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Gnome Founder Miguel de Icaza Moves To Mac
TrueSatan writes "Miguel de Icaza, via his blog, has explained his gradual move to the Apple Mac platform. 'While I missed the comprehensive Linux toolchain and userland, I did not miss having to chase the proper package for my current version of Linux, or beg someone to package something. Binaries just worked.' Here is one of his main reasons: 'To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros, and the incompatibilities across versions of the same distro were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl.' Reaction to his announcement includes a blog post from Jonathan Riddell of Blue Systems/Kubuntu. Given de Icaza's past association with Microsoft (CodePlex Foundation) and the Free Software Foundation's founder Richard Stallman's description of de Icaza as a 'traitor to the free software community,' this might be seen as more of a blow to Microsoft than to GNU/Linux."
Now he's going to try to clone all of Microsoft's clones of other people's technology for the Mac.
Lets see how far that gets him.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
And never looked back. Linux maintains its place as my workhorse, while I rest in the comfort of whichever other OS I feel like using that day, typically OS X or iOS. SSH and SFTP fill the gaps.
So he is leaving the mess he caused?
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
I'm starting to think this guy just likes to read about himself in the news. I think his announcement is pretty funny - Linux Mint is a shining example of Linux as a functional desktop OS. It's still not as polished as OS X, but I do find myself using OS X less and less these days.
Maybe he's just butthurt that Gnome probably doesn't have much of a future. I mean, the older versions are great if, uh, your graphics card stops working or something. . .
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Been running Linux for 15 years now, and it's better than it ever has been. I guess this guy just lost whatever zeal he never really had in the first place for free software.....Read his blog post and it seems like he's just bored or lazy, or both. Oh well......
I did the same about 10 years ago for the same reasons. Oddly enough it was the people at the local LUG with their iBooks & MacBooks that made me realize something was amiss.
It doesn't matter his affiliation or if he likes or even works for MS or not. Judge the statement on it's own, and it's true.
It's something Linux geeks have trouble admitting, but it is the sole reason Linux usage has not skyrocketed in adoption. If the LSB worked anthing close to how it was envisioned, developers would flock to the platform and then so would users.
At the moment, people use the distro they like and defend, while non linux geeks use distros like Ubuntu or Mint, which are the only platforms commercial developers tend to target.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Apple's loss is Linux's gain.
I liked to tinker with configs and settings and libraries, but now I like my home computer to just work. They cost more, but are worth it. I still have a unix command line and most of the open source tools but have access to commercial software as well.
Yummy KoolAid.
founder buys a mac and doesnt look back
The ends justifies the means. Uh. No.
Not that i disagree with you, with respect to using OSX or Windows when it makes sense to do so. But I don't think using either is particularly "evil".
But if I thought Apple killed children and unicorns then I wouldn't use OSX, even if it was the best tool for a job.
Nexus tablet runs Linux
Galaxy phone runs Linux
Wintendo what the hell is that?
Please refrain from attacking de Icaza for these simple reasons.
Like Stallman, de Icaza has donated countless hours of organization and programming time to Linux. Neither got rich as a result. Politics aside, Linux is about superior engineering, even if only as a side effect. Because of the efforts of these two individuals, among many others, Linux is now the most popular operating system on the planet. By any stretch of the imagination, they were and are victorious. Android is closing in on a billion users, but regardless of what Google's marketing materials may tell you, Android is a Linux distribution, and GNU and GNOME have been perfecting Linux distributions for over two decades.
I understand that Android does not ship with much GNU or GNOME software, but GNU and GNOME are what built Linux. Without either, the foundations upon which Android runs would never have accreted enough functionality to even think about running a smartphone.
As mostly non-rich people, often not closely allied with specific companies, we don't have publicists or agents. We don't come off as polished. We don't have speech writers. Forgive us for seeming offensive, rude, obnoxious, conceited, full of ourselves, or some other adjective. We're people, and as engineers we're trained to traffic in the honest truth. Once you meet us you'll like us, for the most part. And even if you don't, enjoy using our software. Contribute if you like.
You trade one slavery for another. The Cult of Macheads will mod me down...
Choice of computing platform is not slavery. Liking things that work is not a cult.
Can't speak for Icaza but for me personally, the trend towards making the Linux desktop "easier to use" has had me running away from the platform as a Desktop.... the problem is if you are going to make a GUI(and as a result make command line configuration more difficult), that GUI better damn well work. And at least with the desktop managers I have tried, it doesn't. So I find myself constantly trying to figure out what they changed from the previous version(that isn't working in the current version), and of course constantly changing where things are located etc. doesn't help.
If you are going to change the desktop experience in order to make it "easier to use", you damn well better get it right, or else not only do you fail to capture a new audience, you end up alienating the current user base. That seems to be what Gnome has done.
For me personally I develop on a mac, and run my test and prod on Linux(I've tried OS X as a server, and ironically it seems to suffer the same problems as a server as Linux does as a Desktop, they tried to make it "easier to use", but didn't get the abstraction right and the result is a mess).
I was recently put in the unfortunate position of having to develop a PHP app, and I tried doing everything on Fedora 18 with Gnome, and.... that was just plain frustrating. The installer tried to be "easy to use", but often failed, the system got stuck in reboot but I couldn't figure out what service was failing because I couldn't get it to not show that stupid startup animation and instead show me the boot log etc. Eventually I got the machine booted and then just ssh into it from my Mac, much less frustrating.
Bottom line: don't make Linux "easier to use" by breaking a bunch of shit.
Monstar L
Mono was a pointless waste of time and De Icaza is a quisling turn coat. Apple deserves that worthless pile of donkey shit.
Lets see:
Miguel's contributions to Linux:
1) Midnight Commander
2) Contributions to Wine
3) He worked with David S. Miller on the Linux SPARC port and wrote several of the video and network drivers in the port, as well as the libc ports to the platform.
4) They both later worked on extending Linux for MIPS to run on SGI's Indy computers and wrote the original X drivers for the system.
5) With Ingo Molnar he wrote the original software implementation of RAID-1 and RAID-5 drivers of the Linux kernel
6) De Icaza started the GNOME project with Federico Mena in August 1997 to create a completely free desktop environment and component model for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
7) He also created the GNOME spreadsheet program, Gnumeric.
Your contributions to Slashdot:
1) Silly karmawhoring hatefilled anti-Microsoft rants on Slashdot
Who has made better contributions to the progress of Open Source?
Linux just doesn't work as a day-to-day end-user platform anymore
So, the Year of Linux on the Desktop finally came, and I missed it?
Who are you trying to scare off with that?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I don't have any issues with Miguel, but I met him about 4 years ago and even then he was using a macbook with osx. Or maybe he was just a closet osx user and now coming out? Or he's just starting a fight?
Bingo.
This has ALWAYS been the basic dichotomy that the Linux faithful (which definitely included me at one time) fail to grasp: One group of people see computers as a fun thing, something to be explored and tinkered with, even if they use them for real and serious work. The other group considers computers,operating systems, apps, etc. as a big, steaming pile of inconvenience they have to tolerate to do something else -- work, listen to music, whatever. This is why do-nothing tablets are so wildly popular -- they manage to eliminate a lot of the hassles of running Windows while spoon-feeding users e-mail and the Web and media. Most people here (including me) consider them pretty toys and nowhere near capable enough to replace even an old, painfully slow laptop.
Apple lets you sue..whatever you like
Oh Freudian slips how I love thee.. .
Liberty.
To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros
So he chooses to get his hardware and software from one vendor. Okay thats very neat and simple but he could get it from Canonical as well, or one of the BSD projects.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
As I sit here on my MacBook Air running Ubuntu, working on Ceph (ie getting stuff done!) while browsing slashdot. I've tried OSX many times, and I keep coming back to Linux because it's so much *more* productive, especially when working on code. The only thing I miss is netflix.
So whatever. I still have a soft spot for Apple hardware, but I'll stick with Linux thank-you-very-much.
I use serveral operating systems frequently due to work (and it used to be my hobby). I appreciate OS X's desktop interface a lot, but I don't realy understand Miguel's justification that Mac "just works" in terms of package availability and the quality of the base system.
It's no secret that OS X's base is lifted from FreeBSD. Is Linux too fragmented and chaotic for you? Do you long for a complete and and integrated system base in a single source tree, backed by unified development effort? FreeBSD has that. It also has very high package availability (better than most Linux distros).
On the Linux side, I use Fedora. I never have any trouble finding packages for Fedora. The quality that gets put into the base system of Fedora also leaves little to be desired.
I don't fault Miguel for his choice. OS X is nice--it gets the job done. I just don't think OS X is really giving him something special that he couldn't have gotten with Linux, BSD, or even Windows. If he misses the development toolchain of Linux, he should go back to Linux; that's totally understandable.
I moved to a MacBook for the sole virtue of it being a well-designed notebook, but I have strong feelings regarding Mac OS's functionality and "administrability" when compared to linux distros. It bothers me that there is NO package system to speak of, and you basically have to scour the internet like a fool to find basic tools that are one apt-get away in Ubuntu. I mean, yeah, I know there's stuff like homebrew, fink and macports, but so far all of those gave me nothing but headache, for the sole reason they are third-party hacks not supported (or even acknowledged) by the builders of the system (i.e. Apple).
To top it in terms of silliness, he speaks of "the binaries just works", but he neglects to mention that you still have to look for them in really random places over Google - something that apt-get like systems have been doing securely for the last what, 10 years? I indeed find it very odd that, although there's only one hardware platform for the Mac OS to run, all those third party packaging tools I mentioned actually require you to COMPILE everything again; then you go to the Ubuntu/Debian world, meant to run on several platforms and there's BINARIES for just about anything.
I really want to know what this guy is on. Gnome was a great thing, and he let it rot into that sad piece of bad usability called Unity; then he started dabbling in the very proprietary, advantage-free world of .NET, and he just bows down to Jobs walled garden legacy? I don't get it.
Anyway, freedom not to use is one of the 4 fundamental freedoms, according to RMS. Nothing of value is being (newly) lost, so big effing deal.
I don't understand this thought at all. I run a mixed environment at home, and it all works pretty well. I have a FreeBSD ZFS server in the basement happily running AFP and acting as a Time Machine target. I also have it running CrashPlan in Linux emulation as a target for my friends, family, and Windows PC. The Windows PC speaks happily to FreeBSD via Samba. Firefox works almost identically on all three platforms, syncing passwords and bookmarks. OpenOffice works on all three as well. CrashPlan client runs just fine on two Macs and the PC. Even Apple proprietary crap like iTunes and Airplay runs across platforms. As long as you try to steer clear of single-platform applications, everything works together pretty well. It would not be a big deal if I suddenly had to ditch Mac or Windows (and believe me, Windows 8 has made me consider the latter).
The truth is, there is no "ecosystem" if you are careful in your application and hardware purchases. That MacBook will happily run Linux or Windows if you get disgusted with MacOS. That Windows PC will happily run just about anything if you get disgusted at MS. Keep your data in an accessible format, and you are golden when you switch platforms.
Besides, as a geek your friends and family depend on you to be an expert at anything with electrons. :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
After developing with Mac OSX for a year using the command line interface (i.e., lots of terminals), I found I needed some sort of ports-like package management which has its own headaches. After jacking around with seemingly never-ending updates to Ubuntu and it's resource hungry UI, I found Debian quite refreshing. Not on the bleeding edge, but this is a GOOD THING! Never regretted it.
/* But if I thought Apple killed children and unicorns then I wouldn't use OSX, even if it was the best tool for a job. */
Shit, that'd probably get me to switch to Apple.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Because you equate it doesn't make it fact. Slavery has a very strict definition and you're twisting of it does good for no one.
"Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did not stop working, I spend three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers,"
Interesting, that is identical to the experience that I have with Debian. Even people on Arch don't need to "recompile the kernel to adjust this or that." But I hope he enjoys his Mac.
Penny - plain text accounting
I went the other way about two and a half years ago. I'm sure someone will tell me I was doing it wrong; I wouldn't be surprised if they're right. But I found the FOSS package managers for OS X incredibly painful to work with. I remember it taking at least a day of mucking around with compiling and pre-built binaries just to get the tools I needed for web development. It took me ten minutes to get the same thing working in Ubuntu.
Still, there were plenty of headaches: sleep mode, hybrid graphics and synaptics. Even though I had been avoiding dependence on proprietary software since activation chased me away from Windows, I had to give up really useful Mac tools like Scrivener, Tinderbox and Screen Flow (I still boot the Mac when I need to do a screencast). I used to be a programmer. Now I'm a social scientist. These days I do mostly reading and writing, not programming; the loss of Scrivener was a hard blow. I smoothed the way by writing my own tool.
OS X was significantly better for all but the most ordinary end-user applications. My area of research is the online commons - copyright, FOSS, creative commons - stuff like that. I could make my peace with Apple when they were only a pipsqueak tyrant. When they released the iPad and it was locked down, I simply couldn't stomach it anymore: and I was tying myself to an ecosystem that could be progressively enclosed by Apple. A friend of mine - a social scientist, not a programmer - switched to Mint, proving it was finally doable. Also, XMonad is pretty cool, and my search for a decent editor finally led me to take vim seriously.
Linux isn't perfect, but it's come a long way since I first used it for development in 1993. It really is usable - and sometimes excellent - for everyday work. Using a platform is supporting that platform. I wouldn't tell anyone else what to do, but I'm content to use this one.
Wait, so, the guy who basically pushed 90% of the bloat, incompatibility, and other such madness I've ever seen in Linux is leaving because of the bloat and incompatibility?
Dude, not cool. You made that bed, now lie in it.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Q: what do you actually "get done" with Linux?
Pretty much everything.
My day job is Linux. My home systems are Linux, other than one new Windows PC for high-end gaming and an old one for iTunes. I can see four Linux systems from where I'm sitting on the sofa, not counting the Android tablet and four to six embedded Linux devices (I'm not sure exactly which of my Blu-Ray/DVD players are running Linux).
Because I'm willing to bet that whatever it is you're doing on Linux could be done just as easily on OS X without fucking about maintaining the operating system.
Wow, yes, because running apt-get upgrade or the upgrade manager every few days is just _SO_ demanding.
That would totally have been worth paying 2.5x as much to buy an Apple laptop with less powerful hardware than this one running Linux.
Time to open up OSX and allow it to be installed on any computer.
A tired response to a tired post. Apple is a hardware maker not an OS maker. They only make OSs to support their hardware. This explains the price difference between Mac upgrades and Windows upgrades. They make their profits off the hardware. They could potentially offer a version of the OS at a higher price that could be installed on PCs but people like you would complain about the price difference. They can't win this argument so why play the game? You want open there's Linux. You want Mac OS then there's Macs. You want everything your way, life sucks and get used to it! Christ when I was in my teens computers ran off Cassette drives! Be happy. 20 years ago Macs cost the same as a car. Cars got more expensive and Macs got cheaper and you're still complaining! Your average smart phone has a 100X the power of my first computer. My iPad would have probably been a super computer when I was a kid. If you were thrown back in time to the 70s or 80s you'd think you were in hell. Just imagine the 60s, as in pre calculator days when computers ran off punch cards. You're living in a time of miracles and you're whining about running OSX on hardware it was never designed to run on! My expartner bought a Mac clone off some one that claimed it worked faster than a Mac Pro. The damned thing was slower than a Mac Mini and crashed constantly. I made him take it back to the idiot that sold it to him. Is that what you want? A slower than hell OSX that crashes constantly? I'm sure you'd just blame Apple for not supporting PC hardware better!
If someone can provide proof that Apple has been killing unicorns, then I will become a true convert and switch to OSX.
Have you seen a unicorn anywhere in Cupertino recently? No? Here is your proof.
And here I thought that I was getting desktop-ready *NIX environment with a UI layer that wasn't a crufty piece of shit pretending to be something it's not. That I can still run native X11 apps on. Next to native MS office, indesign and photoshop. Without vitualization. And VMWare Fusion for situations where that's not enough or for when I want to stage a VM-based server before I deploy it.
I'll pay a couple bucks extra for that at work. And build a Hackintosh at home.
I love BSD, Linux to a degree and even X11. They are great tools. For a desktop workstation, OSX spanks Linux.... it just costs money.
No, you're just devaluing the word slavery by using it in that ridiculous way, because there's already a term for what you're trying to describe: vendor lock-in.
I hear what you're saying about Getting Shit Done. I have that fantasy, too, and occasionally let it play out. Although I've been a mostly-Linux guy since the 90s, I've been jones-ing for some sequencing software that would "Just Work" that I could run on a platform that would "Just Work". Bought Ableton Live and a Mac Mini to run it on. (That's well over $1000, by the way.) If there's anything that should "Just Work", it should be this.
But I almost immediately tripped over the same old minor glitches I've seen on every other platform I've ever used. In this case, the problem is that Ableton perversely installs itself in such as way that only one user can run it (though the license is for the whole box). So, I dutifully tracked down the arcane procedure for making it available system-wide (just as you get with Linux apps by default, I might add), and a couple hours later it's doing what it should have done in the first place. Yes, it works, but it doesn't "Just Work".
Miguel did not write Midnight Commander. He took over as maintainer of an already written and widely used file manager, loaded it down with crud to the point no one else could understand it and it was barely usable, then quit supporting it. The man deserves no credit for MC whatsoever, unless you mean for killing MC.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You forgot to tell him to get off your lawn.
The guy who launched GNOME as a counter to KDE is complaining about "the fragmentation of Linux as a platform"? Tthe guy who made the decision replace GNUstep (which was the GNU project's official toolkit/framework in 1996) in favor of GTK â" he's fled to the Mac? He's got the chutzpah to say, "Linux just never managed to cross the desktop chasm"â"without admitting that his decisions are a major cause of that failure?
Good damn riddance.
So Linux is like a shop full of tools and MacOS is like an angle grinder?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
The Gnome project was a disaster from beginning to end. It accomplished exactly one useful thing: Trolltech was forced to GPL QT. At that point, Gnome should have been promptly shut down, having accomplished its purpose, and Linux on the desktop would be much further advanced than it is. But instead we have this crippled zombie thing that shambles on and on. Somebody put a stake in its heart or something please.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I just read at least a dozen "but OSX just WORKS!!" threads, "I don't have to do anything to make it WORK!#@!".
Well, guess what. What you spend your money on is *REAL* *VOTING*; more than any election.
When you *VOTE* for shitty, evil Apple Business Practices (that would be ALL OF THEM), you're supporting and proliferating Evil (tm). They're worse than Microsoft, just without as many of your Billions. Keep feeding the beast and see what happens.
Technically, Mono is great. Unfortunately, Miguel completely failed to establish it as a Linux standard by antagonizing much of the Linux community and failing to assuage licensing and patent concerns. Frankly, as an early Mono adopter and supporter, I feel let down by him. Let him be happy with his Mac; I won't miss him.
Mono was also a *massive* strategic blunder: it would have been far more sensible if Miguel had built an open source clone of the JVM instead for his Linux GUI efforts:
My observation at the time was that Miguel seemed to be over-excited by the (nice but superficial) language features he saw in C#, and completely forgot that the real value is in the *platform*.
I don't think it's very fair to say the Gnome project was a disaster. Sure, in the context of present-day desktop environments, GNOME 1.x looks pretty damn horrible now. But back then, comparing it to KDE (which, to be fair, was in some respects the more reliably functional interface) it was not bad. At that time, I really hated KDE, since it was so kfucking kluttered and kfugly.
I stuck with GNOME from 1997 until the end of the 2.x versions, since it did what I needed it to do reasonably well. Meanwhile, the early KDE 4.x releases were unusable. Sadly, GNOME 3.x has followed suit (and appears set to stay that way), while KDE has re-evolved itself in recent versions as a really nice, feature-rich environment.