
Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation - planb
http://lunduke.com/?p=1693
======
foob
You can't really blame Apple/Microsoft for not experimenting to the same
extent that a GNU/Linux desktop environment or window manager can. In
GNU/Linux you have countless options ranging from small fast tiling window
managers to more complex things like Unity and GNOME Shell which are discussed
in the article. For any window manager you then additionally have a huge
number of panels that you can choose from. All of this freedom and choice is
awesome and it lets people find the solution that fits their needs and style
of computing if they're willing to do so.

I can navigate around windows and launch applications on my computer using a
customized wmii/dmenu combo much faster than is possible on a mac or in
windows and I love that. If Apple switched to a similar setup in Lion,
however, they would make some extremely small percentage of their users happy
while turning away the vast majority of their customers. Apple and Microsoft
can't be what they are without catering to the lowest common denominator and
part of that is playing it safe. Every radical decision that they make is a
huge risk with the potential for a negative impact on their business. If
somebody wants to make some experimental window manager for GNU/Linux that
attempts to change the paradigm then the worst possible scenario is that they
wasted their time writing code that people don't end up using. If Windows
tried the same thing then they could lose real business.

The beauty of the Linux ecosystem is that users have unparalleled freedom in
deciding how they want their computers to work. This freedom allows people to
create new programs without much risk to the community and it allows multiple
projects with different goals and principals to simultaneously coexist and
thrive. This is a major strength of GNU/Linux and I think it's part of the
reason why we see so much innovation within that community.

------
Xuzz
I think it's really awesome that Linux is finally taking the lead with
innovation on the desktop — Gnome-Shell and Unity are just the beginning. And,
they are not "catch-up": they are released both before and with more
interesting changes than Lion or (what we've seen of) Windows 8.

However, what Cupertino and Redmond are up to isn't "nothing", it's just not
the desktop. The Windows Phone "Metro" UI is downright amazing when you use
it, and iOS isn't bad either. Sadly, and I was hoping this would be better
this time around, the open source world is still years behind on mobile.

(I'm not counting Android here, and that's a shame. Honestly, I've used it,
and the innovation there, especially in user experience, isn't anywhere near
the levels in iOS, Windows Phone, _or_ webOS. I _would_ include Android 3.0,
but that's not open source and won't be for a while.)

~~~
bad_user
I own both a Galaxy S II (Android 2.3) and an iPhone 3GS. IMHO, Android has
the lead on the user interface.

Reuse of components and events provided by other apps is at the heart of
Android, the system notifications are better, it has desktop widgets that are
actually useful, keyboard interaction for writing text is better (I love
copy/pasting or moving the text-cursor around on my Android) and you can use
the back-button everywhere (just as on the web).

The only problem with Android is that many apps available in Google's Market
are really shitty. Skype itself, which works fine on the iPhone, will bleed my
battery dry in only 3-4 hours, with that same battery being able to last for 3
days with 3G + email-sync enabled.

If they get the market story straight, I'm sorry for the contestants, but
Android is a competition killer.

~~~
twsted
But you are a bad user...

~~~
twsted
Hey, it was a joke, after his user name... doesn't matter

------
tzs
Here is the discussion from /r/linux on Reddit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hhpku/linux_the_sourc...](http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hhpku/linux_the_source_of_all_desktop_innovation/)

The top comment there pretty much nails it.

~~~
rbanffy
> And the menu appears on different screens

Actually, it's an advantage. Have you tried to use the menu on monitor 1 when
the app is on monitor 3 of your Mac?

~~~
ralfd
I dislike this too. But there is "SecondBar" from Andreas Hegenberg:

<http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=79>

But his other points that Unitys "wonky" auto-hiding of the menubar is
misguided UI seem reasonable to me.

~~~
rbanffy
It's a 1.0 release. I expect it to improve fast.

Do we still hear people complaining the window buttons moved to the right?

------
blankslate
Sadly, the article completely fails to mention the amazingly useful
innovations made by tiling window managers like wmii, ion3 and xmonad.

Granted, they're not as new as Unity et al, but they offer a compelling,
complete and fairly radical departure from tradition, and one that I really do
miss on OS X.

~~~
rbanffy
Windows 1 used tiled windows (MS programmers didn't learn how to overlap
windows until Windows 2) and Emacs has them since the 70's. I am not sure if
tiling windows could be called innovation.

~~~
Symmetry
There's a big difference between just having tiling windows and having all the
features that make them more useful than a stacking windows manager.

But really we should be giving credit to Plan 9 here for pioneering the model
of the modern tiling windows manager.

~~~
rbanffy
Plan 9 deserves a whole lot more credit than just that. It's really a shame we
are still using Unix-like OSs and not Plan 9-like ones.

------
clawrencewenham
After using modern smartphones and tablet computers I'm starting to think that
the last thing we need is more innovation in how to manage lots of little
windows on a medium sized screen.

I don't want another window manager, even if it auto-tiles for me or has a
really gosh-darn nifty way of hiding and revealing them. I want innovation in
devices and apps that are designed to operate full-screen on all of them. It's
as if I want a "tear off" function for windows that literally tears it right
off the desktop monitor so I can put it in my pocket or shoulder-bag, or hang
it on a wall, or prop it up next to a book. This is what the iPad and the
iPhone have done to me.

Tabs, windows, task-bars, Expose, Spaces, ribbons and others are now making me
feel like geeks are congratulating themselves on discovering a really nifty
new way to organize their sock drawers and lunch-boxes.

The future of "the desktop" are cheap, wireless, mobile displays. Window
managers should be replaced with pockets, wall hooks and stands.

~~~
jimmyjazz14
That is all well and good if you are passive user but when it come time to do
some work on a computer you will likely need to use more then one application
at a time and some way to manage all these application easily so that you can
keep task organized and easily switch between them.

~~~
clawrencewenham
That's not really true. If I'm writing a book, I don't need anything more than
a word processor on that device. If I'm browsing research material on another
device, there's nothing breakthrough about the idea of transferring that
material to the word processor wirelessly: highlight the material in the
browser and "bump" it to the device with the word-processor on it.

Having each app on a separate device would actually make it worlds easier to
perform real work, because I'm no longer Alt-Tabbing or Expose-ing back-n-
forth between programs. I hate doing that because it forces me to stop
thinking about my work in order to think about how to manipulate boxes of
pixels into the configuration I want.

Right now I'm considering spending another $1K to get a 27" Cinema Display to
go next to my $2k 27" iMac. But I'm wondering if I should have spent that $3k
on a stack of wireless tablet computers of various sizes and leave some
Bluetooth keyboards around the house instead.

Edit: Now that I'm thinking about it more, I believe this is the trend and the
reason desktop innovation has stalled. In a decade we'll all have solid state
hard drives and ten times more RAM, so every app can run in its own VM. You
could suspend an app's runtime state to disk, transfer it to another device
and resume where you left off. "Bump" your Final Cut session to your big-
screen when you need to, then "Bump" it back to a tablet when you wanna
continue editing on a park bench.

I don't know why we can't do this with web apps already. It transcends the
whole idea of a desktop manager.

~~~
jimmyjazz14
What you are describing does not sound at all practical in the long run. The
complexity of syncing up many devices is far worse then dealing with a
occasionally fussy desktop manager. Running them as dumb terminals might work
if it was actually possible but I'm still not sure it would be practical in
most cases (I have thought that being able to send a workspace to another
device would be cool though). I realize everyone has their taste but, it
sounds to me like you just need a second monitor.

~~~
clawrencewenham
The second monitor still requires me to spend a large percentage of my time
manipulating rectangles.

Nor is there anything impractical about process migration. I suspend and
resume Windows VMs all the time, and Windows wasn't designed for that. Think
of what's possible when the programming language and OS API makes it easier to
write programs that can re-orient themselves.

And even if process-migration doesn't become a feature, there is still the
inherent advantage of manipulating "windows" in physical space. It's more
intuitive, it's more convenient, and it's direct. When people didn't "get" the
iPad and dismissed it as just a big iPod Touch, it's because they didn't grasp
the benefit of manipulating the UI directly instead of through a mouse.

When you manipulate windows with a desktop manager, you're two steps
abstracted: you use the mouse to manipulate the widget that manipulates the
windows. THAT is what's impractical.

------
Symmetry
This article didn't really get into the part I most care about, the incredible
range of custom window managers you can find that work for various *NIXes. The
fact that the way X is set up allows you to roll your own window manager so
easily has really allowed a froth of new ideas to be tried out - and the best
ideas to be incorporated into the big desktop environments and Mac and
Windows.

I was sort of worried that the move to Wayland might hurt all of this. Compiz
seems to be preparing to do double duty as a X windows manager and a Wayland
display server based on what plugins you have loaded, but I wonder what might
happen to other window managers in the transition? On the other hand, nobody
is forcing anyone to give up X.

~~~
geen7ea
I agree that the incredible range of custom window managers (WMs) is a very
interesting aspect of *NIXes and a source of innovation. I can't however agree
with your initial worries about Wayland.

Wayland actually makes it easier to roll out your own window manager than X11.
The Wayland protocol is a lot more straightforward and has fewer extensions.
You no longer have to deal with XRender, XDamage, XComposite, etc. You also
don't need to think about setups where some of these extensions are missing.

It also does away with network transparency and replaces the protocol with a
simpler, more unified OpenGL ES based solution. You have more freedom to
develop something original as you aren't stuck in X11's rendering system which
is a glorified painters algorithm. You can use XComposite to obtain more
freedom under X11 but so far few window managers use it (compiz, KWin,
metacity). The default for Wayland is very similar to what you find in
XComposite but is faster (given a decent video card driver) and simpler.

The only drawback to Wayland is that it is rather new and the protocol hasn't
been finalized. As soon as it gains wider adoption and there are a few example
Window Managers, expect to see some interesting and innovative WMs.

------
udp
What's Linux got to do with anything? Gnome and KDE run pretty nicely here on
FreeBSD, and I'm sure Unity could fairly easily if anyone actually wanted it.

~~~
jawee
Well, the portability between kernels is nice on Unixlike and Unix systems,
but you would agree with me that nearly all of the developers and users for
these larger desktop environments and GUIs are on Linux specifically.
Technically, you can run them on Darwin even..

------
rbanffy
I still think the greatest innovation in Linux distros is package management.

~~~
cageface
Linux-style package management is a lot more useful for servers, where you
have fairly tightly controlled distribution requirements. I find it an
encumbrance on desktops where I often want to update individual apps or keep
several versions of a single app side-by-side.

~~~
rbanffy
> keep several versions of a single app

How many people actually do that?

I have Python 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 3.x, but I am a programmer who writes lots of
Python. And they were all very easy to install (2.6 and 3.x from packages, 2.5
and 2.7 from source). I also have two different releases of Eclipse (I also
write lots of Java).

Package management frees you from managing the software you don't want to
manage, like MySQL or Apache. I want to manage my languages.

~~~
exDM69
As a desktop user, you might not need this a lot. Sometimes when you have a
new version of a software that's really cool but a bit buggy and you keep the
old version to get work done. Case in point: Blender 2.4 vs. 2.5.

As a programmer, I would need this all the time. Sometimes you need several
versions of a certain programming library or language implementation like
Python or Ruby interpreters. I also need several versions of GCC, I have one
native compiler for C++0x, a cross compiler x86_64-pc-elf for my hobby
operating system project and another cross for arm-eabi-none that I use to
hack system-on-chips at work. I get my GCC from Git sources.

Nix (<http://nixos.org/>) is a package manager that allows you to install
multiple versions of the same software. NixOS is a Linux distro based on that
package manager. You can also use Nix in your home directory on top of another
distro.

Unfortunately I have not had the time to try Nix. Anyone else tried it?

PS. I was visioning a "versionless package manager" that downloads sources
from Git repos, builds and installs them and keeps the build files for fast
updates via incremental build. I only need a name for the thing, which is
better: "vpm" or "dll hell 2.0"?

~~~
rcxdude
portage on gentoo has this kind of functionality, although it needs to be
enabled by the package, producing multiple 'slots' which can each hold a
different version of the same software. GCC by default works like this, as
does python between major versions. It can also do compiling from git although
I don't think it keeps the build files around, but with ccache you can
somewhat mitigate the recompilation time.

------
dimmuborgir
It's unfortunate that KDE doesn't get the attention it deserves. It has been
long rebuked as a Windows clone.

But, KDE's Plasma Desktop is highly innovative (through a wide range of
interesting plasmoids). The fact that it can be easily scripted in JavaScript
makes it even more awesome.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Plasma is just a framework for building little desktop widgets, isn't it?
Except that everything on the desktop (including icons and taskbar) is a
widget?

------
hasenj
Unity is very innovative, and so is Gnome 3, but that does not equal "all
innovation". In fact, about 70% of Unity's innovations are features copied
from the mac: indicators, launcher, panel.

Gnome shell, while innovative, I don't see it as aimed for the typical end
user, instead it's aimed for the more technical users.

gtk2 is still present in Unity and it's still a major anti-innovative set
back.

To be honest, I like Unity as a desktop better than OS X, but as applications,
OS X is still ahead. (As a Unix I still like Ubuntu better, that's a different
subject).

~~~
jamesgeck0
Gnome shell is not aimed at technical users. It's simplified or removed many
features which were present in Gnome 2, as well as a lot of customization. The
tagline, "Made of easy", and the usability testing they've done suggest that
Gnome 3 is trying to be a general purpose environment that anyone can use.

~~~
hasenj
They may think so, but the gnome guys imo (no offense) are a bit too technical
to _really_ understand the needs of non-technical end users. From what I've
seen so far of gnome3 it seems very confusing.

------
davidhollander
Gnome-Do <http://do.davebsd.com/> is what originally sold me on switching to
Linux as my main desktop.

Much quicker to open what I need than either Windows 7 autocomplete or OSX
spotlight.

~~~
navs
I must mention Quicksilver for OS X, which apparently was the inspiration for
Gnome Do. I haven't had much of a chance to use Gnome Do since I'm a wmii user
but from appearances it looks about the same.

<http://qsapp.com/>

------
ralfd
btw: Are there any newer statistics on Linux usage available?

I played with the new google correlate tool today and every search metric for
Linux stuff is merely "meh".

Linux is constantly falling:

[http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=linux&t=weekly](http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=linux&t=weekly)

Gnome and KDE are also getting not more popular, but _less_ (at least in
Google trends).

Ubuntu peaked in 2007 and is sliding sidewards:

[http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=ubuntu&t=weekly](http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=ubuntu&t=weekly)

Why is that? As I said I would like to see a few more representative numbers.
(I remember in seeing in 2008 a statistic, that the then nascent iPhone
overtook Linux desktops in internet traffic. That was an astonishing eye
opener.)

~~~
cschwarm
Wikipedia has a page about usage share statistics for operating systems that
seems quite up-to-date:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems)

The usual caveats apply, of course. According to the web browsing data, iOS
indeed overtook Linux-based OSes, even when one includes Android.

It also has a page discussing Linux adoption:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_adoption>

It lists the reasons or barriers for using Linux. When you compare these for
different systems, you'll note that -- on the one hand-- the reasons to adopt
Linux have become less convincing. For instance, stablility is not that
relevant, anymore, since competitors are often sufficiently stable, too.

On the other hand, there was nearly no change concerning the barriers for
adoption: Android made a dent in the 'pre-installed' barrier, but that was it,
basically. On netbooks, Linux had a lead initially but lost it to Windows.

While the article states that Linux is on par concerning application and
peripheral support, I have my doubts. It has no third-party ecosystem that is
able to compete with its competitors, which is probably due to the lack of a
viable business model for desktop applications, lack of a decentral installer,
higher fragmentation, in general, and consequently less public support.

------
username3
Can we just get something simple like the ability to undo window changes?
Undo: z-order, window activate/focus change, position, window moves, resizing.
How many times did you bring a bunch of windows to the front and then
accidentally click on window in the background? We could use an easy to
remember shortcut key like Windows/Apple/Super + Z and + Y to redo.

Emacs have it. <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WinnerMode>

Can we also get a way to move windows on the z axis or change its z-order?
Windows/Apple/Super + scroll wheel. I want to push back or pull windows.

How about a way to multi-select windows (like Ctrl/Command + click with
files/listboxes) and move or tile only selected windows?

~~~
carussell
Hell yes to this. This lack of this functionality has been bugging me for a
while. I finally wrote it down two and a half weeks ago:

> Every application should have an undo/redo stack related to view operations.

> The way I see it, applications currently focus on allowing users to undo
> operations performed on the _model_. I submit that applications need to
> provide a similar mechanism to undo operations that affect the application's
> _view_ of the model.

> E.g., if you have a sidebar open and are deleting the items listed there,
> you can generally undo the deletion. But suppose you close the sidebar.
> Generally, you can't undo the sidebar close.

You're talking about window management changes, and what I've written about
mentions only application-level changes, but the example I gave doesn't
preclude desktop-level change management you talk about. After you've
established keyboard shortcut scoping conventions
<[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495838>](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495838>),
accomplishing this is straightforward, from a software design perspective.

------
ralfd
"And these are some of the most radical and exciting new features MacOS X has
had to offer since its initial release over 10 years ago."

What a trollish statement.

~~~
rbanffy
Well... the maximize button continues every bit as useless as it was when
introduced in System 5, IIRC.

But MacOS had some very interesting ideas - they did right more-than-one-user
thing (copied from Windows) and Exposé.

~~~
hasenj
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the "more than one user" thing is a Unix feature,
OS X basically gets it for free. It's not copied from windows; if anything,
windows tried to copy it from Unix, and it was horrible before WinXP

~~~
rbanffy
No. It's the desktop login thing. IIRC, you couldn't do that under X. Windows
offered the lock screen and log-in as another user on XP. OSX decorated that
with a 3D cube and Linuxes started getting it a couple years later.

~~~
fader
While (I believe) you're right about Apple adding the 3D cube effect for
multiple logins, X was explicitly designed to allow multiple concurrent users
on the same machine. While many Linux distros did not have that configured by
default in the early days, some did and it was certainly doable on the rest.

(That's one of the things that display managers like xdm/gdm/kdm do -- handle
starting and stopping of X servers for user logins.)

~~~
rbanffy
But, if you stop the X server, what happens to the processes connected to it?

------
wzdd
Here are some of the iOS features that Apple has "shoehorned into Mac OS X"
Lion which I am quite sure will appear in Linux free desktops in future: auto-
save (system-integrated save versioning, integrated with backup); resume;
airdrop (local file sharing without having to be on the same wlan). Even the
full-screen feature, which seems pretty funny on the face of it, is actually
more akin to Opera's "kiosk mode" than a regular full-screened application,
and I am sure it will show up elsewhere.

------
jaimzob
Honest question: as someone who dropped Linux in favour of OSX largely to get
a nicer user experience, what is in the new generation of Linux desktops to
tempt me back?

The videos linked from the article show a Spaces'esk virtual desktop and a
more interactive Growl'esk notification box. Both very slickly done but not
really anything mind blowing. The features in the other videos on the Gnome 3
site seem equally derivative; clones of the Window snapping from Win7, the
icon view from Lion etc.

Am I missing something? Should I be looking somewhere else? KDE?

~~~
drivebyacct2
before you got low UX, high customizability with Linux.

now you get very comparable effects (customizable and evolving with 11.10 too)
with all of the customizability and flexibility of Linux.

I don't mind the UI/UX of my MBP, but I prefer both Unity and GNOME3 and my
heavily customized GNOME2 installs. The app-indicators and control center in
Ubuntu are actually easier to use than in OS X. ICS to my Xbox took 10 seconds
in Ubuntu. It took 10 minutes of Googling and editting a configuration file to
get it in OS X. My phone works out of the box as a router in Ubuntu, it's not
detected as an Internet device _at ALL_ in OS X, who knows why. (And those
tasks took less than a minute or two to access directly from the app-
indicators or control center. (And very excitingly, there is a whole new
connection center planned for 11.10 which out to be even cooler/faster).

I wish more people would come back and really spend the time to give modern
DEs a chance. I personally can't stand KDE even after a lot of customization,
but even Qt apps are indiscernable from GTK+ apps in Ubuntu (yes, even file
selection dialogs, etc).

It's also funny that no one seems to know the history of these UX elements.
Spaces have been a *nix feature since the late 80's, early 90's. The Grid
plugin existed in Compiz as an unstable plugin for a long time before Windows
7 came out. They simply refined it for Natty.

Also, anyone on a MBP should try Unity just to see the power of the uTouch API
they've built. Compiz is actually multitouch enabled. You can move and resize
windows with gestures as well as expose the dock.

~~~
cageface
I too prefer a Linux desktop, but too many of the apps I rely on still aren't
available. The day Photoshop and Ableton Live get ported is the day I switch
back.

I still haven't found a Linux distro that really behaves 100% reliably on a
laptop either. Suspend/wake issues and flaky wireless behavior eventually
became dealbreakers for me, even if the blame lies with the hardware vendors.

~~~
jamii
For what it's worth, I haven't had any issues with Ubuntu in the last two
years or so (HP Envy 15, Alienware M11x). Even things like docks with multiple
monitors work smoothly.

------
spiffworks
I don't know about others, but the reason I love desktop Linux is because of
it's modularity. I can use Gnome, KDE or whatever other applications with
whatever window manager I choose, and it all works. In an era where everything
is being dumbed down for the lowest common denominator, I'm just glad that
there is one environment where power users can flourish.

------
jerhewet
I've gone back to the standard desktop on Ubuntu 11.04, because the Unity UI
is everything I despised (and disabled) in Windows 7.

I don't want a damned cell phone UI on my laptop or desktop, and I sure as
hell don't want a damned web browser as my desktop UI. My computers aren't
"appliances".

~~~
jamesgeck0
The Unity UI looks and functions nothing like a web browser?

------
jcromartie
I should take another look at Linux, then. It's been my experience that Linux
desktop development has largely been a game of trying to imitate Windows
and/or OS X to make new users more comfortable. But if that's changing, then
I'm thrilled.

------
drdaeman
All those innovation are in GUI area, and they have little to do with Linux
(as a kernel). For example, One could easily run KDE on Windows. So the source
should be "FOSS", not "Linux".

~~~
mkr-hn
As far as I know Gnome and KDE were primarily developed on and for Linux.

------
r3demon
Mobile is where innovation happens today and Linux has almost no presence on
mobile devices (except all major mobile OS using linux/freebsd kernel). It's a
stagnation, not innovation.

~~~
sandGorgon
seriously?

What do you think Android is - and its not just the kernel. I have a working
userspace on my phone. In fact, when I have spotty connectivity, the first
thing I do is fire up the terminal and do a ping/traceroute.

Gnome != Linux.

~~~
blub
Android is a Java userspace on top of a Linux kernel.

It doesn't help that most people say "Linux" to actually mean "GNU/Linux", but
Android is certainly not GNU/Linux and it can't be "Linux" either, because
that's just the kernel.

~~~
rbanffy
Shouldn't we start calling it Android/Linux? Oh, and, BTW, Java is just the
language most people use to write (most of the) software for it. Dalvik is not
the JVM and, in fact, the compiler people use to generate Dalvik bytecode
doesn't read the Java sources - it read Java bytecode.

~~~
blub
We can, but I don't know how meaningful that would be. When I say Linux I
think of a combination of things, including the kernel, the GNU tools, a WM -
i.e. a distro.

The differences between Android/Dalvik and Oracle/JVM are few and far between
(that's why they're getting sued :P). The important thing is that you write
your apps in Java and you run them under a VM.

~~~
rbanffy
> The differences between Android/Dalvik and Oracle/JVM are few and far
> between (that's why they're getting sued :P)

Not really. They are being sued because it's a threat to Oracle's control of
Java. Dalvik may very well look a lot like JVM, but reason alone doesn't have
any influence on Oracle's legal department.

------
adsr
I guess what he really means is Gnome, KDE. But never the less, it's a pretty
polarized view he tries to portrait.

------
drv
The author uses "glut" when he means the opposite.

------
nabaraj
Nothing is innovating. Windows, Mac and Linux are just adding colours to
Panel, Dock and Taskbar. Thats it!

------
bonch
This is a poorly written article. Linux on the desktop is infamous for
relentlessly cloning Windows and OS X. When citing the changes in OS X Lion
(while leaving out major changes like the removal of manual document saving)
that he believes to be trivial, he repeats "that's not a joke," as if that's a
valid enough rationalization for his position that he doesn't need to explain
it further.

The source of desktop innovation today is mobile operating systems. He
believes that features from mobile OSes are being "forced" onto desktops,
without explaining why it's bad to be adopting mobile features. Full-screen
display, automatic document saving, and removing the need to manually quit
applications are major innovations that simplify desktop computers even more,
moving them closer to the long-sought idea of appliance computing.

I'm tempted to think the article was intentionally written as flamebait. The
writing is poor, and there are no examples given to explain why exactly Unity
and Gnome are so much more innovative. The absolutist claim that Microsoft and
Apple have "completely dropped the ball," as if their operating systems
haven't changed in 10 years, is just false.

The source of desktop innovation today is mobile operating systems, or more
accurately, appliance computing devices that finally remove extraneous aspects
of computer interaction (e.g., manual saving, manual quitting, filesystem
management, and so on).

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hotdox
desktop innovation, do we really need them?

