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There's been a tremendous amount of work over the last ten years to make the Linux desktop environment habitable. I thing that this is a misrepresentation of t

There's been a tremendous amount of work over the last ten years to make the Linux desktop environment habitable. I thing that this is a misrepresentation of the history of desktop Linux. There was a period at the beginning of the century where Linux was arguably far better positioned to take significant market share. At the time, consumer Windows (98/ME) was dramatically bad. Both in terms of stability and security. OS X just came into existence, but was slow and required expensive hardware. At the time, Linux was far less fragmented. There were only a few distributions and KDE and GNOME ruled the desktop. There was a very serious push some companies to make Linux easy to install (graphical installers popped up in Red Hat, Corel Linux, Caldera, etc.). You could run Microsoft Office using CrossOver Office with virtually no glitches (I used Office like that for years). Corel released Wordperfect for Linux (which still had significance at the time). Loki was pumping out Linux ports of games like crazy. There was a genuine feeling that Linux was taking off on the desktop and many non-tech family/friends installed Linux. The problem at the time was that web apps basically didn't exist. So a lot of interested people eventually abandoned the idea to switch to Linux, because they had some win32 application that they needed to run. In 2017, the Linux distribution landscape is more fragmented than ever and the Linux desktop landscape is more fragmented than ever (heck, even GNOME has three popular forks). Moreover, problems are far harder to debug than they were around 2000, because there are multiple layers of stuff piled on each other (D-Bus, systemd, Debian alternatives, *.d, et al. have blessings and curses). I think there is some movement from OS X to Linux (though it is hard too tell whether it's not just some vocal minority) for four reasons: 1. people rely less than ever on native applications, so it's much easier to move now; 2. OS X is also Unix, so for OS X users it is quite simple to move OS X to Linux and vice versa; and 3. there are serious worries among OS X users about the future of OS X and Apple's lack of focus; 4. Macs are becoming so expensive that it is hard to justify getting relatively bad specs for 1.5 times the price.

jmiserez 10y ago
I remember both that Windows 95/98/ME had it's issues and that at some point you could even buy Linux distros in a box next to the Windows boxes. But how do you see the push Canonical did with Ubuntu? As I remember, the sentiment was that they were going to make Linux usable and easy for the average user, instead of going after advanced users. And IMHO they really succeeded in doing that, surely you're not saying that was all there before? A user with absolutely no Linux or terminal experience can use an Ubuntu system for writing letters/emails/browsing and doesn't need to ever touch the terminal (provided all hardware is supported).
- keypress 10y ago
  But even distros like Mepis or Knoppix were good pre-ubuntu. When hardware works out the box, everything is fine and dandy. As soon as it doesn't like with many OSs, it's a time waster, you loose your confidence with the entire project.
- sten 10y ago
  "A user with absolutely no Linux or terminal experience" I can speak to this. Both my wife and roommate use ubuntu referbished laptops I supplied. Neither knows what a terminal is or how to use it. It just works(tm).
adrianN 10y ago
I tried Linux back in the Win 98 days. I don't remember which distro. I went back to Windows because the X server crashed at least once a day. Windows was much more stable for me.
disiplus 10y ago
i think it is in your head, it was not easy, and most of the apps that you needed would not work there, i even had a lindows and that had the same problems, webapps where nonexistend, and while sure you could maybe find a decent replacement for one app you could not for others. everything was hacky, and there is no chance in hell that average person would run this. and then xp came and it was the better in in everything from 98/ME.
n3storm 10y ago
The "less fragmented" past you describe is not the past I remember. Back on those days you have WindowMaker, Enlightenment, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Sawfish and many more. All window managers where a choice apart from Gnome, Kde, FXCE or mixed with desktop environments. Corel Linux had their own Kde mod. Many distribution had their own administration tools and desktop environments had different settings and look and feel: Suse, Mandrake, Turbolinux, Yggdrassil, Stormlinux. I would also like to mention Slackware and Stampede Linux, just because...
- wruza 10y ago
  I'm not your parent commenter, but I think fragmentation mentioned is at lower level. Back then I could just install base system (few megabytes) and freely choose wms, panels, login managers, etc to build my desktop. Now I hardly can setup sound and x modes without installing e.g. gnome that pulls all the dependencies and initial settings. Lots of userspace modules now exist to make work things that worked out of box before. Dbus, pulseaudio, hal, etc. It is not unix-like anymore, it is bunch of poorly built osx-es on top of technology, that is half-functional unless magically tuned via Desktop Environment (r)(tm). Distro hell only made it slightly worse.
  - n3storm 10y ago
    Some distros where more or less tied to a desktop environment on those days "a la Ubuntu" and some other offered the choice during installation or after. I have been using netinstall for my Debian machines for more than 8 years and I can do what you are talking about. Debian has had flavoured CDs for long time ago. Is not the first time a read somebody complain about lack of choice but unknowingly is only trying or using Ubuntu (not Kubuntu nor Xubuntu). May be in latest years Ubuntu has messed up a bit the percepction of Linux Desktop, but Linux Desktop is as healthy and fragmented as always.
    - wruza 10y ago
      Funny thing, I'm from '00 and never touched Ubuntu. Debian (2005), FreeBSD (2007) usually. And yeah, netinst, only needed things, so it's not my noob-experience. But now I can't make it work because... idk. This state, 'idk', was not even imaginable in old linux, because you opened the handbook/reference and solved it. Now I fail to do this, because there are so many layers that are out of control of core system developers, and it's all about gnome/kde/xfce/craphaldbuspulsed/etc. Recently installed xfce-debian showed me a page of cryptic mounts (systemd's job, right?). Even osx is not a monster anymore vs this crazy thing. And there is a probability that I'm also able to do all that on your box. Not sure about mine.
bad_user 10y ago
I started playing and using Linux around year 2000, before XP. My first computer was a Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and I went through the painful transition to Win 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 8 and 10, so I've known them all. The Linux you remember is very different than what I remember. To say that back then Linux was unusable on the desktop would be an understatement. Yes, you had Red Hat, Mandrake (later Mandriva) and SuSE that were trying hard to provide a usable desktop distribution, but nothing was working well. And people needed Win32 apps because there were no alternatives usable for Linux. Nowadays Linux usually works well on most hardware you can throw at it, it doesn't choke on the most basic of tasks and while it still has an app problem, sadly, the web is making that less relevant. Nowadays all that average users need is a good web browser, coupled with Linux's security and remote debugging capabilities, it's a very good fit for my father for example. Speaking of which, I don't have a high regard for companies and products popular among developers and that don't support Linux. I pay a premium for Dropbox because it works on my Linux box, even though my primary workstation is now OS X. And I've been transitioning away from 1Password. Voting with your wallet does work and if a company isn't supporting Linux then it means it doesn't want my money. OS X was in the same situation a while back, for certain use-cases it still is, yet it prevailed because people have stuck with it.
- danieldk 10y ago
  The Linux you remember is very different than what I remember. To say that back then Linux was unusable on the desktop would be an understatement. Yes, you had Red Hat, Mandrake (later Mandriva) and SuSE that were trying hard to provide a usable desktop distribution, but nothing was working well. And people needed Win32 apps because there were no alternatives usable for Linux. There was a reason why you could buy Linux in bookstores for years. People were actually using it. For instance, SuSE had quite a stronghold in Europe. I was still in high school and I knew quite a lot of people that were using SuSE Linux. coupled with Linux's security What security? It's running every application unsandboxed and each X11 application can read all keystrokes, mouse events, make screengrabs, etc. Linux on the desktop is way behind macOS and Windows when it comes to security. It's just not a very interesting target, because of its small marketshare. One can only hope that distributors will follow the lead of Fedora and move to Wayland soon.
keypress 10y ago
A huge issue in the past was the lack of a good web browser. Firefox really helped. Other annoyances were little things like Flash player. I've used Linux on the desktop as my main OS for at least a decade. Personally I'm really disappointed with the lack of noticeable progression on the desktop. There is a dearth of great desktop applications. As the article mentions, Thunderbird as an email client is _okay_. Rewind back to the late 90s, and applications like Winamp were pretty amazing, it just needed a better user interface. There are loads of music applications on Linux, but I end up using CLI mplayer and even Foobar2k under Wine, because of some of the other shortcomings. Even the core of Linux desktop applications like Nautilus feel like they are regressing. When a file manager in my mind should be at the heart of an OS. Mounts and copying should be very intuitive. Much functionality exists in CLI apps, but is stripped out or lacking in desktop applications. Having something like Rsync in your file manager could be great. And better integration with something like Git. But that's after the core utility of the application is polished to the max. It's the final 10%, and I appreciate how difficult that is, with moving targets weird Window tool-kits and other abstractions and APIs, but it's that polish that makes it. Having said that Windows always feels like a fragmented Frankenstein's monster with UI inconsistencies not only across core applications but also with third party ones. While some of the desktop paradigms have worn well, I don't see much radical experimentation on the desktop, and Linux could provide exactly the platform to try things out.
- lottin 10y ago
  I remember when the only available web browser was the "Mozilla suite", which was extremely slow and basically unusable. You could not play MP3 files out of the box due to patent issues. Most graphic cards only worked in VESA mode, so we had no 3D acceleration of any kind. But the worst thing was the lack of fonts. Fonts were truly abysmal. So I disagree that there has been no progression on the desktop front. The progression has been extraordinary. It's true that in some areas things have stalled a little or even gone backwards as of lately, mostly due to the introduction of Gnome 3 in my opinion, but all in all there's no contest between what we have now and what we had 15 years ago.
  - danieldk 10y ago
pjmlp 10y ago
> people rely less than ever on native applications, so it's much easier to move now; I find it ironic that the GNU/Linux is the one that helped make the GNU/Linux desktop less relevant by fostering web apps. Anything that is able to run a recent browser is good enough. Also the desktop fragmentation and FOSS culture, makes it almost impossible to sell desktop software to GNU/Linux users.
- danieldk 10y ago
  I find it ironic that the GNU/Linux is the one that helped make the GNU/Linux desktop less relevant by fostering web apps. Anything that is able to run a recent browser is good enough. True, but it also boosts the non-traditional Linux desktop. Something like the Chromebook would be a flop 15 years ago.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    I don't consider Chromebooks a Linux desktop, because normal people don't even know what is Crouton. They only see a window manager taking care of Chrome instances, with ChromeOS specific APIs. Google can release a Chromebook without any access to Crouton, replaced the Linux kernel by something else, and no USA school buying Chromebooks would notice. Same applies to Android, specially after the Android 7 locked on linking to private shared objects.
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      chromeOS is based on gentoo.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  > almost impossible to sell desktop software to GNU/Linux users. If you look at the engineering workstation segment, there are companies with hundreds or thousands of seats pooling FlexLM licenses of very expensive software, namely for microelectronics design. Those seats are typically RedHat or CentOS. If you look up revenues for Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys, most of it is EDA software licensing (remainder is mostly IP and training.) Not prime time news, but not pocket change either.
notalaser 10y ago
"Far less fragmented" is anything but a good description of what I remember. There was a time when you had reasonable chances of running applications which used five different toolkits -- Qt, GTK, WxWindows, Motif, Xaw (, FOX, the various "incarnations" of Xaw and so on, like Xaw3D and the one that gave it the NeXT look, I don't remember its name). You could drag and drop within a Xaw application, but not from a Xaw application to a Qt application. A lot of distros routinely shipped with like 5 windows managers, besides KDE and Gnome. There was a very brief period, between cca. 2005 and 2011 or so, when the fragmentation was less obvious because there was some degree of integration and cohesion (we had things like QtCurve, for instance). Then everyone started having delusions of grandeur again, in an early-90s-Unix manner, and things have been pretty much degrading ever since. Today's "Linux desktop ecosystem" (God I hate this particular sequence of words) seems less fragmented largely because application development outside the major desktop environments has been largely abandoned, except for very relevant niches (photo/video editing, web browsers). A development that's largely unsurprising between KDE's architecture astronautics and Gnome's see no feedback, speak no feedback, hear no feedback attitude (that GTK, sadly, adopted for a pretty long time). The unpleasant consequence is, of course, the "app problem" you speak of. A long time ago, the default KDE installation in Slackware 10 (which shipped with KDE 3.5, I think) shipped with a huge suite of applications, including graphical diff tools, VCS frontends, several multimedia players and so on. Two major rewrites later, they haven't re-accumulated this wealth of applications (and some of the ones that they do ship or advertise today are practically abandoned or remnants from the KDE 3 days). Some of the developments have been outright catastrophic, like KMail, which was turned from a very useful mail client to something that borks in a gazillion unpredictable ways as soon as you try to configure more than one account. Similar things are happening in Gnome land, where they've chased feature-parity with Gnome 2 for years as they've been scrambling to fix everything that wasn't wrong with it and the horde of bugs that ensued from these fixes. Which, in fact, is why they have three forks in the first place. There was a lot of negativity about the Gnome 1 -> Gnome 2 transition, too, but that never resulted in forking. Nowadays we have people trying to keep a KDE branch that hasn't been developed in almost ten years alive, and actively using it (TDE). That's because, for all its flashiness, Apple and design fetishism, the super-disruptive community of desktop developers has failed to develop anything that's convincingly better than what was available ten years ago. The discussion, for some reason, is centered on whether the UI metaphors are adequate, ignoring users' feedback that focuses on far more obvious things, like "this thing KEEPS FUCKING CRASHING", "I just did apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and now all my applications look weird" and "everything is huge on my screen and this would look great on a tablet but this is not a tablet". The Linux desktop today is far less fragmented, but that's because a) most of the people who could fragment it by developing fragmenting applications have long given up and use Macs and b) a lot of the traditional functions of a computer's desktop and applications have been eaten up by the web. There's little fragmentation to have when virtually all you use now is a web browser, the terminal and maybe a mail client.
Auzy 10y ago
Actually, back in early days, Linux was probably worse than Windows 98. A few things changed the landscape. Compositing on Xorg (to make the desktop modern finally), Pulseaudio (before then, Audio always had issues), DBUS and the rest of project Utopia. Steam also made a huge difference. I think Linux will be the better option after: SNAP/Wayland goes mainstream and JACK becomes easier (Low latency Audio on Linux is still a nightmare compared to Windows and OSX). But there are still a few rough edges. That being said, I use it for everything at home now, except for my Suunto GPS tracker, and Serato.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  PulseAudio took a while to be good. I recall removing it in every distro for years and using ALSA instead. Perhaps I didn't play sound very often in multiple apps at the same time (who can listen to two sounds at once?)
  - ajsalminen 10y ago
    I don't think being able to play multiple sounds simultanously from the desktop in the Win9x era was that common anyway although some sound cards probably supported it. I do find it useful for playing my own music while playing a game or watching some talk-only video and so on. Never had any issues with OSS or ALSA so I can't say audio "always having issues" before PulseAudio matches my experience at all... Maybe that's referring to ESD.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Never mind that Alsa offered dmix even back then, but you had to know to enable it yourself. Frankly the major reason for PA to exist at all is to handle transitory audio devices. I think Poettering started working on it because he bought himself a pair of USB headphones (basically a USB soundcard with some headphones hardwired to the analog pins). Dmix could just as well have been extended to do audio routing. Or just ram sound down all channels unless the user decides to mute some of them.
    - notalaser 10y ago
babuskov 10y ago
Yup, that was the exact time when I switched to Linux. KDE 3.x felt so much better than Windows XP, and OpenOffice just came out. Firefox (called Firebird at the time) also had the first release. For webdev work, it was great. You could deploy websites to remote server without having to care about Windows vs Linux filesystem differences. The only real problem which you missed is the hardware. Hardware support on Linux wasn't really good these days. I had to buy a new printer and scanner and setting the CRT monitor to work at acceptable framerate took a lot of fiddling with Xorg config.

jmiserez 10y ago

I remember both that Windows 95/98/ME had it's issues and that at some point you could even buy Linux distros in a box next to the Windows boxes. But how do you see the push Canonical did with Ubuntu? As I remember, the sentiment was that they were going to make Linux usable and easy for the average user, instead of going after advanced users. And IMHO they really succeeded in doing that, surely you're not saying that was all there before? A user with absolutely no Linux or terminal experience can use an Ubuntu system for writing letters/emails/browsing and doesn't need to ever touch the terminal (provided all hardware is supported).

keypress 10y ago
But even distros like Mepis or Knoppix were good pre-ubuntu. When hardware works out the box, everything is fine and dandy. As soon as it doesn't like with many OSs, it's a time waster, you loose your confidence with the entire project.
sten 10y ago
"A user with absolutely no Linux or terminal experience" I can speak to this. Both my wife and roommate use ubuntu referbished laptops I supplied. Neither knows what a terminal is or how to use it. It just works(tm).

adrianN 10y ago

I tried Linux back in the Win 98 days. I don't remember which distro. I went back to Windows because the X server crashed at least once a day. Windows was much more stable for me.

disiplus 10y ago

i think it is in your head, it was not easy, and most of the apps that you needed would not work there, i even had a lindows and that had the same problems, webapps where nonexistend, and while sure you could maybe find a decent replacement for one app you could not for others. everything was hacky, and there is no chance in hell that average person would run this. and then xp came and it was the better in in everything from 98/ME.

n3storm 10y ago

The "less fragmented" past you describe is not the past I remember. Back on those days you have WindowMaker, Enlightenment, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Sawfish and many more. All window managers where a choice apart from Gnome, Kde, FXCE or mixed with desktop environments. Corel Linux had their own Kde mod. Many distribution had their own administration tools and desktop environments had different settings and look and feel: Suse, Mandrake, Turbolinux, Yggdrassil, Stormlinux. I would also like to mention Slackware and Stampede Linux, just because...

wruza 10y ago
I'm not your parent commenter, but I think fragmentation mentioned is at lower level. Back then I could just install base system (few megabytes) and freely choose wms, panels, login managers, etc to build my desktop. Now I hardly can setup sound and x modes without installing e.g. gnome that pulls all the dependencies and initial settings. Lots of userspace modules now exist to make work things that worked out of box before. Dbus, pulseaudio, hal, etc. It is not unix-like anymore, it is bunch of poorly built osx-es on top of technology, that is half-functional unless magically tuned via Desktop Environment (r)(tm). Distro hell only made it slightly worse.
- n3storm 10y ago
  Some distros where more or less tied to a desktop environment on those days "a la Ubuntu" and some other offered the choice during installation or after. I have been using netinstall for my Debian machines for more than 8 years and I can do what you are talking about. Debian has had flavoured CDs for long time ago. Is not the first time a read somebody complain about lack of choice but unknowingly is only trying or using Ubuntu (not Kubuntu nor Xubuntu). May be in latest years Ubuntu has messed up a bit the percepction of Linux Desktop, but Linux Desktop is as healthy and fragmented as always.
  - wruza 10y ago
    Funny thing, I'm from '00 and never touched Ubuntu. Debian (2005), FreeBSD (2007) usually. And yeah, netinst, only needed things, so it's not my noob-experience. But now I can't make it work because... idk. This state, 'idk', was not even imaginable in old linux, because you opened the handbook/reference and solved it. Now I fail to do this, because there are so many layers that are out of control of core system developers, and it's all about gnome/kde/xfce/craphaldbuspulsed/etc. Recently installed xfce-debian showed me a page of cryptic mounts (systemd's job, right?). Even osx is not a monster anymore vs this crazy thing. And there is a probability that I'm also able to do all that on your box. Not sure about mine.

bad_user 10y ago

I started playing and using Linux around year 2000, before XP. My first computer was a Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and I went through the painful transition to Win 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 8 and 10, so I've known them all. The Linux you remember is very different than what I remember. To say that back then Linux was unusable on the desktop would be an understatement. Yes, you had Red Hat, Mandrake (later Mandriva) and SuSE that were trying hard to provide a usable desktop distribution, but nothing was working well. And people needed Win32 apps because there were no alternatives usable for Linux. Nowadays Linux usually works well on most hardware you can throw at it, it doesn't choke on the most basic of tasks and while it still has an app problem, sadly, the web is making that less relevant. Nowadays all that average users need is a good web browser, coupled with Linux's security and remote debugging capabilities, it's a very good fit for my father for example. Speaking of which, I don't have a high regard for companies and products popular among developers and that don't support Linux. I pay a premium for Dropbox because it works on my Linux box, even though my primary workstation is now OS X. And I've been transitioning away from 1Password. Voting with your wallet does work and if a company isn't supporting Linux then it means it doesn't want my money. OS X was in the same situation a while back, for certain use-cases it still is, yet it prevailed because people have stuck with it.

danieldk 10y ago
The Linux you remember is very different than what I remember. To say that back then Linux was unusable on the desktop would be an understatement. Yes, you had Red Hat, Mandrake (later Mandriva) and SuSE that were trying hard to provide a usable desktop distribution, but nothing was working well. And people needed Win32 apps because there were no alternatives usable for Linux. There was a reason why you could buy Linux in bookstores for years. People were actually using it. For instance, SuSE had quite a stronghold in Europe. I was still in high school and I knew quite a lot of people that were using SuSE Linux. coupled with Linux's security What security? It's running every application unsandboxed and each X11 application can read all keystrokes, mouse events, make screengrabs, etc. Linux on the desktop is way behind macOS and Windows when it comes to security. It's just not a very interesting target, because of its small marketshare. One can only hope that distributors will follow the lead of Fedora and move to Wayland soon.

keypress 10y ago

A huge issue in the past was the lack of a good web browser. Firefox really helped. Other annoyances were little things like Flash player. I've used Linux on the desktop as my main OS for at least a decade. Personally I'm really disappointed with the lack of noticeable progression on the desktop. There is a dearth of great desktop applications. As the article mentions, Thunderbird as an email client is _okay_. Rewind back to the late 90s, and applications like Winamp were pretty amazing, it just needed a better user interface. There are loads of music applications on Linux, but I end up using CLI mplayer and even Foobar2k under Wine, because of some of the other shortcomings. Even the core of Linux desktop applications like Nautilus feel like they are regressing. When a file manager in my mind should be at the heart of an OS. Mounts and copying should be very intuitive. Much functionality exists in CLI apps, but is stripped out or lacking in desktop applications. Having something like Rsync in your file manager could be great. And better integration with something like Git. But that's after the core utility of the application is polished to the max. It's the final 10%, and I appreciate how difficult that is, with moving targets weird Window tool-kits and other abstractions and APIs, but it's that polish that makes it. Having said that Windows always feels like a fragmented Frankenstein's monster with UI inconsistencies not only across core applications but also with third party ones. While some of the desktop paradigms have worn well, I don't see much radical experimentation on the desktop, and Linux could provide exactly the platform to try things out.

lottin 10y ago
I remember when the only available web browser was the "Mozilla suite", which was extremely slow and basically unusable. You could not play MP3 files out of the box due to patent issues. Most graphic cards only worked in VESA mode, so we had no 3D acceleration of any kind. But the worst thing was the lack of fonts. Fonts were truly abysmal. So I disagree that there has been no progression on the desktop front. The progression has been extraordinary. It's true that in some areas things have stalled a little or even gone backwards as of lately, mostly due to the introduction of Gnome 3 in my opinion, but all in all there's no contest between what we have now and what we had 15 years ago.
- danieldk 10y ago

pjmlp 10y ago

> people rely less than ever on native applications, so it's much easier to move now; I find it ironic that the GNU/Linux is the one that helped make the GNU/Linux desktop less relevant by fostering web apps. Anything that is able to run a recent browser is good enough. Also the desktop fragmentation and FOSS culture, makes it almost impossible to sell desktop software to GNU/Linux users.

danieldk 10y ago
I find it ironic that the GNU/Linux is the one that helped make the GNU/Linux desktop less relevant by fostering web apps. Anything that is able to run a recent browser is good enough. True, but it also boosts the non-traditional Linux desktop. Something like the Chromebook would be a flop 15 years ago.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I don't consider Chromebooks a Linux desktop, because normal people don't even know what is Crouton. They only see a window manager taking care of Chrome instances, with ChromeOS specific APIs. Google can release a Chromebook without any access to Crouton, replaced the Linux kernel by something else, and no USA school buying Chromebooks would notice. Same applies to Android, specially after the Android 7 locked on linking to private shared objects.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    chromeOS is based on gentoo.
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
> almost impossible to sell desktop software to GNU/Linux users. If you look at the engineering workstation segment, there are companies with hundreds or thousands of seats pooling FlexLM licenses of very expensive software, namely for microelectronics design. Those seats are typically RedHat or CentOS. If you look up revenues for Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys, most of it is EDA software licensing (remainder is mostly IP and training.) Not prime time news, but not pocket change either.

notalaser 10y ago

"Far less fragmented" is anything but a good description of what I remember. There was a time when you had reasonable chances of running applications which used five different toolkits -- Qt, GTK, WxWindows, Motif, Xaw (, FOX, the various "incarnations" of Xaw and so on, like Xaw3D and the one that gave it the NeXT look, I don't remember its name). You could drag and drop within a Xaw application, but not from a Xaw application to a Qt application. A lot of distros routinely shipped with like 5 windows managers, besides KDE and Gnome. There was a very brief period, between cca. 2005 and 2011 or so, when the fragmentation was less obvious because there was some degree of integration and cohesion (we had things like QtCurve, for instance). Then everyone started having delusions of grandeur again, in an early-90s-Unix manner, and things have been pretty much degrading ever since. Today's "Linux desktop ecosystem" (God I hate this particular sequence of words) seems less fragmented largely because application development outside the major desktop environments has been largely abandoned, except for very relevant niches (photo/video editing, web browsers). A development that's largely unsurprising between KDE's architecture astronautics and Gnome's see no feedback, speak no feedback, hear no feedback attitude (that GTK, sadly, adopted for a pretty long time). The unpleasant consequence is, of course, the "app problem" you speak of. A long time ago, the default KDE installation in Slackware 10 (which shipped with KDE 3.5, I think) shipped with a huge suite of applications, including graphical diff tools, VCS frontends, several multimedia players and so on. Two major rewrites later, they haven't re-accumulated this wealth of applications (and some of the ones that they do ship or advertise today are practically abandoned or remnants from the KDE 3 days). Some of the developments have been outright catastrophic, like KMail, which was turned from a very useful mail client to something that borks in a gazillion unpredictable ways as soon as you try to configure more than one account. Similar things are happening in Gnome land, where they've chased feature-parity with Gnome 2 for years as they've been scrambling to fix everything that wasn't wrong with it and the horde of bugs that ensued from these fixes. Which, in fact, is why they have three forks in the first place. There was a lot of negativity about the Gnome 1 -> Gnome 2 transition, too, but that never resulted in forking. Nowadays we have people trying to keep a KDE branch that hasn't been developed in almost ten years alive, and actively using it (TDE). That's because, for all its flashiness, Apple and design fetishism, the super-disruptive community of desktop developers has failed to develop anything that's convincingly better than what was available ten years ago. The discussion, for some reason, is centered on whether the UI metaphors are adequate, ignoring users' feedback that focuses on far more obvious things, like "this thing KEEPS FUCKING CRASHING", "I just did apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and now all my applications look weird" and "everything is huge on my screen and this would look great on a tablet but this is not a tablet". The Linux desktop today is far less fragmented, but that's because a) most of the people who could fragment it by developing fragmenting applications have long given up and use Macs and b) a lot of the traditional functions of a computer's desktop and applications have been eaten up by the web. There's little fragmentation to have when virtually all you use now is a web browser, the terminal and maybe a mail client.

Auzy 10y ago

Actually, back in early days, Linux was probably worse than Windows 98. A few things changed the landscape. Compositing on Xorg (to make the desktop modern finally), Pulseaudio (before then, Audio always had issues), DBUS and the rest of project Utopia. Steam also made a huge difference. I think Linux will be the better option after: SNAP/Wayland goes mainstream and JACK becomes easier (Low latency Audio on Linux is still a nightmare compared to Windows and OSX). But there are still a few rough edges. That being said, I use it for everything at home now, except for my Suunto GPS tracker, and Serato.

72deluxe 10y ago
PulseAudio took a while to be good. I recall removing it in every distro for years and using ALSA instead. Perhaps I didn't play sound very often in multiple apps at the same time (who can listen to two sounds at once?)
- ajsalminen 10y ago
  I don't think being able to play multiple sounds simultanously from the desktop in the Win9x era was that common anyway although some sound cards probably supported it. I do find it useful for playing my own music while playing a game or watching some talk-only video and so on. Never had any issues with OSS or ALSA so I can't say audio "always having issues" before PulseAudio matches my experience at all... Maybe that's referring to ESD.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Never mind that Alsa offered dmix even back then, but you had to know to enable it yourself. Frankly the major reason for PA to exist at all is to handle transitory audio devices. I think Poettering started working on it because he bought himself a pair of USB headphones (basically a USB soundcard with some headphones hardwired to the analog pins). Dmix could just as well have been extended to do audio routing. Or just ram sound down all channels unless the user decides to mute some of them.
  - notalaser 10y ago

babuskov 10y ago

Yup, that was the exact time when I switched to Linux. KDE 3.x felt so much better than Windows XP, and OpenOffice just came out. Firefox (called Firebird at the time) also had the first release. For webdev work, it was great. You could deploy websites to remote server without having to care about Windows vs Linux filesystem differences. The only real problem which you missed is the hardware. Hardware support on Linux wasn't really good these days. I had to buy a new printer and scanner and setting the CRT monitor to work at acceptable framerate took a lot of fiddling with Xorg config.