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Even the well-thought-out desktop environments, however, have massive glaring holes in them, e.g. the wifi utility on Ubuntu and Mint is totally broken, almost

Even the well-thought-out desktop environments, however, have massive glaring holes in them, e.g. the wifi utility on Ubuntu and Mint is totally broken, almost all the time, occasionally even lending itself to stroboscopic behavior, and I've never found a distro where the wifi utility actually did everything it was supposed to. Yes, it's distributed ownership, and while that explains why the problem exists, I don't feel it's an excuse. There is definitely room for someone to come in with good product sense plus technical excellence and work to make a really great desktop OS on Linux, it just hasn't happened yet.

dangus 5y ago
That last sentence is a multiple 6 figure salary's worth of job description. The reason why the "year of the Linux desktop" has never happened is because nobody wants to work for free. As soon as you say the word "product" the word "salary" has to follow.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Most of the programming that happens in the Linux world would be compensated along those lines as well. The trick is that developers tend to be deeply aware of the value of contributing to open source and, well, product managers less so.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Disagreed; even if you get that person with a 6-figure salary they'll get bogged down in political and/or technical bikeshedding and won't be able to make any progress. For the "year of the Linux desktop" to happen you'll need dozens/hundreds of these 6-figure employees at every level of the stack (from kernel to desktop environment to apps) to be able to build a coherent system from scratch and being able to ignore/work around all the BS and wastes of time that currently plagues the Linux distro world. I do believe you'll be successful to an extent, though whether the result can still be called a "Linux desktop" as opposed to something more like Android (Linux kernel but non-standard GUI stack) will be up for debate.

dangus 5y ago

That last sentence is a multiple 6 figure salary's worth of job description. The reason why the "year of the Linux desktop" has never happened is because nobody wants to work for free. As soon as you say the word "product" the word "salary" has to follow.

ironmagma 5y ago
Most of the programming that happens in the Linux world would be compensated along those lines as well. The trick is that developers tend to be deeply aware of the value of contributing to open source and, well, product managers less so.
Nextgrid 5y ago
Disagreed; even if you get that person with a 6-figure salary they'll get bogged down in political and/or technical bikeshedding and won't be able to make any progress. For the "year of the Linux desktop" to happen you'll need dozens/hundreds of these 6-figure employees at every level of the stack (from kernel to desktop environment to apps) to be able to build a coherent system from scratch and being able to ignore/work around all the BS and wastes of time that currently plagues the Linux distro world. I do believe you'll be successful to an extent, though whether the result can still be called a "Linux desktop" as opposed to something more like Android (Linux kernel but non-standard GUI stack) will be up for debate.