Is the Linux Desktop Dream Dead? | Hacker News Reader

Is the Linux Desktop Dream Dead?

pcworld.com

5 pointsmacco36 comments

Please, don't send FUD here.

PCWorld is a magazine witch primary Ad buyer is Microsoft, this kind of magazines live from their ads(I have worked on printing presses), not for their customers paying the magazine.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

No, Linux is not dead, and you make the numbers totally up(1% market share). Linus is not going to be professional in the areas that commercial software makers only support Windows or Mac(games, CAD, CAE, publishing...) until they support Linux, but is the only OS in witch you have total control.

I don't think this has anything to do with Microsoft, they're simply almost 2 weeks late hopping on that band-wagon. Note: the argument is about Linux on the desktop, not Linux as a whole. Linux as a whole does well with adoption elsewhere(mobile, servers, super computing, routers?). I don't really know much about Linux on the desktop as it was never a dream for many of us who have better things to do and I don't think it was ever alive so I don't know how it can now be dead :)

If you would have read the first sentence in that article, you would've seen the author argues the contrary ... that Linux on the desktops is not dead.

On the other hand your point is totally useless.

     Linus is not going to be professional in the areas that 
     commercial software makers only support 
     Windows or Mac

NO SHIT ... unfortunately it is not going to happen soon. You know why?

Because Linux users don't pay for software, and proprietary software has some kind of stench attached (RMS says so).

E.g. Adobe tried to ship Flex Builder for Linux: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/

And I've been to one internal meeting in Adobe that discussed the viability of Linux. Users not paying for software was problem #1, but they still considered it viable because of recent trends (e.g. Dell / Walmart starting to sell Ubuntu / gOS computers).

Guess they backtracked on that decision based on consumer feedback.

perennial chicken/egg problem, but they 'chickened' out I guess (yeah, bad pun).

Would be interesting to know the final reason for killing it. At that time, I had a need for Flex Builder, and wanted it on Linux, and would have paid for it in a heartbeat. Others I know would have too. But we couldn't because it's not available.

I've paid for other software on Linux in the past (financial software, mostly) and got tired of waiting for the programs I wanted and needed to be available on Linux, so I jumped to a Mac. I'd been a rather late holdout, only jumping in late 2008, after about 8 years of trying to do only Linux on the desktop.

I guess there were never enough of us to make certain software profitable, or insanely profitable, which is perhaps what vendors like Adobe were after.

The problem with Linux is not the urban legend, that Linux users don't pay for software (just ask Varicad or MathWorks), for example).

For Adobe, the problem might be, that Linux users don't pay for subpar software. The Flex Builder is a perfect example - it feels foreign on Linux desktop. Would Mac users pay for software, that feels so foreign on Mac desktop? Of course not, so why do you expect Linux users to do?

> No, Linux is not dead, and you make the numbers totally up(1% market share)

How is the 1% number totally made up?

I think the desktop itself is dying. The Linux desktop, however, did give birth to KHTML, which became one of the major browser platforms. You can now access your apps without a proprietary software requirement on most devices. A win, but not in the way anyone expected.

Linux got a lot of momentum from the "Microsoft is evil" camp. However, OS X sucked off most of that momentum, and now I would guess the primary users of Linux are developers who deploy onto Linux servers or embedded devices who realize that it's easier to develop on the same platform you deploy on. (And who have a lot of knowledge about the platform because they deploy on it).

But there is a growing "Apple is evil" movement, and I expect Linux to get some momentum from that. I wish that more people would try Linux for it's positive features -- for example, Virtual Desktops is my killer feature, but Linux still gets most of its users because its "not Windows" and "not Apple".

One huge advantage that Linux does have is that it's really the only Desktop platform that's seeing rapid advancement. KDE 4 is maturing into a very nice platform, Gnome 3 is coming out soon, all with significant changes and enhancements, for good or bad. OTOH, OS X 10.7 is coming out with what, an app store?

Of course, neither Microsoft nor Apple are putting a lot of effort into desktop environments because of their decreasing relevance...

> for good or bad. OTOH, OS X 10.7 is coming out with what, an app store?

... that could be described as a credit-card-aware half-brained package manager...

In the meantime mobile phones will probably (if not already) be most people's interaction with "computing" and there Linux is a compelling story.

Linux is a passable desktop OS if you're a developer or most of the things you need live in the browser. I have an Ubuntu box loaded up and sitting in the garage just in case my Macbook gets stolen or dies on me, and I know that I'd be able to clone my projects and be up and running and billing clients again in a couple of hours.

That being said, desktop Linux is lacking a lot of the other things that I use on a daily basis (no, Gimp and OpenOffice.org are NOT "just as good"), and I just don't enjoy using it as much as OS X.

However, I in no way look down on the people who love their Linux desktop machines more than life itself, because without them we wouldn't have things like Webkit, TrueCrypt, VNC, Wine, Eclipse, and Cedega (and its cousin Cider, for running Windows games on Linux and the Mac, respectively).

So keep hacking away on your Linux desktop machines!

I'm the opposite, I used OS X for a few months and found it abysmal for development, really unfit for power-user usage (keyboard accessibility was horrid) and completely uncustomisable. I switched to Linux and never used it again.

I used to use Windows before that, but now I've switched all my computers to Linux. Windows is a close favorite (7 is great), but installing the dev tools I need isn't easy (or possible, sometimes). OS X is a distant third.

I can understand that point of view, but I notice that a lot of desktop Linux users bring up UI customization as one of the big arguments for using Linux.

I've always seen extensive UI customization as just one more distraction between me and real work. I'd rather just set a flat black or very minimalist wallpaper and get cracking instead of spending hours finding the right interface theme, tweaking the colors and fonts, and designing the perfect wallpaper to highlight my CPU/RAM/weather/calendar desktop widgets (I have done all this before).

I'm actually really glad that the only UI customization that's easy to do in OS X is choosing between color or greyscale title bar close buttons.

Oh, no, nothing like that. I agree, and never spend any time customising the look. My wallpaper is usually solid black color.

What I mean is, for example, the horrible implementation of Spaces, which could very easily has an option to work correctly, but doesn't. I need virtual desktops, but it's not a virtual desktop when cmd-tab shows you all the windows on all workspaces. I need to separate workflows on each desktop, and I just can't do that on OS X. They could have a simple checkbox for this, but it's currently impossible, unless you use Witch (a third party alt+tab replacement). This is one of the reasons, but it's the general mindset that pervades OS X. It just doesn't want to give users options, even those are very sane.

Spaces definitely has its issues, that's for sure. Aside from the alt+tab problem you mentioned, it just started feeling really slow so I turned it off.

I guess you could make an argument that Apple gets a lot of usability ideas from Linux, but when they go through the Stevejobsification Process they tend to lose some of their usefulness in trade for simplicity and prettier looks. I think the problem is that the only people who even notice these things are power users, so it's not even a factor in adoption rates.

Probably, but the stevejobsification process in this case completely missed the purpose of the feature and produced a larger desktop instead. I agree that only power users notice these things, but I was commenting on why I don't use it, not on why I don't want other people to use it :P

They're just as good for a lot of use cases.

I use Ubuntu out of the box for desktop machines and Centos for servers. The Gnome/Ubuntu desktop is OK and way better than XP for me. (Yes, I do know my tastes are 3 sigma away from the norm, but I am not sure which direction.)

I am irritated by the tendency of the Linux Desktop designers to clone the Windows and/or the MAC Desktop features and problems, good and bad. I would prefer a Linux Desktop that provides a better interface than the competition, one without the warts of the other products.

I do not see the need all the graphical configuration themes and options, which just seem to add complexity. Few of the people I know use anything other than the "standard" configuration simply because a private configuration needs to be maintained and provides almost no marginal advantage.

I find Desktop GUI tools are frequently cumbersome and using them causes a lot of busy hand work. Shell command lines, BASH scripts, and Python programs work better for me than the Desktop GUI. I am frustrated when Desktop Tools are not easily usable from scripts as sometimes is the case with Gnome.

None the less, I think the Linux Desktop is alive and well.

The 21st-century desktop isn't based on the fat-client desktop of the last 25-years. It exists on the Web in Web-based applications and software as a service (SaaS) and what I call "Content as a Service." If the content providers have their way, you'll view content from the Web instead of downloading it.

So I just took a break and played a round of SC2 and now I'm back to do some work in Photoshop/Excel. Just thought you'd like to know.

Daddy, what's a desktop?

Yes.

And no.

Linux was never a very good desktop OS. Though it was a fair to perhaps good workstation OS. However, the future of the desktop may well be in mobile-heritage OSes such as iOS and Android. Just as the PC grew to fill its mini-computer and mainframe big brothers' shoes so mobile OSes are likely to mature into robust desktop platforms (though founded on different paradigms).

And if that's the case, then the linux desktop dream may yet live indirectly, through android and related offerings (chrome OS, etc.)

> Linux was never a very good desktop OS

Have you ever seriously tried to use it? Because, lacking a proper official definition of what a good desktop OS is, I am very satisfied with the one running in front of me and can only say it's really good. Good as in "solid and predictable".

I understand there are Linux distros for every taste, from the heavy-duty-server guy to the most curious hacker that wants to compile the kernel for every upstream release, but I find - and that's first-hand experience - Ubuntu makes for a very nice destkop OS.

I agree with you on everything, except the fact that it's solid. In my experience, it crashes a bit more than Windows (Gnome/the GUI does, the rest of the system runs great). E.g. gwibber-service keeps taking up 100% of my CPU at random times, network-manager-applet keeps disappearing, disconnecting me from the net, etc.

Other than that, I love it, it's my main OS. I just wish they debugged it a bit more. Ubuntu is known for using bleeding-edge packages rather much...

I have experienced some Gwibber weirdness, but in 10.04. It's been behaving very well on 10.10 and I haven't seen Gnome crashes in a long time except one during the upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 (since no non-linux desktop OS can do such a feat - imagine upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 while you work on the machine being upgraded... - I consider that a moot point)

It's hard to debug with the vast amounts of undocumented hardware people run it on. The developers have access to only a tiny fraction of all the hardware combinations their users have and an even smaller fraction of those have some documentation or specs developers can write for. Graphic accelerators and wireless interfaces are just two very visible categories where far too many hardware manufacturers want to make sure open-source developers fail.

There used to be a hardware popularity/test app with Ubuntu. I can't find it on 10.10 but, if it might be useful for you to run it or whatever came to replace it. Also, it's entirely possible very few people run it on the exact hardware you have and filing a bug report may help others with similar problems.

Ah, it's good to know Gwibber is fixed in 10.10 (I'm running 10.04). I'm waiting a month or so after each release, because upgrading right after release has given me problems in the past.

Gnome doesn't crash completely, just a few applets disappearing or other weirdness. I agree that it's hard to debug wireless adapters or graphics, but gwibber, for example, shouldn't really take up all your CPU like that.

It's generally fine, everything works fine on all my computers, except nm-applet, which does crash on three separate computers quite frequently. I hope it's fixed on 10.10, thank you for the info!

There is no way to escape the fact that Ubuntu has less users than Windows has beta users. It takes a lot of luck to expose more rare bugs during the beta stage, specially in short cycles like Ubuntu's

But I kind of like having a new desktop rolled out every 6 months, even if the price is having to troubleshoot stuff or filing bug reports. If I wanted a boring, stable, rock-solid OS, I would run Solaris 10 on my PC ;-)

On your nm-applet thing, are the three computers using the same wireless interface?

What do you mean? They have different adapters, they are on the same network most of the time but it happens both on other networks, plus it happens to a computer that doesn't even have a wireless interface.

It hasn't happened in a while, thankfully.

Oh no.. Same as in same model. It could be a problem specific to that particular chipset. You can report a nm-applet specific bug with apport-bug. This helps a lot with triaging and collects hardware info and meaningful (hopefully) logs automagically.

Ah, right. I tried apport-bug but it said "You need to specify a PID", and I have no time to research that right now... I'll try later on, thanks!

Thanks.

The more users that report bugs, the better coverage the software will have.

I haven't had a crash since installing 10.10. The only restart came when a kernel security patch showed up.

But I also never have crashes in XP, so we probably use our computers for different things.

I didn't have crashes on XP (had to use it for about two years, from 2008 up to mid-2010) but I experienced increasing levels of "weirdness" that were cured with sporadic restarts. That and regular pushed updates that mandated restarts (when, I assume, a logoff would do). No crashes and no BSODs except on the Sysinternals screensaver, however.

But I did very little development on that machine. When I developed software for Windows (NT-2000-XP era) I had to rebuild the machine every 4 months...

Linux is the best desktop OS I ever used. Sure, it required me to learn a bit about its innards and consider what I need and why, but once configured it is a flawless and relaxing experience for me.

Android will be bigger than Windows ever was.

Yes it is.

Linux desktops will never die.

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