The GNOME project at 15 [LWN.net]

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 14:25 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265)
In reply to: The GNOME project at 15 by bojan
Parent article: The GNOME project at 15

> I would venture a guess it was because Apple didn't break random things from release to release for their users, as often as others did.

I am seriously considering switching to OSX after using Linux for 17 years. Nothing to do with desktop work flows, notifications or animations (either lack or presence) but applications. There are too many desktop applications which Linux lacks (at least with the feature and support level) that I find myself in need of.

I sincerely cannot get the point of so many WM changes, or so many desktop changes when we still lack applications.

[...]

But I think you do have a point wrt Apple's stability through upgrades.

Having to maintain a Linux desktop for my non-technical parents who live far-far-away taught me a lot about how the Linux Desktop is really *not* ready for mass adoption. Things break too often. Fwiw, today I was explaining to my parents that they are getting an ipad to use next to the Ubuntu laptop.

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The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:02 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

It's because applications can't get critical mass. The desktop itself has a fairly small number of developers, but "everyone" using Linux is interested in it and the Linux distributions sponsor it a little bit (not a lot).

For apps, maybe 5% of those using Linux are interested in a given app? And number of OSS developers relates to number of users because generally some users become developers. Also for apps, fewer of the users know how to code (many developers use only desktop, browser, terminal, and editors, and little else).

But _each_ app can be at least as much work as building the entire desktop. And the distributions can't afford to sponsor many apps.

And on Linux there hasn't been much success with proprietary apps.

So that's why there aren't tons of apps. (In my opinion.) In fact it's sort of amazing how many there are. I'd say most of them have only 1 or maybe 3 core developers though.

The apps with the most developers are cross-platform. (Firefox, LibreOffice)

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 18:49 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

> I am seriously considering switching to OSX after using Linux for 17 years. Nothing to do with desktop work flows, notifications or animations (either lack or presence) but applications. There are too many desktop applications which Linux lacks (at least with the feature and support level) that I find myself in need of.

Just curious, what apps are we talking about? I use KDE for a long time, and for the last 3 years I have suffered OSX Leopard, Lion and now Mountain Lion, just because I developed some iOS software. There are no apps in my MacBook that are better than the apps in my home and office desktops...

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 20:17 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]

> Just curious, what apps are we talking about?

Out of the top of my head:
- PDF editor (no, okular does not edit PDFs, it just pretends to do that). I used this PDF X-Change (proprietary) under Wine, but it crashes somewhat often.
- (Own a fancy video camera) a decent video editor (yes, there are video editors for Linux... no, I am not happy with them).
- (Own a fancy photo camera) a good RAW editor (yes, I know dcraw and the others, IMHO they are not as good as Lightroom or the RAW editor that came with my camera which I failed to run using Wine)
- a photo manager that allows me to easily create a high quality album for printing.

On a practical note, my wife uses OSX. Using the same OS would simplify some of my `family sys-admin duties`.