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Torvalds Hasn't Given Up On Linux Desktop Domination, Will 'Wear Them Down' (cio.com)
Reader itwbennett writes: Linus Torvalds told attendees at the Embedded Linux Conference that although Linux hasn't dominated the desktop like it 'has in many other areas,' he isn't particularly disappointed and also hasn't given up on that goal. "I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled," Torvalds said. "That's why, to me, it's not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it's a really hard area to enter. I'm still working on it. It's been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I'll wear them down."
Sorry Torvalds
But in 25 years, you and every other programmer out there will be obsolete. The days of humans coding computers are coming to an end. The dark ages of computing will cease a few months to a year after the first strong AI's are built. I expect that should easily happen before the next 25 years are up.
How exactly are you going to "wear down" people who want an Apple-like simple, out of the box solution for consumer devices? Does he picture soccer moms compiling their own drivers?
Kudos, amigo!
Miscreations like the Unity and Gnome 3 desktop aside, the Linux desktop has been comparable if not better in user friendliness than Windows since the late 90s.
What it lacks is a team of rabid marketing people ready to cram it down the throats of unsuspecting users who do not yet know that they need it.
Now of course there is the temptation of pandering to the masses by trying to be more like OS X or Metro, but this leads to power users leaving and average users still not using it because they do not even know that it exists.
This is sort of the "neckbeard bubble" on display. It meets *my* needs, therefore it must meet everyone's needs. (Forgetting if that's actually true, or if it meets any of their "wants" besides)
This.
If anything is going to win mindshare among the general public, it's going to be cutting-edge, triple-A gaming on Linux.
Another freetard. GNU can be replaced with other userland tools. Just look at FreeBSD.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
No, YOU have accomplished nothing. Linus has accomplished much. Thanks, Linus! :)
Linux on the desktop continues to become more, more friendly towards inexperienced users and more well-supported by drivers and software.
MS continues to shoot both of its own feet repeatedly with a 12 gauge shotgun with things like malicious and obfuscated Windows updates, dishonest practices in trying to force people onto Windows 10 and embedding legitimate spyware into their OS.
I think Linux will be doing great if both these trends continue.
I remember Torvalds complaining about Gnome once, saying that "if you design for idiots, only idiots will use it".
I think that's fundamentally incorrect. If you don't make things idiot-friendly, then only power users will use it, and then you will never have the market share he covets. Plus, it's a false dichotomy to posit that nothing which is idiot-friendly can actually be useful.
Many lessons have yet to be learned in Linux's third decade
Torvalds is being silly. Whether Year of Linux on the Desktop ever happens is out of his hands because it has nothing to do with the kernel itself. The average end user doesn't know what a kernel is or have a reason to care. Android is Linux? Who cares? If Android switch to BSD as the underlying OS tomorrow, nobody would care in the slightest as long as all the apps still worked
And that's the key: "it's the apps, stupid". Until someone, whether the open source community or proprietary software businesses, builds a Linux app ecosystem that appeals to ordinary people, the Year of Linux on the Desktop will not happen. And, at this rate, it will never happen.
When did Mr Torvalds say that it must satisfy everyones' needs? Clearly it's good for enough people that it's thriving at a certain level.
As long as the compilation process is straightforward enough, i don't see that being an issue.
Sure, it's not at the moment, but there is certainly a lot of room for improvement.
Getting close to universal hardware support is a good step. Convincing vendors your product is worth inclusion in theirs is another. Even using some clout to advocate development and production of easy-to-use black-box interfaces and hardware would help, anathema as it is to some.
Clearly the problem is that there aren't enough oddly named distros and mash-ups. If only those pieces of spaghetti would stick. Eventually... Sure...
As a mostly non-linux guy (only at work) who has installed and tried to use a few variants, I just find the experience to be bad. The jargon of the names alone is off putting, I am not installing Hypoxic Ringworm 14.1RC5 3.14.4. Get Mint! No, use Cinnamon Mint!
Let's face it, Linux on the desktop has too much of a resemblance to HAM radio 20-30 years ago. Cool stuff, but too inward looking, and not looking like it will have wide appeal anytime soon. Not to say those who Linux have issues (except you Steve, you know who you are). But User interface and user experience for non-technical users is apparently low on the priority list.
Linux is very powerful, but you have actually be invested in it. If you use it casually you have one of two experience. 1) You figure out hieroglyphics to grep something at the command line, and are wowed, but also realize you will likely forget the details by time you need to do it again. 2) You try to use the GUI stuff that has been layered over top, and find it is all poorly implemented facade by people who clearly don't believe in GUI's.
In the many years I have used Linux on the desktop, I have never once had to compile a driver.
I used Linux for my desktop for about five or six years. I got tired of the perpetual beta aspect, especially when it came to always being a step behind on new hardware integration. I learned a ton, though. It seems that Linux's best chance to take over the desktop is Android. As tablets gradually morph into laptop equivalents, Linux may very well become a top desktop OS, only nobody will focus on the Linux part.
Most users' primary need is for simplicity in function.
When GNOME or KDE declare themselves to be a "Linux-based OS" and act accordingly. That means drop official BSD support, stop working with the distros and start competing directly with them. My prediction is that whichever desktop does that would take more ground in one year than they have in the last 5-10 years. It would not only give them focus and tighter integration, but would give them a powerful rallying point and cry for others to join them.
In some respects, this is why I am bullish on the long term prospects of Ubuntu. My only gripe is that they used GTK instead of Qt.
"Apple-like simple" is the job of a hardware manufacturer that tweaks a good Linux distribution to make it shiny and idiot-resistant.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Linux on the desktop is almost perfect now, and certainly leagues ahead of Windows and macOS. Unfortunately, as long as Microsoft has the power to coerce OEMs, there will be very few good Linux pre-installed boxes for sale.
Wish I had mod points. Exactly.
Any chance of adoption is killed the first time new user gets RTFMed. Until this changes, there won't be desktop linux.
Except a tattered community full of distros that aim high but accomplish nothing.
As he said, it is definitely now possible. I have been using a Linux desktop at work for about 2 years now. It's integrated with our corporate Active Directory, Exchange, windows file shares, etc. The printers work, all my peripherals work, everything I need works. That being said, the process isn't for the faint of heart and is nowhere near stable enough that I'd deploy it to my users. So the next steps are clear: more automation, ease of configuration, and stability. Basically quality control and interface design work, which is not something the Linux community traditionally excels at. I am optimistic though.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
My 56 year old mother and 82 year old grandmother both use Ubuntu MATE and haven't needed any technical help from me.
My grandfather, who has never used a PC before in his life, is using Sabayon XFCE to create a facebook page to find his friends from years past and to use his first email address ever at 84 years old.
None of them have needed technical assistance from me other than showing them that pressing the 'on' button turns on the device and that you click a certain icon to bring up the browser with facebook.
Your comment is the soft of "hipster bubble" on display. It's not on the approved list circulated by *the* hivemind, therefore our groupthink cannot allow it to be used.
The "year of the Linux Desktop" has already come and gone, it was 2008 with ASUS' EEE PC popularity. Even for a while after Windows XP EEE PCs were being sold people would still opt for the Linux one (as it gave you 20GB vs 12GB for the same price) and at least give it a try. I had a 900/20GB model and the Xandros desktop was not bad, especially for beginners, but for the rest of us you really had to enable the "advanced mode" which was a full KDE 3 desktop (yay!). I am not sure why it did not catch on more after so many people where exposed to it, I guess the lack of something that is a *real* replacement for MS Office might have been a factor and possibly the fact that it was not easy to switch to the full KDE 3 desktop (KDE at its finest - made a great replacement for windows) if you were not a beginner computer user, just a Linux newbie and the default tab interface was too restrictive but you wouldn't know how to switch from it.
Anyway, I don't think there will be another chance like that.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Gnome, KDE, or Enlightenment. Any other prospects? Maybe the Nazis should build the desktop into systemd, like a modern operating system.
Those people largely use Windows PC's for their desktops (assuming they still use desktops) which may be idiotic, but far from idiot proof. Having something with sane defaults helps a lot. Having a tool which can be added and adapted to by power users / tweakers is very relevant.
Using the Apple stance, IOS is insanely popular by a large group of people that don't care about interacting with their devices in a personal way. Many probably don't know that there -could- be another way of interacting. Apple says a long press does this, and an edge swipe means that and behold, 100million people also believe it. But, there will always be people that want their desktops to look and behave differently. You or I may think their desktops look like dog food, but it works for them. As such, IOS, windows 10-ish, Chromeos, etc.. will never have a basically universal adoption. Until the creative computer user stops caring about how they interact with information, there will always be the need for more open/flexible desktops/OS's/tools to supplant the uncaring masses.
Bye!
This is sort of the "neckbeard bubble" on display. It meets *my* needs, therefore it must meet everyone's needs.
Uh, I think it's more like the Gestalt Prayer
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.
(Fritz Perls, "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim", 1969)
We neckbeards do our thing and you do your thing.
We do not exist or develop to live up to your requirements or needs. [Unlike those who make a living by doing so.]
You do not exist to use my system but you may in complete freedom
You use what you want to, and so do I,
and if by chance I come up with something that helps you, it's beautiful.
If not, that's too bad. [Go pay somebody to do so for you if you're that desperate.]
I don't know if Linux will ever take over. I actually doubt it because to become "The Desktop" it would have to become something I don't think a lot of the people that use it now would like much. I shudder to think what I'd end up having to use if there were no Linux distributions, probably one of the BSD flavors. I use windows at work and have learned to tolerate it but I'm so much more comfortable using a Linux operating system. I feel that the worst mistakes made in Linux today is to attempt to become too much like windows. Just say no.
Android won consumers, so there's hope for Linux for consumers. I seems that people care about apps, and what's on Windows that you can't get on Linux these days? Definitely not everything. But the list is growing. Video editors (e.g DaVinci) games(steam), it's all slowly coming together, so Linus definitely has a point I'd say.
GNU not needed.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
This is so Linus.
Who is Linus "wearing down" here?
This speaks to the inherent mistake core Linux developers make that keeps them from accomplishing their (25 year) goal.
**Users want to use the Linux desktop**...but it's not designed well enough to meet their ongoing needs like an M$ or iOS OS does.
Even if they don't know Linux exists, they know they hate Windows 10 and would use an alternative, esp a free alternative.
The user base for the Linux desktop is there...the problem is the Linux desktop isn't good enough.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I've been told for years by Indian recruiters with thick accents that I need to know the "Red Hat GUI thing" to qualify for a Linux system admin position. I've always responded that I'm not a GUI but I know the command line quite well. Because they couldn't check off the "Red Hat GUI thing" item on their checklist, I never got an interview. So I finally built a spare system, installed the current version of Red Hat Linux, and discovered... Gnome. KDE was also available. But no "Red Hat GUI thing" that the recruiters kept telling me that I needed to know. Does the "Red Hat GUI thing" even exist?
And maybe he should take a lesson from Apple. You don't have to have 90 percent of the market to be successful.
Desktop vs Server ?
MOBILE.. CLOUD..
Now where does Linux need to conquer??
-- Mike Greaves
I have setup Mint for relatives.
It works great for what they need.
No problems with drivers, compliling, etc;
This isn't 2000... or 2004... or 2009...
The issue consistently turns out to be Office.
Basic computer users who take classes for such things inevitably have to use MS Office or get trained on it.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I remember Torvalds complaining about Gnome once, saying that "if you design for idiots, only idiots will use it".
I think that's fundamentally incorrect. If you don't make things idiot-friendly, then only power users will use it, and then you will never have the market share he covets.
I don't think he cares too much about capturing the market share of idiots. Just because they're more numerous than power users.
Plus, it's a false dichotomy to posit that nothing which is idiot-friendly can actually be useful.
He didn't posit that though, as far as I can tell. You may be adding a subconscious assumption that everything that can be useful will also be used. Which is certainly not the case - it can either be disliked enough to not be used, or there may be more useful alternatives.
Well, if Linux on the desktop developers can get their act together before Windows 7 expires, they may well get all the computers that I personally administrate. I have decided Linux is going to be in competition even with Apple for my patronage, but I'm definitely not doing anything with Microsoft so long as the terms of their agreement dictate that they own everything done through their OS. I just won't have any part of it.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I'm not a Linux expert by any means, but I've compiled drivers lots of times. A common example is compiling realtek ethernet drivers, which are only distributed as source. It's easy to compile them though, just tar xf the archive and then run the included autorun.sh and it even installs them for you.
When talking about the 'linux compatibility' they described it as 'it feels like linux because it is Linux!'
So either the person writing didn't know specifically what Linux was, or Windows 10 is secretly a Linux distro. I assume the latter.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Dropping to Terminal is something regular users never want to do. Let's replace "compiling a driver" to "starting Terminal" and there you go.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Yes, but a Chromebook would do the same thing.
That it is running Linux that you setup for them is beside the point. Without you, they wouldn't have it.
And THAT is the point.
Every time a story like this comes up, someone like you makes the comment you did. Yet Linux is, what, 1% of the desktop market? Less?
I actually think it had more share 10 years ago.
Well, Ubuntu, specifically... in Windows 10.
I think the numbers do say that Windows 10 dominates the desktop already, so Bash is going to sneak right in on the next major update.
This is sort of the "neckbeard bubble" on display. It meets *my* needs, therefore it must meet everyone's needs. (Forgetting if that's actually true, or if it meets any of their "wants" besides)
Uh-uh, no, absolutely not. We need to focus on the multicore performance and on the security features, not the GUI or the ecosystem, and if you disagree with me than ZOMGNECKBEARDALERTARRRRRRRRRRRGHNECKBEARDNECKBEARDTROLLFAIMBAITALERTSCORE:-99999999999999.99999999999DISAGREE
You see how that works? We all have needs, and Torvalds juggles demands from an insanely large amount of people who all want their way in every matter, whether it's from large corporations with lots of funding and manpower to incredibly... persistent... individuals (like a very famous Mr. Poeterring). Torvalds designed an entire kernel, he manages tons of crap, and he puts up with it so that we can enjoy an alternative OS if we want one. If he wants to try a new frontier, why not? Choice can only help, and we could always use a fresh perspective on things. Forgive me if I have very little sympathy for your, eh, earth shattering plight.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
I suspect that by the time we have an actual year of Linux on the desktop, the desktop will stop being relevant anyways.
And no, I'm not bad mouthing linux, I use it all the time.
It's been 25 years. I can do this for another 25.
Arlo Guthrie would be proud.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
I have yet to come across a realtech Ethernet card that needed me to compile a driver from source. Realtech may tell you you need to do that, but I have never bothered.
The last network device that I needed to install a separate driver for was RAlink but I ended up getting so annoyed by the experience that I took a screwdriver to my laptop and removed the blasted thing.
I guess the biggest problem with linux desktop is that choices are too many and change quickly. I started using fedora from college days and still do but I realized that my enthusiasm to troubleshoot a problem and learn new things is slowly dying out. Recently, I wanted to convert a png to jpg image. there was no default app to do it. come on, how hard is it. I had to install gimp to do it. I spent a good 10 mins trying to convert it with a default app. I could use the command line but didnt want so installed gimp. These are small things but make helluva difference.
I wonder what kernel the chromebook runs....
Not so much, it's been a few years since I've needed to open a terminal to do anything on a desktop to get it running.
Linux installs in 20 mins from download to fully functional desktop with all office, web, etc utilities included. Go back to 1999 where you came from.
There is a flea market that's on the way home for me that sells used reconditioned desktop and laptop machines. The ones that have leaked past the fascist "all old computers must be crushed at the recycler" regime promoted by Dell and others. These machines are mostly reimaged with pirated copies of Windows 7. As Windows continues to age, I predict machines like that (unless the fascists keep going even stronger- they already have captured for destruction the stream of _all_ the hardware donated to thrift stores like Goodwill) will be candidates for well tuned Linux desktop OSes.
I took his point to mean, he never *had* to compile a driver, by which he means the one he wanted was there and good enough or else it was compiled behind the scenes and he didn't know about it. These days that is very normal, and it's great.
It was not that long ago that compiling a kernel was not just an advanced user activity, we all had to do it or else live with whatever bare bones support happened to be built into the kernel we were given. I considered that the higher tier of masochism as I preferred text mode to 16 bit vga X-Windows.
I'll be almost dead, but I can hardly wait.
For me FreeBSD and Windows are the only real choices for an OS... with the latter being the only real choice for a modern PC with which I hope to interact with the rest of the world.
I use Linux daily, don't get me wrong, but it is relegated to virtual machines.
Good point... for those users that just use their phone to interact with "apps" and those few places outside of walled gardens that they may travel to.
However, where "The Desktop" is still relevant, in much of the "Enterprise" and other places that need the use of a desktop computer, a chance/choice for Linux to shine would be a thing of wonder.
Especially in light of recent MS Windows (ahem... choke... cough) developments
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Nice story, but not statistically significant. The thing is, we have had the chance to test how the public gets on with Linux; in the netbook days, a lot of netbooks were shipped with Linux to keep the cost down, and the returns rate was way higher than for the same netbooks with Windows. Partly it's inherent usability, partly it's familiarity, partly it's the informal support network of others who are familiar with the OS, but bottom line is people did try Linux, and nobody wanted it.
"Designed for idiots" and "easy to use" aren't the same thing. 99% of UXtards don't grok that, which is why the produce such utter shite.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If he wants the average user to have to learn a single command line, it won't ever be mainstream.
Apple designs for idiots and only the idiots will buy the devices and pay extra for that privilege.
"Apple-like simple" is the job of a hardware manufacturer that tweaks a good Linux distribution to make it shiny and idiot-resistant.
That has been tried, more than once...
Dell has done it, HP tried it, etc...
It turns out that it costs real money to make it shiny, then you end up having to provide support and then people want to know why this or that Windows program doesn't run...
They all largely have dropped Linux on the desktop for that very reason.
Windows isn't free, but it is close enough to not bother fighting against.
desktop will stop being relevant anyways.
Sure, most people just want to watch tv, but is there another platform to be productive on? Maybe it's possible, but I don't really see me doing a lot of cad work, or spreadsheet or programming on a phone or a tablet.
Hence why he said regular users. You are not a power user. You are a regular user if you never open up the terminal.
And that's fine, you don't need the terminal, but for some of us it is life.
Man, obviously you have never actually looked at (nevermind used) FreeBSD. If you have, then you would know how much GNU packages there are in it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Yeah, but 1.78% is not good either, barely better than Windows Vista at 1.41%, and that is more than 6 years after it was replaced by Windows 7.
Linux has been very successful for "real work", but no the desktop.
What I don't see is an acknowledgement that maybe years and years of half-heartedly trying to become a well used desktop OS and failing should result in a change of behavior. "We'll just wear them down" is an acknowledgement of deafness and stubbornness. Anyone arguing Linux has been ready for the masses for years is just delusional. Hell, I say that fully aware of the Windows 8 disaster, and the current Windows 10 mess.
Linux suffers from a bad lack of polish and inconsistencies.
Just look at the recent XScreensaver controversy. As long as there are neckbeards wanting to ruin the Linux experience, it will stay obscure. Even chromebooks are more popular than Linux.
Spell it SystemD not systemd.
That way it looks like an ASCII penis.
I think the more likely scenario is that Linux Desktop won't happen until Torvalds retires. He doesn't abide stupid people very well and you need to design software for very stupid people to operate in the desktop space.
Drivers need a stable binary interface.
Even with completely open source drivers that ability to package a binary that just works is huge for the makers of hardware.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Make the common case easy, make the uncommon case possible."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Most users desire something to use. Linus has no killer app for the desktop thats not available on Windows. Hence no need for a typical user. Dont see that changing either
Linux is the most used OS kernel in the world. Every large company uses it and most smartphone users use it. It's got Microsoft running scared and it's got Valve promoting it and developing their own OS based on it. You call that nothing?
It could happen. Nobody buys desktops anymore. If someone can produce an awesome laptop or tablet with Linux it might happen as long as Facebook works that's all that matters.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
People are able to cook food. Some make delicious meals from ground up and others just heat stuff in the oven. In both cases nobody needs to understand the chemical reactions and formulas behind all that. Soccer moms dont need to know what is going on under the hood as long as its being done in a user friendly manner (e.g., one does not have to use an industrial furnace etc).
And you wonder why Linux is such a niche OS.
The "Year of the Linux Desktop" has already occurred, and it is Android. 90% of what people use Computers for, can be done on Android (running Linux kernel).
For several years, Android was not a desktop-oriented Linux distribution. The stock* operating system forced on users a window management policy of all maximized all the time. Say you're reading a web page, and you want to jot down some notes about it. To do this on current stock Android, you have to switch to the web browser, then switch back to the note-taking application (which completely hides the web page you were looking at), switch back to the web browser (which completely hides the notes you were taking), etc. Though a web browser can run on a phone, as can a note-taking application, and a tablet's display is more than twice as big as that of a phone, current stock Android on a tablet refuses to let the user show them side-by-side. In fact, it was a requirement in the Android CDD that the OS never change the application's window size after installation. (Only CDD-compliant devices are eligible to be shipped with Google Play Store and Google Play Services.) Only very recently was this requirement toned down in the CDD, allowing Remix OS and the forthcoming Android N to begin to work around this.
My current Android phone has more power and Ram than the computers I used 15 years ago, does most if not all of the things those computers and does other things not even thought of.
But how many of those things can it show at once? And why can't the included web browser load more than about three pages in tabs and switch among them without the page reloading (and losing form data) when I return to a tab? I can manage a dozen tabs in Firefox with no reloading on a 1 GB laptop running Xubuntu (a Linux distribution using X11 and Xfce).
* Samsung is not stock. Though some apps included my Galaxy Tab A support Samsung's proprietary multi-window mode, not all apps do, and the ones that don't disappear from Recents when I try to activate multi-window mode. For example, the Stack Exchange app does not.
You GO, Linus!!!
What with the privacy nightmare that *is* Windows 10, I see more and more people abandoning that spyware-laden crap for Linux. Ever since I retired from using/supporting MS products back in 2010, I've quit using MS products on my families systems and NObody here misses Windows.. To keep myself busy, I started, with a few friends/ex-coworkers, a small (very small) business doing "computer janitorial services", AND migrating an ever-increasing number of people
over to Linux. Since Windows 10 came out we've done quite a few migrations for folks who bought a new system during the holidays, learned about what a
nightmare Windows 10 is, came to us for an alternative, which *is* Linux (X/L/KUbuntu/Mint).
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I've been periodically installing Linux and playing with it as far back as 1999. I'd tinker for a bit then go back to Windows because I always needed something plus games.
It's gotten better and better over time. Gaming was the last holdout. In the last year the push from valve and other companies to bring serious gaming to Linux has paid out.
I realized recently that EVERY SINGLE GAME that I have played for the last couple of years is on Linux, and 90% of what I want to play is on or coming to Linux. That's without even talking about WINE or PlayOnLinux. Gaming gap closed for me and gamers of my type.
So I installed Ubuntu. It was actually easier and quicker to get running than Windows. I didn't need to use a terminal once to get everything I needed working. And I haven't come across anything that I need to do that I can't do after 6 weeks on it. This time, I have zero plans to go back to Windows.
Linux came too late to overthrow the Microsoft incumbency which had been around for something like ten years, dominating the business market that defined desktops which in those days were relatively expensive for casual home use. (The desktop business market was essentially handed to Microsoft by IBM.) The chance for *nix was lost early in the fighting between System V and BSD (which spawned Linux) and the shortsightedness of AT&T (which was far from alone in ignoring desktops).
There was no equivalent incumbency for smart phones which is why Apple and Android were able to compete more successfully. It's always been and always going to be too late for Linux since the desktop market has matured and even shrunk somewhat with the increasing functionality of smart phones.
Not really. Most people are idiots (like the parent poster, for instance)
iOS is a bad example, it's the OS for fixed function devices and casual use.
OS X, however, provides a fairly good picture of how a modern unix based operating system could work, that can keep power users and idiots alike happy. It starts however with good hardware utilization and a good compositor. I have sixteen terminals open right now, a browser, text editor and a bunch of other junk required for corporate survival. I can move any window anywhere on each of my cinema displays without tearing, redrawing, graphics glitches, or unexplained behavior. Each window updates continuously while I move it: my organization is decoupled from the application i am mucking with. There is good remote desktop functionality built in, I can resize the windows easily from any point on their frame and my mouse cursor reflects that ability appropriately and quickly. I cannot imagine why any neckbeard does not want this, or why they would clean to some outdated, decrepit system wherein that does not happen. Unless they are working on a server, in which case, not a desktop. I have yet to get this kind of responsiveness on Linux or even Windows for that matter, albeit for different reasons.
Then there's the higher level API stuff: drag and drop, cut and paste, widgets, styles, etc. This is where OS X falls next to Linux: you kind of have to live with their shit. This is also the realm of holy wars and religious crusades, no one is ever going to agree on the right style, and perhaps they should not have to. I don't personally like the OS X UI, Windows always felt better except where windows wastes more space with window frames and unnecessary title bars. In Linux I see neckbeards really caring here: we want to configure it the way WE want, not the way some panzy in skinny jeans and spectator shoes wants it. But, for people who aren't picky or just barely know computers: a good default needs to exist. However there needs to be some set of reasonable and common underlying protocols for things like drag and drop, a cut/paste buffer that make sense and is somewhat consistent from app to app, etc. I long ago gave up tallying the various personality and behavioral differences that various applications and DEs had, there should have been a reasonable default, with options for those that feel passionately to go change. And the defaults should look like Windows, if not that then OS X, as these represent the majority of the market, like it or not.
Unfortunately none of this is the status quo on Linux right now, and it doesn't seem like it will change soon.
The typical desktop user wants:
Seamless web browsing including media.
Seamless email, contacts and calendaring.
Gaming. The good stuff.
Movies.
USB gadgets that just work without discovering that required software is windows only.
Most of the pain around these things aren't Linus's fault. We can blame Adobe et al for media issues. We can blame Microsoft for exchange dominance and interoperability issues. We can blame AMD for the Radeon mess, and a whole host of companies for game incompatibilities. We can blame the MPAA for the DeCSS mess. We can blame gadget vendors for not going to extra mile for linux support too.
We can also observe that in many ways things do get better. Outside the workplace email is web-based, and aside from commerce (tickets, purchase receipts) and password resets, increasingly less important. Many games work under wine, and I hold out hope for Steam to further that cause. Movies work. The USB subsystem is mature and most important gadgets get some form of support.
I remember the days of multi-hour kernel compilations to try and get hardware working. I remember having fun getting 2D acceleration working with the S3 Virge DX. I remember *weeks* of fun trying to get the Soundblaster AWE64 working well. But at this point, I can't even remember the last time I had to compile the kernel for desktop use. I don't even need to compile modules to host VMs any more. That's progress.
However, the lag can still be frustrating. We still get treated as 2nd class citizens too often, and I don't feel that there is a great advocate to help fix that issue. It seems to me that companies have better economic incentive to get linux working well in the server space and to contribute to software running on top of it. Linus cares emphatically about the kernel but doesn't seem too interested in being a voice in the desktop world. That's unfortunate.
Linux is a kernel. Android uses Linux just like GNU/Linux does.
Linux will NEVER achieve desktop domination. Let me explain why!
Too much fanboi developers that think that a machine only needs to be usable at THEIR level. A machine that is a mystery to its user is considered low brow technology no matter how much time and "expertise" it took to create it.
I develop code and my very first concern is how usable my interface is for my customer. A well designed interface in one that requires NO guides or manuals to operate the underlying engine that people are using to do work. Yes intuitiveness can be difficult to achieve, but it is also rarely given any significant thought either.
The people in the Linux world are wastes of development existence that does not care about people despite their constant whining to beat the "inferior" Microsoft OS where the other people go.
Everything right down to the last bit must be administratively controllable by both GUI and CLI which should always work through an API and NEVER natively.
yes, this is a lot of work, but will be the bare minimum requirement for you to topple Microsoft and until you sign up for it, just be complacent in your pathetic little place you carved out in the computing world.
I do hope that Steam OS takes off and that another PC platform can de-thrown the terrible Microsoft, but you guys are just not doing yourselves or anyone other than hobbyists any favors. Please understand that your shit stinks just like Microsoft's!
At which point your OS will not matter as much as the services you choose to use.
The problem there is that Linux does not have good modern services to link it to the insanely popular mobile markets. Only Apple really has that and they are weak, MS should soon take that from Apple when it integrates Android and notifications (along with Linux bash). MS is definitely going to pull ahead when they do that and I don't see where Google/Facebook or anybody else has any suitable way to sync android to Windows in anything that resembles a full featured effort.
MS will be the first company to try to seriously sync Android to the desktop at the OS level because Google hates you all and just wants to mine your data and sell you ads, not make awesome apps. Google needs to get their shit together and stop trying to be Mircosoft in the 90s with the whole free love hardware thing and allowed alterations of their OS by OEMs whom seem to have no real concept of internal branding, no less a concept of the Android brand in general. Even MS has more control of their platform. Google's approach is just insane because the phone market is the only mobile market that really matters. The others are all interesting, but there is no real money in the mobile markets without the phone market leading the charge.
I think Google will be in for a rude wake up call when people start to take another look at Windows 10 mobile in another year or so when it's more or less out of beta. Google doesn't realize how much people hate Android because of the whole OEM customization and bloatware. When people think of their smartphone limitations, they often think Google because it runs Android, not Motorola or Verizon. Google gets most of the hate for OEM's failures, but to some degree that's what they get for being pussies and letting phone makers push them around still.
Anyway the point is that it's all going to be universal apps and browser extensions. MS has .NET so well flushed out now they can integrated themselves into any architecture or kernel they want. There is no more portable full platform than Windows 10. It might be a tad harder to port than a linux command line, but the fact is linux has no portable framework. It's just an OS and applications and the portability is defined by how portable the varies languages are between architectures.
MS uses CLR and .NET so they won't have that problem anymore and while Linux can too the reality is they are far less prepared for the demands of modern desktop users. Not having a voice assistance and mobile syncing all nicely integrated is soon going to make your desktop look very dated.
I'd also like to add that while Windows 10 is not perfect, it's pretty good. It's prob as good as Windows 2000 and XP were in terms of setting a new level of what MS can do. I run Windows 10 with Cortana and chrome with lots of extensions on computers with 2 gigs ram and it runs fine and boots fast and power saving stuff generally works better. I was using Linux Mint and Linux just isn't going anywhere right now while Windows has a lot of exciting new features and Apple has a pretty solid user experience.
Linux has... uh... security most ppl don't need? Windows and Apple are more secure than ever so that Linux advantage is getting a bit old. The low price.. eh.. who cares. Your OS is worth 150 bucks or so.. you will be using it for 10+ years probably oh AND right now just about any Windows 7 key you can find will net you a free Windows 10 license.
So what does any Linux distro do that I need vs Windows 10. Not spy on me? Ok, but I'm comfortable that I can turn that off and I'm not spied on enough OR just leave it on because I have nothing to hide that I would do on my Windows OR Linux personal desktop. So.. in a lot of ways Windows 10 is perfect because I'm that much more aware that i'm being tracked.
So I could use Linux and Duckduckgo, but you lose a lot of features like that, especially with mobile platform integration being an ideal end
After all, we gonna see linux on every desktop once M$ rolls out linux bash on win10.
Heck.. I never thought this could ever happen.
Apple designs for idiots and only the idiots will buy the devices and pay extra for that privilege.
I can just hear the ghost of Steve Jobs quoting Librace on such criticism: "I cried all the way to the bank."
Trolling does not help much the discussion. Android runs on Linux, there's just no way to argue about that. But in the end we are in agreement about some points at least: no enough apps right now, but it's definitely progressing, albeit slowly, just as Linus said... Which was sort of my point. Oh well.
Wine supports Blizzard super well. You grab the bnet installer, run that in wine, and then it's the same GUI as Windows.
Obviously, WINE shouldn't *have* to do that. Blizzard should compile a Linux version. But that's on Blizzard, not Linux.
Systemd is going to kill Linux on the desktop like it's killing Linux in the datacentre.
There are a number of distributions that are pretty user friendly now. I toyed with linux ages ago but went back to windows because most of the software I use is windows specific.
My girlfriend got sick of the WINDOWS 10 UPGRADE NOW! shit on her laptop and asked me to install linux, after explaining there were a billion different distros and some other technical explanations, she picked out Mint.
I was really surprised at how much easier it was compared to last time I messed around with it. There were no missing drivers, everything worked perfectly right after installing, lots of helpful explanations and popup windows for "normal" users. It was apple-tier hand holding in some areas. She loves it.
You can point out that Linux is too complex and offers (requires?) too many choices without having to fall back on seriously outdated nonsense like 'soccer moms compiling their own drivers'. I don't think any normal end user has compiled anything for any mainstream Linux distro in years.
That said, yep. Too many choices, too many desktops. And it all adds up to no 3rd party software. That's pretty much the only downside these days - assuming the likes of Intel, AMD and nVidia keep providing support for their hardware. But even that - in a future world where soccer moms increasingly use Chromebooks - is less of an impediment than it used to be. A modern Linux desktop can do everything a Chromebook can - plus handle all the 'standard' stuff locally. Word processing and watching video and the like. Even playing Steam games.
So, sure. No linux desktop will ever have the range of software that's currently available for Windows. Hey, the Mac doesn't have that range of software either. But we're heading for a future where that matters less and less for more and more people. Personally, I never boot my Windows partition any more. I'm technical enough to compile a driver, but haven't had to in this century. And yeah, putting podcasts on my ancient iPod is a pain in the butt. But it works.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
After just 25 short years, we've accomplished nothing!
Considering Linux is used all over the place, is one of the most popular server operating systems, and is also common in embedded devices, I would hardly call that "nothing".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
nd why can't the included web browser load more than about three pages in tabs and switch among them without the page reloading (and losing form data) when I return to a tab?
How about Netscape Navigator on today's Websites? I compared my phone to a computer from 10-15 years ago. My phone does more than "Desktop" computers from that era. This is about "Linux on the desktop", not comparing Chrome on Android vs Chrome on Windows (or Chromebooks or Mac).
My point, has little to do with App management, it has to do with tasks done during the age of "the year of Linux on the desktop" discussions were taking place. We're there, and people like yourself like to compare today with today, and not yesterday's desktops (when we were asking about Linux on the desktop) and today's Android platform.
Would you rather have a Pentium IV running Windows XP or an Nexus 6P. I know which one I'd rather use.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
backing life extension and age reversing technologies, I don't think a 75 year old will keep up with technology.
I wish I was that lucky. Every time I run into an issue with things like video drivers or sound drivers, the first thing they have me doing is opening up a command line and editing .conf files in vi.
You wanna scare away someone non technical from Linux for life? Show them something like xorg.conf file, and tell them that they have to edit that shit to get the screen resolution correct on their laptop.
Honestly, these things happen to me so often that I have trouble believing people who say that their Linux installs are always trouble free.
Not with the Gnome, Unity and KDE clowns, who insist in repeating Microsoft's mistakes well after Microsoft. To the Linux GUI designers - get your heads out of your arses. Stop insisting in a single GUI for all devices. Stop dumbing it down. Stop getting in the way of work done. Stop using so many resources for Mickey Mouse stuff. Stop being the star of the show - a good desktop should be unobtrusive, nimble and out of the way of the user. Finally, stop copying Microsoft - come up with something new, original and better - if you can.
The Linux desktop is perfectly fine. Linus's attitude is perfect. Linus (and most devs) make tools for themselves. Then they end up with users, and the users are excited about adding some features, and those sometimes get added.
The issue- though it isn't really one- is that when it comes to GUIs, this method seems to take a long time to converge. Probably because users are fundamentally confused about GUIs, and there's a whole bunch of layers involved too, but I don't really know for sure why.
I think GNOME was on its way to being a standard Linux desktop, and by choosing this really bizarre ideological something, they shattered the community. I happily use XFCE now, but it is clear that there's a lot of hunger for certain types of desktops- to the point that packaging a good desktop is pretty much worth a distro to most people, instead of every GUI being expected on every desktop. At some point, something will be able to unite that group enough- one of the desktops will be "good enough" for most people, most especially including technical power users- and then you'll see that become more standard.
The splintering of these users has let everyone have what they want, but the cost is that any problem you have is experienced by a much smaller pool of people than if everyone was on the same thing. This makes the problem live a lot longer than otherwise, etc.
So Linux doesn't just have a good desktop solution, it has several- and obviously it takes longer to polish a bunch of solutions than it takes to polish a single one.
Linus has apparently admitted he sucks at UI design.
So why wouldn't he empower a group of acknowledged UX/UI experts to design a "next standard" desktop UI on top of Linux.
It should be based on simplicity of use, lack of need for manual etc.
It's not that most people are stupid. It's that they don't have time to become an expert in every little detail of their tools. They are focussed on higher-level tasks and want basic operations to just work smoothly, consistently, and with a minimum of unnecessary choices requiring arcane knowledge.
There could easily be built in to such a UI an "Escape to raw Linux land" mode that replaces the easy, choice-free, just works UI with an ultimately configurable land of terminals and bare X-windows and such. It could have a warning pop-up, that said "Beware: Here be woolly mammoths! Enter at own risk."
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Linux is now fabulous at "install, set a wallpaper, start a browser, type a letter."
That 90% of general use is totally and completely conquered.
The problem is that basically anyone who is still using a desktop or a laptop needs one or two unique thing more than this, or they'd just go to a tablet like so many others have done.
Everyone has their one or two "unique use cases." Very often this unique use case involves one peripheral and one piece of supporting software or application.
This is where Linux falls down. Everyone can get 90% of their needs met with Linux. But for that extra 10%, Linux either does not support the hardware/application or does so in a way that results in an inferior experience compared to other platforms (Mac, Windows).
This can't be done centrally; that's been the Linux model for 25 years (add another driver to the kernel or another userspace daemon that has to be downloaded/compiled/customized/whatever). It has to be done by third party hardware and application makers, and to date the chicken-and-egg problem remains: it's tough to get out-of-the-box Linux support when the market share is so tiny. Third parties just can't recoup their costs.
Add to this the fact that many smaller / more niche software and hardware developers only support one platform (Mac or Windows) because quite simply that's the only platform where their labor, scalability, or expertise are practically deployable, and you have the problem that the only things keeping people tethered to their desktops/laptops are also the things that they can't as easily do with Linux.
General use: Tablets > Linux
Specific productive uses: Mac+Windows > Linux
I was a Linux user for 17 years (1993 through 2010) and as I moved up the food chain in my professional life, it simply became too big a headache to continue to use it. Yes, things were always *possible* and there were always *ways to do it* but at the end of the day, for the niche needs I could plug in and/or install on Mac OS smoothy and reach full functionality in single-digit minutes, where on Linux it was the better part of hours to multiple hours in each case. Just as importantly, the Mac OS installs and device support remained stable once in place, while every time I ran an update in Linux it threatened to destabilize all of the devices/applications I relied on, after which more troubleshooting time would be required.
I was very hesitant to switch away from Linux at first, but now I can't imagine spending that amount of time on maintaining my work computing systems. It's just not on. I couldn't go back.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
That fucker wore down the Solaris world by shittily copying Solaris like shit. Now LP OK nux breaks every day! Fun!. I has Solaris boxes run with over 5 years of uptime. FUCK Torvalds
I'll tell you why it's not ready, from my own personal experience these 4 points sum up the issues:
Android succeeded because it has an easy to use GUI and does not require the user to ever set eyes upon a command line interface or have to compile source code to install an application. Ubuntu has been the most successful Linux distro to date simply because it mostly does the above but it fails within 1-2 months resulting in more terminal non-sense to fix something that automatic updates broke.
I had a Broadcom card that needed the flash reprogrammed.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Perhaps in this context 'success' is best defined by how satisfied your users are, not by how numerous your users are.
Any ambition to expand the quantity runs the risk of making decisions to appease hypothetical users that compromise the satisfaction of your loyal users. This is of course a dilemma for a commercial endeavor that thrives on revenue, but for a community effort the urge is less pronounced (financially the ecosystem is sustained by mobile and server space, so the desktop should be free to be an unapologetic power user environment).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If you're careful to buy the right hardware, it just works...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
That's a silly question.
It's pretty hard to SMASH things with a screwdriver. You can only screw them.
Obviously a hammer is the best tool.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That's turning things on their head.
You should install the OS that works best on the hardware you have, not the other way around.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
ITT: m$ shills. m$ shills everywhere.
How exactly are you going to "wear down" people who want an Apple-like simple, out of the box solution for consumer devices? Does he picture soccer moms compiling their own drivers?
Exactly!
Every new version of Windows is worst or just as bad as the last. Just letting Microsoft continue on as it has will produce a Windows so unusable that Linux will be the only answer.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Apple designs for idiots and only the idiots will buy the devices and pay extra for that privilege.
To put that a different way: they're a fashion company. Which, by the way, is a great way to make money. Last I saw, 2 of the 10 richest people in the world were fashion moguls.
And, no, it's not just the idiots: some people get more value from social signalling than they would from what the device actually does.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Ubuntu tries its best to be Windows-like, and the level of polish really isn't that bad these days (I'd say it was better than Windows 8, for example, if you were trying it out and knew Windows 7).
However, people who really like Windows already have Windows, and don't see a compelling reason to switch. Canonical would do better to aim for 10% market share, with something that stands apart from Apple and MS UIs. You can be newb-friendly while pushing back against the current mobile-inspired trends and define your own style that way, for example.
The situation with drivers has gotten a lot better, but there's still room to improve there as well.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I use Desktop Linux almost exclusively - I haven't compiled a driver in a decade. Perhaps it's time to find a new reason to complain?
www.sjbaker.org
I'm completely down with growing it, making it a more robust community, and making it be used more in standard industries/homes around the globe. But having the goal of "dominating" the desktop is retarded. Especially since it isn't going to happen in his lifetime.
Unfortunately, that superlative doesn't hold true when you limit your frame of reference to Desktop computing devices.
Which is, you know, what this article is about.
What I hear you saying is if I want a laptop that just works with Linux I'll have to pay 70 to 100% more. Yes I will, I've looked at prices for laptops with proper Linux support.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I think most of you miss the essential points of personal computing entirely when debating this issue. Apple and MS represent the defacto standards that define that market, but those companies aren't going to spell out for FOSS hobbyists a laundry list of what draws non-technical users to a platform.
People who have paid attention to PCs over the decades realize that:
1. Users will ignore complexity they don't need, as long as the UI is _consistent_ and recognizable. Even OS X UI can be fairly complex, and Apple configures it in a way that complexity is tucked away under 'Advanced' buttons or ingeniously in the filesystem (think: plist editor).
As for consistency -- look at how Windows users are willing to rebel against MS upgrade paths if the changes are too severe. It can be argued that MS waits a very long time before springing unfamiliar paradigms on its users who may still reject the changes.
2. Real platforms are a comfort zone for both users and app developers, because the platform must bring those two groups together. Lack of defined reference hardware and OEM partnerships hurt. Lack of feature stability is very painful. In the PC desktop space, Linux is an _unstable_ platform, which is not the kind of place a developer uses to court potential customers.
2a. Real PC platforms aim to _convert_ their users into developers. They offer standard IDEs that are both rich and easy to get started in. They treat the issue of tool choice as one for more advanced developers, instead of burdening beginners with a whirlwind of confusion. There is always a preferred high level language on offer, as well.
Beginners will also go elsewhere when they realize that their first efforts at useful programming don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of running on another person's "Linux" machine without a lot of extra pain. Not being able to easily share/show their work to teachers, classmates, friends, family, bosses, etc. is a dealbreaker (more accurately, it breaks the _spirit_ and ambition of pursuing ideas on that quasi-platform).
2c. Real platforms draw sharp distinctions between app developers and system developers. Saddling app devs with the expectations of system devs leads to a pecking order where the concerns of focused app devs aren't taken seriously.
3. People will not get excited for your OS if most of your announced plans revolve around making things more (and more) _modular_ so that more and more projects can plug their own implementations of whatever component you can imagine into the system. This is sacrificing vertical integration of concrete hardware (or even software) features in favor of horizontal integration which demands unachievably perfect abstraction and usually results in slipshod appearance and performance. Desktop Environments should not be the disembodied, interchangeable "heads" of PC; the OS vendor needs to "own it".
TL;DR, when you're missing any outward appearance of recognizability and feature stability, and most of the features and developer efforts are for the benefit of fourth-party system devs wanting to plug in or replace commonly used features, and no one knows quite the right way to install independently-produced software nor how to get started writing it, and there isn't even a logo-licensing program for compatible hardware, and no one even knows what the minimum hardware feature set should be nor where they can look at a reference implementation.... I'll just leave it there.
Is there any hope? I think Canonical has some of the right ideas. (So does Google, except their offerings are really mainframe terminals not PCs.)
Please explain how that 1.78% was measured.
True, but he can't measure by revenue.
I am quite familiar with the xorg.conf. I still recall having to hand edit it with my monitor frequency ranges in the mid 90s. Thankfully it has gotten better since then.
I don't know why you would need to edit your xorg.conf file these days. I made a point of not touching it on my last two laptop installs. On my dual monitor desktop, I had to hand edit the config 5 years ago to get the monitors to match inside and outside of X but when the boot drive ate itself at the beginning of last year, I installed without hand editing any of the config files.
Also, consistently IS a virtue. Changing somebody's default DE in the upgraded/newer version, or massively changing the current default DE is not such a good thing.
One of the great things about 'nix is you generally have a choice in such matters, but it seems that lately a lot of that is being eroded or encroached upon
The Linux kernel is ready. It runs on everything from cell phones to supercomputers and everything in between, so unless he's starting a new project all he can do is sit back and watch. Not that Linux really needs a new DE, there's only so many ways you can start/switch/organize applications and if you look through Win95 to Win10 you're not exactly seeing a revolution. Nor did I see anyone really asking for all these widgets and portlets or system integration of contact management, notifications and all that into the desktop itself.
The OS is a means to run applications. And say what you want, but there's a lot more strange needs than there are OSS developers with an itch to scratch. Not to mention the "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" attitude that creates towards users. Without the Play store, Android would be nothing. AOSP + F-Droid would be roughly as popular as Firefox OS or Linux on the desktop. I'm not going to pretend that Angry Birds for $1 changes the world, but thousands of apps like that do. Open source wins by the long game, slowly improving stealing users and lowering the premium they can charge.
People don't want to make the big jump. Linux is too much new, all at once. And unless you're arrogant or delusional, they won't find good replacement for 100% of their softare, maybe 70%-90% if they're lucky often those are a deal killer. Paid/proprietary software is so obviously not welcome that only a few have dared try. Steam did but it's 0.85% of all Steam users now. In February it was 0.91%, January 0.95%, December 0.96%, November 0.98%... More games, less users that's not a trend which is likely to continue unless Valve can make Steam Machines popular.
If anyone can bring Linux mainstream on the desktop I don't think it's any of the existing open source distros, simply by nature of being just that. I'm guessing it'd be something like Chromebooks, if only Google would go on a full frontal assault on Microsoft. But then they're happy as long as people use Google's services, which they seem to do anyway so I can see why they're not in any hurry. After all Microsoft has a pretty big war chest that you don't want to pick a fight with for no good reason. If you're a business that is, OSS don't play by those rules.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Trolling does not help much the discussion.
I'm sorry that you think I'm trolling. I'm really not, just calling a spade a spade...
Frankly, I think a Chromebox is a better choice for your average user who wants to leave Windows, it "just works". But those haven't sold very well either, likely because no one is spending any money to market them.
When is the last time you saw a TV commercial for Linux or Chromebox or anything besides Windows? (for desktops, we're not talking about phones here).
The auto detection works great on most monitors, but some of them fail to return the correct resolution and refresh rate information to XOrg and then it falls back to an insanely low screen resolution like 800x600.
Yeah, I know that's not really XOrg's fault, but there should be an easier way to configure screen settings without hand editing the config files. In these cases, the GUI control panels tend to be useless and not let you choose the native screen resolution.
"I'm smart cos I prefer a tool that's hard to use."
ugh, I used a Linux Desktop for a few years, and I kept on having all sorts of weird problems, problems with printing, lack of webcam functionality. With Windows 7, most applications, and peripherals, just run, even if the Desktop is bloated. I guess Linux could have multiple Desktop Environments, ie. one good for peripherals, and stuff, another for Word processing, printing, scanning, email, web browsing, and security, another Desktop Environment for computer programming, etc.
Not really. Most people are idiots (like the parent poster, for instance)
Except for you, of course.
That's an unfair standard. You buy a Windows machine with Windows pre-installed on it. You buy Mac with an Apple Logo on it. When you start putting together a Windows machine from bits purchased on NewEgg or - God help you - a hackintosh, you start getting into "download drivers" territory... or "impossible to use at all" territory if you don't research the parts ahead of time.
If you plan to run Linux (or one of the BSDs, for that matter), you should probably make sure the hardware will work ahead of time. If you blindly buy a Windows machine with the intent of putting Linux on it, you should expect some amount of pain. Honestly, you might be better off just running Linux in a VM. In which case, you'll probably install some drivers from source to support the VirtualBox guest additions. :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Google has managed it with phones and tablets - Android is just Linux underneath, after all. Chromebooks run Linux and are quietly taking over the education world. Perhaps one of these options will morph into the desktop conqueror...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I bet Linux could dominate the laptop and mobile devices by being more efficient on power usage than Windows. It is already dominant on the smart phones and tablets via Android. I run a Toshiba laptop and just wish it supported a Linux version - what seems to be missing is device drivers.
"We'll just wear them down" is an acknowledgement of deafness and stubbornness.
Wasn't there just a Slashdot article where Linus basically crowed about being deaf and stubborn?
Well, there you go!
Lets have a pole - how many people use Linux exclusively for their main Desktop at home. As it's virtually impossible to avoid that other OS in academia and at work, as it's the standard and to prevent viruses, so I've been told :)
I'm willing to bet that you could grab 100 random Android phone users and 95% of them wouldn't have a clue that Android was based on Linux. Many of those people would never have heard of Linux.
Do Apple users know about their Mach kernel? Do they know about their BSD userland? Who cares if the users "know it's Linux"? It's an iPhone. It's an Android. A user being made aware of the kernel they are running is probably a sign of design failure.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Google "linux market share"
Press enter, get 1.78%
Be surprised that it is >1%.
WINE is a solution for the 1% of Linux users who already use it, not a solution to bring in large numbers of new users.
That was simply my point.
The other issue is that you're always just one patch or update away from breaking it, either on WoWs side or WINEs side.
Indeed. I setup, configure, test, and troublehshoot windows and linux systems. Windows cmd or powershell is a convenience most days. Bash is something I touch every hour of every day. The tools for normal people just don't exist.
All of that is just the reasons why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" isn't coming...
Because it is on phones doesn't mean it will be on desktops. No one is pushing it there and no one outside of the extreme edge cases cares.
By that argument BeOS was a roaring success. How is it doing today?
So far Linux is very successful in server closets, and underneath Android. For servers the extra power of the OS more than makes up for the large sunk investment it takes to be able to use the feature. Android completely tossed out the UI and started over. Same for set top boxes and many other places where Linux hides in plane sight.
Being a half-assed copy of the Windows GUI won't do it. Winning the desktop requires a fully polished UI that never forces normal users to the command line unless they want to go there. It needs to be unified or people will tune you out faster than you can say "compile the driver". Wading through 50 or 100 distros with various chunks and pieces stitched together like Frankenstein's monster to find a one that makes sense is awful. Trying to find out why one distro is better than another leads to unearthing holy wars, and finding out that Linux was destroyed by "systemd" (whatever that is, and no I don't care), and lots of jargon.
I might agree except that the local school system is flooded with Chromebooks... Linux. It might be another education fad, or it might be the start of a larger trend to home computers. It's amazing how much one can accomplish on a Chromebook - and a more familiar Linux environment is only a chroot away.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
My computer doesn't have an xorg.conf. It came up with the right resolution, as specified by the monitor, but if I want to change it I would need to go to System -> Preferences -> Displays, which proxies the command line tool xrandr.
The fact that there is a command line tool is good design. Bad design would be not documenting anything and just having a bunch of gui buttons that no one knows what they do.
Does he picture soccer moms compiling their own drivers?
You must be joking, right? Have you tried Linux in the last 5 years?
How exactly are you going to "wear down" people who want an Apple-like simple, out of the box solution for consumer devices? Does he picture soccer moms compiling their own drivers?
Just wait.
Soccer moms are absolutely rabid about how great Apple products are and how they always just work.
That is until that day when they don't "just work" and they try to get support.
When they realize how much they have to pay to get the device working again they tend to become anti Apple.
Of course that is just my experience form the Apple users I know. You can probably find people with a different experience.
What appears superficially as polish to you is actually deep-rooted lack of design and UX quality. Linus is right that his only strategy is "wearing them down" for he has no other alternatives. Linux desktop needs not a Linus; it needs a Bret Victor.
omg...... what decade are you living in, there is no compiling anything anymore in linux.... only if you want to.
http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html
try again... you never need to go to the terminal for anything...unless you are using arch. My parents of almost 70 have ran linux mint since version 6. Never once did they go to the terminal.
Last time I installed Ubuntu, I booted an installation CD, hit a few buttons and it installed in 20 minutes. On reboot, all my hardware was recognised.
Last time I installed Windows 7 (about 2 months ago, I refuse to use any newer Windows OS) on a 2-year old Lenovo laptop, it took me about 4 hours to work out where to partition the SSD properly (opening a command prompt at the "Install Windows" screen), then about an hour to load on the basic chipset drivers. Then Windows Update wouldn't work, so I spent about four hours updating that, running a Microsoft repair tool, stopping and starting the service, then left in overnight at which point I woke up in the morning with a few hundred updates to install. Another couple of hours later, the updates were on, I finished installing the rest of the drivers and I finally had a completed Windows installation. Then I went to install LibreOffice, Chrome, Firefox, GIMP, etc., all of which had been installed with Ubuntu within that 20 minutes.
So which do YOU think a soccer mom will be more likely to cope with?
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLin...
Beta is bad enough to make me go edit settings like this sig that haven't been touched since I joined
Nope, wrong. Never had to compile a Realtek driver in using Linux over two decades.
A couple of times I needed to do Broadcom ones for some Ethernet chipsets in laptops, but you can avoid ever having to compile a driver by just doing your research into the hardware before buying it.
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
Can anybody see "I'll wear them down" as a joke and not a profession of a strategy?
His stated position "Works for me, so I'm happy" is clear enough - maybe another 25 years of open development will create something competitive with the commercial desktop software market, maybe it won't - I don't think that Linus personally cares.
Me, personally, I think that for Linux to conquer the desktop would require an infusion of cash - developers who can grow up, leave their mothers' basements and feed a family while developing the desktop software - perhaps 30 guys dedicated for 5 years earnestly working for the single goal of taking what's best from Unity/KDE/Gnome and synthesizing a competitive desktop for the market place - maybe $15M in total over 5 years for the development and another $5M or so to do the most minimal of promotional work. Now, show me any entity that thinks they want to spend $20M and 5 years to create a great OSS desktop.... what's in it for them? Who wants the PR headache of coordinating this kind of project with the rest of the open source community? Noone that I know of.
By your own argument, then, Linux does not need to have 90 percent of the market to be successful either.
And whilst this topic is specifically about desktop Linux, by the time you take into account all the Raspberry Pi, Android devices, Internet servers and embedded/car systems running Linux, I would say it just about beats the crap out of any other OS for sheer number of devices.
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
And maybe he should take a lesson from Apple. You don't have to have 90 percent of the market to be successful.
OSX has impeccable *NIX credentials, a stable and refined UI and a desktop market share 4x that of Linux. (Based on the familiar Net Applications stats)
That said, OSX is not particularly strong on the desktop and it is quite cleat that Apple has essentially conceded substantial shares of that market to Windows.
While you meant that to be snark, the reality is - dumb people don't use difficult tools.
That said, it's not hard to use Linux. I use Linux. Every day - and no, not on my phone. As in, Linux is my desktop OS of choice as it is on my servers. I like it.
I do notice a couple of things... I see them both here, on this site, but this site is not the only place I see it...
People seek affirmation. It's prevalent here but it exists on other sites as well. I think the traits are more prevalent here for reasons I'm not going to bother getting into but reasons that should be obvious. Now, I admit, some of those didn't really need to be on the list for today's conversation BUT that doesn't make them any less valid.
Want to see healthy and intelligent? Watch this... Are you ready? Okay, hold my beer and watch this:
I use Linux. I like it. I prefer it. I don't really care what operating system you use but I do hope that you were intelligent enough to make an informed choice and that you formed your own opinion based on your own individual needs. The computer is the tool you use to accomplish goals. You should use the tool that works best for your own individual needs. I feel no need to pressure others into doing the things I do. I do not need affirmation or to be on the side of the majority.
It is like security, a process and not an application. You decide how much risk you'll take to accomplish your goals. In this case, you decide what overhead you'll accept to accomplish your goals. Well, ideally you will. Chances are that a good number of people haven't actually taken the time to learn other things and then make an informed choice to use what works best for them. They do what they think is the "in" thing to do or, a few of them, do the "out" thing just to be contrary. That's unfortunate because they'd be better served knowing more about the things they deride and then make an informed decision that is based on objectivity and logic.
For me, that choice is currently Linux. I am happy using Linux because it enables me to accomplish my goals in a manner that is both stable and secure enough for my needs. I am comfortable with the operating system and I'm glad that I made the choice that I did. I've used many other operating systems (and I do mean many) over the years and I prefer Linux. I hope that you are using the operating system that suits your needs best. If you're not then that's unfortunate and you should spend some time devoted to learning new things and then deciding what meets your needs or wants and enables you to be the most efficient...
For me, that's Lubuntu. I don't actually give a shit what you use but I hope, for your sake, that you've made an informed choice and are willing to be held accountable, and able to be responsible, for your choice. You have myriad tools to learn about the many options and the freedom to decide which, of any, compute devices will serve your individual needs best.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
When Windows 7 extended support ends and there is no Linux to switch to, then there never will be. That's when people will consider Linux for the last time, and if it's not ready then, abandon the PC as we know it. Once the cloud has them, they're never coming back. Vendor lock-in is child's play compared to that beast.
"It's the financial models, stupid."
I hate to be rude about it it. If I were a diplomat rather than a techie, I would reword that to say the financial models are stupid. Microsoft has proven that it is NOT the quality of the software that determines software dominance, but the characteristics of the business model. LOTS of details available upon (polite) request, but I want to keep this short, so let me switch my focus to a possible solution. If you have a better idea, let's see it, but the bottom line is that NONE of the existing financial models for Linux has worked well in comparison to the competing models.
We should have charity brokerages that allow us to pool our small donations to create and SUPPORT better (Linus-based) software (including the OS itself). New features and ongoing costs would be broken down on a project basis, and each project would only commit when enough donors agree the project is good enough to support. The brokerage will hold the money until each project is funded, but will earn a commission for the funded project by making sure the project proposals are complete. That includes making sure critical things like testing and success criteria are not forgotten, and in additional the brokerage would be responsible for reporting on the project's relative success to the donors. The "end result" would be to let your name appear on the donor tab of the documentation for that feature (or for its ongoing cost project), not personal profit--but we would ALL benefit from better software (and without such monsters as Microsoft).
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Its UI becomes very unstable once you step out in to the world of networked computer systems. Constant UI bugs and app failures in all but tightest out of the box walled garden. Upgrades and support actually wose than the most fringe distros. Idiots leading around idiots looking for the same solution.
Sorry OSX held promise that died a while ago long before 10.8. Apple has done a number on our precious BSD
I think you misspelled "... to strong-arm OEMs into installing it by default, to the exclusion of all other OSs."
It has been very long time since that has been legal --- and from the beginning anyone could see that the OEMs were crying all the way the bank and that sympathy for them was misplaced.
Sounds like you're holding it wrong.
I would have given up after 6 months.
An UI must be "idiot" friendly.
An UI must be beautiful.
An UI must follow a well defined user experience.
The power user should be content with the shell.
The power user should not affect design not functionality of an UI.
What is unstable about OS X for you? I run it both at home and work for development. I also run a dual boot Windows/Linux desktop, and a Linux server at home. Out of the three OS X gives me the fewest headaches. The only exception to that is Xcode, which I hate with a passion. Most of my dev work is done with vim and clang though so even Xcode doesn't bother me.
That may be one reason I don't see many problems: I live at the command line. I just use a Mac for my laptop because the drivers just work and I never have to worry about it not waking up from suspend.
How about Netscape Navigator on today's Websites? I compared my phone to a computer from 10-15 years ago.
A 10-year-old PC would be running Firefox. A 15-year-old PC would be running Firefox after a RAM upgrade; I did exactly that on a Dell PC purchased in the fourth quarter of 2000.
My phone does more than "Desktop" computers from that era.
PCs and Macs from 1987 were doing multi-window multitasking in Windows 2 and MultiFinder. This is a feature that stock Android won't get until N.
people like yourself like to compare today with today [...] Would you rather have a Pentium IV
By "1 GB laptop" I meant a Dell Inspiron mini 1012 purchased in 2010, which runs a traditional Linux desktop environment. It has a 1.6 GHz Atom N450 CPU, which is roughly comparable in performance to a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 CPU.
I use nothing but Linux and simply could not stand using any Microsoft products. Linux is fast and stable and can be as secure as you want it to be.
Linus does have a killer app and it's called SystemD.
It's a killer app because it kills all the joy that system administration used to be so full of.
One thing I did see was that every few years someone gets a bug up their ass about how shitty X11 is and tries to make a replacement for it. Their replacement usually ends up having fewer features or more complexity. Usually both. And also never gets adopted by anyone.
Until this situation changes, Linux on the desktop isn't going to go anywhere.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
They just buy a computer, silly.
I recently switched full time to Kubuntu because Windows 10 shows Microsoft going down a very worrying path. I.E. Basic Telemetry is not optional in consumer versions. And even more worrying any attempts to disable Windows 10 spying will be reversed by a automatic update see here http://bgr.com/2015/12/01/windows-10-privacy-preferences/
So it seems you are the product in WIndows 10. People like to point out that this is similar to how Google and Facebook operate their web services. Ignoring the fact that those are web services that you can easily choose not to use. Whilst Windows 10 is the dominate desktop operating system that runs your software that you may have spent thousand of dollars on. Not so easy to switch away from that.
They are also doing advertising in Windows 10 as that's what live tiles in the start menu really are. Currently most of them are just cross promoting things like Microsoft's other web services and offerings I.E. Get Office app Get Skype App and Xbox and of course Windows store. But there are also straight up ads right now. Right now if I open the Windows 10 start menu I see an ad for Flip Board, Minecraft, and I heart radio. I assume Flip Board and Clear Channel media paid for those ads.
So here's the deal, Microsoft's monopoly on the Desktop has been historically very bad for users. It's allowed them to produce shoddy software with little real impact on their bottom line. It's now allowing them to go in a direction that will result in a constant barrage of ads driven by data they have collected about you being built right in to the OS. If this keeps going the way it is soon your desktop will look like the TV screen from Idiocracy just a bunch of ads with a little view port in the middle. Microsoft is not trustworthy nor a good steward of this defacto monopoly. It is really up to us tech types to start the revolution by moving to an open platform like Linux where there can be real competition on the desktop between competing distributions. After all we are the ones that have the technical chops to easily move. Once adoption is up better driver and software support will follow. All though personally in my recent switch on a MSI gaming laptop I had 0 issues.
My move has gone without a hitch I am writing this from Kubuntu 15.10 all my daily work is fine. I have VMWare player setup for the Windows apps I need. And when I logged on to Steam thanks to Steam OS there were 107 games already in my steam Library I could install and play. So I have not missed Microsoft's Advertising System Windows 10 at all. It's time to switch.
Another GNU
Nay, Android succeeded only because it came pre-installed on the phones. Millions upon millions of them. This is where Linux distros fail miserably. Hopefully SteamOS catches on via games, but we'll see.
As I said, it's a dilemma for a commercial effort (BeOS was). BeOS without revenue could not continue, and they did not elect to release it to the world.
Now turn to say something like say AROS, utterly obscure, but a healthy community. As a company, sure they'd never survive, but as a hobbyist effort, they do good by their users.
large sunk investment it takes to be able to use the feature
Actually, my experience is that there isn't that much of a sunk investment difference. Sure it takes work to get server workloads going right, but Windows isn't really better on that front. This may be hard for a Windows desktop user to believe, but Windows Server for typical server use can be a major pain (well, file and print sharing is easy enough, but beyond that...)
The users shouldn't be rooting for 'winning' the desktop away. They should be rooting for the best experience *they* want.
In terms of the rest of your anti-Linux desktop rant:
-People rarely have to even think about compiling a driver these days (and in fact I find most linux desktop installs don't even have a C compiler, which was an unheard of approach in late 90s.
-Multiple DEs does not mean a user actually has to ever deviate from the default environment. I see plenty of folks using Unity or Gnome shell without really thinking about it (though I personally I'm not a fan, my opinion does not detract from their experience unless I make it so)
-Of all the distros, there's only a couple of options that people even know about at any given time, and this has pretty much been the case since near the beginning. Slackware, Debian, Redhat, SuSE, and Mandrake were the only 4 people knew in the wild west 90s. Now, people generally know about Ubuntu, Mint, and/or RedHat/Fedora.
Note by the way, the monoculture of the PC market is an anomaly for society rather than the norm. Cars are not 'tuned out' because you have dozens of manufacturers, each churning out dozens of models. People stick with what they know and generally ignore what they don't care about.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Actually, IMOSHO, the Desktop is already irrelevant: reference Cloud devices like the Chrome book/box/base
Depending on where you work, I'm in an office of techies right now and about half of them have brought their OS X device in with them. Thats a lot of people running desktop BSD. I was under the impression that desktop *nix is here, it just wasn't delivered under a GNU license. If the big difference between OS X and GNU offerings is the Windowing manager, then it seems pretty clear who is letting down 'Linux on the desktop' effort.
>And maybe he should take a lesson from Apple You mean that hardware manufacturer? Why would a software developer care about that?
I gave up on Torvalds a long time ago. He's more like an abrasive blowhard these days than a serious community leader.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
It depends how one looks at it. Technically Linux is a perfectly fine desktop OS, I'd contend that as far as user friendliness on the desktop goes, Windows or OSX have nothing on desktop distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Many organisations have deployed Linux desktops and are happy with them. The general public uses Windows (and the rest OSX) not because they conclude that these are better desktop OSes, but because they come preinstalled. People just regard them as being an integral part of the computer they buy. I know an otherwise perfectly sensible person who had a Windows laptop, used it every day, was happy with it until the day the came to ask me to help her because she would like to buy "a computer that has Paintshop Pro". After some discussion I understood that she never realised she could actually install new windows apps on her laptop. Thus the point is, the general population doesn't use Windows or Linux. They use "a computer" and don't generally care (or even know) what OS and software it runs. Linux's problem in that area is not the OS itself, but compatibility. LibreOffice is nice and well and its MS Office compatibility is usually good, but people send each other photos as MS Word documents with pictures embedded in them through OLE... Until LibreOffice can open such stuff flawlessly every time with 100% reliability, until the most popular game of the day runs on Linux (without having to deal with GL driver conundrums) and until mouse pads sold in your local supermarket are advertised as being "linux compatible", there will be no Linux on the desktop for the wide public. Linus made the OS technically capable of making a great desktop, but this is not something he can change.
That's a rather vague sig. Which aspects of America do you want to stop? (I'm curious if they overlap the aspects of America that I want to stop.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
3) The "Year of the Linux Desktop" has already occurred, and it is Android. 90% of what people use Computers for, can be done on Android (running Linux kernel).
Android builds on the Linux kernel. But it is unmistakably a Google creation (with all the good and bad that comes with that) and not a traditional community-oriented Linux distribution. Android remains focused on the app-oriented mobile world of touch-based UI and the 4 1/2 to 6 inch screen.
That means "Torvalds needs != majority needs" in Pascal-style lingo. I know many know this, but it is written that way to illustrate the different expectations people can have.
Many want a dumbed-down desktop. I don't want it, Torvalds would not even lose his time laughing at it, but the simple fact is that people want it -- and will pay for it.
And that's what "professional" corporations will provide them with. Case in point: Windows come with a stupid option known as "Hide known extensions" or something like that. That means things like:
cvitae.txt.gz looks like cvitae.txt
That looks simpler, no doubt. A lot of folks don't even know what a .gz is. So almost everyone will look at a systems which "simplifies" file listings and find it wonderful. The problem is wanting to open cvitae.txt with notepad and just getting a garbage blob instead of ASCII chars, because it is in reality cvitae.txt.gz with the last extension hidden.
Why Android was launched as one visible task window? Because it's simpler and people like it. Two- or multi-panel apps? It's necessary now as a selling point, but I bet it's hard to sell it... most people probably will do one thing at a time.
We'll never have the desktop we want... because nobody wants it. We may have something like Windows or Mac in the future, but it will make us cringe upon seeing it. It will be a Pyrrhic victory for Linux, one that we won't be able to celebrate.
But if we can make the underlying machinery common and just change to outer interface, that may allow us to enter an advanced interface mode, with all the benefits we're used to.
Which might be the Windows strategy now by adopting things like Bash... :-/
I might agree except that the local school system is flooded with Chromebooks... Linux.
My local school system has the same thing, they were nearly given to the school system for almost nothing.
And they largely sit unused, while the pair of iPads in each room get used every day and the PC lab gets used three times a week (filled with Dell desktop PCs running Windows 7).
It's amazing how much one can accomplish on a Chromebook - and a more familiar Linux environment is only a chroot away.
I am fully aware of it. A whole lot of people using Windows could just as easily be using a Chromebook (or Chromebox).
But the odds are, almost none of those people will ever run what you consider to be Linux on them, any more than most people would jailbreak their iPhone or install vanilla Android on their Galaxy.
Google has managed it with phones and tablets
Yes, but those were areas that Microsoft didn't already own and MS took way too long to push into them.
Chromebooks run Linux the way OS X runs UNIX. It kinda sort exists there somewhere, but not really. Not to the point where it matters or 99% of the users will remotely care.
What Linus wants and what Chromebooks actually are, are not the same thing.
Chromebooks run Linux and are quietly taking over the education world.
Meh, my local school has them, they are hardly used. They got them because they were nearly given to them. They use their iPads and Dell desktop PCs far more.
it has to do with tasks done during the age of "the year of Linux on the desktop" discussions were taking place.
Which is pointless. It's not like they were saying "hey in 10-15 years we want common Linux devices to be able to do what we are doing on our desktops now". Saying "hey we're 10-15 years behind" is not a success.
I don't know what the school system pays for Chromebooks around here, but they definitely use them. They are on carts and they roll them around to the classrooms rather than sending the kids to a dedicated computer lab. I bought a cheap one for my wife to use while traveling, and the kids - even the 6 year old - knew how to use it and their school log-in even worked. Very close to an optimal blend of remote terminal and local caching.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What Linus wants and what Chromebooks actually are, are not the same thing.
The beauty of it is that won't matter. Linus can spend the half-hour it takes to setup chroot on his Chromebook and be happy*. Just like I'm quite happy with the unix that normally lives behind the scenes on my Macbook. The important thing is that unix is there at all, so that those of us who like it can use it. I wish iThings were not locked down, but in any event you can get to unix if you are determined and don't jump on every OS update. Android is a little better since there are so many careless vendors.
*Well, maybe not since he's obviously a kernel developer... I have to assume he works in a VM though.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I have setup Mint for relatives.
For as far back as I can remember, every Linux conversion story posted to Slashdot begins like this --- and it always ends well.
But failure is often more revealing.
I don't have any relations who use Linux and I doubt I could summon a geek out of the woods even if I baited the trap with free beer and one of the gals from Twin Peaks. I began with Windows 95, settled in to stay, and currently run Win 10; if I come across something interesting in F/OSS, I simply download the Windows port.
I've seen what groups do when they try to build a "Linux on the desktop for everyone", and it is ugly. Look at Unity and Gnome3, as examples.
The great thing about Linux and their ilk is that people can load whatever GUI shell they want. Good luck trying to rip and replace the GUIs in Windows or Mac.
I don't know what the school system pays for Chromebooks around here, but they definitely use them.
If memory serves, our school paid $50 per Chromebook.
They are on carts and they roll them around to the classrooms rather than sending the kids to a dedicated computer lab.
Each class room has a rack of them, every kid has their own. At $50 each, they just sprung for 650 of them for the whole school.
They still use the dedicated computer lab more.
For instance KDE 4 is about to be replaced and will die, likely - or has been replaced already depending on your distro.
KDE 5 might have good potential, it looks good on screenshots. Yet it would be nice to have some announcement that if I choose to convert to it, then it will be still around in ~12 years. Even if a Qt6 comes out then perhaps it's time to not care about it, the desktop and file manager / core apps can stay on Qt5?
Wine is a solution that runs Blizzard games - Blizzard likely tests its games in Wine, but never officially supports them.
I've always had Wine installed with Warcraft III / Frozen Throne (in a directory, not installed). It's the game you can play on linux, with minesweeper, mahjongg etc.
Sometimes I have one other game I play. Not anymore.
Haven't launched Steam for a long time. It has a logic bomb : if you run nouveau driver, then it tells you to go fuck yourself. I've run the nvidia driver, but with the current OS installation I decided to leave nouveau turned on (the former OS installation is still available, with nvidia installed).
The nouveau driver allows me 1152x864 resolution, while nvidia driver doesn't support custom resolutions with this version of RandR (doesn't support 1280x960 either).
I could buy a new graphics card but they don't do dual VGA anymore. I would have to buy the very exact right kind of midrange card (GT 730 with Fermi GPU) or order a HDMI to VGA adapter, but I don't have the money to waste on these.
It's better if I reboot into the old OS to play Warcraft III (actually maps like Dota AI). Because the nouveau driver doesn't support gamma correction in the game, so it's very dark. The in-game gamma slider does work. It makes the desktop brighter (not the game). The bad old bug when you exit a game not "cleanly" and the desktop is superbright, it works, but the game itself is permanently very dark.
Windows 10 is an unstable platform. Heck, the forced updates and various changes that happen from build to build means that you can't rely on Windows being Windows unless it's a particular build now. Windows 10 even has major modifications, such as a new metro-style file manager to replace the existing one, so Windows is now an unstable platform as well. All the things people bash Linux for, Windows is now taking in spades. And people don't see the hypocrisy in this!
Linux is awesome, Open Office still is akin to BBN Slate from the 1990s. Open Office is a very primitive tool and that is what is holding Linux down.
https://distrowatch.com/
Mint, Debian, openSUSE, Arch are great on the desktop. They install quick and you can easily install them into virtual machines with zero risk. Play with them all you want until you get familiar with them. If you mess up a config in the virtual machine you can just start over.
Google search for Virtualbox.
You can also use live distro's and install nothing at all. Fanboys like to pretend you have to pick one or the other. You can use both. Windows is global spyware but maybe you don't care for games. Use all of it until Windows goes do-do bird.
Try these live distros:
KNOPPIX
Kali
Blackarch
Tails
You can burn them onto CD's, DVD's, flash drives, SD cards, etc. You can also boot into the .iso's in a Virtualbox virtual machine without installing anything at all.
...because you went there for them?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
When you start putting together a Windows machine from bits purchased on NewEgg or - God help you - a hackintosh, you start getting into "download drivers" territory... or "impossible to use at all" territory if you don't research the parts ahead of time.
Nothing farther from the truth.
I started building custom machines in 1994. There was no need to go download a driver manually since Windows XP SP1. The only exception is if you have an older component which the maker stopped supporting for newer operating systems, but even in this case it's likely that Windows Update slams a generic driver in to use that component's basic functionality.
Maybe I should capture a video of me installing and configuring a Linux flavor of your choice on a machine to see how far can I go until having to drop to terminal to do something that the UI doesn't cover.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Until the big game studios can develop games with the same or less effort for Linux than for Windows, and get an equal or superior product, gamers will be forced to stay with Windows (even if it means to dual boot).
Currently, games ported to Linux are 1/2 the framerate with the same hardware, lower in graphic quality, or have some kind of unacceptable tradeoff. It's not the developer's fault, it is due to a lack of a competitive open-source directx alternative. Even games that were developed in opengl (Kerbal) or java (Minecraft) from the get-go are inferior when run on Linux.
The open source community has a very unhealthy lack of appreciation for the level of quality its commercial competitors achieve.
Cherry-pick more. I don't care, nor do most people. The time of the desktop has passed. Most people use smartphones and tablets now.
The clueless moron that I responded to claimed that Linux hadn't accomplished *anything*, when it's accomplished more than any other OS ever has.
Your last bit about monoculture is interesting but I fear it is not improving.
Sure Windows has less of a stranglehold, but while on the desktop we're relatively free, it's mobile (phones) that has turned into a monoculture that gets stronger by the year.
I'm pissed that Firefox OS has died, which makes me question the future of any other free mobile OS, such as Ubuntu Phone. It's awesome how Firefox OS was always that red headed bastard child the Slashdot user base would always shit and piss loudly on, but Android always gets a free pass.
It's as if they care about CPU hungry programs and video games to run on a cell phone (what you need Java and Native run-times for), whereas others are more worried about basic functionality and basic security or not being eavesdropped on, which Android does NOT guarantee.
In fact running Windows is better than running Android : Windows is proprietary and has security updates, Android is proprietary and has no security updates.
I guess Android users can rationalize their using Android because they hardly have other choices (like desktop computing mid 90s), or they feel smug because they chose the right device, or they feel smart because they used a security exploit against their device to "root" it, or they crawled through shady forums to flashrootjailzapbreakburn the custom JZXHZYY "ROM" (I thought btw that ROM meant "read-only memory").
Yes, but when paradigm changes, some features are lost. With horse riding and carriages replaced by cars, the feature of horses knowing their way home and taking you home if you are drunk, injured or dead - was lost. Self driving cars have still not materialized after over a century.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
There's no hypocrisy in Win8/10... MS waited more than a decade to make structural changes to the UI. And even then, they were doing it out of fright in reaction to Google and Apple's success in mobile devices.
OTOH, Apple is being choosy about which mobile UI features to pull into OS X. Canonical is trying to follow Apple's examples and doing a pretty good job.
This was written a long time ago by Greg Kroah-Hartman and it is very relevant:
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html
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The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
Actually, wearing them down probably consists of waiting for most people to abandon desktops altogether and go to mobile devices. With only power users left, Linux will then rule the remanents of the Desktop Empire®!!
This!
If only I had mod points!
I think the #1 reason why Linux is still hard to adopt is due to the sheer number of options in the form of Distros. I can think of more Distros of Linux off the top of my head than there are companies that manufacture computers. Alot of these companies are doing great things, but i feel the effort is far to spread out between distributions to make a mark in the market space.
This coupled with the complexity in comparison to Windows and OSX would be enough to drive away almost any casual user.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
And neither is my family I guess? It's getting harder and harder to find that "Everyone has their one or two "unique use cases." " I can't remember the last time I came across one. I can't think of anything I can't get done on Linux. Editing home movie clips together, publishing them online and distributing it on blu ray to family, doing vector illustration and animation, home theater PC and media streaming for other TVs and portable devices on WiFi, printing, browsing, composing documents, composing music (rosegarden is brilliant), home closed circuit camera, I use it for everything every day and so does family, I think that the Linux desktop is really hitting every target here.
Twinstiq, game news
Man same here except this is my wife's friends that were asking to get switched over, every time people tell her about the latest Windows headache she isn't in that loop and doesn't chime in or can't relate, finally they see her laptop and ask what she's using and then say "where can I get that?" I make some money on the side doing installs sometimes and it's been working out great so far.
Twinstiq, game news
If you want the stock graphics driver for Windows, sure. Linux will give you a crappy stock driver as well. Last time I installed Windows (7), I had to download wireless drivers (obviously on a separate computer) as well as video.
Windows definitely has better generic support for a wider range of hardware, and I wouldn't claim otherwise. But installing Windows on a machine made for Windows is going to be easy every time. It's an unfair comparison. When the hardware is equally supported, both have pretty painless installs - though the activation stuff is such a PITA that I usually run the pirate utilities on my legitimate copy. God help you if you change hardware frequently.
Anyway, if you are buying any computer, you should probably check that it's good for its intended use. My "Linux" machine these days is just a VM anyway.
Off topic, but what do people do on Windows 10? My understanding is they've closed the activation loopholes.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Ask the 200 novice users I have converted over to Linux desktops in the past 5 years who have found it to be much easier to use than windows and more reliable.
It sounds like your schools have an overabundance :) Our school system is rebuilding schools, and the newer schools are being designed without computer labs. The higher-grade schools are getting a "multimedia lab" with desktops, but nowhere near enough to do general instruction. They do not currently have a laptop (or tablet) per child, but rather these Chromebook carts.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It sounds like your schools have an overabundance :)
I am fortunate to live in a nice city.
the newer schools are being designed without computer labs.
That is a shame. There is value in teaching basic computer skills, the whole world doesn't run on Chromebooks.
Frankly, I'd like to see the schools have a Tech shop similar to the old auto shops. Where they can fix, repair, rebuild, etc. PCs and see how they all work.
Not everyone has to know how to do it, but everyone should have a taste of it to know what is inside all the tech that is around us. It is the same reason you teach a little of everything to kids, to broaden their awareness and open them up to what else is possible.
They do not currently have a laptop (or tablet) per child, but rather these Chromebook carts.
I'm not at all convinced you need a laptop or tablet per child. I've seen the computer education programs, our school uses some of them, and frankly a lot of them are kinda crappy. Yea, maybe I'm old, but pencil and paper have their place and value.
I have read it and I disagree.
A properly designed stable binary interface would not cause security issues, it would not cause any compiler issues that do not already exist with the kernel.
It is simply a way to force people to open source drivers and move them into the kernel space. The practical reasons are just a way to justify it.
The problem is that even if you open source your driver you are at the mercy of the distros and kernel.org as far as the driver goes.
You have a hot new webcam you want to sell and you have even written an open source driver for it. You are ready to ship but none of the distros have put the driver into the Kernel they are shipping yet.
Sure you can ship a source based driver but then you have to support people compiling it.
No no no! that is just politics and not a valid reason to not have a stable driver interface.
If you need to change the driver interface than you make the version change a major change and not a minor. Any installer should check for the version if not supported give you a warning. All drivers in the Kernel would update just as they do today.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Frankly, I'd like to see the schools have a Tech shop similar to the old auto shops. Where they can fix, repair, rebuild, etc. PCs and see how they all work.
I think technical and arts education is currently neglected. The shops, studios, and labs at the high school are adequately maintained, but they look exactly like they did in the 60s. I think jumping on the trendy "maker" bandwagon would be a way for these facilities to stay relevant while simultaneously teaching classic artistic, woodworking, and metalworking skills - while also introducing more modern electronic and programming skill sets.
I'm not at all convinced you need a laptop or tablet per child.
I think studies are bearing this out - technology is not enhancing elementary education. The best you can say is that it isn't hurting it. I don't know if this is because it inherently has no value or if the teachers have no idea what to do with it, but you seem to be right.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes, but when paradigm changes, some features are lost.
But why does the paradigm change in the first place? If the new paradigm of Android on a laptop is better in some way than X11/Linux on a laptop was (until netbooks were discontinued in 2012), which other improvements make up for the loss of multi-window mode and how? Or is the argument just "it's still manufactured therefore it's under warranty therefore it's better; take what you're given"?
I think technical and arts education is currently neglected.
Yes, the arts... those two...
Reading and math are important, but so are a lot of other things.
Music is important, science is important, etc.
That is one of the problem with "standardized tests", you end up teaching to them and they don't test the above things well.
I think studies are bearing this out - technology is not enhancing elementary education. The best you can say is that it isn't hurting it. I don't know if this is because it inherently has no value or if the teachers have no idea what to do with it, but you seem to be right.
One of the things that technology can offer is individual instruction to the level of the child, but schools are not setup to do that, nor are the education programs on computer that I see in my school.
We currently lump kids together based on age rather than ability, and we teach them all at the same speed with the same material.
But that isn't how human beings work. Ok, some stuff can have that done, everyone needs to know the basics, but pretty quickly you have kids a grade ahead, some on grade, and some behind. The social structure of school will be very hard to change.
Example: My daughter is in 2nd grade, she excels in reading and writing, she can read the stuff the 4th graders are going (my 10 year old son is in 4th grade), but she is having a really hard time with math, she still works below her grade level in that. But the class marches on, boring her with reading and writing that she already can do, while not going slowly enough for her with math. It is the worst of both worlds.
The question is, what do you do about that, how do you change it, and how do you get millions of people onboard with said changes?
Let's see. GCC is not really the original GCC - that project died of being a clusterf*ck and EGCC was renamed GCC.
LLVM and Clang are not GCC, and GCC's popularity is going down.
Also, software that is licensed under the GPL is not necessarily owned or controlled by the Stalman Cabal. Much of it is in fact dual-licensed.
And you've obviously never had to write FreeBSD software or you would know that in many cases it's just a few header files that need to be conditionally added.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I think the correct solution to this specific problem probably is to report your monitor details somewhere (the kernel?) and get it fixed there once and for all, so the layers higher up in the stack have good data to work with.
Then other people can also steer clear of hardware vendors who release buggy crap.
Who knows, I don't think anybody suspected that we'd ditch the slide rule after it had been in use for so long.
I suspect we might see some kind of augmented reality work space. You'd still work with it the same, but you'd no longer have an actual desktop computer. Imagine it like this: If you want a bigger monitor, or more of them, no problem.
Maybe, maybe not, but I just don't see the desktop being around forever, but I do think that when it starts to decline, most people will probably be running Linux on it. Why? Because Linux doesn't complain about older hardware.
A couple of times I needed to do Broadcom ones for some Ethernet chipsets in laptops, but you can avoid ever having to compile a driver by just doing your research into the hardware before buying it.
That's a nice fantasy, but that doesn't help in a situation of "I need an extra PC, and I don't want to spend much on it, and I happen to have this motherboard lying around" which is quite a common thing. You can talk about how you never have that situation and you live in a perfect world, but excuse me while I return to reality.
and then Ubuntu put that shitty UI in, and we're back to being 10 years behind
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Heh, we've wandered into "win a Nobel if you figure it out" territory :)
I think that setting schools up into 1000-student-ish campuses encompassing ages 5-18 is the way to go. Make it a goal to get out of there as soon as possible: once a student gets to "AP" courses, they really need to be in more of a college setting. At that point, move to a secondary education campus or the technical education campus. Set up all of the language arts at the same time so that students can smoothly move between classes by ability. It's OK to have a 10 and a 14 year old in the same reading class. Get rid of the concept of "classes" and just move kids up by subject. Recruit kids who are ahead to help kids who are behind. Get rid of arbitrary cut-offs for public funding - if a special ed kid needs an extra few years to finish up, let him. If a kid finishes everything by 16, pay for community college courses rather than cramming too much AP-type stuff into primary education.
Give teachers incentives for efficiently moving kids up the ladder. A failure in a class becomes somewhat inexcusable if pace is not age-determined.
It would be an interesting experiment, in any case.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The problem with LInux is the shitty office tools. LibreOffice is definitely no match for MS Office. I tried to write a document with the former and LOwriter would shift images, one over the other. would do things that made it cumbersome to use.
The frustration I had with LO was horrendous. It was like moving backwards to standard transmission.
It did have some good points. If you document was super simple, just text, with perhaps full width tables, then it was OK to print acceptably (physical print and as pdf). If you had screen shots, then it would go into the middle of the paragraph, instead of moving the paragraph down. Saving a writer (odt) document would result in your cursor and screen being relocated to Gd knows were in the document.
If you want Linux to take over Windows on the desktop, the office product and tools are important. Gnome is one of the culprits in this. Gnome, eg, Nautilus, went from simple and easy to use to now requiring a preponderance of mouse clicks in order to get anything done. Its a shame.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I'm sorry that you think I'm trolling. I'm really not, just calling a spade a spade...
No, you're lying through your teeth. Linux is a kernel. Android uses Linux. That makes Android a Linux-based OS.
Frankly, I think a Chromebox is a better choice for your average user who wants to leave Windows, it "just works". But those haven't sold very well either, likely because no one is spending any money to market them.
You're out of touch with reality. Currently the #2 best selling laptop on Amazon is a Chromebook. In fact, Chromebooks have been best sellers on Amazon for a long time now.
When is the last time you saw a TV commercial for Linux or Chromebox or anything besides Windows? (for desktops, we're not talking about phones here).
Who cares? Television is passe and it's just like Microsoft to be awkwardly anachronistic with embarrassingly out-of-date and copycat commercials.
This is the kind of commercial users see now.
even os x sometimes requires to drop to terminal
some people are a "glass half empty" some are "glass half full" i'm a "there is something in the glass be happy" person
that when hp , dell and other manufactures get with playonlinux or wine and use the bridge already built
some people are a "glass half empty" some are "glass half full" i'm a "there is something in the glass be happy" person
I think that setting schools up into 1000-student-ish campuses encompassing ages 5-18 is the way to go. Make it a goal to get out of there as soon as possible: once a student gets to "AP" courses, they really need to be in more of a college setting. At that point, move to a secondary education campus or the technical education campus. Set up all of the language arts at the same time so that students can smoothly move between classes by ability. It's OK to have a 10 and a 14 year old in the same reading class. Get rid of the concept of "classes" and just move kids up by subject. Recruit kids who are ahead to help kids who are behind. Get rid of arbitrary cut-offs for public funding - if a special ed kid needs an extra few years to finish up, let him. If a kid finishes everything by 16, pay for community college courses rather than cramming too much AP-type stuff into primary education.
I love this plan... I'm sure there are issued to be worked out, but I really like this idea...
You're hired! :)
Apple isn't a fashion company. Apple stuff is far too popular to make it on fashion. Social signalling has to be done with stuff that's harder to get. Apple makes stuff that non-geeks perceive as easy to use and high quality, and a few hundred dollars isn't that much extra to spend if it's what you want. Geeks tend to look for different things (fine) and tend no have very little empathy for people who think differently than they do (not as fine).
What geeks should appreciate is that you can easily launch the equivalent of xterms and start hacking away with Unix.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So 50% of American smart phone consumers are "idiots"?
the terminal is no longer needed.
People can do everything point-and-click in OS X and Windows without needing arcane commands. Firewall configuration, rebooting, resetting a password, updating drivers, installing the latest version of Chrome, plugging in a USB drive to copy over some files, updating the OS, configuring an obscure gigabit Ethernet card that was bought on NewEgg for $4, searching your entire hard drive for a file called "2017 Budget.xlsx", closing the laptop lid and re-opening it out of sleep mode, installing PHP to run your own Wordpress site, uninstalling MySQL, Skyping with friends, watching Netflix, resizing a disk partition. Try any of those on Linux, many can't be done without the terminal.
You're either full of shit or a complete asshole.
Focus on better apps (office, multimedia, mobile etc) for Linux desktop
Casteism
Closer to 2% these days, which is up from the 1% that it used to be. Even more impressive since the overall user base has also grown and Linux is gaining ground and not losing it. OS X has bounced around between 8% and 12% of the market over the last few years.
(Personally, I think the days of Windows as a server OS are numbered. The first leak in that dike is that you can now run Micorsoft SQL Server on Linux.)
Should be denied? Of course not, you are most welcome to launch an operating system UI that enables what you want.
Locked bootloaders and restricted device drivers make it <understatement>kind of hard</understatement> to install an operating system with a different UI on still-manufactured hardware.
On the other hand, are you implying that current operating system UI vendors should be forced to use a paradigm that they don't think their user base has the brains to use?
I don't demand this from operating system publishers as much as from device makers. Too many devices make it impractical to replace the operating system with a free one, and many of them don't have a free-software-friendly competitor in the same size class. I complain about Android because it's the closest thing to a 10" Linux laptop since conventional 10" laptops were discontinued at the end of 2012, for instance.
one in a million use use this feature.
I find your claim that only 7,000 people on this planet use overlapping or tiled windows hard to believe. I'd be more inclined to believe it with a citation.
Most people develop software with neither overlapping windows nor tiled windows.
[...]
Even those who do [use a debugger] - visual studio, eclipse, idea intellisense, emacs debugger (some of the most popular code editing tools used today) all split the window itself such that people can see the program and its variables together
By "tiled windows" I include splitting the window in this manner. This leaves including the output in the split.
Can you cite sources that only "one in a million" use tiled windows between, say, an HTML editor and the browser rendering it? Or can you cite sources that only "one in a million" use tiled windows between a web browser for viewing an HTML document and a text editor or word processor for taking notes on the document?
The world is inefficient. Get over it.
I find it more difficult to just "Get over" artificial inefficiencies, especially those enforced primarily through cryptographic lockdown, than inefficiencies with a substantial cost justification.
I "don't even anecdotally counter [your] observation of no non-geek ever using overlapping windows" because I am willing to acquiesce to the absence of overlapping windows if tiled windows are also available. The problem is that tiled windows aren't available either.
Restarting from here to avoid the personal attacks into which the other discussion degraded:
Why did the paradigm change from overlapping windows, which you claim that only a small minority can use, to forced maximization instead of from overlapping windows to tiled windows?
And why did the paradigm change from preserving the state of open HTML documents to destroying it?
There was really no personal attack. Anyone unwilling to make the smallest effort to use a niche feature has no leg to stand on, even to complain that the feature is "missing". Because it is not missing at all - just takes effort to use like most other niche features.
Why did the paradigm change from overlapping windows, which you claim that only a small minority can use, to forced maximization instead of from overlapping windows to tiled windows?
The thing that you are calling 'tiled windows" is very much available, and Android framework even provides convenient layouts for that. It is similar to HTML frames, or emacs "windows". App developer has to typically choose that and code for that - one popular strategy is to use navigation in phones vs. these "tiled windows" in tablets. Might even be a Google recommendation, for all I know or care.
Why developers don't choose this - reason could be similar. They must deem (and I agree) most people will find that too complicated and choosing a good frame size is an exercise in endless indecision given the zillion possible screen configurations.
And why did the paradigm change from preserving the state of open HTML documents to destroying it?
I don't understand who is destroying open HTML documents. OEMs, like in most devices, under-provision RAM. Web-developers, like most developers these days, hog too much RAM. Anyway they want to push you to use their "app" so that they can steal your contacts, location and attention. So too many open web-pages leads to reload if same tab is revisited. Saving to disk at a RAM starved point of time might be thought of as too much work for little benefit, though it can be useful.
Around 2 years ago, I chose a 3 GB RAM Android phone when they were rare. Around a dozen of pages of those days could be opened together in the browser (along with hosts based ad blocking, of course). The number has since reduced, but it is still comfortable enough that I don't call it a paradigm of destroying HTML documents.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
The thing that you are calling 'tiled windows" is very much available, and Android framework even provides convenient layouts for that.
I assume you're referring to the framework for displaying multiple views within a single app, called "fragments" and introduced in Honeycomb. But the limit of "fragments" is that it can't display views from two different apps, such as a web browser on one side and a text editor on the other. This makes it difficult to, say, write and test code on a small device while commuting on public transit to and from work. Right now my 10 inch laptop works for this purpose, but I don't know what will be available to replace it once it finally breaks. If I were to instead carry a larger laptop, I would run a greater risk of theft because I would need to carry it in something that's more obviously a laptop case.
I don't understand who is destroying open HTML documents.
Chrome for Android has a limit of how many documents it keeps loaded at once. I seem to remember reading that this limit was close to three. When more documents are opened in tabs, or when Chrome receives a memory pressure signal from the operating system, it will destroy a document instead of serializing its DOM to Chrome's cache folder.
So too many open web-pages leads to reload if same tab is revisited.
And this behavior causes data loss. For example, it causes the comment entered into a Slashdot comment form to be lost. Why did the paradigm change to excuse loss of the user's data?
Saving to disk at a RAM starved point of time might be thought of as too much work for little benefit, though it can be useful.
Saving to disk to avoid loss of user data is exactly the behavior I expected, as it's similar to what the virtual memory manager on a desktop OS does.
Microsoft is doing a nice job pushing desktop customers away and I've gone to Mac OSX but I worry that Apple might pull the Google/Microsoft stuff at some point in the future and then there will be fewer options. I use Linux as my primary development system but our systems are professionally maintained so things are pretty easy. I have Ubuntu VMs on my Mac that I use for certain things. Ubuntu is more management work than my Mac would be but I would manage if it came to that point. I just don't see the average person dealing very well with Linux though - they'd just likely go with Windows as they don't care about the stuff that people here care about.
Linux is harder than most people are willing to tolerate from a computer. They just don't care about computers like we do. Does not make them idiots.
I use OS X, because I just got tired of being a Linux user a long long time ago. It's not convenient, or at least was not when I used it. I have better problems to focus on; I don't want to resolve package dependencies, figure out how to compile other people's software, find alternatives to all the great software that doesn't care about Linux, figure out stubborn driver issues, etc. It's truly a waste of time for me, at this point in my life.
OS X is a good Unix based OS, if you don't mind spending a bit more on well designed hardware... Not that big of a deal.
There are actually a lot of Apple geeks, they just aren't IT guys, mostly. They are programmers, designers, musicians... They are actually a pretty big constituency.