
Linus Torvalds still wants Linux to take over the desktop - dsego
http://www.cio.com/article/3053507/linux/linus-torvalds-still-wants-linux-to-take-over-the-desktop.html
======
jomamaxx
Linus has a serious problem understanding what products are, and what
usability means.

The commands for git are an example of that -> they don't make sense. They are
very poorly designed and counterintuitive.

Linus I think has this belief that 'technology & complexity = power' when
really, it's 'products that do useful things' that matter.

Making seamless experiences matters. Consumers really don't care how many
techies think something is cool, they don't care about drivers, or open-
source, they just want it to work.

Linux could absolutely provide the foundation for the desktop, but whatever is
on top of it will have to be equally innovative and provide a lot of value, so
much so that I'd argue that the high level OS layer will be 'the hard part'
not the kernel.

Here's an example: "system, orangeFS, bringing the number of supported file
systems to 35. (Remind me, how many file systems do Mac OS X and Windows
support?)"

Really? Who cares. You only need to support ONE, the right one, and support it
well. Maybe there is an advantage in supporting a few others, but not really.
This is a perfect example of 'engineering' that doesn't necessarily ad up to
any end-user value.

"Pretty is not my primary thing." and here it is. Linux conflates 'aesthetics'
with 'design'. A very common failure. They are not the same thing, not
remotely.

~~~
detaro
> _" Pretty is not my primary thing." and here it is. Linux conflates
> 'aesthetics' with 'design'. A very common failure. They are not the same
> thing, not remotely._

Is it conflating the two? Or is it saying "I don't care about aesthetics as
long as it's well designed (= comfortable to use)?" Linus is famous for rants
about how the Linux Desktop requires to much technical detail to know for the
average user.

> _Linux could absolutely provide the foundation for the desktop, but whatever
> is on top of it will have to be equally innovative and provide a lot of
> value, so much so that I 'd argue that the high level OS layer will be 'the
> hard part' not the kernel._

Did anyone argue that the hard part would be the kernel?

I understand your frustrations, but to me it seems you are picking an odd
target for them. Linus opinion and knowledge about UX doesn't matter very
much, because he doesn't work on anything that an end-user should have to see.

~~~
jomamaxx
I agree with your points - but in the article we're talking about Linux for
the desktop - which is inherently about design.

I think it's maybe better to think of the kernel as something like a 'chipset'
in terms of it's relevance to the desktop.

Linux? BSD? It's like AMD vs. Intel. The user-based OS is so abstracted it
almost doesn't matter. It's a technical detail.

------
88e282102ae2e5b
In Ubuntu, the mouse pointer disappears after locking the screen or suspending
[1], and the Fn button combo can take _minutes_ to change screen brightness
[2]. These bugs have been around for months and years, respectively. You
simply cannot get non-power users to use an operating system with issues like
this. Perhaps there's a more polished distro, but if the one that's touted as
the beginner-friendly one has such obvious user-facing problems, it's just not
feasible to get past 1% market share.

[1]
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1573454](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1573454)
[2] [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-
manage...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-
manager/+bug/847001)

~~~
segmondy
Ubuntu is not Linux. Ubuntu is one option out of many.

~~~
superuser2
Ubuntu is the standard bearer for "just works" for ordinary people on laptops,
and it doesn't achieve that.

Can you point to an option that reliably does?

~~~
0xmohit
Maybe you haven't tried awesome [0]. The wiki [1] provides more information.
Some screenshots here [2].

[0] [https://awesomewm.org/](https://awesomewm.org/)

[1]
[https://awesomewm.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://awesomewm.org/wiki/Main_Page)

[2]
[https://awesomewm.org/wiki/Screenshots](https://awesomewm.org/wiki/Screenshots)

~~~
icebraining
I'm a fan of Awesome, but it's just a WM, it doesn't fulfill everything that a
desktop needs.

------
bhaak
In my world, Linux _has_ also taken over the desktop. For my personal needs, I
would never consider OSX or Windows for that task.

The desktop feels currently like a neglected area. OSX gets more iOSified with
every release, whatever Microsoft does gets booed, regardless if it's good or
bad.

Much functionality that used to be on the desktop has wandered into the
browser. What desktop you're using isn't as important as it used to be.

I wonder if that pendulum ever swings back.

~~~
ywecur
Who even uses features exclusive to desktops anymore? I do for development,
I'm sure video editors and the like do, but which ordinary consumer does?

The future of desktops I see is something like:

Chrome OS: 70% of computers for ordinary use

Windows: 20% of computers for gaming

OS X: 5% of computers for video editing

Linux: 5% of computers for development

~~~
EvgeniyZh
I can't imagine using computer that can't run without internet

------
melling
"bringing the number of supported file systems to 35. (Remind me, how many
file systems do Mac OS X and Windows support?)"

A bunch of fucking nerds who don't understand consumers are never going to
take over the desktop. I've watched Linux for 25 years, basically since the
beginning. Stop telling people you're going to take over the desktop and
figure out how to get another 1%, then repeat. I'd recommend starting with
"putting all your wood behind one arrow".

~~~
icebraining
What's with the slur? Arguably, "fucking nerds" have been the most successful
at taking over the desktop.

[https://twitter.com/billgates/status/478693050404069377](https://twitter.com/billgates/status/478693050404069377)

~~~
melling
Bill Gates deserves more credit than just being a nerd. He was a good
businessman too. He focused on building a business from the beginning:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists)

He had a business goal and effectively followed though getting the job done:

[http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/05/technology/bill-gates-
email-...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/05/technology/bill-gates-email-
microsoft-40-anniversary/)

~~~
icebraining
Every person is more than just a nerd.

~~~
melling
Yes, we are all snowflakes. Anyway, you seem to be missing the point. And
pithy little comments aren't adding any insight.

------
EvgeniyZh
I believe the answer about why Linux isn't dominating on desktop is hidden in
the answer about why it dominates for example, servers. And why that? Because
many companies put much money into Linux and server software for it. This
software is not direct source of income so their is no point to hide it from
other, but it's better to develop it together. Of course, top companies can
create great software.

Desktop is a different story. It's pretty hard to make the same amount of
money on desktop open-source software. So profit from it - and thus desktop
software is developed by enthusiasts. Enthusiasm is good, but it results in
worse quality of software, even though these are the best developers in the
world developing it. As soon as there is way to get profit not from selling
software - it can get good open-source implementation - e.g. browsers (incomes
from ad) or game engines (UE4 for example is not FOSS, but source code is
published because you just can't publish game and not pay). Yet no altherntive
for Photoshop, or CAD, or Chessbase.

That was a bit messy, but I hope you got my point. You want to promote Linux
on desktops - just invent a method to earn on OSS same amount of money es from
selling software - the wave of open sourcing will be enormous.

------
tormeh
Linux won't succeed on the desktop until someone takes a commercial interest
in doing so. In order to have a motivation and ability to make Linux work for
the masses you need to earn money off of desktop users. It's extremely unclear
to me why such a commercial actor should choose Linux over something newer and
shinier like Redox. Sure, there's a bit more work to be done with Redox, but
not that much (you only need one file system for desktop) and in return they'd
get technology from this side of the millennium as opposed to 1970s tech.

EDIT: What I mean is that without earning money off of the end-users,
developers will develop a product for themselves, not normal users. That's
fine. That's FOSS developers's prerogative. But it won't make Linux on the
desktop take off.

~~~
soulbadguy
This, 100 % this. Linux hasn't succeed on the desktop because the business
case for it is weak. The success of ubuntu is in large part due to the
financial input of Mark Shuttleworth/canonical. For linux on desktop to move
to the next step we need a way to generate revenue out of it. I do think there
is a market for it ( a small one), and but that the main hurdle to a
commercial desktop linux distro are cultural as opposed to anything else.

I am not sure if i agree that something like redox would make more sense than
using linux. The most lucrative market for linux desktop right now would be
dev/front-end and backend. Going to redox you would lose all that ecosystem. I
think microsoft is realizing that which is why they are pushing the linux on
windows thing.

But definitly, an desktop os based on something more modern than unix would be
awesome

------
Flow
I wonder if Linus would consider a stable ABI for kernel drivers these days.
Make it stable across one each major version.

So much of the kernel source code is driver code. The old approach was always
to release the source code for your driver and they'll incorporate it in the
major source tree.

WIFI- and GPU-drivers still are very much binary only and don't have source
code released.

~~~
hga
That would be the quickest way to allow Linux to be supplanted: being able to
incorporate its drivers into your own operating system without constant
maintenance would allow you to pass what's by far the highest hurdle in
gaining acceptance, being able to run on "everyone's" hardware.

ADDED: it might also indeed fix one of the biggest problems with Linux on the
desk/laptop. For example, in moving through Debian starting with lenny,
skipping jessie (systemd) and moving to Ubuntu LTS 14.04, I've had both sound
devices and my Wacom tablet stop working and start working again.

This was both _severely_ annoying and expensive in the former case (had to buy
a $$$ PCIe sound card to cover for inexpensive and utterly standard USB
devices to use Skype (or any other VOIP system) and play music)). Still better
than Windows, which I abandoned after XP, and still believe was the right
move, but....

~~~
digi_owl
Dunno about wacom, but when it comes to sound there are things like pulseaudio
that add extra wrinkles to the issue.

~~~
hga
That was an USB 1.x issue, had nothing to do with the sound chip behind the
USB interface. Yeah, that's right, the kernel crew broke something pretty
fundamental in that primarily desktop device driver (servers are going do be
doing heavy duty things with USB 2 and above), and nobody noticed and/or cared
enough to not ship it with squeeze.

That's also the version that broke the Wacom support as I recall, it came back
with wheezy or maybe Ubuntu Vivid's kernel.

Pulse Audio is pretty awful, but I've always been able to get it to do my
bidding, modulo not being able to get the Ubuntu version I'm using to
multiplex outputs (I can probably make that happen, it's not a Pulse Audio
issue per se I'm pretty sure, but it's just easier to switch output from
stereo system to headphones the few times I use Skype).

~~~
digi_owl
Ah yes, USB. Could be the powersave/suspend issue. Iirc, the kernel
implemented it as if there was a upper limit on how long the device could take
to get ready after a resume. But apparently the time mentioned in the spec was
just a suggestion, not a hard limit. And many devices would take a minute or
longer to come back once resumed. Lets just say that USB is a "fun" protocol,
and the latest addition has not helped much.

~~~
hga
It was as I recall a timing/time out issue, and very possibly the one you
describe, it would just have to not effect the normal keyboard and mouse USB
1.x devices, and I'm pretty sure these USB 1.x sound devices had much better
than "a minute or longer" times in resuming.

And, yeah, I can imagine how much of a zoo USB in the real world is....

------
anta40
I think this is a fine goal, and I wish Linus a good luck.

As a software developer, I'm fine with Linux,I think I can I live with a non-
Windows system.

Of course the problem is I still play games on my laptop/PC :p

------
ivoras
> Despite the fact that I'm known for sometimes not being very polite to some
> of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not
> my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I
> started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled.

Pretty much sums up why it won't happen until someone starts imitating Steve
Jobs and DICTATING how The Desktop should look like. And that means more
pretty than functional.

~~~
lkiux
I started with amiga, windows (from 3.1 to 2000) and I've been using Linux as
my main development and OS since more than 10 years now. I no longer use any
other OS. I consider myself lucky I basically never interact with windows
anymore. For the cross-os work that I have to do, python with qt covers me to
the point that I just perform final testing. Amazing.

I used OSX around 10.4 for about four years, because it seemed like the best
of both worlds: nice UX with an unix backend. That is, indeed, why OSX
appealed to most geeks, right?

I became tired of OSX after a couple of years. What apple dictates might look
good, but it's far from functional. It's eye candy with little substance. On
the surface is pretty, but Finder under OSX was essentially a crapshot. Under
Linux I could have virtual desktops, but not under OSX (that only arrived
years later). Tweaking, even slightly, any default behavior is hard. That is
also the reason why Gnome doesn't appeal to me. The basic OSX desktop doesn't
offer anything beyond a current Gnome release. Things change if you need
commercial programs, but the desktop itself is _not_ inferior in both
behavior, looks and general interaction. Gnome is, performance wise, slower,
but the people that use gnome do not seem to notice.

Not to mention that what every developer does on OSX is install an external
package manager, and by and large replace every single userland utility and
library with an up-to-date variant from Brew, MacPorts, etc. This was a
massive burden. Any linux distribution is far superior in that regard.

I don't think that Gnome today is far away from OSX. Sometimes OSX is
smoother, sometimes Gnome actually is.

But, my desktop today is nowhere even remotely comparable to what gnome
offers. I'm using a tiling window manager with pretty much any program
customized to the point of being unrecognizable. It's incredibly efficient
compared to a pretty desktop. I'm aggressively disabling eye candy and
animations everywhere. I'm often using CLI versions of GUI programs because
the actual user interface is superior. Some TUI programs have no rivals in GUI
form.

The fact is, is that if you use your computer professionally and switch to
linux, you start to understand what user interface efficiency is. At some
point, eye candy becomes a second, third, fourth priority. This doesn't mean
the program is any less usable though. I still value presentation. I'll take a
nice UI any day over a crappy one, given the interaction is the same.

I've witnessed the same happening to many people that I've suggested linux.
Many of those still use windows or mac, but with completely different habits.

~~~
stinos
_The fact is, if you use your computer professionally and switch to linux, you
start to understand what user interface efficiency is_

That _highly_ depends on what you do with your computer professionally though.
So it might be a fact for some, but completely false for others.

 _I 'm using a tiling window manager with pretty much any program customized
to the point of being unrecognizable._

I played that game for years but gave up afterwards. Maybe I was doing it
wrong but I spent just too much time to my liking on it. Now I'm more in a
mindest of 'if you can't build me software which I can use almost as-is, I'll
look for something else'. Not always ideal either and sometimes there are no
alternatives so you'r stuck with crap after all. And yeah maybe I'm not using
my computer as efficiently as possible (looking at some collegues though, I'm
a wizard compared to their 'let's use a mouse for everything and double-clik
to make sure it hits'-style), but I'm getting work done.

~~~
profsnuggles
Obviously do whatever works best for you. You don't have to spend a lot of
time configuring your system to end up with something unrecognizable though.
I've been running linux full time since 2003 and my $HOME directory can be
traced directly back to then. Things start out as-is but then something would
be mildly annoying so I'd spend 5 minutes reading the man page and change a
setting. After a decade of that my environment evolved to suit me perfectly
and even someone who knows the software I use would have trouble sitting in
front of my PC and using it. However I never really spent days configuring
anything. It was more of an accident.

------
digi_owl
The problem is not Linux, it is Windows.

A: bulk discounts.

B: bundling

C: embrace extend extinguish

All these combine to shore up the Windows presence on the desktop.

------
qwani1
steam OS looks promising as to get the gaming people to see that games run
superior under open source Linux, specially when you need speed and accuracy
in operating system functions , my hope that Linus and the linux foundation
support valve breakthrough.

~~~
lake99
SteamOS is holding back the Linux community. SteamOS is still based on Debian
8 (Jessie). Steam software often clashes with existing libraries of a current
system. When I benchmarked Steam games, they delivered only 65% of the Windows
performance figures when run on Linux.

I am thankful that SteamOS is nothing more than a lab experiment. If _that_
became popular, Valve will not pay any attention to us, regular Linux users.

------
KasianFranks
That's like expecting the Farmers Market to serve McDonalds hamburgers.

~~~
ywecur
I don't see why you make that comparison. Many distros (Ubuntu comes to mind)
certainly cater to the same market as Windows and OS X, and do it very well.

~~~
KasianFranks
You do not want to refine something, for the sake of simplicity, to the point
where you can no longer easily understand what it's ingredients are. You need
to be able to manipulate its ingredients (and the ingredients of others), at
will, if you are true developer, inventor, creator.

I've also been using the Linux on the desktop since 1994 when Yggdrasil and
Slackware got started, everyday as a developer.

------
WalterSear
So does microsoft, if what they did to my parent's pc last month is any sign.

