How Apple killed the Linux desktop
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
It sucks because it is fragmented. If a developper wants to write a nice GUI application that integrates nicely with the desktop, he needs to target 4 or 6 different desktops, and maybe even more variations (taskbars software, menus, whatever). So the developer makes a console application instead, and the Linux desktop suffer.
Of course, some open-source enthusiasts will cobble together some script to integrate the program with their favorite desktop software. It will work one time out of two, and will break with every update of the program or of the desktop environment.
You end up with complex desktop environments nobody understands fully except the core devs and an abysmal user experience.
One of the things that sets Linux apart is modularity and standards, so if you write a program to work with one envirement, it would almost definitively work in another envirement.
Put another way, what is a form of desktop integration that requires targeting multiple desktops.
Also, developers make console application because they are: 1) Easier to make 2) The norm on Linux 3) More developer/power user friendly 4) More compostable
I find the (mainstream) desktop envirements more understandable than Windows, with a better user experience.
Linux pissed the power users off (the entire market segment no less) during the gnome2 to gnome3/unity transition.
Apple are pissing power users off with their walled garden growing higher and some shoddy unreliable features.
Microsoft are pissing off power users with the same mind bending crapfest changes i.e. Metro.
It's all gone to shit actually. I really wish I did something else for a living.
I'm sitting here on a T61 with Debian on it, awesome window manager and xterms. It's the last bastion of common sense for the power user.
I think you meant "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux" here.
Ubuntu, Redhat (which is pulling gnome3 into RHEL7), Fedora, Mint. Nothing else is of significance.
At least Debian have the balls to pick something different.
Lets start making it harder again and more productive.
"Torvalds switched to Xfce"
Wrong, he didn't switch to Xfce: "And for all the people wasting everybodys time with "Why don't you use Unity/KDE/xfce/xyz" - I've tried them. They are even worse" https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDp...
"GNOME 3.6 is out"
3.6 is not out. 3.5.90 is out, which is a beta version.
I use Linux everyday for development, I'm a big supporter of the project and would recommend everyone give it a go. However I'd fully expect half the people trying it to get confused and give up, some of the interface metaphors aren't quite there, installing software can be a chore of working out how to get there and what to do, and there's still too much emphasis on command line operations.
These things are all fine (and enjoyable in their own right), but for the majority of people they just need something they can switch on, and get on with. Ubuntu has gotten closer, but it's still just not quite there, so it's not that OS X has trumped it on the desktop for people seeking an alternative but that they've hit what they can currently get. There's lots of room for winning people over, some of Apple's poorer decisions recently might actually push a lot more people into the arms of Linux, we'll have to wait and see.
Installing software is easier than on Windows: it automaticly handles dependencies, and if you cannot find the program by searching in synaptic (same concept as an app store except for the lack of money), then Ubuntu is popular enough that the project likely offers their own *.deb.
As a desktop user, I never had to open the command line for normal computer configurations (until I switched to a non-standard window manager).
Finally getting back to Linux, I don't think it has lost. I am pleasantly surprised at how good the latest Ubuntu is as a desktop. If Apple continues to lock down Mac OS people will move to Linux - in my case I am investing in my Linux skills and decided not toinvest in iOS.
As a result of Gnome, Linux was doomed to have two half-baked desktops which would make the Linux desktop, at best, the butt of jokes.
One of the biggest problems of Linux in the 1990's was that applications wrote directly to the sound device, so that only one application could play sound at a time.
The obvious userspace answer is to create an "X Windows" for sound, and it would have been OK if there has been an "X Windows" for sound, but there was also a Y, a Z, and some letters from Suess's "Alphabet beyond Z" as well.
This was unfair to app developers, commercial or open source, and it was unfair to users. Things are better now, but there was a long stretch when I just didn't bother to attach speakers to Linux machines because it wasn't worth the bother.
Finally, RHAT's worst problem is that it was so successful -- look at this chart!
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RHT+Interactive#symbol=rh...;
RHT was successful because it sold to the corporate market, but that's a very dangerous market to aim for -- because a product that pleases corporate buyers typically causes endless misery for corporate users. There's just no reason for a company like RHT to do the slow and steady work to gradually improve a UI when it's selling lots of product to people who couldn't care less cause they'll never use it.