Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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 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.
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.
You're part of the problem.
If you want to help spread the Linux base, such an attitude doesn't help.
If you don't care, then please continue as you are.
A satisfied user doesn't help "spread the Linux base"? Why not, I ask seriously?
I am not a crackpot.
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!
Nonsense.
The main roadblock is that the market has been dominated by a single vendor since long before a single line of the Linux kernel was written. This dominant vendor was nearly able to kill off Apple with an OS that has no GUI and required MANUAL MEMORY MANAGEMENT.
It seems like some people have not been computing long enough to realize just how BAD Microsoft products have been while being an overwhelming force in the industry.
People put up with Microsoft because of it's perceived monopoly and just deal with problems as if they were unavoidable and inevitable. The same goes for companies and 3rd parties.
Some people are under the delusion that magically turning Linux into a Windows clone or a MacOS clone would help anything.
Even real Macs still have trouble getting traction.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I don't think Linus is interested in owning the desktop. Its pretty clear he wants his desktop to be geared towards his workflow as a hard core coder/developer , and that is not the same desktop you would want for ordinary people. That is a key problem with the Linux desktop, the only people that care about it and develop it are hardcore geeks/programmers and the stuff they want is diametrically opposed to what ordinary people want in a desktop. Its seriously got old 10 years ago listening to Linux heads demand the Linux desktop be a few windows with shells in them, or listening to them as they forked and developed 100 different window managers almost none of which gain critical mass and none of which will ordinary people use.
If you want Linux to succeed with the general public my suggestions would be to:
A. Get rid of some of the fragmentation, relgious wars, and wasted time caused by the GNOME vs KDE conflict in particular. I understand why the split happened but its done nothing but damage over the years and its time to stop it or Linux will never succeed on the desktop.
B. You need very well written core API's because everything else flows from those. A good IDE helps too, Eclipse is OK but its not great, Xcode is awesome, DevStudio is pretty good.
C. All apps need to use the same API's so they interoperate and look and feel the same. Constantly writing variations of existing API's. and fragmenting them, is not a wise thing to do on the desktop. A lot of Apple's success can be tied to the fact that Cocoa and Objective C are very well done in a lot of areas, and they make it easy and a joy to develop applications. If its a joy to write apps, more developers will do it and the a quality of the apps for the time spent is consistently higher. Writing apps on Linux by comparison is a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, its painful, inconsistent, there is constant wheel reinventing, everyone does their own thing and it shows in the inconsistent apps that don't interoperate.
D. As much as I hate to say Qt is probably the best API you have but you need to wrest control of it from the people who've been developing it, and stop the major code breaking changes between revisions. The core API's need to develop like Apple develops them, add new things carefully, deprecate old things gradually, and STOP breaking code doing huge somewhat, gratuitous changes. GTK is just not a good API to base a desktop on.
E. Miguel De Icaza needs to be cut out of his position of authority. His track record in recent years, his Microsoft affiliation, his blaming the desktop on Linus recently, has shredded any credibility he had to lead Linux desktop development
F. You have to fix audio and video so they just work like OSX and Windows. This is a steep challenge. The ALSA audio API was a total mistake. An API that contorted, hard to use or write drivers for never should have happened. Linus is partly to blame for that. Getting good audio drivers is a hard problem, everytime a new audio chip comes out you have to start over making drivers for it. Making video work tends to end in a lot issues with patents, proprietary codecs, etc, which isn't easy to solve in open source.
In summary, the chances of Linux happening on the PC desktop are slim. None of these inherent structural flaws are likely to be remedied. Besides which the PC is rapidly starting to fade except for content developers and coders. Everyone else is switching to phones and tablets. Linux is already winning with Android on thosse, and IOS is Unix underneath. Rather than fight a losing battle for Linux on the PC just switch to Android.
@de_machina
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
One thing I will give credit to Microsoft about is their software development tools. It is also useful to remember that Microsoft started out as a compiler developer that happened to end up in the operating system game due to (for them) a fortunate series of events.
I've been using Microsoft products since 1979 in one degree or another, even though I do think they are an evil company sucking the life out of the American computer industry. Still, your comments about the quality of their development tools seems to be pretty spot on with my own experience as well. They use these same tools (Visual Studio) to write MS-Windows, so they get a whole lot of internal attention within the company where it is co-workers complaining about nasty bugs and not just outside customers.
I fell in love with C# because the design team for C# is a bunch of guys that I like and are some of the best compiler/language developers in the world. They were the original developers for Borland Delphi, and if you are familiar with both Delphi and C#, you can find a whole lot of similarities in the language design including underlying philosophies for how they work with data structures. The chief architect of both languages was Anders Hejlsberg, somebody who I have come to admire. What I also like is that Microsoft pretty much let him do what he wanted, and C# has become a pretty successful language on its own merits.