
What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012) - milen
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html
======
VonGuard
I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the
rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and
hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux
were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2.

Couple this with the fact that for a decade, the actual GUI was tied very,
very heavily to the apps. So you had to use Gedit in Gnome, or whatever the
KDE version of a fucking text editor is. Seemed really, really stupid. Can't
we just have a relatively standard GUI text editor across platforms? Or were
we all just expected to use vi and emacs?

When the windowing layers stopped moving around so much, and Greg Kroah-
Hartman and co. had gotten the driver problems under control, we suddenly had
a bunch of different Linuxes that were no longer compatible with each other
due to packaging systems. So, now users had to download a deb, or a yum
package, or a gentoo package... It was all very confusing for desktop users,
especially beginners.

My quote to sum this up would be: "Why are these packages in my repository if
they won't work after I install them because I'm using KDE/Gnome/Cinnamon?"

[1]: Unity took Ubuntu from being the default Linux I could put on anything,
to a bloated, slow moving sack of crap. I could put Ubuntu on a 2001 laptop
and be completely fine, fast enough, usable enough to do just about everything
I needed.

Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it's unusable garbage. I can't even
hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig down
to an absolute crawl. Like, can't even move the mouse, 5 minutes between
keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for
killing the Linux desktop.

~~~
udp
_> Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it's unusable garbage. I can't
even hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig
down to an absolute crawl. Like, can't even move the mouse, 5 minutes between
keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for
killing the Linux desktop._

Have you tried Xubuntu? It fills the gap that Ubuntu used to, and it's my go-
to desktop OS now (apart from on my MacBook because only OS X is usable on
high DPI displays). I've also installed it for non-technical friends and
family and they've found it much more familiar than recent Windows versions.

In an age when the family computer is just as likely to be running Android or
iOS, I think the Linux desktop has a niche and we need to start evangelizing
it again. Even for the typical home user it feels more powerful than ever when
you compare it to such "appliance" operating systems, which Windows and OS X
seem determined to become.

~~~
raverbashing
XFCE: lightweight and powerful

That's my choice as well

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Good thing about XFCE is that xrdp still works when you need it.

------
bitwize
What killed the Linux desktop? Not being preinstalled. For a bit of context
from PC history, this is also what killed the GEM desktop, killed the OS/2
desktop, and damn near killed the Windows desktop until Microsoft put pressure
on vendors to make a 386SX with VGA the entry-level option and ship Windows
3.0 with every unit.

Preinstalls are an OS's golden ticket to adoption.

~~~
alkonaut
If _one_ Linux with _one_ desktop was widely preinstalled, that would help.
That would have made that environment the target for desktop developers, which
in turn would have added the pressure for backwards compatibility. Now, as a
desktop developer I'm surely not targeting Linux desktop because it's not even
a single target.

~~~
lumberjack
Doesn't stop Android adoption.

~~~
closeparen
Um, what? Phones differ in size and power, but a particular version of Android
is a particular version of Android everywhere.

Android developers don't have a debian vs. ubuntu vs. centos. vs. gentoo vs.
arch type choice to make, only a "how backwards compatible do I want to be"
choice.

~~~
fooker
Why do you think desktop applications have to be different for the distros?

It is rather easy to ship libraries with your package or even do static
builds..

Even without that, things are relatively portable. (Steam packaged for Ubuntu
works on most of the distros)

~~~
pjmlp
Libraries are just part of the picture, then comes the location of files, init
systems, lack of standard frameworks for all layers of a modern desktop.

On OS X, in spite of CUPS, I can use AppKit Printing API. On Linux I have to
resort to somehow generate PS and forward into the printer driver.

------
ramblenode
The people I know who use desktop Linux love their Linux rigs a whole lot more
than my Windows and Mac acquaintances enjoy their computers--which in many
cases just borders on tolerance, especially with Windows 10. Maybe software
needs something beyond market share, sort of like what Bhutan did with Gross
National Happiness. We'll rank products based on how much people enjoy them
and then see who's the dominant desktop.

~~~
dcdevito
That's because it takes more work and knowledge to get a Linux machine running
smoothly, so in the end you feel a sense of accomplishment, when in the end
all that was done was just getting a local desktop OS running the way a
computer should be used in the first place. It's all smoke and mirrors.

~~~
mnadkvlb
That's the whole point. You can't achieve this with windows, because it runs
an update whenever it wants and will just give you a restart at a random time.
Happened to me at work during a presentation when i turned on a vm after few
days. And then you have same privacy settings scattered around the OS trying
to scam you into giving your data to Microsoft, which turns on by default
after every godamn update. I would have never moved to linux, if microsoft
didn't shove their crap down the users throats everytime it updates.

I have now complete control over everything, and i feel very happy by using a
fedora workstation on my personal pc/laptop. I am not into gaming, and even if
i were, i would rather sacrifice my windows games just to support an OS which
is more fair to the users and doesn't steal their privacy.

------
PaulHoule
The original sin of the Linux desktop was the kde/gnome split over licensing.
Had Linux had one good desktop, like the other operating systems, it could
have had a future on the desktop.

Instead it has had a number of almost-good desktops that are still fragmented
by hate and the desire to thwart interoperability. For instance, the GTK team
won't fix certain bugs that affect running in a rootless X server because they
can't stand the idea that you'd run Eclipse on Linux and view it on Cygwin/X.

~~~
Shorel
And that was mainly the job of the author of this article.

Who is currently working for Microsoft.

I smell an agenda here.

~~~
oblio
I think he was well meaning. And at some point he just gave up.

As a long time Linux user I agree with him. FOSS is just not conducive to the
kind of development needed for a high quality, long term stable desktop
experience.

------
vectorpush
Nothing killed the Linux desktop. At the end of the day, it all comes down to
the fact that the masses only have two options: Windows or Mac. People become
set in their ways using a particular system either at home or work and there
is basically no reason that they will ever be exposed to a Linux desktop, and
if they are, they will find it just as impossible to use as any other OS that
isn't the one they've used exclusively for 10 years.

Anecdotally, prior to the ubiquity of tablets, I've observed several computer
illiterate relatives thrive on Ubuntu systems (gnome 2 and unity) because they
needed a PC and I passed on an older machine with a fresh copy of Ubuntu. My
uncle who had never used a PC more than 30 minutes at a time before I gave him
an Ubuntu laptop half a decade ago barely uses his 2015 MacBook that my aunt
bought him for his 62nd birthday because he is so comfortable with his Ubuntu
machine.

~~~
hvasilev
Not really, CS students have usually been exposed to Linux at the university
and very few of them still choose it as an operating system.

~~~
vectorpush
To start with, CS students are not the masses.

In addition to that, _some_ CS students at _some_ schools are exposed to the
linux command line, and even less are exposed to linux desktop environments
because most CS students have grown up using Windows or Mac and the curriculum
is nearly always structured in such a way that it is unnecessary for the
student to install a linux DE in order to do their work.

Finally, I'm not willing to blindly accept your claim that "very few of them
still choose it", if you have some way to substantiate that claim I'd be
interested in the details, but my experience says quite a few of them do
choose it, though I'd certainly be willing to yield my anecdotes to some
actual data.

~~~
Forlien
For what it's worth, I have a counter anecdote. I go to a university where for
some computer science courses, your labs are on computers with a Linux desktop
environment. Other students seem to do fine in these labs. Even so, when I
look around the classroom during lectures, almost all the open laptops are
Windows or Mac. Perhaps these students don't get enough exposure over the
couple of courses or don't get shown enough of the reasons to switch to Linux.

------
wolfgke
Quote from article:

"The attitude of our community was one of engineering excellence: we do not
want deprecated code in our source trees, we do not want to keep broken
designs around, we want pure and beautiful designs and we want to eliminate
all traces of bad or poorly implemented ideas from our source code trees.

And we did.

We deprecated APIs, because there was a better way."

The Linux kernel only removes/changes _internal_ kernel interface all the time
- the kernel developers take care to keep the external kernel interface
(syscalls) backward-compatible.

EDIT: One of the commentators at the original article writes something
similar:
[http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html#comment-633...](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html#comment-633569788)

~~~
aidenn0
The linux kernel is hard-core into not breaking backwards compatibility. 2/3
of Linus's rants targeting a kernel developer tend to be because they broke
userspace.

On the other hand, there is approximately zero chance that a dynamically
linked executable from 10 years ago will run on my current system because the
system libraries break backwards compatibility all the time. Drepper takes a
lot of flak for this, but glibc is not even remotely the only library at fault
for this.

Many core userspace libraries broke not only binary compatibility regularly
but often source compatibility. Inspect a steam install sometime. It installs
dozens of DLLs just so games will have a stable base to work from.

Also, have I just gotten lucky or something? This is the second time that
someone mentions audio not working on linux as the norm, but from the
mainlining of ALSA in 2.6 on, I've had zero issues with audio working for all
but the most obscure audio devices.

~~~
paulddraper
DVDs, printers, and to a lesser extent graphics have more issues for me than
audio.

~~~
aidenn0
Also my experience, but people complain about sound. I know Ubuntu adopted PA
_way_ to early, so perhaps that's what some people are thinking of. Also, back
in the day, dmix was not enabled in setups where it really ought to have been
so you had the "some program is blocking everyone else from using the sound."

------
datenwolf
The author makes a good point, namely that the Linux desktopspace is too fast
a moving target. The Linux kernel is exceptionally stable in its userspace
facing APIs (the most important rule Linus holds up is "we never break
userspace"). And userspace has been pretty much stable for a long time as well
on the API and ABI side. But everything that's regarded with making desktop
environments work, the UI toolkits, configuration APIs, essential DE programs,
all that jazz is moving at a breakneck speed and more often than not even
"minor" version bumps introduce regressions and subtle incompatibilites.

But this problem is not going to be resolved by coalescing all the various
Linux distributions into a single vendor model. If anything that would just
accelerate the troublemaking processes. What's really required is infusing a
culture of high quality engineering, forward thinking and consequence
estimation into the community. Focus on fixing bugs and regressions instead of
implementing new features.

------
killacodeninja
How many Linux distros and their many different GUI/UI variations have been
listed here???

No wonder the Linux desktop was dead upon arrival. Too many flavors of
developers to satisfy. But it wasn't about developers; it was about end users
who just wanted something simple. No matter the changes that Windows has made,
from 95 to 10, for end users, the changes caused relatively minor disruption,
especially with everything moving to the web. Switch to Linux? Which one?
Which packages to install and why? Which GUI to use? etc, etc, etc... Linux
was the beginning of developers creating something for themselves to control
and expecting the rest of the world to just simply fall in love.

I say all that because I genuinely like Linux and it's purpose, but not for
desktop purposes. Maybe mobile???

~~~
remir
I'd say Chrome OS will be the only Linux "distro" that will become mainstream.

~~~
pjmlp
Which by being a browser based OS, makes the kernel irrelevant.

Google can even make Chrome run bare metal, no one would notice.

------
patrickaljord
Nothing killed the Linux Desktop. Windows already won that war and it was good
enough. Heck, even Apple and its billions couldn't get more than 5% market
share worldwide.

The next "war" moved to mobile and there linux is not doing that bad.

~~~
Kenji
Windows solved many of the GUI problems 20 years ago that Linux still
struggles with today. Windows was and is ahead and this is why it was and is
more successful. It is that simple. I would take Windows 95's window manager
over Ubuntu's Unity every day of the week.

~~~
patrickaljord
I think Unity (and KDE) were good enough to replace Windows but Windows won 10
years before Gnome and KDE became a thing. And yes Windows95 was not only good
enough but great as you pointed.

The lack of hardware support was because it made no sense for hardware
companies to support an OS with less than 1% market share and same for the
gigantic ecosystem of software that ran on windows which had a very long tail.

My point is that Linux didn't lose the desktop because of any mistakes the
community made (and god knows there were many), it lost because Windows had
already won this platform for a loooong time and the incentives to switch
weren't great (OS are boring, most people don't even know what an OS is).

~~~
hp
I agree. Many mistakes would have been fine if there was a compelling reason
for users to switch. Linux has been successful when it found a greenfield
space: Android, Chromebook, x86 servers. The open source aspect isn't magic,
it won't make "clone knockoff in an existing space" into an interesting
product.

This was the root cause, "a new desktop" presupposes the existing product
category "desktop" which was a solved problem and a mature market. Runaway
marketshare required NEW categories.

ABI compat and hardware support are hygiene features; they can slow adoption,
but solving them doesn't motivate adoption. Linux needed the motivator; that
would have then funded solving the hygiene stuff - just as it has, at least
well enough, for x86 servers, Android, and Chromebook.

I don't say this with 20/20 hindsight either. I made this point loudly both
inside GNOME and inside Red Hat back in the day. We even had chromebook-type
proposals. But the Linux companies at that time were too small and server-
focused to undertake such things, and once ipad/chromebook/android were out,
there wasn't an obvious opportunity anymore for "Linux" proper.

Still, "Linux desktop" continues to work well for me and millions of other
developers daily and I think it's very good for a dev workstation, as long as
you buy hardware with OEM-developed open drivers (which mostly means Intel
parts).

A lot of people who find it doesn't work for them are doing the equivalent of
running OS X on non-Apple hardware with hacks to modify the finder, and
surprise it's buggy. Granted, in the Linux world it isn't so clear what the
"supported configuration" is. But think boring: default config of a major
distribution with all open source drivers...

------
digi_owl
Icaza has no right to complain when he was the instigator of the DE feud with
Gnome just as KDE was on the rise.

Ts'o on the other hand, in the comments, puts the spotlight on how it is
userspace that is the problem. Userspace devs keep breaking APIs and ABIs at
whim, effectively playing out "perfection is the enemy of good" in real time.

------
seibelj
As a programmer, I find Fedora with the Gnome Classic theme and the No Topleft
Hot Corner extension[0] to be an excellent, clean, effective desktop UI. But
in order to get this working properly, I had to go through package hell for a
few hours to get the right graphics drivers and tweak a bunch of settings.
I've heard Linux Mint is good for non-programmers, but I've never tried. Unity
in Ubuntu is the worst desktop experience out of all I've tried.

[0] [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-
co...](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-corner/)

~~~
mnadkvlb
I have moved to fedora since almost 2 years now and i can't say more. It had
been one of the best experiences ever after the initial set-up and learning
curve. I have all my settings on git now and whenever i do a new install of
any linux i just get those settings and boom.

I am very happy linux user and support the philosophy. Its way more fair than
any other os where the main purpose is to rip of the people who support them
by selling their private data etc.

------
gerbilly
I don't remember the details, but I do recall being flabbergasted that the
latest KDE couldn't run the eclipse IDE properly. Dialogs were missing entire
fields. It seemed so odd that made me doubt myself and check the same dialog
on OS X to be sure.

Something to do about Gnome overhauling its style system to use CSS, which
affected some other library in KDE that implements SWT via some gnome library,
or ... gah who even cares.

The teams in charge of the linux desktops environments seem to behave as if
backwards compatibility was no big deal.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but they do make an effort maintain
backwards compatibility with some truly ancient applications.

~~~
nisa
This was probably fallout from the switch to GTK3 and is unlikely the fault of
KDE (that only configures the GTK theme and nothing more). Eclipse and GTK3
was so broken (is it better now? I switched to IntelliJ) that almost everone
recommended to set a flag to get back to GTK2.

But I feel your pain, it's not new - there is a name for it:
[https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html) \- it's
still true :(

------
tangue
Strangely the author omits the KDE/GNOME schism he contributed to create.

~~~
Shorel
May be this article was a way to signal "I have finished my job here" to his
current masters.

------
labrador
This is news to me as I read on an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop

~~~
johnchristopher
> Clearly there is some confusion over the title of this blog post, so I
> wanted to post a quick follow-up. What I mean with the title is that Linux
> on the Desktop lost the race for a consumer operating system. It will
> continue to be a great engineering workstation (that is why I am replacing
> the hard disk in my system at home) and yes, I am aware that many of my
> friends use Linux on the desktop and love it.

~~~
ue_
Was the author aware that perhaps the desire to have a 'consumer operating
system' was not in the hearts and even minds of many developers of the "Linux"
ecosystem?

------
shmerl
Something killed the Linux desktop? Its usage is growing, while MacOS
stagnation causes people to abandon it, yes you guessed it - often for Linux.

UPDATE: Oh, after noticing the date and the author, I realized, my suspicions
were right. I expected the piece like this to be written by Miguel de Icaza.
And here you go, it's indeed his rant. From 4.5 years ago...

Just skip it and read something more to the point, which discusses Linux
desktop today.

~~~
jaimex2
Pretty much.

------
jstalin
Office. If Linux desktop had microsoft office, I could use it. Libre office is
an unmitigated, ugly pile of shit.

~~~
bittercynic
Libreoffice meets my needs just fine. I spend a couple of hours a week in
their spreadsheet and word processor, and don't really have any complaints.

~~~
dhimes
Agree. Libreoffice works quite well, and although their presentation software
isn't as pretty as powerpoint, I actually prefer their slideshow mode on
multiple monitors. Quite sexy, in fact.

There's no reason for any government office or public school system at any
level to be paying for office licenses IMHO. We can communicate and teach
quite well with L.O.- and donate a share of the saved budget to FOSS.

~~~
Forlien
Where do you draw the line for how much you can cut costs and sacrifice a
little bit of productivity or retraining? For example, I often see programmers
talk about having proper tools to do their job, whether that be high quality
keyboards, faster computers with more memory, or subscription IDEs like
Intellij. Should government programmers be denied these things because it is
possible to program quite well without them?

~~~
dhimes
Great question. I was thinking of the people who use office for communiqués
and presentations and such. You don't need Microsoft Word to write an
interoffice memo, nor do you need it to write a request for proposal.

That would free more money so that the people who did need or could truly
benefit from premium tools could get them.

------
madiathomas
I have just installed Fedora Linux 25. So far so good. Only thing stopping me
from switching completely to Linux is MS Office. If Microsoft can create a
Linux version of Office, I am switching completely. Until then, I will keep on
going back to Windows whenever I want to compile documents.

I have lots of Office documents. Alternatives are just awful. If focus of the
open source community can be diverted to making LibreOffice better, Linux will
win some decent Desktop market. Having 100 different distros won't help.

~~~
kasabali
Office 2010 works fine in Wine (and so does 2013 in latest wine release I
heard). Just give it a try, I'm sure it is better than 2 reboots.

------
protomyth
For me the question is a bit to the side of the article. If Adobe or any
independent developer were releasing a Linux desktop app today, what would
they target?

~~~
herbst
Debian and later rpm. Most other distros will pick one of both and build a
build process around it. Not perfect butnthe way it works.

~~~
protomyth
What UI? [edit]Also, what type of process goes into converting a binary
shipped by someone like Adobe? We are talking just changing the package format
to install the binaries correctly, right?[/edit]

~~~
herbst
No change needed. Often the file structure just needs modification and
dependencies need to be installed and fixed. AUR from arch is a good example
for that. UI is not relevant most machines have qt and gtk

------
lutusp
Quote: "The only way to fix Linux is to take one distro, one set of components
as a baseline, abadone everything else and everyone should just contribute to
this single Linux."

Essentially the article's point is that technical totalitarianism would make
Linux succeed on the consumer desktop, using the successful models of Windows
and OSX -- one source, one model, no disagreement. Hate to acknowledge it, but
it might be true.

~~~
microcolonel
This is why systemd's natural dominance of system orchestration and device
initialization, and PulseAudio's natural dominance of consumer audio
configuration could not be more welcome.

The big threat right now, as ever I suppose, is fragmentation in consumer
desktop systems; the worst problem being Canonical's decision to develop Mir
for reasons they later admitted were fabricated. The point is that all major
toolkits now support Wayland quite well, but Canonical has to fight to
maintain Mir support in just a subset of toolkits.

If we can get all of the system services standardized in a way which doesn't
completely alienate the community; then we can move on to having standards for
consumers.

~~~
pawadu
things that have caused problems on my machine lately:

1\. systemd

2\. pulseaudio

3\. avahi

do you see a pattern?

~~~
microcolonel
The pattern is... you edit the default configurations of system daemons until
they don't work, then complain on the internet?

Wow! it's terrible that your init system has been fighting you! Let's figure
out what custom unit you wrote which is causing the problem.

Unless your alsa devices are broken, I find it unlikely that pulseaudio 10
will do anything untoward; if it does, well then, time to fix a bug, good
thing there are so many people working on pulseaudio.

Avahi... well idunno. Avahi tends to be true to the name of ZeroConf
networking. I have never written an avahi configuration in my life, and yet it
works for me. Maybe you have a malicious mDNS peer on your network? I'm sorry
you have to experience that! If you could fire up wireshark and pass the hail
mary instead of letting it drop to the green, that would be great.

------
gravypod
I've said this many times but the only real problem I have is the shere pain
to get things to work and for uniform styling across programs.

I find myself just using terminal applications because gparted's UI is SO
different from Wireshark, FireFox, etc. There is no consistancy. There is no
standard written. There is nothing. It's just a hodge-podge of "this looks
good to me!"

No standards = Confused Users

~~~
ryukafalz
>I find myself just using terminal applications because gparted's UI is SO
different from Wireshark, FireFox, etc. There is no consistancy. There is no
standard written. There is nothing. It's just a hodge-podge of "this looks
good to me!"

Then use GNOME Disks, which (if you're using a distro with GNOME) is probably
already included:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Disks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Disks)

And GParted vs. Wireshark? Of course they look different, they're completely
different tools - and most non-technical users never need to look at either
one anyway. But here's Wireshark vs. macOS's disk utility, for comparison:
[https://imgur.com/a/V9zZC](https://imgur.com/a/V9zZC)

~~~
gravypod
You're missing the point. Look at that top bar. What do those mean? How do I
un-gray them? What do I click to start capturing packets?

Look at these

[http://cdn2.tekgoblinmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Restore-
di...](http://cdn2.tekgoblinmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Restore-disk-
utility-3.jpg?d8d5b3)

[https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare...](https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/osx/preferences_overview.png)

All icons have text. There is a uniform icon for Hard Drive. There is a
uniform color scheme. There is a uniform font size. There is a uniform spacing
between elements.

In the macOS window you see descriptions where needed like under "First Aid"

You get human-friendly lables such as "Capacity", "Used", etc. It is all
presented eligantly and simply.

On the left of your screen all I see are random strings of text with squigly
lines next to them. Are those buttons? Can I click them? I know you have to
from using wireshark before but the average person sees that and says "...well
shit".

Presentation is a very sensative art. HCI should be much more appreciated and
people majoring in it shouldn't be relegated to VR as there are still many
problems in desktop UI that needs to be fixed.

~~~
ryukafalz
>Look at that top bar. What do those mean? How do I un-gray them? What do I
click to start capturing packets?

I agree, yes. But notice that my screenshot was on macOS, not desktop Linux.

My point was that there _are_ design guidelines for desktop Linux apps. GNOME
has them[0] and KDE has them[1]. And then there are applications that don't
follow those guidelines - like Wireshark, one of the ones you referenced -
regardless of platform. It's not the platform's fault, it's the app
developer's decision to either make their UI conform or not.

0:
[https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/](https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/)
1:
[https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/HIG](https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/HIG)

------
no_wizard
I quote from the article: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too
quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b)
incompatibility across Linux distributions"

I must say, this is the type of thing I have been talking about for years.
Linux has always had its evangelists and champions in the Server community (I
would reckon Red Het, Ubuntu, and Debian/Slackware are the root of what what
upended Unix servers in the 2000s, but that is for another day at another time
to get in-depth).

Yet, there was no foundation, no company, no project, until maybe in the last
year or two with elementary OS and some of the standardizations coming out of
the Fedora project, that you even see some evangelism in the Linux desktop
space (let alone mobile. I am not counting android). The problem as I see it
is Linux is the programmers playground - which is great! - but what that also
turns out to be is that since you can fork, edit, re-create, spin, and
otherwise modify the code as we programmers see fit, you get no level of
standardization, no harmonized quality control on fundamentals, no one
evangelizing the Linux Desktop as a platform that you can make apps for (which
I still contend is a big issue for Linux as a Desktop for the even semi-
mainstream user. I think most developers not withstanding.) It was never an
inclusive platform

Some might say this was the point. They don't want, nor do we need Linux to be
the same as macOS, or Windows. Perhaps the point of the communities that
sprang up around the Linux on the desktop movements is that there is a ethos
that having these fundamentals is bad, or that evangelizing a platform is
'selling out'. I've seen this argument many times over the years. To me, the
quote from the article above, sums it all up nicely. The platform never had
any fundamental evangelists pushing for a harmonized Linux experience. There
is always Chaos, sometimes a little (nvidia driver breaks again because of a
point update) or a lot (Well, today we have no GUI because Gnome moved to
Wayland and for some reason my distro has some component it doesn't support
yet so when it went to apply the update it failed).

Until idealism stops running the show and there is some consolidation in the
fundamentals of Linux on mobile and Linux on the desktop, neither will be a
way forward if you value access to the latest software, consistency in the
fundamentals, stability, and out of the box hardware support from
manufacturers.

------
faragon
Blaming Linus for whatever personal frustration with Linux is becoming a
sport. From my side, I prefer simpler GUIs, without massive bloat.

------
mmphosis
<rant> Ubuntu eases the transition because I don't have to think (too much)
about partitioning the disk. As a "user", I really don't want to ever see disk
partitioning software, ever! Although, now I wish /home was in a separate
partition -- why wasn't that the default?

I continually trip over the Super key which brings up the Unity version of
Spotlight. I killed Spotlight on my Mac a long time ago. I killed whatever
Unity thingy the Alt key used to do. Was it the Alt key it hijacked? I don't
remember. I don't even remember what weird UI it was trying to foist on me. It
was annoying.

I killed the Guest user, but it reappeared with subsequent updates. I still
sometimes get logged in as the Guest user, just annoying. And why does the
login screen forget the state of the NumLock key? When we type in numbers that
might be in our password, we get cursor keyed to the next or previous user in
the list. Fun times.

I stopped using LibreOffice. I so much wish I could kill the office ecosystem,
it is dreadful. Stop sending me .doc files. My solution is to use an ancient
version of Word on an old Mac, and it prompts me so that I can avoid running
those Word Macros.

My production server runs Linux (for years now), and I am surprised by how
robust it is. A desktop is much more complicated to do well, to satisfy
everyone's whims, never mind all of my strange choices.

Not even particularly a desktop issue, but: init cron rc rc.local upstart
systemd runit launchd daemontools srvscanner inetd xinetd StartupItems grub2
SystemStarter (I am sure there are many more.) Do I care? No. Ah yes Linux,
all of those choices, doesn't even have to be Linux, flavor of the week of BSD
anyone? And if I don't like them ... it's open source, so I can "simply" fork
my own turd. Not. </rant>

~~~
mos_basik
>now I wish /home was on a separate partition

I feel you there. When I first started dipping my toes into Linux at age ~16,
I remember the Ubuntu installer asking me all kinds of questions I didn't know
the answer to, like "Would you like to repartition your disk?" "Would you like
a logical partition or a physical partition?" "What disk would you like to
install your bootloader on?" etc. I had no idea how to answer any of these and
I just sort of went with the options that sounded safe to me.

It wasn't until several years and versions of Ubuntu later that I decided I
wanted to try a different distro and realized how convenient it would have
been if I had put /home on its own partition. The whole concept of "you can
swap out your OS and leave your files alone" was incomprehensible to me at
that point as a lifetime Windows user. Even if it had been the default to
split up the partitions, I probably would have set it to stick with just one,
because that's how Windows did it.

(Incidentally, I have vivid memories of my grandfather's Windows hard drive,
which he had inexplicably partitioned up to at least G:\ and I think L:\\. I
still don't know why he did this and since he has passed, I probably never
will. Our best guess is that it was a habit he picked up from some pre-Windows
OS - he was an early tech adopter, but opinionated.)

>all those startup service managers

I haven't used desktop Ubuntu in a while, but after investing some time into
grokking Arch and systemd, I'm pretty happy with my idling process list. I'm
pretty sure I know what each of them are and how they got there. I'm young
enough that I don't miss init, though, so maybe that's just naivete on my part
and malicious gluttony on the part of systemd :)

~~~
NeutronBoy
> It wasn't until several years and versions of Ubuntu later that I decided I
> wanted to try a different distro and realized how convenient it would have
> been if I had put /home on its own partition.

It's a great idea in theory, but my /home is full of dotfile configs that
belong to specific applications - which is great, I can take my configs with
me! Except that not all distros have these in the same place. For a given app,
some distros will have the config in ~, in ~/.config/, in /etc/, and so on.

------
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6
You reap what you sow – in this case by having people confused over needlessly
controversial choice of title for a blog post.

Personally I'm not invested in operating systems, so I do not care about their
market share or anything of that sort. I have ended up using the dreaded Linux
Desktop solely for the last decade, because it's what I'm most comfortable
with (also, I can install it on my machine unlike OSX, which is why it never
had a chance to compete).

(I can understand that people who use laptops have much more compatibility
issues, but can't say anything else on that matter due to lack of experience.
I've had essentially equal amounts of hardware compatibility issues with both
Linux and Windows in the 2000s, adding up to very little in total indeed. For
me personally, the last major issue with the Linux Desktop was purely
aesthetical, and which not many found a problem to begin with, to which I
found a solution about a decade ago.)

~~~
digi_owl
> You reap what you sow – in this case by having people confused over
> needlessly controversial choice of title for a blog post.

Never mind that the author greatly contributed to the whole problem way back
when...

------
alias_neo
Nobody else seems to have mentioned it, but with 2x4K screens, Ubuntu Gnome
(16.04) with it's Hi-DPI capabilities is the only thing even close to usable
for me at the moment.

I've tried switching to XFCE and a couple of other light weight DEs but when I
can actually get both displays to output at once, the text and UI are so tiny
or messed up it's unbearable.

That said, Windows 10 does an almost equally horrific job (scaling everything
up to a horribly pixelated size but at least a size I can see sitting 2-3 feet
away. I only use Windows 10 for gaming so it doesn't bother me.

My go-to for both home and work is Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 right now, sadly even
Kali is horrific to use when I do occasionally need it now, but Ubuntu with
Gnome has worked close to flawlessly and looks stunning with its crisp clear
test and UI elements at 4K.

------
sverige
I began to read some of the comments, realized this is just a continuation of
the Gnome/KDE holy wars from many years ago, and so stopped reading.

The Linux Desktop environment contributed to pushing me to OpenBSD plus cwm,
or Windows for when I need to use it for work.

------
Clubber
I think one of the problems is that there's no centralized leadership from an
encompassing GUI perspective. It's tribal. The kernel and RMS contributions of
course has centralized leadership and are much more successful and coherent.

------
MrFurious
The linux desktop was killed for desktop developers. We haved good desktops
with gnome 2 and kde 3, only needed evolution (kde 4 is true that was
evolution,but plasma 5 is a buggy horrible slow thing), and nerds decided that
the cool thing was transparencies or twisted cubes, then came KDE4 with
unstable first versions, Gnome 3 with many icons triyng look how a mac, and
unity.

I was KDE user but with Plasma 5, the kde people spit again to users with a
new buggy version that broke all things as with kde4.

I use MATE now, and i'm happy. Simples menus, file browser, no problems with
graphic card because incompatible drivers with desktop...

------
Floegipoky
For anyone who skipped the comment section of the article, I found the
following comment by "has" to be very insightful. Specifically the way that
the community would rather divide its resources to keep multiple mediocre
implementations of a given thing around than consolidate them, and how the
Unix Philosophy has been ignored:

@Miguel: You are right about developer culture being a huge factor. Linux
geeks all to often see the OS as the end in itself, whereas the rest of the
world knows the OS is merely the means to an end. The OS is the least
important component in the ecosystem: what actually matters is the
applications and services they can use to get things done. Either it enables
that or it obstructs it.

You also mentioned excessive fragmentation as being one of those obstructions.
Now, I do believe the 'let a thousand flowers bloom' approach of the OSS world
is valuable: where it completely falls down is in its abject failure to asset-
strip the less successful variants for whatever merits they have unveiled,
then put them wholesale to the sword. Evolution doesn't succeed by ideology or
sentimentality; it works through merciless competition culling the weak so the
strongest may dominate.

The best immediate remedy for Linux's desktop ills would be to put 80% of
current DEs to the axe. Really you only need three mainstream distros: one to
cover general users (Ubuntu; sorry Gnome 3), one to cover the inveterate
tinkerers (KDE), and one to cover the reactionary conservatives (one of the
Gnome 2 clones/derivatives). Retain a few specialised distros for niches such
as very elderly/low-powered machines (hi, Pi!) and security work. Anything
else is a research project to produce new ideas that can then be stolen by the
mainstream distros, or just a leach on the body Linux that should be salted
forthwith that the rest may grow stronger.

...

However, I think you completely missed one other valuable - and uncomfortable
- point; arguably the most essential of them all.

While addressing the excessive dilution of manpower and message may help in
the short term, there is a far more fundamental cultural problem: the Linux
desktop world (and even the kernel world beneath it) has _completely and
utterly forgotten its roots_. Unix Philosophy isn't merely a neat marketing
phrase: it describes a _very_ specific way to construct large, complex
systems. Not by erecting vast imposing monoliths, ego-gratifying as that may
be, but by assembling a rich ecosystem of small, simple, plug-n-play
components that can be linked together in whatever arrangement best suits a
given problem.

By mimicking the Apple and Microsoft tactic of constructing vast monolithic
environments and applications, you have all unwittingly been playing to
_their_ strengths, not yours. Such enormous proprietary companies can afford
such brute-force strategies because they have vast financial and manpower
resources to draw on. Indeed, it works in their favour to do so because vast
monolithic applications help to create user lock-in: look at Adobe Creative
Suite; look at Microsoft Office. Nobody can truly compete with them because to
assemble comparably featured applications takes at least a decade: until then,
any competing applications are fewer featured and far more susceptible to
being excluded by the vast user-side network effect that the big boys have
formed around themselves.

Conversely, look at what has happened when the above vendors have tried to
take a more component-oriented approach. For instance, Apple's attempt to
implement OpenDoc failed not because it was fundamentally, fatally flawed at
the technical level. (It may not have been perfect, but what is? It was still
a good and promising platform in itself.) It failed because the business model
it proposed - lots of small, cheap, single-purpose components from many
vendors that users could purchase and mix-and-match however they liked - was
utterly disruptive and utterly incompatible to the business model used by the
very application vendors that Mac OS relied on to survive. Adobe's control of
the market was predicated on it being the 800-pound gorilla in the room; it
was _never_ going to give that up by choice.

Whereas the Linux business model has no such requirements for maintaining
artificial scarcity; indeed, given its far more limited development resources,
it should be pouring every ounce of its strength into finding ways to work
smart, not hard, like this. Unix Philosophy was a reaction to the inescapable
hardware limitations of the day; now those limitations are no longer enforced,
_nix developers have gotten flabby and soft. They build these vast, inflexible
edifices simply because they are not required to find a more ingeniously
efficient way, and because as a short-term strategy diving straight in and
copying how everyone else already does it is inevitably the easiest, laziest
approach available. As a long-term strategy, however, it 's an absolute
disaster. Projects like Gnome and Open Office become like our banking
industries: vast, baroque, impossible to regulate effectively, and cripplingly
expensive to maintain.

The result is: vast projects that are _far too big to fail _. The thought of
axing, say, Gnome 3 - not on technical merit but simply because it consumes
too much resource from Linux as a whole - becomes unthinkable. So rather than
killing it and folding its best bits into other, fewer distros, even more
manpower must be poured into keeping it going and looking like it actually
serves a critical purpose instead of acting as yet another boat anchor on the
whole show. Manpower that should 've been invested in finding ingenious ways
to play to Linux/Unix's unique strengths, not to its competition's.

Apple didn't go from virtually dead husk to #1 in the whole damned industry by
continuing to play Microsoft's game by Microsoft's rules. It did it by looking
at what MS and all its other competitors _weren't* doing, or weren't doing
well, in order to meet consumers wants and needs, then devising a cunning plan
to do a complete end-run around the lot of them: redefining the entire game to
suit their own strengths and allow them to define their own rules. Even if it
meant burning their own traditional platform to get there. It was an absolute
masterstroke, and a prime reminder that if you want to understand how this
game is really played, you don't read Slashdot, you read Sun Tzu.

...

TL;DR: Windows didn't kill the Linux desktop and neither did OS X. The Linux
desktop killed itself, by playing on their terms instead of its own. The best
thing it can do now - once denial and recrimination are done with - is turn
the killing process itself into a virtue, and slice not only the
DE/application mess but also the cultural one right back down to the bone and
start rebuilding from there.

Good luck, and apologies for length.

~~~
remir
The comment you quoted was right; people don't care about the OS, they care
about their apps. Since Windows is king on the desktop, it would make sense to
have an open source "clone" of Windows that will be able to run all the Win32
apps people love. This is exactly what React OS is! Sadly, the project never
got the resource and support it deserved. Instead, we have 200+ Linux distros,
multiple package manager, DE, etc...

Ironically, the only "distro" that has a real chance of success is Chrome OS,
because everything is moving to the web, but also because Google made it ultra
simple, secure and zero maintenance. It can also run Android apps, so that's
interesting.

~~~
pjmlp
And in both cases, Chrome OS and Android, the fact that Linux is running
underneath has zero value for the Web and Java developers targeting the
respective OS.

Google can replace it by something else and they won't notice.

This is just a Pyrrhic victory, but geeks haven't yet realized it seems.

------
epx
The desktop is dead anyway - people use phones and tablets now. For the uses
that my son gives to the PC - YouTube, Agar.io and Counter-Strike - he uses
Mac or Linux without making distinction

------
shiven
Gnome 3 and Unity. The kiss of death.

------
legends2k
It's the difference between riding a hand-tuned motorcycle versus a car. The
latter is low maintenance, always works, etc. but ask a biker, he'd say how
passionate he's in maintaining his beast and how well it performs, etc. a car
is no comparison to it.

Now how many bikes do you see as opposed to cars? The premium would always be
lesser, only for those who want it and are willing to sweat for it.

~~~
fulafel
So which is Linux in your comparison? I think many users, especially
developers or "power users", feel things just work on Linux compared to more
frequent twiddling required on macOS / Windows.

------
crispytx
I just read this on my Chromebook, powered by Linux.

~~~
youdontknowtho
you read this with chrome. they could port that to bsd or even their new os
magenta and you wouldnt notice. the linux part of that is tightly constrained.
honestly,thats why itworks.

------
elihu
I liked this essay, but I also wanted to rant for a bit about how the state of
the Linux Desktop is just one particularly glaring example of a bigger
problem, which is that instead of building something that works for most use
cases, it seems to be popular to build things that work really well for one
use case and not so well for others. Which in some cases is fine, but when
we're talking about infrastructure like operating systems or programming
environments or APIs, it's a big problem for anyone who wants to build on top
of this infrastructure because then they have to pick a technology stack that
limits who will use the thing they write because it was built on top of stuff
that only works well in its little niche.

I write software. Suppose I want to write a program and have lots of other
people use it, and want good confidence that those people will continue to be
able to use it for a long time into the future. This is a pretty basic thing
to want to do; how do I do it?

The first question is what kind of software is it? If it's a desktop
application, then I'd need to write it for Windows and/or MacOS. If it's a
server application, then Linux would be a good choice. If it's mobile, then
iOS or Android.

Writing in Java might be a good choice for OS portability, but then I'd have
to educate all my users on how to run java apps on their platform.

So, what we have is a lot of walled gardens and the un-walled wilderness of
Linux, and these are all incompatible with each other for various reasons and
I can't really say that any one of them is what I would call a good general-
purpose platform for writing general-purpose programs.

It seems like something that's missing in the open source community (and
something that would combat the walled-garden balkanization of user
communities in both proprietary and open-source software) is an effort to
create portable, carefully designed binary formats and APIs that we intend to
be stable and usable for the next fifty years or so, and that "just work" for
almost any common use case, whether it's a desktop app, a mobile app, a server
app, an enterprise app, an embedded systems app, whatever, and then we make
sure that there are tools available on every open platform to run these
portable binaries.

(Java did attempt this before, but their early efforts were slowed by being a
proprietary single-vendor platform; once they opened up, Java was kind of old
and less exciting. It should be possible to do better by creating a new
platform that isn't part of some maneuver by one tech behemoth to take market
share from some other tech behemoth, and by building from a more modern
foundation.)

~~~
pjmlp
> then I'd have to educate all my users on how to run java apps on their
> platform.

Only if you do a bad service to your users by not packaging them correctly.

~~~
elihu
You mean package the JVM with the application, in case it isn't already
installed? The details of how to do that vary by OS, and making sure it works
properly on all recent and future versions of Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu, Android,
iOS, RHEL, SLES, Raspbian, Arch, the various BSDs, VxWorks, Hurd, and anything
other platform that exists now or will exist in the next few decades isn't
something I care to do. I just want to be able to write software and have
users be able to use it without knowing or caring what platform they're using
-- which is what Java was meant to solve, but they never had a broad enough
user base that that you could truly hand someone a java binary and trust that
it would "just work" for everyone.

(I admit that I'm not very knowledgeable about how Java is used in 2017; there
may be some cross-platform solution for distributing Java programs to people
who might or might not already have the JVM installed of which I am unaware.)

------
st3fan
> As for myself, I had fallen in love with the iPhone, so using a Mac on a
> day-to-day basis was a must.

I don't understand this. Why do you need a Mac if you use an iPhone? I have
not used iTunes to manage my iPhone in half a decade I think. Is there any
connection left between iOS and macOS? From a user point of view?

~~~
jon-wood
The high level of integration in Apple's stack is the one thing I really miss
after moving back to Linux. If you have a Mac and an iPhone the two exist
almost as one thing - you can answer phone calls on your computer, have a
shared message history, and these days copy and paste between devices or use
the presence of your watch to unlock your computer.

------
innocentoldguy
While I agree with many of the author's points, I don't think "lost" or
"killed" are valid descriptions. It's never too late to dig in and make the
Linux desktop experience better. It's not like Linux disappeared and doesn't
exist anymore.

------
dang
Big thread from 2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4450244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4450244)

------
ianai
Why not create a gnome equivalent of containers? It won't make compatibility
issues go away in the past. But containers for Ui applications could help
going forward.

~~~
youdontknowtho
thats kind of what flatpack and company are trying to do. its something that
apple got right a long time ago. its also something microsoft is moving to
with the .appx package format. everything should be in a bundle that is
installed and removed as a unit.

------
Asooka
That title implies the Linux Desktop was ever alive.

------
raj_nayar
I guess linux desktop should have a UI just like chromeOS , Period. Designing
UI requires different talent , more than just blurb

------
erikb
lol? The Linux desktop as a widespread phenomenon only started after 2012.
Usually things can't die before they start.

------
Shalhoub
'What Killed the Linux Desktop' by Miguel de Icaza

~~~
pawadu
TL;DR: Miguel de Icaza killed the Linux Desktop

------
dcdevito
The Linux Desktop didn't die, because you simply can't kill something that
never had life to begin with. Linux (as in the kernel) succeeds because it's
free, flexible, stable and secure. But none of those words are "pretty",
"aesthetic" or "powerful". And the DEs associated with Linux reflect this in
every nature. OSX became the uber tech junkie's OS of choice, but with Apple's
recent shenanigans these savvy enthusiasts and devs are also starting to use
Windows again. And in the end it doesn't matter, the internet has taken over
the desktop OS anyway.

~~~
mschuster91
> OSX became the uber tech junkie's OS of choice, but with Apple's recent
> shenanigans these savvy enthusiasts and devs are also starting to use
> Windows again.

I believe that hipsters/nerds migrated to Apple for two things: build quality
(most laptops these days STILL are made of plastic, and well as someone who
often eats near his machine or operates it with pizza-greasy fingers I can say
that an Apple laptop just doesn't give a sh.t while all my Windows laptops end
up looking very indecent after a year), and battery lifetime.

The latter is the most important: Apple with its ultra tight control down to
the tiniest chip on the motherboard can tune the performance in ways that
cannot ever be achieved by either Windows or Linux, with 6+ hour usage times
being the norm. Windows laptops with this usage time usually are way more than
expensive than Macbooks, are heavier than a piece of granite rock, or a
combination of both.

~~~
bwat48
> The latter is the most important: Apple with its ultra tight control down to
> the tiniest chip on the motherboard can tune the performance in ways that
> cannot ever be achieved by either Windows or Linux, with 6+ hour usage times
> being the norm. Windows laptops with this usage time usually are way more
> than expensive than Macbooks, are heavier than a piece of granite rock, or a
> combination of both.

This definitely used to be the case (and was one of the main reasons I used
macbooks over windows laptops, the other being the touchpad) but this is no
longer true (outside of cheapo laptops) imo.

High quality ultrabooks like the dell xps 13 rival the macbook in build
quality and battery life, and afaik are not more expensive than macbooks.

------
Altay-
The Linux Desktop was never a thing so how could it be killed?

------
convalleysili
In addition to the fact that you can't attach a McDonalds drive-thru to a
garden.

------
jankotek
Fedora switched to FreeBSD kernel? I better start reading release notes ;-)

------
microcolonel
> The ecosystem that has sprung to life with Apple's OSX AppStore is just
> impossible to achieve with Linux today.

And yet Apple breaks compatibility basically every release; and the App Store
itself often fails to operate at all, even for Apple's own packages!

Also, if computing is suddenly all about _The Open Web_ ; then the point is
moot since all three major desktop platforms have identical support for _The
Open Web_. Then in praising the Mac App Store, Miguel goes full circle and
affirms that native software is still important. I'd countenance either train
of thought, but you can't multi-track drift your ideas like this.

I really don't like this new _hipster post-mortem_ style of writing which
makes heaps of unfounded assertions, and mixes them in with indisputable
facts. I wish Miguel would stop trying to convince people to leave the
ecosystem he helped create just because _he_ no longer prefers it to the
alternatives. Why drag your old friends down with slam pieces on _WIRED_ when
you could just let things shake out?

