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I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point. Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crap

by nirvana 14y ago

I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point. Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. Before I go on, let me say that Design is NOT "making it look pretty". In fact, thinking that this is what design is, is what leads many linux advocates to reject the needs of design. Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well. Design is about usability and understanding the user and making an interface for the user that works well according to the users understanding, perspective and needs. Design is an engineering discipline. Seriously. The Linux community hasn't had that, and I've seen many of them reject it. In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example. You see it all the time in lots of contexts. Look at the UIs of Linux... they didn't design one, they just copied windows. Literal copying is about as far from design as you can get. Sure, over the years, designers have taken cracks at bringing design to linux, including the work of Ubuntu, but it is rejected by the community. Rejection of design is a cultural trait of the linux community. They reject it as a discipline, doesn't even see that it exists. (broadly speaking, of course.) But as users, they have been influenced by it and many of them have switched to OS X because it is the best designed operating system. And then they write long blog posts about how its wrong that OS X does things a certain way ... based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way. Its ironic. But its fine- if you want to run a linux desktop and don't value or care about design, more power to you. Won't ever fault someone for making that decision. We should all use the systems that we prefer. But the culture that doesn't value design, and can't even see it as an engineering discipline, is going to have a great deal of trouble making something usable by the mainstream.

untog 14y ago
Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. [...] Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well. Actually, I'd say the same of Windows, if not more so. I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down.
- batista 14y ago
  >I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down. I'm not sure. Windows has some overall design, but also has tons of design neglect. One example: due to static compiling and linking, you often get programs (and lots of them) that still use Windows 98 like Open/Save File dialogs, instead of every program automatically getting the latest OS standard widget with late binding. Or things like the Metro/Windows dichotomy in the latest version. Windows always feels design by committee to me, and one where some manager can have idiotic ideas and no developer/designer can shoot it down.
  - seabee 14y ago
    That example isn't due to static linking, it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility. Software compiled in 1998 has no problem using the newest common dialogs if they used the standard API without installing their own hooks and customisation.
    - batista 14y ago
      >That example isn't due to static linking, it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility. I'm not sure what this means though: "it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility." So you mean something like the Windows API featured 2-3 different dialog styles and they set some option / flag in their code to use one that was subsequently not updated by MS? Could be. But at least the dialog style could change, it seems in Windows API all drawing is hardcoded, so the dialog also comes with the old style buttons etc. MS should have continue to offer the dialog styles they once had as options instead of deprecating them. But even failing that, they should at least made it so that their graphical elements (sub-widgets like buttons, text fields etc) are kept updated. That doesn't involve changing the API or binary compatibility will the calling program. Also, seeing those dialogs in old shareware/commercial programs when run on modern Windows is one thing. But one also sees them in some very-rarely-updated MS applications that MS ships with Windows. At least you did, until Vista (haven't used Windows since). Another infuriating thing from Windows dialogs of old --that still appear in apps: when the size of text-entries, icon fields etc is too small, but the dialog is not resizable.
gavinlynch 14y ago
Thank you. All too-often that entire line of thinking was minimized into simply "caring about eye-candy" and summarily dismissed. That irked me. It was like with the Linux desktop, you had to choose a side, instead of simply marrying what is great about GNU/Linux with what is great about a cohesive modern design and user experience.
wonderzombie 14y ago
At the risk of re-igniting that flame war, I posit that this is also a cathedral vs. bazaar issue. OS X is more or less centrally planned, by one company, Apple.
- spiralpolitik 14y ago
  There is nothing stopping people sourcing the parts from the bazaar and using them to build a cathedral. After all it's exactly what NeXT (and Apple) did.
  - mbreese 14y ago
    Yeah, but you need an architect that people will listen to in order to build a cathedral. It has to be many people, united under a common vision. That's really hard to pull off in the Linux community.
    - misnome 14y ago
      This is a reason for poor design, not an excuse
- tristan_juricek 14y ago
  I would think so, but OS X has had several great or important applications within it's ecosystem, that break UI conventions. Twitter clients used to be a playground for new UI concepts, none of which came from Apple. The Sparrow mail client was a good example of something probably more influenced by Tweetie than anything else. Even Apple doesn't have a ton of consistency. iTunes continues to baffle me with random changes things like what resize does. The App Store app shifted the window management buttons. So I don't buy that the OS X ecosystem is a "cathedral" at all, just a bazaar with better taste. What's interesting is that I noticed the standards of design for Mac apps were significantly better than Windows apps when I "made the switch" several years ago; and these are for apps that were not coming out of Apple. I could never entirely figure out why; the ecosystem was just more attuned to details. I posit that Apple was helped by having the right people excited long enough to get a great ecosystem going. Linux didn't die because it's a bazaar; every modern app ecosystem (OS X, iOS, Android, the web) functions like a bazaar. Linux just made it absolutely painful to set up shop.
batista 14y ago
>I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point. Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. I'm not sure he is missing it, even if he doesn't name it explicitly on the post. For one, he was always pro good design (and trying to get the good design parts of other systems), but also, when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side, he is essentially lamenting the lack of a central design authority.
- alberich 14y ago
  > when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side Maybe that is what really makes Linux struggle as a desktop. Fragmentation. It really sucks to have to install hundreds of libraries to run an app because you run Gnome but it was made for KDE. It's always unconfortable to change environments because it's not just different looks, it is different ways of doing things. Some users and hackers do like choice, but most common users don't, because it is reduces the number of things to learn. You don't have to copy MS Win or OS X to be good, but consistency is good, and unless you select a subset of Linux desktop (and its related apps) you will be missing a more consistent user experience.
scrumper 14y ago
This is pretty much spot on. I believe that the lack of "strong-D" Design you refer to is because Linux's desktop is pretty much the ultimate committee-driven project. It's very democratic: great for preventing abuse, but rather bad when it comes to vision. Most of us here know how difficult it is for one person in a company to drive an idea through without it being diluted; countless product companies have gone bust over the years because of committee-induced paralysis. It's much worse when you have a distributed group of volunteers who rarely, if ever, get to meet. Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project.
- mratzloff 14y ago
  Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project. The Rails community seems to manage.
  - jmelloy 14y ago
    Rails has a pretty strong leader in DHH.
    - mratzloff 14y ago
      But there are strong personalities in the Linux community as well.
  - scrumper 14y ago
    Well, Rails is a web framework. It's not an end user desktop environment like Gnome, KDE, NeXTStep, Windows or what have you. Collaborative development does rather well with developer tools.
    - mratzloff 14y ago
SCdF 14y ago
So I enjoyed using Ubuntu w. Gnome2 more than any other OS/window manager that I've used, which includes Win 98-7, and Snow Leopard->ML. I thought it was designed well. So what does that make me then? "if you want to run a linux desktop and don't value or care about design" But I do care about design, it just sounds like you and I like different kinds of design.
freyrs3 14y ago
> Design is about usability and understanding the user Here's the point you're missing. The overwhelming majority Linux users don't give a flying hoot about the average user or mass adoption. They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. Linux succeeds and excels at this because it is precisely designed for that niche and curated by its end-users. There are however people who do care about mass adoption, i.e. Canonical, "Linux Advocates". Generally they're either emotionally invested in Linux for some reason or they get a paycheck for their work. These people are the minority of Linux users. Saying the culture doesn't care about design is absurd, it's the non-technical user we don't care about. Let's not conflate the two. Looking at a piece of software like XMonad or TMux it's hard to not appreciate the elegance in it's design. It's just different form of design that say iTunes or Photoshop.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  I actually ditched Linux as a primary OS as it didn't get out of my way, I had to spend way too much time burying into the system to get the results I needed. That can in a few cases be attributed to poor design, the thought process seems often to be "I get this piece of design fine, everyone else will".
- lazyjones 14y ago
  > They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. That's precisely what Linux fails at. Most minor UI/desktop-related tasks that are hassle-free with Win7 or OSX take far too much time. Time that most people don't have and don't want to invest. Example: doubleclicking on a .ttf file in the Xfce file manager (plain Debian Xfce) does nothing. Right-clicking offers various unrelated applications. Copying the file to an appropriate font directory does not "install" the font so it is visible to applications. No, I have to shut down all terminal windows and restart them to be able to use the font. Do you see an advantage in this? I don't want to spend time doing (or even researching) this when I could be developing instead (with the best console font known to mankind please!). Desktop Linux just lacks basic functionality and wastes people's time. Sure, I was fine developing with fvwm2 or twm 15 years ago and did not mind using xfontsel and "xset fp rehash" back then, but today it feels like an unproductive waste of time when Win7 and OSX (esp. OSX) do not "get in my way" in any conceivable meaning of the phrase when I just want to develop stuff in an environment that I can adjust to my liking. If you think Linux on the desktop hasn't failed for and abandoned by most technical users, you're delusional.
anigbrowl 14y ago
The last time Linux on the desktop looked and felt good was when Enlightenment DR16 came out. When I installed Ubuntu last year I felt like I was using something for children.
misnome 14y ago
I completely endorse this, and wish I could hit the "up" arrow hundreds of times over. It's also refreshing to see a comment like this that isn't immediately shot down. It's hard to overstate the importance of actually having things written by someone with at least a sense of what it takes to make an intuitive and pleasant-to-use interface. The problem that linux seems to have, is that everyone wants everything and so everything gets thrown in with configuration options to change absolutely everything. I don't think, however, that lack of good design - or even seeing the need for it, is isolated to linux - in a very real sense, I think most of the population is usually oblivious to it - they just know whether something is easy to use or not.
rufugee 14y ago
I'm sorry..I strongly disagree. You have me on the video support...OS X does a much better job there. You even have a point on audio drivers...they can be a pain at times. But design? Gnome 3 and Unity to me are FAR superior to OS X in terms of UI experience. YMMV of course. I bought a Macbook, gave it a fair shot, and it ended up being a dust collector simply because the desktop experience was painful compared to Ubuntu or Fedora (well, that and the fact that I got maybe three hours of the supposed 7 hour battery, and the fact that I can't upgrade it past 4 GB of ram o.O). Perhaps I'm set in my ways, but the absolute insanse window switching behavior, the piss poor excuse for a terminal, the fact that apps continue to run in the background after you close the last window, and the general SLOW performance made my $2500 investment one I'll regret for very long time. Switching to a Lenovo running Ubuntu was a far better (and MUCH cheaper) experience.
- thornofmight 14y ago
  "Perhaps I'm set in my ways" -- I think this pretty much says it all.
- sjs 14y ago
  It sounds like you expected a clone of Windows and were predictably disappointed. > I got maybe three hours of the supposed 7 hour battery You should have taken it back. Seriously. > Perhaps I'm set in my ways You hit the nail on the head here. There's nothing wrong with that but most of your complaints amount to "this is not what I am used to". > the absolute insanse window switching behavior On Windows and Linux I cannot switch to an app bringing all windows to the front, I have to do it one at a time. Anyone used to one behaviour could claim the other is insane just because it is different. > the piss poor excuse for a terminal What on earth are you talking about? The Terminal app? Get iTerm2 or something else then. If you don't like gnome-terminal you don't whine about it, you just install urxvt or whatever. > the fact that apps continue to run in the background after you close the last window The fact that you have to have visible windows for an app to run on Windows and Linux could be perceived the same way. What if I wanted to switch back and use that app again?
  - lttlrck 14y ago
mindslight 14y ago
You're conflating design with the marketing and support that convinces people to open themselves to learning a new system design. Linux copied the Windows interaction paradigm (and everything else too - fvwm95/afterstep/olvwm/cde/etc) because the goal wasn't to create a new method of interaction and suffer from two adoption battles, but to appease people complaining about how Linux wasn't intuitive (after they'd already gone through one UI learning curve). Ubuntu will never ship with a default tiling window manager (certainly not the "best" design, but it's a novel design). > based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way. If a user desires for their operating environment to function in some way, they should be able to develop that customization, full stop. I use 24 virtual desktops with windows generally maximized, switching between them with [Alt+]F1-F12. Is this good design, especially for the average user? Hell no. But it fits my desires and is quick enough that I can't understand why people desire multiple monitors. The idea of someone saying my setup is 'wrong' from a design perspective is laughable, and only serves to illustrate the bounds of the field. > This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. Sigh, back to this again? Nope, what's being rejected is the idea that engineering an implementation of a concept should get you the rights to the entire concept through a "concept plus computer" patent. Where's the novel signal processing algorithms to clean up capacitive touchscreen input? Instead, we get descriptions of straightforward processes in terms of vague programming idioms.
- nirvana 14y ago
  >You're conflating design with the marketing and support No, I'm talking about knowing that users are faster and more efficient when the menu bar is at the top of the screen rather than attached to windows. Design makes people more efficient. Undesigned things, or poorly designed things don't care about these factors, or do them half assed. > The idea of someone saying my setup is 'wrong' from a design perspective is laughable, This is because you reject design. You claim it is marketing. You reject it as an engineering discipline. That's my point. >Where's the novel signal processing algorithms to clean up capacitive touchscreen input? Patented, and you guys claim that the patent is disproven by the existence of "touch screens" in the past that worked by pushing one layer in enough that two wires touched closing a circuit. > should get you the rights to the entire concept The only people claiming that the rights to an entire concept are involved are those who are trying to claim that these are bogus patents... which is either profoundly ignorant or completely dishonest.
zerostar07 14y ago
I would bet if you ask people what they don't like in their linux setup design would come last. The main issues i hear seem to be compatibility and missing obvious functionality (oh clipboard). In fact , most desktops are so configurable you can actually make them look great. If you want to make a system popular, start with the people who are actually using it. Linux is used by technical people, so why are they putting us off with silly animations and glossy layers that will break in the next upgrade? OSX is not easier to use either, it has many nonintuitive quirks but they stick to their design and improve it instead of overhauling it.
- nirvana 14y ago
  Right, because the people who use linux don't understand what design is. Look at the responses to my comments-- almost all of them defending linux make comments that show they don't understand what design is. They think it is how it looks. >OSX is not easier to use either, it has many nonintuitive quirks but they stick to their design and improve it instead of overhauling it. I suspect you simply haven't used OS X much. It was designed correctly and is intuitive. The reason you think its "unintuitive" is likely you've been trained to use a broken system that was not designed correctly and thus what feels "natural" to you-- which is actually learned behavior-- feels wrong on OS X. Meanwhile, Apple has continued to improve their design, and in the rare case where they got something wrong, they fix it -- for instance, they reversed the direction of scrolling to make it more intuitive... move the finger up on the trackpad and the page moves up on the screen. They don't need to overhaul it because they have been improving it for 3 decades.... They've done such a good job at it, that you think they havent' done anything!
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - zerostar07 14y ago
    I said there are some quirks , OSX is very usable in general although first time users do have to learn the ropes. For example, maybe everyone likes the fact that the maximize window does different things depending on the app or hate using keyboard shortcuts but i don't. I didn't mean to be anyone's advocate, as you seem to do.
JoeAltmaier 14y ago
Maturity is the driving factor. Linux has a lot of immature attempts at a desktop. OS X has one but not a lot of time or manpower spent perfecting it (XCode sucks, Core APIs are weak/incomplete, OS support lacking for fundamentals). Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools.
- derleth 14y ago
  > Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools. And yet it still BSODs on me too often to be actually usable.
  - seabee 14y ago
    Bad hardware/drivers are more likely to be the culprit...
    - Shamanmuni 14y ago
      When something doesn't work or works badly on Linux, the critics always say it's Linux fault (just read the comments here). Hold Windows and OS X to the same standard and you'll see they aren't so wonderful in comparison.
    - JoeAltmaier 14y ago
      Sorry to hear about that. Windows isn't a closed hardware platform like OS X, so driver support can be difficult (Windows update helps a lot on that). Also, are you overclocking? Using a 4-year-old motherboard? There has to be some reason for BSOD - it's not a normal condition. Not making excuses, hundreds of millions of machines run for years without doing it.
      - derleth 14y ago
        > Windows isn't a closed hardware platform like OS X I use Linux.
derleth 14y ago
> Apple's work looks pretty To you. Not to everyone. > Look at the UIs of Linux... they didn't design one, they just copied windows. Yes, because ratpoison looks just like Windows 95. Just like.
lallysingh 14y ago
Linux never got usable enough for design to matter. The process of getting linux to boot, and then run usably -- with wireless networking and sound -- was too hard. If you got as far as being able to actually get work done, you claimed victory and used your machine as a continuing monument to your success. In 2001, when I switched from Linux to OS X, the mere fact that I could go buy a machine, turn it on, open a terminal, and type 'ls' was enough to make me switch. It still took hours to get a portable machine working reliably with linux -- and it took 2 machines if you wanted wifi to work at the time. One to get wifi working, and another to look up the documentation and download whatever you needed. Even as I'm back on Linux, I don't think of buying anything other than a ThinkPad, for the fear of returning to that worthlessly hellish place.
joe_the_user 14y ago
Design is important, really. However I find it disturbing that such a self-righteous rant has crawled up the rankings in this thread... Design is an engineering discipline. Design isn't engineering discipline. It is certainly a discipline and deserves respect but the reason software engineers fail at design so often is that it is different discipline with a different mindset. Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well. Here I simply disagree. Apple's look pretty because they are designed well. I don't find that they function well in terms of usability - that I have to use the mouse for nearly everything is a usability nightmare. The way they've hidden file system is also a usability nightmare. But enough prettiness and responsiveness, Apple can still feel enjoyable to use without being more useful or even as useful as Linux or Windows. In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example. Wow! Holy leaps of logic, here we've got the disingenuous conflation part of the rant. For the sake of argument, the particular way iOS or OSX is designed might indeed be a work of genius but the patents Apple is hurling Samsung are not for that unique approach but rather are a disgusting grab of the right for anything vaguely like iOS or OSX, which would include really badly designed things. Jeesh...
agentultra 14y ago
This mythical user must also be the bottom of the barrel. I don't think the Apple designers ever consulted me when they designed OS X. Who were they designing for? Everyone? How can they possibly conceive of what every user wants but me? This "design," argument is a floppy, magical, hand-waving fish. I know what design is. I design software all the damn time. I am sensitive to interface and expectation. I want as little friction between my tool and the thing I am creating. In that regard, as a software developer, OS X is a piss-poor experience. Using emacs on the thing is ripping years out of the cartilage in my fingers due to the masochistic meta-key layout that I've had to accustom myself to. It's terrible. The eco-system of package management systems on OS X is infuriatingly shoddy. Between macports, homebrew, and fink -- none of them can seem to get it quite right. They have to compete with the user-land eco-system that Apple ships. Half the packages are broken. And I can never bloody well find any configuration files anywhere once it has installed something. It's ludicrous how much time I've wasted trying to figure out how in the seven hells you're supposed to get MySQL or Postgres to run on the damn thing (there are half a dozen ways at least by my reckoning and google's). Their /design/ isn't the best design there is. They are designing for someone, but it surely isn't me. If you happen to fall into their mold then I'm sure you're as happy as a clam but don't think the entire world of people are just like you.

by nirvana 14y ago

untog 14y ago

Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. [...] Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well. Actually, I'd say the same of Windows, if not more so. I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down.

batista 14y ago
>I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down. I'm not sure. Windows has some overall design, but also has tons of design neglect. One example: due to static compiling and linking, you often get programs (and lots of them) that still use Windows 98 like Open/Save File dialogs, instead of every program automatically getting the latest OS standard widget with late binding. Or things like the Metro/Windows dichotomy in the latest version. Windows always feels design by committee to me, and one where some manager can have idiotic ideas and no developer/designer can shoot it down.
- seabee 14y ago
  That example isn't due to static linking, it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility. Software compiled in 1998 has no problem using the newest common dialogs if they used the standard API without installing their own hooks and customisation.
  - batista 14y ago
    >That example isn't due to static linking, it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility. I'm not sure what this means though: "it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility." So you mean something like the Windows API featured 2-3 different dialog styles and they set some option / flag in their code to use one that was subsequently not updated by MS? Could be. But at least the dialog style could change, it seems in Windows API all drawing is hardcoded, so the dialog also comes with the old style buttons etc. MS should have continue to offer the dialog styles they once had as options instead of deprecating them. But even failing that, they should at least made it so that their graphical elements (sub-widgets like buttons, text fields etc) are kept updated. That doesn't involve changing the API or binary compatibility will the calling program. Also, seeing those dialogs in old shareware/commercial programs when run on modern Windows is one thing. But one also sees them in some very-rarely-updated MS applications that MS ships with Windows. At least you did, until Vista (haven't used Windows since). Another infuriating thing from Windows dialogs of old --that still appear in apps: when the size of text-entries, icon fields etc is too small, but the dialog is not resizable.

gavinlynch 14y ago

Thank you. All too-often that entire line of thinking was minimized into simply "caring about eye-candy" and summarily dismissed. That irked me. It was like with the Linux desktop, you had to choose a side, instead of simply marrying what is great about GNU/Linux with what is great about a cohesive modern design and user experience.

wonderzombie 14y ago

At the risk of re-igniting that flame war, I posit that this is also a cathedral vs. bazaar issue. OS X is more or less centrally planned, by one company, Apple.

spiralpolitik 14y ago
There is nothing stopping people sourcing the parts from the bazaar and using them to build a cathedral. After all it's exactly what NeXT (and Apple) did.
- mbreese 14y ago
  Yeah, but you need an architect that people will listen to in order to build a cathedral. It has to be many people, united under a common vision. That's really hard to pull off in the Linux community.
  - misnome 14y ago
    This is a reason for poor design, not an excuse
tristan_juricek 14y ago
I would think so, but OS X has had several great or important applications within it's ecosystem, that break UI conventions. Twitter clients used to be a playground for new UI concepts, none of which came from Apple. The Sparrow mail client was a good example of something probably more influenced by Tweetie than anything else. Even Apple doesn't have a ton of consistency. iTunes continues to baffle me with random changes things like what resize does. The App Store app shifted the window management buttons. So I don't buy that the OS X ecosystem is a "cathedral" at all, just a bazaar with better taste. What's interesting is that I noticed the standards of design for Mac apps were significantly better than Windows apps when I "made the switch" several years ago; and these are for apps that were not coming out of Apple. I could never entirely figure out why; the ecosystem was just more attuned to details. I posit that Apple was helped by having the right people excited long enough to get a great ecosystem going. Linux didn't die because it's a bazaar; every modern app ecosystem (OS X, iOS, Android, the web) functions like a bazaar. Linux just made it absolutely painful to set up shop.

batista 14y ago

>I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point. Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. I'm not sure he is missing it, even if he doesn't name it explicitly on the post. For one, he was always pro good design (and trying to get the good design parts of other systems), but also, when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side, he is essentially lamenting the lack of a central design authority.

alberich 14y ago
> when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side Maybe that is what really makes Linux struggle as a desktop. Fragmentation. It really sucks to have to install hundreds of libraries to run an app because you run Gnome but it was made for KDE. It's always unconfortable to change environments because it's not just different looks, it is different ways of doing things. Some users and hackers do like choice, but most common users don't, because it is reduces the number of things to learn. You don't have to copy MS Win or OS X to be good, but consistency is good, and unless you select a subset of Linux desktop (and its related apps) you will be missing a more consistent user experience.

scrumper 14y ago

This is pretty much spot on. I believe that the lack of "strong-D" Design you refer to is because Linux's desktop is pretty much the ultimate committee-driven project. It's very democratic: great for preventing abuse, but rather bad when it comes to vision. Most of us here know how difficult it is for one person in a company to drive an idea through without it being diluted; countless product companies have gone bust over the years because of committee-induced paralysis. It's much worse when you have a distributed group of volunteers who rarely, if ever, get to meet. Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project.

mratzloff 14y ago
Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project. The Rails community seems to manage.
- jmelloy 14y ago
  Rails has a pretty strong leader in DHH.
  - mratzloff 14y ago
    But there are strong personalities in the Linux community as well.
- scrumper 14y ago
  Well, Rails is a web framework. It's not an end user desktop environment like Gnome, KDE, NeXTStep, Windows or what have you. Collaborative development does rather well with developer tools.
  - mratzloff 14y ago

SCdF 14y ago

So I enjoyed using Ubuntu w. Gnome2 more than any other OS/window manager that I've used, which includes Win 98-7, and Snow Leopard->ML. I thought it was designed well. So what does that make me then? "if you want to run a linux desktop and don't value or care about design" But I do care about design, it just sounds like you and I like different kinds of design.

freyrs3 14y ago

> Design is about usability and understanding the user Here's the point you're missing. The overwhelming majority Linux users don't give a flying hoot about the average user or mass adoption. They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. Linux succeeds and excels at this because it is precisely designed for that niche and curated by its end-users. There are however people who do care about mass adoption, i.e. Canonical, "Linux Advocates". Generally they're either emotionally invested in Linux for some reason or they get a paycheck for their work. These people are the minority of Linux users. Saying the culture doesn't care about design is absurd, it's the non-technical user we don't care about. Let's not conflate the two. Looking at a piece of software like XMonad or TMux it's hard to not appreciate the elegance in it's design. It's just different form of design that say iTunes or Photoshop.

nicholassmith 14y ago
I actually ditched Linux as a primary OS as it didn't get out of my way, I had to spend way too much time burying into the system to get the results I needed. That can in a few cases be attributed to poor design, the thought process seems often to be "I get this piece of design fine, everyone else will".
lazyjones 14y ago
> They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. That's precisely what Linux fails at. Most minor UI/desktop-related tasks that are hassle-free with Win7 or OSX take far too much time. Time that most people don't have and don't want to invest. Example: doubleclicking on a .ttf file in the Xfce file manager (plain Debian Xfce) does nothing. Right-clicking offers various unrelated applications. Copying the file to an appropriate font directory does not "install" the font so it is visible to applications. No, I have to shut down all terminal windows and restart them to be able to use the font. Do you see an advantage in this? I don't want to spend time doing (or even researching) this when I could be developing instead (with the best console font known to mankind please!). Desktop Linux just lacks basic functionality and wastes people's time. Sure, I was fine developing with fvwm2 or twm 15 years ago and did not mind using xfontsel and "xset fp rehash" back then, but today it feels like an unproductive waste of time when Win7 and OSX (esp. OSX) do not "get in my way" in any conceivable meaning of the phrase when I just want to develop stuff in an environment that I can adjust to my liking. If you think Linux on the desktop hasn't failed for and abandoned by most technical users, you're delusional.

anigbrowl 14y ago

The last time Linux on the desktop looked and felt good was when Enlightenment DR16 came out. When I installed Ubuntu last year I felt like I was using something for children.

misnome 14y ago

I completely endorse this, and wish I could hit the "up" arrow hundreds of times over. It's also refreshing to see a comment like this that isn't immediately shot down. It's hard to overstate the importance of actually having things written by someone with at least a sense of what it takes to make an intuitive and pleasant-to-use interface. The problem that linux seems to have, is that everyone wants everything and so everything gets thrown in with configuration options to change absolutely everything. I don't think, however, that lack of good design - or even seeing the need for it, is isolated to linux - in a very real sense, I think most of the population is usually oblivious to it - they just know whether something is easy to use or not.

rufugee 14y ago

I'm sorry..I strongly disagree. You have me on the video support...OS X does a much better job there. You even have a point on audio drivers...they can be a pain at times. But design? Gnome 3 and Unity to me are FAR superior to OS X in terms of UI experience. YMMV of course. I bought a Macbook, gave it a fair shot, and it ended up being a dust collector simply because the desktop experience was painful compared to Ubuntu or Fedora (well, that and the fact that I got maybe three hours of the supposed 7 hour battery, and the fact that I can't upgrade it past 4 GB of ram o.O). Perhaps I'm set in my ways, but the absolute insanse window switching behavior, the piss poor excuse for a terminal, the fact that apps continue to run in the background after you close the last window, and the general SLOW performance made my $2500 investment one I'll regret for very long time. Switching to a Lenovo running Ubuntu was a far better (and MUCH cheaper) experience.

thornofmight 14y ago
"Perhaps I'm set in my ways" -- I think this pretty much says it all.
sjs 14y ago
It sounds like you expected a clone of Windows and were predictably disappointed. > I got maybe three hours of the supposed 7 hour battery You should have taken it back. Seriously. > Perhaps I'm set in my ways You hit the nail on the head here. There's nothing wrong with that but most of your complaints amount to "this is not what I am used to". > the absolute insanse window switching behavior On Windows and Linux I cannot switch to an app bringing all windows to the front, I have to do it one at a time. Anyone used to one behaviour could claim the other is insane just because it is different. > the piss poor excuse for a terminal What on earth are you talking about? The Terminal app? Get iTerm2 or something else then. If you don't like gnome-terminal you don't whine about it, you just install urxvt or whatever. > the fact that apps continue to run in the background after you close the last window The fact that you have to have visible windows for an app to run on Windows and Linux could be perceived the same way. What if I wanted to switch back and use that app again?
- lttlrck 14y ago

mindslight 14y ago

You're conflating design with the marketing and support that convinces people to open themselves to learning a new system design. Linux copied the Windows interaction paradigm (and everything else too - fvwm95/afterstep/olvwm/cde/etc) because the goal wasn't to create a new method of interaction and suffer from two adoption battles, but to appease people complaining about how Linux wasn't intuitive (after they'd already gone through one UI learning curve). Ubuntu will never ship with a default tiling window manager (certainly not the "best" design, but it's a novel design). > based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way. If a user desires for their operating environment to function in some way, they should be able to develop that customization, full stop. I use 24 virtual desktops with windows generally maximized, switching between them with [Alt+]F1-F12. Is this good design, especially for the average user? Hell no. But it fits my desires and is quick enough that I can't understand why people desire multiple monitors. The idea of someone saying my setup is 'wrong' from a design perspective is laughable, and only serves to illustrate the bounds of the field. > This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. Sigh, back to this again? Nope, what's being rejected is the idea that engineering an implementation of a concept should get you the rights to the entire concept through a "concept plus computer" patent. Where's the novel signal processing algorithms to clean up capacitive touchscreen input? Instead, we get descriptions of straightforward processes in terms of vague programming idioms.

nirvana 14y ago
>You're conflating design with the marketing and support No, I'm talking about knowing that users are faster and more efficient when the menu bar is at the top of the screen rather than attached to windows. Design makes people more efficient. Undesigned things, or poorly designed things don't care about these factors, or do them half assed. > The idea of someone saying my setup is 'wrong' from a design perspective is laughable, This is because you reject design. You claim it is marketing. You reject it as an engineering discipline. That's my point. >Where's the novel signal processing algorithms to clean up capacitive touchscreen input? Patented, and you guys claim that the patent is disproven by the existence of "touch screens" in the past that worked by pushing one layer in enough that two wires touched closing a circuit. > should get you the rights to the entire concept The only people claiming that the rights to an entire concept are involved are those who are trying to claim that these are bogus patents... which is either profoundly ignorant or completely dishonest.

zerostar07 14y ago

I would bet if you ask people what they don't like in their linux setup design would come last. The main issues i hear seem to be compatibility and missing obvious functionality (oh clipboard). In fact , most desktops are so configurable you can actually make them look great. If you want to make a system popular, start with the people who are actually using it. Linux is used by technical people, so why are they putting us off with silly animations and glossy layers that will break in the next upgrade? OSX is not easier to use either, it has many nonintuitive quirks but they stick to their design and improve it instead of overhauling it.

nirvana 14y ago
Right, because the people who use linux don't understand what design is. Look at the responses to my comments-- almost all of them defending linux make comments that show they don't understand what design is. They think it is how it looks. >OSX is not easier to use either, it has many nonintuitive quirks but they stick to their design and improve it instead of overhauling it. I suspect you simply haven't used OS X much. It was designed correctly and is intuitive. The reason you think its "unintuitive" is likely you've been trained to use a broken system that was not designed correctly and thus what feels "natural" to you-- which is actually learned behavior-- feels wrong on OS X. Meanwhile, Apple has continued to improve their design, and in the rare case where they got something wrong, they fix it -- for instance, they reversed the direction of scrolling to make it more intuitive... move the finger up on the trackpad and the page moves up on the screen. They don't need to overhaul it because they have been improving it for 3 decades.... They've done such a good job at it, that you think they havent' done anything!
- deleted 14y ago
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- zerostar07 14y ago
  I said there are some quirks , OSX is very usable in general although first time users do have to learn the ropes. For example, maybe everyone likes the fact that the maximize window does different things depending on the app or hate using keyboard shortcuts but i don't. I didn't mean to be anyone's advocate, as you seem to do.

JoeAltmaier 14y ago

Maturity is the driving factor. Linux has a lot of immature attempts at a desktop. OS X has one but not a lot of time or manpower spent perfecting it (XCode sucks, Core APIs are weak/incomplete, OS support lacking for fundamentals). Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools.

derleth 14y ago
> Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools. And yet it still BSODs on me too often to be actually usable.
- seabee 14y ago
  Bad hardware/drivers are more likely to be the culprit...
  - Shamanmuni 14y ago
    When something doesn't work or works badly on Linux, the critics always say it's Linux fault (just read the comments here). Hold Windows and OS X to the same standard and you'll see they aren't so wonderful in comparison.
  - JoeAltmaier 14y ago
    Sorry to hear about that. Windows isn't a closed hardware platform like OS X, so driver support can be difficult (Windows update helps a lot on that). Also, are you overclocking? Using a 4-year-old motherboard? There has to be some reason for BSOD - it's not a normal condition. Not making excuses, hundreds of millions of machines run for years without doing it.
    - derleth 14y ago
      > Windows isn't a closed hardware platform like OS X I use Linux.

derleth 14y ago

> Apple's work looks pretty To you. Not to everyone. > Look at the UIs of Linux... they didn't design one, they just copied windows. Yes, because ratpoison looks just like Windows 95. Just like.

lallysingh 14y ago

Linux never got usable enough for design to matter. The process of getting linux to boot, and then run usably -- with wireless networking and sound -- was too hard. If you got as far as being able to actually get work done, you claimed victory and used your machine as a continuing monument to your success. In 2001, when I switched from Linux to OS X, the mere fact that I could go buy a machine, turn it on, open a terminal, and type 'ls' was enough to make me switch. It still took hours to get a portable machine working reliably with linux -- and it took 2 machines if you wanted wifi to work at the time. One to get wifi working, and another to look up the documentation and download whatever you needed. Even as I'm back on Linux, I don't think of buying anything other than a ThinkPad, for the fear of returning to that worthlessly hellish place.

joe_the_user 14y ago

Design is important, really. However I find it disturbing that such a self-righteous rant has crawled up the rankings in this thread... Design is an engineering discipline. Design isn't engineering discipline. It is certainly a discipline and deserves respect but the reason software engineers fail at design so often is that it is different discipline with a different mindset. Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well. Here I simply disagree. Apple's look pretty because they are designed well. I don't find that they function well in terms of usability - that I have to use the mouse for nearly everything is a usability nightmare. The way they've hidden file system is also a usability nightmare. But enough prettiness and responsiveness, Apple can still feel enjoyable to use without being more useful or even as useful as Linux or Windows. In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example. Wow! Holy leaps of logic, here we've got the disingenuous conflation part of the rant. For the sake of argument, the particular way iOS or OSX is designed might indeed be a work of genius but the patents Apple is hurling Samsung are not for that unique approach but rather are a disgusting grab of the right for anything vaguely like iOS or OSX, which would include really badly designed things. Jeesh...

agentultra 14y ago

This mythical user must also be the bottom of the barrel. I don't think the Apple designers ever consulted me when they designed OS X. Who were they designing for? Everyone? How can they possibly conceive of what every user wants but me? This "design," argument is a floppy, magical, hand-waving fish. I know what design is. I design software all the damn time. I am sensitive to interface and expectation. I want as little friction between my tool and the thing I am creating. In that regard, as a software developer, OS X is a piss-poor experience. Using emacs on the thing is ripping years out of the cartilage in my fingers due to the masochistic meta-key layout that I've had to accustom myself to. It's terrible. The eco-system of package management systems on OS X is infuriatingly shoddy. Between macports, homebrew, and fink -- none of them can seem to get it quite right. They have to compete with the user-land eco-system that Apple ships. Half the packages are broken. And I can never bloody well find any configuration files anywhere once it has installed something. It's ludicrous how much time I've wasted trying to figure out how in the seven hells you're supposed to get MySQL or Postgres to run on the damn thing (there are half a dozen ways at least by my reckoning and google's). Their /design/ isn't the best design there is. They are designing for someone, but it surely isn't me. If you happen to fall into their mold then I'm sure you're as happy as a clam but don't think the entire world of people are just like you.