Villa: The Linux desktop's change problem

Luis Villa has put up a thoughtful post on the difficulties of innovating on the Linux desktop. "Discussion in this bug about the Sugar filesystem is fairly typical of what happens when you try to implement radical change- people used to the old system focus intensely on the transition costs (it doesn't work RIGHT NOW and my old system WORKS RIGHT NOW DAMMIT) and give varying levels of thought (usually little) to the potential upside of the change- maybe tagging and search really have vastly more potential than hierarchies now that our computers have more capabilities than they did in the time of Aristotle. Kudos to the Sugar folks for persisting despite that resistance."

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