4 ms·

This post is a nice case study why the year of desktop Linux is unlikely to happen any time soon, or didn’t happen in the past. It takes large engineering work

This post is a nice case study why the year of desktop Linux is unlikely to happen any time soon, or didn’t happen in the past. It takes large engineering work to write all the software, and needs discipline and people working on very boring areas and aspects of the UI. I find it unlikely any OSS community will ever pull it off, unless there is a clear monetary incentive to fund it and work hard.

sph 4y ago
There is no reason to think it can't be pulled off, but the Linux world suffers from catastrophic amounts of bike shedding. The Linux desktop needs a leader figure. A Steve Jobs, or a Linus Torvalds. Leave it to the community, and everybody wants to reinvent the wheel and paint it their favourite colour. Directed innovation can only be achieved from a single vantage point, not by a committee, let alone a ragtag of independent actors.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  How do you propose that people work for free at the behest of a leader directing such unpaid contributors how to o their work? Slave labor?
  - sph 4y ago
    How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? The official repo is under his personal account at github.com/torvalds/linux And regular for profit companies aren't incompatible with Linux. Canonical, Red Hat, etc. make billions from open source. Let me stress this again: the only reason the Linux desktop sucks is organizational. Not monetary, not technological. Linux would be a niche project today if Linus had been replaced by a committee or other loose organization. The Linux kernel is successful because there is a person at the top saying "No." The Linux desktop has no such thing. None of the singular desktop environment have such a thing. GNOME has no BDFL, nor does KDE. So its endless bikeshedding and churning and going nowhere.
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      > How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? Right confluence of factors to a large extent. GNU needed a kernel, and BSD was mired in legal trouble. Linux was there at the right time to provide a GNU-friendly kernel made from scratch. I think the GPL was also a fortunate choice. It ensured large companies couldn't easily have a closed in-house version and had incentives to contribute to the common good.
    - account42 4y ago
      > The official repo is under his personal account at github.com/torvalds/linux I think you mean https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
      - sph 4y ago
        Right, I stand corrected. Point is, it's Linus that merges what he wants in his tree. The kernel development isn't a democratic process, not everything has to be. Everybody can fork it and be the big boss themselves, the fact that nobody and no company has succeeded in doing so is worth thinking about.
        initramfs 4y ago
        Yeah, and the thing about forking is, it's not that it shouldn't be done, but it should be done in an organized way- too much forking and you could have many people interested in a common alternative, but not enough coordination to pull it off. https://cmustrudel.github.io/papers/fse19forks.pdf https://cmustrudel.github.io/papers/fse19forks.pdf "What the Fork: A Study of Inefficient and Efficient Forking Practices in Social Coding" 2019
    - alxlaz 4y ago
      > How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free. That's not to say there aren't people contributing code written in their spare time. I'm one of them (but not completely: there's stuff I wrote on my own, and submitted in my own name, and also a bunch of stuff I wrote on the job). But the vast majority of people contributing critical code are not doing it for free, and haven't been doing it for free for a very, very long time. Unpaid contributions are the exception, rather than the norm.
acomjean 4y ago
Sigh. Lamentably I think you are right. Although to be fair I'm using linux as my daily driver and it works great (PopOS X11 still...) Though I fear adding extra confusion to writing desktop linux apps isn't going to help things get better. I would like to write some applications for linux when my work life ends, but there seems to be a dozen different ways to do it. A ton of choices to make I don't fully understand, but I really don't want to have to know the nuances of the windowing system to be able to write something that works well with KDE and Gnome, Qt, GTK and whatever else one needs to know about compositors... A lot of stuff is web based now and linux handles that great, but desktop apps still have a place. I feel like sometimes being the "best" platform doesn't matter so much as being able to target most distros with less work would help the ecosystem a ton. Using Linux as my daily driver so hope springs eternal. Developers! developers! developers!
- freedomben 4y ago
  I agree completely. FWIW, if you use Qt, your app will look and work good pretty much everywhere, excepting if you want to integrate deeply with the shell. But for most apps it's not an issue. I'm optimistic and hopeful regarding newer GTK. It seems to be modernizing nicely, though I haven't actually written an app in it yet. If I could wish for one thing for Linux though, it would be a great toolkit to target it that also makes distribution a breeze. That it is still an unsolved problem causes me pain.

sph 4y ago

There is no reason to think it can't be pulled off, but the Linux world suffers from catastrophic amounts of bike shedding. The Linux desktop needs a leader figure. A Steve Jobs, or a Linus Torvalds. Leave it to the community, and everybody wants to reinvent the wheel and paint it their favourite colour. Directed innovation can only be achieved from a single vantage point, not by a committee, let alone a ragtag of independent actors.

encryptluks2 4y ago
How do you propose that people work for free at the behest of a leader directing such unpaid contributors how to o their work? Slave labor?
- sph 4y ago
  How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? The official repo is under his personal account at github.com/torvalds/linux And regular for profit companies aren't incompatible with Linux. Canonical, Red Hat, etc. make billions from open source. Let me stress this again: the only reason the Linux desktop sucks is organizational. Not monetary, not technological. Linux would be a niche project today if Linus had been replaced by a committee or other loose organization. The Linux kernel is successful because there is a person at the top saying "No." The Linux desktop has no such thing. None of the singular desktop environment have such a thing. GNOME has no BDFL, nor does KDE. So its endless bikeshedding and churning and going nowhere.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    > How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? Right confluence of factors to a large extent. GNU needed a kernel, and BSD was mired in legal trouble. Linux was there at the right time to provide a GNU-friendly kernel made from scratch. I think the GPL was also a fortunate choice. It ensured large companies couldn't easily have a closed in-house version and had incentives to contribute to the common good.
  - account42 4y ago
    > The official repo is under his personal account at github.com/torvalds/linux I think you mean https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
    - sph 4y ago
      Right, I stand corrected. Point is, it's Linus that merges what he wants in his tree. The kernel development isn't a democratic process, not everything has to be. Everybody can fork it and be the big boss themselves, the fact that nobody and no company has succeeded in doing so is worth thinking about.
      - initramfs 4y ago
        Yeah, and the thing about forking is, it's not that it shouldn't be done, but it should be done in an organized way- too much forking and you could have many people interested in a common alternative, but not enough coordination to pull it off. https://cmustrudel.github.io/papers/fse19forks.pdf https://cmustrudel.github.io/papers/fse19forks.pdf "What the Fork: A Study of Inefficient and Efficient Forking Practices in Social Coding" 2019
  - alxlaz 4y ago
    > How did Linus convince hordes of people of contributing to his kernel, his trademark, for free? You will find -- unsurprisingly -- that most of them are not contributing for free. That's not to say there aren't people contributing code written in their spare time. I'm one of them (but not completely: there's stuff I wrote on my own, and submitted in my own name, and also a bunch of stuff I wrote on the job). But the vast majority of people contributing critical code are not doing it for free, and haven't been doing it for free for a very, very long time. Unpaid contributions are the exception, rather than the norm.

acomjean 4y ago

Sigh. Lamentably I think you are right. Although to be fair I'm using linux as my daily driver and it works great (PopOS X11 still...) Though I fear adding extra confusion to writing desktop linux apps isn't going to help things get better. I would like to write some applications for linux when my work life ends, but there seems to be a dozen different ways to do it. A ton of choices to make I don't fully understand, but I really don't want to have to know the nuances of the windowing system to be able to write something that works well with KDE and Gnome, Qt, GTK and whatever else one needs to know about compositors... A lot of stuff is web based now and linux handles that great, but desktop apps still have a place. I feel like sometimes being the "best" platform doesn't matter so much as being able to target most distros with less work would help the ecosystem a ton. Using Linux as my daily driver so hope springs eternal. Developers! developers! developers!

freedomben 4y ago
I agree completely. FWIW, if you use Qt, your app will look and work good pretty much everywhere, excepting if you want to integrate deeply with the shell. But for most apps it's not an issue. I'm optimistic and hopeful regarding newer GTK. It seems to be modernizing nicely, though I haven't actually written an app in it yet. If I could wish for one thing for Linux though, it would be a great toolkit to target it that also makes distribution a breeze. That it is still an unsolved problem causes me pain.