

Why there should never be a "year of the Linux desktop" - blhack
http://www.gibsonandlily.com/blogs/77

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krschultz
The "year of the Linux desktop" is no longer relevant.

It works for me. It works for a lot of other people. That's all it needs to
do.

The "year of the Linux desktop" being a viable choice was about 2006. Today
people look forward to the "year of the Linux desktop" in the sense of it
gaining massive popularity. But that day will not come without lots of
marketing or the price difference actually being meaningful. Windows will
never have solid DRM because the day the price conscious are ever forced to
choose between free Linux and $200 Windows is the day Microsoft loses a
massive chunk of market share. So masses of users comes down solely to
marketing, and who would get into an advertising buying war with Apple and
Microsoft trying to push something free?

Linux has a critical mass of developers, testers, and users willing to help
others. As long as it fulfills their needs, it will continue to improve.

It is not a business where market share matters. It is not a business selling
licenses on seats. It is a project that scratches some people's itch, and
thats all it is. People derive great value from it, and that drives its
growth.

I've used it at home for 4 years, and my company (30 people) has used it for
2.5 years. It does everything I need and my company needs, and costs a lot
less in licensing and IT support. It might be different for other companies
who came from Windows and have to deal with legacy systems/documents, but
starting from scratch it is great. I'm happy to give back some bug fixes and
support in exchange for what I perceive to be a better experience. That
experience is derived solely from the number of developers and dedicated
users, it has nothing to do with how many total users there are. A billion
more users that do nothing to help Linux progress wouldn't do a damn thing for
me.

So I believe that the "year of the Linux desktop" has long since past, and
anyone still writing about it just doesn't get it.

~~~
blhack
I think that was sort of the point of the article...

There is no "year of the linux desktop" because Linux and Windows should be
looked to to fulfill different roles.

To me, windows isn't a "real" operating system. I don't use _windows_ for
anything other than running putty or chrome. It isn't really doing anything.

Linux, on the other hand, is at the absolute core of the business that employs
me. ALL of our servers (except one domain controller) run either Linux of
OpenBSD.

If I had my way, all of the workstations would be running it as well. This is
an okay solution for me, because all of my workstations have identical (or
very similar) hardware. An install would be as simple as imaging a disk,
running a few scripts to configure things like networking, and powering it on.

Naturally, I can't speak for everyone, but I _do_ have a considerably larger
amount of experience with linux as a desktop than most. I also have a lot of
experience with support. Supporting linux on a hodge-podge of hardware is
definitely not something I would want to undertake.

Guiding my mom through Ubuntu would also not be something I would want to do.

I think a lot of Linux nerds (members of the church mentioned in the article),
have a bit of a cognitive bias when it comes to how easy linux is to use. They
_WANT_ it to be easy. They overlook the bits of tinkering they have to do to
actually get it working correctly.

Like I said, this is all my own experience. YMMV. However, if you are having
as easy a time installing and running linux as a desktop OS as you do with
windows...please tell me what hardware you're using!

~~~
krschultz
Old thread so hopefully you read this later. We use Dell's bought with Ubuntu
pre-installed at work. If we have a problem we call up Dell and they fix it.
If you are doing desktop Linux in an office it is the best way to go.

------
anigbrowl
What a silly article - after all, Gentoo is the system where tying your
shoelaces involves growing your own feet from scratch.

I love desktop Linux (or wanted to) but it hasn't really happened because
there's a shortage of application development that suits the needs of early
adopters with deadlines. You can use Gimp, for example, but most people want
Photoshop. If you're editing audio or video then your options are more
constrained, and none of the market leaders have Linux editions. I'm
simplifying here, of course, but the reasons have been laid out in more detail
time and again.

Round 2000 or so I was sure Linux was going to take over - I was running Gnome
with enlightenment as my WM and people would come up and say 'wow, what's
that'. And i could run Compiz right now and throw windows around, and people
would still be impressed...but once you get past the eye candy, you hit this
real functionality gap and have to make a choice between becoming a dedicated
Linux hacker who runs experimental software all day, or going with the
industry standard and running something industry-standard that you can show to
your clients.

There isn't a truly compelling reason to move from Windows or Mac unless
you're building your own system for most applications. This isn't a fault of
Linux: there just aren't many end-user applications of which you can say 'this
is the best, and you can only take part by running Linux', nor any 'holy shit
where has this been all my life' for non-programmers.

------
ibsulon
I have my macbook. I like the hardware, for the most part. However, I just
installed ubuntu again on my desktop, and it's like coming back to an old
friend. I love middle click paste alongside ctrl-V. I still can't get used to
all the mac changes in software I already know. For me, Ubuntu just works.
_shrug_

The linux desktop is mature as far as I've been able to see. The linux laptop,
on the other hand, still isn't there and from what I can tell, may never be.
They still can't get the power management quite right, last I checked. Suspend
and hibernate still give it fits on some hardware. I think the only way that
will be solved is if the vendors take responsibility to ensure compliance on
their own hardware, and that doesn't seem to be happening.

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decklin
What in the world does this person's experience however many years ago
compiling Gentoo have to do with "linux on the desktop"?

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mquander
For what it's worth, seven or eight years ago, it was a huge exercise in
wizardry for me to get every piece of hardware working on my laptops under
Slackware or Gentoo or Debian. If it wasn't the wireless, it was the sound,
the graphics card, or the ACPI. Then I enjoyed the careful prospect of
fiddling with X and window manager configuration files endlessly if I wanted
any kind of pleasant GUI.

I just installed Ubuntu on my new Dell laptop the other week, for the sake of
running a particular thing that isn't available on Windows, and the difference
is eye-popping. Zero configuration for _any_ hardware. (For some reason, it
didn't load the ATI drivers by default, having them in a "restricted"
category, but it was easy to add them.) Wireless worked out of the box. No
package management problems. Totally capable GUI configuration. 90% as usable
as Windows 7.

Additionally, I didn't even have to repartition my drive to install it, which
blew my mind. It installed into a disk image with a Windows installer, and
modified the Windows bootloader to boot from the image. That's sure a big
improvement from (to a newbie, extremely scary) disk partitioning and
LILO/GRUB adventures.

------
mcantor
I've been espousing this view for months. As much as we hate it, Windows "just
works", and if you have a serviceable Linux box on your LAN, all it takes is a
few PuTTY shells and you're in business. Keep a cmd.exe window open to pscp
things that you're working on locally (like web graphics, for example), and
things are pretty seamless.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
>Windows "just works"

That has never been my experience. Trying to customize my Windows install to
the point where I can actually do anything with it has uniformly been a long,
painful, expensive process every time I have had to do it.

Er, not to mention having to go over to friends' houses frequently to try and
get their "just works" Windows installs to _just work, already_ , when they
run into problems.

Frankly, my last three Ubuntu installs (on an Acer Apire One, a cheap dual-
core PC, and the old, decrepit PC that the cheap dual-core PC replaced) were
faster, easier, and far less painful than my previous four or five Windows
installs.

I had to do a bit of fiddling with the netbook to get wifi working (I had to
install and configure madwifi-hal), but I had to do a _lot_ of fiddling to get
wifi working on the default XP install, so tit-for-tat.

Suspend _just works_ , the low battery warning _just works_ , remote desktop
_just works_ , multiple displays _just works_ , and I'm seamlessly connected
to my home PC and the backup server in the basement.

That's not to mention the fact that I can browse easily to remote servers
using the default file explorer (Nautilus) without having to muck around with
an FTP program, which is kind of handy when doing web application development.

~~~
blhack
What are you trying to do on a windows install that requires customization?

Also, fiddling with the wifi on *nix and fiddling with it on windows are...not
quite the same thing.

I have no problem with it on linux (in fact, I have destroyed several
keyboards in fits of rage while trying to get it working on windows.), but my
mother would have absolutely no freaking CLUE how to even begin trying to get
it to work.

~~~
sp332
>What are you trying to do on a windows install that requires customization?

Slipstreaming XP SP3 into a pre-SP1 ISO image, installing useful software
(esp. Firefox), setting themes and desktop backgrounds, etc. I've done the
first without too much pain, the second with some fiddling and mediocre
results, and I don't even know if you can do the last.

~~~
blhack
What percentage of users do you suppose are doing these things? Less than 1%?
Less than .5%?

As far as setting desktop backgrounds...the process is the same in KDE as it
is in Windows or Gnome. (FVWM, which is actually the WM I run on most of my
machines with X installed is a bit different).

As far as themes...I'm not even entirely sure that windows _has_ themes. What
do you mean by that?

~~~
sp332
>What percentage of users do you suppose are doing these things? Less than 1%?
Less than .5%?

With 80+% marketshare, 0.5% of users is still a lot.

>As far as setting desktop backgrounds...the process is the same in KDE as it
is in Windows or Gnome.

Sorry, I thought you meant _during_ installation.

>As far as themes...I'm not even entirely sure that windows has themes. What
do you mean by that?

Really? Right-click on XP desktop->Properties. The first tab is Themes.
Microsoft used to sell them, you can download a bunch from
[http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/desktop/default...](http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/desktop/default.mspx)
and there are lots of 3rd-party themes too.

------
amackera
I suppose people push the "year of the linux desktop" meme since it generates
buzz. I personally use Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows all in the same day, and
feel great doing it.

