Slashdot Mirror
Raspberry Pi's Linux-Based PIXEL Desktop Now Available For PC and Mac (betanews.com)
From a report on BetaNews: If you own a Raspberry Pi, you're probably familiar with PIXEL. The desktop environment is included in the Raspbian OS. The Raspberry Pi Foundation describes PIXEL as the "GNU/Linux we would want to use" and understandably so. It offers a smart, clean interface, a decent selection of software, the Chromium web browser with plug-ins, and more -- and from today it's available for PC and Mac. The version of Debian+PIXEL for x86 platforms is described as "experimental" but having taken it for a spin, it seems pretty stable to me. To run PIXEL on your PC or Mac, download the image, burn it onto a DVD or flash it onto a USB memory stick, and boot from it. The desktop environment will load ready for use.
It's basically LXDE reskinned to look more like GNOME 2.32 with some pretty icons.
Oh shit, this means https://raspberrypi.org/ is going to get Slashdotted. I hope their ISP has got some spare capacity ready for the deluge.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
yeah, and they all go there at the same time. you fucktard.
One of the unusual cases where "PC" still means x86 and not Windows. I'm so used to PC meaning Windows by now, that I expected it to be the about a desktop theme now being available for Windows and OSX.
Desktop Linux may arrive, indeed may already have arrived in a form nobody expected 15 years ago. Chromebooks have been outselling Windows laptops for years now on Amazon for example.
Just as IBMs computer monopoly was disrupted, but not in a way anyone (at the time) expected. These nuisance "toy" microcomputers came along. They were under IBMs radar because they were not a threat. Just as Linux was under Microsoft's radar for a long time. Before long, a manager could buy, within their own purchasing authority an Apple II with VisiCalc and have it on their desktop -- without involving any of the mainframe people and the attendant hassles of dealing with them. When IBM introduced their PC they thought there was a market for maybe a couple million units. Little did they know that a de-facto standard of clones would unleash a huge software industry that would drive the need for more of these cheap "toy" computers. And you know the rest. Those "toys" now dominate the industry and then formed the basis of large data centers full of hardware derived from these "toy" computers.
Disruption sometimes arrives in forms you don't expect. Microsoft was also quite unprepared for Android and still hasn't found an effective response.
Microsoft stated that the reason for the Linux on Windows subsystem was to attract developers back to Windows. WTF? A direct admission that open source was more attractive to developers? Yet in all the innovative things I've seen developers present in public, they largely seem to be running open source -- even if on Mac hardware.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Most of those are unknown to the general public, and we can see the same pattern here. To my dad, Linux=Ubuntu, because that's something he heard somewhere, even though I installed Linux mint on his computer. And he's still referring to it as "Ubuntu".
I believe that fragmentation is not an issue. It can merely repel people who are afraid of it because they were told it was a "bad thing" (TM); while not realizing that installing any software (say Firefox) on windows was already making it somewhat different from the original one; and the only reason why this is not called a distribution is that you (in this case) do not distribute your new windows installation with Firefox freshly installed as a Windows spin. That's all.
Minor problems such as libraries distribution are what they are, minor (and considered solved) problems with a plethora of solutions.
I usually like the idea of a distribution for a specific purpose. I wouldn't install DD-Wrt on my desktop, or ChromeOS on my NAS, although both are possible. I hope you do not feel overwhelmed when opening your wardrobe and noticing that you have more than one kind of cloth, or that you do not only have hammers in your toolbox
Talking about Linux versions, just to nitpick (here, the correct terminology is distributions)... yes, they are fragmented too, but the current stable is generally regarded as being the one from kernel.org, currently 4.8.15.
like none of the versions that are already out there are up to the job
This is an interesting argument, that I partially answered above: installing a new piece of software, then distributing it makes it a different distribution. But why create something from scratch? Ok, most of the time it's not completely from scratch. But sometimes, they are indeed not completely up to the job, or they would like to try and do something different, showcase a new piece of technology. At other times, distribution makers like to be in complete control of the experience they provide, and that seems to be the reason here. Provide something that's configured out-of-the box like they intend it to be; without any additional tweaking necessary for the end user. Plus, it's not like they are starting from scratch either. They just took a Debian, installed their software plus a few other utilities, and called it a ~day~ distribution :)
(off-topic) Seriously, slashdot? no strike/s/del or small html tag?
>the GPL's viral nature when involved with proprietary source code
What does that have to do with anything? If you're modifying the desktop software itself, or other parts of the OS, then yes, you need to give back your modifications, you can't simply claim 1,000,000 man-hours worth of code as your own because you added another 10 with something clever in it.
But if you want to make an application that runs on the OS, then you have no problem. You can even use most of the platform libraries which are under the LGPL, which explicitly grants the right to link to them from proprietary software.
Any lawyer that simply issues blanket advice of "stay away from the GPL" isn't worth their salt, they've just proven that they can't even be bothered to read to read the license, or lack the software-domain expertise to be able to understand it (in which case you really shouldn't be consulting them about anything software related). Now, if they said "Don't even look at GPLed code", that would be far more understandable - but when you're developing for a proprietary platform you wouldn't even have the option to look at the analogous code in the first place.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Otherwise there are already lots of Linux dists and few of them need to cut as many corners as Rasbian to get it to run on a slow embedded device.
What commercial paid for desktop applications still exist these days? Microsoft visual studio, Microsoft Office, photoshop, some audio editors? Much of it is now online, where the operating system is irrelevant.
I think any lawyer worth their salt that can read, could advise clients that its perfectly fine to develop on linux, as long as they have a fifth grade reading comprehension and are content with the terms of the licenses of the libraries they wish to build upon.
I think the real difficulty in the past has been developing software that works on multiple distros and won't be broken by updates. Both Xorg's Flatpack and Ubuntu's snap packages should help prevent that problem and make it way easier. But considering my first point, it might be too late.
mint is ubuntu with a different set of skins
All of Adobe's suite (Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere), Avid's suite (including ProTools, Sibelius, etc.), Imagineer's Mocha, The Foundry's NUKE suite, all of Autodesk's offerings, are all desktop applications I use daily (obviously not every single application in every single suite). Some certainly exist and work well on Linux, some don't, my point is merely that the range of desktop applications encompass more than Office suites, with much of the functionality not really translatable to online/cloud.
So just one more DE for Linux. Quite a waste, given the plethora of choices there already are aside from KDE and GNOME - things like XFCE, LXDE, LX/QT, Razor-qt, Unity, Cinnemon, et al. Just not worth the real estate on storage. I just installed TrueOS, and I like the fact that only Lumina gets installed by default, and anything else would have to be separately installed from AppCafe
What an incompetently written headline: "desktop now available for PC and Mac" makes one understand that it is just a desktop environment running on top of Windows and macOS, replacing Explorer.exe and the Finder, but still the same operating systems underneath running the same applications. Which is not the case at all.
Circumcision is child abuse.
hmm, while I get your point, I think that's not quite fair. I've been a user of Mint for a while, then went back to Ubuntu when Ubuntu Mate came into play. Now I'm back on Mint Cinnamon due to the fact that Cinnamon works great on a 4K HDPI laptop. I'm just not into KDE, really don't like Unity and Mate doesn't handle 4K well. Mint Cinnamon handles 4k quite well, has all the other advantages of Ubuntu and has an even better update system. So IMO it's a lot more than just a skin
---
So, who's taking bets on how long before Alphabet or Google sends them a cease and desist notice for using the PIXEL name? Surprised it hasn't happened yet.
Who would honestly use this interface over the default MacOSX interface? C'mon guys, this isn't even news.
if they said "Don't even look at GPLed code", that would be far more understandable
Not really. The learning aspect of studying Free software is never bound by viral licensing. See: Freedom 1.
What the fuck is a Gnu/Linux? It sounds like something made by children.
Quite true. But looking at the code opens the possibility of accidental infringement, hence clean-room reverse-engineering of proprietary software, where the folks doing the reverse engineering never type a single line of code for the re-implementation.
And of course there's also the perpetual temptation to simply cut and paste - it seems like a great many developers have trouble with the idea that just because you can look at the code doesn't mean you can reuse it as you see fit. Or maybe it's a management decision and the developers just go along with it trusting that they won't be made the fall guy if/when caught. Either way, making it corporate policy to "not even look at GPLed code" bypasses the problem entirely, while still allowing the LGPL compiled libraries to be used freely. It could also make a good "official" policy in that individual developers might well look at similar GPLed projects for insight anyway, but give them incentive to hide that fact - i.e. not copy and paste or re-implement in too similar a manner. Which is exactly what you wanted to begin with.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I should also further clarify that I'm talking about your average "What's the GPL?" development house, where "Don't look at the code" is a huge step up from "don't use the programs or link to the LGPLed libraries"
If you're actually looking to work more closely than that with GPLed software (without GPLing your own work), then it's probably worth investing in a lawyer who's already familiar with it, as well as engaging in systematic developer training, as there truly are a lot of grey areas in the license, including some situations where the legalese and the declared intent contradict one another, and you have to decide whther you want to play by the "community rules" or the actual legally stated requirements. (Can't remember any offhand, but I recall a couple being brought up on Groklaw back in the day)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
dollars to doughnuts if I put cinnamon on ubuntu and got the exact same theme, you couldnt tell the difference
You don't need a lawyer, it's a pretty simple rule: GPL is designed to keep code free and open.
If you plan to share your code, consider using/linking GPL. If not, don't use any GPL code in your project/product.
"It's a good computer... for I to BM on!" - apologies to Triumph, the insult comic dog
Microsoft stated that the reason for the Linux on Windows subsystem was to attract developers back to Windows. WTF? A direct admission that open source was more attractive to developers?
No, nothing to do with open source. It's that UNIX is attractive to developers.
Chromebooks have been outselling Windows laptops for years now on Amazon for example.
Android tablets are a dime a dozen and they're mostly rubbish, Chromebooks are really Google's competitor to the iPad. They let you browse the web and run web apps but their advantage is just that they're cheap, there is no innovation or differentiation there that Linux is offering, you can do those tasks equally well on pretty much any personal computing device these days. They could replace Linux with BSD or even whack that shell on Windows and it would make no difference because there is no disruptive feature there.
Chromebooks are a great way for people to do the most basic computing tasks on the cheap and not be tied to a platform but Linux itself doesn't offer any attractive features, in fact none of the hundreds of distros have done anything to attract significant amounts of users or developers to supplant Windows (or even OSX) in the professional space. Last I looked even Windows Vista had half the market share of all the Linux distros combined, Windows fucking Vista!
For economies of scale (with respect to development) and critical mass to kick in Linux needs to offer something disruptive to users and/or developers just like Apple did with the iPhone, being just another option for those with platform agnostic computing needs doesn't get it anywhere, it's trivially replaced.
If you're doing image editing, audio production, video production, architectural design, BIM, most simulation (solvers often have the ability to run on Linux but pre & post are most often Windows), product design, solid modeling, visualization, game development (while engines are portable editors usually aren't, unity for example), most of the professional industry.
Each computing niche there adds up and what remains is largely the kind of platform-agnostic computing that can be done on anything from a smartphone to a an ipad to a chromebook to a highend workstation.