The lifecycle of a PC is about 2 years. A mac is about 5 years.
Those blue $3000 G4 towers had an enormous lifespan (mainly because the G4 scaled so slowly it wasn't worth it to upgrade them... it took more than 3 years to double the clock). However it's completely ridiclous to extend that to cheap Mac Minis and iBooks that are already obsoleted by the models that you know Apple will be introducing in six months.
Plus, the main reason PC users upgrade their machines is because it's cheap to do so. Now that Apple is trying to be more affordabe, Mac users aren't going to be clinging to ancient machines like they had in the past.
On an open system not controlled by a single authority and lacking a lot of standard infrastructure for advanced graphical applications, multiple desktop environments are inheriently inevitable.
If you say so, but most other parts of the stack don't suffer from this sort of API war.
How could KDE have started that way when GNOME didn't even exist then?
OK, the Kommon Desktop Enviornment set out first to wipe CDE off the map, and then switched to Gnome. Regardless, it was always designed as it's own silo which was unrealistic given that "open system not controlled by a single authority" (as you put it) should have welcomed a more open approach to the desktop that didn't mandate the use of a single widget kit.
TrollTech isn't going to "reorient" a damn thing in QT to use GNOME "infrastructure" because QT and GNOME are written in different languages
Use your head. QT does theming and a lot of other integration bits on Windows and Mac, and could easily do the same to fit in better on a Gnome desktop.
> It was deliberately designed to be inseperable by the KDE core developers (many of whom work for TrollTech).
You and I are in agreement. The infrastructures were specifically designed in such a way to encourage the use of one toolkit over the other. There never was an an attempt to build a collaborative desktop enviornment where different toolkits could live side-by-side, using IPC when necessary.
Again, the lack of agreement on basic things like a shared settings file/database, or common mime-type handling, etc has absolutely 0 to do with licences and everything to do with politics.
(And I do agree with everything you are saying about KDE/Trolltech, just that I also believe that Gnome was doing the exact same things in their own ways.)
> Why do you think the price of a "premium" computer will fall below $500 any time soon?
Because business desktops are already falling below $500.
I think you make a good point that as computers become ridiclously cheap, it's a lot easier for Apple to sell more 'premium' machines on style points and consumer trinket value. However, even with their traditional high margins, the hardware profits are going to get thinner, so to remain a hardware-based business, they would need to greatly increase their hardware sales (like say double their marketshare). Whether that's possible with a purely consumer-based strategy is a good question.
I don't think it's particularly Utopian -- having a Desktop War wasn't a historical inevitability. It happened because both projects set out to make it happen, and they did this by intentionally building incompatible infrastructure and emphasizing differences to the end user that are simply unimportant to that audience.
Both projects set out to wipe the other one off the map, and it looks like Gnome is succeeding at that. Good for them, bad for the Linux desktop. Considering the no-growth in that market, Winner-Take-All seems like an awfully dumb strategy in retrospect.
(And I agree that Trolltech will probably eventually re-orient QT around Gnome infrastructure.)
Bah, after QT went GPL, licence issues were just convienent divisive political flamebait rather than a reason. Licence issues didn't cause two VFS, two sound systems, and two settings databases. The issues that exist could have been solved with a good common IPC system, something that both projects fought for the longest time.
Comparing Mandriva and Xandros with the likes of Sun and Novell is a little obtuse, don't you think? I have my doubts about their financial stability, but I'm sure you will never see any sort of real compeititon for Microsoft out of those guys.
Do you know how many people get a new computer with Windows and spend an hour choosing their wallpaper, screensavers, IM avatars etc.? Loads. Look and feel and customisation is important even to the least tech-savvy person.
Realistically, Linux has no opportunity to be sold to this kind of user. It's going to be a long time before Linux is any sort of serious retail consumer solution.
Linux desktops tend to be positioned towards managed IT solutions, dull functional and accessible, where disabling this sort of customization is more important than having it.
Yeah, the common pattern is that there's no real demand for a Linux Desktop of any sort. It's not exactly like KDE-based distros were bumping Windows off desktops either.
Seriously, anyone who has been involved in software development will tell you the same thing -- in fact, I remember telling KDE supporters 5 years ago that one desktop will have to die before Linux can make any real headway for desktop applications,
No, KDE and Gnome could have cooperated to create a single, great, open source desktop, with one project focusing on C++ frameworks, and the other focusing on C, with shared configuration settings and support software.
The fact is they both chose to set up this There Can Only Be One Winner situation, and therefore it was inevitable that there was going to be a lot of blood-letting eventually. What was unfortuante, in everyone's zeal to be the winner in this, they ended up in the worst possible situation for Desktop Linux. (Which ain't exactly catching the world on fire as it is.)
1) Where is the profit in letting vendors sell Intel machines with Mac OS X?... Right now for a $1k system they might get $100 profit
Yes, but when the price of a 'premium' computer falls to $500 (and it will soon), then they are looking at a $50 profit, then a $30 profit, etc etc. [I remember the days when Apple cleared $1000 profit on each Mac sold.]
If they license OS X for $30, they might get $20 profit
And they might sell two OS upgrades for $100 profit each, plus iLife upgrades, plus a higher potential in iPod and other "digital lifestyle" sales.
I think your numbers make sense now, but within a year or two I could easily see software overtaking hardware as the profit center for Apple, and that means they'll probably start licencing the OS in a limited fashion.
> The visual differences are mostly artificial ones. We will see crosstheming very soon.
The visual differences are mostly intentional, to encourage end-user loyalty to one programming toolkit or the other.
KDE and Gnome have had many years to sort out the theming and l&f issues, as well as things like file dialogs and VFSes. They haven't done it because they are both trying to magnify the differences between the toolkits, not minimize them.
Most people only browse one page at a time. Tabs are a nice power-user feature, but if it were something that ordinary users really cared about, IE's marketshare would be a lot lower.
Sorry to bitchslap you with facts, but Google just introduced a major desktop product based entirely on IE and COM/ActiveX infrastructure. Just the kind of Internet product that Microsoft has been talking about since Pearl Harbor Day, 1995.
If Google actually thought that way, they would build their stuff on Mozilla technology. But facts speak louder than words.
The similar "Mac is easier for novices" meme is equally annoying, since historically the Mac has NOT succeeded among casual home users. The markets where Mac has consistently succeeded is among professionals who use very expensive and technical software suites to do their work.
While I agree this is somewhat true, it runs counter to 20 years of Apple marketing. Macs are sold to people who are scared of their computers going "beep beep beep" and might be confused by more than one mouse button (sorry!).
While Apple does have some very strong professional segments, I think they know their bread is buttered by education and by people who really don't like computers. It's only been a real technical choice for the last couple years since OSX came out, and still their hardware lineup (iMac, eMac, iBook) is still heavily biased toward the Make It Easy user.
I don't understand this argument at all. You pay RedHat and SUSE good money for packaging. If something about the packaging sucks (docs are an inconsistent mix of info, man, html, and text), you expect them to fix it and not shrug their shoulders and point upstream.
"IS NOT!!" wasn't a very compelling argument on the gradeschool playground either. Face it, the community has not really thought through the the cost-of-ownership implications of the status quo, and footstomping won't change that.
Specifically, the XP copy protection came after Ballmer took over the company.
When Gates was CEO, Microsoft products were intentionally very piracy friendly, because his goal was total universality, whether or not he got paid for it.
The issue was that both Gnome and KDE became branding and marketing machines very early on, with goal of garnering end-user loyality to their particular programming toolkit over the other. Thus a thin bright line was always drawn between a "Gnome application" and a "KDE applicaiton". In other words neither project had the goal of "making the Unix desktop environment the best". Their goal was "making sure our Unix desktop environment is the one people use".
And that focus has lead to a lot of technically shoddy decisions, including a vast and enormous number of desktop toolkit features that should not be tied (technically or marketing-wise) to a particular widget set or programming language/style.
...Ultimately it's about expanding the market. The community can continue to shut costs onto the userbase, but the users who are willing to accept that are all there. But improving the ease and economics of Linux ownership through binary compability will allow it into areas where it is currently has not been viable.
Those that do, are welcome to work on 'solutions' like this, but they shouldn't be surprised when large portions of the community don't see the point.
No, I think the commercial companies understand where "the community" is coming from. Maintaining binary compatibility requires discipline, testing, standards, and above all time and/or money. It's not that source compatibility is such a great solution, it's just that binary compatibility is hard issue, both politically and in cost.
The shoestring developers in the Linux world threw binary compatibility overboard mainly for efficiency and ease of development. Source compatibility was the cheap work around for a cost they could not afford to bear.
Only that cost didn't really go away -- it just got pushed onto the end users and porters. All of those thousands of Debian packagers bear the cost of binary incompatibility. The sysadmins who reinstall Fedora every 12 months bear the cost of binary incompatibility. The guy who pays RedHat $700/year/server for compatiblity bears the cost. The end user who can't find the package he wants bears the cost. And many of these "members of the community" are asking someone to do something about it.
Ulitimatly it's about expanding the market. The community can continue to shut costs onto the userbase
Slashdot Mirror
The lifecycle of a PC is about 2 years. A mac is about 5 years.
... it took more than 3 years to double the clock). However it's completely ridiclous to extend that to cheap Mac Minis and iBooks that are already obsoleted by the models that you know Apple will be introducing in six months.
Those blue $3000 G4 towers had an enormous lifespan (mainly because the G4 scaled so slowly it wasn't worth it to upgrade them
Plus, the main reason PC users upgrade their machines is because it's cheap to do so. Now that Apple is trying to be more affordabe, Mac users aren't going to be clinging to ancient machines like they had in the past.
where you separate out the logic into tiers: Persistence Layer, Biz Logic Layer and Presentation Layer.
.NET.
Which works great only if you are willing to completely standardize on one enviornment like J2EE or DCOM or
I don't particularlly like business logic in the DB either, but for certain environments it's the the easiest solution to the problem.
On an open system not controlled by a single authority and lacking a lot of standard infrastructure for advanced graphical applications, multiple desktop environments are inheriently inevitable.
If you say so, but most other parts of the stack don't suffer from this sort of API war.
How could KDE have started that way when GNOME didn't even exist then?
OK, the Kommon Desktop Enviornment set out first to wipe CDE off the map, and then switched to Gnome. Regardless, it was always designed as it's own silo which was unrealistic given that "open system not controlled by a single authority" (as you put it) should have welcomed a more open approach to the desktop that didn't mandate the use of a single widget kit.
TrollTech isn't going to "reorient" a damn thing in QT to use GNOME "infrastructure" because QT and GNOME are written in different languages
Use your head. QT does theming and a lot of other integration bits on Windows and Mac, and could easily do the same to fit in better on a Gnome desktop.
> It was deliberately designed to be inseperable by the KDE core developers (many of whom work for TrollTech).
You and I are in agreement. The infrastructures were specifically designed in such a way to encourage the use of one toolkit over the other. There never was an an attempt to build a collaborative desktop enviornment where different toolkits could live side-by-side, using IPC when necessary.
Again, the lack of agreement on basic things like a shared settings file/database, or common mime-type handling, etc has absolutely 0 to do with licences and everything to do with politics.
(And I do agree with everything you are saying about KDE/Trolltech, just that I also believe that Gnome was doing the exact same things in their own ways.)
Most of KDElibs is LGPL. The projects didn't cooperate on backend infrastructure because they didn't want to, not because of legal reasons.
Either fix your threshold or learn to read, flameboy.
> Why do you think the price of a "premium" computer will fall below $500 any time soon?
Because business desktops are already falling below $500.
I think you make a good point that as computers become ridiclously cheap, it's a lot easier for Apple to sell more 'premium' machines on style points and consumer trinket value. However, even with their traditional high margins, the hardware profits are going to get thinner, so to remain a hardware-based business, they would need to greatly increase their hardware sales (like say double their marketshare). Whether that's possible with a purely consumer-based strategy is a good question.
I don't think it's particularly Utopian -- having a Desktop War wasn't a historical inevitability. It happened because both projects set out to make it happen, and they did this by intentionally building incompatible infrastructure and emphasizing differences to the end user that are simply unimportant to that audience.
Both projects set out to wipe the other one off the map, and it looks like Gnome is succeeding at that. Good for them, bad for the Linux desktop. Considering the no-growth in that market, Winner-Take-All seems like an awfully dumb strategy in retrospect.
(And I agree that Trolltech will probably eventually re-orient QT around Gnome infrastructure.)
Bah, after QT went GPL, licence issues were just convienent divisive political flamebait rather than a reason. Licence issues didn't cause two VFS, two sound systems, and two settings databases. The issues that exist could have been solved with a good common IPC system, something that both projects fought for the longest time.
Comparing Mandriva and Xandros with the likes of Sun and Novell is a little obtuse, don't you think? I have my doubts about their financial stability, but I'm sure you will never see any sort of real compeititon for Microsoft out of those guys.
Do you know how many people get a new computer with Windows and spend an hour choosing their wallpaper, screensavers, IM avatars etc.? Loads. Look and feel and customisation is important even to the least tech-savvy person.
Realistically, Linux has no opportunity to be sold to this kind of user. It's going to be a long time before Linux is any sort of serious retail consumer solution.
Linux desktops tend to be positioned towards managed IT solutions, dull functional and accessible, where disabling this sort of customization is more important than having it.
Yeah, the common pattern is that there's no real demand for a Linux Desktop of any sort. It's not exactly like KDE-based distros were bumping Windows off desktops either.
Seriously, anyone who has been involved in software development will tell you the same thing -- in fact, I remember telling KDE supporters 5 years ago that one desktop will have to die before Linux can make any real headway for desktop applications,
No, KDE and Gnome could have cooperated to create a single, great, open source desktop, with one project focusing on C++ frameworks, and the other focusing on C, with shared configuration settings and support software.
The fact is they both chose to set up this There Can Only Be One Winner situation, and therefore it was inevitable that there was going to be a lot of blood-letting eventually. What was unfortuante, in everyone's zeal to be the winner in this, they ended up in the worst possible situation for Desktop Linux. (Which ain't exactly catching the world on fire as it is.)
1) Where is the profit in letting vendors sell Intel machines with Mac OS X? ... Right now for a $1k system they might get $100 profit
Yes, but when the price of a 'premium' computer falls to $500 (and it will soon), then they are looking at a $50 profit, then a $30 profit, etc etc. [I remember the days when Apple cleared $1000 profit on each Mac sold.]
If they license OS X for $30, they might get $20 profit
And they might sell two OS upgrades for $100 profit each, plus iLife upgrades, plus a higher potential in iPod and other "digital lifestyle" sales.
I think your numbers make sense now, but within a year or two I could easily see software overtaking hardware as the profit center for Apple, and that means they'll probably start licencing the OS in a limited fashion.
> The visual differences are mostly artificial ones. We will see crosstheming very soon.
The visual differences are mostly intentional, to encourage end-user loyalty to one programming toolkit or the other.
KDE and Gnome have had many years to sort out the theming and l&f issues, as well as things like file dialogs and VFSes. They haven't done it because they are both trying to magnify the differences between the toolkits, not minimize them.
Most people only browse one page at a time. Tabs are a nice power-user feature, but if it were something that ordinary users really cared about, IE's marketshare would be a lot lower.
Sorry to bitchslap you with facts, but Google just introduced a major desktop product based entirely on IE and COM/ActiveX infrastructure. Just the kind of Internet product that Microsoft has been talking about since Pearl Harbor Day, 1995.
If Google actually thought that way, they would build their stuff on Mozilla technology. But facts speak louder than words.
The similar "Mac is easier for novices" meme is equally annoying, since historically the Mac has NOT succeeded among casual home users. The markets where Mac has consistently succeeded is among professionals who use very expensive and technical software suites to do their work.
While I agree this is somewhat true, it runs counter to 20 years of Apple marketing. Macs are sold to people who are scared of their computers going "beep beep beep" and might be confused by more than one mouse button (sorry!).
While Apple does have some very strong professional segments, I think they know their bread is buttered by education and by people who really don't like computers. It's only been a real technical choice for the last couple years since OSX came out, and still their hardware lineup (iMac, eMac, iBook) is still heavily biased toward the Make It Easy user.
I don't understand this argument at all. You pay RedHat and SUSE good money for packaging. If something about the packaging sucks (docs are an inconsistent mix of info, man, html, and text), you expect them to fix it and not shrug their shoulders and point upstream.
Nope, because what I'm describing exists on a factual basis, independently of your ability to understand it.
"IS NOT!!" wasn't a very compelling argument on the gradeschool playground either. Face it, the community has not really thought through the the cost-of-ownership implications of the status quo, and footstomping won't change that.
Specifically, the XP copy protection came after Ballmer took over the company.
When Gates was CEO, Microsoft products were intentionally very piracy friendly, because his goal was total universality, whether or not he got paid for it.
(Allow me to reinterpret the argument)
The issue was that both Gnome and KDE became branding and marketing machines very early on, with goal of garnering end-user loyality to their particular programming toolkit over the other. Thus a thin bright line was always drawn between a "Gnome application" and a "KDE applicaiton". In other words neither project had the goal of "making the Unix desktop environment the best". Their goal was "making sure our Unix desktop environment is the one people use".
And that focus has lead to a lot of technically shoddy decisions, including a vast and enormous number of desktop toolkit features that should not be tied (technically or marketing-wise) to a particular widget set or programming language/style.
...Ultimately it's about expanding the market. The community can continue to shut costs onto the userbase, but the users who are willing to accept that are all there. But improving the ease and economics of Linux ownership through binary compability will allow it into areas where it is currently has not been viable.
Those that do, are welcome to work on 'solutions' like this, but they shouldn't be surprised when large portions of the community don't see the point.
No, I think the commercial companies understand where "the community" is coming from. Maintaining binary compatibility requires discipline, testing, standards, and above all time and/or money. It's not that source compatibility is such a great solution, it's just that binary compatibility is hard issue, both politically and in cost.
The shoestring developers in the Linux world threw binary compatibility overboard mainly for efficiency and ease of development. Source compatibility was the cheap work around for a cost they could not afford to bear.
Only that cost didn't really go away -- it just got pushed onto the end users and porters. All of those thousands of Debian packagers bear the cost of binary incompatibility. The sysadmins who reinstall Fedora every 12 months bear the cost of binary incompatibility. The guy who pays RedHat $700/year/server for compatiblity bears the cost. The end user who can't find the package he wants bears the cost. And many of these "members of the community" are asking someone to do something about it.
Ulitimatly it's about expanding the market. The community can continue to shut costs onto the userbase