Linus Torvalds: 'I Still Want the Desktop'

darthcamaro writes: Linux has clawed its way into lots of places these days. But at the LinuxCon conference in Chicago today Linus Torvalds was asked where Linux should go next. Torvalds didn't hesitate with his reply. "I still want the desktop," Torvalds said, as the audience erupted into boisterous applause. Torvalds doesn't see the desktop as being a kernel problem at this point, either, but rather one about infrastructure. While not ready to declare a "Year of the Linux Desktop" he still expects that to happen — one day.

Comments

Nobody else seems to want it

[Anonymous Coward]

If he waits a little longer, he can probably just take it without anybody noticing.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[bobbied]

If he waits a little longer, he can probably just take it without anybody noticing.

Great point. Maybe we can take over tablets and cell phones with Linux, er, Android, er, whatever... It's not like Microsoft is making much of a play for these... (Windows 8, 8.1, and 9 not withstanding)

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[hairyfeet]

Actually Google is taking a page from MSFT and is going EEE on Android and if the rumors are true Win 9 will either be free or insanely cheap so...good luck with that.

BTW what Torvalds SHOULD have said was "I want the desktop....but not enough to give up my shitty 1970s throwback driver model" because you look at the forums and a good 90% of what the problems in linux get boiled down to is that shitstorm of a driver model, it'd be like MSFT trying to build Windows 9 on top of the old DOS .INI drivers because when you have such a fundamental thing old and shitty it makes all the new stuff on top just new and shitty. BTW this is NOT a FOSS thing, its a LINUX thing, as nobody in the FOSS world besides Linux uses his shitty driver model, not BSD, not Android, NOBODY.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Iniamyen]

I'm a Linux (and UNIX and Windows) user, but I honestly know very little about how drivers in Linux differ from drivers in, say, Windows, or any other OS for that matter. Could you explain what the issues are? I Googled for "Linux driver model" but didn't find anything particularly enlightening.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Skarjak]

I'm always puzzled to see these kinds of posts. Do you do your work on a tablet? "Desktop is dead!" is a lame cliche the media came up with that everyone can parrot to show how "knowledgeable" they are about the industry, when a simple inspection of the facts shows desktops aren't going away any time soon. I'm writing this from a desktop, with a confortable mechanical keyboard, a good mouse and a widescreen monitor, cause that's what you need if you want to get shit done.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[bADlOGIN]

As a monopoly, Microsoft gets to hold the proverbial "gun" to device vendors heads and say, "support our OS on our schedule exactly how we say we'll fucking destroy your market and feed you to your competitors". Thus, Windows drivers get support from device manufacturers. Linux device drivers come from begging, pleading, and sometimes reverse engineering and all volunteer efforts of the open source community. Sometimes this happens despite hostile responses and legal threats from device vendors. My hope is that some day Linux will get to wield that gun...

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Iniamyen]

This doesn't sound like a design decision, though. At least not directly. Still wondering what the parent is talking about.

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[binarylarry]

I think Linus would reply with:

"Are you fucking high?"

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ost99]

The desktop IS dead, at least in one sense.
If you buy one now, you might never have to buy one again.

Acknowledging that I might be pulling a "640k ought to be enough for everybody", I predict that a current generation mainline i7 and i5 will be sufficient for any "desktop" task more or less for ever (or until we move away from a physical interface like keyboard / mouse and touchscreens).

My 5 1/2 year old desktop is still a solid workhorse and significantly faster than my new $3000 ultrabook.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Khyber]

Uh, DOS most certainly did have drivers. I know for fact you weren't plugging an SB16 into a DOS machine and expecting it t work just by modifying your autoexec.bat and config.sys files. You had to install the drivers for it, first.

I'm sitting right here on my 486DX4 75MHz Toshiba laptop playing Doom on it.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm writing this from a desktop, with a confortable mechanical keyboard, a good mouse and a widescreen monitor, cause that's what you need if you want to get shit done.

And yet here you are on /. showing that you're not getting shit done. Maybe it's the fault of the windowing system exacerbated by that large screen. Maybe, if you didn't have a browser window constantly on view, but just a single app filling the screen, you wouldn't be so easily distracted?

I think the implication here is that he's posting to Slashdot because his shit is already done.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[cmdr_tofu]

So what you are saying is that NVIDIA and ATI don't release closed source binary-only drivers? I wonder what this whole tainted kernel thing is about then?

I wrote a FUSE driver for a toy fs in Linux a VFS driver to do the same thing in kernel-space, and it's funny, I don't remember getting cooperation "from the " whole "Linux kernel team". Apparently Basil Brush and hairyfeet are involved in anti-Linux FUD.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Rob Y.]

Well, actually, if mobile, the cloud and chromebooks take enough of the market away from the traditional desktop, Microsoft has 2 choices. Either raise the price of Windows to make up for the declining market or lower the price of Windows to fend off the competition. If the price of Windows goes up - and the traditional desktop is only necessary for a limited kind of user, then Linux wins what's left of that market by virtue of the cheap price. If the price goes down, Microsoft may continue to dominate, but they're going to have to make up for it somewhere - in which case LibreOffice wins.

Of course, there's a major chicken-and-egg problem here. And if the first egg doesn't crack (the inability to buy an OEM desktop machine without paying for Windows), the others probably won't either...

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[Electricity Likes Me]

Err no, it would be because you can pickup 3 1200p mo itors, flip them vertical, ane have all the real estate you need for under $1000. Computers weren't 'not important enough' - TV finally got not terrible enough.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[NormalVisual]

So individual apps had to be aware of the individual drivers.

For some drivers, yes. Drivers that defined block devices just showed up as a drive letter and were available to any program without any device-specific code needed in the user app itself, although there occasionally was a system EXE that needed to be run as well to provide the functionality. Examples include CD-ROM support under DOS (with a device-specific driver + MSCDEX.EXE to read the filesystem on the drive) and RAM drive support (RAMDRIVE.SYS).

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Skarjak]

I am getting shit done! Correcting people who are wrong on the internet is a noble and worthy endeavour. :p

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Skarjak]

I disagree. Fridges haven't really been getting any better for a while, but no one claims that industry is dead. You'll have to buy new desktops because like everything else, they'll eventually stop working. And I wouldn't be so quick to say extra power will never be needed. The average computer has been fully capable of doing all tasks the average user needs to get done for a quite a few years now, but they keep getting stronger anyway. That's because you can find new things to do with that power. And of course, work computers or gaming computers can absolutely make use of extra power. Finally, companies can still work to make computers more silent or power efficient. I think there's still room. What we'ere seeing is a diversification of ways to interact with technology, which inevitably means a reduction of market share for the older products, but as long as these products are still needed, the industry will be in good shape.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[exomondo]

"support our OS on our schedule exactly how we say we'll fucking destroy your market and feed you to your competitors".

Actually it's more just basic economics, if you want to sell hardware to people who run Windows then not supporting Windows isn't going to be a good choice now is it?

Linux device drivers come from begging, pleading, and sometimes reverse engineering and all volunteer efforts of the open source community.

Obviously, since Linux has like 3% of the market. Again basic economics dictates that you wouldn't put anywhere near as much support into it, not to mention one of the biggest selling points of Linux is that you can use it to repurpose old hardware. Did you know very few hardware vendors support Minix? Or Hurd? Or Amoeba? Or Mach? And nor should they, there's no reason to put resources into doing it.

My hope is that some day Linux will get to wield that gun...

So it isn't the attitude that you have a problem with, it's the just the one with the power is the one you don't like.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[whoever57]

In Linux, there is no ABI. Drivers have to be accepted and included in the kernel source tree. Yes really. It's that fucked up.

This is complete BS. Drivers can be delivered as source and built on the target machine or as binaries with the appropriate packageing. For example, drivers can be delivered like the ElRepo kABI-tracking kmods (this includes such things as the Nvidia drivers), or installed via DKMS.

What is true however is that, without an open-source shim layer, drivers have to be delivered as source, which some closed-source bigots hate.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[NotSanguine]

Now you got Windows 8 because desktops aren't as important a market as mobile phones and tablets.

Uhh, no. Don't run that garbage except for testing (and laughing at its craptastic-ness) on a VM. I'm sure that Satya Nadella does *all* his work on his Windows phone. Please.

Is your data in the cloud yet?

Uhh, no. why do I want my private data hosted on "someone else's servers?" (that's the phrase you should substitute when anyone *ever* says "the cloud")

Is your email client a web app?

No. And it won't be anytime soon. Why should I? Standalone mail clients have *enormously* richer feature sets.

Still sure about the future of the desktop?

Eventually, "the desktop" will be commodity monitors and user input devices which you plug your mobile device which contain all your data, applications and other stuff. As long as there are people who need to crunch numbers, write code, write prose, etc, etc, etc, there will always be a market for equipment to allow people to use computing power in a stationary location. The equipment, software, form factors and input devices may change, but there will always be equipment which provides "desktop" like functionality.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[visualight]

In Linux, there is no ABI. Drivers have to be accepted and included in the kernel source tree. Yes really. It's that well thought out.

This means that you have to have code review from the Linux kernel team. And you have to divulge any amateur or buggy code embodied in the source. Which may compromise the imaginary advantage your marketdroids think they have on other platforms.

FTFY

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[visualight]

Intolerant of fools and slackards maybe, always for very rational and defensible reasons.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Quarters]

The first commercial game I shipped, SVGA Air Warrior (November, 1992) came on five 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disks. Three of those disks contained nothing but drivers for various video and sound cards. DOS absolutely had drivers, they were a nightmare to deal with.

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[Richard Dick Head]

Even so, 20 years ago, I had one computer, one monitor, and one TV, and each of those was expected to last 4 to infinity years. Today? 3 TVs, 4 laptops, two desktops, a tablet, a netbook, and 6 monitors, and I'm periodically replacing it all about every 2-4 years. The expanded market just increases your upgrade load. Everyone I know has a desktop, a laptop, and a tablet (even if the desktop is only used once a year for taxes). I only see more and more variety of these things at the electronics store. I'm pretty certain the bitching you hear about a shrinking desktop market has everything to do with more companies competing and lowering costs, than number of units actually sold. I'm still buying desktop computers at a rate of once every two years, and I have been since at least 2004.

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.

So I went and bought a OnePlus One that came with CyanogenMod already on it and unlocking the bootloader ("fastboot oem unlock") didn't void the warranty.

Fuck you Samsung, fuck you GOOG. I'll give my data and money to the Chinese.

Then I've got my ISP reading my every packet, GCHQ inspecting them. The NSA looking over their shoulders and making comments. The Germans reading their product. And finally the Chinese who have backdoored my hardware more than a cardinal on a choirboy.

But it has a nice big screen and sends texts.

Anonymous because offtopic and I don't have karma to burn.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ol Olsoc]

BTW what Torvalds SHOULD have said was "I want the desktop....but not enough to give up my shitty 1970s throwback driver model" because you look at the forums and a good 90% of what the problems in linux get boiled down to is that shitstorm of a driver model,

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. the 70's are gone, but your idea that Linux is still in the 70's shows ye know nought.

Next up, why don't you tell us all about those stupid 1 button mice that apple is still using....

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm a Linux (and UNIX and Windows) user, but I honestly know very little about how drivers in Linux differ from drivers in, say, Windows, or any other OS for that matter. Could you explain what the issues are? I Googled for "Linux driver model" but didn't find anything particularly enlightening.

Whne a smug Windows users wants to coomplain about Linux drivers, just ask them about how Vista handled drivers.

Then sit back and listen to the litany of replies blaming everyone else but Microsoft. Meanwhile a lot of contemporary peripherals were just unusable. ALthough they still worked on Linux.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ol Olsoc]

As a monopoly, Microsoft gets to hold the proverbial "gun" to device vendors heads and say, "support our OS on our schedule exactly how we say we'll fucking destroy your market and feed you to your competitors". Thus, Windows drivers get support from device manufacturers..

Now tell us about the Vista drivers

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Harlequin80]

Not to mention that as soon as you host data external to your location you add latency and a failure point.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[viperidaenz]

A driver is code to interface between an abstraction layer and the hardware.
Sounds like those three disks were not DOS drivers, but SVGA Air Warrior drivers.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[sg_oneill]

Uh, DOS most certainly did have drivers. I know for fact you weren't plugging an SB16 into a DOS machine and expecting it t work just by modifying your autoexec.bat and config.sys files. You had to install the drivers for it, first.

Wrong. DOS did NOT have *any* support for audio drivers. Instead *applications* had the support. An application would have to select the 2 or 3 most common types and then write code to interface with the different drivers separately. At no point did DOS interact with this process at all because DOS simply had no concept of audio outside of the BEEP command for honking the inbuilt speaker.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Skarjak]

I'm using archlinux with Awesome WM, a tiling window manager. The width of my screen allows me to have a tall window on the left, where the main file I'm working on is, while keeping two terminal windows open on the right for various uses. The width of my screen is being fully used. :) Also, none of the things you said invalidate what I wrote. Are there still some things you need desktops to do? Yup. Unless you've found a good way to develop software on a tablet... Or play games at high resolution and 120 fps. Or do video processing. Or write novels. Or make spreadsheets. You get the point. People need to do these things, so they need desktops. If anything, you're basically making an argument for why the year of the linux desktop is close: Microsoft no longer respects the desktop, but it is still very important to linux.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Skarjak]

I think the gamer market will keep the desktop model alive and well for a while. Most serious PC gamers want to build their own machine. Though the "one mobile device to do all" approach will certainly be a big thing eventually.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW this is NOT a FOSS thing, its a LINUX thing, as nobody in the FOSS world besides Linux uses his shitty driver model, not BSD, not Android, NOBODY.

You are aware that Android uses the Linux kernel, and hence has the same driver model as Linux?

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[bored]

Not sure what the GP actually intended, but I'm convinced the fact that the kernel and a few thousand drivers all simultaneously have to be bug free for any given "release" is a serious problem. Should your hardware experience a driver problem you get to roll the dice again and hope the next version fixes your problem without breaking something else. Good luck, especially if you have a couple dozen different hardware configurations to contend with, especially if any of them are not x86.

Its futile, the drivers and the kernel should be separate and there should be a stable API, if not a full blown ABI for them. Linux has been evolving for ~20 years now its probably time to start trying to maintain some kind of actual kernel mode API. That way the _USER_ can pick and choose the kernel and any given set of drivers independently from one another. If kernel X happens to be "good" but you need a driver newer than that kernel you shouldn't have to upgrade to the latest buggy kernel just to get a driver for a more recent piece of hardware.

Android avoids this problem because the OEM spends time assuring that the driver set for their device is working/stable before shipping the device. Then rarely are they ever upgraded for anything other than bug fixes.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[DamnOregonian]

He's a moron. No need for a response to him. Judging by the list of examples he gave, I'm not sure anyone in the world shares his definition of the word 'model'.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[thieh]

I think you can get multi-button mice from vendors like logitech that work on a mac out of the box. So I imagine the problem would be better rephrased as "why don't you tell us all about those stupid 1 button mice that apple is still shipping with their stuff"

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Khyber]

No handle, no. I did have the old model (white one) that had the handle! That was my Ultima V machine!

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Khyber]

Wrong.

http://bochs.sourceforge.net/d...

And I've been using DOS since MULTI-TASKING MS-DOS 4.0, thank you. I can assure you, DRIVERS ARE REQUIRED. Even for CD-ROM drives running through the IDE channel on-board the sound card (SBIDE.SYS is the driver file, BTW.)

You've got that UID and you don't even know the basics of DOS?

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Anonymous Coward]

make computers more silent or power efficient

Not worth it. My latest desktop system is solid state. It doesn't have a spinning disk or a fan. It's silent, not just quiet. It's the cheapest computer I've ever bought, but the electricity it takes to run it for a decade costs even less.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Anonymous Coward]

Go you, since MS-DOS 4.0 no less. Some of us pre-date MS-DOS, and as the previous poster said, DOS did not support sound cards at all. Applications did. Take it from some of us who have programming experience, not just user experience of MS-DOS, CP/M, Unix, VMS, MVS-TSO etc. etc.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[blane.bramble]

Sounds more like your game needed drivers - if DOS needed them, then you would expect them to be provided with the hardware, you would install them, and then your applications would use them through the OS API. The fact that you had to configure games specifically for your hardware means they were not "DOS drivers" but "game drivers".

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[NotSanguine]

Computing power is not required to write prose. A keyboard, maybe.

Absolutely. Heck, you don't even need a battery or a power receptacle either. Just bang on the keyboard. You don't even have to connect it to anything. Sigh.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Dr_Barnowl]

It's not a problem anymore...

They now ship a mouse with no buttons.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[nukenerd]

....would be better rephrased as "why don't you tell us all about those stupid 1 button mice that apple is still shipping with their stuff"

Means the same thing. Only thing wrong is that he did not capitalise the "A" in Apple (nor you).

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[serviscope_minor]

The parent is grand bitching because he thinks th unstable API is the reason for the lack of drivers, rather than the reason being that manufacturers don't care for targeting Linux.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[serviscope_minor]

This means that you have to have code review from the Linux kernel team. And you have to divulge any amateur or buggy code embodied in the source. Which may compromise the imaginary advantage your marketdroids think they have on other platforms.

God yes this. 1000 times this.

One particular example I remember well was TV capture cards in the early/mid 2000s.

Basically the chipset was the Brooktree BT878, which was actually pretty good though remarably cheap. I ended up with a few capture cards what people gave to me because "they didn't work".

That meant they didn't work on Windows. Every manufacturer wrote their own buggy, unstable, system crashy drivers and put effort into some god-awful shiny TV program which made heavy use of gradients and nonstandard TV controls.

On Linux, they all. just. worked. There was one BT878 driver that was well written and well debugged and "shitty" capture cards that "didn't work" gave years of stable, flawless performance.

The same thing cycled around with webcams. It was a wild-west of chipsets. They'd all work after a fashion on Windows. On Linux, they either worked perfectly or not at all due to lack of drivers. The ones that did work were invariable more stable and more featureful because the driver would be written to expose the full functionality of the chipset.

These days the situation is better on all platforms since the standards people have realised that having standard driver interface makes for a much better experience. xHCI means that any random USB chipset works. Same for bluetooth now too. UVC means any camer works and so on and so forth. It's like magic. You can buy a cheap-ass piece of crap from any random vendor and it will just work, no drivers, no hassle on Windows, Linux and OSX.

The thing is vendors are almost uniformly bad at writing drivers. On Linux this means they don't bother. On Windows the drivers are a pile of crap. Having centrally maintained drivers is in fact a large improvement on BOTH operating systems.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[serviscope_minor]

if DOS needed them, then you would expect them to be provided with the hardware, you would install them, and then your applications would use them through the OS API.

Er have you ever used DOS. It provided almost no API at all. And the ones it did no one used. It certainly didn't provide any graphics. The BIOS provided a spectacularly slow interface to the VGA card.

The fact that you had to configure games specifically for your hardware means they were not "DOS drivers" but "game drivers".

No not really. The DOS model was it did fuck-all so if you wanted to use any hardware beyond the small range that was directly supported by the dos APIs and the BIOS then you had to provide all the drivers yourself.

Basically DOS did an OK job at files. And text out to the console. Everything else, graphics, sound, a mouse, joysticks, printers, scanners and so on was provided by drivers in the application program.

The only reason VGA worked uniformly is a whole bunch of manufacturers reverse engineered the VGA register map so that the specially written VGA drivers for dos stuff would work with their clone cards.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[nukenerd]

The desktop IS dead, at least in one sense. If you buy one now, you might never have to buy one again.

Unfortunately they fail sometimes and need replacing. But I believe they will always be availble - look at the Hi-Fi world where heavyweight "professional" kit is still an industry despite iPods etc, and the SLR camera market where you can still buy a massive Hasselblad (>$20,000) despite everyone else having a phone camera. It baffles me why someone would want to use a laptop (or anything even more portable) when it stays in one place all the time. I am even thinking of screwing my (heavy IBM AT) keyboard and trackball to my desk because they slide a bit sometimes. I use something more portable only when I am travelling, or at home, occasionally, when using in another room.

What will change is that desktops will become "professional" kit. There will be no more of the bargains that we have got used to. I paid 1200GBP for my first desktop in c1995, the equivalent of maybe 3000GBP today. That was an enthusiast/professional price, and that is what it will return to.

My 5 1/2 year old desktop is still a solid workhorse and significantly faster than my new $3000 ultrabook.

I can beat that. Some parts of my desktop here are >20 years old, and the m'board is 8. Bits fail now and then and I replace piecemeal.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ost99]

The desktop will not disappear. I don't think that's what all the "the Desktop is Dead" hype is about. The desktop will no longer be the primary technology driver and will become a much smaller part of the overall computing-device market - probably to less than 10% of the overall market (including phones, tablets, laptops and whatever comes next).

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ost99]

Yes. And that means that the Desktop is dead as a technology driver.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ost99]

Desktops won't go away, but the industry will have to adapt and find new markets / new products when the upgrade rate changes from once every 24 months to once every 10 years. As a technology driver, desktops are dying (or dead).

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[TheDarkMaster]

And here we have a clear example of how sometimes the Slashdot moderation system is used as a means of censorship. Because what the parent said is exactly one of the biggest reasons companies do not create official drivers for Linux.

1)Trade secrets are serious business, and no company in their right mind will offer them to the world in order to create an open Linux driver;

2)And when the company (such as Nvidia) goes to the trouble of trying to get a compromise by doing a binary with an open source interface, they discover that their code fails every three months (or less) because of countless compatibility-breakers changes in the API between kernel and drivers. Developer time costs money, and when the company sees the size of the market share of Linux they decide it simply is not worth the work.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[BasilBrush]

Drivers can be delivered as source and built on the target machine or as binaries with the appropriate packageing.

Massive fail.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[BasilBrush]

Madness. You've got religion if you think this is a defensible position.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[BasilBrush]

The driver model you are complaining about is never ever ever ever ever ever going to change.

And Linux is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to be successful on the desktop. In part because of this.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ash-Fox]

BSD has one and their drivers work for years

BSD doesn't even support nearly as many devices as Linux has. Are you certain BSD is capable of scaling up to Linux's numbers without foundation changes to the ABI?

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[mrmangosir559]

It's really simple, desktops were the first tools by people who just wanted to get news, Facebook, email etc. There was nothing else available. They needed a tool browse the internet or do some printing etc, maybe the casual game or two. Then they moved laptops, because of the advantage of having mobile computing. Now Mobiles and tablets are available, the % that don't buy desktops and laptops now, have no need for anything specific other than access to the internet, play games or do whatever. Ok, it's a little stereo typical, but that's what's happened. The PC was once a hobbiest machine, then games, the internet became popular with other none computer enthusiasts (again not the best label). They bought PC's to play games or access the internet. Just moving onto the next convinient machine. The rest are still using desktop and laptops, because they need the software, hardware for their hobby and/or job. Whilst others moved on, because they don't need that box under their desk. I still need a good machine for my work and items I do at home. But people I know, can do everything from their tablet/phone and that's fine. it's not the end of the desktop, it's the end of the dominance of the desktop.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Daniel Hoffmann]

I agree 100% with you, to this day I have owned several machines that I need to manually download and install wifi and ethernet drivers for them to work on windows, in linux they just work. As matter of fact the only drivers I ever had any problem with in Linux were video card drivers.

I always forget to download the drivers before formatting and then I am stuck with a box that can not get into the internet to download them.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[AmiMoJo]

As someone who has written Windows drivers I can tell you that this isn't true.

All you need to write basic drivers is a $150 certificate to sign them with. The user will see a warning about "Do you trust $COMPANY?" when installing, but they will install and work fine. It's a good compromise and gives some basic security for modules that operate in the kernel space and were often used by malware writers. It's a lower bar than required to get an app onto iOS, for example, as Microsoft don't check anything. You just need to buy the cert from a vendor who does a few basic checks to see if you are who you claim to be (e.g. name on certificate matches corporate email address/web URL).

You can buy a more expensive type of cert that makes the warnings go away. It involves more detailed checks. You can also get your drivers WHQL certified, but that isn't by any means a requirement for them to work. They just get a nice logo and can be put on Windows Update for automatic download and installation.

And yes, there is a developer mode that lets you use unsigned drivers for testing or your own purposes if you really don't want to pay. It's not a perfect system but it has reduced driver based malware significantly while not placing a particularly large burden on companies like mine that just need to sign a few drivers for their low volume products.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Windowser]

the inability to buy an OEM desktop machine without paying for Windows

https://system76.com/

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[GuB-42]

In Linux, there is no ABI. Drivers have to be accepted and included in the kernel source tree. Yes really. It's that well thought out.

This means that you have to have code review from the Linux kernel team. And you have to divulge any amateur or buggy code embodied in the source. Which may compromise the imaginary advantage your marketdroids think they have on other platforms.

That's linux stance, which is consistent with both the monolithic design and open source philosophy.
However, this is not without problems.
First problem is that some drivers can't reasonably be opensourced as they offer a real competitive advantage to the companies writing them. Or they may use licensed code that prevent them to go opensource.
Second problem is that it relies on "kernel developers" or "the community". We shouldn't forget that these are made up of people with limited time and resources and chances are that they won't bother with your obscure long tail device* which mean that you'll have to constantly maintain your driver for every changing kernel version.
Third problem is that stable linux distros are commonly build around a specific kernel version. If, for some reason, you need use hardware that is too recent you can't easily add support without changing the whole kernel.

(*) : no, I'm not talking about a black cat

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[Electricity Likes Me]

Again: so?

We've reached monitor parity. We reached it because TV improved and there's no point trying to maintain a difference for difference's sake.

But the vertical height argument is just rubbish. People run 16:9 and 16:10 screens vertical all the time, and no one was ever going to be manufacturing giant squares which physically wouldn't fit on a desktop. 4K and the like is going to sell principally to the computer market first because lord knows there's little need for it in home theatre for most people.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[hairyfeet]

It doesn't matter as a core of the OS is being decided by POLITICS, oh and FYI but that PC World article? Its bullshit, its changed a grand total of TWICE in 20 years, from VXD to WDM, from WDM to DF, and you can still use WDM even on Windows 8. I have used XP drivers in Windows 7, that is 14 years of driver support, show me a video of you using a 7 year old driver without playing the make and break game and we'll talk.

If the core of your OS is decided not on its merits but by politics? Then your OS is doomed to become a punchline. BTW the zealots have been making the same excuses for so long that you can break down more than 90% of posts on any Linux article into just the same TMRepo memes, why? Because like Dems and Reps all that matters now is the politics, NOT the OS.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[VGPowerlord]

I think it's funny that you'd say this.

DOS had drivers in the form of Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programs.

For instance, you had Microsoft's mouse.sys or mouse.com for standard serial port (and later PS/2) mice.

CD drives required config.sys to load a vendor-specific CD-ROM driver followed by autoexec.bat executing mscdex.exe.

From memory, sound cards notably didn't have drivers built-in, or rather the only startup programs they had just set the ports and interrupts the cards used. (i.e. sb16set)

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Andy Dodd]

Huh? Nobody else seems to want it? Then why are Linux-based laptops (ChromeOS is Linux) frequently in the top 10 best selling laptops on Amazon?

(Usually there are 2-3 Chromebooks up there, but right now there's only one. I'm not sure how often they recalculate the rankings.)

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Grishnakh]

There's nothing wrong with drivers in Linux; hairyfeet always bitches about drivers in Linux but he really doesn't know what he's talking about.

The main controversy with Linux drivers is that they're tightly tied to the kernel, and maintained with it; there is no standardized API or ABI for Linux drivers, so a driver for one kernel version will likely not work with other versions; drivers have to be ported between kernel versions. In addition, drivers are absolutely not binary-compatible between kernel versions, and have to be compiled for them. In practice, this isn't a problem except for proprietary vendors who don't want to open-source their drivers. For everyone else, they just contribute their driver code to the kernel tree, it's integrated into the kernel, and maintained with the kernel. If an interface changes in a new kernel version, the maintainers update the associated drivers accordingly. When distros build kernels, the build the kernels and drivers together. So the only problem is a few proprietary vendors who don't like this model, and want to keep their drivers closed-source. Windows itself is a prime example of why this approach is bad: Windows has a terrible reputation for reliability, and much of the reason for this isn't actually Windows itself, it's shoddy drivers from various vendors, especially small Asian vendors of low-cost peripherals, but also big ones had problems. Drivers operate at the highest privilege levels, so if there's a bug in them, it can easily crash your system, so code quality is paramount. Crappy drivers crashing gave Windows a terrible reputation, and MS had to fix this by instituting their "WHQL" program, whereby vendors had to submit their drivers to Microsoft to be certified. This is a big reason why Windows is now fairly reliable. However, it's not something Linux can do; there's no single company behind Linux, and certainly not with the financial resources, or marketshare clout, to force vendors to go through such an expensive and onerous process. No company is going to pay millions of dollars to have someone certify their Linux drivers, but to run on Windows, they will.

The Linux driver model works just fine for Linux, and it's part of why Linux is so reliable and easy to install on most hardware. Instead of hundreds of drivers for simple devices running on the same chipset, for instance (a common happening with things like SD card readers) there's only one, maintained by the community, with high quality. The main problem is with video drivers (NVIDIA and ATI), because these are far more complex than an Ethernet or USB driver, which a few motivated programmers can write a driver for in a short time on a volunteer basis. This is why Linux has had trouble with video support with high-end video chips. These two vendors have closed-source drivers, but to get them to work with Linux and its frequently updating (due to security fixes) kernels is a little awkward and has caused problems in the past. However, open-source efforts including "Nouveau" have made a lot of progress and are pretty close to replacing the closed-source drivers.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Grishnakh]

They don't consider that a problem, they'll just tell you to buy newer hardware which supports >= Vista.

Remember, hairyfeet makes his living running a computer store, so it's entirely in his interest for people to simply throw away perfectly good but older hardware and buy new hardware (from him) to replace it.

But you're entirely correct: Vista introduced a new driver interface which was not compatible with XP, so users with XP-era hardware frequently found that their vendor didn't bother to issue updated drivers to make that hardware work on Vista, and just told customers to buy new hardware. This was not a problem with Linux since it doesn't do such things as it's open-source and community-maintained. If Linux adopted the MS driver model, Linux users would be constantly having to throw away perfectly good hardware whenever a vendor decides to not bother issuing updated drivers for new kernel versions.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[serviscope_minor]

TSRs

Yeah, people did use DOS for the filesystem access, so providing a TSR that hacked that layer allowed any program to access files on the CD.

I forgot about the mouse driver. That was some what standard by the end.

From memory, sound cards notably didn't have drivers built-in, or rather the only startup programs they had just set the ports and interrupts the cards used. (i.e. sb16set)

And then the programs tweaked the registers of the cards manually given that info. IOW they had the drivers built into the programs.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Grishnakh]

No, it doesn't. Yes, it does use the Linux kernel, however many drivers in Android are closed-source. It's a real problem for community versions of Android like CyanogenMod, because this means you can only run some hardware on a certain kernel version, because you only have access to a closed-source binary driver. It's been a problem with a lot of other embedded ARM hardware too.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[BadDreamer]

And the reason you get a BSOD in Windows when you use a cheap peripheral which installed an unsigned driver for a commonly used chipset is - the Windows ABI. Yes really. It's that fucked up.

The same peripheral will not crash Linux. Instead it will use the driver for that chipset in the Linux kernel.

Some of us prefer a model which acts in the interests of consumers. If you consider that a fault, and something which should change, you go ahead and vote with your wallet. Just don't expect others to follow your descent.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Merk42]

So the sale price of software is inversely proportional to its quality?

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[guruevi]

Win.ini could only offer things if the core was already exposed in config.sys and autoexec.bat; 32-bit drivers could not be loaded by Windows and it was pointless to load drivers for windows only as it was easier and more stable to targe DOS.

win3.11 didn't have it's own drivers besides netbeui and other windows crapola but it required a tcpip and network drivers to be loaded in DOS.

Win95 did also have win.ini but already had 16 bit driver support and a registry. However most things still had to be loaded in DOS. This didn't change for desktop systems until windows XP. So when it came out there was no driver support for anything.

The Linux kernel does have a relatively stable API for drivers, I wrote a USB driver for kernel 2.2 which still works for 2.6. Most drivers do not change, there are several in source that work and haven't changed in a decade. Even old nVidia drivers work with current kernels. If you want a binary driver, you may have to write your own shim but that's trivial if you're really bent on protecting your imaginary property.

Some things change but these days all of the common stuff is stable. Sometimes stuff had to be fixed to conform to standards, that happens in windows too although windows rather breaks the standard to support legacy and expects everyone to follow a broken design.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[interval1066]

However, this is not without problems.

Implying the Windows driver model is flawless.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[interval1066]

Trade secrets are serious business, and no company in their right mind will offer them to the world in order to create an open Linux driver...

And yet they do (IBM), becuase there's more than one business model in the world.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[interval1066]

...tightly tied to the kernel, and maintained with it...

I gotta correct ya champ, that's not exactly true, at least in every case. Its true that the kernel maintainers (Torvalds & gang) maintain some drivers with the kernel, but not all. And what do you mean "tightly tied to the kernel"? Are you saying that if Microsoft made a radical change to their "kernel" (three big DLL's is a kernel, who knew?) architecture those drivers would still work? I doubt it. "Tightly" as a loaded word; either you have an architecture that has many parts yet all works together, or you you don't. That they all work in harmony to deliver a satisfactory user experience- is that "tightly" coupled? Oh, and don't get me started on GNU Hurd...

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[TheDarkMaster]

Well, it's their choice, I never said that companies are prohibited from disclosing their trade secrets. But also when you disclose a trade secret he ceases to be a secret, right? Just remember that many companies would like to make drivers for Linux but can not do it because:

a) To do so the developer may have to disclose proprietary methods over which he has no control and which may even be owned by third parties licensed to him;

b) If he can get to the point of producing and distributing the driver, he will have to be forever changing it because the API between kernel and drivers is a moving target, not all companies are willing to be spending money on this.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ol Olsoc]

I think you can get multi-button mice from vendors like logitech that work on a mac out of the box. So I imagine the problem would be better rephrased as "why don't you tell us all about those stupid 1 button mice that apple is still shipping with their stuff"

I have not used a 1 button mouse with a Mac for 15 years now, since the apple pro mouse was introduced in 1999. The last single was the abomination of the USB mouse, the infamous "hockey puck. Full disclosure - The magic mouse actually doesn't have any "buttons" at all, but it works like a regular two button mouse, and any USB mouse fro a PC works great also. That was my point. People saying that Linux has problems with drivers and that the Mac uses one button mice are living before the turn of the century.

As for drivers, I've had much more trouble with Windows regarding drivers, including ones that Linux simply intstalls, but no driver exists any more for Windows, nor any planned. A dead device as far as Windows is concerned, fully functioning in Linux.

In the last month, I've installed Linux on a Toshiba Satellite, an Acer touch-screen laptop, an eePC netbook, a Compaq laptop, and an Acer Desktop. Every driver loaded and worked, every printer, wirelsss USB and network worked fine.

Linux is not your father's Linux. Live in the now.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Grishnakh]

How much device driver programming have you done? It doesn't sound like you've done any, or know what you're talking about.

>Its true that the kernel maintainers (Torvalds & gang) maintain some drivers with the kernel, but not all.

Most drivers are part of the kernel. Any that aren't are "out-of-tree", and are either in the process of being put in the tree (most of these are in the "staging" area), or are not for some dumb reason and their maintainers have to waste time maintaining them separately. In practice, in a normal Linux distro, ALL drivers which a normal user uses for his normal desktop/laptop hardware are part of the kernel, except the Nvidia and ATI proprietary ones (IF the user chooses to use those).

>And what do you mean "tightly tied to the kernel"?

Device drivers call exported functions that are part of the kernel. Those functions have particular arguments. If the interface changes in the kernel, then any drivers which make use of those interfaces must also change. In a fixed API which some detractors call for, these interfaces are fixed and never change. In Linux, the maintainers don't believe in this because it limits flexibility and makes improvements later much harder (you end up creating new interfaces, but also keeping around the old ones for backwards compatibility, leading to code bloat). The way it is now, if they decide they want to add an additional function argument for some piece of hardware, it's no big deal, they just add it in, then modify all the drivers which call that function to add that argument. You can't do that with a fixed API, you have to create a whole new API (e.g., "function_call_V2(a, b, c, ...)").

>Oh, and don't get me started on GNU Hurd...

HURD is a microkernel, which is an entirely different architecture than Linux which is a monolithic kernel.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[LWATCDR]

"This is complete BS. Drivers can be delivered as source and built on the target machine or as binaries with the appropriate packageing."
Which means when you get a kernel update things stop working until you fiddle with the drivers.

I do not see any value of not allowing an ABI. Even if you limited it to just FOSS drivers! I would like it to be universal but even FOSS drivers that are not included in the Kernel become a PITA when you do a update.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[whoever57]

Which means when you get a kernel update things stop working until you fiddle with the drivers.

No, what it means is that you completely failed to understand what the KMOD drivers and DKMS do.

In the case of the former, they ensure that the drivers work over multiple kernel revisions and in the case of the latter, the kernel modules are automatically re-built on boot up.

In neither case do "things stop working".

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[TheDarkMaster]

I see that you failed to understand what I meant.

To begin, you need to read the text of the parent (the one mistakenly marked as "-1 troll"), which makes it clear that one of the reasons for not making a Linux driver is that to be able to do so the developer may have to reveal company trade secrets in the process, like a proprietary and non-obvious way to do an video operation (and without which the driver can not work) on their hardware. or to the driver work he will need to incorporate a technology that his company has licensed from third parties and can not be included in the open source as free software.

Short version: The driver itself is not a trade secret, the methods and knowledge inside him is that may be trade secrets.

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[LWATCDR]

I did.
"You think you want a stable kernel interface, but you really do not, and
you don't even know it. What you want is a stable running driver, and
you get that only if your driver is in the main kernel tree. You also
get lots of other good benefits if your driver is in the main kernel
tree, all of which has made Linux into such a strong, stable, and mature
operating system which is the reason you are using it in the first
place."

I do not agree that the only get this is if your driver is in the main kernel tree.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[chmod a x mojo]

if it is about the drivers not having a stable API / ABI he does have a point though. If a company already has doubts about releasing a driver for Linux, then finds out they have to tweak their driver every couple months when there is another point release they will be more likely to just say screw it and not bother with a driver.

If the API / ABI was stable for a sane set amount of time ( like Win9x / WinNT lifetimes, or even say 1-2 years ) companies probably would invest in building a codebase of drivers.

Hell even the X.org FOSS driver crews could probably be further ahead on their drivers if they didn't constantly have to tweak stuff to match up to the kernel every. single. damn. release.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Khyber]

Application usage of the sound card did not happen without DOS drivers. They most certainly were not an optional thing.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[jd]

Binary drivers exist and are loadable so long as they are properly versioned.

Block drivers can always use FUSE.

Automatic builders can recompile a shim layer with new kernels (or even the git tree version), automatic test harnesses or a repurposed Linux Test Project can validate the shim. You don't need to validate the driver for everykernel, if it's totally isolated from the OS and worked before then it'll remain working.

Automated distributors can then place the binaries in a corporate yum/apt repository.

What has an ABI got to do with it? Only gets in the way of writing clean code.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Trogre]

Man I remember those BT878 cards. Leadtek WinFast 2000 in my case. Terrific cards that, as you say, just worked in Linux.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[uninformedLuddite]

Apparently Basil Brush has been seen on multiple occasions consorting with Cliff Richard, Rolf Harris, and that Jimmy Saville guy. It won't be long until he's in gaol too.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Pigskin-Referee]

Your answer, while well intentioned, is way over simplified. I am in a position that I am able to talk with the person or persons involved in driver development in many companies. The general consensus is that developing a driver or drivers that offer the same usability that the ones developed for Microsoft is just too expensive and time consuming.

I recently had a conversation with a developer from Brother USA. The individual uses Linux on his person PC at home. He explained that one of the major stumbling blocks were the many flavors of *nix that are available. Developing for all of them, especially the niche market ones like FreeBSD is not feasible. With Microsoft, a driver developed for WinXP might very well still work on Win-8.1, whereas in the *nix world, a driver developed for one flavor of Linux is usually useless on another flavor. If the FOSS world came together and developed one uniform driver model that employed a uniform installation routine, etcetera, then the costs of developing drivers for *nix would no longer be the problem that the presently are.

Not mentioned here, but important to remember is that Microsoft develops drivers for many devices on their own. They are usually "universal" drivers, but at least they offer some limited use of the device it was developed for. In some case, even more than the one written by the device's developer. Microsoft also offers "in-house" support for authors attempting to write drivers for its operating system.

It is also worth noting, that in many instances, the operating system does not offer the support that the device needs to operate to begin with. In the FreeBSD word, it took nearly 10 years for them to get support for "n" protocol drivers, and it is still woefully incomplete.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[GuB-42]

Implying the Windows driver model is flawless.

Not at all, there are also many points where the Linux model is better : http://www.linuxfoundation.org...
I think that it is related to the monolithic vs microkernel debate. Each model has its pros and cons, and a lot of potential for flamewars too.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Stan92057]

No sorry your wrong. The FOSS inability and unwillingness to pay for drivers licensing keeps Linux in the dark. Smugness on Linux part not Windows users. FOSS could instantly be a challenge when and if they change their philosophy and business model of free OS paid support. Hows that working?? not good at all. And ya cant use Android or Apple they are closed source OSs just like Windows is.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ol Olsoc]

No sorry your wrong. The FOSS inability and unwillingness to pay for drivers licensing keeps Linux in the dark..

And yet, I have driver issues with Windows, and have not had any with Linux or Mac (except 1 that I'll tell you about) for years. And I've worked with a lot of obscure peripherals.

The only Mac issue was with a High speed scanner that the manufacturers refused to allow to be used on OSX. Talking to them, they were adamant that they hated OSX, and Windows was just "superior" I think they are out of business now, go figure.

But hey - you are the expert. Actually, since you are, I only have empirical evidence of peripherals working under linux. You probably have the list of what doesn't work. I'd love that list.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Stan92057]

And yet I have no driver or any other problem with my windows so your point is what? we going to tit for tat? Linux on the desktop is a crying failure for alot of reason nothing you say can prove me wrong. what is the combined market-share of Linux desktop after 20 plus years of competing with a FREE OS? My list of Linux failures are small. dual monitor,Gaming,inability to run my windows programs on Linux.Thats more then enough reason not to use Linux period the free junk that they say is as good as isnt as good as or even close too but that's that dark area you don't like to talk about or acknowledge. I would use a linux PC as a drone for rendering but nothing more.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ol Olsoc]

And yet I have no driver or any other problem with my windows so your point is what? we going to tit for tat?

Okay - let's not.

Linux on the desktop is a crying failure for alot of reason nothing you say can prove me wrong. what is the combined market-share of Linux desktop after 20 plus years of competing with a FREE OS?

Well, I suppose that you belive that the Toyota Corolla is th ebest care ever made right? It's the most popular car since 2007, therefore it is the best car. The point isn't about it being the best car, or Windows being the best OS because of "market share". A whole lot of us simply think that Windows has alot of problems. I supported it for many years, and yes it does. A lot of problems, every patch Tuesday it rolls out more.

Market share? Installed user base? Do not care one bit. I really don't care what OS is used, and don't try to use market share as the metric. Means almost nothing to a person who uses what they like.

My list of Linux failures are small. dual monitor,

By the way, turns out that is one bit of Linux weirdness. At least in Ubuntu and Mint, when you set up your dual monitor, instead of putting them side by side as in a Windows machine, you place the secondary monitor icon on top of the primary. If you put them side by side, Linux wants to make it a very wide screen and slows things down a lot. Haven't done any dual monitor setups on any other flavor, so can't vouch for how they act.

Gaming,inability to run my windows programs on Linux.

I know what you mean. I haven't been able to get my Mac or Linux programs to run on Windows. I'll spare the WINE bit for the reverse.

Thats more then enough reason not to use Linux period the free junk that they say is as good as isnt as good as or even close too but that's that dark area you don't like to talk about or acknowledge.

Yeah - I keep forgetting about games. Probably because I use my computers for work. But hey, thanks for the short list. I think that your dual monitor problem is solved, the games is a valid issue, and a draw on the Windows programs on Linux, as not everyone is capable of using Wine. Perhaps Linux just isn't for you.

But don't ever make the mistake of thinking that you are some how superior because you use Windows.

Or if you drive a Toyota Corrola - 37.5 million sold since 2007.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Stan92057]

oh did i forget the snobbish attitudes of Linux users, god forbid someone have so fun by playings OMFG a game.....oooooooooo And Wine is a poor poor product. A program that is trying to get users to switch to Linux shouldn't as you say "as not everyone is capable of using Wine." lol We agree to disagree nothing more. If wine was a great product I would have switched years ago but its a poor program Gold,silver,bronze??? WTF is that LOL. Listen you snobs dont want Windows users your heads would pop. So be happy you have an OS unlike any other be happy. But don't cry because not everyone want to be a geek like you.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Ol Olsoc]

oh did i forget the snobbish attitudes of Linux users, god forbid someone have so fun by playings OMFG a game.....oooooooooo And Wine is a poor poor product.

It takes a good bit of work to get some programs working, which is exactly why I said it wasn't for everyone.

A program that is trying to get users to switch to Linux shouldn't as you say "as not everyone is capable of using Wine." lol We agree to disagree nothing more./p>

You mistake me for someone else. I don't give a damn what OS people use. My point was and sitll is that any Windows user who complains about Linux and drivers needs to look at What Microsoft did when they brought out Vista.

Just in case you didn't read that, I wrote:

"When smug Windows users wants to coomplain about Linux drivers, just ask them about how Vista handled drivers.

"Then sit back and listen to the litany of replies blaming everyone else but Microsoft. Meanwhile a lot of contemporary peripherals were just unusable. ALthough they still worked on Linux.

And you proved my point exactly Running off into non-sequitar land, instead of addressing one of the biggest issues in Vista, lack of drivers for contemporary equipment. I had a linux system rammend down my throat, and it was an interesting day when I had to tell the rammers that the yneeded to replace all their peripherals because Vista didn't have hte capability to run their printers, scanners, and a few other items.

By going on some tangent about how I am wrong, how popular Windows is and it's market share, how awful Linux is, and how awful Wine is, And games? My god man You provd my point exactly, and you admit you don't have much experience in Linux.

If wine was a great product I would have switched years ago but its a poor program Gold,silver,bronze??? WTF is that LOL.

First, Ihave no idea what you mean with "Gold/Silver Bronze," but I fear I owe you an apology. I haven't seen "LOL" used in years, and fear I might be discussing technical matters with a kid. Okay let's let you off the hook here. Yeah, Linux is a lousy OS, not a driver for anything to be found, and I should be ashamed for not using the more popular and cool Operating system, which is obviously a whole lot better because a whole lot of people use it - what was I thinking?

Now you can tell your middle school friends you won an argument with some geek on Slashdot." lol".........

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[toddestan]

The next big push may be high resolution. Things get different when you have to start pushing beyond 2M pixels (which modern desktops can do without a sweat). Try playing a modern game on a 4K monitor, for example. Now, if we could only get the monitor manufacturers to start cranking out some really high resolution desktop displays. You would think they would, but they still seem to be stuck in a 100DPI world. The few 4K screens out there are a nice start, but the resolution/DPI king is still the IBM T221 which has been out of production for nearly a decade now...

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Bing Tsher E]

Geesh, I feel like I am back in the .advocacy newsgroups of the mid 90's. Fun example.

I guess we want these fun-fest topics on Slashdot. For some reason.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Bing Tsher E]

The corollary is, though, that if I don't use 'cheap peripherals' with unsigned drivers I won't have problems. I've never, ever had a BSOD incident on the machine I presently use. I haven't had one that I can recall in about a decade.

Which leads me to believe that it's not a problem because of the Windows ABI, but because of the cheap peripheral vendor who wrote the unsigned driver.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Bing Tsher E]

OMG. You used DOS 4.0?

The rest of us held onto 3.3 until they fixed the problem by coming out with 5.0. Oh, you could use 4.0.1 from some of the OEMs, but not many of us were stupid enough to want to.

PC-DOS 4.0 was even worse than Microsoft's MS-DOS 4.0.

Are you sure you used 4.0, and it was multitasking? What were you using, DesqView? Hopefully not TopView.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[Bing Tsher E]

For old times sake, I played an MS-DOS game, Duke Nukem 3D, on DOSBox earlier this week. It has an install.exe program that you have to run to tell the main executable which hardware I/O port, Interrupt, and DMA interrupt the sound card uses. Then you run a little test within the program that plays a test sound, and it spits out a .cfg file when it exits.

DOXBox is actually built to emulate a PC, with DOS, and the appropriate drivers for the sound card installed, so the Duke Nukem game can simply blat out data to the I/O port and listen on the interrupts it's informed to use.

But on real PC hardware you'd need to have a reference like 'device=v:\sb16drv.sys 220,7,1' in your config.sys file.

Some of us still deal with this stuff to a certain degree. At my job I get to be the expert who can quickly change out a floppy drive in a box, or get the fan on the power supply spinning again. They still uses shitty old 486 boxes with ISA data acq. cards in them in the test lab. The test engineer maintains the test software, which is written in GWBasic. I've never been able to convince him to even try updating to QBasic (which would almost certainly 'just work') so that he could strip most of the line numbers out and use a full screen editor and have much more readable code. So he tweaks cycle counts, stepper motor steps, etc. using the crummy line editor in GWBasic. He's probably going to retire in the next few years.

Re: Nobody else seems to want it

[Bing Tsher E]

My bet is that 4K just isn't going to sell. But that's my wholesale position based more on geopolitical and economic terms than technically.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[BadDreamer]

I truly wish that was the case. Sadly, the problem can and will appear with signed drivers written by reputable vendors as well. It just isn't as common with them.

And the corollary is actually about peripheral support. Since developing and releasing a driver requires effort and money to code and test properly as well as a cost to sign, older peripherals will seldom, if ever, get updated drivers as newer models enter the market and - more crucially - as Windows changes and driver changes would increase stability, or are required for the peripheral to function properly.

This problem simply does not exist in the Linux driver model. I can still use my 1990's Epson parallel port scanner in Linux, just plug in and it works. That scanner has had no Windows drivers since Windows 2000. And it works just as well as a modern USB consumer scanner, so why should I have to go buy a new one simply because Epson will not develop drivers for it?

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[nobodie]

hf, dear old friend, most of us who do use Linux are clueless about this driver problem you harp on about. We just don't see it. Now, someone has modded you down as a troll, which I think is unfair, because it is just you being you, and you really aren't a troll, you're just very tightly focused.

Robert A Wilson pointed out in his book "Final Trigger" that people have a basic instinct to find patterns, even where there are none. He pointed to a number of examples, but this over-focus of yours is my prime example for today: there is no "driver problem" with Linux, there is only your pattern rocognition brain sectors seeing what you "need" them to see.

I hope this helps, because you don't deserve to be modded troll, even though you did go a little over the top.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[hairyfeet]

"Are you saying that if Microsoft made a radical change to their "kernel" (three big DLL's is a kernel, who knew?) architecture those drivers would still work?"

YES because you can use 32bit WDM drivers right now on 32bit Windows 8.1, you can even take Win2K drivers and use them right now in 8.1, as I have used WinXP RTM drivers in Win 7 SP1, that is 14 years of working drivers to choose from. Meanwhile you can't even use 4 year old drivers in Linux without black screen o death and after 8 years not a single mainstream Linux OS can pass the Hairyfeet Challenge which simulates just FIVE YEARS of support, less than half of what you get with Windows.....HAND.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[hairyfeet]

Show me a distro that will pass the Hairyfeet Challenge, which just FYI simulates HALF of a Windows support cycle, that is a lousy 5 years...you can't do it, because they will ALL shit on their own drivers and fail. the closest ANY FOSS zealot was able to get was by using fricking SCI-Linux, a specialty distro built for research labs (and therefor breaking the first requirement, a mainstream consumer distro) and even after breaking the very first requirement he FAILED because at the end of the challenge? He didn't have functional sound AND the wireless wouldn't even be recognized by the OS...nice.

The challenge is free, takes less than 4 hours start to finish, and gives several advantages to Linux over Windows such as no requirement to support mobile phones or printers yet NO LINUX CAN PASS what honestly should be the absolute minimum that should be acceptable to consider yourself a functional OS, to be able to update without destroying yourself. Just FYI I can do this on Win2K and pass, from RTM to EOL, from XP from RTM to EOL, and on Vista through 8.1 from RTM to current.

So if you truly believe what you are saying? Then film yourself taking the Hairyfeet Challenge and post the results to Dropbox. But I have a feeling this is the last we will be hearing from you because every person who has had the guts to take the challenge and respond has either come back with "but but but...its not fair to expect Linux to actually work!" excuses for why their OS can't even provide the most basic of functionality, or the few truly honest ones who said "Ok you are right, this is an issue because I can't get my distro to pass" which is usually followed by them going to the forum of said distro to point this out only to be attacked for not guzzling the koolaid.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[hairyfeet]

If your failure of an OS can't even pass HALF of what Windows can? admit its a failure and STFU. I'm standing here, throwing down the gauntlet and saying your shit OS can't even provide HALF of what fricking Windows Vista can...who is gonna prove me wrong? As for saying I'll change the rules? I can't, they are posted and so simple..well a FOSSie can understand them.

Pick ANY mainstream consumer Linux, PCLOS, Ubuntu, Mint, the only requirement is that it had to exist 5 years ago otherwise it can't simulate a 5 year cycle can it? As for mainstream, distrowatch has a list of the top whatever mainstream distros, listed under "user friendly"...take your choice, pick your poison, they all suck. Then make sure you have working drivers INCLUDING a wireless that can use WPA V2 and then update to current...that's it. NO printer support, NO mobile devices, simply show the world your OS is capable of the most limited of functionality, what frankly should be the baseline for even calling yourself an OS, the ability to apply security updates without shitting yourself...and YOU CAN NOT DO IT because the linux driver model is THAT shitty, it really truly is.

So PROVE ME WRONG, make me eat my words. the challenge is free, takes less than 4 hours, and no requirements on the hardware other than the most basic, sound, video, and wireless...that's it, that's all.

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[nobodie]

hf, if your challenge is so realistic then why are so many companies running various distros? Why have I run a variety (say 8 or 10) of different distros in 4 or 5 different countries with different hardware and never, ever had a driver problem with any hardware? What is it in your challenge that you use to set a use case that would overcome the basic needs of a business person (me) a university professor (also me) and a parent with a wife and 3 kids all running Linux for home work and school (obviously also me.)

I really don't get why you feel the need to get all trolly about it as well. I have heard you being reasonable, intelligent and someone with useful viewpoints that, while not my own, are still valuable. What you are doing above is none of that. Why bother to be like this when you impressed me most as a reasonable and intelligent commentator?

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[nobodie]

as to your basic "challenge", the computer sitting next to me is a core2 duo that I built in Thailand in 2007. I thas been running Fedora since then, and nothing else. I upgrade it when new ones are released using the upgrade tools. Still works, all works, runs everything fine, never broken once. Does that satisfy?

Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[strikethree]

I predict that a current generation mainline i7 and i5 will be sufficient for any "desktop" task more or less for ever (or until we move away from a physical interface like keyboard / mouse and touchscreens).

Do not confuse the current state of stagnation with what will actually happen. You could have said the same thing about web browsers back in the IE6 days: It does everything that is needed and there is no more advancement in sight.

Things WILL change. More processing power will be needed. Current paradigms (not buzzword bingo paradigms) will become outmoded. New ways of programming and solving problems will come to pass. Tomorrow? No. The market has been captured and is being thoroughly raped. It can not stay this way forever though.

Why focus on the desktop?

[timrod]

Linux has so much going for it in the device market that I don't see why Linus doesn't just double down on it. The future of Linux seems to make more sense as a kernel used for other things (like Android) rather than trying to break into the standalone desktop OS market.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

The desktop is something that a user interacts with every day. That extended usage turns into familiarity with the processes, limitations, and querks of a technology. That familiarity turns into a desire to develop new functionality or to conquer limitations which breeds developers.

Without that Linux will always have a high barrier to entry, a steep learning curve, and a niche audience.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Your.Master]

What's he doubling down though? That term implies some stakes are being allocated.

It goes on to say he doesn't think the desktop is a kernel problem. Well, that kind of means he's not spending specific resources on desktop, which means that wanting the desktop doesn't contradict "doubling down" on the device market.

The actual part of the article that talks about investing is when he talked about shrinking Linux and about addressing the embedded market.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[bulled]

Because Linux started as a project to fill a need he had, a Desktop OS that he could afford as a student. I presume he wants to see the desktop continue to because he still wants to work with one and I applaud that because I do as well.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[TechyImmigrant]

>rather than trying to break into the standalone desktop OS market.

It's there and dominant in a whole host of industries. The western world would collapse if Linux ceased being available on the desktop. For example we couldn't make chips.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Charliemopps]

Linux has so much going for it in the device market that I don't see why Linus doesn't just double down on it. The future of Linux seems to make more sense as a kernel used for other things (like Android) rather than trying to break into the standalone desktop OS market.

Where would you code the kernel without the desktop? On your tablet?

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[bird]

We need a free desktop OS. Linux is the only contender.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because unless Linus reins in all the different variations of Linux distros into some kind of "one Linux" , there never will be a Linux desktop.

Hell there still is no such thing as a Linux Desktop. ChromeOS, FirefoxOS aren't desktops, and KDE/Gnome don't work with each other without both being installed.

Like it's somewhat ironic in a way, that to get a Linux Desktop, you need to install everyone's flavor-of-the-week libraries and frameworks, so you end up with a much more bloated mess than had you simply developed the application for OS X if you needed UNIX support or Windows if it's not important.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Kjella]

Well first of all Linus has never been overly concerned with market share, just building a technically damn good kernel so I doubt this will have much practical influence on his work. It's got to be frustrating though, Linux works on massively huge and complex servers. It works on the smallest mobile and embedded devices. But a regular desktop that from the kernel's side is rather simple, one CPU and usually one GPU and pretty much no exotic devices (from the kernel side all USB devices look the same, for example) and no absurd limits being pushed in any direction.

I think the last real significant desktop feature was when they increased interactivity by changing the default time slice from 100 Hz to 1000 Hz and that was in 2004 or so. Heck, I would say it was at least as ready as the BSD kernel was when Apple created OS X in 2001. It's quite telling that the one thing Google did not want to rewrite when they made Android was the kernel. All else they ripped out and replaced with Apache licensed code, but not that. Well that and a bunch of Google proprietary APIs, but that's another flame war. I think I'd feel just the same in his shoes.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[mrbcs]

Bingo. We have a winner!

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[worf_mo]

We need a free desktop OS. Linux is the only contender.

Is that so?

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[gbjbaanb]

Its true, and the reason that happens is (partly) because those devices are pretty fixed hardware, hence pretty fixed device driver requirements.

When you go to most desktops you have to support a lot of different bits of kit, which Linux does support, but the lack of a stable kernel interface for drivers makes vendor support difficult (to them), and as a result, you get sub-standard drivers for a lot of devices

the PC became popular because you could mix and match whatever you wanted to put in there, upgrades for everything. Until you can go to the shops and buy a new graphics card and install the driver that came with it (because the vendor refuses to open source their driver) then Linux will never be fully ready for the desktop.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[phmadore]

Because we want students at public schools using free software and learning to hack it, and without a desktop takeover, that's not going to seem viable for anyone.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[phmadore]

You're postulating that the majority of cloud-based operating systems are not going to be GNU/Linux based over the next decade? Now that's laughable.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[tepples]

Well first of all Linus has never been overly concerned with market share, just building a technically damn good kernel

Without a substantial usage share, it's hard to find affordable hardware on which to run "a technically damn good kernel".

and no absurd limits being pushed in any direction.

Other than the political limits of obtaining cooperation from hardware manufacturers and application developers.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Lisias]

Because he needs a functional to develop the Kernel! :-)

He used to use Gnome Desktop 2, and I prefer not to reproduce what he said when Gnome 3 was spilled out from the Gnome Foundation.

(and I totally agree with him)

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Lisias]

[...]Moving from Snow Leopard to Lion was my greatest mistake. Up to that point I had been a satisfied, kool-aid drinking, cash-spending Appletard.

I totally agree. I miss Snow Leopard very much. Lion was a piece of shit.

I'm currently using Mavericks, and I finally started to like Mac OS again - but I still miss Snow Leopard. Apple managed to dumb down the Mac OS X to a level that, frankly, offends me : why I can't use Expose? I was happy with it.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[exomondo]

Um, OS X is free. Yes, as in Beer.

Also the kernel is libre so there's nothing to stop you building a userland (or re-purposing an existing one) to run atop Darwin.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[brantondaveperson]

Let's not be silly. OSX is free if you steal it. More power to you for doing so, but don't pretend that building a 'hackintosh' and running an illegal copy of OSX on it makes OSX free.

Re: Why focus on the desktop?

[exomondo]

Fair point, yes I believe OS X apps are mostly reliant on proprietary frameworks but that said Darwin is certainly a viable alternative - kernel-wise - to Linux and has a stable ABI.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Gothmolly]

Also the pre-emptible kernel, but it's the same basic type of kernel improvement - creating a more fluid experience for the GUI user.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[aaronb1138]

Embracing the device world and abandoning the desktop means exclusive large sources of cash and interested parties who would take control of the kernel from Linus. That's why he needs the desktop to stay alive as a dream. Red Hat, IBM, and Apache are probably the only ones with any clout keeping Samsung and Google from digging deep and streamlining the kernel for ARM / mobile device use exclusively.

I wouldn't even blame Google, Samsung, et. al. if they did decide to just flat out fork the kernel completely and drop the cruft. Hopefully they would bring an ABI driver framework with them.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[aaronb1138]

Horribly ineffective, but that hasn't stopped the iOS fandom from embracing the iPad as a poor substitute for a content creation device, including software development.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[epyT-R]

of course, in order for your 'corporate social media' hipster morons to do this, it requires a phalanx of software engineers working on desktops to maintain it all. Then there're all the limitations that come from doing all your work within a javascript application. If your entire workflow can be done on 'the cloud', then you aren't doing very much at all.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Tough Love]

Well, Gnome always was a piece of crap in terms of internal structure and finally that project is imploding. About time. KDE/QT always was the technically superior approach and with Gnome fading it does look like we are heading in the right direction. Of course, we a monoculture would be horribly counterproductive for long term evolution, but there is obviously no danger of that.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Tough Love]

...Linus has never been overly concerned with market share...

Other than being bent on world domination?

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Barsteward]

seems like most proprietary OS supporters are thieves, windows users steal software all the time. looks like only open source supporters are ethical

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Barsteward]

" there never will be a Linux desktop."

because linux is a kernel, any desktop system that uses linux as its base OS is by definition a "linux desktop"

"KDE/Gnome don't work with each other without both being installed.

bollox, you only need some libraries from either system not fully installed desktops if you want to use a gnome app on KDE (can you do that with OSX and Windows without installing a virtual machine?).

"you need to install everyone's flavor-of-the-week libraries and frameworks, so you end up with a much more bloated mess"

again bollox

"so .... you simply developed the application for OS X if you needed UNIX support or Windows if it's not important." so simply develop the app for KDE or Gnome if its too complicated a paradigm for you.

Re: Why focus on the desktop?

[macs4all]

Actually, statistically speaking, Mac users have a pretty good record overall when it comes to being ethical, with shareware and commercial apps. And before someone wants a citation, I can,t remember where I read that, but I definitely did.

But, we ALL also have read our share of Linux users on these comment-pages that believe that paying for software (and I don't mean FOSS) is something that doesn't apply to them.

You're right about one thing, though: Windows users, by and large, are the hands-down biggest software thieves on the planet!

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[JackieBrown]

>rather than trying to break into the standalone desktop OS market.

It's there and dominant in a whole host of industries. The western world would collapse if Linux ceased being available on the desktop. For example we couldn't make chips.

But the eastern world would be ok?

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[TechyImmigrant]

>rather than trying to break into the standalone desktop OS market.

It's there and dominant in a whole host of industries. The western world would collapse if Linux ceased being available on the desktop. For example we couldn't make chips.

But the eastern world would be ok?

Yes. They have good bread and public transit.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[TechyImmigrant]

Well if it does, they can just give up and go to the baker on foot.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Richy_T]

It's not just the desktop. Even a headless install tends to drag half a dozen scripting languages in with it.

Re: Why focus on the desktop?

[Barsteward]

"we ALL also have read our share of Linux users on these comment-pages that believe that paying for software (and I don't mean FOSS) is something that doesn't apply to them"

i think you live in an alternative dimension with a bollox comment like that

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[TechyImmigrant]

Layout tools, Schematic capture, logic simulators, analog and mixed signal simulators, P&R, floorplanning etc, etc.
The all have a GUI that needs to be used.

What's notable is that with all these tools, the specific ones I use in the company I work for making big-ass chips, precisely none of them work on a windows desktop. You either run them locally or remotely on a Linux desktop. As time goes on they tend to drop support for older unixes. I don't know anyone who runs these on anything except Linux these days and windows is just a platform to run X or VNC to get to the desktop of the Linux box running the tools.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

If they are happy then why should it bother you?

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Bing Tsher E]

Linux started as a project to fill a need he had, a Desktop OS that he could afford as a student.

If Microsoft had been more evil at the time, they would have shipped Linus a shiny brand-new Sun 386i with SunOS on it as a gift and smothered Linux in the crib.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Bing Tsher E]

Windows is just a platform to read emails from your boss and check Outlook to see if there are any meetings today.

I did once see an oscilloscope (a Tektronix one!) that ran embedded Windows 98. It was creepy watching it boot up.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Lisias]

why I can't use Expose? I was happy with it.

Good question since it still exists as Mission Control.

If it's there, it's very well hidden. I stil can't find a way to use Mission Control in the same way I used to use Expose. :-)

From my point of view, isn't there.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Lisias]

Similar story here. Until they bring back scrollbars and the ability to own a copy of the OS on physical media I wont be going back to the Mac

You can copy the DMS into a Pen drive and install the thing from there. It works, I managed to install it on a VM.

You can even burn it on a DVD, I was told, but I didn't tried it.

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Lisias]

I was using Snow Leopard, but when I needed Java 7 and there was no easy or official way for me to install it without upgrading I decided it was time to move on.

Not a bad move. Java 8 broke a lot of java applications on MacOS . Of course it's still possible to run it (it's Java, goddann!) but Oracle managed to break something important on the OS integration - I can launch some programs from Finder anymore, I need to open a terminal window and invoke the launching script from there.

However, this time it's Oracle's fault, not Apple's.

Apple is catering to the lowest common denominator (iPhone users) with OSX. They're not interested in returning control to power users because their proportion of the install base is so small and their requirements so large.

Yes, we can sit around and complain about how Snow Leopard is so great and how Apple is ruining newer OSes with watered down settings and crappy interfaces, or you can actually do something about it. I know what I did.

Well, I did something about it *AND* I will keep bitching about it. I'm not the type of guy that allows anyone to take my money without a fight. :-)

MacOS are, still, be best tool for my job. The U.I. is sucking here and there, but I installed X11 and Windowmaker using Macports to deal with the exceptions.

(And the hardware are pretty good - I must give that to them)

Re:Why focus on the desktop?

[Lisias]

DMS => DMG

(sorry the typo)

Oh, the timing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Working out of a coffee shop - just hit the slashdot page when one of the passer-bys looked over my shoulder and said "Slashdot? Is that site still around? Are they still talking about the Year of Linux on the Desktop?" ... and then we noticed the first story simultaneously...

Re:Oh, the timing...

[namgge]

And a techie's definition of 'working', i.e. drinking coffee and reading slashdot is still the same too.

Re:Oh, the timing...

[geekmux]

Working out of a coffee shop - just hit the slashdot page when one of the passer-bys looked over my shoulder and said "Slashdot? Is that site still around? Are they still talking about the Year of Linux on the Desktop?" ... and then we noticed the first story simultaneously...

You should have just told them that Linus is looking to give Duke Nukem Forever a run for the record. I'm sure they remember that one too.

Re:Oh, the timing...

[Master Moose]

And a techie's definition of 'working', i.e. drinking coffee and reading slashdot is still the same too.

You mean I am not paid to do *this*?

Re:Oh, the timing...

[Barsteward]

i'd fucking hope it was a customer if i was really working in a coffee shop

Re:Oh, the timing...

[WuphonsReach]

And a techie's definition of 'working', i.e. drinking coffee and reading slashdot is still the same too.

Which tends to involve reading about technologies that you are not already familiar with, or getting information about finer points explained. In sales-speak, just another form of "continuing education".

It used to be much better. Someone would post an article about new technology X (such as Xen or KVM or HyperV) and you'd get 50-100 modded-up posts detailing what it is good for, why to use it, why not to use it, and anecdotes about how well or poorly it works in reality.

These days, I only read 10-20% of the articles, and only briefly browse the comments (usually at 3+ or 4+ scores).

Re:Oh, the timing...

[Hemogoblin]

Thanks for this, so accurate it made me actually laugh out loud. I'm sitting at my desk drinking coffee, reading a year of the Linux desktop story and thinking about the "good old days". I raise my coffee to you, cheers!

Logged in for the first time since 2012 to write this :)

Re:Oh, the timing...

[CauseBy]

Yeah, the Year Of Linux On The Desktop, I remember it well. And then after that, those planes crashed into the twin towers and we went to war. Good times, good times.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[i_ate_god]

perhaps you can enlighten us as to why he's wrong, and what the linux kernel has to do to better support desktop environments?

Chrome OS or Android

[Henriok]

I think Chrome OS or Android is the only way to go. Both Apple and Microsoft is trying to go in the same direction, and hide all the arcane intricacies and really simplify the computing experience for the common computer user. To varying degrees of success, I must admit, but I think it's the way forward for most of the users.

Re:Chrome OS or Android

[jcdr]

Actually Chrome OS or Android are toys compared to a full desktop experience. Gnome 3 and Unity has go into the direction of toys for simple applications resulting in the frustration if so much users that projects like XFCE and Mate get attention like never before.

Would be awesome

[penguinoid]

Would also require that people be able to run most of the apps they want in Linux. Note that though this has long been a problem, the increase in web-based apps is slowly eroding the relevance of any specific OS. Even for games, though the quality of web-based games will always be inferior. And (nearly) everyone likes to play games.

Re: Would be awesome

[cyber-vandal]

Why does point and click make the OS less reliable? In any case there's been a GUI free version for 5 years if you want to put yourself through that.

Re: Would be awesome

[TWX]

The problems with point-and-click, as I see them, are first that there's generally less understanding of the underlying configuration and how things actually work, second that people that really aren't qualified to be administrators end up playing admin and doing a poor job of it, and third, a pretty GUI is meaningless in the way most server functions work, and the entire underbelly could be a disgusting morass of barely-functional code that is chock-full of vulnerabilities or bugs but sells because the untrained buy it based on its prettiness rather than on how solid it is.

Re: Would be awesome

[kesuki]

What really kills open source is that it doesn't have a functional GUI or a dearth of useful apps. It is because it doesn't have what marketing is looking for, vendor lock in for not giving competitors access to the same tools/data sets. It doesn't guarantee high profits, on low margins. It doesn't offer a user base of clueless clickers, who will pay because everyone else is charging for software, and think software means paying money...

Re: Would be awesome

[gothzilla]

"What really kills open source is that it doesn't have a functional GUI or a dearth of useful apps. "

Every couple years or so I check to see if we can replace MS Office in our company. I grabbed some of the larger, more complex word and excel docs we use here and tried to open them. Every time I try, all of the alternatives fall on their faces within the first few minutes of testing. In a business, if you can't replace MS Office then you're not replacing Windows with Linux.

Re: Would be awesome

[tepples]

Try opening some of the larger, more complex Pages and Numbers docs and seeing what Word and Excel do with them. Or try opening Word and Excel, saving your complex documents in ODF, and opening them in LibreOffice for Windows. Let me know if that works any better.

Re: Would be awesome

[cyber-vandal]

And config files offer a way to screw up that makes it really hard to find the error, depending on how well the config file is designed. I prefer a combination of both personally. Sometimes it's easier to hack a config file (which Windows has plenty of believe it or not) and sometimes it's easier to do right-click -> Properties and tick a couple of boxes.

Re:Would be awesome

[epyT-R]

Web apps will always be second class to local applications and data. In terms of access control they can't be beat.

Re: Would be awesome

[brantondaveperson]

That's a very good point - and the argument that word and excel can't be replaced in a business environment is increasingly untrue. Not that they'll be replaced with behemoths like libreOffice - we've pretty much replaced them with google docs and an installation of confluence. I haven't opened word to write a document for quite a long time, and I certainly don't miss it.

Re: Would be awesome

[gothzilla]

I would if that had anything to do with our business. If we recieved docs like that from customers or business partners then of course I'd have to set up a way for us to use them. We don't though. I've never seen anything but MS Office docs come into this business, so there's no reason nor point to do the test you describe.

In business you use what works and what fills your needs. In my testing in this business, every alternative to MS Office fails testing. That is all that matters.

Linux could own the desktop...

[WaywardGeek]

All Google has to do is dump that stupid steaming pile called ChromeOS, and admit that Android wins. A desktop customized version of Android (complete with a real desktop) is still based on Linux (at least Google's fork of it), already has hundreds of thousands of apps, and could be better in nearly every way than Windows or Mac OS-X in 2 years, IMO.

The other broken OS, GNU/Linux, needs a major overhaul before it will ever be popular among anyone but geeks who are willing to accept that their OS is hostile to sharing new apps, or too blinded by fan-boy-ism to notice. I write this from my Ubuntu laptop, where my code contributions are far lower than Android or even Windows, even though I put in most of my effort here. It's just easier to publish an Android app. It's even easier to publish software for Windows. If Mark Shuttleworth were just a bit smarter, I think he'd realize he needs to abandon managing .deb packages and start this whole mess over based on a more git-like aproach. He's done a lot in that direction - user PPAs for example, but it's still not there. No RPM or .deb based Linux OS will ever become the basis for the Year of the Linux Desktop.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[geekoid]

Chrome OS and Android are different things that have a different focus.

" needs a major overhaul"
what needs top be overhauled?
Publishing apps for Linux is trivial? Or do you mean having a company that can hold you hand?

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[NotInHere]

True, its too hard for most new open source software to become accepted by debian. I like it rather this way than the microsoft app store way: full of scamware. That doesn't mean I like it the way it is right now. I agree think that desktop linux is only something for geeks and the only-mail-and-internet grandma. Still I use kubuntu.

KDE shouldn't waste their resources to redesign with every release, but they should rather work on exposing more system features through the GUI, and make it more stable. The average user shouldn't need to use the console.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[rasmusbr]

If that's the case, then why is it that every single time I find out about some interesting software I have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a reasonably up to date version of that software?

This is on the latest version of Ubuntu.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[jcdr]

Packaging is a very big achievement. Even Android use packaging with APK file. Really, packaging is not the problem. I remember systems before packaging, this was a nightmare. Never return to this hell...

The problem is to have popular tools able to build and publish proper *.deb package as easy as for *.apk packages. For example a good IDE where you find a "new C++ Debian package" button (and others language option of course), fill a simple form and start coding your application from a functional template. Then a "build" button should create the *.deb package and you should be able to debug it. The IDE should have a "Add Debian repository" button with a simple form to create a remote Debian repository using FTP or SSH. Finally the IDE should be able to publish your packages in your remote repository. Like for Android, the IDE should be able to build package compatible with a choice of releases.

From my point of view, the packaging is not the problem. The lack of competitive developers tools advancement in the Linux distribution compared to Android is in my opinion far more the root cause if the problem. While structured very differently, *.deb and *.apk packages target almost the same goals from the system and user point of view.

The situation in creating and publishing *.deb package is actually like if you create and publish *.apk packages all by hand using a lot of command line, instead of a easy and shiny IDE.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[jcdr]

Making Debian package of your application never require that it is accepted by the Debian project. You can maintain your own packages repository where you can publish your Debian packaged applications. If your application became popular and is open source, you will certainly get new contributors motivated in maintaining your application into the Debian distribution.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[tepples]

So... an app system full of useless trivial apps that have really stupid permissions to my box

Are you aware of what permissions a .deb has to the user accounts on your box?

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[visualight]

Yup.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[tepples]

Then perhaps I'm not sure what you meant by "really stupid permissions".

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[Richard Elmore]

So you're saying, take an OS and application model designed around single screen touch based devices and port that to multi-monitor PCs that don't have touch screen but have mice and keyboards instead; and you think that will be a user experience that people will love?

Didn't some other software company try that recently and it sucked?

Just sayin'

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[jones_supa]

I can already see in my mind how that kind of development system would break after some development package gets upgraded:

In bubblegum-wrapper.py, line 1208:
deb-pkg: Invalid argument: --no-externals

When Windows programs use robust binary interfaces, Linux programs always use this kind of fragile backend scripts.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[shutdown -p now]

To be more specific, what they need to do with Android is what Microsoft is doing with the next version of Windows (for store apps): put a full-fledged multi-window desktop there, complete with a taskbar/dock, and allow it to run existing Android apps in resizable, closeable windows. They already have fairly decent mouse support in Android, in fact (and the browser even understands hover), and most apps aren't that bad with a mouse, either. They just need to make the core UI around the same, and make it an official Android platform, so that people writing apps keep it in mind when doing UX design.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[Barsteward]

can you visualise KDE 1.0 or 2.0 (or 3.0 ?) working on a tablet?

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[jcdr]

You don't need to use backend script to package a binary. The *.preinst , *:postinst , *.prerm and *.postrm scripts are all optional. Many packages contains only a compressed archive and a simple "control" file.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[jones_supa]

Actually I meant that the development system which creates the package would break in the aforementioned way.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[jareth-0205]

All Google has to do is dump that stupid steaming pile called ChromeOS, and admit that Android wins.

I'd agree but one thing needs to happen first... a desktop-class webbrowser that includes Flash. Before that... it just can't compete. I had various Android laptops and tablets, and they're great, but if I want to browse the internet like a normal person, I still really need to use the Chromebook or a PC. Not having Flash (/having to work around the fact) and a limited webbrowser (slower javascript, not a full set of keyboard control) gets tiring very quickly.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[jcdr]

It's not realistic to get a such deb-pkg error from a python wrapper is you wanted to create a package containing only a binary application.

I have packaged many binary applications without any problem, this is in fact the most easy way to create a package. The tools to do that are well tested and reliable.

This process is nothing related on how you have compiled and linked your binary application. In some project this includes some horrible hack to link proprietary binary libraries compiled with old or unusual compiler. If you get the stage where the result work, then packaging it is trivial.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[NotInHere]

OK, that's a point where KDE 4.0 got better, but still no multitouch gestures. I've tried to scroll or pitch on my KDE 4.13 netbook, and it didn't work, while it is advertised that my touchscreen supports up to 10 distinct points.

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[Barsteward]

so did KDE waste resources in the redesign?

Re:Linux could own the desktop...

[NotInHere]

OK, you convinced me, they didn't waste them in that particular release. But still I'm against too frequent redesigns: they make the life of those harder, who aren't too comfortable with computers and don't use it by understanding the labels, but by memorizing "clickpaths": lower left corner of the screen, third entry, second entry, in the window the icon with the computer screen, and so on.
Unfortunately these people are the majority.

And I want...

[prisoner-of-enigma]

And I want a week long orgy with the Victoria's Secret supermodels, but I'm intelligent to know the likelihood of that happening is pretty damned small. Linus should be exhorbitantly happy Linux has made the inroads it has in the server and mobile markets. Desktop, if it ever does follow, will probably not resemble "desktop" as we now know it.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[Anonymous Coward]

A stable binary driver interface would help for starters.

Well, you have mine.

[doti]

My desktop computer at home is running Linux for more than a decade now.

Re:Well, you have mine.

[bswarm]

Since 9.04!

Re:Well, you have mine.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should reboot more often than that.

Re:Well, you have mine.

[Flavianoep]

Without never shutting down or rebooting? O.o

Re:Well, you have mine.

[jasno]

Yep... and my work machine as well. It all depends on the apps you use. If you are like most people nowadays and only need a web browser then Linux is probably sufficient as a desktop OS.

I should admit that my work desktop does host a windows 7 VM, but that's only because my company chose an IE-only solution for our timetracking tool.

Re:Well, you have mine.

[Zero__Kelvin]

Yes. Without never shutting down or rebooting.

Re:Well, you have mine.

[spacefight]

Right, so is mine. Even though a fresh Ubunutu 14.04 install is still not handling multi monitor setups flawless, and by that I mean that I don't want fullscreen video on the other screen from where it launched, same with gtk apps, wrong QT tooltip color schemes and what not....

Re:Well, you have mine.

[Flavianoep]

Mageia (former Mandriva (former Mandrake)) asks me to reboot my computer every three or four months on average to apply updates. On my UMPC with Kubuntu, I am asked to reboot about once a month for the same reason. Anyway, it's better than rebooting once a week.

Re:Well, you have mine.

[BringsApples]

Same here, Slackware (14.0 now) at that, running KDE (installed by default). I work with many clients using this as well. I can connect to their windows servers via remote desktop (KRDC) (installed by default) if need be. I haven't had any issue conversing with, and/or sharing notes with any microsoft office users, (calligra suite) (installed by default). I'm browsing with firefox (installed by default), run my own email server (sendmail) (installed by default) and view mail with thunderbird (installed by default). Sometimes if I leave k3b (DVD burning software installed by default) open for to long, it causes KDE to go full-on rahtard, and has been known to require a reboot. Other than that, once you get used to it, and learn a way to do things that produce the results that you're looking for, it's quite nice.

Every time I upgrade to the latest version of slackware, I'm able to simply copy data and I'm right back in business. This matter of having the same data for 10+ years is extremely important to so many people. I wonder how many windows users can say that they have data (and I'm talking about personal files as well as other files, like config files for programs to run as you like them to run - not music, movies etc...) that's 10+ years old. I ran windows for 15+ years prior switching completely to slackware. I ran slackware for more than 6 years before I ever typed 'startx' at a prompt.

I'd also like to point out that fixes for security issues and/or any other update that's required, are almost always released prior to any microsoft fix. Pretty important stuff, especially if you're running any type of server out of your home.

I point all of this out, not out of egoism, but to really say that even running slackware, probably the clunkiest way to run the linux kernel, the X environment is pretty damn stable, and very adapted to the rest of the world. Of course, slackware IS known for it's stability...

Re:Well, you have mine.

[TeknoHog]

My desktop computer at home is running Linux for more than a decade now.

--
factor 966971: 966971

My year of the Linux desktop was 1999. Besides, my UID is _twice_ a prime, so obviously my testicles are larger.

Re:Well, you have mine.

[gigne]

single prime here. i'm glad they are just smaller. Not sure how I would cope with a unibollock

Re:Well, you have mine.

[jones_supa]

If you are like most people nowadays and only need a web browser then Linux is probably sufficient as a desktop OS.

Windows is also sufficient for that...and it also does much, much more.

There's yar problem.

Re:Well, you have mine.

[Barsteward]

reboot for kernel updates or app updates? i never reboot for app updates

Re:Well, you have mine.

[Zero__Kelvin]

The funny part, excepting the fact that you cannot understand what you read, is that I read this on my cellphone, and then opened my laptop and brought it out of sleep mode to respond. ROTFLMAO.

Re:Well, you have mine.

[Rob Riggs]

My primary desktop has been running Linux since November 1994 (Slackware -> Red Hat -> Fedora). We are going to hit the 2 decade mark in a few months.

Re:Well, you have mine.

[monkey999]

Sometimes if I leave k3b (DVD burning software installed by default) open for to long, it causes KDE to go full-on rahtard, and has been known to require a reboot.

You may find you can just restart X. press CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE

Every time I upgrade to the latest version of slackware, I'm able to simply copy data and I'm right back in business. This matter of having the same data for 10+ years is extremely important to so many people.

This is a huge advantage of *nix from a sysadmins PoV; the fact that there is an enforced directory convention, with config data all in /etc, apps in /usr etc. windows has something similar in theory - but it's not enforced and few apps follow it.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[bobbied]

perhaps you can enlighten us as to why he's wrong

I never said he was wrong... Only that he's true to form..

Linux fanboys ftw

[rcht148]

We Are the Linux fanboys.
You Will be Assimilated.
Resistance is Futile.

- Linux fanboy :)

Re:Linux fanboys ftw

[Zero__Kelvin]

I'll grant you that M$ now claims to embrace Open Source, but they haven't taken it that far ... yet.

Oh it'll happen...

[MikeRT]

The day that the various desktop environments decide to cut out the middlemen. When I can go grab an official KDE install disk that gives me a polished KDE experience with the latest kernel and Wayland from kde.org, that's the day Windows will start really hurting. Then I can say to my relatives "Linux? Just go get KDE" and there'll be no confusion anymore. If it's KDE compatible, it's KDE compatible. Load the binary, off you go. Just like OS X and Windows.

Re:Oh it'll happen...

[armanox]

They used to have a link to an OpenSuSE live CD to do just that (well, with XFree86/X.Org. Wayland isn't a priority for KDE). It would appear that is no longer present on the site. Also, KDE doesn't really care to be Linux - they target UNIX compatible systems (AIX, FreeBSD). GNOME, on the other hand, wants to be just Linux, and is largely in bed with the Fedora Project.

Re:Oh it'll happen...

[Zero__Kelvin]

"The day that the various desktop environments decide to cut out the middlemen."

Right. Because a Window Manager is the OS. All that threading, management of processes, filesystems and the like are just uneeded cruft!

"Then I can say to my relatives "Linux? Just go get KDE" and there'll be no confusion anymore. If it's KDE compatible, it's KDE compatible."

You have what you are asking for available today. You just don't know which distribution to recommend. Your recommendation to relatives should be: "Find someone with a clue and they can help you." Your problem is that you are pretending to have when, when you actually don't

Give your relatives a computer sans OS and try recommending : "Just go get Windows!" and see how far they get before they ask Which version? Home? Premium? 7? What is this Server 2008? Or should I get Server 2012? Maybe I want MS-SQL? What's the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit? How many Gigabytes should be CPU be? The Hard Drive is the box with all the cables coming out, right?

Re:Oh it'll happen...

[TeknoHog]

What's with all this KDE shit? We all know GNOME is the real package to go with. Only losers use KDE.

Yes, I'm kidding, but now you know exactly why we don't have Linux on the desktop. Linux Ignorance sat around for the better part of a fucking decade bitching back and forth over which desktop package to go with.

Desktop schmesktop. I want to use an application, not stare at some fscking icons, menus or panels all day. Fluxbox with no panel and a dozen virtual screens gives me just that. I basically have one v-screen for each task, for 100% focus. Out of sight, out of mind. The point of a computer is that it can handle much more information than me -- I'd just get lost in all that, instead I'll just do one thing at a time, and do it well.

Of course, that's just, like, my opinion, man. If someone wants to recreate the Windows experience on Linux, by all means, just do it. That's the whole idea of open source, use your computer the way you want. (Why "PC" means "Windows" in common parlance is beyond me -- Linux and other open OSes make computers much more personal.)

As for binary compatibility, just by assuming x86-64 (or just x86?) you're breaking a whole lot of opensource/unix tradition. The portable way of installing software involves ./configure and make, and it doesn't care about architecture. Unfortunately, most distros break this by not including basic stuff like compilers by default. The distros themselves are pandering to the Windows way of binary assumptions.

Linux on the desktop won't have much hope unless people get the whole idea of open source. With the typical binary distro, it's not much better than Windows or OS X. The kernel won't matter that much when the user experience is crippled to that Fisher-Price level where you're allowed to do these certain things, and not be the master of your own machine.

Re:Oh it'll happen...

[Dimwit]

This is a much bigger deal than people seem to think. I tried getting my father set up on Linux not that long ago.

"I need help, this says GNOME needs updating, I thought I was running Linux?"
"You are, Linux is the kernel, but GNOME is the desktop environment."
"Well, what's Debian? It says Debian needs updating."
"You're running the Debian distribution of Linux."
"I thought it was GNOME?"

Re:Oh it'll happen...

[techno-vampire]

Fluxbox with no panel and a dozen virtual screens gives me just that.

I'm not quite that minimalist, but I do use Xfce with Compiz because I happen to enjoy the eye candy. And, being retired I can set my computers up to please myself, rather than some corporate standard of what you can have installed and what you can't. I remember, once, showing the desktop cube on my laptop to a Windows fanboi, back when Vista was fairly new. He told me that it was possible to have virtual desktops on Vista but nobody ever bothered because they couldn't see the point. I guess Windows users must think it's better to use one desktop with a bunch of windows, mostly minimized, than to have four times as much screen real estate (or twelve times in your case) than you have screen. I can't help but think, sometimes, that it's this lack of imagination that keeps most computer users from trying something new or looking for ways to get the most out of their computer.

Re:Oh it'll happen...

[quantaman]

"The day that the various desktop environments decide to cut out the middlemen."

Right. Because a Window Manager is the OS. All that threading, management of processes, filesystems and the like are just uneeded cruft!

He's not entirely wrong. The underpinnings are critical of course, buy they're also sort of generic. But even as someone who primarily uses a CLI the Window Manager is still my primary point of interaction. Application switching, clipboard style, aesthetics, etc, I see the effects of the WM every time I interact with the machine.

"Then I can say to my relatives "Linux? Just go get KDE" and there'll be no confusion anymore. If it's KDE compatible, it's KDE compatible."

You have what you are asking for available today. You just don't know which distribution to recommend. Your recommendation to relatives should be: "Find someone with a clue and they can help you." Your problem is that you are pretending to have when, when you actually don't

Give your relatives a computer sans OS and try recommending : "Just go get Windows!" and see how far they get before they ask Which version? Home? Premium? 7? What is this Server 2008? Or should I get Server 2012? Maybe I want MS-SQL? What's the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit? How many Gigabytes should be CPU be? The Hard Drive is the box with all the cables coming out, right?

Here I agree, I've never seen the plethora of distros as an issue. In fact I see them as a strength as they can very easily tailor and market for a specific audience without diluting their brand. I mean how well does apple actually do in the server space? They shouldn't have any trouble with their Unix underpinnings but I think a lot of people have trouble taking Apple seriously as a server because of their home user market focus.

If someone asks me for advice on installing Linux I generally recommend Fedora or Ubuntu depending on how bleeding edge they want to be (or for a laptop how well the LiveCD works). From a novice user's perspective the distro's are pretty generic.

Re:Oh it'll happen...

[Zero__Kelvin]

"He's not entirely wrong."

Actually, he is entirely wrong. If KDE made a linux distribution it would merely be yet another distribution that has KDE as a WM. There are already hundreds of distributions that use it. It adds no value for them to create yet another one, and that's why they don't waste their time and effort. Claiming that KDE or Gnome releasing a distrubtion would "cut out middlemen" is just a phenomenally clueless thing to say, and is 100% wrong.

Am I Missing Something?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Linux as my desktop system successfully and happily for over 10 years. My productivity, aside from a few small areas, beats anything I can accomplish on an MS Windows machine.

What, then, am I missing? What is this "Linux desktop" that everyone claims is not yet here?

Re:Am I Missing Something?

[thoriumbr]

What, then, am I missing? What is this "Linux desktop" that everyone claims is not yet here?

Yes, you are missing something...

I am a Linux desktop user since 2001. Things now are way better than then, when ./configure && make && sudo make install where required to almost anything. When drivers where a problem, and other quirks.

But the Year of Linux on Destop will happen when Linux marketshare hits double digits. When you see hardware with stickers featuring a small penguin and "Linux compatible" bellow it. Before that, there's no Linux on mainstream desktop.

When Linux ceases to being "nerd's operational system", we would be there. But not yet.

But with Microsoft messing up with every OS release, tablets and phones dominating even the console area, web apps doing almost everything, and the PC market disappearing, I think we will be there soon. As soon as we realize that the desktop market is not that important anymore...

And Russia wants to be the USSR again ......

[who_stole_my_kidneys]

Neither are going to happen, so move along and focus on something that CAN happen.

Re:And Russia wants to be the USSR again ......

[bobbied]

Neither are going to happen, so move along and focus on something that CAN happen.

I don't know. Seems Putin is making inroads into getting the old gang back together.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[Bacon Bits]

perhaps you can enlighten us as to why he's wrong

I never said he was wrong... Only that he's true to form..

So he's right, but for the wrong reasons? How do you know when he's right for the right reasons?

careful what you wish for

[slashdice]

Linux "won" mobile in the same way Michael Moore "won" the war on anorexia.

Re:careful what you wish for

[geekoid]

SInce the vast majority of in use devices run and Linux variant, I'm not sure of you point.

Re:careful what you wish for

[jedidiah]

> Linux "won" mobile in the same way Michael Moore "won" the war on anorexia.

So then what's the bit in that analogy of yours that corresponds to Microsoft's failed attempts to dominate? Or Apple's faultering position?

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[jedidiah]

> A stable binary driver interface would help for starters.

No. Probably not. Lack of stable interfaces never harmed the WinDOS market. That's because these kinds of things are driven by market share and have little to do with "platform quality". Either a vendor thinks the market is large enough to bother with or not. The "level of bother" factor is largely irrelevant.

That's why much software is still Windows-only despite there being a mythical commercial platform that's supposed to do everything right.

Re:Infrastructure?

[TWX]

Well, to an extent he's right; the kernel does what kernels do, and that is, talk to the hardware at the lowest level. It does that just fine.

Unfortunately the stuff piled on top of it is either not keeping up with trends (X and the way modern video changes on the fly), or not really good at handling what a user would want automagically.

I attempted to use the most integrated desktop with vanilla Ubuntu 14.04, but I found its window manager to be so restrictive as to be useless to me. It handled a lot automagically, but not what I wanted, and it was also very unclear how to go about getting to what I needed to change. It wasn't even intuitive on how to bring up a terminal window, for example, which is basically the bulk of what I use Linux for.

The lack of documentation is also hurting, badly. I'm working on building a multiseat box at home and LightDM was redone sometime between Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, and there wasn't any good support documentation explaining how the configuration files now work. I ended up switching to kdm even though I'm not using KDE, just so that I could configure a display manager that would actually work right.

I think that the golden age of FOSS documentation is over. For a long time Linux and other FOSS docs were based on how commercial UNIX documentation was written, but slowly more and more developers aren't creating volumes of use or configuration docs in the UNIX model anymore, and as few UNIX-era developers work on Linux and other FOSS, there are less people who remember how those documents were made and why. I think that is what will hurt FOSS the most, simply being unable to figure out how to do the things that one wants to do because the docs don't exist.

"Year of the Linux Desktop" is...

[Flavianoep]

... a dead joke, isn't it?

Re:"Year of the Linux Desktop" is...

[Cid Highwind]

Maybe, has Netcraft confirmed it yet?

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[armanox]

As the GP said though, what does that have to do with Linus and his kernel?

It's not a kernel problem

[91degrees]

Successful desktop operating systems have been based on various kernels. Apple used a pretty crummy one before switching to a BSD derived one. The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga each used their own, and they had certain success in their niches.

The problem is the GUI. People don't like X, and Linux people have no desire to give us anything else. Engineers and enthusiasts may well argue that it's better from various objective reasons but the end user doesn't care. They use it and they think it sucks. Perhaps the problem is that it still pretty much needs the shell. Perhaps it's large, slow and clunky. Perhaps it's the poor support for games.

Android doesn't have these problems because the developers didn't cripple themselves with X. TiVos and Tomtoms (before switching to Android) used Linux without X and people were quite happy with them.

Give us a nice, simple, standard GUI without a bazillion customisations, and with the ability to to just install an app from the GUI and run it from the GUI, and Linux might actually work on the desktop.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[jedidiah]

> The problem is the GUI. People don't like X

A stupid noisy minority of techno-hipsters don't like X. For the rest of us it's invisible and no more bothersome than the graphics subsystem on any other platform.

The problem with your rant is that the still marginal market share of Apple refutes it. Linux in other forms was able to gain traction because of lack of an entrenched monopoly (or being the monopoly).

Apple demonstrates that applying the "one true way" approach to the desktop won't help you get away from Microsoft.

So there's no real point in sabotaging Linux just to suit some delusion that ignores reality on the ground.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[orasio]

Give us a nice, simple, standard GUI without a bazillion customisations, and with the ability to to just install an app from the GUI and run it from the GUI, and Linux might actually work on the desktop.

You can find all of that at http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/ .
Millions of people are already using it, for years now.
The only challenge it might have, is that it complies with the simplicity and ease of use you demand. But that's for hardcore users to care about, and they have alternatives.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[r_jensen11]

The problem is the GUI. People don't like X, and Linux people have no desire to give us anything else.

I seriously doubt the premise that the common user cares about X enough to not like it. The operating system is a platform for people to run the programs they need to accomplish certain tasks. Windows will continue to be the heavyweight champion because there is so much legacy crap out there which nobody cares to port over to other platforms. It's not a matter of saying that Linux has application A which is fully compatible with application B on Windows; it's a matter of saying that a user can accomplish everything s/he needs to within a single platform. For many of the people who make the decisions in the enterprise environment, that means people can accomplish everything they do in:
Excel
PowerPoint
Outlook
and *maybe* Word

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[Yunzil]

Except Ubuntu has a bazillion customizations.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[swillden]

The problem is the GUI. People don't like X

Non-sequiteur. X has nothing to do with the GUI, at least not any part of the GUI users care about. X is merely the tool used to draw stuff on the screen; it says nothing about what gets drawn. Everything users care about, including what windows, buttons, fonts, etc., look like, how applications interact with one another, and whether or not all of the above is nicely integrated and looks like it belongs together has nothing to do with X.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[cyberchondriac]

I don't know.. I still think KDE and Gnome still look a bit "Fisher Price" compared to a commercial GUI like Windows or Mac, but they've improved.
But far more important are the applications, as you mentioned. For the average user, an office suite is usually all they need; but as an admin, I find a great many of my app tools to be Windows-centric in one way or another. Even many of the java/browser based apps or tools I use that are supposed to be platform independent seem to work much better on Windows than linux, like EMC's Unisphere.
Dell pushes everything Windows. Whenever I call tech support for this or that (not just Dell), they just assume I'm running Windows, even on servers (when I'm actually running SuSE), it's kinda annoying. Then there's Active Directory, and all it's GPOs, which interacts directly with the desktops as well as servers, so it's a homogenous inclusive system that many admins would be loath to break up. I don't see Windows desktop marketshare going down for a long time.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[7-Vodka]

I won't speak to your other points because I don't have a good answer, however on the point about monopolies...

The free market ensures that monopolies can't be successful with anti-competitive practices for very long. Always.

If you study historical monopolies as some economists of the austrian school have, you will see that unless a monopoly has the backing of the government, they don't last long and they pay dearly for trying to be anti-competitive.

Tom Woods has a good talk on this.

One example is M$ vs Netscape. M$ was the 800lb gorilla, netscape was a mouthy monkey and they were fighting for a banana. Microsoft spent many millions or billions of dollars fighting that battle. They killed Netscape, the company. But what they found was that in it's place, other challengers show up in ways you don't expect. Ultimately they've lost the fight many times over and it's a losing battle for them. The browsers go to those who serve them best, free software.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[phantomfive]

Gnome looks the same whether it's running on X or not. The problem isn't X (that's a thing only developers see), it's the stuff built on top of it.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[TechPony]

Apple demonstrates that applying the "one true way" approach to the desktop won't help you get away from Microsoft.

So there's no real point in sabotaging Linux just to suit some delusion that ignores reality on the ground.

Apple demonstrates that closing hardware platforms and overcharing for them wont help you get away from Microsoft, not that the one true way approach is flawed.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[jd]

The free market didn't provide alternatives. The free market created Microsoft and the other monopolies. Adam Smith warned against a free market.

The majority do not create alternatives, either. The majority like things to not change. The familiar will always better the superior in the marketplace.

Alternatives are created by small groups of people being disreputable, commercially unproductive and at total odds with the consumer. These alternatives will typically take 7-14 years to develop. Adoption will typically reach peak after another 7-14 years. By the 30th year after first concept, the idea will be "obvious" and its destiny an "inevitable consequence" of how things are done.

In reality, it takes exceptional courage and a total disregard for "how things are done". 7-14 years with guaranteed losses is not how the marketplace works. Even thinking along those lines is often met with derision and calls of "Socialism!" by the market. No, real inventors are the enemy of the free market.

If you want a Linux desktop, you must forgo all dreams of wealth. You must subject yourself to the abject poverty that is the lot of an inventor in a market economy, or move to somewhere that supports the real achievers.

Re:It's not a kernel problem

[7-Vodka]

You realize there's not one single argument in your response right?

You wrote a paragraph full of opinions...

I didn't say the free market prevents monopolies. I said it prevents monopolies from acting against the interest of everyone else with impunity. Who are you to say that for a certain market you know how many companies should exist in order to best use the available means to reach the desired ends?

It is possible that in certain economic situations, the optimal number of companies serving the market is two, three, five or even one.

Comparable GUI experience

[buckfeta2014]

I had linux on my desktop for several years at one point. I wasn't a huge gnome fan, but kde 3.x was a pretty decent experience. Then gnome and kde nastified their GUIs and I was left without a decent GUI. Xfce was close, but it's not mature enough in my opinion. So windows 7 it is. I still use linux on servers.

Re:Comparable GUI experience

[scorp1us]

I've transitioned a 65 year old man (neighbor) and my 30-something sister to Mint 17 Cinnamon. Both have zero issues after I switched them from XP.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[WaywardGeek]

It's GNU/Linux's fault. Android, still based on Linux, could likely win the desktop if Google got their act together and stopped pushing ChromeOS. Notice how my binary applications run on *very* many Android devices without recompilation, even when I write in C using the NDK. Notice how Android does not introduce bugs in my applications by swapping in a buggy shared library which I never tested. Notice how nearly impossible it is to publish a GNU/Linux app in comparison. In one case, you just publish your app to Google and wait a day or so. Notice how my app simply installs in a comparitavely secure jailed directory rather than having to disperse crap all over the file system. For Linux, you need to write and test different and binary incompatible installatoin packages for RedHat, Arch, Debian, Suse, then wait a few years for your package to be accepted and migrate from unstable to testing to stable, and even then you don't run everywhere.

Just freaking stupid.... year of the GNU/Linux Desktop my butt!

On a completely unrelated note, WTF is up with the new slashdot site? I had the newly dumbed-down ads disabled with a check-box. The check box is gone, and the ads are back, and dumber than ever! I miss the days of Barracuda ads that made sense on slashdot. The new ones aren't targeted at geeks at all.

There are too many linux distros for desktop to

[Joe_Dragon]

There are too many linux distros for desktop to work good also package maintenance needs to be more windows like.

Where as you can install 3rd party apps with out braking stuff / have them be able to point to / bundle with the needed run times with out them needed to be part of the main app store / package manger system.

  As well being able to have things like use ones that are build for package manger systems. Like on windows as you can use app that use install shield, Installer VISE, apple update, Windows Installer, etc side by side without hitting major Dependency hell

Infrastructure?

[Loopy]

He mentions something in the article about devs having newer hardware and everyone else having older stuff. That's a point, to be sure, but in my experience, there's enough info on the web to make fixing drivers doable. The bar to adoption is mostly user interface design. Lack of offline help, inconsistent UI guidelines, inconsistent context-menu-access, difficulty in figuring out why you can't enable certain options (because the GUI doesn't tell you that other options are available with a package download), inconsistent hotkeys, etc. On any windows machine, I can blindly press a few keystrokes and both launch apps and navigate their menus. Not to mention that menus and common buttons are almost always in the same place and look pretty much the same.

My family has expressed lots of consternation over some of the changes even within the Windows ecosystem (start menu layout changes, control panel layout/submenu changes, Office quickbar, etc.).

But instead, we're focused on the latest new shiny thing rather than making it all work consistently and intuitively. I mostly use bash consoles so I don't really bother with the GUI but you'll never get anywhere by trying to revert today's typical OOOSHINY wanna-be nerd to use that when they can just pay a few hundred extra bucks and get something that does the same thing the same way every time they click or tap in a specific spot.

kernel does crash on desktop

[short]

While Linux kernel is solid on servers for whatever reason on desktop it always was crashing and/or required occasional reboots. Flashdisks plugging/unplugging creates allocated un-unmountable devices. Desktop machines just randomly reboot. Screen occasionally goes black or garbage forever (it may be X bug). Keyboard becomes unresponsible. OOM problems where the system locks up or some fundamental process gets killed. etc.

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[rasmusbr]

While Linux kernel is solid on servers for whatever reason on desktop it always was crashing and/or required occasional reboots. Flashdisks plugging/unplugging creates allocated un-unmountable devices. Desktop machines just randomly reboot. Screen occasionally goes black or garbage forever (it may be X bug). Keyboard becomes unresponsible. OOM problems where the system locks up or some fundamental process gets killed. etc.

Do you have a swap partition and is it reasonably large? A lot of strange stuff can happen if you decide you don't need a swap partition (think again), or if you use a really small swap partition, i.e. 2GB.

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[rasmusbr]

That should read smaller than 2GB. 4 gigs is usually a good size.

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[short]

Currently I have small swap (1GB for 8GB of memory).

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[techno-vampire]

While Linux kernel is solid on servers for whatever reason on desktop it always was crashing and/or required occasional reboots.

Twenty years ago, you would have been right. I've been using Linux as my only OS ever since Fedora 9 came out, and the only time I ever need to reboot is for a kernel update. It's not uncommon for me to have uptimes of three or four weeks, and I can remember it once reaching 43 days. Of course, Fedora does update the kernel (and everything else) more often than some of the other distros, but how many people are there running any version of Windows on their desktop with uptimes like that?

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[short]

Exactly, 3-4 weeks but never more. That's the problem.

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[techno-vampire]

As I wrote above, the only reason that I rarely have more than 3-4 weeks uptime is the fact that new kernels come out. Once in a while there will be a longer gap between updates, making my uptime longer.

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[Gothmolly]

Who swaps anymore? This isn't WindowsNT or Solaris.

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[short]

This is off-topic, I am aware _servers_ are stable; the discussion here was about desktops.

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[short]

This is probably the reason why you do not see the crashes. When you reboot often enough the kernel does not rot fast enough. Although I get sudden reboots completely randomly, even after one day, but the sudden reboots may be caused by some hardware/BIOS issue (BIOS updates do not help, Lenovo X220). And after all you may not be messing up with many USB hubs/extenders, rotten flashdisks etc. That one computer does not crash does not prove the kernel is rock solid on every computer. The monolithic (non)design of Linux kernel can never be really stable.

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[techno-vampire]

That one computer does not crash does not prove the kernel is rock solid on every computer.

I never said that it did. I was just offering as a counter-example to the claim that the Linux kernel was crash prone on desktops, and that the only reason I don't have longer uptimes is that Fedora updates the kernel fairly often. I will also mention that my sister uses Xubuntu and has had similar experiences to mine.

Re:kernel does crash on desktop

[rasmusbr]

Swap is not optional if you're going to use leaky software (like for instance browse the web) on a linux machine for long periods of time without rebooting. Firefox or Chrome can easily grow to 4 or 8 gigs over time if you don't have a swap partition. If you have 16+ gigs of RAM on your machine you might not need swap at this time, but as web sites become ever more bloated you will need to upgrade to more RAM or get a swap partition or swap file.

Apple as a model

[LessThanObvious]

Apple's success is an interesting model for what it would take to make Linux mainstream on the desktop. The average non-techie Apple user doesn't know or care that there is BSD running beneath the GUI or that a UNIX command line even exists on their Mac. Granted there is a legacy there where people are already comfortable with the idea of a Mac being a legitimate alternative to the Windows PC, but it is the seamless user friendly GUI and fully developed application ecosystem that make it desirable. The argument can be made that Ubuntu and maybe others are pretty usable and are getting close to mainstream useability, but we aren't quite there yet. Until there is a GUI that is so fully featured and bulletproof that the user never needs to do anything at the command line to achieve reasonable efficiency at all common tasks and the application ecosystem is developed to have decent parity with current mainstream OS in use, Linux doesn't stand a chance in the desktop. I'm not sure that the financial payoff is there for any business to undertake the investment needed, but I certainly hope we get there someday.

Re:Apple as a model

[jedidiah]

Apple's success is hardly a good model for Linux. Despite a great deal of effort, having a GUI platform that nearly predates MS-DOS, having a BRAND that does predate MS-DOS, lots of focused resources, effective advertising, Super Bowl ads, and even dedicated stores they still only managed to eek out a small minority of the market.

Apple's current success is based on NOT being a computing company.

If anything, Apple is a pretty conclusive demonstration of how "doing everything right" will really get you nowhere in the desktop market.

As far as non-technical users go. Apple products are just quirky enough to be annoying and off putting.

Re:Apple as a model

[0123456]

A small minority of the market thats still an order of magnitude bigger than that of desktop Linux.

[citation needed]

Oh, you can't cite it, because there are no valid stats for the number of desktop Linux users.

Personally, I haven't seen a Mac in years, but I can see six Linux desktops from right here.

Re:Apple as a model

[LessThanObvious]

I agree with a lot of that. Apple's market share in desktop is lower partly because mass adoption wasn't the goal. They won't sell outside of their high priced, proprietary hardware which keeps Macs out of the running in many segments including business desktop. It's the relationship Apple has with the user and the usability I was trying to highlight. It's the difference in the user experience between Mac OS X and Linux that is still a wide gap. I'm not an Apple fan by any means, I haven't had an Apple product since my hand me down Apple IIe. Hopefully someday we will have an open (not Google) Linux based OS that can truly compete head to head with Mac OS X and Windows for mainstream use, but I don't see it on the horizon. Until then I will be grateful for Linux as a server OS and for my own desktops when I need only secure web browsing.

Re:Apple as a model

[Daniel Hoffmann]

I still haven't found a Linux distro that has GUI for configuring everything I want to configure, say what you will about windows, but at least its GUIs for configuring stuff is pretty complete (even if stuck in windows 2000 UI creating a dissonance with aero and metro.)

Re:Apple as a model

[Twillerror]

If slashdot allowed for +1ing I would.

I would go further and say that both Apple and MS have some standard libraries at their core. Imagine trying to write a WebCam based app for Linux. For OSX or Windows you'd do a search and get pretty standard answer. For linux you'd get a ton of links to different libraries at different levels.

In general developing an app for OSX is way easier than for X. Yah most things are just webapss these days, but not everything. Which is why Chromebooks haven't totally take off. If Chromebooks had MS Office, Photoshop and a few other installed apps ( free or otherwise ) I think it would have more success. I mean why can't I installed Eclipse, Sublimetext, a Shell on a Chromebook....if I could we would have a Linux desktop technically.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

No. He isn't saying that. Of course, a big reason he isn't saying that is because Linux is on the desktop, and has been for more than a decade. Linux has also been superior on the desktop for quite some time. I have two laptops. One dual boots to Win 7 and Mageia Linux. The other dual boots to Win 8 and Fedora Linux with Secure Boot / UEFI. I occaisonally boot into Windows to apply updates so that if I ever actually need Windows I won't have to wait an hour between clicking "Shut Down" and the computer actually turning off if I ever do need it. I don't use Photoshop, so I haven't actually needed Windows in years.

Several years ago I installed a new DVD Drive and k3b was crashing. I needed Windows then to see if the hardware was bad or if I had a driver issue. When Windows hung hard the minute I tried to use the drive, as opposed to Nero merely crashing, I knew I indeed had a bad DVD Drive. So yes, Windows has its use, but being productive in 2014 isn't one of them.

People who purport to know about computers need to stop asking stupid questions like "When will Linux be ready for the desktop ?", and start asking intelligent questions like "When will the general populace get a clue ?"

Re:Linux has already had 10 years of the Desktop

[TWX]

You meant, "bungling", right?

I've seen several apps and window managers "get it right" only to jump the shark when updated.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[Zero__Kelvin]

Yes. In other news it isn't your Doctors fault you're stupid.

Re:Infrastructure?

[SQLGuru]

I think the main problem is that Linux is *TOO* configurable. "Normals" don't want hundreds of options. They want people to tell them which of a limited number of options will work for them.

Which distro should I pick? Which window manager should I pick? How do I configure my computer to be optimal for *ME*? I'm a techie and I can't tell you which distro is really the best for most people. I can tell you which ones are more stable.....but it isn't just ONE.

With Windows....and even Apple.....those choices are more or less made for you. All a "normal" needs to do is decide which apps they need to run and whether their OS supports those apps.

Re:Infrastructure?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Well, it's a Completely Open Computer Kernel.

It's in the pipeline

[tyggna]

Dividing out compute functions into mobile devices might have been the key to this happening. Tablets/smartphones do a lot of the leisure activities associated with computers, and can do some of the minor business features too.

This means that, increasingly so, the market for desktop computers will be for heavy business uses, and for heavy gaming. The marginal stuff will move to mobile as it's able to.

The day the Linux desktop comes is when it becomes easier for the majority of people to use Linux in the office than the alternative.

So, how is that going? What are some of the heavy-use applications that will likely never move away from a desktop computer?

Office applications - Openoffice and libreoffice are considered a viable alternatives to Microsoft Office. The fact that you can write macros in python gives the FOSS stuff a bit of a longevity advantage as new office workers come into the labor force and don't feel like learning Visual Basic. Where it lacks is the Exchange server market, where there's no viable FOSS software to handle email, organize meetings, allocate resources, and have it all work natively with single-sign-on credentials.
Gaming - OpenGL has seen huge improvement over the years, and it gets easier to work with every release. If it isn't already equivalent to DirectX, then it's well on its way. I see OpenGL as having more potential as well, since there are more interested and intelligent parties involved with its development than DirectX. The rendering library is just one component though. You also need top-notch hardware and drivers to match. The NVidia drivers are equivalent from Linux to Windows and are pretty good, if a little unstable. The FOSS drivers for NVidia have a long way to go still, as do the ATI drivers. NVidia is on-board with maintaining Linux as diligently as Windows, but ATI tends to lag behind in that area. Most major gaming engine components already work for Linux, like Havok, or the Source engine. With Steam picking up the banner of Linux gaming, it will certainly grow more viable over time too.
Interface - This is a big one. No matter how proficient you are, this one has to be learned. Linux has hundreds of different interfaces, and all of them require some amount of training to use and customize. Windows has this one because it has been essentially the same since Windows 95, and the paradigm and prior knowledge from all previous Windows OSes tend to transfer over from release to release. The only solution to this one is making streamlined workflows a priority inside of the interface, and then training people on it. As odd as this might sound, I think the best candidate for Linux gaining more ground on the PC interface is a window manager that focuses on ease of user customization, rather than ease of use. For me, that's fluxbox or openbox, with xfce making strong ground. Teaching people how to edit a text file and customize their menus and hotkeys takes me about 10-20 minutes, and the person learning it usually can get far enough with it to make it their own after an hour or two of use. Add in a program that turns your interface into a drag-and-drop to customize mode that's easy to use and it might start making some serious ground. I mean, Linux's real interface is the command line, and bash largely put to rest our ancient shell holy war. Once we can intelligently combine the advantages of gnome, kde, and xfce (which are the three biggest contenders for user space) and make all these paradigms work together, then we'll be on track for taking the desktop.
Anyways, just my two cents.

Too configurable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now be honest: when was the last time you "configured Linux"?

Re:Too configurable?

[Anonymous Coward]

yesterday.

Installed Ubuntu 14.04 in a VM - largely pleased with the results, but still hit a few snags in a VM running under Fusion on a 27" iMac.

Also installed Debian Wheezy (7.6) in another VM, also on Fusion, also on the same 27" iMac.

I'm a software engineer for pay, and a Debian maintainer for kicks, fwiw - so I also have a decent idea of how this shit fits together. I still ran into issues and annoyances:

Ubuntu - there's no easy & obvious way to set up an IPSec VPN out of the box. Why not include that with the default networking stack in a way that's easy for users to access? apt-get install l2tp-ipsec-vpn did the trick. Then, once connected to the work vpn, I was getting barked at because the system couldn't resolve hostnames for work properly - turns out it was an avahi-daemon issue that I needed to work around because somebody at my company made the brilliant choice of naming everything with a .local domain name. Worked around that, and noticed that the desktop wallpaper was behaving weird when I'd first boot and go into full-screen mode: the upper left corner would display properly, the remaining 3/4 of the screen would just end up black. Still not sure of the root cause on this one, but opening settings and reapplying the wallpaper selection works as a workaround. Getting chrome working in the dock turned out to be a much harder proposition than it should be, as well - kept clicking my "locked to launcher" chrome button only to have no browser window come up. Got that working with some trial and error.

Debian - desktop wouldn't even boot into 3d mode because of missing drivers. Desktop resizing issue? check. VPN missing? check. A host of other issues and command line fiddling ensued.

The net result? Linux, when compared objectively to Mac or Windows, is *much harder* to "just use" on the desktop. And I love my Linux boxes, too. But let's not pretend that there aren't a significant number of issues to getting this working. My bet is that the company that wins the "Linux on the desktop" fight will end up being Ubuntu, because they're devoting so much energy and focus to it. But even still - they're not there yet. There's a lot you can do with Linux quickly on a desktop... but there's also a fair amount of fiddling required.

Re:Too configurable?

[Darinbob]

Haven't installed linux in a long time, but did today. I was surprised that xubuntu gave some basic introduction during installation, which was more than Microsoft did for their Windows 8 release.

Re:Too configurable?

[nukenerd]

Debian - desktop wouldn't even boot into 3d mode because of missing drivers. Desktop resizing issue? check. VPN missing? check. A host of other issues and command line fiddling ensued.

None of that would be an issue if it were pre-installed like Windows usually is.

Linux will be pre-installed on most PCs when it is the Year of the Linux Desktop.

The Year of the Linux Desktop will be when Linux is pre-installed on most PCs.

As far as Joe Sixpack and Granny are concerned, browsing porn and cat videos (respectively) on Facebook, it will make f#@k-all difference to them.

Re:Too configurable?

[Ash-Fox]

Next time buy a system76 laptop, compare the Linux installation on it, then install OS X and Windows on it and see how they compare.

Linus does not understand the size of the effort

[sproketboy]

Microsoft probably has somewhere between 6 and 20 thousand engineers working on device drivers for various windows versions out there making about 80k a pop. Sorry but Linux simply does not have these kinds of resources. It would be nice but I don't see it happening.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[orasio]

It's not his fault.
Linux is a kernel, an a great one at that.
GNU is a desktop, and isn't dominant right now, but it's very popular among large groups of users, some corporate included.

Windows 8

[Dwedit]

Windows 8 basically handed Linux an opportunity on a silver platter. Now they just need to make the desktop significantly better than what Microsoft is currently offering.

Re:Windows 8

[geek]

Windows 8 basically handed Linux an opportunity on a silver platter. Now they just need to make the desktop significantly better than what Microsoft is currently offering.

And to take advantage of the Windows 8 fiasco Linux created it's own with Gnome 3, Unity and KDE 4. Honestly, Linux had the Windows 8 problem before Microsoft did. The state of UI's on Linux is a travesty.

Re:Windows 8

[drkich]

Please enumerate in detail exactly how Windows 8 has handed Linux an opportunity on a silver platter. I am not a windows appologist, but at the same time, I do have a Windows 8 machine. It works. I do not have any issues with it. I use it for my gaming rig, home development for Java and Python, and random office use and browsing thrown in for good measure.

I have no issues using it, and it works well. Did I make tweeks to the UI to have it do exactly what I want? Sure, but who doesn't tweek those settings? I go right to the desktop. I can use all my old programs from XP and 7 without issue. My old hardware devices work.

So I am interested in exactly what you see as broken in Windows 8 that is handing Linux this platter?

Re:Windows 8

[scorp1us]

As a Mint 16/17 user that occasionally deals with Win 8:
- Updates - The distro has a unified updater. That updates in the background. Not at boot up, not at shutdown. No forced reboots by the updater. No waiting.
- Metro (user learning curve)
- and an overall respect for you. I get the feeling I'm a market, a commodity when on Windows. Told to install all this crapware, slogged aroudn with the latest trends. I just want to work, or kill time under my terms. If you need firm example, MS forcing MSN Messenger over to Skype. All the various virus scanners and viruses. I love being immune to all those web hacks.

Re:Windows 8

[0123456]

The state of UI's on Linux is a travesty.

Only for distros that don't ship with MATE as an option. Just install it and forget all the other crap.

Re:Windows 8

[jcdr]

Forcing users to Unity or Gnome 3 was an abyssal error at the time when potential for users switching because of Windows 8 was high like never before. Those desktops was too limited, too unstable, and new potential users found a lot of complain from old users. This was not coll at all.

Linux distributions enjoy the possibility to let the user choose his desktop from multiple options. It's tragic that this feature was not used on that problematic switch. Now XFCE and Mate have bring back full usable desktop. Maybe Unity and Gnome 3 will someday get usable. The whole story have just fragmented the effort at the risk of loosing valuable contributors in each projects.

Re:Windows 8

[jcdr]

Well, the problem is not that Gnome try to develop a new innovative desktop, the problem is that is forced the users to use it innovative experimental hack by stopping the development of the loved and stable Gnome 2. If only Gnome 2 have transited to GTK+ 3 like MATE is actually doing, the Gnome 3 fiasco would have been only a failed experiment without much negative consequence.

Re:Windows 8

[Alioth]

I don't know what all the hate of Gnome 3 is other than basic resistance to change. When Debian 7 came out, it had upgraded to gnome 3. Of course being a Debian user I don't get the early and possibly unstable versions - but it took me all of 15 minutes to figure out gnome 3 and I never looked back. It seems perfectly easy to use and does what I want it to do and it doesn't get in my way. This is on my main work system, and I do all tasks on it, use it 8 hours a day, it's not a machine for limited uses. Never felt the desire to go back to Gnome 2 or anything that looks like it.

Re:Windows 8

[jcdr]

I don't known what work you do with your Gnome 3, but for anything more than basic task it's a complete failure.

The panels management, something that reached the perfect stage in Gnome 2 after a decade of effort, was completely trashed away with nothing close to replace it. The upper right corner application switch is totally ineffective on big resolution screen like 4K. Removing the trivial application menu is not a simplification at all. The virtual desktop management completely broke the fact that the human brain work mainly with spatial representation. The window management is full of bugs that make too many applications a frustration to use. Almost any good panel plugin was either trashed or replaced by a inferior and unstable version.

I actually work with Debian Xfce4 and it's a usable replacement of Gnome 2 after a full day of configuration tricks. I have a others machines: one with Ubuntu Unity, one with Debian Gnome 3, one with Debian Jessie Xfce and Mate, and a last one with Mint Mate to be able to test different systems. Mate will certainly be my choice when I will switch to Debian Jessie on my main workstation.

My girlfriend use maily the Gnome 3 machine but also regret the Gnome 2. My children use manly the Ubuntu Unity and Debian Jessie with Xfce or Mate. The vastly prefer Mate or xfce desktop. That said there even more prefer Mint Mate because of the innovative well designed application menu and application installer, even if it is a bit slow from my point of view. If there is a future in the desktop usability, you should look in that direction instead of degrading a computer to the usability of a mobile phone like Unity or Gnome 3 do.

Re:Windows 8

[Alioth]

I run gnome 3 on a dual monitor setup. It is a development machine, mostly used for Java, C and scripting, but also documentation, web browsing, email (i.e. usual office tasks), system administration of servers etc. I don't have any complaints about it. The only customization I really care about is focus follows mouse, and Gnome 3 supports that without any difficulty.

What's wrong with alt-tab to switch applications? It's what I use and works awesomely well under gnome 3.

Re:Windows 8

[jcdr]

I run a single 4K monitor setup with a fixed grid of 8 x 8 virtual desktops to work on a lot of projects. Sloppy focus is a requirement: so much natural and efficient. Using alt-tab of upper left corner to switch application is a total vast of time. Either you better have to put widows side by side to not switch at all, or use the taskbar/taskmenu to directly raise the one you want, because on a machine with close to 100 windows the "always changing position in the list" of the atl-tab menu is a nightmare. I use Ctrl-Up/Down/Left/Right to quickly switch between virtual desktop with a single hand. Add Shift to move the focused window across the virtual desktop. There is absolutely nothing floating, moving, growing or shrinking dynamically: no effect at all. This make all the operations immediate, blazing fast, and perfectly predictable in my brain without looking at something other than the task I am working on. In addition, I have found that no effect is the best setup to lowering visual fatigue.

I have tried multiple times to get the same comfort and efficiency with Gnome 3, but it's actually not possible to reach the level of xfce4 or mate. From a high level Gnome 3 look like it can do it, but so many details are broken/unconfigurable that in fine it's just a vast of time.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Wycliffe]

Linux has also been superior on the desktop for quite some time.

Superior by what definition? Stability? sure, I'll give you that. ease of use? I doubt it.
I've been a linux only user for over a decade but it still doesn't work as smoothly as windows out of the box.
I occasionally still run into random problems like wifi failing to connect, can't read a cd which windows has no problem with,
wifi card is not supported, etc... Granted most thinks come with windows drivers but even when they do happen to
include linux drivers the linux drivers are often an afterthought and subpar. These small little rough edges are a fine
trade off for a geek but a huge turn off for a "normal"

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[bobbied]

perhaps you can enlighten us as to why he's wrong

I never said he was wrong... Only that he's true to form..

So he's right, but for the wrong reasons? How do you know when he's right for the right reasons?

Boy, you just insist on reading into my post what's not there, twice now. I think you are doing it on purpose....

Torvalds is right... I just find it amusing that he is quoted to be blaming somebody else and being "True to form." Clear yet?

Re: Infrastructure?

[jd2112]

There lies the problem. Many Linux distros have gone from being over configurable a few years ago to bring even more tightly locked down than Windows or MacOS. Often there is a way to change the behavior of the of the window manager but often the option is deeply hidden within the bowels of the configuration manager that you will never find it unless you know where to look, assuming it is there at all.

Re:Infrastructure?

[angel'o'sphere]

When I had my first linux installation, Slackware, 1992 or 1993, I ofc. had a desktop ... X Windows, don't remember which windows manager. And I believe I also played with OpenView, or at least a windows manager that looked like it.

However I never really worked with a linux desktop (except in companies where my Java Development environment ran on a Linux machine, and Firefox and Thunderbird, ofc.).

The main reason is they brain dead idea how yo configure such systems.

If you edit a config file, next boot some automatism overwrites it, because it gets regenerated out of a DB which is managed with a GUI tool, e.g.

Then there are linuxes where you still can edit the config files, but every distro has a different idea how services are configured. (And I'm an old *real unix* programmer)

So bottom line I'm tired in the moment to find a distro that suits me, as I'm back on the mach since 2003 or so ...

Otherwise I basically use linux only on servers ...

Buy a chromebook and install Linux on it ...

[perpenso]

I've been using Linux part-time for twenty years. I build my own desktops so its been easy to build systems that are compatible between windows and linux.

However laptops have always been very troublesome. I have figured out a solution. Buy a chromebook and install Linux on it.

Re:Buy a chromebook and install Linux on it ...

[Tough Love]

I've been using Linux part-time for twenty years. I build my own desktops so its been easy to build systems that are compatible between windows and linux. However laptops have always been very troublesome. I have figured out a solution. Buy a chromebook and install Linux on it.

Lately, I have found that laptops are working very well under Linux, including reliable suspend/resume.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[Mike Buddha]

What corporate?

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[vux984]

Either a vendor thinks the market is large enough to bother with or not. The "level of bother" factor is largely irrelevant.

ROI.

What is the Return on the Investment? The "level of bother" is the "I". The smaller the "level of bother", the better the ROI, the more likely the vendor will do something.

That said, I DO agree that if the R in ROI is sufficiently small, then even if the I goes to zero it still won't be worth the vendors while. Lots of large companies require both a high absolute R, plus a reasonable ROI, which is why you get companies shutting down small but otherwise perfectly profitable business units. (which is VERY frustrating...)

Device market does nothing for Linux ...

[perpenso]

The device market does nearly nothing for Linux as a consumer brand, nearly nothing for the promotion of FOSS. People don't see the Linux embedded in their router, they don't see and can't even get to the Linux that hosts Android on their phones. Most Android developers don't even touch or see Linux during development.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Superior by what definition? Stability? sure, I'll give you that. ease of use? I doubt it."

You don't know what "out of the box" means. You pick any laptop with Windows pre-installed and buy another and let me install and configure Linux and put it in a box. You will then see how a Windows system when compared to a Linux system is inferior "out of the box". Everybody wants to bundle properly installing and configuring an OS as part of the user experience. It isn't.

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[geek]

Microsoft probably has somewhere between 6 and 20 thousand engineers working on device drivers for various windows versions out there making about 80k a pop. Sorry but Linux simply does not have these kinds of resources. It would be nice but I don't see it happening.

Try 500-600. Most of those are "project managers" too who farm the work out to Indian contractors. Microsoft doesn't have the development force you think they do.

Re:Desktop is dying though

[scorp1us]

We'll win it when it is irrelevant.

Re:Linux will NEVER be a Desktop - Every Day OS.

[orasio]

Feeding the shill/troll here...

Linux is was not, and is not meant to be anything but a hobby OS for someones spare time, or a companies spare time that they can develop a UI for and deploy their own flavors (android, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc.) Linux is far too complicated for the everyday user to understand. Even something as simple as entering a static IP address sometimes requires going back to the terminal windows (command prompt) and setting it the hard way. And THAT's the problem with Linux! It was never meant to be a GUI OS just like it's parent, UNIX.

That's why desktop users use Ubuntu.
1 - Open network meny by clicking network indicator at the top bar of the desktop
2 - Choose "edit connections"
3 - Choose the connection you want to edit - click "edit"
4 - Click "IPv4 settings"
5 - Change IP

Please, remind me how that's done in windows 8.1. Feel free to explain differences with windows 8, 7 , XP.

The drivers for Linux SUCK and that's because it's an open source OS and there's no one "single" distro.

Just like any other OS. Supported hardware works, and in this case, backwards compatibility is maintained. Unsupported hardware, shockingly, doesn't work.

I suggest Kickstarter

[scorp1us]

I use Mint 17 Linux daily, but what I miss, what is really lacking are Adobe apps. Someone should start a kickstarter for Linux ports. Adobe is already familiar with Qt ( I think I read Lightroom is Qt) so they have the experience.

Let's put our money where our mouth is and get adobe to Kickstart the ports.

Re:I suggest Kickstarter

[phorm]

And autoCAD, and MS Project. Visio. Exchange... and that proprietary application that's really popular with X.

Linux isn't really fighting against usability (yes, it does have some issues there), it's fighting against an entrenched user-base whose needs are tied to existing software. Porting Adobe might help for some, but there are still plenty of other things out there.

In the same vein, though, for a lot of users it's more than enough. It's got email, web browsing /w flash/java support (facebook and games), word-processor, spreadsheet, some basic games, and now even some stuff on Steam. Getting Adobe moved over would help add to that, but I'd imagine that if Steam ever gets their Steambox out there with a killer title (another Left 4 Dead, Half Life, etc variant would probably do it), then adoption will increase quite nicely as well.

Re:I suggest Kickstarter

[rizole]

Cus what Adobe is lacking is funds. Give them a few quid and your linux ports are a surety.

Re:I suggest Kickstarter

[scorp1us]

We gotta start with the biggest apps first. Then move on to the AutoCADs. If Adobe moved, then the single largest publisher of software outside the OS vendors (by user) would make people notice. Then we'd get a bigger install base that would snowball to the next biggest, etc, etc. so that Linux was it's own platform.

Re:I suggest Kickstarter

[phantomfive]

Photoshop mostly runs on Linux. There used to be a donation page to get Wine developers to focus on certain apps, but I can't find it. Seems they are mostly interested in making sure games work correctly......

Re:I suggest Kickstarter

[TechPony]

Except that Valve already has ported quite a few of their own games to Linux. Portal 2, TF2, DOTA2, L4D2 and more are already there. It hasn't sped up Linux or SteamOS adoption. SteamOS is nothing more than a PR stunt.

Re:I suggest Kickstarter

[phorm]

If you add Battlefield 3 to the PS4, would that increase PS4 adoption? That's not likely, but bringing out Uncharted 4 probably will.

I mean adding a *new* title, possibly as an exclusive title (at least exclusive for the first while).

Re:I suggest Kickstarter

[TechPony]

Adding anything exclusive to Linux is just shooting yourself in the foot. Adding new titles isn't going to sway many either, there's still no incentive to switch.

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[T.E.D.]

Microsoft probably has somewhere between 6 and 20 thousand engineers working on device drivers

Are you sure? I know they make their own mice and keyboards. But for most devices, I get the impression they rely on the hardware manufacturers to write the drivers for their own devices.

Unless you literally meant "6<engineers<20000".

Android is hosted on Linux, not based on ...

[perpenso]

Android, still based on Linux ...

No. Android is hosted on Linux, not based on Linux, very big difference there.

... Notice how my binary applications run on *very* many Android devices without recompilation, even when I write in C using the NDK

Most Android apps are pure Java and do not use the NDK. Those that do are often using legacy C/C++ code that is not Linux specific, many OS calls are actually POSIX calls so they are not really Linux specific either. Again, linux is just the current host environment. Most apps don't care, even many apps using native code via the NDK.

Linux already has the desktop

[mark-t]

Just because it's not widely used doesn't mean it isn't used. Everyone that I know that uses Linux uses it as a desktop OS. Maybe not their only one or primary one, but they still use it as a desktop OS.

So Linux is entirely viable as a desktop OS... the fact that it isn't widely used is just one ilustration of the old saying about leading a horse to water.

Re:Linux already has the desktop

[shutdown -p now]

You don't know anyone with an Android phone or a wireless router?

Re:Linux already has the desktop

[mark-t]

Touche.... however, I did mean on a PC. I know that it is quite popular as a server OS as well, but none of the people that i know who use it on a PC utilize it primarily for that purpose.

Re:Desktop is dying though

[Mysticalfruit]

So you wrote this post on a mobile device or desktop? Exactly... The desktop is so "dead" except for the fact that everybody you know including yourself has a desktop at home and at work... Yeah, you've got a mobile device, but honestly how many people do you know who only have a mobile device?

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[orasio]

Posting from a corporate desktop, using Ubuntu, there are 6 Ubuntus out of 10 desktops around me.
This is not a Fortune 500 company, but it's a public company.
I also read Slashdot, I have seen news of corporations using Ubuntu

Re:Desktop?

[Gavagai80]

The need has been gone for ages. Perhaps you're talking about removing the option, or forcing online help to stop suggesting it even though it's much clearer than if they tried to tell you to click on various things? What exactly are you using grep for?

Android is not Linux ...

[perpenso]

A desktop customized version of Android (complete with a real desktop) is still based on Linux (at least Google's fork of it) ...

Android is not based on Linux. Android is **hosted** on Linux, it is really its own operating system. Most Android apps are Java and have zero interaction with Linux, they only use Android. As for apps that have some native code (c/c++ via NDK) they are usually using legacy c/c++ code that is not Linux based and/or they are using operating system calls that are POSIX based not Linux based.

Linux is just a host for Android. It could be replaced with some other POSIX compliant OS and the vast majority of Android apps would not know or care.

Re:Android is not Linux ...

[Tough Love]

Android is not based on Linux. Android is **hosted** on Linux, it is really its own operating system.

Complete nonsense. Android is an "operating system" only in market speak. In fact, Android is an application platform, not an operating system. If you doubt me then you need to get an operating system textbook and read for yourself what an operating system actually does. Hint: manage hardware at a low level, presenting a uniform interface for applications; manage memory; schedule execution; enforce security constraints; etc. All of this done by Linux, and not the Android libraries, and much more besides.

Re:Android is not Linux ...

[perpenso]

Your definition of an OS is quite narrow, overly so.

Hint: manage hardware at a low level

Android delegates this to the host. Is a microkernal based OS not an OS merely because it delegates the hardware interface away?

presenting a uniform interface for applications

Check. Android does this.

manage memory

Check. Android's Java runtime environment does this for applications.

schedule execution

Check. Android does thread scheduling for applications.

enforce security constraints

Check. Android enforces security constraints on applications.

All of this done by Linux, and not the Android libraries ...

As I said, Android is hosted by Linux. The fact that some Linux code is ultimately called is largely meaningless. Much of it is probably stdio or POSIX. From an application's perspective Android is the OS. Apps are unaware of Linux, even many native apps that use C/C++ via the NDK. They merely use stdio or POSIX. If Android were ported to BSD the vast majority of apps would not know or care.

Re:Android is not Linux ...

[Tough Love]

Your definition of an OS is quite narrow, overly so.

manage memory

Check. Android's Java runtime environment does this for applications.

It is a safe bet that you have never had anything to do with operating system design or implementation. Apparently, you do not understand even elementary principles of operating system memory management. So... according to you, how does Java manage the process page tables?

It is people like you who make the world save for marketdroids.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Teun]

You must be developing or at least love Unity :)

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[bobbied]

Where I work I have a Windows desktop, but web browsing is done on Linux. You wouldn't know it though if you didn't look close.

There are places that use Linux desktops.

Re:Infrastructure?

[RabidReindeer]

The difference is that Linux desktop comes running out of the box.

I had to use Windows 7 the other day for the first time in 6 months, repairing someone's failed Windows Update.

After the system was all cleaned up, I clicked the login button. And waited. And waited. And waited. And watched the disk drive light flicker like nobody's business. And waited. All those "essential" accessories starting up, disk scans, mysterious machine-eating magic, all shouldering themselves between me and being able to do anything.

I'm not in love with the current crop of Linux desktops, but at least I can begin using the bloody things within a few seconds of logging on.

It no longer matters.

[Rob_Bryerton]

Total non-issue; the majority of computing consumers have moved on; they're using phones and tablets. Corporate users will use what they're given.

The days of paying hundreds of dollars for an operating system and compiler are (thankfully) gone. The OS is irrelevant anyways; you go to where the applications are; anything else is just silly...

Re:It no longer matters.

[gsslay]

That was my first thought. Wait 5-10 years and everyone else will be saying to Linux; "You can have the desktop. We're not interested in it any more."

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[Skarjak]

I'm not sure why people are looking for a cause. It's obvious why Linux isn't number one: momentum. Windows managed to grab a dominating share of the market first, and it's going to take a lot to change that. This is true in any industry. Linux will only be #1 on desktop if the others really screw things up. Most people don't choose an OS based on their merits, they just buy a computer and use the OS it came with cause it works. There won't be a "year of the linux desktop". There might be, however, a year of the "OK this time Microsoft has really dropped the ball".

Re:I love games, but ...

[ziggystarsky]

I hate FPS games. Desperately. I love small and sometimes clever games, though. Flash games - and recently sometimes HTML5 games - are perfectly suited to my needs. Play a game for 15 minutes, sometimes 5 hours over several days - then you're done with it. You can play something completely different next time. I noticed that very often games that take only 5 minutes (like the story is over and there is no point in replaying it) get very high ratings - also from me. I love playing games with fresh ideas. And almost never a game requires to be 3D. I hate 3D games. Desperately. One series of desktop games I played was Heroes of Might and Magic. A great game. But then they decided to make the new one in 3D. For no real purpose, as the gameplay requires only 2D. Result was that you had to pan and rotate, just to get a view on your hero that was not obstructed by trees. Why in hell did they do this? 3D simply sucks.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[bobbied]

As the GP said though, what does that have to do with Linus and his kernel?

Nothing apparently.

Linus is blaming somebody else for Linux not taking the desktop, this is not to say he's not right, it's just amusing that he would blame others and tells me he's not interested in helping with the solution.

Re:Infrastructure?

[godrik]

I'm working on building a multiseat box at home

Wow! There are still people doing that? I was doing it 10 years ago and found it useful at the time. I no longer need that configuration, but I'll be glad to hear bout it. Could you tell more? Did you blog anything on that topic?

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[godrik]

I thi nk that what you are seeing is the difference between fat packages and slim packages. What I mean is that in your typical gnu/linux distribution, libs are installed on the system and applications depends on teh libs. That makes dependency issues a real nightmare.

But all other succesfull operating system take a different approaches. on windows, application typically deploy their own libraries. On macosX everything is typically in a fat binary. On android, all libraries are shipped in the APK. I assume IOS works the same. They all depend on a slim "operating system" and on shipping "complex" libraries when needed.

I wonder if that is the main problem with application deployement?

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[wisnoskij]

Ok, so than about 20 thousand seems about right then... As every project manager would manage 10+ employees.

Linux could own the desktop...

[whistlingtony]

Ew... you NEED the .deb repositories, because we don't HAVE a unified ecosystem. I need the debian apt system to grab all my dependencies for me! a more git like approach? What? How? You want a more android app like system?

So... an app system full of useless trivial apps that have really stupid permissions to my box.. And on top of that nightmare, you want to drop .deb dependency checking... on a linux desktop?

No Sir. Just.... No. Ew.

If you're concerned that it's hard to get code into the official debian repositories, that's a conversation we can have. But no, we can't go away from dependency checking toward an app store model. I don't WANT any old stupid app to be in the offical repositories.

Linus does not understand the size of the effort

[DMJC]

Nope, Microsoft don't provide many drivers for most hardware. Linux is supporting far more platforms/hardware drivers directly in kernel compared to Microsoft. All the Xerox/HP/Canon/NVIDIA/ATI/Intel/Philips/NEC/Toshiba/TV Tuner/Sound drivers for windows are third party drivers. It's no longer a Microsoft vs Linux issue, it hasn't been for a long time. It's all about the apps. Windows itself is incompatible with many pieces of hardware (forced obsolescence) Mainly because third parties decided to drop support around 64-bit or a newer Windows version.(I'm looking at you HP, dropping network scanning from windows 7 64-bit on certain printers) The same manufacturers who refuse to support Linux funnily enough don't support their Windows products well either. The hardware support claim is a furphy. All the large scale corporate printers/photocopiers/POS systems I've encountered have full Linux support. The only thing holding Linux back is stuff like frontline service applications written in .NET/Win32 that aren't getting ported over. More OSS software that can drop in and take over corporate software deployments is what's needed. Samba 4 and OpenExchange server are BIG steps in the right direction and we are seriously evaluating these for corporate widespread deployments.

Blind coding for the blind

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time this topic comes up, we see the same old thing: Hard core Linux users who can't figure out that it's not about the kernel, it's not even about the UX, it's about the apps and device support. Tell a mainstream computer user who's never touched anything but a Windows system or one of the tarted-up versions of Linux (e.g. Android) to switch to Linux, and one of the first things he or she will ask is, "Can I run Office/PhotoShop/whatever? Will it work with my printer/scanner/whatever?"

This should be painfully obvious, but let me explain it yet again: For real world computer users the OS is a necessary evil that they put up with as a way to do the things they want with a computer, like Web access, e-mail, document creation, image and video editing, etc. They could not care less about the Linux vs. Windows battles so many people here find consuming.

Linux is easily a modern enough and feature-rich enough and slick enough OS to keep mainstreamers happy, except for the lack of support for what they really want. Until that changes, Linux has virtually zero chance of taking a sizable portion of the desktop, even when MS releases a complete train wreck like Win8. Even as dreadful as Win8 is, people STILL chose to limp along with it and hope for improvements instead of switching to a free and rock-solid alternative. That should tell you everything you need to know about Linux on the desktop.

Re:Blind coding for the blind

[neminem]

Screw that. It is *definitely* about the UX. Linux doesn't even need to court the everyday "I don't know how to get pictures off my digital camera even though it's been explained to me 500 times" crowd to make some inroads into the desktop market. It'd be enough to make better inroads in the computer enthusiast world, the sort of people who know what they're doing, and are happy to mod their OSes to a certain extent, but who still *also* use their computers mainly to get things done.

I'd love to run Linux as a primary OS, but I've tried all kinds of distros, and there has not been a single desktop environment that felt robust and professional, where things were in places I'd expect and everything just worked without a lot of unnecessary fiddling and looking up of vague error messages. That is completely a UX issue. (Ok, yes, some of those error messages requiring fiddling were also device support-related, but still.)

The kernel is great, yes. So is Win8's. The UX is where Win8 failed, and it's where Linux (of various flavors) has been failing too.

Re:Blind coding for the blind

[jones_supa]

I'd love to run Linux as a primary OS, but I've tried all kinds of distros, and there has not been a single desktop environment that felt robust and professional, where things were in places I'd expect and everything just worked without a lot of unnecessary fiddling and looking up of vague error messages.

Same experience here.

Linus does not understand the size of the effort

[whistlingtony]

And yet, no one's really complaining about device drivers. Linux device drivers are fine. You don't see it happening? Uh. It already happened. It is happening. It will continue to happen. I plug stuff in, it works. Except for some printers, because those companies are just dead nasty evil.

We're talking about the desktop here....

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[macs4all]

As the GP said though, what does that have to do with Linus and his kernel?

It has to do wth Linus' alleged desire to capture the "Desktop" market, which was the topic of the Article.

Do try to keep up, please!

Re:Easy

[bobbied]

Which seems like a good idea to me, except for the following list of requirements..

Will it run window's apps? You are doing to have to support running miscellaneous windows applications fairly well, up front. Things like Turbo Tax, Quicken, old games and the like will just need to work, out of the box, and not require special knowledge to install. Dorking around with Wine should NOT be required.

What apps will it come with? It's going to need to have a fairly complete stable of applications, starting with Office. They are going to need to look and feel almost exactly like Microsoft's offerings and do everything Office does and more.

Will it infringe on somebodies IP? I'm sure Microsoft has some kind of IP or patent on the look and feel or something they can use to drag the project over the coals and kill it.

If you do this, PLEASE use Apache licensed stuff!

Re:Linux will NEVER be a Desktop - Every Day OS.

[bobbied]

Just like any other OS. Supported hardware works, and in this case, backwards compatibility is maintained. Unsupported hardware, shockingly, doesn't work.

I don't know, some of the "unsupported" hardware does happen to work just fine on Linux. Not often, but sometimes.

Big Whoop.

[westlake]

My desktop computer at home is running Linux for more than a decade now.

"Winning the desktop" has never been about winning over the geek.

It's always about winning over the full time office worker, the temp and the senior volunteer. The billion or so clerical workers in this world who keep things running behind the scenes.

Stopping staring at your navals

[Moof123]

I'm a fairly savvy guy, but my background is in RF&Microwave engineering, not computer science or IT. I should be low hanging fruit for Linux. I don't do a lot of programming, but have done some assembly, C, Matlab, Vee (shudder), etc.

So why don't I run Linux?

Every couple years I try. Most recently I put a Linux Mint installation on a virtual machine and gave it another pass. No go. Getting the monitor resolution right took a bunch of googling, tracking down some arcane text file to edit, restart, finally get to select the right resolution. Halfway through I remembered I had to do the same BS when I put Ubuntu onto a partition a couple years before (still there, couldn't easily figure out how to get the boot-loader going on the new machine, so it just sits there on my second drive). It's the fricking 21st century, it should just work!

The more you dig in, the more you are confronted with vast wasteland of fragmented BS.

I also tried a pre-canned distro called CAE Linux a little while back. I hit a road block trying to run some of the tools when I found that only about 3/4 of the needed pieces have english localizations, and I don't speak French. The other problem was that a lot of the naming within the main toolset was cutsey crap that was not intuitive, so it made a hard learning curve worse. Linux is rife with such dumbass naming conventions (WTF does "Grep" have to do with searching?!). I was hoping to keep the company from pouring money into a grossly overpriced thermal simulator. Sadly for an engineering group it was clear that Linux and those tools were just not adequately usable.

So unless you are installing Linux for a home user to surf the web and little else, I just don't see the current philosophy of Linux ever getting broad penetration on the desktop. There is a thin veneer of polish for Office and web, but anywhere off the beaten path, even a little, requires a deep dive into jargon hell.

Re:Stopping staring at your navals

[Khyber]

Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p globally search a regular expression and print.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Re:Stopping staring at your navals

[iggymanz]

You're not very tech savvy if you mention "grep", that utility has been in various operating systems since 1973. MS-DOS 2.x called it FGREP or FIND depending on version. Macs have grep.

I did zero work having Linux Mint recognize my NVIDIA card, sound system, wireless....maybe you should research a system's support for Linux rather than plopping it on something (usually full of cheap "win-devices")

Re:Stopping staring at your navals

[rubycodez]

There are GUI tools in Linux desktops that do what "grep" does (which is NOT a Linux thing per se but is 40+ years old utility). There are sites on the net that list systems and devices that Just Work with Linux, there are system vendors that tout LInux compatibilty and even contribute kernel modules, drivers and programs just for Linux (my HP Officejet is fully supported in Linux, for example).

Re:Stopping staring at your navals

[Alioth]

The same thing is true of WIndows if you have to install it from scratch, and it doesn't come pre-installed. It can take several hours to get a fully functional Windows build including much searching for drivers unless you have hardware that is completely supported by what MS ships on the installation CD.

If you're complaining about "grep" (which is not an invention of Linux, it's a standard unix tool that has existed since the 70s), try to guess what the "cacls" command is supposed to do in Windows without looking it up.

I've been pleased with LotD

[EmagGeek]

I've been using Linux on my desktop since running AfterStep WM on RedHat in 1996. My current machine is running Mint Cinnamon 17...

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[macs4all]

On macosX everything is typically in a fat binary.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

"Fat Binaries" are a term that originated back in the days of Apple's first CPU-platform migration (back in the MacOS days). "Fat Binaries" are Applications that have been targeted to install and run on Macs with different CPU Architecture (in the original case, either 68k or PPC, then later in OS X, either PPC or Intel).

They are "Fat" because they actually have the necessary "CPU-specific" code duplicated for the different hardware platforms.

Apple just had a "Launcher" (can't remember the actual name) in the OS that would silently and automagically pick the proper version of the App to load and launch.

However, talking about "Dependencies", OS X (and even the original MacOS) was (and is) VERY nice about not Spraying stuff all over your Drive (like Windows STILL does!!!). That's why, by and large, you can move an Application (which looks like a single Icon, but is in reality just a Folder full of stuff) simply by Dragging it to virtually anywhere on any accessible volume, and Uninstall it by Dragging it to the Trash and clicking "Empty Trash". It will probably leave behind a Preference file of a few Kilobytes; but, compared to excising a Windows App (or apparently a Linux one), it is a beauty thing...

Re:Infrastructure?

[Khyber]

"So yes, Windows has its use, but being productive in 2014 isn't one of them."

You say that while I run four servers, administer an auction website, do support in Google Helpouts, and multiplex four webcams at once while doing that Helpout.

What is your definition of productive? It doesn't seem realistic, by any means.

Desktop

[12_West]

Dear Mr. Linus Torvalds: I may not like your personality profanity, attitude, etc, but, completely agree with your stance on the "desktop". I am also a fan of your baseline achievement: creation of "LINUX". The "distributions", based on your work, continue to be a valuable component of my overall approach to PC survivability. I feel that I OWE you, and it does not matter whether or not I "LIKE" you, based on some comments posted somewhere on the web. You have a permanent "ally" in me, if you should ever need one at my level. Godspeed, and good health. Sincerely, Robert I. Baker.

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[sproketboy]

Next time you have a Windows box check the device manager. You'll see almost all the drivers are signed by Microsoft. I should have clarified that these numbers include devs doing device drivers and working on general compatibility issues with various softwares.

Re:Infrastructure?

[0123456]

Superior by what definition? Stability? sure, I'll give you that. ease of use?

1. Take a random Windows XP user.
2. Sit them in front of two machines, one running Window 8, one running Linux MATE.
3. Ask them to start a text editor on both machines.
4. See which one takes longer, and results in more bitching and swearing.

I mean, seriously, if I didn't know about Windows+R, I wouldn't have been able to start freaking Notepad on the Window 8 machine I played with in a local computer store.

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[sproketboy]

https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...

ease of use

[Iamthecheese]

I use Linux, almost exclusively, but I can see one of the major problems preventing migration that many linux developers cannot. It's confusing and difficult for the average user to learn where all the configuration files are and what they do. The moment you expect a new user to open a terminal you've already placed a giant barrier to adoption in the way. Certain distros have made giant leaps of progress in this matter but it's still a problem for all.

Want to make a minor adjustment to how your sound card works? Command line. Want to tell your laptop to ignore the touchpad? Command line. Want to use Tor? Command line. Want to install software that's no on the Ubuntu Software center? Command line. I understand that GUI is a dirty word to some developers. I understand the focus on making things work before worrying about making them easy. But the path to the year of Linux on the desktop is paved with intuitive, simple, GUI driven configuration and computer usage.

Re:Infrastructure?

[westlake]

You pick any laptop with Windows pre-installed and buy another and let me install and configure Linux and put it in a box. You will then see how a Windows system when compared to a Linux system is inferior "out of the box."

How much say will I get in how you will configure the system?

You are a geek but I am not and we have a very different set of interests, values and expectations.

How Linux wins the Desktop

[Pathway]

How Linux wins the Desktop

1. We need a "Default". Not necessarily a default Distro, but a set of standards that all distros can follow. Of course, other options will be allowed, even encouraged. Rationale: We need the "fragmentation" problem to be addressed, and I would suggest that a good start would to have a standard interface that is common across all of "Linux".

2. We need an easy way to manage a large group of computers. Large or small, businesses and schools want to make the configuration of their computers easy. Examples: Mass deploy Chrome. Setup a lab of computers to use a single printer. Setup logins with permissions and shared home folders. Rationale: These features are easy to configure on Windows and Mac OS X, but not so easy on Linux.

3. Easy Deployment. There needs to be a scriptable deployment that can mass install Linux onto multiple computers easily, including initial setup and joining of whatever management system is being used. While "image based" deployment can work, native installation deployment with configuration would be better. Rationale: If it is going to compete against Windows and Mac OS X, it has to be as easy to deploy.

I'm sure there are some projects that already fill some of these needs... but it's not there yet.

Re:How Linux wins the Desktop

[Shados]

The problem is the "good enough" mentality. A little like how IE6 was seen as "good enough" by Microsoft, and then they got pushed into the ground, a lot of features of the *nix ecosystem are seen as "good enough!" and then never improved on. Whenever you mention pushing and configuring software on a network, you'll hear stuff like Puppet or even rsync. Those tools are inadequate compared to the state of the art on so many levels....

Of course, Windows is having that issue more and more lately, as Microsoft is cutting corners more than ever before in fields they use to dominate. So I guess it evens out?

Re:How Linux wins the Desktop

[phantomfive]

1. We need a "Default". Not necessarily a default Distro, but a set of standards that all distros can follow. Of course, other options will be allowed, even encouraged. Rationale: We need the "fragmentation" problem to be addressed, and I would suggest that a good start would to have a standard interface that is common across all of "Linux".

Biggest thing here is the ability to install apps that aren't in a repository. Most of the rest is ok.

Re:How Linux wins the Desktop

[WuphonsReach]

#1 - There's really only two games in town for Linux. Either you publish an RPM for use on RedHat derived distros or you publish DEB style for Debian derived distros. If you service those two markets, you cover maybe 80-90% of the Linux systems in use. The outliers are SUSE and Mandriva, followed by the source-based distros like Slackware or Gentoo.

There's also the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) which your installer should adhere to, which smooths away most issues.

On the UI side, you really only have Gnome or KDE, and most apps run as-is on either because they use things like Qt.

#2 - "Chef" or "Puppet" or some other configuration management. Those tools have existed for a few years now and are stable and used.

#3 - Generally a solved problem, some of it is covered by configuration management tools like Chef/Puppet. Others have to be adapted from the cloud solutions. With a good cloud setup (private, hosted, or whatever) you can create and boot a new server in 10 minutes or less. On the desktop side, install a standard image, then let your configuration management software take over.

Re:How Linux wins the Desktop

[jonesy16]

I agree with some of what you're saying, but I think the biggest thing holding back Linux on the Desktop is all the duplicity of development effort carried out on the hundreds of various distributions. If we want Linux to be a competitor, we need to stop forking. There's clearly enough development taking place to support a competitive operating system, but we're spreading that effort too thin by trying to maintain and improve a dozen window managers, two dozen email clients, a hundred music players, and a few dozen package managers, etc. I get it, everyone thinks they have a better idea and 1 in 10 of those actually is better. But just think about how great an OS we could have at this point if all of that effort had been put into perfecting just one or two products. If we limited ourselves to one or two distros then it would be easier for all of that development work to be put into creating a standard set of gui tools for configuration settings so that the use doesn't have to open a terminal prompt to change something. If we focused our collective efforts on one set of PDF viewers / music players / IM clients, etc, we could pull together an OS that is AS polished as OS X is.

I install Linux on a "desktop" every 2 years or so just to see how things have improved and every time I do that, even with the same distro, there have been numerous changes but very few improvements. There's a new picture manager app, or a new default email client, but the feature sets haven't improved much. If we can get to that level of polish and consistency, then we'll open that door to more market penetration which will then hopefully lead to solutions for the other 2 problems:

1) Drivers (mentioned already on this page)
2) Commercial application support (also already mentioned)

Both of those are important, but their solution becomes easier if we can create a standard linux distribution that they can focus their efforts around.

Re:How Linux wins the Desktop

[LienRag]

How Linux wins the Desktop

1. Rationale: We need the "fragmentation" problem to be addressed, and I would suggest that a good start would to have a standard interface that is common across all of "Linux".

No, that's not a point. As long as there is ONE distribution of Linux that just works and is built to be easily accessible to newbies, you can have all the flavors of the world besides this one, it won't matter.
That's what Canonical tried, and it quite worked for a while.

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[cheesybagel]

The problem in my point of view is that the Linux desktop infrastructure is way outdated in architectural terms.

Too configurable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does fiddling with the KickStart and PXE rebooting (a lot) to get the rocket sled that is linux lined up on that badger just right count? Blap, wall of text, hope you know some good Tasseography. Oh, and then when some undebuggable problem from some unholy combination of systemd|dbus|polkit|selinux|pam|sssd|ohwhatnow and then futile forum and bugtracker blues morphs into "eff it, I'm reinstalling"...yeah. Good fun.

    echo `date +%Y` is the year of the `uname` desktop\!

There we go, problem solved.

My experience this past month with Linux

[GrBear]

PC: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H, i7-4770K, 16GB RAM, GTX 780 Ti.

Tried Mint Linux 18 Cinnimon & KDE, Ubuntu 14.04, Debian 7.6

None of them would even boot on my computer, even after dicking around with bios settings for an hour.

Laptop: Asus Zenbook UX41LA

After pissing around for half an hour with bios settings, I finally managed to get it to get farther than the grub bootloader. Things seem to work, but KDE crashes randomly, Cinnamon and Unity don't remember window locations and have their own oddities. None of them let me control screen backlighting, even after trying all the 'hacks' posted around the net.

Then I find out that video performs even worse with the open source Intel video drivers.

I'm all for Linux on servers, I own and run several, but damn, it shouldn't take a bloody engineering degree to get a GUI OS to install and work properly.

Re:My experience this past month with Linux

[tanderson92]

p>Laptop: Asus Zenbook UX41LA

After pissing around for half an hour with bios settings, I finally managed to get it to get farther than the grub bootloader. Things seem to work, but KDE crashes randomly, Cinnamon and Unity don't remember window locations and have their own oddities. None of them let me control screen backlighting, even after trying all the 'hacks' posted around the net.

Then I find out that video performs even worse with the open source Intel video drivers.

I know this won't help you now, but in the future you should know that Lenovo Thinkpads have some of the best out of the box linux support I have ever seen. All the little details work seamlessly and effortlessly.

Re:My experience this past month with Linux

[serviscope_minor]

Out of interest, how well does OSX work on that laptop?

My guess is the experience will be even worse than with Linux.

The lesson here is that if you want a Linux or OSX laptop, you buy one that's known to run the OS of choice. In OSX's case, you go to an Apple shop. In Linux's case, you go to a Linux laptop shop like Dell or System 76 or a bunch of others.

It doesn't require an engineering degree you see, just a little nouse with purchases.

I'm curious which model you actually have: the UX41A does not exist as far as I can tell. Unbuntu 14.04 works perfectly on the UX21.

Re:My experience this past month with Linux

[GrBear]

You're missing a letter my friend, I said UX31LA..

http://www.asus.com/Notebooks_...

Re:My experience this past month with Linux

[GrBear]

Forgot to mention, I never tried installing OSX on it. I may however, once the bugs are worked out of the EFI bootloader.

Re:My experience this past month with Linux

[serviscope_minor]

You're missing a letter my friend, I said UX31LA..

Nope :) You had a typo, I believe.

Anyway that's curious. The UX21 works flawlessly with 14.04. The wifi was buggy before but the driver was fixed some time in 2013. Are you using stock ubnutu or using a different desktop environment?

Re:My experience this past month with Linux

[GrBear]

Stock Ubuntu.. the wifi worked well however.

Desktop?

[ranpel]

If he wants the desktop he'll need to stop wanting the desktop. It's not a kernel problem, it's an office problem. Communications. Seamless integration has been a pipe dream for far too long from my perch. Without a full package you're tossing rocks at the river and hoping for a damn. KDE? This that or the other wrap that's functional and cool? Nope. Private and secure operations with links to people that will encompass the full work flow, that's the problem. Linux will work all day long on any desktop. It's all of the desktops that are the problem. Isn't there an early adopter that wants to roll their entire country back onto MS? That's not a kernel problem, that's a comms problem, communications with every other mid to large size office on the planet. Linux - not the problem.

Neither do some geeks

[John Bokma]

Neither do some geeks. I prefer my OS working reasonable well out of the box without the need (!) to have to reconfigure things. I don't want a Lego set for each and everything in my life; thank you!

Re:Infrastructure?

[PrimaryConsult]

The config overwriting used to annoy me as well, but the universal solution is to chattr +i the file that keeps getting overwritten. There's often an added bonus that whatever keeps overwriting it generates an error logged to the console or syslog whenever it tries again, providing a nice breadcrumb to figure out what's overwriting it.

Ugh

[Greyfox]

I just started maintaining an old Linux X11 app. A REALLY old app. Some of the function declarations still use K&R. It's all Motif and XT. Looking at it with an eye to modernizing it, well... I guess QT won. Problem is, if I go QT, I pretty much have to drink all the QT kool-aid, since they seem to have tried to re-implement the entire C standard library under their API. Other than that, the field's pretty much right where I left it back in the mid '90's, last time I really looked at X11 programming in a big way. Actually back then GTK and gtkmm were at least looking like promising competitors to QT. Looking around at an even lower level, I can find a rant from Rasterman about imlib being faster than Xrender, and pretty much everyone deciding that OpenGL was a better way to go than Xrender anyway. That's pretty much everything, since 1995.

I think if you want the desktop it's going to take another linux-kernel-level effort around the GUI. The question is do we keep trying to put more band-aids on X11 or do we design something from the ground up that everyone can agree on?

Re:Ugh

[phantomfive]

That's pretty much everything, since 1995. ....The question is do we keep trying to put more band-aids on X11 or do we design something from the ground up that everyone can agree on?

There's Wayland now, and Mir was an attempt for a while. You've missed some stuff.

Re:Ugh

[Uecker]

I don't see your point. Xrender works just fine and just traced some applications using xtrace and they happily make use of it. And yes, this works perfectly over the network.

Changing this would mean breaking a binary protocol with decades of backwards compatibility. I do not think the Linux community could do something more stupid than breaking compatibility with X11. As if those many applications magically rewrite themselves. And applications which use direct rendering work exactly the same way on X as anywhere else, so there is not even something to gain.

What is missing for the desktop is a consistent and polished GUI on top of that. Unfortunately, gnome, Ubuntu, all made the same mistake as Microsoft: Abandoning their old stuff to get something hip which also works on tablets. Now we have an inconsistent mess that is worse than what we had a few years ago.

Re:Ugh

[Greyfox]

Yeah, I'm kind of waiting to see if everyone drinks the Wayland kool-aid. Everyone seems to hate it because Canonical is trying ram it down our throats.

Re:Ugh

[Greyfox]

Well anyone on QT can just pick a new renderer. Assuming we want to throw our fortunes in with QT. More people seem to be going that way. I'm pretty much writing off Gnome/GTK/Unity. I run Enlightenment right now. It doesn't look like ass, has focus follows mouse and has the concept of running more than one app (or multiple instances of one app) at one time. Rather than ramming some concept of how someone else thinks I should work, it lets me work the way I want to work. This is a very simple concept which if you don't embrace will relegate you to the status of also-ran. Gnome/GTK/Unity chose that status for themselves. So did Windows 8. Hopefully the next thing that comes along won't make the same mistake.

Re:Ugh

[phantomfive]

Whenever someone says, "I don't like this code I've been working on, I think I'll rewrite it" it inevitably takes longer than they expect and usually ends up being worse. Based on that principle alone, I am skeptical it will be any good (the creators weren't known for good project management).

However, they do have a group of devoted fanboys, and anytime I mention something like that on Slashdot, I get a bunch of replies saying how great Wayland is (and that I don't need X forwarding, even though I use it every day). Who knows, maybe they are right. Maybe someday I'll have a great system that combines Wayland with Python 3.

Re:Ugh

[tkotz]

I've always been a fan of WxWidgets. Which similar to QT is an application framework, but has really good native cross platform support. It tries to not re-implement too much basic C++ stuff (for example the deprecation of wxStrings with the improvements to STL strings).

The problem with designing something from the ground up everyone can agree on is getting everyone to agree. We will see where things like OpenGL-Next and Wayland go, but legacy support is always an issue and requiring everyone to quantum switch to a new interface is tough to coordinate. If the old interface is extensible the band-aid approach gets around a lot of these issues. A better move is to start to get serious about deprecating old parts of the API while adding new parts.  This way you can transition to a completely new interface and implementation without ever completely losing consistency.

Multi-window and focused activity

[tepples]

"Linux on the Desktop" is called Chrome or Android and the "desktop" is wherever we are instead of a jumble of wires connected to a monitor.

Perhaps "Linux on the multi-window desktop" or "Linux on the desktop in a focused activity setting" is a more precise of what some people mean. The Android ecosystem, from the CDD on up, is staunchly opposed to rich window management, instead preferring a paradigm of all maximized all the time that makes it hard to work on one document while referring to another document.

Full screen

[tepples]

A desktop customized version of Android

Won't have the Google Play Store. The Android CDD requires that apps run in the full screen (or at least think that they're running in the full screen). This means the calculator app fills your entire 24" monitor, obscuring whatever else you're working on.

Windows can be just as Fisher-Price

[tepples]

I still think KDE and Gnome still look a bit "Fisher Price" compared to a commercial GUI like Windows or Mac

If you'll remember, Windows XP's default theme was considered "Fisher-Price" until people saw Windows 8's Start Screen.

Re:Windows can be just as Fisher-Price

[cyberchondriac]

Luna? The taskbar was kinda goofy, but not the windows themsevles and icons throughout the rest of the interface.I think most people just had an issue with that taskbar..

Localization costs disc space

[tepples]

Lack of offline help

How much space would it take on the install disc to have full manuals for all included packages translated into all supported languages?

Re:Infrastructure?

[NotSanguine]

I think that the golden age of FOSS documentation is over. For a long time Linux and other FOSS docs were based on how commercial UNIX documentation was written, but slowly more and more developers aren't creating volumes of use or configuration docs in the UNIX model anymore, and as few UNIX-era developers work on Linux and other FOSS, there are less people who remember how those documents were made and why. I think that is what will hurt FOSS the most, simply being unable to figure out how to do the things that one wants to do because the docs don't exist.

That's one of the best jokes I've heard in a quite a while. And you don't even realize that it's funny, do you? I mean, it's really fabulous! I'm guessing that you were born after this quote was published:

One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How
enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many
years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines.
Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple
language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for
students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for
interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of
its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on
VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will
run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and
will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and
quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With
VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of
documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the
difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS
is that it's all there.

-- Ken Olsen, President of DEC, 1984

Linus wants the Desktop?

[Lisias]

So I recommend him to start his own Desktop project. :-)

Seriously, I don't know of, now, any other Open Source leader capable of doing a decent Desktop. Torvalds finishes what he starts, and he finishes it vrey well (see git).

We had very good Desktops in the past, but nowadays things are just too shiny and too new and... too dumbed down to be useful to me: who knows me from other /. posts about this matter knows why I migrated to MacOS two years ago, and don't plan to migrate back in the short run.

I still love Linux - all my non desktop machines are Linux, no questions asked. But I just can't handle any of the present mainstream Desktops to use Linux again on my working box.

Re:Linus wants the Desktop?

[Lisias]

You guys no nothing about Linus or how he likes to use his desktop. It's funny how people export their dreams and ideas to one man like this.

I follow the guy on G+. I did read what he said about Gnome 3 at that time in first hand.

But you can read about it here.

The guy is not remotely qualified to write a desktop. Have you seen all the commands in git? The first round was a usability nightmare. Hell he himself would admit that.

Linus wrote Linux 0.99, a really little piece of crap compared to any usable UNIX kernel at that time. But yet, he managed to lead this project in a way that now Linux is probably the most used kernel (UNIX like or not) in the world. And the thing is really good (but granted, perhaps not the best).

Linus wrote git, a really piece of crap compared to any usable DCMS at that time. But yet, he managed to lead this project in a way that now git is probably the most used CMS (distributed or not) in the world. And the thing is really good (but granted, perhaps not the best).

Did this makes a ring sounds somewhere in your head? Or you need me to draw it to you? :-)

The guy is a great engineer. Great engineers don't invent great things, they build great things - most of the time, using shitty things as experiments/prototypes/proofs of concepts in order to get the great thing done.

Re:Linus wants the Desktop?

[Sri Ramkrishna]

The guy is a great engineer. Great engineers don't invent great things, they build great things - most of the time, using shitty things as experiments/prototypes/proofs of concepts in order to get the great thing done

Yes, an engineer which is great when you're dealing with computers. But a desktop is essentially dealing with humans which is a completely different problem set and I would say a lot harder. In GNOME, it takes an enormous time to get all the details right on a user interface. It is nothing like working with a kernel. It isn't as easy as you think it is. Even the early desktops took all their designs from Windows 95, copying a lot of the look and feel because nobody was trained on how to write a user interface. Even today we're still messing around with the same design.

I suppose you're just asking Linus Torvalds to re-engineer windows 95 interface, I suppose he could do that. But to do something new, and unique that requires an anthropologist.

Re:Linus wants the Desktop?

[Lisias]

Yes, an engineer which is great when you're dealing with computers. But a desktop is essentially dealing with humans which is a completely different problem set and I would say a lot harder. In GNOME, it takes an enormous time to get all the details right on a user interface. It is nothing like working with a kernel. It isn't as easy as you think it is.

Man, you really got over the line now. Are you dismissing LInus Torvalds because the "Kernel is not as complicated and easier"?

No one's saying that making Gnome 3 was easy. We were just saying that Gnome 3 was a nightmare - two completely different things,

Even the early desktops took all their designs from Windows 95, copying a lot of the look and feel because nobody was trained on how to write a user interface.

I really hope you are not one of the anthropologist that designed the Gnome 3.

The early desktops came from XFCE and OpenSTEP, that came from IBM's CDE and NeXT STEP - both initiatives predates Windows 95 by at least 1 year.

And no, neither CDE nor STEP have any ressembles on Windows 95.

Even today we're still messing around with the same design.

Wrong again, but not that much. MacOS is, as it was, very different from anything Microsoft did in the past or nowadays. At least, for while and on the Desktop.

I suppose you're just asking Linus Torvalds to re-engineer windows 95 interface, I suppose he could do that. But to do something new, and unique that requires an anthropologist.

Nopes. I just asking Linus to step up and LEAD a Desktop project.

The result will probably be not shiny and new and full of [insert your favorite insult here], but it will be usable, and it will works, and more importantly, it will get the job done without hassle - that what matters when the month ends and I have to pay my bills.

Re:Linus wants the Desktop?

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Yes, an engineer which is great when you're dealing with computers. But a desktop is essentially dealing with humans which is a completely different problem set and I would say a lot harder. In GNOME, it takes an enormous time to get all the details right on a user interface. It is nothing like working with a kernel. It isn't as easy as you think it is.

Man, you really got over the line now. Are you dismissing LInus Torvalds because the "Kernel is not as complicated and easier"?

No one's saying that making Gnome 3 was easy. We were just saying that Gnome 3 was a nightmare - two completely different things,

Dealing with humans is harder than dealing with the kernel. Dealing how they interact with a computer is quite a bit different. It is an entire research subject. GNOME 3's deployment could have gone better. It would have been better to allow people to parallel install both and let them move when they were comfortable. The design itself continues to be a successful work in progress. Next iteration, I will likely make sure that we don't do it this way.

Even the early desktops took all their designs from Windows 95, copying a lot of the look and feel because nobody was trained on how to write a user interface.

I really hope you are not one of the anthropologist that designed the Gnome 3.

The early desktops came from XFCE and OpenSTEP, that came from IBM's CDE and NeXT STEP - both initiatives predates Windows 95 by at least 1 year.

And no, neither CDE nor STEP have any ressembles on Windows 95.

Let me a bit more succinct. I'm saying that the people who were building Linux based desktops took a lot of their design from windows 95, amigaos, and various other desktops that were there before. All the examples you've stated doesn't invalidate what I said. We took our designs from someone else. The most popular ones are based on windows 95, GNOME and KDE.

Even today we're still messing around with the same design.

Wrong again, but not that much. MacOS is, as it was, very different from anything Microsoft did in the past or nowadays. At least, for while and on the Desktop.

And so is GNOME 3. However, the usage patterns completely changed and a lot of people (rightfully) were upset. But over time, it has gained acceptance and winning people back to the desktop. That could have happened faster if we had parallel installable GNOME versions.

I suppose you're just asking Linus Torvalds to re-engineer windows 95 interface, I suppose he could do that. But to do something new, and unique that requires an anthropologist.

Nopes. I just asking Linus to step up and LEAD a Desktop project.

The result will probably be not shiny and new and full of [insert your favorite insult here], but it will be usable, and it will works, and more importantly, it will get the job done without hassle - that what matters when the month ends and I have to pay my bills.

Why? What gives him the expertise to run a desktop project, exactly? Just because they are both software projects doesn't mean that he has the ability to lead a group of people working on UI and middleware projects. I don't think he's remotely interested in running it. Perhaps when I run into him at some conference I'll ask him. Perhaps you can ask him? In any case, I find it amusing that people think Linus is some kind of uber geek. Given the personal feedback he's given me, I know that his requirements are fairly modest compared to some.

Re:Linus wants the Desktop?

[Lisias]

This would help a lot. First he should write a simple, simple, fast and Unix styled version of systemd. Then replace the network-manager with one that does not pull in half of the Gnome desktop. Then help writing a replacement for CUPS, that would actually work.

How the KDE folks are dealing with this issues?

And make a policy for not breaking compatibility with user on the GUI side (no, you can not suddenly move the window minimize/maximize/close/ -buttons to left side of window, or other insanities).

From my point of view, they can shove =P the buttons where they want. Just give-me the choice to move them back to where I want, and I'm happy.

Re:Linus wants the Desktop?

[Lisias]

Dealing with humans is harder than dealing with the kernel.

And yet, cars and airplanes and bicycles and a lot of other tools (some more complicated, some less) are still being engineered by engineers.

I don't see a link here, sorry.

Dealing how they interact with a computer is quite a bit different. It is an entire research subject.

Dealing with (some) corporate egg headed's wishes on how people should use a computer is that it's quite different.

Common People are using computers since the 80's. Some metaphors sucked a lot, some others was successful (and some, besides sucking). The break even point was simple: I work/play/whatever better now that did yesterday?

Cars use steering wheels and pedals since Ford's era, besides a lot of research on new ways to drive a car. Did you ever considered why?

GNOME 3's deployment could have gone better. It would have been better to allow people to parallel install both and let them move when they were comfortable

That would had helped a lot, indeed.

The design itself continues to be a successful work in progress. Next iteration, I will likely make sure that we don't do it this way.

Successful to whom? You see, people are not all alike.

Let me a bit more succinct. I'm saying that the people who were building Linux based desktops took a lot of their design from windows 95, amigaos, and various other desktops that were there before. All the examples you've stated doesn't invalidate what I said. We took our designs from someone else. The most popular ones are based on windows 95, GNOME and KDE.

Now I see.

Perhaps this happens because is considered BAD ENGINEERING creating something out of the blue just for the sake of it.

There's a good reason cars are still using steering wheels and pedals nowadays - people don't have to be trained and reissued a new driver's license when they sold the old model and buy a new one.

Any nowadays stereo are still using the same metaphors from decades ago (Play, Stop, Next, Previous, Volume Up and Down - even the Eject are still used), and the remote control from my new shining OLED TV has the same buttons my old, ultrasonic, mechanical remote control had (but granted, it has that buttons and a lot more).

Of course modern remote control are a lot more sophisticated and useful that hat old craps, but the basic metaphors are still there - the enhancements were introduced rationally, without breaking current usability.

Why? Because this is considered *GOOD ENGINEERING*.

Nopes. I just asking Linus to step up and LEAD a Desktop project.

The result will probably be not shiny and new and full of [insert your favorite insult here], but it will be usable, and it will works, and more importantly, it will get the job done without hassle - that what matters when the month ends and I have to pay my bills.

Why? What gives him the expertise to run a desktop project, exactly?

Because it's already proven that he is capable of handling successfully huge and complex open source projects.

Just because they are both software projects doesn't mean that he has the ability to lead a group of people working on UI and middleware projects.

Just because he never did it, doesn't mean that he doesn't have the skills neither. However, he's a proven open source leader that delivers solid artifacts, with a nice (but granted, far from perfect) historic of consistency between releases. I prefer to do not make comparisons with some other Open Source projects - there's no need for a jihad here.

I'm not hiring the guy to write code or specify usability requirements. But you can bet your arse I would hir

Re:Infrastructure?

[exomondo]

People who purport to know about computers need to stop asking stupid questions like "When will Linux be ready for the desktop ?", and start asking intelligent questions like "When will the general populace get a clue ?"

No, no they don't. What they need to ask is "Why do Linux desktop distros not appeal to end users?". The answer has always been clear, it is that they don't offer any significant advantage over the incumbents, they are not disruptive and thus will not disrupt the market.

Look at iOS and Android, they stole the smartphone - and much of the wider cell phone - market from the incumbents by being innovative and disruptive, users didn't care that they were different or incompatible because they offered features that were better! Desktop Linux distros do not do this, they are me-too products scrambling to do whatever OS X and Windows do and thus people don't want to abandon familiarity and compatibility for dubious benefit.

You can provide all the anecdotes you want about your hardships with OS X or Windows and I'm sure they'll be matched with anecdotes about people's hardships with Linux so that gets you nowhere. You can blame Microsoft or blame the user (which is what you're doing) but that doesn't make desktop Linux distros any more disruptive or innovative and thus no more appealing to users.

Offer real, tangible, innovation that is disruptive to the market and the ISVs and OEMs will be climbing over eachother to support it just as they did with Android.

The problems IMNSHO

[NorthWay]

There are two problems with The Year of the Desktop for Linux:
1. Linux - it is a kernel and can't fix what goes on in the desktop. I never understand why people expect those to correlate.
2. Linus - there is no Linus in the GUI world who can put the foot down and stamp out a path.

And yes, X and its ecosystem _is_ a problem. When parts of the GUI are separated and with individually selectable APIs you get a wonderful sense of freedom, but the days of yore with the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Archimedes, the Be, and Apple they did unwittingly reap rewards from having a nazi stranglehold on the _whole_ of the GUI.
How do you go about adding 'Datatypes' (Amiga feature - I believe Be had something more advanced?) to every GUI running on top of Linux? Who can plant the flag on top of that hill and declare "so be it"? It is a framework for GUIs that really made everything easier for everyone.
Failing that, I'd like to point the the XPK compression framework for the Amiga that in many ways was similar to Datatypes - for the end user it also helps the desktop experience by being able to handle more types of data in applications that didn't have an explicitly coded way to do so.

Linux has solved the kernel part, but you shouldn't expect that to automatically fix things several layers higher in the stack.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Yunzil]

Um, if you're on the Metro screen you type "notepad" and press enter. Gosh Windows is complex.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Darinbob]

I'd be happy just getting TWO options for most things. But that's considered too many for the mass market to understand.

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[Darinbob]

Often the device makers create the drivers and Microsoft just validates and signs them.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[phantomfive]

The check box is gone, and the ads are back, and dumber than ever! I

It's still there for me, maybe your karma dropped a bit.

I miss the days of Barracuda ads that made sense on slashdot. The new ones aren't targeted at geeks at all.

I agree.

Re:I love games, but ...

[penguinoid]

You seem just like me. I've mostly been playing browser based games for the novelty. And I absolutely loathe the morons who make a good 2D game into a terrible 3D game. I wouldn't complain if they didn't sacrifice functionality... but they usually do.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Richy_T]

How much say did you get in how Microsoft, the laptop vendor and all those little annoying trialware app vendors configured the Windows install?

Re:Infrastructure?

[Richy_T]

Good, balanced, objective post.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Wycliffe]

The issue isn't wifi. I happened to mention 2 issues with wifi. I could easily list a dozen more issues with a dozen different subsystems.
I'm a linux administrator. I use linux daily. It's easier to configure for someone who knows what they're doing but it lacks many of the
wizards that power users hate but people who can't find the C drive love. The issue is ease of use. When I plug in a usb drive, does
it automount? Personally, I don't want it to, but someone who has a hard time finding the C drive is going to be lost. Installing a printer
on linux is alot more cumbersome and is less step by step. Even some advantages like multiple desktops can make it more confusing.
Linux is not ready for people like my dad who "lost" his desktop icons once because he accidently maximized his current application window.
Unfortunately the linux "power users" would hate a linux that is made for newbies as it would have to hide alot of what makes linux
great under the "advanced" options.

Re:Infrastructure?

[bondsbw]

How do you think that's even a fair comparison? I could easily wipe the hard drive and put a Windows install that is finely tuned and put it in the box as well, and there's a good chance my install will have a better user experience than yours.

Re:Infrastructure?

[bondsbw]

PEBKAC.

Linus wants the Desktop?

[Sri Ramkrishna]

You guys no nothing about Linus or how he likes to use his desktop. It's funny how people export their dreams and ideas to one man like this. The guy is not remotely qualified to write a desktop. Have you seen all the commands in git? The first round was a usability nightmare. Hell he himself would admit that.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Anonymous Coward]

So to use Win8 one needs to drop to the CLI?

due to current trends..

[bbelt16ag]

I suspect windows will be come illrevent, free, or cloud based very soon. Android has kicked it in the teeth tablet wise, and apple hit them when it was down in the mobile phone market. the chinese makers are coming with linux variants and samsung is biting at their tail on mobile too. this market is going to take care of 99% of the leisure read/game/talk time of people. They no longer need a desktop for that. The only reason to have a desktop is gaming is a big keyboard and mouse. windows can compete with gaming on the xbox, but with stuff like linux steam and support for native gaming in linux their days are numbered. They should go like IBM and become support for legacy windows and then sell it off to some other company to die a quiet death. Then they could start to innovate and be cutting edge doing stuff like Watson or Siri stuff they already have most of the know how.

Re:Infrastructure?

[strikethree]

I think the main problem is that Linux is *TOO* configurable. "Normals" don't want hundreds of options. They want people to tell them which of a limited number of options will work for them.

I hate being an ass... but, shut the fuck up you stupid moron. YOU are the reason Gnome sucks.

It is not the number of options that are available, it is how they are presented. You remove the ability to configure, you remove the most important part of your user base.

DO NOT EVER MAKE IT LESS CONFIGURABLE.

If someone is telling you it is too confusing, give sane defaults and then think of a way to organize the configuration options in such a way that the ordinary user does not feel they need to go in and start playing with those options.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked this UI paradigm better when it was called "MS-DOS."

2015

[electrosoccertux]

Year of Linus Torvalds on the desktop???

Re:Infrastructure?

[Tough Love]

I will second that. I use both Windows and KDE desktops, and KDE is just a lot smoother and easier to forget about when you're working, which is really the main thing you want from a desktop. It also some very nice features that Windows lacks, such as providing fine grained persisent control over window geometry for given applications. And there are just an endless number of annoyances that Windows has that KDE does not. Reboot in the middle of your work, to name just one.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Tough Love]

Offer real, tangible, innovation that is disruptive to the market and the ISVs and OEMs will be climbing over eachother to support it just as they did with Android.

I like my Linux desktop the way it is, thankyou, and I do not want it "innovated". We will crush Microsoft some other way.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[Tough Love]

Linus is blaming somebody else for Linux not taking the desktop, this is not to say he's not right, it's just amusing that he would blame others and tells me he's not interested in helping with the solution.

Good thing too. Linus is arguable one of the worst user interface designers on the planet.

Re:Infrastructure?

[DamnOregonian]

I was pretty surprised to learn, at age 25, that Windows was in fact NOT free. Apparently I missed the portion of my childhood education where copyright law was explained to me.

In summary, your logic is unsupported by the facts.

Re:Infrastructure?

[DamnOregonian]

I want to smile and pat you on the head. Doing systems administration for a living, I've probably been exposed to some shit the average Linux user doesn't see, but I assure you, update failures on both Debian and Red Hat derivatives can't be quite spectacular and fatal.

Re:Infrastructure?

[DamnOregonian]

I've been a Systems Administrator for going on 8 years now, though I'm now our Senior Network Engineer, I still lead the Systems Administration team, and I couldn't concur more. We manage ~400 Linux machines/virts, and a handful of Windows machines (kill me.)

About 6 years back, I started using Linux exclusively for my desktop, but prior to getting a firm grasp of the Linux internals, I hated it on the desktop. It was garbage. Every single subsystem seems to be in a flux of brokenness, with every progressive generation doubling down on stupid and making the entire subsystem more flaky to fix one single problem the old one had. Drives me crazy. Still love the OS though. You can't beat it for administration.

My experience right now

[lien_meat]

I have a dell laptop with 8.1 on it I bought some months ago for work. I have all the latest drivers and windows is up to date. However, the WiFi randomly decides to disconnect, and then will reconnect only after clicking on the network icon in the task bar. It's not the access point, its only this laptop in windows. Also, the reported remaining time on battery is always higher by a factor of 8. Not making this up. Nothing I have found has fixed this. In Ubuntu 14.04 though, I have zero issues like this, and it is a stock install. No hackery at all. None. Also, using the exact same applications that I use for work in windows my laptop is more responsive and has 2gb more free ram, and it doesn't hit my HD as much. I'd work in Ubuntu but MS Lync is required for me to work with my team, and doesn't run in linux.

Re: Infrastructure?

[Barsteward]

" Many Linux distros have gone from being over configurable a few years ago to bring even more tightly locked down than Windows or MacOS"

Not the ones using KDE as the desktop

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[Barsteward]

"The one I like happens to be Windows. I'm used to the way it works, it enables my productivity while at the computer. I've yet to find a desktop environment for Linux that does the same."

what is the difference between a linux and windows and OSX desktop? nothing, point your mouse and click on the app, works on all of them (maybe win 8 is a change). only the app is different (except Libreoffice etc)

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[epyT-R]

Help who exactly? There are good reasons why non gpl modules get limited api access, and why the kernel has a tainted/not tainted flag displayed in every oops. The devs don't accept bug reports from kernels that have closed/non gpl code running at the time of crash. Why? Because they can't look at the source or build debug versions. The kernel devs don't want to deal with floods of users posting such kernel dumps and demanding answers the devs cannot give. A linux ecosystem like this would be no better than windows' (or any other closed platform, really).

The net result is that the vendors who take linux seriously submit working source for their hardware under gpl2, which is then folded into the main release via git pull requests. If the vendor then abandons the hardware and driver at some point, at least the code is available and can be maintained as kernel internals change and as it is ported to new hardware.

The ones who don't release source, don't get to take advantage of this 'automatic' maintenance and must do it all themselves, nor do their blobs interfere with the kernel devs or users running more recent kernels that won't load them. This effectively keeps these vendors accountable for the entire ecosystem needed to support their blobs, which is good since they're the only ones with complete source. The users stuck on the older kernel releases in order to retain needed functionality are rightly dependent on the vendor for fixe instead of the kernel devs.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[epyT-R]

Those don't run in the kernel...and the stubs that load into the kernel are non-gpl, so any crashes posted will show as tainted and will not be addressed by the kernel devs.

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[shutdown -p now]

Note that only 65k are in "engineering". This is across the entire company, working on numerous products (many of which you probably don't even know exist), and also internal infrastructure like build systems, test automation, and internal dev tools.

Quite obviously, one third of that cannot be working on the drivers, and even one tenth is an unreasonably high estimate.

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[shutdown -p now]

Just because they are signed by Microsoft, doesn't mean that Microsoft wrote them. For Vista, and even more so for Win7, large number of drivers was included out of the box to cover a wide range of hardware without needing driver CDs as often as XP did. Most of those are third party drivers, but because they are redisted by MS, they have the MS signature on them.

Basically, if you see MS certificate on some binary, it means that someone at Microsoft has built that binary. It doesn't mean that they wrote the source code for it.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[epyT-R]

Actually, the notable exceptions are the gpu vendors, and a smattering of printer models... Most devices 'just work' under linux as they're just generic hardware anyway. People shouldn't be hiding their secret bits in binary blobs anyway.. It is NOT secure.

They don't have to give anyone source, but then they don't get to take advantage of having their driver maintained in-tree as kernel internals change over time and as it is ported to new systems. The kernel devs also don't have to deal with users complaining about crashes when those drivers are loaded. If the user's kernel oops message says 'tainted', the devs will tell him "go talk to your vendor for support." Why should the devs have to debug systems with source they can't access? Linux is supposed to be open source, not half-open/closed.

Most raid controllers work under linux, even the shitty software ones do now.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[epyT-R]

Userland is not the kernel. In fact, linus has made it very clear that it is not allowed for kernel devs to break userspace ABI. Beyond that, it's up to others to decide what to do with userspace. The fact is, you CAN run old linux 2.0/libc6 binaries on modern linux for a given platform. You just need copies of libraries that haven't broken ABI with the ones it was linked against.

If you want to blame someone for their laziness in supporting your desire to keep your code closed, then blame the distros who aren't shipping the ancient libraries you linked against 5 years ago in their current releases and/or blame the authors of the libraries who broke their ABI.

Linux will never be on the desktop, never.

[Z80a]

It will take over every single other machine on the planet, from cars to celphones, to pace makers, to microwaves to game consoles to everything.. except the desktop.
Even 100 years from now, when the linux powered skynet coordinate the uclinux 6502 powered terminators to finish off the last of the human resistance, those terminators will still use windows on their desktop computers.

Re:Torvalds is true to form....

[epyT-R]

Actually applications break on osx updates and major releases quite a bit. This is usually due to libraries being removed or changed in the background. Apple's 'successful' solution is to tell users 'sorry your shit doesn't work on the new os.' Beign the apple fanboys they usually are, they swallow their pride and rebuy their applications. If they're lucky the application vendor will release a patched version for free.

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[cbhacking]

MS creates a lot of generic drivers (think stuff like USB mass storage, generic monitors, SATA controllers, Media Transfer Protocol devices, anything like that where there's a standard that the hardware implements). You can get a basic (but functional, if you don't mind probably having the wrong video resolution) computer running almost entirely on Microsoft-written drivers.

With that said, the vast majority of Windows drivers (by count, not necessarily by usage) are developed by hardware vendors. Microsoft probably doesn't even have 20k people in the Windows org at all, even if you include test, PM, and management. They certainly don't have that many on the kernel and devices team, never mind the portion of that team which is actually developing (including designing and testing) drivers.

@bADlOGIN - Re:Nobody else seems to want it

[nukenerd]

As a monopoly, Microsoft gets to hold the proverbial "gun" to device vendors heads and say, "support our OS [or] we'll fucking destroy your market ...".

No, MS do not need to hold a gun or say anything.

Any hardware maker, unless they are very very specialised, will first write drivers for Windows simply because ~95% of their market is going to be Windows users. After that they might write drivers for Linux perhaps to pick up a few more sales (like that's why I buy HP printers) and/or just in case next year really does become the year of the Linux desktop.

Re:Linux will NEVER be a Desktop - Every Day OS.

[cbhacking]

1 - Right-click the network icon in the system tray (it's in the same place on all versions of Windows from the last decade, and XP too for that matter).
2 - Select "Open Network and Sharing Center" (if on XP, just go to Properties, but make sure you got the right network interface if you have more than one).
3 - Click on the network interface name (something like "Local Area Connection" or "Ethernet"; XP users skip this step because you already chose the interface) to open the interface status.
4 - Click on Properties and, if not already running elevated, go through UAC. This gets you where the XP users were waiting (for the 13 years since their OS came out...).
5 - Double-click on "Internet Protocol Version 4".
6 - Change IP.

There's a number of alternate ways though some of those steps. You can also short-circuit the whole thing using netsh, but it was implied that you wanted the GUI technique. Oh, and these steps work for the last four (arguably five) OS releases, on everything from the extremely basic Starter SKU to the highest-end Windows Server Datacenter Edition to even the RT versions. Care to give the steps for Ubuntu 9.04 (a mere five years ago), or for Kubuntu/Xubuntu/etc.?

Re:Let's face it: desktop Linux is a piece of shit

[nukenerd]

Don't even get me started on Linux Mint. ... Turns out that Mint, in their INFINITE GENIUS, decided to base their distro on Ubuntu's package repository..

I entirely agree that Mint are idiots for using Ubuntu repositories. Ubuntu in turn is based on Debian, so why don't Mint (and certain other distros) use Debian repositories and cut out the (dodgy in this case) middle man?

You'll be mocked and flamed and ridiculed and kicked off, told you are unworthy of Linux and should just go back to Windows. So go ahead assholes, just keep on dreaming about being the choice for desktop computing.

I'm not mocking, but people's reaction depends on how you phrase your argument. Yours looked reasonable until the third paragraph, but turned into a flame itself after that. I am always complaining about certain Linux issues on more technical forums than this one, but I think I am nevertheless respected for making my points effectively. There is indeed a lot wrong with Linux (it's certainly not "gold"); but I use it because the alternatives are even worse IMHO.

Re:Infrastructure?

[DamnOregonian]

* s/can\'t/can/;

Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

The elephant in the room is the sound subsystem. Umpteen sodding layers of incompatible nonsense on top of a vastly inferior API. Getting applications to work seamlessly with ALSA+Portaudio/JACK/Pulse/ARTS/Phonon is a bloody nightmare. Meanwhile, on the "dead" operating system that is FreeBSD, we have virtualised multi-stream concurrent playback out of the box.

Every time I touch a Linux desktop the audio subsystem gives me a few more grey hairs. It needs ripping up and starting from scratch or OSS brought back with the same codebase that FreeBSD uses. That won't make me switch but you'll stand a better chance of your fabled "year of the Linux desktop" if the audio applications actually work reliably.

Problems and Suggestions on how to get Desktop

[szir]

Here is how l see it.
Linux is good for Linux gurus (who live in the terminal and use vi). lt is also became good enough in recent years for simpleton users who just want to browse the web (watch youtube, write mail...).

But the problem is they are not going to install Linux (or Windows for that matter). Because "I'm just not adept/understand/know...". (not sure how it is in English, i only hear it in Hungarian) Even though they could. Because they all know intermediate users they can ask. And that's where it's at. We intermediate users install maybe 90 percent of the desktops. So if you want desktops then you need to win us over. And you are not...

I'm an embedded hardware/software engineer. When I was young I was playing with OSes (DOS, Win, qnx, OS/2 warp, BeOS...), but now I want to *use* my desktop (for work) and not play with it (maybe play on it). If the OS is not working properly it is preventing me from doing my job, and I'm loosing money (and/or my free time and my sanity).

Linux Desktop (ubuntu) LTS is a joke. WinXP was around for a decade, that is LTS. I don't have time to learn new distributions, UIs... every year. And the ever present or growing inconsistency does not help either.

So who are intermediate users? Basically we can use Google (or Bing, Yahoo). That's it. And when I search for "how to ..." I get maybe 10 percent success rate or even less. Because either the top result is a forum, where the same question is asked but there is no solution, or there are many solutions that none of work, the result is for a different distribution, same distribution but different incompatible version... (RTFM does not help because I do not have time to read 10 new ones every year)

(for example: configure (multiple) static IP on Linux: /etc/network/interfaces right? well that's what it says if you are debian based, not even gonna start with RHEL, but on raspbmc the file is so fucking empty and does not do anything, and on my ubuntu it is also does not contain eth0 (and eth1) because of the network manager. Configuring monitor resolution (permanently), xrandr? edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf? well you mean create one. Would it be so fucking hard to include a sample one in every distribution where you can just uncomment lines? Run something on startup: sys-v init.d, rc.d, upstart, lsb script, service, update-rc.d... Ubuntu 5 had GUI group (and user) management, they removed it since then. Congratulation.)

I could continue, but I have to work now...

Maybe if developers would focus more on stability, fixing bugs and developing useful tools, features we need rather than rewriting everything (Unity, that is useless on VMs)... (I know, it's less exciting to write production quality code than writing something new.) Maybe one day.

I really like the quote I found on Coding Horror blog:

quote from Havoc Pennington:

"It would be wonderful discipline for any software dev team serious about Linux 'on the desktop' (whatever that means) to ban their own use of terminals. Of course, none of us have ever done this, and that explains a lot about the resulting products."

Re:Problems and Suggestions on how to get Desktop

[Ash-Fox]

But the problem is they are not going to install Linux (or Windows for that matter). Because "I'm just not adept/understand/know...". (not sure how it is in English, i only hear it in Hungarian) Even though they could. Because they all know intermediate users they can ask. And that's where it's at. We intermediate users install maybe 90 percent of the desktops. So if you want desktops then you need to win us over. And you are not...

Then buy a computer with Linux pre-installed, (such as stuff from system76)

Linux Desktop (ubuntu) LTS is a joke. WinXP was around for a decade, that is LTS. I don't have time to learn new distributions, UIs... every year. And the ever present or growing inconsistency does not help either.

Then use a long term support distribution like Redhat Linux.

So who are intermediate users? Basically we can use Google (or Bing, Yahoo). That's it. And when I search for "how to ..." I get maybe 10 percent success rate or even less. Because either the top result is a forum, where the same question is asked but there is no solution, or there are many solutions that none of work, the result is for a different distribution, same distribution but different incompatible version...

Sounds like a personal problem. I don't have this issue when searching for how tos for Linux.

Maybe if developers would focus more on stability

I don't have stability issues.

fixing bugs and developing useful tools

I have plenty of useful tools and I see bug fixes all the time when I do updates.

features we need rather than rewriting everything (Unity, that is useless on VMs)...

Sounds like more personal problems. I can run Unity just fine on VMware workstation 10, VDI configurations etc.

(I know, it's less exciting to write production quality code than writing something new.) Maybe one day.

I have seen non-FOSS production ready code, there is no standard of quality. There is some immense crap out there. Anecdotally, some of the best code I have seen comes from scrum-agile development teams (which I find a lot of modern FOSS projects use).

Re:Linus does not understand the size of the effor

[sproketboy]

Really? No one complains about device drivers on Linux? Where have you been the last 20 years?

Re:If he wants it (part 2) then

[Ash-Fox]

Please provide the licensing for redistribution on media.

Re:Infrastructure?

[TheDarkMaster]

For me the "excess" of settings and options was never a problem. What has always been a problem for me is that none of the options works correctly all the time.

Re:Infrastructure?

[TheDarkMaster]

Linux has also been superior on the desktop for quite some time

You are smoking crack? Serious? Maybe for YOU is superior, for the other 97% of users (market share) is only usable. And before you put me as troll, consider that if the Linux was so superior as you claim, then his participation in the market would be a lot bigger than 3%.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Ash-Fox]

Should have bought a laptop from System76.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"You say that while I run four servers, administer an auction website"

So you're saying that you don't know what the desktop is, then. Got it.

"do support in Google Helpouts"

So your saying you couldn't do your work without Linux, then. Got it.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

So you're saying you bought a laptop before even Windows 8 was ready, and then didn't give time for the Linux community to develop drivers for the new hardware, but once they did you switched because it is indeed better.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"How much say will I get in how you will configure the system?"

100% more than you will get with the Windows laptop :-)

Re:Infrastructure?

[Trogre]

You'll have to wait for the next "average Linux user" there, sonny. I have been doing system administration for two decades and have seen Linux systems, yes both rpm and deb based, badly messed up from updates. Some have required several hours work to get back running again. But, repeating myself, nothing that has required a complete reinstall. And it has been several years since I have seen an update require more than a few minutes work post-install.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

photo editing, video editing, audio composition, CAD, CAM, CAE or 3d modelling

Excellent point! Most people do use their computers for that purpose! That's why most people don't use Linux. Why wasn't that obvious to me? I feel so foolish now!

That being said, there are numerous tools for video and audio. Far more than Windows. People can't save you from your own ignorance I'm afraid.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

" What they need to ask is "Why do Linux desktop distros not appeal to end users?"."

Oh! I know this one! Because when the end user bought the computer they had a Metro interface forced on them! Surely you aren't claiming that Metro was an attempt to "appeal to end users." Please tell me you're not that stupid.

Re:Linux will NEVER be a Desktop - Every Day OS.

[Ash-Fox]

Oh, and these steps work for the last four (arguably five) OS releases

Windows Vista's workflow isn't covered in your description by the way and some systems don't even display the networking icon in the tray by default on clean installs (unlike Ubuntu).

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

Somebody already wiped the hardrive, put a Windows install that is finely tuned, and put it in the box, but maybe you can do better. But we want a level playing field as you said, so let's start with bare hardware. Don't forget that you have to pay for Windows, can't add any proprietary software unless you charge for it, and they have to cost the same. Go* ...

*Yes, you're an idiot if you haven't figured out you already lost on the "level playing field" for which you cried so loudly

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

So you have a four year old computer that supports Secure Boot then do you? ROTFLMAO at your obvious lie and complete inability to come up with a believable one.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"then his participation in the market would be a lot bigger than 3%"

It might help if you knew Linux wasn't a person before claiming to have a clue. You just broadcasted your ignorance to the entire population of Slashdot. Your complete inability to understand why Linux doesn't dominate the desktop market while simultaneously having a major foothold in every other market, and the fact that it literally has nothing to do with usability and everything to do with M$ malfeasance parallels your cluelessness about what Linux is and the fact that a guy named Linux isn't behind it perfectly.

Re:Infrastructure?

[TheDarkMaster]

I am sorry, but you, and only you are the clueless one, basement dweller... Linux is a good server OS and the Android (Linux based) is a good mobile OS, but on the desktop is not. And it will remain a clumsy experience as long as developers like you continue blaming Microsoft for your own incompetence, rather than simply put your hands dirty, forget the religious fanaticism and begin work on a stable desktop API that does not break compatibility on every update. When you stop blaming others for your own mistakes and create a stable API that application developers can use without fear of breaking each update (like Android), then maybe we can have the year of Linux Desktop.

Re: Infrastructure?

[bondsbw]

And you are an idiot if you think people will not pay for good/familiar software. They have been doing it for decades.

But please, continue to tell me about how THIS is the year of Linux on the desktop.

Re:Linux will NEVER be a Desktop - Every Day OS.

[orasio]

I use Windows 8 at one of my computers at home.
Those instructions don't work there. You need to do some additional steps before, to summon the "Open Network Center" option.

In any case, what I was responding to the troll was not that Ubuntu has a great magic and beautiful way of changing the IP, only that it doesn't require a console.
Like you explained, in most Windows versions, the process is more or less the same, which was my point.

Re:Infrastructure?

[wiredlogic]

That is why I abandoned Win7 for Linux: Its startup time is decent fresh out of the box but it starts to drag on interminably after you've used it for a year.

Re:Infrastructure?

[SQLGuru]

You remove the ability to configure, you remove the most important part of your user base.

Most important *today*. Not most important if you want to win the desktop wars.

And I didn't say that I wanted configurability to go away. But my mom and grandma and the lady down the street and any clueless redneck that uses a computer don't want as many options. THEY aren't "computer people" and there are only a handful of people that I'll spend the time helping when problems creep up.......

Re:Infrastructure?

[Windowser]

When I plug in a usb drive, does it automount?

On my KDE-based laptop, it just popup a box giving me the choice to open it in my file browser. How hard can that be ?

Installing a printer on linux is alot more cumbersome and is less step by step

WTF are you talking about ? Every time I plug a printer in my laptop it just automagically detects it and configure it.

Want to talk about confusing ? let's talk about Windows Hate. Every time I show it to a windows 7 user and I ask them to power the machine off, after about two minutes of searching, they all hit the same thing : the power button

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

You are hilarious. You have clearly never used Linux. You read a couple of misinformed posts and believe a bunch of ridiculous misinformation. I assure you, I have been using Linux on the desktop for more than a decade, I update all the time without rebooting * ... GASP!!! ... and nothing ever breaks. Good luck with your misinformation campaign though!

*There are ways to change kernels without rebooting, but admittedly mot people do reboot in that case.

Re: Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

Why would I tell you that any year is the year of Linux on the Desktop? As I said, Linux has been far superior on the desktop for some time. Believing that this is the year of the desktop would be like believing that this is the post that will stop you from being a clueless moron. And that's fine with me. Two great things about freedom are that I'm free to use superior products even when clueless idiots refuse to get a clue, and I'm free not to associate with clueless morons like you. Plonk.

Re:Infrastructure?

[TheDarkMaster]

I am sorry again clueless one, but your "almighty" ability to update without restarting[citation needed] is only relevant to servers. And I dispute the veracity of your claim, as for example the X window server needs a restart after updating it. After all, remember again that we are talking about desktop here, not a server.

footnote: I also know and use Linux for a decade now, so what? ;-)

The problem is with the community

[TechPony]

As much as I hate to say this, the real reason why Linux will never be a viable desktop replacement is that there is a lack of standardization and the open source above all else attitude.

If you want people to come to Linux, you need programs for them to use. Not open source programs that they've never heard of, but the same programs they use on Windows. Developers of these programs don't want to support an ecosystem where they're shunned and where it's comparatively harder to maintain on Linux due to any number of factors.

If you want a real user base it's time to stop expecting that you're going to win them over with the benefits such as free as in speech. It just doesn't speak to the majority of computer users out there because the only thing it changes for them is that they're able to see and study something which they cant comprehend in the least.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

" for example the X window server needs a restart after updating it. "

Log out and log back in. The fact that you don't know the difference between restarting a service and rebooting a computer speaks volumes.

" I also know and use Linux for a decade now, so what? ;-)"

Perhaps you are not a liar and have used it for a decade, but even to this day you don't know anything about it, as you have just proved.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Yunzil]

The Metro screen *is* basically the start menu. You've been able to type things in the start menu to find them since at least Vista. God damn, did you even try to think your reasoning through before posting it?

Re:Build a decent desktop?

[smash]

OS X is a lot more than a Window manager. The fact that Linux people tend to think they can replicate what OS X is, by building a window manager that looks similar is pretty much representative of the problem. No one bothers to design any of the platform to build things on. Cocoa is massive and full featured. It provides everything you need to build applications, and is used pervasively throughout the system.

Nope, not really.

[DarthVain]

That might have been true 10 years ago, however today there are plenty of flavors that are very easy and default install just fine with little or no interaction from the user.

The main stumbling block is install base and compatibility. Windows has as big a strangle hold than ever. Apple has made some strides, however with their expensive machines, they will only ever be niche players. Where they have been loosing and where it may transition into a loss for them is the tablet and phone markets which are all basically iOS and Linux (in Android). If computing transitions along those lines, windows will eventually lose. Which I am sure why they made the ill conceived leap with Windows 8 and the Metro interface to try and get ahead of any convergence that may take place in the future.

The issue with today is that they have such a large install base that is not compatible with linux. I presume that is why Red Hat bought WordPerfect software back in the day, as it was the only one that challenged MS on their home office turf. Problem was it was too little too late as it was already on the way out. Before that I recall trying use wordperfect files in office all the time. So Office compatibility is one issue on the business side, and on the other you have the gaming issues on the entertainment side. However players like Steam may have an impact in this regard depending on how their plans go.

People in business buy Windows because of largely office and other windows only business related software (on the desktop, not servers). People that buy for gaming get windows because most games are only compatible with windows. Everyone else (who you are talking about) pretty much buy windows because it is really the only thing available (other than iOS if you have the $$$). It used to be that common users might be more comfortable with windows, however MS pretty much killed that advantage with windows 8.

On top of all this, what baffles me, is that Windows as an integrated media player is truly horrible with Windows Media Player. I have no idea why this is the case, a company like MS *should* be able to make a decent video player, but they do not. Software like VLC are becoming much better alternatives, than trying to break your system installing malware loaded "codec packs" in an attempt to fix their broken media player. I can only surmise that MS makes it intentionally broken in an attempt to only support official codecs that they can load DRM for the media companies... however is that business worth flushing their brand down the toilet?

Anyway linux while not there yet, and not a lock for surpassing MS, has some opportunities to do so. However likely it would take a large company (like Google say partnering with Steam) to really put a nail in the coffin. Pushing things like Google Docs and the like for office compatibility and transition (particularly when MS starts pushing their Office 365 BS), also strengthening the media software as more and more people use their devices as a connection to their TV, while getting Steam to offer an easy conduit for linux games and developers to market them to a growing user base. Once you have people that are used to it at the office, as a media device, as a gaming device, the common light users will start having more options, and have more people used to the UI. Also if using similar devices say on tablets and phones, this will also raise your common users comfort level, particularly as the demographic that grew up with smart phones start maturing...

So while I don't see it happening anytime soon, it is defiantly something that is possible over time should all the ducks line up in a row.

Re:Nope, not really.

[DarthVain]

As an example:

I have Windows 7 at home. My phone is an Android. I use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice, whatever), occasionally google docs. I have a number of video games, however the only one I really play is DOTA2 off Steam. I use it as a media device, and while I have customized it enough that most of my media files play, a growing number only work under VLC.

To also counter your Linux is too hard to configure VS windows:

I would put custom configuring linux up against custom configuring Windows Media Player codecs any day of the week. That is to say, I would much rather configure linux than try to get Media Player to a point that it can play everything. I had to do a re-install last winter of Windows 7, and while annoying, the part I dreaded the most was trying to figure out all the codec BS after my previous setup was wiped. It is one of those things that you do a whole bunch of arcane mystical shit, and eventually you get it to the point that everything seems to be working (don't even get me talking about subs as well)... and you never want to touch it again, as you will A) never remember whatever it was you did to get it all working together, and B) never be able to replicate again the same way.

Re:Infrastructure?

[TheDarkMaster]

Sorry, I know the difference between restarting a service and a kernel. But, as I said before and I will say it again, we are talking about a desktop here, clueless one, and the Xorg is only one in a long list of things that can broke in funny ways on upgrade. Can you explain to me why the average user (not the super geniuses like you :-)) would switch from windows to linux due to one functionality (upgrade without having to reboot, which once again I say that is debatable) that he does not need because he is using a desktop and not a server? And even considering also that in exchange for this functionality he would have a desktop that is, at best, problematic?

Clueless one, you are showing here, for all, another reason for the lack of progress in desktop Linux: You see it as a server. And the Average Joe do not need a server.

Is Debian/Hurd not an Operating System ?

[perpenso]

Your definition of an OS is quite narrow, overly so.

manage memory

Check. Android's Java runtime environment does this for applications.

It is a safe bet that you have never had anything to do with operating system design or implementation. Apparently, you do not understand even elementary principles of operating system memory management. So... according to you, how does Java manage the process page tables? It is people like you who make the world save for marketdroids.

Actually I have a background in writing low level kernels, in porting c runtime environments to these custom environments. I know about memory management from the hardware up.

What I don't have is an overly narrow concept of operating systems, a viewpoint stuck on some quiz once taken in an operating system class that expected a student to regurgitate a 1970s list of OS components.

Android is no less of an OS for delegating some low level operations to the host linux kernel than a microkernel based OS that delegates some low level functions to its microkernel. Is Debian no longer an OS when it delegates low level functions to HURD?

Re:Is Debian/Hurd not an Operating System ?

[Tough Love]

Actually I have a background in writing low level kernels, in porting c runtime environments to these custom environments. I know about memory management from the hardware up.

Then how could you possibly have confused operating system level memory management with garbage collecting? I am not sure that I would want you working on the Linux kernel, certainly not on the core.

What I don't have is an overly narrow concept of operating systems, a viewpoint stuck on some quiz once taken in an operating system class that expected a student to regurgitate a 1970s list of OS components.

The term "operating system" was recently coopted by marketdroids and PHBs who have not got the faintest clue of what a timer wheel is, to mean something convenient for Apple and Google's respective business plans. Please go get any operating system text, including a recent one, and you will find that the classic meaning of "operating system" is still the only one taught in the schools that produce our kernel engineers.

Android is no less of an OS for delegating some low level operations to the host linux kernel than a microkernel based OS that delegates some low level functions to its microkernel.

You seem not to grasp the scale, power or subtlty of "some low level operations" that Android relies on the operating system for.

Debian no longer an OS when it delegates low level functions to HURD?

Debian is referred to by Debian developers as a "distribution". That is exactly what Android is, nothing more and nothing less.

Re:Infrastructure?

[w1z4rd]

I have been using Linux since the 90`s. I must have missed the "golden age of FOSS documentation". If anything, its better now that its ever been. I speak from experience when I used to compile packages with 0 information on them or their dependencies. Sometimes I would get lucky and there would be documentation... but they normally came in strange scandinavian languages.

and how would you discover this?

[Chirs]

If you didn't already know about this, and didn't have a network connection, how would you discover this?

(And yes, the same complaint holds true for linux as well....)

Re:Linux will NEVER be a Desktop - Every Day OS.

[zlogic]

Windows is seeming to be actually going backwards.
For example, if you disable hibernation in Windows 7, you can only re-enable it with a command line tool rather than a GUI like it was done in XP.

Or even worse: Windows Vista/7 had network management features that recognized networks and allowed to enable features based on the assigned network type. This is a neat feature which automatically enforces stricter firewall rules in public hotspots. Windows 8 had this feature really dumbed down, and what's more, you can now only manage locations with a command line tool! If you shared some files at a local Starbucks, locking it down would be extremely difficult.

With this rate, some future Windows version would only allow DHCP auto-configuration, or if you need to set your own IP/DNS, you're a power user and should use the console.

Re: Infrastructure?

[bondsbw]

How do you define "superior"? This argument is about the general masses, not just you. The question is, which system will the user would take home? I say it will be the Windows computer almost all of the time, and history completely has my side.

You do realize that OEMs have created pre-configured Linux desktop computers, right? And how well did that go?

If Apple can't dethrone Windows on the desktop, or even come close despite having an arguably better experience in every way (and much better than Linux)... you certainly are not going to do it either.

Good luck with that.

[ToddInSF]

For all the talk and dreaming about the Linux desktop you'd think by now the community would have designed a GUI that doesn't frustrate end users.

Where would all that smug go if there was a decent and usable Linux desktop ?

Re: Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"I say it will be the Windows computer almost all of the time, and history completely has my side."

History does not have your side. Your proposed test has never happened. The fact that a few manufacturers made a few computers with one of the worst distributions on the planet on them doesn't equate even remotely with the idea of having all users exposed to both and making an informed choice.

"If Apple can't dethrone Windows on the desktop, or even come close despite having an arguably better experience in every way (and much better than Linux)"

I accept your claim that you have no experience with Linux, along with your acknowledment that you are too stupid to figure out that more people will buy a $300.00 laptop than will buy a $1000.00 laptop, regardless of OS.

Re:Infrastructure?

[DamnOregonian]

Well, being we're a large enough operation (~400 machines), I've never had to reinstall- one just restores from a backup, but I can simulate my favorite upgrade explosion for you; cause never determined:

server:~$ host google.com
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
server:~$ # odd.

server:~$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
cat: /etc/resolv.conf: No such file or directory
server:~$ # Hm... weird.

server:~$ ls -l /etc
ls: cannot access /etc: No such file or directory
server:~$ # Oh. I see.

There's no rolling that back or fixing it in a graceful way.

Re: Infrastructure?

[bondsbw]

I accept your claim that you have no experience with Linux

Actually I have quite a bit of experience with Linux. Here's a tiny bit of proof... just search for ID 6746.

But unlike you, I seem to have experience with other operating systems as well.

along with your acknowledment that you are too stupid to figure out that more people will buy a $300.00 laptop than will buy a $1000.00 laptop, regardless of OS.

You mean, like these?

Re: Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

You are an idiot if you think Linux from Scratch has anything to do with this discussion, and even more of an idiot for pointing out that all the $300 laptops run Windows, since that was my point. Furthermore, any idiot can register on LFS and download a book. Understanding it is quite another matter. Again, you have proved you haven't got a clue, and can't even understand exceedingly simple points of logic. Couple that with your absurd claim that Apple has a "far superior" product in terms of usability shows that you are merely some moron that downloaded LFS and didn't understand it, If you did, you would certainly not be mentioning it in this discussion.

Tanenbaum recognizes Java-based operating systems

[perpenso]

Actually I have a background in writing low level kernels, in porting c runtime environments to these custom environments. I know about memory management from the hardware up.

Then how could you possibly have confused operating system level memory management with garbage collecting? I am not sure that I would want you working on the Linux kernel, certainly not on the core.

Only you are mixing alloc/new and garbage collection. My point is that whether an operating system offers malloc/new or garbage collection (manual or automatic memory management) to its applications is irrelevant. In either case it ultimately drills down to a kernel, and this drilling down to a kernel is irrelevant to the applications. The application code could care less if the kernel is linux, bsd, mach, hurd, etc ... The kernel is as abstract and as irrelevant to the application code as the hardware itself.

What I don't have is an overly narrow concept of operating systems, a viewpoint stuck on some quiz once taken in an operating system class that expected a student to regurgitate a 1970s list of OS components.

The term "operating system" was recently coopted by marketdroids and PHBs who have not got the faintest clue of what a timer wheel is, to mean something convenient for Apple and Google's respective business plans. Please go get any operating system text, including a recent one, and you will find that the classic meaning of "operating system" is still the only one taught in the schools that produce our kernel engineers.

Your are wrong. Even Andrew Tanengaum says that the definition of an operating systems is fuzzy because it does several different things. Abstracts the hardware, manages resources and provides an API that application programs are written for. That operating systems have evolved and the simple kernel/user mode distinction of years past no longer works. That it is legitimate to define an operating system from both bottom up and top down perspectives. You are simply taking a narrow bottom up perspective, and a further narrowed monolithic perspective on top of that. Android provides an API, it manages memory (automatically), it schedules threads, it performs I/O, etc. Android fits one of Tanenbaum's definitions of an operating system. Tanenbaum specifically refers to Java-based operating systems.

Android is no less of an OS for delegating some low level operations to the host linux kernel than a microkernel based OS that delegates some low level functions to its microkernel.

You seem not to grasp the scale, power or subtlty of "some low level operations" that Android relies on the operating system for.

You guess wrong yet again. Its not the utility of the kernel that matters. Its the visibility of the kernel, the necessity of one particular kernel. Linux is an implementation detail under Android. Android could be ported to use a different POSIX based kernel and applications would not know or care. Why? Because Android is an operating system from an application perspective.

Debian is no longer an OS when it delegates low level functions to HURD?

Debian is referred to by Debian developers as a "distribution". That is exactly what Android is, nothing more and nothing less.

That is an amusing dodge. What developer's call their software only matters when it fits your narrow definition.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Sorry, I know the difference between restarting a service and a kernel. But, as I said before and I will say it again, we are talking about a desktop here"

So you don't know what services are then. Imagine my surprise! Your belief that services run on servers and not desktop systems is just one more indication of your complete cluelessness.

Re: Infrastructure?

[bondsbw]

Yes, please continue to illustrate your powerful use of ad hominem. When you can't beat them, call them names!

Re:Infrastructure?

[TheDarkMaster]

Clueless one, you are incredible! you really are THE ONE clueless! :-) (someone call Neo and tell him he was fired, we found a new The One)

I know what is a service, my clueless friend. I know that desktops and servers have services too, despite your naive attempt to put words in my mouth. But, not wanting to bother you, do you not notice you did not answer my question? I'm really curious to know why the Average Joe would use Linux instead of Windows based only on the fantastic ability to upgrade parts of the system without having to reboot[citation needed] (And do not forget that our friend Joe would receive in exchange a desktop that would be at best problematic to use in the long term. Remember, he is not a super-genius like you to fix it! :-)).

Footnote for anyone following this interesting discussion: Do you see now why the year of the Linux Desktop is currently actual_year + 1?

Re:Infrastructure?

[TheDarkMaster]

Uhh... Can tell me the name of one of then that can do more than 30% of the work? P.S: Without crashing and without the command line, after all is a desktop :-)

Re:Infrastructure?

[TheDarkMaster]

Thanks for showing that most people here were not taken by fanaticism.

Re:Infrastructure?

[chmod a x mojo]

I can tell you from first hand experience: Photo wise the Linux equivalents are complete and utter shit, which is unfortunate since I would love to have a free cross platform alternative. For anyone who has actually worked with PhotoShop, not just played with a copy grabbed from the Pirate Bay, GIMP = shit (ungodly cluttered horrible looking UI), Krita = shit ( no where near as powerful), Picasa ( if you can call it a full fledged "editor" even ) = shit. Hell even on OS/X iPhoto is shit compared to PhotoShop... even as old as PS7.0.

And that is completely ignoring LightRoom.

Re:Infrastructure?

[exomondo]

Surely you aren't claiming that Metro was an attempt to "appeal to end users."

No I'm not, but their applications run just the same so a new UI (particularly one that doesn't replace the old one) is of little consequence whether it is good or not, Microsoft doesn't need to appeal to the market, they already own it. Microsoft has stumbled many times, notably Windows Vista and Windows 8 but users could use XP until 7 fixed Vista and it looks like they'll be able to use 7 until 9 fixes 8, therefore what Microsoft does matters little. Like I said, you won't disrupt an established market without disruptive innovation and provably the market can withstand Microsoft's foibles.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"GIMP = shit (ungodly cluttered horrible looking UI)"

I beleive you are sincere, and I'm curious. Have you used GIMP 2.8 in Single Window mode? How about Blender?

One other question: why would it matter if I got a copy from TPB (other than the obvious danger of malware)?

Re:Infrastructure?

[exomondo]

I like my Linux desktop the way it is, thankyou, and I do not want it "innovated".

And that's ok, nobody is going to take it away from you. But the topic isn't about you, it's about Linus wanting to take over the desktop market and in that context what I said stands.

We will crush Microsoft some other way.

ok

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

Microsoft is already disrupting their own market. One needs only sit back and watch. :-)

Re:Infrastructure?

[exomondo]

Sure if you like watching grass grow, clearly you haven't been following long enough to have seen the debacles before Windows 8. Notably there was Window ME and Windows Vista and neither of those did anything to harm Microsoft's share of the desktop market. Microsoft can and have screwed up monumentally in both recent memory and distant past yet that didn't help Linux one iota.

Re:Infrastructure?

[chmod a x mojo]

One other question: why would it matter if I got a copy from TPB (other than the obvious danger of malware)?

Because the people that actually pay for PhotoShop are the ones who are much more likely to use the more powerful features instead of just being an amatuer ( no matter how good SOME of them are ) just fooling around with it. We can tell you the limitations of the software ( gimp actually can do a fair amount of what PS can, it's mostly the horrid UI that holds it back). Part of it is also plain old cussedness on the users part, we KNOW the shortcuts and where the tools / actions we need to do are in PS... when we look at gimp it looks like the UI threw up and we can't find what we want without a detailed search that breaks our concentration away from the project.

I beleive you are sincere, and I'm curious. Have you used GIMP 2.8 in Single Window mode? How about Blender?

Yes, I checked it out when 2.8 first came out ( the floating windows wasn't a deal breaker, only annoying ). It's the rest of the UI, it's very cluttered* and un-intuitive*.

One example from working on OS/X a few weeks ago when I checked it out again:
I select the 1px brush tool expecting a one pixel brush like I would get by default in PS. My "1px" brush was actually 3px in a horizontal bar by default ( and the brush shapes toolbox was out constantly cluttering up the UI ) and couldn't' for the life of me figure out how the hell to just get my brush to be 1px just by looking at the UI ( there was no 1px square in the shapes toolbox).

*In PS all tools are grouped by function( with the most commonly used on top with press and hold to bring up the lesser used tools) and the tool selection toolbox is user selectable either 1 or 2 tools wide, in gimp, at least by default it is a more scattered something like 5 tools wide and no grouping + other toolboxes embedded within the tools toolbox. This is in addition to some filters and adjustments being in odd places ( at least to a long time PS user ). One that I seem to remember all the time is the DeNoise filter not being grouped with other filters that deal with noise in gimp.

I don't use Blender, I use PhotoShop and Lightroom for photo editing, not the modeling / animating stuff Blender was meant for.

I actually LIKE Creative Cloud now, for $10 a month ( which is something like 5 minutes of work ) I get the most up to date PS and Lightroom instead of 300+ every few years. Obviously I would rather not pay anything ( hey $10 is a couple drinks a month ) but so far gimp just doesn't work out yet... and judging from the time it took to get single window mode, even if someone came up with a truly nice UI the devs would fight implementing it for years to come.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Khyber]

Uh, it's all done from a desktop. Rather, a laptop with 2GB RAM running Windows 7. And I still run intensive stuff like Camfrog while administering said websites or providing support inside of firefox.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Trogre]

Re-install/re-image, effectively the same thing in this context.

An upgrade trashing all of /etc/ is a new one on me though. I'd be keen to hear what upgrade event, if you recall, led to that result.

The newest fun here is that Windows 7, even when sysprepped, will still occasionally barf when cloned to a computer with different hardware. An operation that is trivial in nearly every Linux-based configuration.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Trogre]

That is not discoverable.

Where's the command for "Please show me the DTP programs on this computer"?

Why?

[jd]

The commands to the bus don't change.
The commands sent to the hardware don't change.
The internal logic won't change.

That leaves the specific hooks to the OS and the externally visible structures.

Nobody is insane enough to use globals directly and structures are subject to change without notice. So external stuff will already be isolated.

If the hardware is available for any two of HyperTransport, PCI Express 2.x, VME/VXI or one of the low-power busses used on mobile hand-warmers, err, smart devices, then the actual calls to the bus hardware will be compartmentalized or go through an OS-based abstraction layer.

So 95% of a well-written driver is OS-agnostic and the remaining 5% is already is isolated.

So either drivers are very badly written (which is a crime against sanity) or the hardware vendor could place the OS-dependent code in its own DLL at bugger-all cost to them. Since the OS-dependent code has nothing trade secret in it, they can publish the source for the shim at no risk. Since the shim isn't the driver, there's no implication of support for OS' they don't know or understand. It's not their problem what the shim is used for.

Everyone's happy. Well, happier. The companies don't get harassed, the Linux users get their drivers, Microsoft gets fewer complaints about badly-written drivers killing their software. It's not open, it's not supported, but it's good enough.

The problem isn't X.

[jd]

The problem is corruption. OSDL were working on a Linux desktop environment, but a key (financial) figure in the organization worked hard to kill off success and left around the time the unit went bankrupt. Several organizations they've been linked to have either gone belly up or have suffered catastrophic failure.

I won't name names, no point. What is the point is that such people exist in the Linux community at all, parasites that destroy good engineering and good work for some personal benefit of their own.

X is not great, but it's just a specification. People have developed Postscript-based GUIs using it. It's merely an API that you can implement as you like (someone ported it to Java) and extend as you like (Sun did that all the time). The reference implementation is just that. Interoperability of just that set of functions used by Glib/Gtk and Qt would give you almost all the key software.

Alternatively, write a GUI that has a port of those three libraries. You could use Berlin as a starting point, or build off Linux framebuffers, or perhaps use SDL, or write something unique. If it supports software needing those libraries, then almost everything in actual use will be usable and almost everything written around X in the future will also be usable. If what you write is better than X, people will switch.

Re:Infrastructure?

[rdnetto]

I think the main problem is that Linux is *TOO* configurable. "Normals" don't want hundreds of options. They want people to tell them which of a limited number of options will work for them.

Which distro should I pick? Which window manager should I pick? How do I configure my computer to be optimal for *ME*? I'm a techie and I can't tell you which distro is really the best for most people. I can tell you which ones are more stable.....but it isn't just ONE.

With Windows....and even Apple.....those choices are more or less made for you. All a "normal" needs to do is decide which apps they need to run and whether their OS supports those apps.

Being too configurable isn't a problem - needing to configure it is. Debian is about as configurable as Arch, but is significantly easier to use because it comes with a default configuration. You pick the most popular distro (Mint, according to distrowatch) and use whatever it comes with. Knowing how to customize it to suit you is something you learn over time, and is also completely unnecessary at the start of the learning curve.

The whole point of a distro is to make those choices for the user, while enabling varying degrees of customization. Choose the most popular distro, and you'll be fine.

I want Linux on my Under my Desktop

[riondluz]

Even if the Desktop has transformed itself into a (virtual desktop) "Workspace", I want the OS on my laptop, my pad, my phone....

I want it running E17, or another light DM/WM
I want it to run my android/PlayStore stuff
sandboxed in a container or a VM.

I want it to run encryped out of the box:
Selinux, shorewall, gpg email, encrypted FS,
TOR/I2P browsing.....

To Linus: met you at UNH in 93or94; what a ride
it's been.

More please, thank-you

Re:Infrastructure?

[PeonPete]

Except... you know...you havent. And wont.

Re:Tanenbaum recognizes Java-based operating syste

[Tough Love]

Idiot.

Re:Infrastructure?

[Zero__Kelvin]

So you don't know what fragmentation means, then. Got it.

Mod parent UP please

[Burz]

The committment to stable programming interfaces is one of Microsoft's strengths; They don't all get the 14-year treatment, but at least *some* do.

Re:Mod parent UP please

[hairyfeet]

No I'm always buried when I dare to point out the truth, that simple math will show that "let the devs handle it" is simply impossible. You have right now around 250,000 drivers out there for Linux, new hardware probably adds 3k-4k a month and you have MAYBE 500 kernel devs worldwide who have the years of experience in low level coding required to debug a low level driver...starting to see the flaw here? if you pumped the kernel devs full of speed so they did NOTHING but work on drivers 24/7 (and in reality the amount of time they spend on drivers versus the kernel is pretty low, probably 25% at best) then in a perfect scenario you'd have the drivers for a particular piece of hardware looked at by a kernel dev about once every 10 years for a max of 3 minutes! and this isn't even bringing up the facts that 1.- the kernel dev most likely won't have the hardware on hand to test, 2.- Will have little to no hands on exp with said hardware, and 3.- has little to no incentive to spend any real amount of time trying to fix a driver he/she will never need for hardware they will never own...see why it doesn't work?

THIS, this right here, is what royally pisses me of about the FOSSie faction, you can show them that something is fucking IMPOSSIBLE to pull off, its as much as dream as fricking zero point energy but as long as Torvalds or Stallman says its true? Well who you gonna believe, that lying math or the saints? I mean its fucking basic math, you have X NUMBER OF PEOPLE THAT CAN DO A JOB AND THE JOB IS GROWING BY X+Y*Z THEN THE JOB AIN'T GETTING DONE!!! Seriously how fricking hard is that?

The fatal flaw in both "let the devs" and "many eyes" is that they go by the assumption that because something worked once upon a time that it will work now while ignoring that the situation is VERY different. Both of those worked just fine, in the 1990s when the entire OS with DE and all the drivers could fit on a single zip disc with tons of space left over....that ain't been the case in over a dozen fricking years! Now the kernel alone is over 10 million LOC and the Linux drivers are in the tens if not hundreds of thousands, yet as we saw right here not to long ago because the kernel devs are a bunch of arrogant asses its become a "good old boys" club that is not only not growing but is stagnant...and they are supposed to keep up with ALL the devices and ALL the drivers and ALL the changes to every subsystem that could break said drivers AND fix them...really?

I'm sorry but there is bullshit, arrogant bullshit, and the "I can fart hard enough to fly to the moon!" completely unbelievable bullshit and "let the devs" is firmly in the latter by a LARGE margin, just ask these guys about the quality of Linux drivers. But because the fanboys are so fricking cultish about Linux anything other than "Gee Biff isn't Linux perfect? Why it sure is Bob, it cures cancer and makes rainbows!" is attacked and modbombed.

Re:Mod parent UP please

[Crosshair84]

As long as Microsoft prices server licenses stupidly, Torvalds and company are gonna be able to get away with their amateur hour politics.

Like you, I don't care if it's Linux, BSD, or whatever else come around. I, like every other mainstream user, just wants the dammed thing to work when I hit the power button like I expect my car to work when I turn the key.

Perhaps the best thing that could happen is for MS to get competitive on the server side and Torvalds and company find server companies are no longer willing to put up with their crap. Who knows, perhaps something comes out of left field; IBM, with the bad rep of the 80s forgotten, sinks some money into BSD and gets a foothold in the desktop market? Crazier things have happened.

Re:Mod parent UP please

[hairyfeet]

That is why Torvalds needs to be quaking in his loafers, the rumors are the new CEO is getting rid of the Ballmer era bullshit and is gonna bring sanity back to MSFT.

I don't know if you've heard but the rumor on the enterprise front is they are gonna offer an Office 365 style package for the OS in the server and desktop space, where you will just pay a set yearly fee and your OS will always be capable of upgrade for free, with a single upgrade button that will upgrade the OS to the latest version and no more of the license hedgemaze. If this comes to pass I can easily see Linux being relegated strictly to LAMP and embedded roles because the corps won't have to deal with Torvalds' messes anymore.

The start a hardware company

[Twillerror]

At this point I think you would need to manage the device from start to finish.

Basically put out limited line like Apple. Use high quality and standard chipset. I mean like a good ethernet chip, a good sound card, etc. With a standard build it is way easier to test your OS and make sure everything functions on your various models.

From there take Gnome or KDE and fork it. Go the Linux Mint Gnome route. If you are a company you can just decide how things work. Macs work one way, Windows another, but for the most part they work the way their company's wants to. That standard is what makes them popular, even amongst developer types and the kind of people that go to OSCon.

Then get a good testing community going. Make sure it works with printers. Make sure it works with projectors, make sure it works with dual monitors, make sure it works with the keyboards.

Come out with your own damn keyboards and mice.

Make the upgrade process simple, straightfoward, and automated. Certainly use a package manager, but hide it away.

The community might be able to take it and abstract, but given the linux community they would just tweak it to the point where it isn't as "beautiful".

Ubuntu tried and failed many of things. I think mostly because the people who generally run linux do so because they want to.

The difference here is that someone will walk into best buy, login to amazon, or your own site, maybe a dedicated store (think apple store) and walk out with a device that runs an OS which happens Linux...not buy some hardware and "try" to get linux working on it.

I don't think HP, Dell, etc have any interest in this and so someone needs to start it. Maybe we can leverage open hardware, maybe not, but I think we need to replicate the Apple model.

From there the hard part. Get the gaming community behind you, get Office to run on it...I mean the real Office, and keep going to get the world to treat your product with respect.