I think some of this is perceptive. It's true that the attempt by both Canonical (Unity) and Red Hat (Gnome 3) to sort-of-incompatibly break away from the so close to standard that it hurts to type this Gnome 2 environment did a lot more harm than good, at least as far as platform adoption goes.
And clearly OS X is an extremely polished Unix and is going to appeal to the more UI-focused of the hacker set. And Miquel is definitely among the most UI-focused of the hacker set. He's also an inconsolate "platform fan". Much of his early work was chasing Microsoft products and technologies, of course; now he's an iPhone nut apparently, and that doesn't really surprise me.
But at the same time the Linux desktop was never really in the game. I use it (Gnome 3 currently) and prefer it. Lots of others do. For many, it really does just work better. But in a world where super-polished products are the norm, a hacker-focused suite of software isn't ever going to amount to more than a curiosity. (And again, I say this as someone who will likely never work in a Windows or OS X desktop.)
So in that light, I think the idea that the Linux desktop got "killed" is sort of missing the point. It's no more moribund now than it was before. It's more fractured in a sense, as the "Gnome" side of the previous desktop war has split into 3+ camps (Unity, Gnome 3 and Gnome2/Xfce, though there are other spliter camps like Mint/Cinnamon too). But it's here and it works, and it's not going anywhere. Try it!
So in that light, I think the idea that the Linux desktop got "killed" is sort of missing the point. It's no more moribund now than it was before.
I strongly disagree. It is losing exactly the sort of person that the author is: developers who, all else equal, would rather use Linux. But who eventually get tired of the BS and just want something that works and you can actually get software for. I have a lot of sympathy for that.
I write this from a Linux laptop, but that's more out of mulish stubbornness and 15 years of accumulated irritation with Steve Jobs and his dickish business practices.
The last time I got a new laptop I knew I didn't have time to screw around for days with X configuration files. And so I paid a vendor several hundred dollars over list to give me a laptop that JFW. And despite that the sound is still way too quiet. After a few time-boxed 2-hour excursions into whatever sound system they're using this week, I still can't fix it. I've given up.
The only legitimate reason I have for staying on desktop Linux is that I code for Linux servers, and I think it's impossible to really understand system performance if you're not running the same OS. But even that seems shaky to me; hardware keeps getting cheaper and developers keep getting more expensive, so it just doesn't matter as much.
One day some bright Linux spark is going to "innovate" again in a way that I'm expected to put up with their rough edges for 6 months (hello, Unity!) and I'm going to say fuck it and buy a Mac because I just don't have time to screw around right then. Or maybe I'll just want to watch a Netflix movie without hassle, or play the video game my pals are all talking about. And maybe by then it will be a fancy dock for my 8-core Android phone.
Overall, I agree with his point, except that I don't think Linux on the desktop is so much dying as cutting its own throat.
When you write "whatever sound system they're using this week", I know what you mean. There's terrible fragmentation, and buggy libraries get rewritten and replaced by some other buggy thing instead of fixed. That's definitely a pattern. From 2007-9 I even fled to OpenBSD on the desktop to get a more stable OS.
But for the past two and a half years I've used Ubuntu with Xfce, and those problems have become a distant memory. Nothing breaks, nothing gets changed on me (Xfce has moved a few things around, but nothing too terrible). No one forced me to switch to Unity, so I didn't. For me, Linux is more usable and stable than it's ever been. I also seem to see more people running it on the desktop than ever before, and in fact stats from Net Applications show a 50% rise in market share in 2011: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/is-the-linux-desktop-a...
Inside the Apple-centric echo chamber of HN, it's easy to believe that all the developers have moved to OS X and desktop Linux is dead, but I disagree. Despite its problems, desktop Linux is secure in its (small) niche.
Honestly, I like Unity. Or more accurately, I like where they're going with Unity. And I would like the thing itself if it actually worked reliably. But here I am, running the stock version of the biggest Linux distro on popular hardware, and I have to log out and in or reboot roughly daily.
I don't really believe developers are moving to Apple gear because of HN. I believe it because last time I went on a hiring spree, a lot of people said, "Oh, you're running Linux? Do we have to?"
Fair enough, but why not wait to use it until they get there? Daily reliability problems seem like a lot to put up with just for some cool ideas.
Also, I'm not sure how your interviewing experience supports the conclusion "Linux is dead/dying". What it does seem to suggest is "Linux is unpopular", but that has never not been true (on the desktop).
I'm using it because that's part of the default install. At one point I had the time and inclination to spend futzing with stuff to get it to work, but that's not where I'm at. If something isn't ready to use on a desktop OS, they shouldn't ship it.
My previous interviewing experience wasn't like that say, five years ago.
Then you haven't heard of Xubuntu? It's an alternate flavor of Ubuntu that has Xfce as the default install. Here's an iso that will get you basically the exact setup I have, no futzing required: http://xubuntu.org/getxubuntu/
Already installed stock Ubuntu? Install the xubuntu-desktop metapackage (in Synaptic or 'sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop'), log out and select "Xubuntu Session" from the login screen. That's it. I did this on my laptop after realizing I didn't want to switch to Unity. (For bonus points you can remove the Unity desktop apps, but that's hardly necessary unless space is at a premium.)
I don't think I'd put up with Linux myself if it was as much of a pain as you seem to think. For me, Xubuntu has been no trouble at all.
What are you using for sound? I use Pulseaudio on my desktop (custom built with a M-Audio Delta 2496 Pro soundcard) and on my laptop (crappy Lenovo G575) and I don't have any problems at all.
He might be using Arch or Gentoo, or another of the more "DIY" oriented distros. Last time I used Gentoo you still had to really go out of your way to install pulseaudio, though that was four years ago so I don't know if that has changed.
I'm using Arch, but this applies to any distro if you don't use a DM and instead use xinit.
I much much prefer the simplicity of only using what I at least partially understand - the more magic (ie a DM) the more shit to go wrong that you don't understand.
It is the default in all mayor DEs, but he might have a custom X session, using a standalone window manager and extra tools. Or he could work in the console.
Many of the problems people have with Linux have nothing to do with Linux itself.
When I first tried to use Linux about 7 years ago, wireless drivers were a huge problem. Manufacturers didn't provide assistance--not much Linux distros could do about it at the time.
These problems are simply inherent to Linux being a minority platform.
> Many of the problems people have with Linux have nothing to do with Linux itself.
I disagree.
What the OP is complaining about is the same thing Miguel was complaining about, and it's the exact same thing JWZ called out 9 years in his CADT rant[1]. It has nothing whatsoever to do with manufacturers failing to provide drivers and everything to do with attention-deficit devs never wanting to knuckle down and do the hard, unglamorous work of long-term maintenance and bug fixing.
Working systems (with known bugs) are thrown out and re-written as new, incompatible systems with even more bugs. Everything breaks every time some idiot decides that they'll rewrite the audio/desktop inter-op/init/logging/whatever subsystem because This Time It'll Be Done Right™. This perpetual treadmill of half-working betas never ends.
OpenBSD actually made a huge contribution here by reverse-engineering binary blobs and writing open-source drivers that could be maintained and debugged, which eventually made their way into Linux. At one time, the wireless support on OpenBSD was vastly superior to Linux. (This is a bit of a tangent, but I think props are due.)
> These problems are simply inherent to Linux being a minority platform.
I suspect part of the reason people spend so much time with advocacy is that popularity does pay off, long term: popular platforms get more support, more applications, and more other people who can help you with your own problems.
>So in that light, I think the idea that the Linux desktop got "killed" is sort of missing the point. It's no more moribund now than it was before.
Oh, but it is. Because it has lost a lot of momentum that it had, momentum that was coming from the "we're gonna overtake MS and win over the Desktop" feeling prevalent at the time.
Heck, the guy behind GTK complained recently that he is just one man taking care of the project. The full GUI foundation for Gnome, and one that is far from feature complete at that, and it only has one guy working on it.
It has also lost a lot of people and companies associated with it at the time betting on this possibility [of it winning the desktop]. Most companies nowadays support Linux development only for the server stuff, but it wasn't always so. Miguel moved on, Ximian moved on, Hazel moved on, Rasterman moved on, etc etc. Even Adobe quit developing Flash for it.
And it also lost a lot of "alpha geeks" to OS X, which wasn't even commercially available at the time (1997-2001). This "desktop UNIX" come out of nowhere and it was it that did what Linux was supposed (and expected) to do, ie eat into MS market share. Well, even OS X didn't eat that much, but 15% is still a lot.
>He's also an inconsolate "platform fan". Much of his early work was chasing Microsoft products and technologies, of course; now he's an iPhone nut apparently, and that doesn't really surprise me.
You're saying it like it's a bad thing. Gnome (or Linux for that matter) are also platforms.
And to be frank, his early work was not "chasing Microsoft products and technologies". His early world was Midnight Commander, Gnome, Gnumeric, and Evolution.
He indeed like the component model (not the Window platform itself) when it was presented to him at a Microsoft visit, though (the story of this visit should be up there somewhere). But what's not to like about it? A good, clean, component model of sorts was also needed for FOSS, maybe still is.
The phase you describe, IIRC, was several years _later_, when he saw the .NET platform and got hooked.
I really didn't intend it as a swipe against Miguel, but I think it does inform his perspective. And I meant "platform fan" in the advocacy sense: he has a tendency to "fall in love" with favorite products. That's not uncommon in the general population (it's pretty much the norm at HN!), but it certainly is among core Linux people who tend to prefer doing new things in different ways.
> His early world was Midnight Commander, Gnome, Gnumeric, and Evolution.
Clones of Norton Commander, Windows, Excel, and Outlook. To be fair, Gnome 1 wasn't really a "clone" (though it did mimick more than innovate) and mc was chasing a Symantec product, not a Microsoft one.
But to claim that these were innovative new projects is silly. Miguel's career has been one of seeing something he loves in an existing product and duplicating it in his preferred free software environment. There's no shame there. But it's absolutely the same thinking that drove the Mono project.
Pedantically speaking, I wrote Gnumeric not because I loved Excel, or enjoyed using it or because I was trying to be innovative. In fact, I did not even know how to use a spreadsheet at the time.
Gnumeric was the product of the mood in the early days of Gnome: we need to provide this to have a complete desktop offering and we were talented hackers that could get it done. So I did.
Once I started, I enjoyed writing a spreadsheet every second of it. It was both a very educational process, but also the one that made me grow fonder of strict compiler warnings and errors. And from this experience, most Gnome software after this was compiled with warn-as-error.
>And I meant "platform fan" in the advocacy sense: he has a tendency to "fall in love" with favorite products.
Well, for one, C#/CLR was not a favorite product when he fell in love with them, were they? At the time lots of people thought MS was foolish to try to overtake Java, and it took a couple of years for people to accept and like .NET.
>But to claim that these were innovative new projects is silly.
Sure, they weren't, but it's not like Linux in general has given us much innovative things in the desktop space.
Workspaces? You mean virtual desktops? Those date back 1986, implemented at Xerox PARC (and patented!).
As for appstores, I assume you're talking about the packaging systems, which are similar only if viewed from 50,000 feet.
The packaging systems were not stores. You couldn't buy packages. They didn't serve as an agent to sell other people's personally submitted packages. They had "apps" but no "store". The applications weren't sandboxed to make it relatively safe for them to sell 3rd-party submitted packages. The applications were expected to be open-source.
The only similarity to the app stores is that they had a repository of software and an automated installation system used to install it.
Plus the dependencies. With app stores you (usually) get one program and that's it. It works. With package systems you have to install several dependencies for each, sometimes an absurd number (say, 100 packages to get Gnome). And then there's dependency problems (had my share in Debian at older times).
At the core, dependencies are a good thing, although there's downsides to that as well.
I have no experience with desktop app stores, but you wouldn't get Gnome and similar large and complex software from one, would you?
Which makes your comparison pretty unfair.
You can't name innovative things amongst a crowd that rejects that innovation can happen. They'll tell you someone else did it earlier, even when they didn't.
For instance, cars were not an innovation according to hacker news, because Horses!
And clearly OS X is an extremely polished Unix and is going to appeal to the more UI-focused of the hacker set. And Miquel is definitely among the most UI-focused of the hacker set. He's also an inconsolate "platform fan". Much of his early work was chasing Microsoft products and technologies, of course; now he's an iPhone nut apparently, and that doesn't really surprise me.
But at the same time the Linux desktop was never really in the game. I use it (Gnome 3 currently) and prefer it. Lots of others do. For many, it really does just work better. But in a world where super-polished products are the norm, a hacker-focused suite of software isn't ever going to amount to more than a curiosity. (And again, I say this as someone who will likely never work in a Windows or OS X desktop.)
So in that light, I think the idea that the Linux desktop got "killed" is sort of missing the point. It's no more moribund now than it was before. It's more fractured in a sense, as the "Gnome" side of the previous desktop war has split into 3+ camps (Unity, Gnome 3 and Gnome2/Xfce, though there are other spliter camps like Mint/Cinnamon too). But it's here and it works, and it's not going anywhere. Try it!