fast, and covers 80+15 of what people want (killer apps that work better than the competition + drivers...Linux needs to easily support the vast majority of peripherals, etc). Make an ad with killer music (EPIC music), demonstrate getting things done faster/better, and then show how it improves your life...
Add real package management to Mac OS-X.
macports doesn't cut it, neither does brew. yum or apt-get based would be the way to go. Plainly put, the distance to perfect desktop (A decent package manger for the Unixy bits) is closer in Mac OS-X than it is on Linux (Adding a, usable, consistent desktop with usable office apps)
I like all my little lines of words just fine.
How would you 'fix' it?
Well, start with some simple things. GFX and Driver API layers need fixing. And by fixing I mean make it easy for Intel, Nvidia and ATI (and others) to make drivers and offer support while cutting ALL the crap that ends up as a firefight because they are blobs or none free. Linux neds these people, and their tech
Talk to Steam and others and discuss a Direct X alike layer, perhaps really getting to the core of providing OpenCL, CUDA, OpenGL, Maybe Direct X emulation layers, or perhaps a new layer that does the same. Heavily invite the players, steam, Nvidia, AMD, others to be part of it.
Sound API. Fix it. Properly.
Gnome was a shitty limited desktop. The Compiz bunch / crew created a layer on top that allowed *fun* and *customisation* - and resulted in a true surge of YouTube Videos and interest globally in the Linux desktop. It become fun, cool, and interesting. If you could bottle it, wasn't that what you wanted to get hold of?
Since then, every window manager, and distro, has seemingly wanted to move away from that, kill that, do touch, or make Gnome 3 or Unity.
*Hint to the gnome people, Compiz saved your ass and made your desktop interesting. Maybe you need to understand what it was that was good. It was not your tired, 2d, boring, unconfigurable, tedious, limited desktop, broken desktop.
Having screwed up the desktop via Unity and Gnome 3 - I hear people saying 'Linux on the desktop is dead, its dead man!'. Little wonder why. The desktop stuff I see is tried, limited and in most cases unconfigurable. Only throwiung compiz (for example) adds a layer of personalisation and life. And even that is years old and needs a refresh really.
For anyone saying 'I've used my linux desktop for the past 18 years, man, and I love it' - Yeah. You might, but the part you are missing here is it needs work.
Anyway, the nearest I see is Cinnamon, but while its nice, its pretty lacking in customisation.
We`re all equal
1.rely on intel.
2.ignore possible screen resolutions when building a GUI, thence so menus are cut-off on 1024x600 screens.
3. bash closed sourced, other kind of language (not C) and math (quaternions) add-on cards.
4. try to reverse engineer the above toaster that is certified to run your own breed nevermind
5. supply the least amount of background (QT, gimp->framemaker, clutter?, mesa, openGL, X, remain black-ops and topsecret)
6. more of the above plus even less background
7. drunk more beer when commenting on that green screen flip open mobile phone, eepoc, on slashdot!
8. remove dog-shit from the public sandbox playground, even if u don't call your kid a dog. 9. bad formatting ruleZ!
Linus Torvalds claims that the kernel is great because it doesn't break existing applications.
What Be Inc. did so well was to create complete plug-in based application kits that provided
full skeletons for application development. BeOS was thought out *in advance* by very bright
people. The Linux desktop fails because it is a hodge-podge of competing technologies which are
always changing and breaking themselves (Gnome, KDE, etc.)
How was BeOS better? For example, do you want to play MP3s? Then just add that plugin to
the MediaKit, and ALL applications which use the MediaKit will be able to play MP3s. The
MediaKit was unified; it was not part Gstreamer, part Xine, part Ogg, part PulseAudio, part VLC,
part Jack, part FFMPEG, etc. It was ONE consistent set of interfaces.
Another example is how they used their filesystem, BeFS, as a database, storing
extended attributes in the filesystem. Yeah, Linux has that capability now with
Ext4 and XFS. But, it was thought out in advance, and usage was encouraged.
That sounds a lot better than nepomonk and its ilk, and all the plethora of
homegrown gdb, msql, postgresql, nosql databases used to store basic
things, all of which are incompatible.
Now, you might not want to go the Be route and use C++. And it's not a good
idea to *force* people to write multi-threaded applications. Novices need to
be able to write simple programs too. Perhaps C# would be a good choice?
Or D?? It would be good to have way for have multiple languages generate the
same bytecode.
And hey, as BeOS and Apple's OS X show us, there is a value to having
a good message passing subsystem, so perhaps ObjC would be a good
choice as the main language?
The goal would be to have 1 main, good primary interface for everything,
and one primary programming language, but still allowing for some choice
for developing non-essential home-brew apps.
My humble opinion.
While touch IS coming to desktops, it's not here now and it won't be on the majority of desktop systems - perhaps ever.
Don't design for a tablet if you're designing for a desktop.
That's particularly aimed at Gnome and Unity, who seem to be ignoring desktops when it comes to new designs.
Apple and Microsoft say that the PC is dead or on its way out. There's no way to make the Linux desktop a better Windows tablet than windows 8 or a better iPad than an iPad, but there will be a large number of people who *don't* want to give up the PC/Dekstop. Be it for the input devices, higher display resolution or because people want general purpose computing, there will be a large need for exactly what Linux currently is. It would be good to have more applications, and a better, all-encompassing API would be nice, but there's no crisis like the summary makes it out to be. Also , it would be like the xkcd about standards, unless it's a beautiful wonder of an API.
1 - Focus on *usability*. This means *simplicity* You don't have to drop skins/theme support, but get one looking *really* clean and sharp, and make that the default. If other people want to add more, fine, but get one default skin looking really clean and simple. For reference, the plastik theme for KDE is pretty darn close. This also means there shouldn't be a dozen icons on the taskbar - the default should be clock, wifi status (only if using wifi) and sound.
2 - You need really good UI building tools that are well documented and well supported. Stop cramming features into the desktop, get the basics rock solid and support the crap out of them on the builder.
3 - You should be able to make the desktop work just like Windows or MacOS - it's what people are familiar with. It doesn't matter how much better you think your desktop is. It might be lightyears easier to use than MacOS or Windows, but if it's too alien-feeling people won't want to switch to it.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I'd like to replace the desktop metaphor with a notebook/binder/planner metaphor: eg, tabs for different projects. Being able to mix spreadsheets and photos and word processing functions all on the same page; kind of like MS-Onenote, but with more active content, and more convenient features. For example, why can't I set an appointment or an alarm when I click on the clock?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Mangled that for you (hope you don't mind).
I do agree it's a problem though; have you tried looking at distrowatch.com, they do reviews of various and sundry distro's.
if you want a 800 number to call and yell at because your Linux computer is not working you could go with any of a number of commercial distro's (redhat, suse,oracle) or any of a number of other firms that will provide support for non commercial distros (canonical). In fact debain keeps a page devoted to paid consultancy firms around the world that will let you scream at them for a set rate $ per hour. http://www.debian.org/consultants/
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I've been on linux for 10+ years.. I work on the system side, so I use linux mainly for the cli, and my de of choice is wmii... but I always had to dual boot into windows:
1) Netflix is adamant about not supporting linux.. I don't own a tv. I don't have time to torrent stuff.. I just want to open a device and have it play videos
2) Photoshop doesn't work on linux.. gimp is no where close to photoshop. As an semi-pro photographer, this is a big deal to me.
3) I've moved to google docs for most of my doc needs, but need to log in to windows, just to open some msoffice docs that wont render well on OSS.
So in short.. people don't care if Gnome/Kde/wmii/enlightenment/ratpoison/next great desktop is the answer to their prayers.. people who configure stuff can figure out how to configure whatever the DE(desktop environments).. people who don't, just care about the apps. Why are there no apps? because there are soo many DEs, there is no consistency in the way windows are handled (amongst many other things) .
We are not going to fix the problem by coming up with another DE. The almighty Linus Torvolds himself branch the linux kernel project to a linux os project and pick one DE to be packaged with it.. and only "that" will be called linux.. rest all distro will need to get a new name for their OS. From the package managers perspective, it shouldn't be too hard to just pick one (read deb), and modify it to add clis that mimic other package mangers.
My advice has been the same from the 1995-ish days of RH... you need a solid foundation that is close to static and stable to build on. Just like the kernel, there cannot just be chaos. Linux needs to be not just the kernel but the basic framework and a single set of core apps. Instead of 15 terminal apps, window managers, editors, etc. There needs to be one, and the very best/stable/simple one from each category. This would get people interested in working on that one project since it would bring the most fame and notice, it would make the base system close to a standard, and it would eliminate a lot of complexity. From there people can be free to add whatever they want in any of those categories or specialized apps but the foundational base would still be standard. That alone would be huge.
After that my opinion is that there should be self-contained applications. All the files and dependencies should be in the apps package and directory. With disk being cheap and huge the redundancy and extra space would be completely worth it to give up. It would make the dependency hell go away and it would simplify so many aspects.
After 17 years though, I'm not holding my breath... the usual crew will just continue to say how it isn't necessary and go about their business with no regard for reality.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Seriously, looks at the most successful *nix distros, OS X, Android, you know damn well that these are not "community" driven projects.
The biggest problem with Linux has always been is fragmentation. Having 1000 distro's all thinking they can make a better desktop platform, better development system, better server, better UI, etc weakens the whole community source code initiative. A lot of great developers are all working on different variations of essentially the same thing, which waters down the whiskey.
I think the ONLY thing that could fix Linux is to create one-Uber distro, make is a real community project and put all the collective innovation and interest into creating one desktop version of Linux.
However, the big problem now is that the Desktop is dying, so I think any effort into making Linux for the Desktop is moot. Even if a super-uber fantastic Desktop Linux is created today, the platform it runs on is dying.
Linux has to move into Mobile platforms if it wants to survive, but then that will introduce a whole new generation of groups thinking they know how to build a better iOS/Android killer, and failing miserably at it.
I think fundamentally open source OS'es fail, period. The only successful versions of Linux/*nix have been relatively closed projects from big companies with deep pockets. About the only hope for Linux is to wrap it into some hardware platform like a game console, tablet, phone, etc which effectively closes it down. Linux is like Utopia, everybody wants it but it is fundamentally unattainable because it is a flawed concept unless you compromise.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I find this particularly interesting.
This discussion happens over and over ad infinitum on Slashdot and elsewhere, and indeed the KDE 3->4 and GNOME 2->3 "revolutions" are giant meditations-in-code on the problem of Linux on the desktop/Linux for regular users, yet the Linux community never seems to get their head around the problem, despite dozens of comments from users giving simple directions and despite very successful examples in Windows and Mac OS.
I suspect that the self-selection of the Linux community with respect to Linux's political goals and characteristics (which have been the most consistent dimension of Linux since the beginning) leaves the Linux world culturally and ideologically blind when it comes to being "good on the desktop" or "good for regular users."
Witness the way in which so many complaint posts from regular users are shouted/modded down, here and elsewhere.
They're giving the Linux community plain, simple, honest directions about what would encourage them to select Linux as a tool, but I think that what you're hinting at is right—Linux as a social project (not a technical one) is incompatible with the consumer marketplace at a broad scale. This has basically left the "Linux on the desktop" question as a waste of time for many years now—witness all of the wasted development hours in KDE/GNOME since their respective beginnings. Sure, lots of people here will post and suggest that "KDE 4 is great" and "GNOME 3 is the best ever," but in terms of the actual number of real-world users being served by these codebases vs. the amount of time and resources invested in them, they're much more expensive at the social/labor level than most commercial software, and with poorer ultimate results when measured in the same way (though that's something of a tautological calculation).
What I wonder about is whether this will ever die off—or, on the other hand, will we continue to see questions like this in another 10 years, with Linux still at the same marketshare and with the same public perception, and with a lot of code churn and invested labor hours over that time?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
For my IMHO why desktop Linux lags, watch this video.
Linux has no infrastructure to support desktop developers. There is no Linux as a development environment. And it all changes too fast and too often - and diversity of distros is a separate bag of hurt. On top of that there are still piles of gaps. Classical one is the multimedia. Another one is the DB interface. Basically, you need a big-sized well-coordinated community to have a concerted development and maintenance of a Linux as a development platform.
Most importantly, one shouldn't forget: most desktop developers are ex-users and ex-power-users.
Windows and Mac OS make it very easy to transition from a user to a developer (VB and VBA, AppleScript and Automator). They also provide moderate guarantees that experience and skill will not expire too fast so that the time invested into coding something up will not be wasted and can be reused after the OS update. (Linux version: user starts with shell scripting ... but that's direction rather opposite of the desktop.)
I can name only Qt as something what came close. But then it does not completely cover everything. KDE - yes. But there is no dumb abomination like VB which allows to build something useful in very short time or from copy-pasted samples gathered on google.
GNOME's Vala comes closer (at least from my initial impression of it), but unfortunately, it is bound to rather unpredictable GNOME project.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
aussersterne has many good points above, but I don't agree 100%
Graphics, graphics, graphics - and sound. You get the gamers and the home desktop will follow.
Business users are always going to be stuck to vendor software. If you get enough home desktop coverage and vendors will start to take it seriously, and businesses will follow.
and that was the lindows goal. integrated wine, where the user could just run 95% of the windows software. It even worked quite fine for the software, which was the primary goal. But Lindows was not successful, because when it looks like windows and runs windows software as primary goal ... you can just use windows, as it came preinstalled with your pc.
Between your post and mine, the dichotomy/disagreement has been made clear.
There are two views of users, computing, what computing is for, and what useful computing actually is at work in this discussion. Another way to say what I was saying is that broader Linux community's ideas of what computing is for and what a user is like are very different from the ideas that are in the economic mainstream.
Rather than respond to your points, I'd like to draw them into relief and point to them. You've made good points with respect to a particular set of goals and a particular value system. But the continuous questions about Linux on the desktop that we see on Slashdot suggest that there is some ambivalence in the Linux world about the ways in which meeting these goals and these values does not seem to lead to widespread adoption.
The stalemate (a decade-old, at least, one) is crystallized by the way in which the Linux community does not want to change its goals and values, yet wants somehow to enjoy widespread adoption. The two are not compatible; to enjoy widespread adoption, Linux must share the goals of the people walking around Best Buy right now. If the broader community wants to distance themselves from these people and these goals, it is destined to fight windmills for a long time when it comes to widespread adoption.
Better, to my eye at least, to simply concede on that point and enjoy the system that exists, understanding that for the limited userbase that it has, it is probably currently the best choice.
Or: You can have users that are not developers or you can have users that are also developers, but there is a distinct limit on the degree to which you can have both groups with the same product.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
To succeed on the desktop you need the applications that consumers want. What does Red Hat, Canonical, etc. do to get MS Office, iTunes, Photoshop, video games, etc. ported to run on Linux? Nothing? The open source equivalents are sometimes good enough but not always. I figure they help the enterprise DB companies and stuff like that.
I know that Microsoft and Apple spend time and money to get companies to port their software to their OS. I remember the big deal when Bill Gates face was shown at a Mac convention 10 years ago with Jobs on stage. MS agreed to continue MS Office support. Do you think they did that because MS saw a market to make money or Apple paid them? I remember DEC, PowerPC consortium, MIPS vendors, all paying MS to port Windows NT to their hardware so their hardware would "succeed" on the desktop.
Everything 'broken' about Linux is already solved by Windows. Paying the MS tax is far easier than getting Linux OS developers to all agree on common standards that would make life easy for Linux App developers. It's easier than getting hardware manufacturers to start supporting Linux. It's easier than getting game developers to support Linux.
If you want Linux, use Linux. If you want an OS to do the things Windows does, use Windows. If you want both, dual boot.
the latest versions of Office, Adobe products, corporate infrastructure products, games, etc.
In short, to get to the 95% figure, you have to count every last shareware and freeware app for doing not much of anything in particular as a part of the "Windows software" ecosystem. There's a reason Obscure Shareware App X 1.0 is obscure, and it's because not many users care about it.
Most users do care very much about Office, Photoshop, games, and a few other essential apps, which is why Wine has never fulfilled its promise.
In short, your post is willfully obtuse. Or perhaps my post was. Let me change it:
"Only it didn't do the most critical things that Windows does: run the latest versions of MS Office, Adobe products, retail PC games, and Windows enterprise connectivity applications. So it was, in fact, completely different."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It's still leaps and bounds better than any client side Calendar app that runs on Linux. Same goes for Mail.app - although Postler may change that given some time.
Try actually involving people who know something about user interface design, usability, etc. Not a bunch of hackers who like to make pretty displays. Develop common and stable APIs, a common UI toolkit, and common IPC protocols. Strive towards uniformity in user interface appearance. Stop "skinning" and develop a standard UI appearance based on actual research.
There is many decades of HCI research that applies to this. You could spend ages leafing through journal and conference proceedings on this stuff. Much of what applies to fixing the Linux desktop was solved long ago. People just need to implement it, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel or assuming that the academics are idiots. Be willing to implement something you disagree with because you MIGHT BE WRONG, or (more likely) what works for you may not work for more typical users or novices or even power users.
Get rid of X11 and switch to Wayland. Yeah, I know. Everyone will cry about the loss of network transparency. You know what? Windows and MacOS do not have network transparency. They use other solutions like VNC. And those other operating systems are successful on the desktop, while Linux is not.
Linux on the desktop is a failure for several reasons. They include:
- Unstable APIs and driver ABIs
- Too many choices about UI toolkits
- Too many inconsistencies between applications, even those part of the same "desktop environment"
- Lack of educated and informed leadership
- Unwillingness to work on the "boring parts" of software development
- Too much infighting among contributors
- Etc. etc.
Another thing we need is more open source graphics drivers. The Open Graphics Project started working on solving that problem once and for all, but it didn't get enough financial support. The OGP started before Kickstarter, so perhaps that would have helped. In any case, the graphics card and driver problem needs to be FIXED.
We need photo shop. Its the only thing really holding me back from ditching windows completely.
Photoshop under wine is a joke and slow in a VM. Gimp 2.8 is nice but it's still no photoshop, not by a long shot.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Linux desktop, there are icons, you click on them and they make programs start, it's not rocket science, it doesn't need to. But there are tons of small issues and interoperability problems. Just fix them one by one instead of constantly reinventing the wheel.
I began using Linux in 1996 and went full-time Linux Desktop in 1999. I switched to Linux because, as a network engineer, I could do FAR more with Linux than I could with Windows, even if it was at the expense of the quality of the GUI.
Fast forward 13 years, and there is virtually nothing that I need to do that I can't do with Windows or OS X. What's more, it's now even easier with Windows or OS X than it is with Linux. But, the killer is that there are now LOTS of things that I can do with Windows that I cannot do in Linux, meaning the availability of quality applications for Windows now FAR exceeds those available for Linux.
I'm presently evaluating upgrading or switching and I'm trying to remain impartial, but every time I see an article like this I think it's time to switch. Lack of SSH with X forwarding are the only losses I see right now.
Linux on the desktop works fine. There's nothing wrong with it; I can use it, anybody can use it. As long as you don't have craphardware, that is. However, there's one thing you can be 100% certain about. Within a year, an upgrade will come around that will totally fuck shit up. All your settings will be gone, your desktop environment probably won't even start and compiz will start behaving horrible. All your gnome panel applets will behave oddly and right-clicking on the gnome panel won't work anymore. I cannot explain this kind of bullshit to end-users.
If it weren't for this kind of crap, it'd be totally awesome. I'd have the total noobs that I help with their PC migrated to Linux a long time ago. It'd be so much better without the virusscanner crap, without all kinds of odd applications nagging about updates and running crap in the background etc. But I can't. Because I can be 100 percent sure they'll all call me right after the first update because it fucked them in the ass.
0x or or snor perron?!
So first you install Windows, then you need to find more disks or google around for drivers for some of your hardware. Hardware compatibility is a bit more of an issue for Linux, but less so than Apple products. But if you have hardware that Linux supports (vendors don't support linux, linux supports hardware) then there is usually no issue. Just install from the media of your choice, set up a user and go - everything works out of the box for me.
I use LXDE because it is light on the resources. I really do not see why a desktop environment has to use several hundred megabytes of RAM. But even LXDE takes a lot. Needs about 100M. It makes them sluggish. The Firefox developers embarked on a "memshrink" program, and it's yielded excellent dividends. That effort made Firefox faster and more reliable. Seems Linux desktops could benefit from a similar hard look at memory usage.
LXDE has other problems. The file manager, pcmanfm, is still buggy and prone to crashes. Move lots of files around with it, and its stability goes to pot. It'll quit handling commands when it doesn't just crash. I've had to close it and start it up again to get it to work properly. I've not had good experiences with KDE or Gnome's file managers either. The file manager is a core part of any desktop environment, and the ones available in Linux are not good enough. Then there's the window manager, Openbox. Openbox works fine, but it isn't easy to configure. It has unusual commands (Shade/Roll up/down, and Un/decorate) that only serve to confuse the casual user, and which cannot be removed. If I switch to, say jwm, which doesn't have such extraneous features, then I have to deal with lxpanel and jwm's dueling task bars.
The UIs of all these desktop environments are full of holes and missing functionality. Still difficult to do it all and not at some point drag out the old text editor. For an example of a hole in the functionality, in LXDE if you right click on the desktop, a window pops up. Fine so far. Then if you click on the main menu (aka Start) button, that popup window does not go away, and the menu does not come up. You have to click somewhere on the desktop to make that popup window go away, then you can access the menu by clicking on the magic button. Why does it work that way? It's kludgy, that's why. The Linux desktop is still a messy collection of independent apps that don't play nice with each other. It lacks polish.
Peripherals are another weak spot. What happens if you try to print something, but you forgot to turn the printer on first? Depends how CUPS is configured. That job could hang around in the queue forever, and you will not be able to print until it is cleared. And it can't be cleared by any action that makes sense to a casual user. Canceling the job is the way to get printing working again, but this is not so easy. Turning the printer on doesn't work. Even rebooting doesn't work. But first, the user may not know any of this is happening, and will try to print again. Might end up with multiple copies. There may not be a printer dialog in which the user can cancel a job, instead the user has to pull up a browser and navigate to localhost:631. Or bring up ye olde command line prompt and do "lprm *". How many casual users know to do that? Evidently HAL was a wrong turn, and now it's all dbus.
One other thing: games. For games, must have hardware accelerated 3D graphics on commodity low end graphics cards. The open source drivers still can't do it. The proprietary drivers can, but cause other problems.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
AppleWine
Linux is exactly the right product for those in the self-selected Linux community.
But there seems to be a deep ambivalence about the limited size of this community (witness the endless discussions on Slashdot about desktop Linux and what it needs/what's wrong with it/why it hasn't taken off) in the Linux world.
I doubt it will go away—Linux users want Linux to continue to be what it is, but they have also shown a long-term desire to find more fellows, to grow the userbase, and to engage in advocacy. I suspect the deeper wish here is that much of the world was more computer literate and/or that much more of the world was OSS. Of course, both of these scenarios are unlikely to happen, for reasons that have been discussed here for years now.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Here is my solution:
1. Create a Linux Testing Center with hardware and all the stuff.
2. Buildbots and static analysis, the earlier bugs get caught the better. Each patch commit should be tested.
3. Governments like Russia should invest strategically into Wine to lower national digital dependencies.
4. Provide an excellent, market leading solution to a special interest groups, e.g. ebay sellers, visually impaired, schools, internet cafés, porn collectors
5. Improve Flash support.
Buy a Mac.
Seriously, after using Linux for several years as my main desktop OS, I got fed up with the constant fiddling required to keep it running. I bought a Mac and have never looked back. The Mac is a Unix machine with a nice UI. End of story. It requires maintenance, but 2 orders of magnitude less than a Linux desktop.
I would change a few underlying issues:
1. Standardize on all the components that are needed and enforce it as a version number of the linux desktop /Volumes just like in Mac OS X with their partition name as the directory they are mounted to
-example, you must use eglibc libraries version 12.x
-you must use bash 4.x
-you must use gnome 2.x.y
-all libraries to be included by default must remain binary compatible
-you cannot change the source unless it is accepted upstream
-standard file system determined
2. Replace xorg and get wayland in there
3. Standardize of the Desktop Environment
-no more of this kde vs gnome vs etc
-everyone uses the same one
4. Standardize on a universal package install format
-deb and rpm don't count, they are distro specific
-you can keep using them to install system related stuff but that's it
-this can include automatic updating similar to how apt works
-this universal install format will include the minimum version number of the linux desktop that must be there
5. Remove any other programs/games that are not system related in the distro packaging format and make the developers create a universal install package of it
6. Change over to a swap file instead of a swap partition
-using a swap partition is no more faster then a swap file
-you can then adjust the size of the swap file as needed either manually or automatically by the kernel
-hibernation is then easily supported
7. With the swap file in place instead of a swap partition, lets make the installing easier
-select a single partition to install to
-you can still have multiple partitions and adjust their mount point but the single partition option should be the default
8. All partitions mounted in
-all partitions mounted show up on the desktop
-this includes when mounting a dvd
9. Make case sensitivity file system optional instead of the default
-there is no technical reason anyone wants 2 files with the same name to exist but with different case in the same location
-we don't do it in real life, so why do it on the computer
-it's just confusing, lets get rid of it
10. Standard location for user data and system data
-this will make upgrading easier
11. Replace all configuration files with an xml formatted one
-easy to check if the xml is valid
-easy to check if the specific xml schema is valid for it
-if it is not valid, remove the file and a new one is generated automatically
-all configuration files for a specific application must be in its own data directory to make it easy to find and not mix up with another applications configuration data files
12. For any applications that don't want to use the xml formatted configuration data, they never get included as part of the system required files
13. Get rid of the audio api and replace it with a thoroughly thought out carefully designed one
-should have all the features that the one in windows and os x have
-can play multiple sounds at once
-ability to send compressed audio if the port identifies itself as digital and not analog
14. Replace the clipboard used in xorg and put in a proper one in wayland
-should be able to copy and paste when the source for text has already been closed
-support for different data types such as audio and video
-no more selection based copying unless the app integrates it
-will use ctrl key plus x, v, c for copying and pasting
-if an app already has a use for those keys, then it will do copy and paste another way using selection for copying and right clicking for pasting for example like putty does in windows
-support for copying/pasting files/directories as well
-NOT to be implemented in the desktop environment level
15. More hopes for wayland
-multiple monitor support without having to log out
-easy to change resolution configuration
-ability to set what monitor is on the left/right/etc, basically the position it is at visually, not by text description
And that's all there is for now, enjoy!
"I have all the highly-specialized knowledge and experience necessary and required to, say, install drivers for my new hardware, or to install applications that don't come on a CD or DVD with an autorun app, therefore Linux is already fine for desktop use, and anyone who doesn't have that knowledge and experience is A LAMER WHO SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO USE A COMPUTER!!!!!!!11111eleventyoneone YAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH SPIT FROTH"
Way to spread the love.
Make a .exe standard across Linux versions. This .exe cannot escape its install directory or access root privledges. You might allow them to access other directories by assigning privledges, say if one application needs to play with another application.
The reason I quit Linux is that not everything installs via C++ that well. Last I tried was back in 2003 when you needed to install every program you added via a compiler.
God spoke to me
If I have to touch another fucking server that this pile of shit software has decimated, I'm going to scream.
But the big attraction of LInux is that it's free. Once you add support costs, it's going to lose that edge.
Lubuntu provides all the usability I need ... two years totally Windows free and going .. and I've got a version running on a USB device for system backup/restore ...
AccountKiller
Most insightful thing I've read on /. in ages. Well done!
I find it interesting how much what you're promoting mirrors Android development. I don't think that should be surprising.
I would like to reiterate:
1. Users are not developers. Don't act like they are.
2. Users do not want to be developers. You can't convince them that they do.
3. Users are not less important than developers. A developer without users is little more than a hobbyist.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Not trying to bait anyone but I run a small business. We have Microsoft and Apple desktops along with iPhone and Blackberries. These are all TOOLS that we use in our business to generate revenue. They are a means to an end (back to the money theme). We are definitely more technically conversant that the average consumer and I have yet to see an argument that would make me consider a Linux desktop. God help anyone trying to sell Linux to the general public.
I think what many Linux fans don't know about is a formidable market entry rule called "Good Enough". It's a killer. It's inertia squared. It's the challenge that you face when people don't feel enough pain. It's the devil you know challenge.
Unless Linux and it's advocates are able to address this challenge or Apple/Microsoft make it easier (which is highly unlikely) then the Linux desktop is a great forum discussion, but not much more than that.
I'm an average user and non-techie (relatively speaking) and have recently put Ubuntu 12.04 on a new $399 Samsung laptop as my first linux install.
The only major criticism I have is Ubuntu should have an easy out of the box setting for DPI scaling. (You can change scaling by downloading either dconf Editor or "Advanced Settings", but then have to change the launcher and cursor size separetly. "Advanced Settings" doesn't support 125% and dconf Editor is too hard for new users. Also, Chrome's tabs do not scale at all, while Firefox scales poorly.)
Side note: Chrome should properly label it's default global zoom setting hidden in the "advanced settings." (Firefox still lacks a global zoom setting.) Also, the browser's global zoom should perhaps automatically match the system dpi settings as Internet Explorer 9 does, albeit poorly, in Windows 7. (In Windows 7 if you've already changed the zoom setting, then adjust the dpi scaling, the settings don't match, but adjust proportionally.)
Also, much of the community effort seems to be in wasted providing workarounds, and writing long bash scripts to address gaps in functionality. I bet much more effort is spent on writing those forum replies and scripts rather than what would be involved in actually fixing the issue or functionality gap.
Linux forums are FULL of posts like this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11926504
http://kyleabaker.com/2010/07/11/how-to-fix-your-ubuntu-boot-screen/
And then we have people pointing out the issues with the scripts and trying to fix them. So in the end you have very poorly discoverable forum posts with workarounds that may or may not work for your configuration.
I guess this is because projects do not welcome contributors, and actively drive them away even if they want to contribute("Works for me!".
Huh, it's broken? Damn I wish you'd told me sooner! What part? I'll fix it!
Mine appears to be ok. It's precisely how I designed it to be and that's what I love about it. I pieced it together about 4 years ago and it's still running strong. (IBM think pad t42 / 1.6ghz single / 1gb ram / 80gb HDD. And yes I do have a powerhouse).
Doubt mac or windows 7 would run anywhere near as nice. GIMP, music, 40 FF tabs, FileZilla, and more it's all happening here!!!
On an informative note: I think the statements are pretty null talking about desktops like that. Sure, Gnome was a bit of a flop but it's being revised. It makes a damn better impression than Unity to first time users I'm sure.
KDE is another big player and they just got investment to continue on their project as it may be entering an enterprise environment soon. How exciting :D
But relative to the topic, how would I *fix* it?
Well it could be made better by making a really noob friendly distro, which is with a DE that's fresh in looks, intuitive and makes the migration for technophobes from windows to Linux much easier. We could call it CoughGnome.
Couple that desktop environment with such a distro which has a large application database, with easy one click installs, support for PPA, and support for 4+ years and recent developer backing from a huge games vendor with a keen interest in Linux... We could call it CoughUbuntu.
Damn if only such a thing existed.
Get them n00bs on board and using it the corps will follow.
For those who are adept they're probably having fun on Archy or Sabayon or at least a Debian derivative.
Admittedly I understand some whine about shared packages with gnome when all u want to do is have GIMP and not have gnome but tbfh if your enthusiastic about Linux you probably arent habing issues and you probably aren't saying its broken.
--
13 years Linux user.
-- David
Linus is free. Support isn't necessarily. It hasn't lost that edge just ask redhat.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You are going to get a lot of people saying "There is no problem."
You are going to get a lot of people saying "Fix this problem with my favorite distro"
You are going to get a lot of people saying "Fix this hardware problem that gives people problems"
In other words, you are going to get denial or narrow and self-serving answers.
The people that should be asked are people who don't use Linux. Get a bunch of people who have never used Linux, find out what applications they use, load up machines with Linux and their apps or the FLOSS equivalents, and have them use those computer. Then, ask them how to make Linux better on the desktop.
It is called market research.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Here is how I would recommending making the Linux desktop better:
1) Improve the Control Panel applications so you can make practically all OS configuration changes without having run a command or hand edit a configuration file. If I have to open a command prompt or a text editor to fix a problem, you've made configuration more difficult than what 90% of computer users are willing to put up with?
(And if you don't believe the statement above, consider yourself lucky. You obviously haven't been doing much tech support for "regular" computers lately. The command line scares the hell out of them.)
2) Standardize on a single method of packaging and installing applications. .RPM's, .DEB's, yum, apt-get... It's too many choices for the average computer user.
3) Get some of the major PC game developers like EA and Blizzard to start making their products Linux native. Make those versions available for $5 less than the Windows versions. That will get you some market-share growth quickly!
I agree 100% on all of it, I wanted to pat your back on a few other things.
- Stop "shipping early and often." Ship late (i.e. once bugs have been fixed/stabilized) and rarely (no more than once every couple of years).
I SO agree with this. I'm sick of Mozilla's updating Firefox every 2 weeks. FOLKS IT DOESNT NEED AN UPDATE EXCEPT FOR SECURITY OR BUG FIXES! (ahem)
This is why I love Debian. It's updated when it needs it I don't need the latest/greatest KDE. After v4.2 it got rid of the buggy, laggy code. It works fine! And I've seen the latest. - BIG DEAL! Reminds me of what XP was compaired to Win2k. Win2k with a bit of polish.
The biggest thing I want to add to this.
I'm a linux user from early Slackware. I actually installed Slack by just reading the instructions. So what - 15 years? I can't remember. But I remember spending hours trying to track down one oddball piece of code to get program x running. Know what? I'm now 46, I don't want to do that anymore. I don't want to be on the computer for hours on end. I've got a suspection that's what's happening to everyone else. Yes, we want smart phones, and tablets. But we don't want to be tied up behind a desktop anymore.
We don't want an OS that we have to fiddle with, and tinker. We want a secure, lean OS that works out of the box. The security fixes come as fast as possible, and just works.
Give us something that can be installed as easy as Windows. A universal installer would be great, but at least CHECK the installers before you ship. I went though 5 popular distros 2 years ago, and only 1 (OpenSuse12.1) worked on a 4 year old system. All the others just froze up, or crashed. Debian 6 (my last one) has an installer that is even more of a pain in the tail. I personally left because of that installer.
Fix it so we can install drivers from company web sites (cough nVIDIA Choke) instead of having to use the buggy, and SLOW noveau (Debian, you listening?) Don't force us to use something that people don't want.
There is dangerous stuff in linux. Why is GRUB automatically installed? I've had more problems with it ruining my systems than anything I ever used. It seems there's a lot of code for something that's used only briefly. Why do we need backgrounds? GUI versions? Etc? It's just suppose to be a way to boot into another OS, (or kernal) But yet, it's so complex, and so dangerously written, one screw up can lock you out of your OS. There's very few tools to fix it, and work with it, and they don't work half the time. The command line interface is almost useless too. Lets just go back to a simple thing that's installed if necessary.
-- Kevin C. Redden kcredden@ gmail 392992
1 every X releases have some sort of LTS release and then fix everything DON'T EXPERIMENT WITH NEW BETA STUFF
and have it work as much as possible (so no switching to some new version unless EVERYTHING is working in that version)
then use the run up to the next LTS to get everything ready
2 if you are in the Thou Shalt Not Use the Root Login EVER camp then eliminate every time something needs ROOT you can
(set automount to mount portable drives READ WRITE WORLD not Read Only Root Owned (unless that is set in the drives meta data))
3 even if its a Python clicky shell eliminate the need to go to the Command Line Shell as much as possible
4 have the desktop "control panel" slurp any generic control panels it can
5 God help me for this one: Have in the Help system some sort of Clippy type Agent that you can use to invoke "wizard" type things for the times you have to do stuff across multiple control panel items
6 any person that uses JFGI in your distro forum WITHOUT GIVING A CORRECT SEARCH PHRASE should be banned and if an employee does so that person should be fired.
7 and finally INSTALL A LOCAL COPY OF THE HELP FILE WITH ALL APPLICATIONS never assume that your user currently has a network connection
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The best way to get more people to use desktop Linux is to ignore anything said on Slashdot, including this.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
How about Linux on corporate desktops with the support of I.T.? It already has some traction as a thin client O.S. on devices like those that runnig HP's Linux-based Thin Pro (http://www.hp.com/sbso/busproducts-thinpro.html).
I've been using Gnome 3 on a Fedora 15 box since the distribution was made available for download. The latest Fedora release includes the ability to use USB-connected stations from Plugable (http://plugable.com/products/ud-160-m/) to share a Linux box amongst a set of USB connected terminals.
Over the summer I installed a lab of Windows 2008 based nComputing thin clients. The design of Gnome more closely meets the needs of the school, but a couple of problems keeps it from completely filling their needs.
The most obvious one is the inability of Linux to run Windows programs the school's purchased. This, however, is also a problem with Windows Terminal Server. Another somewhat unexpected problem I encountered was the number of web apps that require Internet Explorer. Hopefully, with greater support of web standards by browser manufacturers, this is a trend that will be reversed by revised web designs by application providers.
*Linux damn spell check
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I'm all for continually making desktop Linux better, and anyone that is trying to do that I wish them great success! As for myself however, I find Linux, including the desktop, great. It was around 2006 or so that Ubuntu really started having success, and with each year they make the Linux desktop more capable, intuitive, and streamlined. Just because it doesn't have the majority doesn't mean it's necessarily broken - maybe it's just not for everyone. I use OS X as my main desktop, and there's nothing 'broken' about it just because it's not the majority. Same goes for Linux.
I would get GNUStep finished, throw in the whole kitchen sink, get all the video decoder/encoder features implemented, get gnustep's web browser completed, and get the desktop components super polished and complete. Finish the System Preferences.app for gnustep etc. It's the best desktop system noone uses and the only real option linux has to take massive market/mindshare away from Microsoft.
Let's assume I am a Windows user.
I probably like
1. Ease of program instillation
2. Gaming
3. Hardware/ hardware apps
My opinion is that Linux is lacking in those areas
... is the only way I'd switch. Right now I use windows primarily for games, if games would run faster on linux I would switch in a heartbeat.
The Start menu is just another UI choice. It's the one that you are used to because MS debuted the idea in Windows 95, but it's not the only possible choice. Nor is it necessarily the best... Computing has changed since 1995, and the UI should be appropriate to and work well with the form-factor, and we are in a phase where form factor is changing; the new computer is the tablet, the mobile phone, your glasses and your wallscreen. In ten years time your desktop and laptop will seem a bit like one of those pictures you see of mainframes.
Change is the one certainty in our industry. Go with it. Find better things, even if that means some wrong turnings and deadends along the way. But if we don't experiment we won't find something better.
This is a classic crossing-a-chasm problem: the next set of users are not like the previous set of users. If you listen to the existing base, then you never make the leap to the next stage, you become pigeonholed and marginalised. When you hit that chasm breakpoint, you can't take all the old users with you - they aren't your future userbase.
The answer is so obvious, but goes against the very nature of Linux such that it will never happen.
1) One, single, stable, UI
2) One, single, stable distro
3) One, single, stable package management system
4) Fix all of the bugs in the apps already written, instead of creating a new app with the same functionality and with a entire new set of bugs
5) Fix the complete cluster fuck around Wifi connection management
The kernel is fine, fix the rest of the crap that is currently called "The Linux Desktop"
It would take a couple of years and there would be no thanks and no one is interested in fixing bugs anyways. Most linux developers only have one goal (really 2): 1) create a new app and become famous and well respected enough to retire on, even if it's full of bugs
2) see above..
* LibreOffice will do 99% of what most Office users would like.
The vast majority of people I know who use Office products (and I've really tried to pry them off it) are using an older Windows with an older Office, but the thing that they do is use them for their embeddable components and integration with Microsoft SQL Server.
All of these are SMB - small and medium business owners (read: usually 50 people or less), and they have either a consultant or one or two in house people, depending on size, who glues everything together into a vertical market application for the business using Visual Basic, or more recently, C#.
The real win here is the API contracts in user space for shared object modules (read DLLs) that have common functionality, and then also use the IUnknown interface to the class factory to pick up components from other DLLs. So long as the top level interface doesn't change, the internal contracts can go whatever way they want, but are usually versioned.
Microsoft didn't include the SQL functionality or the scriptability in the Office for Mac because this is their bread and butter: tools, certifications, captive market for replacement machines, or new machines, if someone new gets hired, escalating storage over time, etc.. They get one "my computer guy" who they pass around between them and their other SMB friends, and that hooks them on the Microsoft crack.
But realize: there's no capability for that type of ecosystem in Linux because of the lack of top end and intermediate contracts. You don't need something as complicated as DCOM/CORBA to implement this, they are all (effectively) COM components, which is effectively OLE stuff. When they need some third party package to handle the sales tax calculations in their point of sale systems, etc., they buy it, and just use the interfaces.
It's unfortunate that no one has stepped into this type of area for Linux (or BSD), but there really isn't much in the way of interchangeable components. You can't really replace Microsoft's components, either, but that's not the point: they've left enough space for niche component vendors to sell bar code scanner interfaces and so on, and it doesn't matter if they come from one vendor or another, so long as (A) each vendor gets enough to stay alive, (B) enough profit to keep them engaged and therefore keep the ecosystem running, and (C) they all come back to the Microsoft mothership to pay their union dues.
Please run the queries
and
and let us know the earliest mention.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
All the old terminals are buried now.
We have page-up and page down, and home, and arrow keys, and insert, and home...
We have standardized keys for cut copy and paste, too.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
1. 100% binary compatibility with Windows binaries. Many people have some "killer app" that they need to run which is Windows and/or Mac only.
As it stands, I need to boot into Windows to run Sketchup.
2. 100% binary compatibility with Windows device drivers.
My Linux wifi driver often flakes out talking to one access point with a panic which requires manual intervention. The last Fedora I tried progressively increased my fan speed running X until I had a jet engine until the next reboot. My Windows drivers don't do that.
3. 100% binary compatibility with Linux, including 32 bit binaries on 64 bit systems.
It's a pain in the butt as a company to deal with multiple Linux versions in terms of builds, test, and support. It's a pain as user where the software you want has the wrong flavor.
I have 32 bit Firefox (with 32 bit only plugins that I need for reliability) mostly working on a 64 bit Debian, although some of the libraries have hard-coded paths in them which produce frightening error messages and I never got the Java plugin to work which I'd need to use my company VPN.
The (non) viability of this (as a hobbyist I don't want to waste my life reverse engineering Microsoft APIs, and as a business I don't care whether my servers run desktop applications) is a separate issue.
Reading through many of these comments I think I see the problem you don't: Linux sucks to use unless you are skilled in using it. The market share of Linux/BSD/etc. is less than 1% because it is too hard to use for 99% of the computing public. Compile their own applications? Seriously? Write a shell script- what's that, a play written for mollusks? Try to find a driver for their printer? Sync their iPhone or iPad or Android phone? If it's not plug and play most computer users cannot operate it. Thee folks want to bring their new computer home, turn it on and be able to use it. They don't want to configure stuff. They don't want to read a manual. They don't want to learn about it. They don't give a baboon's ass crack about the differences between the GPLs. They just want to use it and look at Facebook and Pinterest and send Aunt Martha an e-mail with a LOLcat they found. Why do you think the Web browser is the only application most computer users run? They've figured out how it works. That's why people buy Macs and Windows- those companies have spent time figuring out how to make software usable and make the interface work. Linux geeks tend to wear unusability like a badge of honor. They like having 400 ways to make their interface unique to their needs. That scares off everybody else. You want to make Linux catch on? Figure out an interface that is as simple and elegant and attractive as the Mac, not the 20 year old quasi medieval look that most Linux interfaces sport. Too much of it still looks like Windows95.
Because the underlying toolkit libraries are in a constant state of flux, with each version being incompatible with the previous, applications are all subject to bit-rot. An app that worked in 2008 will very likely not work today unless the author went to the trouble of porting it to the new toolkits. This is true for both gtk and qt. And don't even talk about motif and olit.
I have been using the Linux Desktop for at least 10 years or more. I wouldn't use anything else. I am disappointed that I have heard that Gnome doesn't have the large force of developers behind it that it used to. I still don't like Unity. Compiz is one of the best things that ever happened to the linux desktop. It adds glitz that out does anything on Mac and Windows and with patience it can be customized to it makes the linux desktop even more functions.
Oh, certainly. Experimental UI designs are certainly essential to progress, and I'm sure that the existing Windows UI (by which I mean the one from win2k, before they started crapping it up with junk) isn't the best thing that could ever exist.
It's just that real UX people of the sort likely to come up with new crazy ideas that'll revolutionize all of UX... are probably off in academia, coming up with crazy ideas (most of which will suck), and then testing them scientifically with prototypes in a lab. Rather than, say, coming up with a crazy idea (which will probably suck), stating that it's the best thing ever without any proof, then forcing it on actual users who just want to be left alone to do what they know.
Please, don't. I am a huge fan of GnuStep and I would like nothing better than to see a solid GUI OS built around it and become successful. But dont ruin it by copying recent Apple crap, please. We can do much better than that.
I want a NeXT clone updated to take advantage of modern hardware, not a Mac clone that requires modern hardware just to generate pointless visual effects.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Also, If there is anyone doing the linux desktop "right", my vote would be for Mint. They actually have a simple vision and are very responsive to community. I hope they continue to kick ass.
Linux is not broken. It's just that popular distros default to things like GNOME3 and Unity. No problemo. Just get LXDE, KDE, XFCE, etc. Please, stop complaining. KDE might be too shiny by default, and LXDE and XFCE might be a bit incomplete, but they work better than you think. I promise.
What is broken is how difficult it is to find hardware that was purposefully made to be supported by the kernel. The other problem is that ATI and NVidea have closed-source drivers that they (especially ATI from my experience) don't update soon enough, or support long enough. I really don't understand why they think that they HAVE to do all of the work, and then whine and complain that there is too much to be done.
Windows programs natively ;)
Perhaps the answer is in the question. There is no one Linux Desktop to be fixed, rather a number of competing desktops that duplicate effort such that you end up with a number of file managers, video players etc.
Actually, you can even do that too using Winelib. Might require a certain tendency to masochism.
Here's how to fix the Linux desktop:
Make it polished and reliable.
Enforce a single GUI environment.
Have it run real productivity applications (e.g. MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, Mathworks Matlab).
Make it certified under Single Unix Specification [wikipedia.org].
Make it support smooth trackpad gestures.
Those are just some minor suggestions.
There, fixed it for you :)
I can't call that English
I don't think they're that technically competent or organized.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I had to install windows 7 32 and 64 bit with and without sp1 with full updates 3 times because my machine would freeze up for 30 - 50 seconds 10+ times a day, just to figure out the problem. No event viewer error messages or issues. No hardware issues checked myself and swapped out parts, I have the latest BIOS update as well. I had kubuntu and ubuntu installed on the second partition of the machine and i was not having any freezing so than i knew there was a driver issue. I thought maybe it was my south bridge windows drivers so I installed the amd versions and same issue. I later went into the bios and changed the storage settings from IDE compatibility to AHCI only and after reinstalling windows 7 with all the patches, sp1, than amd chipset drivers and everything is okay now. No more freezing issues in windows 7 32 and 64 bit. I meant WTF! windows 7 craps out in IDE mode and linux does not? The thing is linux like ubuntu and kubuntu it's still faster than windows when it's all configured.
Right now, MY new ubuntu 12.04.1 install can't seem to keep the resolution and refresh rate settings i set, on every boot. xorg.conf shows 1024x768 at 60hz which i set but my ati video drivers are set to 1280x1024 at 75hz and every time i changed it back to 1024x768 in ati administration mode or through terminal "sudo amdcccle" on the next log out or restart it changes it back to 1280x1024 at 75hz. I'm probably going to delete the xorg.conf and remove the fgrlx and reinstall the video drivers again if not i will have to change to xinerama mode to see if this helps, i have a dual monitor and first time i had this issue, but for me to fix things like this is pretty fun but it might not be fun for the regular joe or office people.
The other issue with ubuntu with ati, during the install i have to set it to "nomodeset" or otherwise during the install i get scrambled graphical glitches and can barely see shit, after the install i use the recovery mode to install the fglrx and no more visual issues except for the resolution thing.
"Linux suffers from diversity... Seriously - it's a bad thing sometimes. If you want Linux to succeed on the desktop then take one distro and kill the others"
Epic fail - one Linux distribution will lead to a situation similar to Corel Linux. Remember that? MS got involved with Corel, in a few months or maybe a year or two - Corel Linux died, along with support from Corel to the WINE project, despite what some Corel employees said in interviews about how GREAT the Microsoft partnership was going to be.
Get it? Corel Linux, one distribution which at the time was easier to use and install, Microsoft swoops down and Corel Linux was DEAD.
What keeps Linux's head above water IS the variety and number of people from all edges of the world working on different pieces, different distributions, WHICH CANNOT BE BOUGHT AND KILLED.
I'm shocked OpenSUSE hasn't died yet.
Because I think that is the issue with the Linux Desktop - Acceptability.
,I'm just going to go with an amalgum of experiences over the *nix collection excluding Darwin/OSX, I've probably made multiple symmantec errors where things have been fixed)
From what I can see of my time as an OSX admin (on and off, someone always has one of these bastards hanging off a server rack) as well as with end users, the operating system just goes, is obvious.
(before I commit failure, please note
Now, I think Ubuntu gets fairly close, from what I have used (one or two distros) but it suffers the old 'we can also do' problem, which extends from the windowing system down to the windowing applications including the terminal representation with confusing names on top of everything! I know, once you've used everything for a while you get your head around it.
Firstly KDE and GNOME. I'm a new user, why am I even being asked to make this decision already? How do swap it later? Why isn't there just a batch file that does that already, why do I have to edit config files.
Next, whats with this application menu? Why can't anything have a normal bloody name? Notepad, Calculator, stuff I can easily comprehend. Not Kompressor or whatever they call these things. Place program name is brackets or something and make sure the generic name is available as the sortable option. This could even just be done via Windowing aliases that are set up on install and can be turned off. Obviously clients are not going to approach something that goes out of its way to be alien considering every other Windowing methaphor uses these basic office analogies. If the analogies are insufficient, create a better analogy system, but don't waste our time working out what these bloody programs do.
Then after all this you end up with one of the most spartan / ugly desktops available. I would be adding on the two desktop 3D features that let you jelly folders and cube around desktops. Thats neat eye-candy. Eye-candy makes people play. Playing is a key part of acceptability. Its far easier to teach someone to use a computer if they have an interest for games because they will practice without being asked.
And then, you will probably need to diminish this 'jack of all trades' mentality Linux often has. Yes, we know, it can be scaled to anything. Thats why we end up with embedded version (or some minimal linux), eyecandy desktop version, server version.
Oh, and the settings wizards in the gnome 2 were crap in as much as they did allow control and configuration of the Windowing system, but not the computer itself. To do that, you go editing files as Root. Does Linux need a better architecture for script files that allow it to be easily represented in a dynamic dialog?
Finally, I don't like the implementation of the terminal - too much Inception - at least in the last version of GNOME I was running. Terminal boxes are represented as windows, but I think the metaphor is a little mistaken for an OS that prides itself on being all about 'Windows' with a command box shell added on. They almost demand their own management GUI in Linux due to their necessity though. Maybe ALT+~ will cycled your open terminals and ALT+TAB will eventually let you select the consoles group tab which takes you back to last active console with the other sessions grouped to the status of that. There may be some use-cases where this idea is stupid, but as of the last time I used Linux as a desktop/server I swear 80% of the time was in terminal, with another 10% was in GEDIT modifying files opened via the terminal. Makes you wonder why the 'Start' menu on the keyboard doesn't just launch a friggin terminal window.
So, this is how Linux needs to reinvent itself. Automation and more stuff out of the box presented in a generic fashion (fewer crazy names).
Sorry if is seems as though I have a low opinion of Linux, because that is certainly not the case. On the contrary, I have a low opinion of MS Windows from an operational stand point, I just don't think that technologies are as meshed and concise as they should be with Linux.
Linux has already made it well. The kernel is in use by Android which is outpacing all other OS in terms of smartphone sales.
On computers however, either you run Android or do at least the following (if not more).
1. Reliable new computers with OS preinstalled (HW with good specs, better than or same as Windows/MAC systems).
2. Authentication and home networking (like a Windows system)
3. wifi and bluetooth
4. Automatic software updates
5. Plug-n-play external display support
6. Automatic backup/restore
7. Consistency in the UI icons/actions etc. A standard needs to be "enforced" by an UI review panel for smooth user interaction
8. Support for 3G/4G modems from the providers
9. Smooth VPN
10. Openoffice preinstalled
Lack of the following means that Linux will never catch on to Windows or Mac. The following are the ones where half of the community should work on.
1. Printer, Scanner, Digital camera specific software and drivers
2. User documentation that is not out of date
3. Games
http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html
I'm using Unity now, I really like it, I tested out the media latency and it performs as well as xfce but gives you a cool "we're in the 21st century now" ui without being doggish like windows 8.
Ditch X11 and start over. This should be something that is assumed to only run local and will have direct access to hardware. while compositing window managers take a step in this direction, jump in all the way.
While it is impressive that you can direct an application to use a remote display, even an underpowered PC can host a native GUI that runs locally and is accessed remotely via VNC or RDP.
Combine it with a standard UI widget toolkit that is constant and don't waver. Do not allow co-mingling of various widget technologies, the current state of X11 allows such a diverse assortment of UI toolkits (KDE / GTK / etc.) that you are destined to get apps that look and behave differently.
Users don't need to theme their desktop, it is usually more important to them that it looks and behaves the same on every computer it gets installed to. The last thing a user wants is to sit down in front of an app and find that it looks completely different.
Finally, build a killer visual IDE that is as easy to use as VB.NET and use this to construct all of the apps your new desktop. That should just about do it... It wouldn't hurt to OEM bundle it with a few large PC vendors.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Find a good vendor trading high-end hardware. Convince Autodesk and Adobe to port their products do Linux. Ship all of this in a good-looking, highly stable box, running a customized and solid distro, without forgetting good end-user support and integrated cloud services. Follow the long tail and be happy.
In other words, follow Apple's history on niche markets. There's no need to Linux to be a dominant OS among end-users in an era that is seeing the end of PCs. Linux could, howevert, become a very good alternative to people needing good workstations. Those people feel that Apple is abandoning them.
I just installed Windows 7. For the first time since 1999 I will NOT install any flavor of Linux. It use to be harder to install Windows. That is no longer true. And they don't change the *(#! interface on you every six months. There is also plenty of evidence that most distributions and desktops are not designed for users who actually want to do something. Like use flash on a 64 bit system (Fedora), use a network driver that somehow violate Debian's Social Contract (There is an easy install). And god forbid you want a minimize or shutdown button in Gnome, they tell you how you will use your software. I won't even start on the abomination that is KDE 4. When the best reviews for it are "try 4.8, it is almost as good as 3.5 was..." you screwed the pooch hard.
So yeah, I love free / open source software. It is about all I run on my windows machines anymore. And while I hate windows, I hate the Linux Desktops much, much more.
OpenSuse has never dropped KDE3, and still supports it in the newest
version, 12.2, which was released two days ago! In fact, they're still
adding things to it to keep up with recent developments:
http://en.opensuse.org/Features#Other_Free_Desktops
http://lizards.opensuse.org/2012/06/02/kde3-gets-udisks2-backend/
I've used (Open)Suse for about 12 years on my desktop machine. The
administration program (Yast) is very easy to use, especially the
software installation section. The rare program that isn't in any
of the repos always compiles easily (it will tell you if you need
to install any libraries).
I rejected KDE4 when I found that the desktop pager (the little
applet that switches between any of the up to 20 virtual desktops
that you've defined) doesn't legibly show the names that you've given
to the desktops! Multiple desktops are one of the most important
Linux features for me, allowing me to keep all the programs set up
and running for all of my task categories -- Mail, Music, Website,
etc. -- and to switch to any category with a single click on the
pager (which lives in the panel that appears in all desktops). All
those programs take up almost no CPU cycles when they're not in use,
and they only appear in the screen and taskbar where I put them,
so there's no reason to set them up and take them down every time
I use them. This saves a huge amount of time and effort. They take
a little memory, but 8GB of RAM only costs around $50 today.
I have KDE4 installed also, so I can use some of its apps,
e.g., konsole and okular, which have been improved over the KDE3
versions. If they pull in QT4 in addition to QT3, who cares? But
there are three of its programs that I've made non-executable --
akonadi, nepomuk, and strigi -- because when I accidentally ran
a KDE4 app that uses them, one or more of them grabbed both cores
of my CPU at 100%, and required finding and killing about a dozen
processes. Whatever they were doing, I don't need it.
OpenSuse works great in desktops and servers. The folks in its IRC
channel are very helpful, and will keep working on any problem you
have til it's fixed. The only reason I can think of to prefer some
other distro is Ubuntu's huge userbase, which sometimes comes up
with a drop-in solution for some unusual need that can't be found
anywhere else. If you need that, the Trinity fork of KDE3 is going
strong and is scheduled to do two releases in the next few months,
which will hopefully handle the newer versions of Ubuntu.
http://www.trinitydesktop.org/
Mark S Bilk, cosmicpenguin.com
There's always a lot of fussing about how the command line scares people, how if you have to do something on the command line then something is horribly wrong. This attitude has resulted in the dumbing down of the various GUIs for Linux, as if Linux will ever be able to compete with Windows or OSX for the content consumption market, or as if it would be a *GOOD* thing to turn Linux into the crappy knock-off cheap alternative to a real OS. I don't see how anyone with the intelligence to engineer an OS or a UI could be motivated by such a dumb goal.
I don't want to say what Linux should or shouldn't be, but occasionally I have flashes, glimpses of something awesome that it *COULD* be, and I wish I had the skills to make it or even articulate clearly what I'm seeing. I'll try here.
In selling Linux to newbies we're always afraid to show them the command line, and so no one has worked on developing a better shell. As a result, the shell is some monster out of the 1980s. What if all the expertise in user interfaces was turned on developing a better command line? (The fish shell is a step in the right direction; the OS X Terminal also has some nice features, such as drag-dropping files into it.) Where you interact with your computer by typing commands, rather than by pressing buttons? It isn't so unnatural. As I read in some post here a while ago, people have been talking to each other to get things done for millenia, but we've only been pressing on things that look like candy to get things done for a few years. On Star Trek, they instruct their computer verbally. And yet UI designers insist that our interfaces have to be entirely visual, because the CLI has been done in such a user-unfriendly way in the past.
The command line is powerful because it is a language; in languages you can build an infinity of possible sentences by combining words according to grammar. In Unix, you can make your computer do pretty much any complex task by chaining together other small programs. There is no comfortable visual metaphor I am aware of that enables this infinity of possible tasks. In a GUI, you have a finite amount of space on the screen, a finite number of buttons to press. In a CLI, you have an infinity of options that you can build up if you know the language. In my work, I do a lot of text processing; I make up new pipelines every day and I can't imagine any way of doing that in a GUI.
But the command line is still a dinosaur. It doesn't have to be that way.
This is my as-yet-fragmentary, inarticulate dream. Imagine if you type "ls" at the command line, and instead of a bunch of color-coded names of files (wow! color! on a monitor!?!?!? how high-tech!) you get thumbnails, so you don't have to open things individually to see what they are. And maybe those thumbnails stay at the top of the terminal, in some unobtrusive form, as you do your complicated renamings or whatever, so you don't have to keep typing "ls". What if you had the option of clicking cool.pdf OR typing evince cool.pdf? Or, if you don't remember that your pdf reader is evince, what if you could just type "open cool.pdf" and it would use $DEFAULT_PDF_THING? What if every program had a little terminal on the bottom where you could tell it what to do, in case you prefer to talk to your computer instead of press predefined buttons?
I don't know if I've articulated this clearly--I think about it quite a bit, in my spare time. The last thing I want to see is the command line wrecked by trendy UX crap. Rather I want to see the real work on usability brought to bear. Linux doesn't have to be the next OS that limits you. Linux can be the OS that makes it easy to build new things, to do things no one has done before. Steve Jobs said that computers should be like a bicycle for the mind: it enhances what you can do, it lets you go farther to places you hadn't thought of before. And he seemed to fulfill that idea in things like HyperCard before dumping it in favor of turning people into content-grazing animals with stuff l
It's the developer tools stupid. Efforts need to focus there. They need to be designed and Engineered. Not just coded.
What an epic failure of a post. Your first point has been done by Nvidia for many years and if you were not aware of it you really know very little about this subject. If you were are of it and are trying to make the point anyway you are an evil lying prick.
To the poor readers sujcected to the above - I've got no idea why the above poster wasted so much time and occupied so much space with such drivel. Could we please hear from somebody that actually has some points instead of either ignorance or lies?
With apologies to those who do love XFCE, I don't know that most people like XFCE and really think that it is good enough. Most people are switching to XFCE not because it is good enough but because it is better than the abominations that are GNOME 3 and KDE 4.
1. If you want more Windows users to switch to Linux, make Linux look and feel just like Windows. Users can switch without having to relearn how to use the OS.
Look at the backlash with the Windows 8 Metro UI; people don't want to relearn how to use even a new version of Windows.
2. Have AAA games for Linux. Games are the primary reason many people use Windows. Any OS (Linux, Android, etc) can let a user browse the Internet.
If a "killer app" came out exclusively for Linux, it would drive many people to switch to Linux. Right now, except for using a Windows emulator, you can't play many AAA games on Linux.
How to fix Linux:
STOP BREAKING DEVICE DRIVERS WITH EVERY KERNEL UPDATE!
Stop completely reinventing the desktop experience with every update. People hate Unity for the same reason they hate Metro, it is a USELESS AND PAINFUL desktop experience.
When people report bugs, FIX THEM. A fixed bug is better than a new feature!
The terminal should NEVER be necessary for a normal or even an intermediate user.
The GUI tools used to configure the computer should ACTUALLY WORK!
STOP SETTING KNOWN BROKEN DRIVERS AS THE DEFAULT FOR PRINTERS. (Especially HP printers)
People don't give a shit if the drivers are "free" if they don't work. Better a propriety driver that works than a "free" driver that DOESN'T.
The "free" AMD radeon driver SUCKS! The propriety one sucks even more...
STOP BREAKING DEVICE DRIVERS WITH EVERY KERNEL UPDATE!
FIX BROKEN DRIVERS, FFS!
STOP BREAKING DEVICE DRIVERS WITH EVERY KERNEL UPDATE!
Windows and Mac users can get the newest version of almost any "free" software simply by downloading the newest version. Yet, in major distros like Ubuntu the packages in the official repositories are often YEARS out of date. Building the packages yourself is NOT an acceptable solution for standard users.
STOP BREAKING DEVICE DRIVERS WITH EVERY KERNEL UPDATE!
And just in case you missed it - STOP BREAKING DEVICE DRIVERS WITH EVERY KERNEL UPDATE!
It doesn't matter how many applications Linux has as long as you have to pray to Linus and the distro gods that they won't render your hardware useless every 6 months. Linus loves bragging how 20 year old applications still can run on the newest Linux kernel, but why can't 20 year old hardware do the same? Even some 5 year old hardware has issues...
That's an example of a data format being badly broken. I'm in an industry where we read in files from as early as the 1960s, and we can do it with software released in 2012 because the data format is a known standard. Don't blame other software providers for a game played by one. MS Office compatibility or lack thereof is a Microsoft problem, and it's an ongoing one since they shift their obfiscated formats with time and even prevent it being read by their older products. Their compatibility patches have been failures, so if you want to use their current format you need to use their current software on their current platform - they fail to provide an effective fancy typewriter unless you stay on the upgrade treadmill.
It's time to stop the command-line/GUI factionalism and come up with a true hybrid desktop that implements the best of both worlds. Even Microsoft have been unable to kill off the command-line, someone was showing windows 8 at work today and in response to someone who didn't like it told them, "You can always hit the windows key and start typing". Let's allow things to be centered around tasks too. directories and virtual desktops lean this way but let's make it a fundamental part of operations.
Also, let's lose the application-centric model and go to a true document-centric model. It looked like Windows was starting to go that way as far back as 3.1 and maybe earlier but then it stalled out. Unix's "everything is a file" metaphor is a good step in that direction too but never really got explored. Mac's resource forks probably would have been something to feed into that too (Though you'd probably get sued for that these days). This is more of a top-down OS change than a desktop change, however.
Let's lose annoying focus grabbing pop-up dialog boxes and per-window menus. One menu at the top, per the old Mac style and some kind of docked dialog/tool area. Remember, document/task, not application centric. Think something like the Visual Studio IDE but designed better and as the actual desktop.
Oh, and ponies.
The problem we have is that we want linux to be all things to all people. Its not.
A distro that was actually aimed at the average PC user would go a LONG way.
Ubuntu 11 was close, but missed.
Here is what you need to do:
- File system that makes scene. Too much history in our file system. /var is that partition where things change a lot, and that needed the fast disks. Today, disks are fast enough that that isn't needed /opt, /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin - all of these are places where user programs go. The average user will never find what they are looking for. Yes, I know the history of each of these. And I agree that they made seance when they were created. But now? /programs would work really well here.
- Make client/server set ups work without a lot of hell.
Remember when openLDAP was configurable via a config file? Back then, it was a snap to set up the server. Wonderful scripts did all the hard work. Ask your average joe to do it now. Good luck. This was NOT progress.
And how about joining a client to a server domain? IPA is making some progress, but its not their. IPA should be the default identity provider (and it should install without hell)
Make a distro that scans the network for a server, and asks if you want to use that for automatic config, then get creds, load /home, whatever shared directories, load its printers, scanners, etc. without the user having to do it all.
- Command line hell.
We do a lot with repos, why don't we make scripts to fix things available via repos? Not that hard.
Why can't we highlight a set of commands from a web page, and then send that to a terminal to execute?
Why can't maintainers understand that the average user doesn't WANT to understand the command line?
- Make the command line more useable for the average user
start/run. In Linux we should have a smart command line where we can search our system, the net or execute a program. Chrome does it.
- Turn on defaults that make scene.
Why does sane not enable net clients by default?
Why does CUPS not show remote printers by default?
Why do we try to push music stores the user has never heard of? itunes, Amazon, Google as defaults, ability to add others easily.
- Drivers.
Its a LOT better than it was, but it has a LONG way to go.
- Connect accounts.
Google, Amazon, Yahoo, MS, work, school, city, library, etc. All of these accounts, yet no good way of managing and using the services. They got it better in ICS. Make that work in a distro as easily. Make it easy to extend. Make it easy to add to,
- Make config sane.
So many places to go to find out how to adjust things. Why can't we agree on some simple tools for this? MS's W2K8 server had the right idea with it (bad implementation, but the right idea). If we simply made the same config tool work with lots of things, it would make it a lot easier. With OSS, this should be easy!
- Log hell
How many different logging systems do we have on the system now?
Why?
- Make web software the same as apps to the user.
Most users don't see a difference, Koha or Wordpress should be installable via repo.
- Understand the use model.
law offices use computers in a specific way. Doctors offices use them in a specific way.
Why don't we seem to understand this?
- Commercial software.
I love OSS, but it doesn't scratch all itches. An ecosystem of commercial software would go a LONG way.
When we can do this, we can own the desktop.
Isn't Linux the hottest selling desktop--err palmtop--err settop--oh I don't know what it's called-- the hottest selling OS on the market. Android is Linux.
So maybe what linux on the desktop needs is a replacement for X, and I don't mean Wayland. Or maybe I do. I don't know. Apple put a different face on BSD and it seems to be working out. So let the techies keep X, and develop something deeply integrated from the X level up. But even that probably isn't the answer. I think the answer is probably not to have Linux succeed, but to have DistroZ succeed. Isn't that Android's secret? It isn't succeeding as Linux. It is taking the market by storm as Android.
And / or missing. So many media things just don't work as advertised out of the box. I've been using Linux since it was available, and before that Solaris and Unix. What I see wrong with Linux are all the damn customizations and different versions. Berkeley or AT&T. This distribution or that. The bloody millions of cute or differently coloured interfaces. Etc. Awhile ago, I decided on Arch Linux, and to build all my experiences into one. This is happening well and is an example of Linux goodness, which cannot be had without the badness, I guess. But why zillions of distributions include, for instance, pulseaudio, and insist on newer and ever newer booting procedures is dumb, IMNSHO. It's a system designed originally by brilliant minds, now handed out in distributions like Halloween concoctions, one by one, by creative idiots. On the other hand. I won't live without it, and until someone proves to me that the new MS secure boot cannot be easily overcome, it is in danger.
I've been using computers since the Apple II days and was a pretty decent programmer at one point. As time has gone by, I've become less interested in how things work, and more interested in what I can use them for. So I've lost some technical abilities on the detail level over time.
Recently, I've been trying to install a webcam security software, and thought I would give Zone Minder a try. I have tried 3 different distros of Linux and I could only even find where to get the package in one of the distros. Even then, I got it to load, apparently, but I'll be damned if I could find an icon or any sort of reference to the fact that it had loaded.
Sure, I could figure it out. I could figure almost anything out. I'll spend $80 on a Windows application that does the job after running setup.exe instead though.
You give me something that works at that level of ease, I'll be happy to use it. I'm not interested in doing research to install an application anymore. That's my biggest problem with all of it.
Simple, standard, backwards compatible APIs that don't change on the developer's whims (I'M LOOKING AT YOU GTK and GNOME) a stable, sturdy sound system (OSS, ALSA, JACK, PULSE, etc) and a bunch of common features that will attract developers.
Android for example, is a great example of Linux succeeding, even if it isnt branded linux, it's still linux, and why does it succeed? It has a standard API for sound, graphics, and a common tookit that ensures that in 5 years your program will not be useless.
Go ahead, go use a GTK based app from 10 years ago, and tell me how it looks in a GTK 3 environment. themes don't even match.
QT is pretty rock solid and stable, but of course the only project that uses it is KDE, which is not as popular, and tends to be accused of being bloated.
That's the next issue: The desktop needs to be kept simple and somewhat simple, with advanced features being available to the user, this worked great for microsoft and works great for mac users (go under utilities and bam, instant access to advanced features such as disk utilities and a terminal that allows you to go nuts with the underlying unix system)
Gnome feels that users should be given a complex over simplified environment that makes it extremely hard to fix issues due to unreadable config files and a central registry, much like windows.
Linux can do well, but it's going to take a unified effort, and likely, not happening due to the egos of developers.
There's a reason why project managers run the show in software development, if developers and programmers did whatever, most corporate products would never see the light of day due to inconsistency.
I don't want linux to be widely adopted. Simple as that. I'm an arch user, and there's a high percentage of fellow users that don't want arch to go the way of ubuntu either. It's simply picking the right tool for the right job. Distro's like ubuntu are geared towards the noobs. Fine. But they still won't learn how to fix xorg settings when unity goes fubar. Frankly, I don't want people switching to linux just to switch to it. It's a choice you make if you feel it can benefit you. Just as I feel I don't want newer ubuntu users to switch to arch. Driver's are tricky. Most of it is OEM related. The rest is kernel related. But as previously espoused from previous posters, try seeing how many drivers you need to hunt down on a clean windows install VS. a current linux distro. The bigger issue is a meta user mindset. Computing & computers(non-commercial) have gone from a hobby to a device that should just work out of the box. PC's have been nearly reduced to the level of a kitchen appliance. I guess thats why linux will run on a toaster :p
For the sake of argument; To get linux mainstreamed to anywhere near the level of windows...It would have to not be linux as we know it. OR at the very least, condense it down to a single sort of distro with options burried cryptically to modify it back to the way we power users find it useful.
The major question we need to answer: Should Linux focus on wide-spread adaption? If the answer is YES then this what needs to be done.
Step #1: A major poll or survey. We must develop a website that allows people to voice their opinion on what they want their desktop environment to do for them. Linux has become a developer’s playground. Most developers are simply experimenting with different ideas or features that they want. We need the input of both users and developers on what features and applications must exist for them to adopt Linux as their primary desktop operating system. Target other major OS users and get their input, figure out why they are not using Linux. Adapt a model of direct democracy with people voting for the things that they want created or fixed in Linux.
Step #2: A source of funding. We need to figure out a way to provide incentives for developers to work on user requests. A service similar to Kickstart but exclusively focused on developing for Linux needs to be established, this is the only way to force developers to stop experimenting and start making a Linux desktop for the users. Generate millions of dollars and focus all the money on the primary issues that must be resolved. Developers of niche or obscure projects will flock. Provide monetary incentives and recognition to developers who solve specific problems or create wanted applications. A separate fund can be set aside to provide monetary incentives for computer companies to sell Linux pre-installed systems for the first x amount of systems. Many users and organizations will be interested, and with this many people we might be able to generate enough revenue to jumpstart a new revolution in Linux development.
Step #3: Standardization. We need to focus on creating a standard model for the Linux desktop. By providing funding to developers, many will pause creating obscure software and help in this process. Furthermore a general plea to distributions and developers to help in the creation of a major set of standard applications should be requested by the community. Take popular projects and advance them to be standardized, fork if necessary. Create a desktop environment that is not an experiment, but exactly what most average users want. Create applications that are polished and provide identical or superior features and usability to their competing counterparts. Provide support for longer periods and interfaces that do not change every few months.
Step #4: The Killer Application. We need Linux exclusive software that is not available anywhere else. 1 or 2 projects that can outperform, provide functionality or experience that cannot be found on any other major desktop environment. Maybe it’s a game, maybe it’s some type of an image or 3d software or a business application. Whatever it might be we need to figure out how to secure it for Linux. This may be very difficult, but it will get a ton of users for Linux. The server side of Linux is already on top of this, we need to do it for the desktop.
Step #5: Media attention. Use generated funding to launch a major media campaign, create a huge buzz. Commercials, billboards, events, etc. Tell users why they want Linux and not something else, explain why Linux is better. When people walk into a Best Buy or Walmart, they should be asking for Linux systems. Major retailers and hardware vendors will follow.
I believe if these steps are followed, Linux may have a chance to become a significant if not the prime force on the desktop. Of course the path ahead is uphill, but Linux has many advantages. If the cause it worthy, we need to band together and achieve it.
If the answer is no to the original question, well then there is no point to this discussion.
There is nothing wrong with the (?) Linux Desktop. Use it, or don't; I don't fscking care. That I can use it is all that matters (to me). I'd be happy to tutor you if you wish, but that's as far as I'll go. I don't much care what you want. That's primarily your problem (which I would be happy to help you with, but I'm only volunteering ...).
I really hate that so many people fixate on this so much. It's a non-issue. If you don't want it, stay with what you're presently using (gasp!). It's no skin off my nose (gasp; not really).
Hi Linus. :-) Hug your wife and kids for me, please.
[I was going to say a lot of even more insightful things here, but thought better of it. "Quit while you're ahead!!!" is always a smart plan, I think.]
Linus, keep on keepin' on. :-)
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
The best chance Linux had to make real inroads on the desktop was 5-8 years ago. The XP/Vista era. XP, before SP3, was a horrible mess. It was a magnet for viruses. Vista had a lot of promises but all it really delivered was a new GUI. The driver support was terrible. OSX was in it's early years and not as stable as it is now.
So what did the Linux camps do? What they always do...bicker and argue and fork to yet another distribution. I like Linux and I use it often but I'm willing to fiddle with it, unlike the average user. If you have the right combination of hardware then Linux works great. If you don't then you'll either spend lots of time trying to fix the problem (typically video, sound or wireless) or simply give up on it and go back to Windows.
For the record here is what I think Linux could do to expand their market:
1) The groups need to come to an agreement on what the default GUI is. Sure, it's cool to have so many choices but the average person will get confused.
2) Allow for more administration using GUI rather than CLI. I know, I know, the CLI is more powerful. But guess what? The average person doesn't care. They want an easy to use GUI.
3) Come preloaded with a few nice themes. Let's face it, many of the Linux distributions are pretty bland out of the box. Yes, you can jazz it up with themes but they are not all that straight forward to install for people that are used to Windows or Mac. Aunt Bessy does not want to deal with tar files, trust me on that.
4) Don't put Linus in charge of the desktop. That guy is about as hard core geek as they come and I'm sure he could care less what the desktop looks like. He is all about function over form. Well...to the average person form is just as important as function. They want something that looks cool and works right. Witness the success of Windows 7 and Mac OSX. Both of them are polished, beautiful GUI's that look cool and work great.
Now I have to say that Linux has come a long way in terms of driver support. Installation is far easier than it once was - easier that Windows actually.
At the end of the day, none of this really matters though. The war is over. Microsoft has a stranglehold on the desktop market. Apple has, what, 7-8% of the desktop market? It might grow a bit but they seem more interested in selling iThingies than desktop computers. Linux has a few percent spread over umpteen distributions with a passionate, albeit small, following.
Linux on the desktop is for the hobbyist, the person that likes to tinker, the person that likes to have complete control of their PC, the person that doesn't necessarily follow the crowd. And you know what...there's nothing wrong with that.
3 things: 1. Games, 2. Games 3. Games I dont mean games like Duke Nukem 3D or Doom2 ported to Linux. Im talking new - state of the art games. Once that is sorted, the little penguin will grow wings and fly.
Just like nobody wanted:
1. The raping of google search results to allegedly reduce link farm sites (instead: gives shopping sites priority!). Google was better before.
2. The revamping of /. (instead: makes it nearly impossible to find comments posted as AC). No-one actually wanted the new site design, the old one wasn't any worse.
3. Unified tablet and PC interfaces. These were never meant to look and work the same. So many webpages are now full of wasteful white space up the sides to accomodate tablets.
Gnome3 is a case in point with its much-maligned designer/developer-driven "innovations". Face it: Win7 (XP really), Gnome2 and OSX are about as good as the UI design will ever get as far as 99.999% of users are concerned. Various attempts to create linux-based 'minimalist' desktop interfaces for Joe Public's non-mobile use have failed miserably.
No-body likes learning curves that they don't feel they need and which do not offer any payoff versus the status quo. Kids grow up with Windows and Mac.
As someone once said, the only truly "intuitive" interface is the nipple. All others are learned. Kids grow up with Win and Mac interfaces so for them that is "intuitive". Perhaps people need to STFU about so-called "intuitive" interfaces. "Intuitive" is meaningless and is code for "what the designer wants". There are clean, easy-to-use interfaces with sensible, logical flow, good error handling and minimized clicks per task.
Recently I was watching some non-english speaking kids grapple with a ps2 game with an English setup (no memory cards in slots). They couldn't read any text on screen. The blasted "no memory card" handling was so badly designed it had them going around in circles for 15 minutes to get out and just play without saving state, as if it was a deliberate tactic to encourage buying memory cards.
Want to see if the UI graphic design and flow are really good? Test it out with all the text unreadable eg lorem ipsum and see if the graphic indicators of usual default setup are so strong that the user doesn't have to read the associated text.
simple as that, give 'em the same budget that MS uses/d for advacating windows (or Apple for Mac OS) and you should be dandy. The system can be shit as you want, actually (which I don't imply Linux is)
The strength of Linux is and has always been that it's Linux and not Windows, Mac OS X or anything else. You can't be all things to all people. What MIGHT drag a lot of Windows users away and make Penguinistas of them is if you managed to make Linux act like Windows. EXACTLY like it. Meaning it just works. No worries about device drivers, no questions about whether it will run their favorite game or some piece of software they have to have for work or school, no cryptic, unintelligibly short meaningless name or command abbreviations, just a thing that works and gets the hell out of the way. Also, they want the system to be simple, intuitive and easy to use. They actually don't like that there are 50 different ways to do something. 2 or 3 are generally sufficient. To beat Windows, Linux would have to become Windows, and then the antiWindows crowd would be pissed. As for Macheads, the only way to make them happy is to convince them that Jobs, whose cock every last one of them would have loved to suck as far down their throats as possible until his Nut squirted out of their ears, had complete and total, absolute final authority over the guts, and the look and feel of the OS as well as the applications that work with it. The truth is it's only broken if you want mass acceptance, in which case either the software will have to change or the people will. which do YOU think is more likely to happen?
First i want to comment that i think that Linux is an awesome environment, especially for servers. The problem is the fact that there are so many distros. Each distro attempts to make something easier, and i think that is where the actual problem with the Linux desktop is.
When you have someone who wants to install linux the first question is. How do i install linux?
The answer to this is Which distro... Which then breaks down to several additional question.
Even if you get a distro pinned down then you have the whole hardware compatibility issue, choosing which software to run, all and all you need to go through hundreds of pages of documentation to get your system running correctly.
If you look at the "successful" OS's the first think you will notice is that this whole process has been simplified. From what I've seen there are lots of programs for android, even when manage usually through an install manager i have to question "where did it go, well it works but where is it?". The problem i have with Linux is that the whole system seems over complicated, I want full control over what the machine is doing but i want it intuitive, and simple.
Also I hate the idea of not knowing where something installed to, or why my folder structure is so erratic. (The problem i have with windows as well, but at least with windows i know what is my fault and what is being done by other programs.) apt-get or package managers drive me nuts like this, i want to know what i going on. the feel i get from Linux is that if i touch it it will break. i don't get this feeling from android or windows, or even ios.
Linux documentation is great for engineers,geeks, and nerds. but i get the feeling that everything is over documented. And nothing is simple in Linux, everything feels like it's overcomplicated compared to other modern OSes.
To sum it up
Windows feels like a toy, as does android. Mac/ios feels like a toy but i just don't know how to play with it. Linux feels like a carefully constructed glass elephant that i can play with if i am VERY careful. When Linux matures to the point where i don't feel like it will break if i am a little rough with it then I'll use it much more but until then it's more of a show off item to me, and not something i will really use.
I hope this comment is truly informative and not lost in the multitude of comments.
Give back my config options!!
Get Ubuntu. It just works for 90% of users. The 10% have more special needs but can manage by themselves (they can compile the kernel, are technical, and so on).
The latest 12.x Ubuntu is good.
Now, I used to think that Unity was just horrible and made no sense and and that Ubuntu had lost it. Seriously. I was sad. But, I gave 12.x a shot. Guess what, I think it's awesome. Unity has improved my productivity - no longer do I need to mess so much with the mouse or navigate menus to find something. Just try e.g. Gimp, hit Alt and write Blur, cursor down a few times and that's it. By the time I'd grab the mouse I'm already configuring the filter.
Also starting programs is just SOO easy. Windows key + type name + cursor down + enter.
Of course, Ubuntu could do better. There are some annoying bugs which, when they are reported, are just tossed back and forth without anything happening. Canonical, if you can't fix it, report it to upstream. Don't just say "there is no problem".
Even so, Canonical is much, much more effective and community involving than e.g. Microsoft.
There are other annoyances too. I don't use Ubuntu software center that much, but I removed the ads from it. It's all Python so wasn't that hard to do.
To fix it for new generation installations:
1. Make it possible to have packages with non-free proprietary software for sale (Ubuntu finally did that)
2. Make sure there is one standard for major distributions (Ubuntu is trying that hard).
3. Merge KDE and Gnome together tightly, so KDE software won't look like alien crap on Gnome and vice-versa.
4. Make sure LibreOffice opens MS Excel and MS Word documents flawlessly, so you can print-out Word document from MS Office and LibreOffice, put two papers on a window and see they're not different a milimeter (they do this in Japan, JFYI).
5. Fuck free-only ideology to slurp all sources into repository and build everything from sources only. Allow proprietary closed-source software.
6. Keep LSB as a fucking Holy Cow and never fucking violate it!
7. Make sure developers can make money from it. They want eat as well.
Oh, but that above will never happen, because everyone wants to have a choice and be free. And choice = chaos and shitload of knobs that a regular user never needs... Too bad, this is mostly geeks-only. Only Ubuntu makes some limited sense on a desktop so non-geeks can use it for a regular daily e-mail/web-browsing/music-playing box.
Linux desktop is too little for too late.
(Warning, long ass post, I will try to put a tl;dr if I can)
I face the same bullshit in my country's politics, oh it's not us, it's the foreign secret agencies, our unfriendly neighbour countries that want to occupy us, the evil western countries whose aid we will still take, the global jewish conspiracy, it's everything else EXCEPT us that's wrong...yeah right.
Seriously, the day we admit this is the day we can start fixing it. (Admitting is the first step to recovery....)
First of all, my background. As my sig says, I am a student of accountancy, so as far away from the typical linux and computer sciences/programming as you can get. When I was in highschool, I was browsing the interwebz randomly one day, and came across this product called "Ubuntu" that was all in rage over the forums for some reason.
I googled for their website, and came across this product called "Hoary Hedgehog" (5.04, incase you are wondering). I said weird name, never mind I have windows, these crazy computer geeks and their crazy Finnish OS. I would have ignored it except for a link that said they would send linux CDs, for *free!*, to me. ( I am in a 3rd world country, and dialup was what I had back then, so the concept of downloading and testing couldn't possibly have crossed my mind) I said, what the heck, wouldn't hurt, and applied. Surprise Surprise, when Canonical actually send me five of those things! (and for which I am deeply grateful to Canonical)
Actually ten CDs, five installers and five "live-cds", I kept one setand passed the rest to my friends and the computer science teacher in my school. I don't know about the teacher, but I know none of my friends actually ever used them.
But I did. You see, I was insanely curious. I tried this "live CD" thingie, and despite the fact that the modem didn't work, the sound didn't work, a zillion things didn't work, I was still impressed by it to actually go ahead and install it! I didn't for the life of me know how drives worked in linux, and had never partitioned a drive in my life, but googling around, I understood how the SDA system works, and actually installed the damn thing! (oh and this was in the days before the graphical installer, I had to face this crazy command prompt interface, but damn it, come hell or high water, I was going to install the darn thing, and I did!)
That day and this day, I have never had a computer in which there wasn't a linux dual-boot of some kind.
But I have never kept any *one* linux install for more than an year either. And neither have I have I moved to linux completely even for my casual work.
Clearly something must be wrong. It's not like I don't like linux, or I wouldn't be installing it to every computer my family has, nor I would always be keeping a live-usb by me at all times.
I never blamed linux when I couldn't play mp3, or the sound didn't work for some weird reason, or the modems didn't work, or flash didn't work... I never blamed for problems that were caused by others not sharing code, drivers whatever.
I also never blamed linux for *not* having a feature in the first place, after all, you are giving me this gift free of charge, it's not my place to look a gift horse in the mouth.
I don't mind it asking to use the console, I understand that command prompt is a good way to effortless get data or implement instructions *exactly* as they should happen, and that GUIs can become cumbersome whilst troubleshooting. I perfectly understand, and this has made me learn quite a few commands and appreciate a lot of console-only programs, some of which have become my favourite (htop and bmon come to mind as my install-first-before-anything-else tools)
I don't mind linux is not flashy, given that I purposely go to "windows classic" mode on any windows I use, I prefer function over form anyways. I am also forgiving of the hodgepodge of GTK and QT based GUIs, if it can give me the certain functionality, I couldn't give a damn whether it looks like a duck or a swan.
And I realise t
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
I have come to really like almost everything about Unity (in Ubuntu 12.04). Almost. Unity's support for multiple monitors blows. When alt-tabbing between windows, the window switcher appears on whichever monitor one last used - it really needs to be (at least optionally) on the primary monitor. Drives me out of my mind so much I leave the second monitor shut off 98% of the time.
I think we should make a leap ahead.
Take a look at what we have know. Gnome with Gnome/Gtk applications written in C and KDE with QT applications in C++. And the most popular languages are Java and C#. Both have automatic memory management. We simple cannot stay on the basis of C/C++ as we will not attract any developers.
I think that we should start new desktop environment written in efficient open source language that support automatic memory management and parallel programming.
Why?
1. Good, new language that makes parallel programming easy will attract developers.
2. New project will attract developers.
3. We can support X and Wayland since the very beginning.
4. We can support touch interfaces since the very beginning.
5. We can really use the hardware that we have today.
A good choice of language would be Go http://golang.org
I have been using linux since RedHat 4.1. Finding a desktop that is usable is not the problem.
.doc and .ppt files correctly. Shortly after OpenOffice got good enough at it, Microsoft introduced .docx and .pptx files. The question of who is responsible for this, or why it happens, is irrelevant. What matters is that I have to ask my colleagues to convert their files from THEIR default format to something I can read. Personally, I like poking my colleagues a bit. But when I tell a friend to use linux, and they can't read the files that everyone is sending them, they don't poke, they just return to Windows.
The problem is that there is no way to seamlessly run Microsoft products. (Yes, I know, it's not even possible to do that on a Windows box, but that's beside the point.)
It took a long time before I could read
At work, I use scientific instruments that are controlled by Windows software. Some manufacturers are gradually providing other options, but for the most part, it's Windows, and it's got to be REAL Windows, not Windows inside VirtualBox. As much as I would like to make linux the operating system in the lab, it's not going to happen until linux can run Windows applications.
Users can adjust to a new desktop, and will if there is a reason, or if it's interesting. But you can't adjust to a system that won't read what you need to read or run what you need to run.
What's wrong with a linux desktop? Nothing in particular!
Don't llike the look? Well, there is plenty to choose from. You can have a lean system that logs you on in under a second, or something more bloated like gnome/kde.
And there are plenty of applications - to do useful work or a selection of games. No viruses, spyware, crashes or bloating means linux is already a more productive platform than windows.
Not the most recent games because the platform is small, but who cares about that? They can use something else.
Linux is small on the desktop because windows is being preloaded everywhere. Fix that, and it will grow to its natural size. I.e.,computer shops should either sell machines without the os, or offer any available os preloaded. Other than that, no "fixing" is needed. Perhaps preloading windows could be outlawed as an anti-trust measure.
Do not try to 'spread' the Linux desktop. There is no point in trying to convince perfectly happy Windows or OSX users into installing an alternative operating system that, most probably, will not hold any practical advantages for them.
I have been a (desktop) Linux user for ten years or so now. Like (I think) most of us, no one ever pushed me into installing whatever flavour of Linux distro. I learned about Linux by myself, started reading about it and finally found it so interesting - both technically and ethically - that one day I decided to give it a try. The switch was painful at times. I've had pieces of unsupported hardware that used to simply work in Windows. I've had (and still have) trouble exchanging data with Microsoft Office users. It took me a long time to see the superiority of the Unix directory structure compared to the Windows registry. Every new Linux user will sooner or later face such problems. The motivation to surpass those problems needs to come from whithin. Out of technical interest, political enthusiasm, or both. But certainly none of them can be solved by whatever changes to the 'Linux' desktop environment(s).
Today, I am perfectly happy with my Linux desktop which is installed on three different machines, both at home and at work. It is based on Ubuntu 12.04 and KDE 4.8.5. The KDE look-and-feel is changed considerably with respect to the standard Oxygen color scheme and font size. QtCurve delivers a consistent look for both Qt and GTK applications (OK, it could not integrate GTK 3.0 apps, but I don't have any). Friends using one of my PCs are generally positively suprised about how well my Linux desktop works (the efficiency of apt-get compared to Windows Update routinely amazes them, btw. ...) and how polished it looks. However neither would I ever think that my setup is ideal for everyone and to be pushed on every single Linux user in the world as the Standard Linux Desktop Environment (tm), nor would I ever try to convince anyone into abandoning his Windows 7 setup in favour of a Linux desktop he's simply not ready for.
If they ask you: "Hey, I did some reading about that 'Linux' thing you have got on your PC. It sounds fascinating. Do you think I could try that on my machine?", first tell them that, yes, it is fascinating. Then be honest and also warn them that It took you years to become the proficient Linux user you are today. If then they still want to try it out, help them wherever you can. Be a happy user, not a missionary.
First: have a very small minimum install base. One singel CD (CD, not DVD) should be enough. Not sure about that, regarding support for the huge hardware range we have in our days. However it makes no sense imho to install an über system with hundreds of X-Applications etc. a ordinary user never needs.
Second: get rid of the attitude that everything worthwhile has to be written in C. Seriously, oo (scripting) languages are much better suited for ordinary programmers and power users than C or FORTRAN.
Third: to make my second point happen, you need a simple Application framework. Make a case for Qt e.g. Having GUI libs like GTK wont cut it.
There is ofc huge progress done in this direction, with Mono and Java and Python (but which GUI binding to use with Python?) but the (so called) "geek community" frowns on them.
On my Mac I can do simple stuff by using automator, applescript and system services: select a date in a browser, right click and automatically create an event in my calendar, including the times headline of page and url to the page in the event. If I choose as target calendar my web dav mounted google calendar I so update my published calendars for my friends.
How would you do that under X/Linux?
Copying windows is not enough either. Windows was usable around Win 95/Win 98, perhaps if you liked it at the Win XP stage. Well, talking about windows means talking abut the office suit and the browser as well. IE never was a real useful working thing, compared to firefox, safari or chrome. The current office with its ribbons is a mess. I fear it is just a matter of days and Open/Libre Office will copy that mess.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
At my (large) organization we recently had a little spat with M$ over licensing. So we walked away from renewing an Enterprise Agreement. At this time we seriously considered alternatives to Windows. However, everything we have is tied to MS Active Directory, and migrating to an alternative (such as Open Directory, Novell or IBMs offernings for example) would be an enormous undertaking.
Then pile onto that the user retraining, the roll out costs, the Enterprise web application incompatibilities with anything but IE, the historical document base that might not work without Office, issues with two-factor authentication (required), the driver issues with existing desktop hardware, etc, etc, etc....it becomes a Herculean effort. The ROI on such an undertaking would be non-existent or so far out in time as to make it a very dubious business decision (given the time value of money issues).
If, say Red Hat, solved these issues...you might see some pilots spring up...and you might see Linux take root. If people had Linux at work...they'd want it at home too. But it has to be easier for the Enterprise to get there.
BTW..these issues are also why Apple OS hasn't made big inroads into business.
Personally I'm OS agnostic, the OS is a tool and as a technologist I keep lots of tools in my box. I run both Windows and Linux dual-booted and use the right tool for the specific job, both are fine..but I spend most of my time in Windows as it integrates better into all the things I do at work. Which is my principal point.
Business IT depts aren't going to demand it, no matter how much sense it makes for the business.
You would be surprised how many business departments actually use linux.
However your other points are exactly right!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Try to live by the Unix philosophy.
Remove dbus, remove pulseaudio and you are slowly getting towards it. Then try to get rid of any "low speed" interface (i.e. changing status of an IM-client) which require linking to libraries.
In the long run, I would make it file system based. You get a virtual file system representing GUI elements. Each of those elements would have a text based interface to make it easy to be used by shell scripts. Things that do need to be fast would use an additional binary interface. Network transparency will be done via NFS. Locally this works via shared memory.
Whenever you need to link a library to interface to something else, rethink that interface. Linking 2 C programs is very unstable. Even a slight change in the Interface makes it incompatible. Some form of text based interface will be much more stable.
Binary formats are necessary for certain types of high speed data transfer and processing, like video for example. However the rest can be done by simple column based text files or XML if you need complex structures.
This all sounds so familiar and has been going on for 30 years in the computer community. It is like joining the Freemasons. From the outside it looks like an impregnable fortress and once you're in, you don't understand those on the outside.
Back in the 1980s, I discovered Fidonet and thought it might be a nice way to send files back and forth between cultural groups. But understanding how Fidonet worked was completely impossible for a non-nerd. I managed to get it running, but couldn't expect a secretary or designer or translator or other non-nerd to come to terms with it.
It has happened all over again with Linux. If you can use it, you realise how fast and efficient it is and it's easy. But for non-nerds there are just too many pitfalls, hidden set-up tricks, command-line interaction etc.
Is it broken? I didn't know that. I have been using Linux since 2000 and things are better than ever before. However, if you ever find something broken please just fill the appropriated bug report.
Ease of use is the key to the mass market.
Installing software:
Windows: run the installer - ready.
Linux: If I am lucky, I can use the packet manager. Id the desired software is not in te packet manager, I have to first decide which Linux I want the software for. RPM or a DEB package?
The installation will the tyoicall tell me that some library is missing or outdated.
Hardware drivers: Windows drivers come with pretty much any
product. Linux drivers ????
long term OS support: XP has been running for 10 years. Unless I chaned machines, I did SP's and patches but all my softeare stayed installed.
Linux: every 6 months or so I need to re-install. Ubunti LTS veresions give me 2 years - lately even 5. As said - XP had 10.
long term Application support:
Windows: When I changed from XP to 7 2 yrears ago, I could re-install all my trusted applications - no new expsense.
Linux: commercial packages typical wont run any more
So why on earth would I use Linux on my desktop ?
Don' t getme wrong - I like Linux - my server runs Linux and for special projects I use Linux as well - By for everyday work it's windows. I just works and causes me less pain.
Honestly I do not understand all these stories about unstable Windows. I have OS autoupdate and Secunia PSI autoupdate- Never had crashes - - its rock stable work horse
If you want to attract more 3rd party developers and desktop users, the ABIs need to stabilize. Developers should be able to provide generic application binaries that will run unmodified on a majority of distros released over the past ~5 years. Drivers too (yes I know that's a tall order); it is irksome that I need to manually rebuild the drivers for my motherboard's audio codec and fan speed monitoring chip from source every time there's a kernel patch.
IMO the Linux desktop isn't going to gain more traction as long as it continues to require that users either A) use only the versions of apps/drivers that are available from their distro's repository; or B) build from source (dealing with the library version dependency hell this often entails, and drivers that break every time there's a kernel patch). True believers are willing to deal with these irritants, but we shouldn't need to.
entertainment is a multi-billion dollar industry. not tiny
http://www.myvisajobs.com/H1B-Visa-045-2009-SO.htm
Casteism
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The way for Linux to eclipse MS Windows is to solve a pain people experience when using Windows while avoiding causing pain. The biggest pains people have with Windows are 1. their windows is infected with viruses and 2. they cannot upgrade Windows because their hardware is too old. Freedomix will solve these pains and will dominate the PC industry very quickly.
Freedomix is a new Linux distribution which comes with Wine and MS Office XP built in. It should run on an NTFS partition. MS Office, Firefox, Flash, X-marks, Skype, PDF, VoIP, VLC, DropBOX, uTorrent and Evernote should all be installed when the OS is installed. Most users do not want Open Office which almost works (incompatibility is a pain). Users want MS Office which just plain works (painless).
Yes, MS Office would be pirated but since the OS download is free nobody is profiting illegally. So what. Microsoft no longer sells Office XP and MS does not make a version of Office for Linux so it is not really immoral. How can it be immoral to pirate an office suite which Microsoft no longer sells on an OS Microsoft does not want to support?
Installation should be simple:
1. Download a Windows installation file
2. The Windows installation checks the hardware installed on the user's system and informs him whether there will be driver issues before he choses to proceed
3. The Windows installation includes a backup and migration utility (which includes X-marks and DropBox)
4. User backs up their bookmarks and data to the Internet
5. User executes a program which formats their hard drive and installs Freedomix. Once the installation is complete all their data is already on their new system and the critical applications they chose during installation on on their system
Volunteer to build Freedomix and MS will be in big trouble.
I love Linux but, let's face it, we have three major problems if we want to reach "general public" :
1) Your OS should not require you to use command line on a daily basis (I don't mind, but most people do, and do not tell me you do not use terminal that much!) - and fixing things can be really a nightmare for noobs
2) Your desktop environment should be usable (I mean really usable) out of the box. - MacOS success? No configuration required (or allowed)
3) You wanna know your colleague's M$ office file will just open and work right.
how about "market research" - find people who:
1)Have switched to Linux but switched back - and find out why and fix those reasons
2)Have not considered Linux and what keeps them from doing so
3)Have switched to Linux but also use Windows (games and applications come to mind)
I think the move to live filesystem distros off of USB/optical media helped removed a major roadblock for transitioning.
Assuming the "economic man" model of human behavior that we are guided by rational cost benefit analysis (something which I doubt, but let's pretend) a driving force in these mixed economic times would certainly be cost. However many people savvy enough to use Linux simply pirate their version of Windows. Many people struggle to use their Win/Mac machines and perhaps the support experience seems daunting.
Assuming, at a minimum, people could be migrated to switch based solely on economic reasons how can they be made to switch and not switch back?
Gamers are a curious market and if they're willing to spend $400 on a graphics card and $40+ on a game (or $120/year on monthly subscriptions) it seems likely they're going to spend money on the OS. So maybe gamers are out.
Pre-installation is the mechanism by which many things are maneuvered into the hands of the buyer and getting Linux pre-installed is fairly hard (I've never seen it in person retail and on-line retailers are few and oddly expensive). Maybe it's as simple as getting people to get it preinstalled and assuming they have some windows background, or catching them at the time they're about to upgrade and spend money on commercial products when free ones would do as well or better.
Revamp Window Maker and CDE. Make them better, smoother, and make them work with newer technology. Keep everything simple don't add a million little widgets and special touches to it.
That's just my take.
Unfortunately, you are in the vast vast minority. Most of us only care that we can get a days work done so we aren't fired, or fix 200 photos from a shoot without having to retune our drivers. Our security and privacy is a secondary concern at best, because having a job is more important than digital security for us. That's why we want commercial Linux, because of people in the open source community whose motivation is very very different from most of us. Commercial companies interesting in selling product will implement what the majority of its customers need, or they go out of business. Put simply, that is usable product, digital security and freedoms be damned. Is this a short-term view, is this wrong-headed thinking? Maybe it is, but, it is the status quo, and it takes very big things to happen to change the status quo. Modern America taking time to stop and think would be a pretty radical shift from the status quo.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
Unity, Gnome3, XFCE, KDE - and each distribution swears on its own combination of Desktop and default apps.
A user who is not already a Linux expert is lost and unable to see why this plentitude even exists. Visiting any of the distro web pages will not help at all and asking in a forum will start a flame war between supporters of Unity and supporters of XFCE.
I personally like that there is competition and that there are different developments taking place for different preferences and different groups of users.
But there is nothing to communicate those differences, nothing to help users to choose and to make it easy for them to choose. Distributions do not communicate any of whay they think are their advantages and disadvantages in comparison to other distros and they do not tell the user what his choices are when it comes to desktops.
Even long-time Linux users are pissed off about this.
Do not make the desktop to a battlefield of religious wars. Make it into a friendly store of choices and make the different choices work together.
Just try to stick to making updates that DO NOT (and I mean it!) break old features. Then each new desktop will be slightly better than the previous one by simple continuity, no need for rocket science...
Instead of thinking globally, I want to share why I didn't try to push for the Linux desktop anymore, after being a Linux zealot for a long time.
With Linux you had the excitement of doing something new and radical, helping the community with LUGs, pushing the boundaries, etc, etc. Once that became old, you were left with trying to make it work for real for people around you. At my LUG, we had success at our college lab and even with a couple of teachers who started teaching C programming in Linux instead of Windows as well as computer graphics programming (POV ray stuff, OpenGL/Mesa). Then came the problems, the multiple support issues with hardware drivers, either faulty or complete lack of drivers for some stuff. The major selling point back then was stability, and that got eroded real fast with some of the "easy" distros, only this time you had to learn each particular distro and surf the net for that hard to find answer. Lately I was even installing Ubuntu to a complete office with several computers and to my boss in another office. That was the climax I guess.
Then the boss computer Ubuntu's presented a major issue with the chipset where it would totally lock the computer. Lack of certain applications made it hard to convince people using things like AutoCAD to join the fray. There were some issues with printer drivers. Samba acting funny with Windows Vista when it came out and lack of documentation that left me in the dust. After hearing so many complaints, that the file format of openoffice is not the same, the lockups, the ugly fonts, etc, etc. I kind of had it. Left people to their own devices, and in my case I could explore other platforms that were truly awesome, like OS X. I still have a Gentoo box since I love tinkering with stuff but in general I would consider myself an Apple guy, Objective-C and all. Looking back I would never have imagined I would go from hippy open source to a totally closed source monopolistic company. That's life I guess and that is the state of the Linux Desktop for me.
You nailed it! The problem with Linux is there are no shareholders. The whole thing is designed by committee. Only 2 ways Linux will ever end up on the desktop:
1. Installed by the manufacturer
2. Installed by the user
Clone manufacturers will never install Linux because it is free so it brings zero value to the system so why should they bother. So its down to the user to install.
When and why would a user ever install Linux if their system already comes with Windows? No reason. Unless I could install Linux over top Windows and keep all my Windows applications working. Now that would be cool! But Linux developers are too busy inventing their own file systems (which I don't want) and wasting time fighting over Gnome vs. KDE vs. LXDE vs. Unity. Always trying to invent a better mouse trap. But I don't want a better mouse trap. I don't care about Gnome / KDE / LXDE / Unity. Imagine all the time wasted building the same functionality 5 times! If I am installing Linux over my Windows OS I want it to:
1. Keep my existing file system
2. Keep my data
3. Keep my key applications working
4. Run faster than Windows (LXDE)
5. Run virus free
The first 3 are requirements. The last 2 are reasons enough to change. Especially when somebody has a virus on their computer. Just install Linux and the virus doesn't function any longer. But as soon as they finish reading this post all the Linux developers will go back to the committee to see what features they can ad to create the next best thing (isn't what this entire Ask Slashdot post is?). They will argue that the file system they use is better than NFTS and that Open Office is just as good as MS Office. Both prevent users from ever switching to Linux. My request is like asking Linux developers to stop being Linux developers.
Back to the first solution - Installed by the manufacturer. This will happen when a Linux company becomes a hardware company, or when a hardware company becomes a Linux company. This is slowly happening with Android. Almost happened with HP (WebOS) and Nokia (Meego). Kind of happening with Samsung before the lawsuit. Linux must be so closely tied to the hardware that the user never realizes (or cares) he is running Linux making the computer a consumer device, rather than a computer.
Solution number 1 requires a lot of money. Solution number 2 requires coders that will stop worrying about building a better mousetrap and start worrying about making Linux easier for the Windows user to adopt. For all the non-developers out there, we just have to wait.
The consensus for modern OSs is that the userland should be based on a unified set of base classes and a managed language runtime.
If only some organization with many tens of millions to spend on development were willing to create a modern, touch-oriented UX built on an architecture like that, with a Linux kernel, and put enough resources behind it to attract not only enough apps to replace desktop Linux's app current inventory, but far surpass it. If all goes right, within three years, such a system could be activating a million users day.
A pipe-dream, I know.
What is the objective of wider adoption?
"You have to be careful if you are not sure where you are going because you might not get there."
-Yogi Berra
Every since I could dual-boot I have always used both Windows and Linux. Now using both Windows and Linux is much easier with VMs.
Tools are tools and I use Linux and Windows where they most benefit me. To that end I've never used Apple because there is nothing compelling for me on Apple. There have been only two applications I'm aware of on Apple that might convince me to run the Apple OS:
1. Pro Tools
2. Final Cut
Adoption of Linux desktop is lacking a clear objective. I use Linux when it benefits me and Windows the same. Running both is trivial for those who are tech savvy. If you are not tech savvy you probably don't need Linux. Given the advent of smart phones and touch pads then the real question is not the future adoption of Linux Desktop but the future of the desktop in general.
"The fork/exec model"
What, precisely is wrong with this? Fork/exec on linux is as fast as threading on Windows.
"File modes (as opposed to ACLs)"
Windows has file modes (as opposed to ACLs). Of course BOTH have ACLs AS WELL.
"and the lack of built-in mandatory access control/RBAC"
Same with windows. Of course, you have BUILT IN LIDS and two options for secure running of programs, one written by the security bods at the NSA to run.
"The fact that files can only be streams (not records, not multidimensional arrays, not trees, etc.)"
This is true of Mac OS, Windows. But, like the all the others, you don't actually say what they are. You just make a list of things in an OS and then say "they're wrong".
Note, WinFS is still delayed, and there are two dictionary-based filesystems (neither popular nor default) for Linux. How many filesystems does Windows manage, by they way?
"The "just give up" approach to error handling (don't even try to recover from certain signals)"
SIGKILL should never be recovered from. Another "list something but not say why it's wrong" point-less.
"The difficulty in propagating an error through the composition of several programs (if one is killed by SEGV, others will be killed by PIPE)"
Yes, this is what happens with ANY OS.
"No standardized support for file versioning"
Several filesystems you can use do. But file versioning isn't available on Mac or Windows either.
"A very primitive concept of object oriented programming (e.g. FILE, the sockets API, etc.)"
A very primitive concept of what FILE and sockets do is the source of this point-less.
"...and there are many others"
No, there are many things that Linux does. Apparently you see them all as bad things. Indeed, it seems anything UNIX does is a "bad thing". No reason why, just things you can list.
However, what can be expected from someone with the handle of betterthanunix...
something that isn't broken?
Maybe the argument shouldnt be about end-user usability, since it clearly isn't working anyways. Maybe we should just appreciate Linux for what it is. I love it to learn something new, and have a manageable, secure system that is customized to my liking. If everyone else wants to use their psycho-babble operating systems for Facebook and cat videos then let them, but a lot of brilliant people have come from the unix universe and have a lot to offer the world from their background. If we standardize it and make everyone just shut up so it can be marketed more, then you will just be in another apple situation, which is a stripped down, altered version of unix/bsd that is now an "icon" and charge 2000 for "uniqueness". I appreciate the Linux community because, let's be honest, even though there are a lot of nerds and flame wars, it's a movement, saying we believe in open-source, and that everything else including governments and corporations should be under the same influence. Instead of arguing about pointless notions, people need to get back on sight to why we started using unix/linux in the first place. If canonical wants to make an end-user desktop, let them. If Patrick Volderking wants to keep Slackware as simple as possible, let him. Shouldn't that be the beauty of Linux, not the argument? That's the ultimate choice, which in turn, is freedom, which is why we are all having this conversation in the first place. If you really want people to switch, all you need is confidence in the system you use, and stand up for the notion that we can edit our code and kernel, which apple and Microsoft dont want to allow. If they don't switch, what's stopping you from still using linux?
I wasn't aware it was broken? Maybe fix it with duct tape?
You know what my computer is to me, aside from the app I am using> It' s my mouse, my kb and my screens. That's it. How much of that stuff just doesn't work on Linux? A lot. Any decent mouse or trackball, one that I can use to get real work done, one beyond left / right/ middle button doesn't support Linux. For me, start there. I hit that snafu, and I just gave up.
what's the benefits to use a linux desktop which badly mimic windows system, none, except for developpers to improve skill, and show they can do similar things windows do. An other reason to go for linux desktop would be price, but since windows is offered with the computer, plainfully installed, with all devices working.
Users don't care of the OS, what matters, is their job, what they can use it for, how reliable it is and how easily it can help to communicate with others.
Make their life easy, and they will come by.
I remember a time when microsoft was said, to make new protocol all the die, will make the life of linux desktop very difficult. This is exacty what happened.
I would consider some sort of Linux desk consortium to centralize core efforts, and provide a common set of tool / packages, which can be reliably used by all desktop flavor, in charge to bring a reliable linux desktop to users.
I've always considered split of gnome and kde, a waste of time and resource, after all if you are against KDE, you'd better be inside to change / kill it, like who inspired james bond aka Duan "Duko" Popov.
just my 2 cents. as a developper i am pretty happy with linux, plenty to do, plenty to learn, as a user, sometimes i am tired, bothersome because i have to fix my desktop while doing some real work, unrelated to computer development
The best way to fix the Linux desktop is to stop breaking it. No, really.
Some examples? Look at what the gnomes (sic) did with Gnome 3 after Gnome 2 finally became mature. And even worse, look what Ubuntu did, not only abandoning it, but choosing a not-yet-ready-for-prime-time replacement for a long-term release. Seriously, a long-term release with a choice of two Desktops both not ready for prime time? What is the average corporate or small-business evaluator to think?
KDE is actually worse, because it runs Nepomuk and other such software which doesn't run on a majority of machines, and then when you search for fixes, the answer is to turn it off. And when you turn it off desktop search, file search and even email search sto working, not to mention auto-complete
Apple isn't any better of course, moving towards an iStore model, and Microsoft threatens to move in the same direction (and even worse design) moving towards W8.
As a Linux desktop user since 1999, I'm about ready to buy some W7 licenses to use until someone/anyone reaches their senses.
KDE is much easier to comprehend if you come from a Windows environment, therefore it would be easier to get people to switch OS. Gnome has turned into a complete mess. It doesn't really cater to any target audience any more and as such it should really be abandoned and developers should focus on a saner solution (such as KDE).
Yes, I believe this is a large part of why.
Still, we lack solid data on the particulars of this. I might see if I can get my local LUG to give collecting data on this a half-assed try and submit it to Slashdot and get criticised for our methodology. Hopefully this will encourage others to do it a lot better. ;) Actually, is there any data already out there? Perhaps someone should create a slashdot poll... anyone?
one major release back. It doesn't work.
Office 2007 gets released. You had better upgrade with the rest of your enterprise or you won't manage to open files correctly and without error. Wine doesn't run it yet at Gold level. It will be 2-3 years until it runs it at that level, and there will still be issues. By then, the enterprise will be on the next major release.
Wine is practically worthless in corporate work, and incomplete/unstable to boot.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Lubuntu is awsome on my ten year old laptop. Thanks Mark Canonical.
Huh? Did you forget already that vendors have already tried shipping Linux computers and immediately regretted it? Remember Dell?
Remove all notion of compositing by default on the popular distros. Not only are compositing window managers bad on overall GPU performance but they are usually as buggy as can be and crash all time. I do not want that on my production desktop systems. I don't know who popularized or evangelized this but there are more important things for a desktop than wobbly windows.
Linux distros are way too fluid, Ubuntu in particular. I know people like to talk about Linux being under constant, rapid development and what not, and that things are always changing and improving. This is considered a pro rather than a con when compared to the mostly static Windows platform which only has a new revision every few years.
People like stability. People like the fact that they don't have to relearn how to use Windows again for another 3-4 years, or whenever the next version comes out. But they hate it when they DO eventually need to - oh how they hate it, as Microsoft will no doubt discover with Windows 8. So why do people get surprised if people don't want to complicate matters by using distros where the front and back-ends tend to change even MORE rapidly?
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Linux owns every computing market except desktops. Not only are desktops are (slowly) on the way out, Microsoft simply can not compete in the non-desktop market.
Linux is in an excellent position. It is MS that is hurting because they doubled down on the desktop and now is trying to claw itself out of the hole it dug itself into. Of course, 8 is a loser before it begins.
Microsoft needs more help than the Linux ecosystem.
Like someone else before me said, the install base is too fragmented to have any meaningful inroads made into the consumer desktop market. You have different installer types, package types, desktop window environments, cryptic command line commands, etc, etc, etc. Yes I realize these things represent choice, which can be overwhelming for "the average user". I tried a few different distros for home use and the best I found were Fedora and Ubuntu, but even they have their shortcomings. Ubuntu is probably the closest thing to a unified consumer distribution I have seen. I honestly base a consumer distro on how easy it is to set up printing. Long story short, got tired of fighting with everything or finding some obscure forum post on how to enable something for fix something and switched to a Mac.
I hate sigs.
Games.
With the licensing problems of Windows I have seen in the past three years, there's a reason my older laptops run Linux. Let's take my first NEW laptop, an Acer, for example. Bought it new, made my OS restore CD's and put them away. Then the hard drive crashes a few weeks after the warranty expires and it's a paperweight. I replaced the hard drive with the same exact model drive, used, and tried to use the restore CD's to put Windows on the new hard drive. It doesn't work. I called Acer. No sir, you're out of warranty, you'll have to pay $25 for the installation disc. I paid the $25. Got the disc a few days later. Installation still doesn't work. I called Acer. No sir, if you changed the hard drive, that copy of Windows is bound to the original hardware. You'll have to buy a new copy of Windows. I'm not spending $109 for a copy of software I already have the right to use on that particular laptop. I called Microsoft. No sir, you'll have to buy a new copy because the hard drive that crashed is the only drive you can have that installed on unless you UNINSTALL it first and free up the license. Burned a liveCD of Ubuntu and put it on the laptop. Took me about 45 minutes to get it running again. Haven't gone back.
When I buy laptops from school surplus auctions to resell they wipe the drives clean. You can be darn sure I'm not putting XP back on them. They get Ubuntu and they get sold on CL like that. If you can buy sixty old P3-P4 era laptops for $1000 and throw Linux on them and TAKE THE TIME to teach the person you're selling it to for $100 how to use it, there's 60 new Linux users not to mention $5000 in your pocket for your trouble. Those people come back to me when they want a newer faster laptop and I keep a few more modern laptops around, they cost me about $150-$200 each on eBay, usually a Pentium T4x00 or a Penryn Core 2 Duo of some kind, and I put Ubuntu 12.04 on them and fancy it up the way I use it to sell for $250-$300. Sometimes people want a speed demon and I'll go grab an E6410/E6510 Dell Latitude on eBay for $350-$550, depending on if it's i5 or i7 and if it has the nVidia NVS graphics in it or not, and sell that for $450-$650.
Yes, I give out my phone number on a card for people to call. Yes, I have them come to me or I go to them if there's a problem. Yes, I take the old laptop as a trade-in for the full $100 they paid if they want something snappier. Yes, I give them a LiveCD to use in case it won't boot and show them how to fix things and help them LEARN so they can figure it out for themselves eventually. Some people don't learn. These people are the ones who go back to Best Buy and drop $600 on a new Windows laptop only to be stuck in the same situation a year later. Some learn OK and become happy FOSS users. Some get real zealous about it and post here. That's me.
'Preinstallation, preinstallation, preinstallation'... and games.
It is unrealistic to assume new desktop applications in meaningful amounts for Linux. If it were possible, they should exist already. But majority of native Windows applications can be run on Linux deskto, by using WINE & Crossover. Linux GUI desktops in cloud environment is a realistic scenario.
Why not simply build the DE that's in Avengers/Iron-Man? Instant recognition and inertia.
I am an informed amateur at Linux but I've built a couple of Linux boxes, Ran RedHat and SUSE and have been using Ubuntu 11.04 for a couple of years. There are update reminders constantly that 11.10 is out there but I'm fearful of loading same. The last few times I've "upgraded" I ended up rebuilding all my content because i wasn't savvy enough to figure out how to get my backed up files into the upgraded operating system. Either that or some thing I installed knocked something else out and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. It really is too long a learning curve for someone not involved in the nuts and bolts to a great deal to learn how to do this stuff.
I use a MacBook with a 2007 hardware set that I've upgraded with memory and hard drive space. I'm told that it won't run the newest OSX which I find a problem.
I prefer to use the LInux desktop and really utilize having fifteen windows open at once. Can't do that with an Apple I don't think. I lug around a Panasonic laptop for my workshop/construction use. The beast is really built like a tank and I use Sketchup on a Microsoft O/S because that is not available on Linux yet. It should be. If it was I'd dump the M$ and install Linux on the Panasonic.
Admittedly it has ben many years since I tried Linux but I think the programing community in demonizing Microsoft for so long can not see the value Microsoft brought the the computer world. I like many of you was using a computer before Office existed. The thousand difference document formats that were never compatible with any other system. Microsoft dominated the market because of Office Suite not because of windows. They were strong before than they choose a more flexible platform to develope on that other vendors but it was the introduction of Office crushed the rest of the market. As soon as businesses recongnized that you could easily tranfer documents from one system to the other they nearly all adopted window and then to be efficient in business you had to know office, so you bought windows and office for your home computer. I barely use my home computer the only time I upgrade it is when I can't open the latest version of an office file. There are far more people that want what they have at work than care about the best system.
If you want to compete with windows you have to have a very intuitive interface and extreme compatibility with office producs, if not run office suite itself. Google docs may open a door that was never available before. As Microsoft struggles to compete with Google and they offer more and more office functionality on the web, this leaves the door open for Linux. Good interfaces with google docs and windows live will go a long way. If you then add supior performance then you may sway people.
Toy OS
First, there's not Linux desktop. Threre are numerous desktops that run on Linux. Are we going to fix one of them or try to fix all?
Second, commercial organisations can force their developers to do what they want. So their developers won't argue and split into dozens of competing projects, but actually get their work done. On several occasions I have seen Windows copy what Linux had for months or years and deliver their usable version months or years ahead of polished Linux version.
Third, Linux desktop programs have serious stability problems. Potential users don't see the kernel. If your KDE desktop crashes each time you try to configure applets on bottom panel don't be surprised that Linux is not going to become popular. It's DE's fault but people will blame Linux.
Fourth, I have suspision that some desktop environment designers have never used their system before the release. Gnome 3 seems to be broken beyond repair. KDE need lot of configuration to make their desktop comfortable to use for everytday tasks.
There's some sensible effort on the part of Linux Mint leader, but it might be too little too late. It seems like we miss most of the chances to fix Linux desktop. Clem's reasons for creating Cinnamon and Mate sum up well symptoms of Linux Desktop disease.
I have fixed my Desktop problems by changing my expectations and requirements. As long as I can easily start Emacs I don't care.
If Watson can win Jeopardy, why can't my OS spot malware? Have any of you even started coding Asimov's three laws of robotics? Any decent computer should have had rudimentary self-awareness by now. Doesn't anybody read Science Fiction? My Dog --no, my dog's fleas -- understands me better that all of my computers put together.
There is far too much infatuation with eye-candy, and nearly no focus on hard questions regarding what a computer should DO. The current paradigm of WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) is Forty Years old and should be retired. This isn't just about interface. Advances in clustering technology should be adapted to today's multi-platform distributed personal computing. Google's cloud knows which applications I've installed, on which device. What is the local answer to that? It should not be a "desktop" solution, it should be a more ubiquitous one.
I was digging through a small pile of half working laptops. I grabbed one functioning one that had a dead harddrive, and pulled the harddrive from another. Anywho, after 10 minutes of cannibalizing I had two usable laptops. I went ahead and put linux mint on one of them for my 9 year old. I took care of the install, and loaded 1 proprietary driver(omg, I pushed a button). I showed him how to connect to our home network, as he hasn't done so with windows yet either. And since then, I've come to help him occasionally. He has far more problems from websites he signs up for accounts on than anything else. But almost nothing OS related. He can't play all the games he had on the windows desktop, but as far as userfriendliness, it's a dream. He knows where to find apps and games, although he usually doesn't know what to do with the ones he already has. Samba sometimes fights back, and so does wine. If winetricks could auto-install more games for us, it might make linux more desireable. Linux does look nice if you customize your display to your own preferences. For example transparancy effect where you see straight through other windows to the background they use in the backtrack distros, that looks pretty snazzy. Speaking of, does anyone know where I can get that effect for my own OS? I've been using linux for about 2 months now. It was an easy start, and as I tweak and mess things up I learn more about it. If I do mess things up too much, it's not hard to format and reinstall. I wont have to hunt down any install disks except the linux install. But all your apps you need are ready for you to redownload, just like when I replace my android phone. I have a dual boot setup, and I haven't booted windows in a month and a half.
PC compatibles became the biggest while they weren't the cheapest machines out there. I remember that Amigas were the cheapest (and the most powerful by all seeming), Macs were more expensive, and PC compatibles were more expensive yet. Still DOS machines became the biggest. When they started to come down in price as well, then they really dominated the market.
The root of their success seemed to lie in the fact that they started in the business/enterprise market. The software and hardware that you ran at home could now be compatible with what you ran at work. That was the tipping point toward MS-DOS in the market. The only reason the other two systems stuck around for a while was that a GUI was more friendly to new users. That's why once DOS had an even halfway competent GUI (Windows 3) along with prices coming down on the hardware, the other computers were driven out nearly altogether (actually Commodore was driven out).
This was reflected in the attitude of the time. The general attitude seemed to be: Amigas are for fun and games; Macs are for art, music, and publishing; DOS computers are for serious business. Of course Amigas and Macs at the time could be used for serious business, artsy stuff, and fun and games. The only system with serious shortcomings was the PC compatible with DOS; it was only good for business apps; the other stuff was adapted in later. We see from this that it's not about the most capable or user friendly system. Then it was about what was used and targeted for business. I'm not sure how much this is still the case, but there's no reason to believe that it's become about what works best.