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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

It's 2012. Who cares?

I think Linux on the desktop hit its peak in the early 2000s, when 'Windows, Mac and Linux' was in people's minds, we had Linux companies like Loki and Transgaming etc, commercial games from Epic and ID, proper UX-focused companies like Eazel and Ximian, etc.

I think most people have given up, but that's OK: Linux on the desktop, back then, still made a huge difference to today. GNOME had GTKHTML which spawned a rival KHTML which became Webkit which now seems to be the app platform for the thing that came after the desktop - the browser.

Now I have more apps open in Chrome right now than I do in the dock, taskbar, gnome panel. So do many users. And the direction is more in the browser than ever.

It's not just Linux: worrying about the desktop per se is irrelevant - like worrying about the dominant groupware platform or the dominant LAN manager. OS/2 might be better than NT, but nobody cares anymore.

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I'm not sure , if more apps move to the browser then surely the desktop OS becomes more of a commodity as long as it is able to support running the browser itself.

One thing Linux does lend itself well to is providing a kernel and basic services for interacting with hardware etc and leaving a fairly blank sheet to build other stuff on top off which could be a very basic consumer system with just a browser or a full fat dev environment, Android is a good example of this.

If all I want to do is run HTML5 apps using Chrome I can't think of a good reason to justify a $100 purchase of a Windows license , or paying more for hardware in order to run OSX.

In the future I can imagine a huge amount of the population using Linux based devices, they just won't know or care that they are Linux based devices. However I don't forsee a future in which everyone uses KDE or Unity and run only "free as in freedom" software.

Some of us like Linux on our desktops (and laptops) and do not use web apps for anything intensive.

The only web app I make intensive use of is Google Reader, and I plan to move away from it. I am glad that so many programmers and startups can make a living on a platform (the web) that is not controlled by any gatekeeper, but I would be sad if I were forced to move to something like Chrome OS.

Yes, only about 1% of users of desktops and laptops run Linux, but that situation is probably sustainable given how knowledgeable and resourceful that 1% is.

If you do not want to see discussion among that 1%, maybe you could just avoid articles like this?

"Who cares?"

The guy who wrote it clearly does.

Please do not assume that your personal opinion is shared by everyone.

> Please do not assume that your personal opinion is shared by everyone

Sorry if you thought I was doing that.

Maybe I should explain things better: the guy who wrote the post is indeed concerned with Linux on the desktop. I'm just suggesting that, whether the Linux desktop is good or bad, the desktop OS itself isn't particularly relevant to the state of computing right now and isn't worth being concerned with.

I think to a large extent "the desktop OS itself isn't particularly relevant to the state of computing right now" is because of Linux (and OSS in general).

We now have a commodity OS and toolset that can be adapted to a huge number of devices from smartphones to servers and thus used for a huge variety of purposes.

Imagine if we had a world where MS (or some other proprietary vendor) was the only game in town on desktop and server, would we have the same number of startups creating MVP webapps? In fact would the web even exist as it does today?

I would like to differ on this - I just dont get the recent consensus on linux UI's being broken. What is so bad about gnome / kde / xfce / xmonad ?

In the Linux world more so than anywhere else, you have an odd and "at-odds" mix of users. There exists the "1993 was a great year for Linux" crowd, and the "Linux on the desktop" crowd. And somehow, you have major overlap between the two. While there are distros and packages contributing to both mindsets (meaning the two can coexist just fine), the biggest problem I see in the Linux world is the users who outright reject experimentation and change.

Personally I love where Gnome and KDE (and even Unity) are going. I might not use them daily, I might not find all their features helpful or productive, and I sure as hell am not using them on my server, but there is nothing preventing any Linux user from simply not using the new software. It's easy to find a distro that uses Gnome 2 or KDE 3 or doesn't have PulseAudio. But it's hard to use modern day software without modern day packages or backends. Without this rote experimentation that is at the heart of open source, I wouldn't be using Linux on my desktop. There are a lot of very controversial ideas put forth in the mainstream distros over the years which have contributed more to the adoption of Linux than they've taken away from the traditional users.

If someone doesn't like Unity, doesn't like Gnome 3, doesn't like KDE Plasma, doesn't like bleeding-edge distributions... there is a choice. Debian, Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, the list goes on. I don't much like the interface of OSX, but I don't create mailing lists to pooh-pooh it, I simply don't use it. If you have a point, make it. If you just want to complain, get a cat.

Personal experience only:

KDE - mostly fine, I use it, but it still won't let me set a default transparency the way I could in v3.5. If I could find a supported way to run 3.5 I would.

Gnome/xfce - gtk-based so backwards button order, requires magic typing to let you enter a file path in an open dialog, probably other things that would annoy me if I put up with those any longer. Gnome also has registry-based configuration, and neither has a decent well-integrated browser or email client; firefox/thunderbird/evolution work as standalone apps but e.g. drag-and-drop doesn't work as reliably as on KDE (or didn't when last I tried), proxy settings have to be configured individually, etc.

xmonad - urgh. Underdocumented if you don't want to learn haskell, and doesn't even have a browser etc. last I looked.

There's not a whole lot wrong with KDE, but for my use cases it's still worse than it was on version 3.5 (the aforementioned transparency problem, and the lack of a music player with the features of amarok 1.4 are my main issues). That's the most irritating part.

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