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What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

• labrador 10y ago
  This is news to me as I read on an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop
  • anbende 10y ago
    Agreed. Reading this on my Ubuntu 16.04 laptop. I may head over to my office and read it on my Ubuntu desktop later! (That said, I may in fact be part of the "developer culture" that surrounds desktop linux according to the article)
  • baobrain 10y ago
    Agreed, on opensuse 42.2 Granted, the state of linux on desktop was much different in 2012 than it is today. Back then UEFI support was garbage and you had to fiddle around and use things like rEFInd to get it to even boot.
  • spdy 10y ago
    Arch Linux / i3wm best time investment in a long time
  • johnchristopher 10y ago
    > 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_ 10y ago
      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?
  • adtac 10y ago
    You're a HN user. I think it's safe to say that you're more technically educated than the average user - which is where Linux has failed.
  • splintercell 10y ago
    Ubuntu clearly has not stepped up their game in terms of rendering dates.
• YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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...
• VonGuard 10y ago
  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.
  • jankotek 10y ago
    2001 laptop? Even contemporary systems (Win XP) would be slow on that. > Inside, it had plenty of power, an 850MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of RAM, and 802.11b for wireless networking (if you could find a wireless network, that is). Plus it had 20GB of storage, FireWire and even one USB port.
    • VonGuard 10y ago
      LOL, I use this very laptop with XP all the time. Yes, it is slow for modern tasks. But the XP OS is responsive! I can move the mouse, navigate menus, open the text editor. I can do this on this 2001 machine using Debian with no GUI, but not with Unity over Ubuntu. This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrived, we were fucked. We had to go and build our own image with Gnome as the default and install that. It was really stupid, and I never saw our users have any easier a time with Unity than they did with Gnome. It was a gratuitous change for change's sake.
• wolfgke 10y ago
  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-633569788 http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html#comment-633...
  • aidenn0 10y ago
    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.
    • digi_owl 10y ago
      These days when people say "audio broke" it is most likely the pulseaudio layer that is acting up (and their devs blaming bugs in alsa for the breakage).
    • paulddraper 10y ago
      DVDs, printers, and to a lesser extent graphics have more issues for me than audio.
• jankotek 10y ago
  Fedora switched to FreeBSD kernel? I better start reading release notes ;-)
• tangue 10y ago
  Strangely the author omits the KDE/GNOME schism he contributed to create.
  • Shorel 10y ago
    May be this article was a way to signal "I have finished my job here" to his current masters.
• convalleysili 10y ago
  In addition to the fact that you can't attach a McDonalds drive-thru to a garden.
• jstalin 10y ago
  Office. If Linux desktop had microsoft office, I could use it. Libre office is an unmitigated, ugly pile of shit.
  • bittercynic 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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 10y ago
          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.
    • herbst 10y ago
• ramblenode 10y ago
  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.
  • muninn_ 10y ago
    Part of that comes from the sense of ownership and the love that a tinkerer has for their projects. Not that it's a bad thing, but I think it's easy to see how that love would arrive.
  • dcdevito 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
    • fulafel 10y ago
      That might be true for some users, who are into the tweaking. But I don't think "OS as a challenge" characterises Linux users generally. All my Ubuntu laptop installs have been pretty much plug-n-play, and I leave out the "last 1%" like installing 3rd party drivers for the fingerprint reader. Last time I spent effort was when setting up dual boot on a Macbook, and all the effort was on the macOS sids, shrinking encrypted partitions using the CLI tools etc. (Of course I research Ubuntu compatibility beforehand and select the laptop based on that)
• JustBoo 10y ago
  FAKE NEWS.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• crispytx 10y ago
  I just read this on my Chromebook, powered by Linux.
  • youdontknowtho 10y ago
    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.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • pjmlp 10y ago
    Google can replace it by something else, Chrome won't complain.
• PaulHoule 10y ago
  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.
  • transposed 10y ago
    How common is this in Linux development? Is it better to have two competing solutions and "may the best one win"? Or would it be more effective for those two teams to work together on one project?
    • ue_ 10y ago
      Of course it would be more effective, but it's hard to coordinate individual ambitions and goals within one project, so much so that it will cause splits or over-engineering of features just to please developers. I don't know if GNU for example can get around that by having Stallman there to give the final say, or the Linux kernel with Torvalds there. Perhaps a similar approach would be good for DEs.
    • elihu 10y ago
      Part of the problem about KDE vs GTK is that it comes down to C++ vs C, which is a pretty big dividing line in the Linux programmer community. (You can have API wrappers, but the "native" language of the desktop environment influences the core abstractions, and so it'll probably seem more "natural" to use the same language the DE was written in.) Maybe someone will come along and write a new desktop environment in Rust or something that's better than the other two. My fear that then we'll have three desktop environments. Another option is to accept that these old debates will never be resolved and to start over with something new that isn't Linux. I've had a feeling like that's the best option that's been growing for the last few years. It's an enormous amount of work, though.
  • 10y ago
• epx 10y ago
  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
• seibelj 10y ago
  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-corner/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-co...
  • mnadkvlb 10y ago
    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.
• erikb 10y ago
  lol? The Linux desktop as a widespread phenomenon only started after 2012. Usually things can't die before they start.
• gravypod 10y ago
  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
  • shiven 10y ago
    You've hit the nail on the head. The lack of (enforced but painfully overrideable) standards was a fundamental contributor to fragmenting the "Linux Desktop", if there was such a thing to begin with. This coupled with the community philosophy of "one man's turd is another's lollipop", leads to a thousand flowers blooming, with none representative of a "Linux Desktop" and thus fundamentally confusing to new users in the target audience.
  • ryukafalz 10y ago
    >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 10y ago
      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-disk-utility-3.jpg?d8d5b3 http://cdn2.tekgoblinmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/Restore-di... https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/osx/preferences_overview.png https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare... 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.
• patrickaljord 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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...
• microcolonel 10y ago
  > 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?
• ianai 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• lutusp 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      things that have caused problems on my machine lately: 1. systemd 2. pulseaudio 3. avahi do you see a pattern?
      • microcolonel 10y ago
        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.
• shiven 10y ago
  Gnome 3 and Unity. The kiss of death.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• Asooka 10y ago
  That title implies the Linux Desktop was ever alive.
• Floegipoky 10y ago
  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.
• dcdevito 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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 10y ago
      > 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.
• Clubber 10y ago
  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.
• innocentoldguy 10y ago
  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.
• mmphosis 10y ago
  <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 10y ago
    >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 :)
• digi_owl 10y ago
  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.
• Shalhoub 10y ago
  'What Killed the Linux Desktop' by Miguel de Icaza
  • pawadu 10y ago
    TL;DR: Miguel de Icaza killed the Linux Desktop
• vectorpush 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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.
• dang 10y ago
  Big thread from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4450244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4450244
• faragon 10y ago
  Blaming Linus for whatever personal frustration with Linux is becoming a sport. From my side, I prefer simpler GUIs, without massive bloat.
• datenwolf 10y ago
  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 10y ago
  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???
  • stan_rogers 10y ago
    That's the dichotomy right there: the "I can fix everything" versus the "I shouldn't have to" user bases. "I shouldn't have to" is much, much larger. There does come a point where freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.
  • remir 10y ago
    I'd say Chrome OS will be the only Linux "distro" that will become mainstream.
    • pjmlp 10y ago
      Which by being a browser based OS, makes the kernel irrelevant. Google can even make Chrome run bare metal, no one would notice.
• shmerl 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Pretty much.
• bitwize 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Doesn't stop Android adoption.
      • closeparen 10y ago
        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.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
        • fooker 10y ago
          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)
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• st3fan 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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.
• deleted 10y ago
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• MrFurious 10y ago
  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...
• protomyth 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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
• gerbilly 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 :(
• no_wizard 10y ago
  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.
• sverige 10y ago
  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.
• Girlang 10y ago
  Interesting, but as someone who develops on Linux all day long , I run Windows 10, not OSX. It's a much better host OS for Linux VMs.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• madiathomas 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• raj_nayar 10y ago
  I guess linux desktop should have a UI just like chromeOS , Period. Designing UI requires different talent , more than just blurb
• Altay- 10y ago
  The Linux Desktop was never a thing so how could it be killed?
• legends2k 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• elihu 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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.
• alias_neo 10y ago
  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.