There's some sort of delusion that's been going around the Linux community for years, called the Year of the Linux Desktop. The idea is that in some fanciful year, the Linux Desktop will finally be ready for mass consumption, and hordes of Windows and Mac users will finally see the light and convert. This event is contingent on some unknown value of Stability and Usability being reached in the Linux Desktop.
If that's all it were contingent upon, we'd already be living in the Era of the Linux Desktop. Linux is very stable and usable now. We've arrived. But the Year hasn't. What's missing? Raevol, if everything's so grand, why is everything so terrible?
I'll tell you why, dear reader. Applications. People don't use computers because of their nice desktop environments, pretty window managers, or convenient package management systems... they use them as solutions to tasks they need to finish. Word Processing, Web Browsing, Chatting... all of these tasks require applications. And Linux has some good ones, sure. But it's missing the most important ones.
Which are the important ones could be argued. In my opinion, we're missing a video editor, and games. And I don't mean crappy, half-assed games like Nexuiz. I mean real games, like Half Life, Guild Wars, and Age of Empires. There's some AAA commercial games on Linux, but not hardly enough, and not the ones that matter. And by a video editor I don't mean iMovie, I mean Final Cut Pro.
There's been some effort in the right direction, see Lumiera and 0 A.D., but these projects are moving at a very slow pace, and are not getting the attention from developers that they should be. These kinds of projects are important if Linux is ever to matter as a Desktop OS. The focus on Linux development needs to move away from territorial pissings over GTK vs QT, apt-get vs yum, and so forth. The Linux Desktop needs to provide solutions to problems, not just be a stable environment where nothing happens.
Next up: Why WINE is terrible and has no bearing on anything whatsoever.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Mark Shuttleworth: Maybe You Missed The Point
Window buttons. It's all over the blog-o-sphere. The iron fist of Mark Shuttleworth has slammed down on the iron armrest of the Canonical throne. Window buttons, to the left.
And all of this in the name of Design. Oh Design! That word of words, that instills such longing and idealism in the hearts of wannabes everywhere. It's time to toss aside the charade. Sure, there's some arguments for the buttons being on this side, or that side, or on no side at all, but what's the real issue? User choice. Isn't that why we switched to Linux anyway?
Do a little searching, and you will see that the window buttons can be moved back. But what the hell is this? Gconf-editor? It's so reminiscent of the Windows registry editor I almost start hallucinating Bill Gates cackling in my ear.
In summation, this whole business shouldn't be about right side or left side, it should be about freedom of choice for the user. And hiding functionality behind complicated, secret editors is poor design. Get over yourselves.
And speaking of user choice, you could always just switch to XFCE, like I did a long time ago. Goodbye bloaty Gnome!
And all of this in the name of Design. Oh Design! That word of words, that instills such longing and idealism in the hearts of wannabes everywhere. It's time to toss aside the charade. Sure, there's some arguments for the buttons being on this side, or that side, or on no side at all, but what's the real issue? User choice. Isn't that why we switched to Linux anyway?
Do a little searching, and you will see that the window buttons can be moved back. But what the hell is this? Gconf-editor? It's so reminiscent of the Windows registry editor I almost start hallucinating Bill Gates cackling in my ear.
In summation, this whole business shouldn't be about right side or left side, it should be about freedom of choice for the user. And hiding functionality behind complicated, secret editors is poor design. Get over yourselves.
And speaking of user choice, you could always just switch to XFCE, like I did a long time ago. Goodbye bloaty Gnome!
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Introduction, or WHY DEAR LORD WHY
I used to game on Windows. It was great. I'd heard of Linux, even tried it a few times. Let's be honest though, it was awful back then. Windows users, especially gamers (read: power users), are used to having to tweak their OS to get what they want out of it. They're also used to having GUIs expose OS functionality to them. On the rare occasion that they have to do something drastic, they're reading a handy guide and it's got fancy links and formatting to show them how to get things done. Linux offered none of that. If you wanted to fix one your all-too-frequent problems, you had to patch it yourself. Give me a break. I just want to play games.
So skip forward a few years. Linux stopped being so awful as Ubuntu matured. Windows started getting more awful as Vista showed up. Microsoft started treating XP more and more like an unwanted stepchild, and there was no way I was subjecting my beautiful hardware to the bloated, infested mass that was Vista. It was time for me to take off the training wheels and become a real computer user.
I switched to Linux. I still use it, on all of my machines, so obviously there's something right with it. But there's a lot wrong too. I don't want there to be things wrong with my Operating System, that's why I switched in the first place. Here's where FOSS ideals start kicking in. You might tell me, submit a patch, or fork a project, or make your own distro.
Sure, I could do that. I could reinvent the wheel. But it's time we stopped being a bunch of whiny little children, and started working together. So my contribution to all this will be my thoughts and observations, as a user of Linux. As a former Windows gamer, turned open source idealist. But still bitter about the games.
I'm not a developer. I don't spend hours with my head in code. I come at this from an outside perspective. Every day I boot up my computer, and I can't play the load of Windows games sitting on my shelf. I can't use Winamp, the best media player in the history of media players. There's a lot I can do that I couldn't do before, to be sure. But somewhere in this crazy world of penguins and other such mascots somebody missed the damn boat. Linux isn't what it should be. This blog will investigate those shortcomings. Hello.
So skip forward a few years. Linux stopped being so awful as Ubuntu matured. Windows started getting more awful as Vista showed up. Microsoft started treating XP more and more like an unwanted stepchild, and there was no way I was subjecting my beautiful hardware to the bloated, infested mass that was Vista. It was time for me to take off the training wheels and become a real computer user.
I switched to Linux. I still use it, on all of my machines, so obviously there's something right with it. But there's a lot wrong too. I don't want there to be things wrong with my Operating System, that's why I switched in the first place. Here's where FOSS ideals start kicking in. You might tell me, submit a patch, or fork a project, or make your own distro.
Sure, I could do that. I could reinvent the wheel. But it's time we stopped being a bunch of whiny little children, and started working together. So my contribution to all this will be my thoughts and observations, as a user of Linux. As a former Windows gamer, turned open source idealist. But still bitter about the games.
I'm not a developer. I don't spend hours with my head in code. I come at this from an outside perspective. Every day I boot up my computer, and I can't play the load of Windows games sitting on my shelf. I can't use Winamp, the best media player in the history of media players. There's a lot I can do that I couldn't do before, to be sure. But somewhere in this crazy world of penguins and other such mascots somebody missed the damn boat. Linux isn't what it should be. This blog will investigate those shortcomings. Hello.
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