Cinnamon 1.4 released [LWN.net]

Cinnamon 1.4 released

Posted Mar 21, 2012 7:32 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Cinnamon 1.4 released by Company
Parent article: Cinnamon 1.4 released

But you won't convince me that "the desktop" is at fault here.

Will not even try.

It is and will forever be a distro-level problem.

This is and will forever be a Linux desktop problem (till Linux desktop is alive, that is). Because Linux desktop only exist as a bunch of distros as far as “Joe Average” is concerned. I don't care if GNOME developers have dropped the ball or Debian/Fedora/etc developers have dropped the ball. In fact I don't even care if GNOME developers are real of figment of the imagination. As far as “Joe Average” is concerned Linux desktop is bunch of distributions and GNOME as separate entity does not exist.

Note that all the “bad” examples you've shown are regarding broken backward-compatibility as something problematic (if not outright catastrophic) and then discuss mitigation strategies. Linux desktop rarely deigns the topic important enough to even mention. Can you point something similar to your links above but for Debian or Ubuntu? Backward-compatibility does not even deserve separate web page on distro sites (the most you can find is “upgrade notes” which is most definitely not the same).

Both Gnome and KDE keep this compatibility just fine. And they could easily do better if the distros using them deemed it the tiniest bit important. But they don't.

Well, that's the problem I'm talking about: GNOME developers explain how it's responsibility of distro developers to make everything compatible (the logic is: when different versions of GNOME put different things under the same name in the same place it's because distros can fix the sources) and distros don't care about backward compatibility at all (they only care about upgradeability which is not the same).

The end result: Linux desktop is dying. If this will continue then both distributions and GNOME/KDE/whatever will join XFree86 in irrelevancy: yes, they will be around in some form, but few people will care and even fewer people will use them.

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Cinnamon 1.4 released

Posted Mar 21, 2012 9:51 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>Nope. As far as Mr. Average is concerned Linux is just like Windows, colors on the screen.

Except that there's no Photoshop, or Mass Effect, or CoD.

And that's the main problem of Linux, not some unusual interface defaults. Users can get used to strange UIs, but they can't get used to not having their favorite applications.

Cinnamon 1.4 released

Posted Mar 21, 2012 13:20 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

And that's the main problem of Linux, not some unusual interface defaults.

Yup. The problem here is not even the fact that Linux has tiny market share (albeit it's the probtoo). The most problematic fact is that Linux is still stuck in old UNIX do-it-yourself paradigm. For the people who are accustomed to compile software from the source Linux is awesome and distributions are pretty usable. And Linux have managed to conquer this niche. When was the last time you've seen Sun or SGI workstations in actual use?

The problem is with the other 99% of users: people who don't know or don't care about compilation from source. The recent trend looks crazy: KDE/GNOME/etc developers pretend to care for this exact segment with streamlined UI, social integration, etc while distributions continue to care only about users who can compile everything themselves. The end result is perfect for the intersection of these two groups - but the size of said intersection is 0.1% at best! If KDE/GNOME/etc care about these users then they need to either convince distributors to care about third-party developers or invent some clever way to sidestep distributors.

Users can get used to strange UIs, but they can't get used to not having their favorite applications.

This is not 100% true. If it were 100% true then switch from Windows to MacOS and switch from Symbian to Android will be unexplainable - yet they are happening. Users can pick different “favorite applications” - but only if there are wide enough selection. Games are especially fashion-affected: even few weeks of delay are reason for discussion on forums. Few months required to be added to the repo (few years in case of Debian or Ubuntu LTS)… this is just not acceptable.

Cinnamon 1.4 released

Posted Mar 21, 2012 10:48 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The problem with the Linux desktop is that it has _nothing_ that Joe may need or want that justifies the pains of changing the defaults. Even today, trying a live USB image requires curiosity and good predisposition.

Sorry, but this sorry tale was disproved few years ago quite convincingly. For about a year most netbooks were sold with Linux preinstalled. People rejected them en masse and either returned them or installed [pirated] Windows XP. Linux failed on desktop not because of wide conspiracy among manufacturers, but because it sucks - at least it sucks as an OS for Joe Average.

As far as Mr. Average is concerned Linux is just like Windows, colors on the screen.

Sadly it's not “just like Windows”. It's much, much poorer. Sure, the OS itself is surprisingly rich - where Windows includes toy text editor and toy image editor Linux includes quite adequate spreadsheet, vector editor and more. But at some point Mr. or Ms. Average wants to do something beyond even that rich selection… and finds out there no applications for Linux. Well, there are handful (Google Earth, Wolfram Mathematica, etc), but they are quite specialized and most of them don't even work because system does not include required libraries.

Desktop Linux still lacks a killer app.

Times of a single killer apps are long in the past. If you want to name anything a “killer app” today then it'll be Google's Play Store or Apple's AppStore. Mr. Average today expects to see selection of few hundreds thousands of apps (including games). S/he can live with any of them missing (people have switched from Symbian and Windows Phone to Android even if most applications were never ported), but when it finds total disaster which Linux desktop presents… it's easy to see why people are balking.

If you'll replace “kernel” with “desktop” and “user-space” with “third-party applications” in the following quote then you'll have succinct explanation of what is wrong with Linux desktop:

Dammit, I'm continually surprised by the *idiots* out there that don't understand that binary compatibility is one of the absolute top priorities. The *only* reason for an OS kernel existing in the first place is to serve user-space. The kernel has no relevance on its own. Breaking existing binaries - and then not acknowledging how horribly bad that was - is just about the *worst* offense any kernel developer can do.

Because that shows that they don't understand what the whole *point* of the kernel was after all. We're not masturbating around with some research project. We never were. Even when Linux was young, the whole and only point was to make a *usable* system. It's why it's not some crazy drug-induced microkernel or other random crazy thing.

The rot is deep. We are not distributing high-end software packages here, just a measly SDK which includes a compiler, debugger, handful of simple test utilities… yet even ABI used for this small set of features is still not stable: just recently we were bitten when most distributions stopped offering /lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 !!! Come one: this is not core feature, it's essential feature (that's why it's in /lib, not in /usr/lib)†. And now it's not just removed from default install, it's not just moved from /lib to /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu, it's not even included in main repo today! It's in “not officially supported software” repo!

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†) Yes, I know: / vs /usr split goes away soon. Still today it exists and separates features which are optional from ones which should always be there for the system to even boot.

Cinnamon 1.4 released

Posted Mar 21, 2012 12:43 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Sorry, but this sorry tale was disproved few years ago quite convincingly. For about a year most netbooks were sold with Linux preinstalled. People rejected them en masse and either returned them or installed [pirated] Windows XP.

That may have had less to do with the fact that Linux in general sucks and more with the fact that the machines in question usually came with weird and unusual Linux distributions that not even hardened Linux fans had ever heard of let alone willingly used, so it was difficult to obtain updates on an ongoing basis or additional software. If the manufacturers had bothered to use a reasonable main-stream Linux distribution that would have made a significant difference.

I have an original Asus Eee PC 701, the machine that basically defined the »netbook« genre. When these first came out they literally sold like hotcakes. Also they're way too small to support XP. The default OS was Xandros Linux (a Debian derivative), which incidentally runs quite well as delivered – its main problem, as mentioned above, was haphazard support and a limited range of applications, both of which might easily have been avoided if the machine had come with Debian instead of Xandros to begin with. Even so, the Eee PC 701 is a nice and useful computer within its limits. Personally, I know a bunch of people who had one and have never heard of one being returned because people were dissatisfied with the OS – most people eventually graduated to netbooks with better specs once those became available, or presumably iPads and such. I still use mine, mainly as a glorified MP3 player for dance classes, because it works just fine and I haven't seen the need to replace it.