What Killed the Linux Desktop

[linuxviolin]

What Killed the Linux Desktop
Posted on 29 Aug 2012 by Miguel de Icaza.

Loving OSX is the wrong thing to do, but Linux on the Desktop can only be dead.

[bimsebasse]

If something more alive than ever is dead, what was it before, then? Double dead?

[linuxviolin]

Miguel de Icaza is not a stranger neither a novice in the Linux and open source world, so what he has to say may be worthy of some interest...

[animaguy]

Your losing me. Linux Mint 13 w/ xfce is awesome and I have an iphone.

mind you my sister gave it to me for free when she upgraded hers. she is a nurse and isnt into computers like me and she makes enough to own fancy cellphones but then again she has a windows laptop.

and i should also mention that I still have my android that I can easily activate.

Linux Desktop is alive and well.

If you want to pay a couple of g's for an OSX go ahead.

Linux is still free.

The atticle makes no sense to me.

I dont see what the problem is.

[monkeyboy]

Miguel de Icaza = Mono

[linuxviolin]

Miguel de Icaza = Mono

Yes, and what? He is also responsible for GNOME, Gnumeric, Wine, X drivers, Midnight commander...

Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects.

Early software career

One of the earliest pieces of software he wrote for Linux was the Midnight commander file manager, a text-mode file manager. He was also one of the early contributors to the Wine project.

He worked with David Miller on the Linux SPARC port and wrote several of the video and network drivers in the port, as well as the libc ports to the platform. They both later worked on extending Linux for MIPS to run on SGI's Indy computers and wrote the original X drivers for the system. With Ingo Molnar he wrote the original software implementation of RAID-1 and RAID-5 drivers of the Linux kernel.

In summer of 1997, he was interviewed by Microsoft for a job in the Internet Explorer Unix team (to work on a SPARC port), but lacked the university degree required to obtain a work H-1B visa.[citation needed] He declared in an interview that he tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even before Netscape did so with their own browser.

GNOME, Ximian, Xamarin, and Mono

De Icaza started the GNOME project with Federico Mena in August 1997 to create a completely free desktop environment and component model for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. He also created the GNOME spreadsheet program, Gnumeric.

In 1999, de Icaza, along with Nat Friedman, co-founded Helix Code, a GNOME-oriented free software company that employed a large number of other GNOME hackers. In 2001, Helix Code, later renamed Ximian, announced the Mono Project, to be led by de Icaza, with the goal to implement Microsoft's new .NET development platform on Linux and Unix-like platforms. In August 2003, Ximian was acquired by Novell, Inc. There, de Icaza was Vice President of Developer Platform.

In May 2011, de Icaza started Xamarin to replace MonoTouch and Mono for Android after Novell, Inc. was bought by Attachmate and the projects were abandoned. However, shortly afterwards Xamarin and Novell, Inc. reached an agreement where Xamarin took over the development and sales of these products.

(...)

Awards and recognition

Miguel de Icaza has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award 1999, and was named one of Time magazine's 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000.

In early 2010 he received a Microsoft MVP Award.

In March 2010, he was named as the fifth in the "Most Powerful Voices in Open Source".

[teilnehmer]

The faults he points out are very valid. Especially the frequent breakage is exactly what annoys me and what keeps me from recommending Linux wholeheartedly.
The term "dead" though, seems a little harsh and driven by his own decision to leave the project. Of course it's easier to leave one's baby if you've decided it's dead. Otherwise, you're leaving your baby that is in dire need of your help, which is hard to bear.

I'm just a user, but from my POV Linux grows more mature with every release, and the availabilty of easy to install fresh software greatly outweighs that I can't run a 10-year old photoshop. Also, the diversity of desktops is a strength. Sure, some developers of clodes software will shy away from it (Google Picasa is a painful example), but with so many developers of Linux software, "dead" really doesn't fit the reality. Hell, my drugstore photo place offers a linux software to upload my pictures.

[zerozero]

this >> https://plus.google.com/115250422803614 ... MT5kW8LKJk is an interesting follow-up

[animaguy]

Since I use xfce and love I do not know if this applies to me.

[linuxviolin]

The faults he points out are very valid. Especially the frequent breakage is exactly what annoys me and what keeps me from recommending Linux wholeheartedly.

I didn't want giving my view here but just bringing some information and maybe inducing some discussion, but...

The points raised by Miguel de Icaza are valid, and there would be several others that could be quoted... No, don't ask me to develop as I have already done it for months/years in other forums and other places, and also in this forum. I have absolutely no courage to start again. But over the years I've seen, learned things, saw how developed Linux etc and I can say unfortunately I like less and less what I see. And yet, for a long time I was its fervent advocate.

Well, to make a little more polemical, lol , even the fact there are "36" desktops, although few are actually really good (I guess there is only KDE currently), can be weakness, a problem... The so-called choice. I know, I'm provoking, but it is so good...

I say this with serenity as I use Linux exclusively for 10 years, without never a dose of Windows. And this is always the case on my desktops. But last December, I bought a laptop on which I installed Linux but kept Win7 in dual boot. And in fact, on this machine I'm much more often in Windows than in Linux! Makes me wonder if I'm going to keep it or recover the partitions for Windows...

The year of Linux on the desktop is not there yet and will probably never happen. On embedded systems and servers, yes, on the desktop, no. Like it or not. Sorry.

[monkeyboy]

Well Linuxvioilin letn me congratulate you on you ability to cut and paste. Nothing says I know what I am talking about better then a good dose of plagiarism. Seriously dude if you are going to use othetr peooples work you should at least credit your source.
Now back to the Miguel de Icaza. In an abstract released in April of 98 by Miguel de Icaza, Elliot Lee, Federico Mena and Tom Tromey (what I consider the whole brain trust of the GNOME project at that time) stated "Since most of the GNOME code had to be written by hackers, we kept them happy: the magic recipe here is to design GNOME around an adrenaline response by trying to use exciting models and ideas in the applications." This quote (complete doc avaiable from usenix.org) seems to clear the picture a bit on who actually did most of the work on the foundations of GNOME. So I suggest that before we deify Miguel de Icaza we look at the reality of most open source projects where there isn't one guy who gets all the credit or blame but a group of folks at work.
However seeing that you already did the old "yhea but thing" perhaps we can touch on some of those projects too. Gnumeric, based largely on Tom Millers work on XESS and supported by a raft load of open source contributors.
As for WINE he was just one of the raft crew as cited by this cut and paste from the official WINE site "Users of the upstart Linux operating system began discussing the possibility of a similar approach in June of 1993. At the time, the chances of Wabi being ported to Linux were slim to none. A mailing list was set up to facilitate discussion. The name "Wine" was quickly adopted. Several of the early developers included some of the first Linux kernel hackers including Eric Youngdale and David Metcalfe. Other recognizable names included Alexandre Julliard who now leads Wine and Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame. Bob Amstadt headed the development. " So we see that not only did Miguel de Icaza not write WINE he didn't even head the project.
Moving on to Midnight Commander, it was in my opinion was yet another two pane file browser that looked a lot like other file browsers of the period and if memory serves it was built with lots of preexisting FOSS code anyways.
In reference to the X drivers don't know much about his but I do know he wasn't in on the original X Windows project which came out of MIT (I once talked to a guy who worked on that project) and I have never seen records listing Miguel de Icaza as being associated with MIT.
Bottom line selective cutting and pasting just to support your position is FUD. Enjoy

[animaguy]

So does anyone have an opinion on xfce?

[linuxviolin]

Well Linuxvioilin letn me congratulate you on you ability to cut and paste. Nothing says I know what I am talking about better then a good dose of plagiarism. Seriously dude if you are going to use othetr peooples work you should at least credit your source.

(...)

Bottom line selective cutting and pasting just to support your position is FUD. Enjoy

Plagiarism? Lol Don't say foolery... If you talk about the post where I quoted something about Miguel de Icaza, OK, maybe I should have given the source. It was wikipedia, simply. No FUD, although this is a word you love, specially when someone says something that you displease...

Oh,and it's not "to support my position" but just to give some information about this man...

[linuxviolin]

So does anyone have an opinion on xfce?

I have already given my view about XFCE in several places in this forum and elsewhere. Sorry but, for my part, I won't start again... If really you want know my view about it, just make some research. My apologies.

[DrHu]

From that article, and remember this is the guy that wanted to mono (copy Microsoft .net functionality, even if a cli was available already that allowed that to be available to anyone who wanted it..) to get into the sweet spot for a developer..

Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers.

I am not sure that is true, except in the general case of supporting any Linux
--you could as a developer, do as thus

• Choose a base
  apt(Debian), rpm (red hat/fedora) etc
• Choose a desktop
  kde, gnome, xfce, lxde: or you own custom version

--the rest is simply the programming language of choice and either applications or system functions (one presumes applications)

I think he is only correct in the attitude being presented to developers: after all, with Microsoft and Apple working to tie up as many developers as possible and paying for it, there is an obvious caveat against getting someone to work for free: apart from idealists
--he is also incorrect about the ecosystem: that is a dependency of the cash-flow that both Microsoft, Apple Intel etc have available to support and contain their developers..

This is the lot of an upstart; nevertheless it has succeeded well
--it has been noticed by almost all major corporations (Microsoft, IBM et all)

[linuxviolin]

--you could as a developer, do as thus

• Choose a base
  apt(Debian), rpm (red hat/fedora) etc
• Choose a desktop
  kde, gnome, xfce, lxde: or you own custom version

--the rest is simply the programming language of choice and either applications or system functions (one presumes applications)

Well, precisely. You must "choose a desktop" and "choose a base". No system compatible for everything and for everyone, apps, users and devs. Everything is broke in multiple sections, no unity, you must choose your camp and develop, use the packages, for it. Things are incompatible or/and other things of the kind. This is precisely one of the problems with this type of "behaviour"...

And this brings incompatibilities, bugs, poor coded apps and various other problems we see regularly.

[DrHu]

OK, so we get into that old saw: why doesn't Linux have one desktop and one version and one development track
--its probably way too insensitive of me to ask, what have you developed for a Linux so far ?

That isn't in any way what Linux and Open source (aka Gnu/Linux) is about
--albeit there are enough open source successes to merit attention

Postgresql, mysql
jboss
apache
mozilla
Openoffice : Libreoffice
Linux distributions: Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora et all: people can decide for themselves

A few applications and systems that come immediately to mind..

And we ended up copying some of the debatable features of windows: eg the graphics included in the kernel
--exactly what used to crash (bsod) for NT, and earlier XP systems

Naturally it has improved since, but it was a painful process..

--Linux by being stuck behind Microsoft and Apple is last in line for driver fixes, except that Nvidia tends to keep up reasonably well.

[monkeyboy]

Well Linuxvioilin letn me congratulate you on you ability to cut and paste. Nothing says I know what I am talking about better then a good dose of plagiarism. Seriously dude if you are going to use othetr peooples work you should at least credit your source.

(...)

Bottom line selective cutting and pasting just to support your position is FUD. Enjoy

Plagiarism? Lol Don't say foolery... If you talk about the post where I quoted something about Miguel de Icaza, OK, maybe I should have given the source. It was wikipedia, simply. No FUD, although this is a word you love, specially when someone says something that you displease...

Oh,and it's not "to support my position" but just to give some information about this man...

Yep incomplete, misleading and plagiarized you know FUD

[KBD47]

Gnome would like to blame everyone else for them fracking up the Linux desktop. They've created, and continue to create, Linux desktop problems. My answer is to drop or ignore Gnome and use KDE or Xfce or one of the Gnome forks.
This is a good response:
http://www.zdnet.com/linus-torvalds-on- ... 000003641/

[linuxviolin]

Yep incomplete, misleading and plagiarized you know FUD

My God! Worse and worse... I take this for a joke, saw also the smiley. I hope, and I prefer answering no more to this.

what have you developed for a Linux so far ?

I'm sorry but this has nothing to see with the subject. This has no importance. And this could be assimilated to some "superior and arrogant" behaviour by power users and devs who consider other people like crap. At least those who don't think like them and dare to question what is being done. Sacrilege! As bad that a religion...

I'm sorry and apologize to be a little harsh but this kind of remark makes me bristling hairs... What you have develop? OK, so you can say nothing. Pfff... Just stupid. Unfortunately, we see this often. Don't be astonished if people don't come to Linux...

Oh, and I have never said we must have only one desktop. Although this has advantages...