5 ms·

20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 4)

122 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

ChocolateGod 1y ago
> A JavaScript desktop? Seriously? Yeah, it was cool for screenshots but it was slow and barely usable. GNOME is at least usable now due to a mix of performance improvements over the years and faster hardware, but it still eats RAM (my current session is running at 3.4GB RSS with just the AppIndicators extension). But, I wonder had GNOME not gone this direction whether the Linux desktop wouldn't be so fragmented as it is now.
- p_l 1y ago
  GNOME started moving in that direction back in 2.4 release - GNOME 3 was where, for better or worse (my personal opinion for worse) they decided to experiment even further away from the beaten path. But the seeds of what became GNOME 3 were sown in first 3 releases of GNOME 2, not in widely discussed but unrelated to actual decisions talks about patents.
- rebeccaskinner 1y ago
  I remember back in the gnome2 days there was still a lot of fragmentation. Gnome, KDE, WindowMaker, AfterStep, Enlightenment, ratpoison. Linux has always appealed to tinkerers and that was always going to lead to some amount of fragmentation. I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily. For all of the complaints about it, systemd has unified a lot of things that used to be handled through desktop environments and made things less fragmented as a whole.
  - ChocolateGod 1y ago
    No the fragmentation is worse now, GNOME wasn't even going to support the same DRM-leasing protocol (needed for VR) that all the other Wayland compositors agreed on until Valve told them it was adamant it wasn't going to support their custom protocol.
  - 77pt77 1y ago
    > ratpoison That's a really fringe window manager. Not a desktop environment like the others.
    - spauldo 1y ago
      Afterstep and Windowmaker were also just window managers (you can kinda argue Windowmaker with the whole GNUSTEP thing, but that never really took off). I believe ratpoison is the granddaddy of today's tiling desktops, which have a decent following.
      - 77pt77 1y ago
        > I believe ratpoison is the granddaddy of today's tiling desktops I know. I'm using i3 as I write, bit no desktop environment.
        spauldo 1y ago
        I was arguing against the "really fringe" part. I agree it's not a DE. But I suppose it could go either way - ratpoison itself didn't have a very large user base, but it spawned a decent one if you count its successors.
        77pt77 1y ago
        > ratpoison itself didn't have a very large user base, but it spawned a decent one if you count its successors. Agree. Ratpoison itself was barely usable.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  The fragmented Linux desktop is not really a problem IMO. People want to customize their desktops. One way that could happen is through having some sort of grand super-flexible window manager than can do anything, and then customize their behavior in some configuration language. Another way is for interested folks to write their window managers in C or whatever language they want. The latter is usually more performant, and has less social coordination overhead, so it was the way things worked out. I mean, we have Windows and Apple, with all the programmer-hours spent on their window managers, and they aren’t anywhere near as flexible as the open source ecosystem.
p_l 1y ago
I see it repeats the claims of patents being responsible for GNOME choosing to go bonkers in GNOME 3 - Something that, for all that I dislike GNOME, at least they actually had courage to go on a new path and find it demeaning that it would be reduced to old FUD about patents.
righthand 1y ago
I think the general fallacy of Linux Desktop is that there needs to be some sort of tangible market share to make using it tangible. That’s never been the truth though, perhaps for Ubuntu, but most Linux distributions are made by people trying to escape the market share people.
- edg5000 1y ago
  > but most Linux distributions are made by people trying to escape the market share people I never thought about it like that, but it makes sense in a lot of ways! PS Linux desktop has reached 5% I believe.
  - coldpie 1y ago
    > > but most Linux distributions are made by people trying to escape the market share people > I never thought about it like that, but it makes sense in a lot of ways! Yeah. I developed Linux/open-source software for more than a decade, and the point was never to gain marketshare for Linux. The point was to develop good software that people would want to use. I don't care what software other people use, so long as it doesn't impact what software I can use. We would occasionally get suggestions from particularly enthusiastic users to make the experience worse(!) for Windows users, because it would promote the Linux experience. Just completely missing the point.
- Hilift 1y ago
  Hard to get to tangible with an ecosystem that is fragmented. There are products that support two or three distros but if you have something else it could be a deal breaker. We had some oddball distro for special devices that was imperfect in almost every way. That alone was infuriating, but the real fun came when evaluating third party products. We also had people that refused to upgrade from RHEL6.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    I saw a meme the other day about what Jigsaw would set up as a torture for a Linux developer in the Saw movies. It would be to have them sitting in a room, in front of a Linux laptop with a perfectly usable userland utility and expecting them to not reinvent the wheel. The door would be unlocked and the developer would be free to leave at any time.
streptomycin 1y ago
I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 rather than trying to do 50 different new things simultaneously... Personally I still use MATE :)
- MisterTea 1y ago
  The Gnome desktop churn was a bit of a headache. Gnome 3 took this weird tablet approach like Windows 8 did and it felt like they were playing "keeping up with the Jones's" instead of making a solid user experience. I remember around that time trying to record video from my Thinkpad's webcam using Cheese which was a buggy mess. That made me really mad as the Gnome team clearly focused on rearranging the furniture instead of focusing on improving the components that make up the entire desktop experience. I used to like Mate and moved to Cinnamon but lately I just use XFCE and call it a day.
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    I appreciate all open source work, but the gnome 3 UI definitely hit like an attempt to chase trends rather than improve usability. A lot of times, designers get pushed by team leadership to chase trendy paradigms and techniques because the leaders don’t want to feel like they’re out of date, but just like architectural changes in code, impetuous revamps cause problems that take time and testing to ferret out and address. Some of the design choices in Linux desktops over the years, however, just felt like ham-fisted amateur design. Who ever thought it was a good idea to have no visual feedback on a gui login screen while entering your password? Not even a password box, or anything saying “enter your password?” Something like that reeks of a cocky wannabe designer hearing a talk about reducing cognitive load by reducing unnecessary visual elements on a screen, probably figured “well the password doesn’t show up on the command line login, and if the password isn’t showing up, then why is a password box necessary” or something like that. Doing it right is harder than it looks.
    - edg5000 1y ago
      I don't get that argument. GNOME 3 with the Canonical app launcher (default on Ubuntu, it provides an alternative to the stock fullscreen app launcher with its awkwardly huge icons) really has great UI design. At least the statusbar controls, settings, file management, and basic apps like calculator. Not sure which parts you think are bad? (apart from the garbage stock app launcher, haha)
jmclnx 1y ago
Somehow I missed parts 1 -- 3, but those are linked in the part 4 article. Started with part 1, so far it seems interesting.
davidkwast 1y ago
It should be always XFCE (joke)
- jrm4 1y ago
  this, but without (joke)
- 77pt77 1y ago
  LxQT was pretty good.
fsflover 1y ago
Recent discussions: Part 1, 5 points, 4 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593958 Part 2, 36 points, 9 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435282 Part 3, 35 points, 12 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43320364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43320364
jrm4 1y ago
I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage, but funny that I'd never bothered to read up on the history and background of exactly why, so this is illuminating. For me it generally lines up with what it felt like was going on with those projects, aka "5 mediocres in a trenchcoat will never add up to a Steve Jobs, but lets go ahead and try and beat Apple at their own game." Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!"
- haunter 1y ago
  > Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!" huh I never thought about this but makes perfect sense. Sad times
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage Mostly agree, except one Unity feature that never came back in any other DE. What Canonical called the "HUD" - being able to search through application menus, like you can on macOS from the help menu (and now from spotlight on macOS 26). Instead everyone (Except KDE) decided to go backwards in terms of desktop UI design, and started shoving everything into stupid hamburger menus trying to look like Android because "Convergence" was the big buzz word of the time, and everyone (including Microsoft) thought we'd all just start using one device - a phone/tablet/PC hybrid device. Unfortunately, KDE was also going through its transition to KDE 4 at this time which eventually did get much better but it was rough going for a while. This was the time period that I moved to OS X, and have been on mac ever since. Ironically Apple is now going down the same road of missteps that the Linux DEs did back then, and would have pushed me back to linux by now if I could just get a laptop on par with the apple silicon macbooks.
linguae 1y ago
I remember the late 2000s and the early 2010s. This was not a good time for the Linux desktop. I was a Mac OS X user at the time, but I used Linux in virtual machines for development, and so I paid attention to the Linux desktop landscape. Let's step back half a decade to the mid-2000s. Things were looking great for the Linux desktop. GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were well-received, though I do remember some grumblings about GNOME 2 "dumbing down" certain UI elements. Also, Windows was fumbling back then. Windows XP at the time was suffering from security issues, and Windows Vista was poorly received. There was always the allure of Mac OS X for those who wanted a Unix desktop but with a proprietary desktop environment (Aqua) and support for proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite. Of course, switching to Mac OS X meant purchasing a Mac, which was a high barrier for many people. Given people's frustration with Windows at the time and the cost of buying a Mac, it seemed like the "the year of the Linux" desktop was just a few years away. But then came GNOME 3, which was so controversial that it led to the development of MATE and Cinnamon. KDE 4 was also not well-received, leading to a fork of KDE 3 named Trinity. In the meanwhile, Microsoft released Windows 7, which was well-received and is considered one of the best versions of Windows of all time, alongside Windows 2000. Also, Apple released Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which many Mac users consider the pinnacle of Mac OS X. I think the controversies surrounding GNOME 3 and KDE 4, combined with Microsoft's getting its act together for Windows 7 and the allure of Jobs-era Mac OS X releases, helped push back "the year of the Linux desktop." Personally I wish Etoile (http://etoileos.com/ http://etoileos.com/), an experimental desktop built using the GNUstep (https://www.gnustep.org/ https://www.gnustep.org/) framework in the late 2000s and early 2010s, had taken off....it would have been really cool to have some type of alternate universe FOSS Mac OS X-like system.
calvinmorrison 1y ago
KDE 3.5 Gang
- haunter 1y ago
  I use TDE more and more and unironically became my favorite DE nowadays https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
  - doublerabbit 1y ago
    I've recently found comfort in IceWM.
  - calvinmorrison 1y ago
    Yes I'm a sometimes contributor of tde
    - haunter 1y ago
      Thank you for your work!
      - calvinmorrison 1y ago
        My biggest contribution lately was clickable links on kcal meeting descriptions so I can easily launch my Google meets lol
danans 1y ago
Most people don't want to "install a distro" on their desktop computer. They buy desktop computers like they buy microwave ovens: hardware + OS without any sense of distinction between the two. Then they decide what to cook in it (based on their own culinary interests). There have been only a few opportunities in the history of desktop computing for a new user-facing OS to break through, usually at the emergence of a new user paradigm (i.e mobile), and those have all been captured by big brands like Apple, MS, and Google, using either complete vertical or tightly horizontal integration, and their offerings were mostly like microwave ovens. Ironically, all 3 of those companies now offer "Linux" that you can run on top of their desktop OS's to use for software development, effectively making Linux an "app", no different than Photoshop. And that paradigm works pretty well.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > Ironically, all 3 of those companies now offer "Linux" as an environment you can run on top of their desktop OS's for software development, effectively making Linux an "app", no different from Photoshop. And that paradigm works pretty well. It does work really well, almost too well. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that even though it's providing a useful feature, particularly for devs, it's all an anti-competitive practice to keep people from experiencing true computing freedom, going "See - you can have all your same Linux tools right from [macOS/Windows/ChromeOS/Android] - please stay on our proprietary and telemetry infested OS, don't free yourself. OTOH, WSL was a godsend when I had to use Windows, and actually made Windows relatively pleasant to use outside of the recent copilot everywhere shenanigans. There's something nice about having an integrated Linux environment (or "app") within a polished desktop environment with access to all the big commercial software. It doesn't feel good to use, from an ideological standpoint, but damn if it isn't productive.
  - danans 1y ago
    > it's all an anti-competitive practice to keep people from experiencing true computing freedom That's pretty much the history of all non-free software products, nothing specific to OS's. It turns out there isn't much of a market for computing freedom, but there is one for packaging up its innovations.
geoffbp 1y ago
2025 - year of the Linux desktop
somat 1y ago
What I like about the linux desktop is that it does not have to be this super heavy "and the kitchen sink" environment. There is a lot of freedom to be found here. Some would say almost too much. For example, I am a sys-admin, not only do I not mind managing my system via text console, I prefer it. It is fairly trivial to go off the deep end of "standard desktop environments" install one of them tiling window managers and have my perfect desktop, nothing overlaps, terminals for days, hot-keys to do anything, I never see my root window. No file-manager, it is almost the anti-desktop. I love it. But this amazing environment just does not exist in microsoft or apple land.

122 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

> A JavaScript desktop? Seriously? Yeah, it was cool for screenshots but it was slow and barely usable. GNOME is at least usable now due to a mix of performance improvements over the years and faster hardware, but it still eats RAM (my current session is running at 3.4GB RSS with just the AppIndicators extension). But, I wonder had GNOME not gone this direction whether the Linux desktop wouldn't be so fragmented as it is now.

p_l 1y ago
GNOME started moving in that direction back in 2.4 release - GNOME 3 was where, for better or worse (my personal opinion for worse) they decided to experiment even further away from the beaten path. But the seeds of what became GNOME 3 were sown in first 3 releases of GNOME 2, not in widely discussed but unrelated to actual decisions talks about patents.
rebeccaskinner 1y ago
I remember back in the gnome2 days there was still a lot of fragmentation. Gnome, KDE, WindowMaker, AfterStep, Enlightenment, ratpoison. Linux has always appealed to tinkerers and that was always going to lead to some amount of fragmentation. I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily. For all of the complaints about it, systemd has unified a lot of things that used to be handled through desktop environments and made things less fragmented as a whole.
- ChocolateGod 1y ago
  No the fragmentation is worse now, GNOME wasn't even going to support the same DRM-leasing protocol (needed for VR) that all the other Wayland compositors agreed on until Valve told them it was adamant it wasn't going to support their custom protocol.
- 77pt77 1y ago
  > ratpoison That's a really fringe window manager. Not a desktop environment like the others.
  - spauldo 1y ago
    Afterstep and Windowmaker were also just window managers (you can kinda argue Windowmaker with the whole GNUSTEP thing, but that never really took off). I believe ratpoison is the granddaddy of today's tiling desktops, which have a decent following.
    - 77pt77 1y ago
      > I believe ratpoison is the granddaddy of today's tiling desktops I know. I'm using i3 as I write, bit no desktop environment.
      - spauldo 1y ago
        I was arguing against the "really fringe" part. I agree it's not a DE. But I suppose it could go either way - ratpoison itself didn't have a very large user base, but it spawned a decent one if you count its successors.
        77pt77 1y ago
        > ratpoison itself didn't have a very large user base, but it spawned a decent one if you count its successors. Agree. Ratpoison itself was barely usable.
bee_rider 1y ago
The fragmented Linux desktop is not really a problem IMO. People want to customize their desktops. One way that could happen is through having some sort of grand super-flexible window manager than can do anything, and then customize their behavior in some configuration language. Another way is for interested folks to write their window managers in C or whatever language they want. The latter is usually more performant, and has less social coordination overhead, so it was the way things worked out. I mean, we have Windows and Apple, with all the programmer-hours spent on their window managers, and they aren’t anywhere near as flexible as the open source ecosystem.

p_l 1y ago

I see it repeats the claims of patents being responsible for GNOME choosing to go bonkers in GNOME 3 - Something that, for all that I dislike GNOME, at least they actually had courage to go on a new path and find it demeaning that it would be reduced to old FUD about patents.

righthand 1y ago

I think the general fallacy of Linux Desktop is that there needs to be some sort of tangible market share to make using it tangible. That’s never been the truth though, perhaps for Ubuntu, but most Linux distributions are made by people trying to escape the market share people.

edg5000 1y ago
> but most Linux distributions are made by people trying to escape the market share people I never thought about it like that, but it makes sense in a lot of ways! PS Linux desktop has reached 5% I believe.
- coldpie 1y ago
  > > but most Linux distributions are made by people trying to escape the market share people > I never thought about it like that, but it makes sense in a lot of ways! Yeah. I developed Linux/open-source software for more than a decade, and the point was never to gain marketshare for Linux. The point was to develop good software that people would want to use. I don't care what software other people use, so long as it doesn't impact what software I can use. We would occasionally get suggestions from particularly enthusiastic users to make the experience worse(!) for Windows users, because it would promote the Linux experience. Just completely missing the point.
Hilift 1y ago
Hard to get to tangible with an ecosystem that is fragmented. There are products that support two or three distros but if you have something else it could be a deal breaker. We had some oddball distro for special devices that was imperfect in almost every way. That alone was infuriating, but the real fun came when evaluating third party products. We also had people that refused to upgrade from RHEL6.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  I saw a meme the other day about what Jigsaw would set up as a torture for a Linux developer in the Saw movies. It would be to have them sitting in a room, in front of a Linux laptop with a perfectly usable userland utility and expecting them to not reinvent the wheel. The door would be unlocked and the developer would be free to leave at any time.

streptomycin 1y ago

I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 rather than trying to do 50 different new things simultaneously... Personally I still use MATE :)

MisterTea 1y ago
The Gnome desktop churn was a bit of a headache. Gnome 3 took this weird tablet approach like Windows 8 did and it felt like they were playing "keeping up with the Jones's" instead of making a solid user experience. I remember around that time trying to record video from my Thinkpad's webcam using Cheese which was a buggy mess. That made me really mad as the Gnome team clearly focused on rearranging the furniture instead of focusing on improving the components that make up the entire desktop experience. I used to like Mate and moved to Cinnamon but lately I just use XFCE and call it a day.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  I appreciate all open source work, but the gnome 3 UI definitely hit like an attempt to chase trends rather than improve usability. A lot of times, designers get pushed by team leadership to chase trendy paradigms and techniques because the leaders don’t want to feel like they’re out of date, but just like architectural changes in code, impetuous revamps cause problems that take time and testing to ferret out and address. Some of the design choices in Linux desktops over the years, however, just felt like ham-fisted amateur design. Who ever thought it was a good idea to have no visual feedback on a gui login screen while entering your password? Not even a password box, or anything saying “enter your password?” Something like that reeks of a cocky wannabe designer hearing a talk about reducing cognitive load by reducing unnecessary visual elements on a screen, probably figured “well the password doesn’t show up on the command line login, and if the password isn’t showing up, then why is a password box necessary” or something like that. Doing it right is harder than it looks.
  - edg5000 1y ago
    I don't get that argument. GNOME 3 with the Canonical app launcher (default on Ubuntu, it provides an alternative to the stock fullscreen app launcher with its awkwardly huge icons) really has great UI design. At least the statusbar controls, settings, file management, and basic apps like calculator. Not sure which parts you think are bad? (apart from the garbage stock app launcher, haha)

jmclnx 1y ago

Somehow I missed parts 1 -- 3, but those are linked in the part 4 article. Started with part 1, so far it seems interesting.

davidkwast 1y ago

It should be always XFCE (joke)

jrm4 1y ago
this, but without (joke)
77pt77 1y ago
LxQT was pretty good.

fsflover 1y ago

Recent discussions: Part 1, 5 points, 4 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593958 Part 2, 36 points, 9 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435282 Part 3, 35 points, 12 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43320364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43320364

jrm4 1y ago

I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage, but funny that I'd never bothered to read up on the history and background of exactly why, so this is illuminating. For me it generally lines up with what it felt like was going on with those projects, aka "5 mediocres in a trenchcoat will never add up to a Steve Jobs, but lets go ahead and try and beat Apple at their own game." Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!"

haunter 1y ago
> Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!" huh I never thought about this but makes perfect sense. Sad times
thewebguyd 1y ago
> I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage Mostly agree, except one Unity feature that never came back in any other DE. What Canonical called the "HUD" - being able to search through application menus, like you can on macOS from the help menu (and now from spotlight on macOS 26). Instead everyone (Except KDE) decided to go backwards in terms of desktop UI design, and started shoving everything into stupid hamburger menus trying to look like Android because "Convergence" was the big buzz word of the time, and everyone (including Microsoft) thought we'd all just start using one device - a phone/tablet/PC hybrid device. Unfortunately, KDE was also going through its transition to KDE 4 at this time which eventually did get much better but it was rough going for a while. This was the time period that I moved to OS X, and have been on mac ever since. Ironically Apple is now going down the same road of missteps that the Linux DEs did back then, and would have pushed me back to linux by now if I could just get a laptop on par with the apple silicon macbooks.

linguae 1y ago

I remember the late 2000s and the early 2010s. This was not a good time for the Linux desktop. I was a Mac OS X user at the time, but I used Linux in virtual machines for development, and so I paid attention to the Linux desktop landscape. Let's step back half a decade to the mid-2000s. Things were looking great for the Linux desktop. GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were well-received, though I do remember some grumblings about GNOME 2 "dumbing down" certain UI elements. Also, Windows was fumbling back then. Windows XP at the time was suffering from security issues, and Windows Vista was poorly received. There was always the allure of Mac OS X for those who wanted a Unix desktop but with a proprietary desktop environment (Aqua) and support for proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite. Of course, switching to Mac OS X meant purchasing a Mac, which was a high barrier for many people. Given people's frustration with Windows at the time and the cost of buying a Mac, it seemed like the "the year of the Linux" desktop was just a few years away. But then came GNOME 3, which was so controversial that it led to the development of MATE and Cinnamon. KDE 4 was also not well-received, leading to a fork of KDE 3 named Trinity. In the meanwhile, Microsoft released Windows 7, which was well-received and is considered one of the best versions of Windows of all time, alongside Windows 2000. Also, Apple released Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which many Mac users consider the pinnacle of Mac OS X. I think the controversies surrounding GNOME 3 and KDE 4, combined with Microsoft's getting its act together for Windows 7 and the allure of Jobs-era Mac OS X releases, helped push back "the year of the Linux desktop." Personally I wish Etoile (http://etoileos.com/ http://etoileos.com/), an experimental desktop built using the GNUstep (https://www.gnustep.org/ https://www.gnustep.org/) framework in the late 2000s and early 2010s, had taken off....it would have been really cool to have some type of alternate universe FOSS Mac OS X-like system.

calvinmorrison 1y ago

KDE 3.5 Gang

haunter 1y ago
I use TDE more and more and unironically became my favorite DE nowadays https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
- doublerabbit 1y ago
  I've recently found comfort in IceWM.
- calvinmorrison 1y ago
  Yes I'm a sometimes contributor of tde
  - haunter 1y ago
    Thank you for your work!
    - calvinmorrison 1y ago
      My biggest contribution lately was clickable links on kcal meeting descriptions so I can easily launch my Google meets lol

danans 1y ago

Most people don't want to "install a distro" on their desktop computer. They buy desktop computers like they buy microwave ovens: hardware + OS without any sense of distinction between the two. Then they decide what to cook in it (based on their own culinary interests). There have been only a few opportunities in the history of desktop computing for a new user-facing OS to break through, usually at the emergence of a new user paradigm (i.e mobile), and those have all been captured by big brands like Apple, MS, and Google, using either complete vertical or tightly horizontal integration, and their offerings were mostly like microwave ovens. Ironically, all 3 of those companies now offer "Linux" that you can run on top of their desktop OS's to use for software development, effectively making Linux an "app", no different than Photoshop. And that paradigm works pretty well.

thewebguyd 1y ago
> Ironically, all 3 of those companies now offer "Linux" as an environment you can run on top of their desktop OS's for software development, effectively making Linux an "app", no different from Photoshop. And that paradigm works pretty well. It does work really well, almost too well. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that even though it's providing a useful feature, particularly for devs, it's all an anti-competitive practice to keep people from experiencing true computing freedom, going "See - you can have all your same Linux tools right from [macOS/Windows/ChromeOS/Android] - please stay on our proprietary and telemetry infested OS, don't free yourself. OTOH, WSL was a godsend when I had to use Windows, and actually made Windows relatively pleasant to use outside of the recent copilot everywhere shenanigans. There's something nice about having an integrated Linux environment (or "app") within a polished desktop environment with access to all the big commercial software. It doesn't feel good to use, from an ideological standpoint, but damn if it isn't productive.
- danans 1y ago
  > it's all an anti-competitive practice to keep people from experiencing true computing freedom That's pretty much the history of all non-free software products, nothing specific to OS's. It turns out there isn't much of a market for computing freedom, but there is one for packaging up its innovations.

geoffbp 1y ago

2025 - year of the Linux desktop

somat 1y ago

What I like about the linux desktop is that it does not have to be this super heavy "and the kitchen sink" environment. There is a lot of freedom to be found here. Some would say almost too much. For example, I am a sys-admin, not only do I not mind managing my system via text console, I prefer it. It is fairly trivial to go off the deep end of "standard desktop environments" install one of them tiling window managers and have my perfect desktop, nothing overlaps, terminals for days, hot-keys to do anything, I never see my root window. No file-manager, it is almost the anti-desktop. I love it. But this amazing environment just does not exist in microsoft or apple land.