Slashdot Log In
Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Leaves Desktop Linux Behind
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Apr 14, 2008 12:41 PM
from the time-to-push-back-on-corporatization dept.
from the time-to-push-back-on-corporatization dept.
Linux.com's Joe Barr has an interesting commentary about the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and the astounding lack of attention for desktop Linux. Now, a great deal of the monetary support driving Linux these days comes from companies with a vested interest in "big iron" but hopefully this won't completely eclipse the rest of the community. "Before I learned that the press was not welcome in any of the working-meetings at the summit on days 2 and 3, I saw and heard rumblings of discontent from more than one ordinary Linux desktop user. One example: a top-ten list of inhibitors to Linux adoption, created by a committee of foundation members, contained nothing at all relating to desktop usage. Nothing. Everything on the list was about back-room usage. Servers. Big iron."
Related Stories
[+]
Red Hat Avoids Desktop Linux, Says Too Tough 472 comments
eldavojohn writes "We recently discussed the Linux Foundation's decision to leave desktop Linux alone but Red Hat is also steering clear of that goal. The reason? It's too tough. From the company blog: 'It's worth pointing out what's missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future. An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers.'"
[+]
Major PC Vendors Push For Open Source Drivers 232 comments
hweimer writes "Remember the heat the Linux Foundation took for allegedly not giving enough attention to Desktop Linux? The latest events at the Foundation's annual summit paint a different picture. Industry heavyweights like Dell, HP, and Lenovo 'announced on stage that they will now include wording in their hardware procurement processes to "strongly encourage" the delivery of open source drivers.' The move specifically targets desktop and mobile products."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Uh Oh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh Oh (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Uh Oh (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're waiting for Linux to wipe out the competition, it's not going to happen. It's just going to be a long, slow growth curve as both MacOS and Linux suck up increasingly large chunks of Microsoft's market share.
Parent
Not Likely (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux will slowly bring over the technical crowd, though most of the ones who are going to switch already have. You just have some niches left and the "less technical techies" who will still convert.
MacOS has made great strides in woo'ing the "stylish elite", and the "wealthy cool kids"....but they still lack a wide selection of applications, and the price-point that would convert the "average we
Re:Not Likely (Score:4, Informative)
I can run almost anything that I can on Linux on OS X, but there is a lot from OS X that I _can't_ run on Linux.
Parent
Re:Not Likely (Score:5, Insightful)
The next wave has begun, and that's the push to create highly market-specific Linux desktop offerings. You've already seen this in the "just mail, IM and Web" boxes that have been sold recently by large corporations. There are already offerings in the digital film-making arena, and then there's the mobile world which you may or may not conflate with the desktop world, depending on how you see things merging or not.
People don't want "selection," they want the apps that "everyone else uses."
Macs are more expensive, but they have a brand loyalty that's hard to contend with.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh Oh (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Uh Oh (Score:5, Interesting)
Growth curve?
What growth curve?
Top Operating System Share Trend [By Versions] [hitslink.com]
Top Operating System Share Trend [hitslink.com]
I've played pool tables with a more visible slope than this particular measure of the trend line for Linux - and since these are web based stats, I am going to assume that the numbers for Vista for real.
- - a fair representation of Vista's strength in the consumer market.
20% by the end of in April. 50% probably no later than late summer or early fall. The Back-To-School sale.
In the W3Schools OS Platform Statistics [w3schools.com] it took OSX and Linux five years to edge up from 4% to 8% of the market - and these stats track the pro, the web developer.
Parent
Re:Uh Oh (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, compared to all the time spent running apt-get to check for software updates,
Strange that's done automatically for me
running netstat to check for ports that shouldn't be open to the world but for some reason are
,This was fixed two years ago AFIK
deleting and reinstalling 50 libraries to fix a dependency hell broken by the aforementioned apt-get update,
This only happens in debian unstable. Complaining about it is like complaining about bugs in a Beta windows release
and trying to defragment reiserfs only to realize you can't, so going back to ext3, which isn't much better (or worse) than NTFS.
Reiserfs doesn't defrag because it's designed not to need to defrag.. same goes for XFS and the other more modern filesystems
I'm amazed this is the list you came up with when questioning other people's intellectual honesty
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, it might not "just install". I have a lot of programs from 90-s and early 2000-s that just DoNotWork(tm) on XP/Vista.
Second, you STILL can get DLL hell if application tries to be nice and uses shared DLLs.
Third, you can get SECURITY hell if application does not try to play nice and stores private copies of DLLs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit... I've been trying to straighten out a library/dependency versioning problem in CentOS for a week caused by a package updater.
He said apt-get and that's not normally used on CentOS. RPM is it's own special form of evil.
I've used RHEL, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu depending on my clients demands and I can tell you I would never willingly use and RPM based distro.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Codecs work perfectly, but the installed fonts and desktop schemes seem to change according to the preference
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except the "average computer user" cannot use the command line interface where you yupe "sudo aptitude update", because that's too hard, and this article is about Linux on the desktop. If you want to argue Windows vs. Linux for uptimes, power user ease-of-use, etc., that's fine. For the average computer user, you can't really say that Linux is easier or as functional. And for those people, greater ease and functionality = better OS.
Utter nonsense. Try kpackage [kde.org] or many similarly easy to use graphical package management frontends if you would rather not use the commandline method. Interesting, my wife, who is very nontechnical, prefers the command line method for installing packages. After I showed her how to open the console and give the commands she never used the gui version again.
Re:Uh Oh (Score:4, Insightful)
Vista won't run well on the increasingly popular lightweight and low end laptops like the eepc, olpc xo, and what are sure to be many imitators. People have demonstrated they're willing to use linux on these machines, and Microsoft has demonstrated they Don't Get It.
Parent
Stay away annoying journalists. (Score:3, Insightful)
When engineers get together in technical meetings in standards groups, SIGs and the like, they have deep technical and commercial problems to solve that leads to long, difficult, nuanced discussions, all aimed at getting to a solution that will work, get implemented and be commercially feasible.
What no one involved needs is the press sticking their noses in and printing these arguments in the press, dressing them up like some narrative in a thriller. Its happened to me several times and every time, the uninvited journalist got it hopelessly wrong, presenting technical work as interpersonal bickering and being clueless on the technical matters.
Journalists are a pox on standards meetings. They can eff right off.
When the journalists turn up, propose work items on desktop issues and promise not to run away and write up events in some rag, they will have dragged themselves out of the bottom of the barrel.
Re:Stay away annoying journalists. (Score:5, Insightful)
This particular "summit" seemed largely useless to me. I don't really know anybody who cares about it or even knew about it other then the participants.
Parent
Re:Stay away annoying journalists. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Stay away annoying journalists. (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder what kind of access you get for an individual affiliate membership of $25 [linux-foundation.org]? Somehow I doubt they'd pay much attention to me compared to those Platinum sponsors at $500K. Reading the Bylaws [linux-foundation.org] tells me only that as an affiliate member I can't vote for members of the Board, vote to dissolve the Foundation, etc. Other than that, whatever privileges Affiliates get is determined by the Board. I didn't see a list of those privileges, but I can't claim to have scoured the site.
And, doesn't Adobe have a few interests on the desktop?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, it's not as if the "ordinary Linux desktop user" doesn't have any other opportunities to loudly voice his opinion. (If nothing else, he can just write Linus an email!) It doesn't seem surprising that a meeting focused on high-end servers doesn't want to open the floor to a bunch of Ubuntu fanboys to squabble about WiFi driver configuration.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Big Business is ten years behind (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
someday, perhaps, the geek may realize that the PC market splintered into distinct segments a long time ago.
that placement on the enterprise desktop doesn't give you anything more than placement on the enterprise desktop.
but I am not holding my breath.
Re:Big Business is ten years behind (Score:5, Insightful)
The author worries about the developers ignoring the linux desktop without seeming to realize that the kernel hackers use linux as their desktop. He doesn't mention the scheduler changes to make it more friendly to the desktop. In fact, he comes across as a pouting child who wants their desktop worked on before the servers.
Is it that hard to realize that the linux foundation is about servers and keeping market share in the area of servers while ubuntu and the kernel hackers focus on making the desktop faster? Right now server linux is a business, desktop linux is a side note. Asking them to focus on the desktop at the expense of their big platforms is dumb and short sighted.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
i'd say his lead time is a bit off (i'd cut that to maybe 5 or 7 years), but the concept holds that major businesses are slow to change to the new latest-and-greatest software. i'm sure there are still places transitioning to XP still.
Re: (Score:2)
That was why it was founded! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't find that more noteworthy, than freedesktop.org focusing on the desktop. Different organization have different focus.
Focus on strength! (Score:3, Insightful)
MSFT 'attacks' other pieces of the market because of its near monopoly on the desktop and in Office apps. Linux can do the same.
Why shouldn't the Linux Foundation focus on Linux's strengths and continue to shore up that area, particularly if the people with the money have those priorities? If Linux is the major player in several segments then it can leverage that strength to gain others.
Linux on the desktop isn't going to become a winner because a technical committee somewhere listed its strengths or weaknesses. It'll take a nimble, energetic core of developers to drive and make decisions that are innovative and exciting to users. Always playing catchup is probably not the way to go.
Meanwhile, if Linux dominates at the Big Iron/Appliance/Server areas, then it will become easier for the desktop driven folks to achieve their goals. This is particularly so in a world where the buzz words are virtualisation, "in-the-cloud" etc, that remove many applications from directly being on the desktop, as application adoption and readiness for the desktop is one of the high barriers to Linux becoming a force on the desktop.
--Q
Lack of Desktop Focus?! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's his job to do to others.
Haven't you understood that "Journalism" isn't abou the facts.
It's about what the "Journalist" wants it to be instead.
Sheesh.
only a matter of time (Score:2)
Re:only a matter of time (Score:5, Insightful)
They said that a year ago and it didn't happen.
I'm no MS apologist, but I think you should actually try using Vista before making statements like that. Despite what you might read on slashdot, there is nothing fundamentally broken in it and most "average" users find it a step up from XP. Frankly I've had less trouble with Vista than I've had with Ubunutu on the same machine.
I don't really understand how using it on a server makes you familiar with an OS? To most people the "server" is that folder with funny icon on it, or, for the more technical, where their web pages come from.
I run CentOS or RHEL on all my public servers and would never dream of using anything else, but I ain't about to get all my staff to install ubuntu; for one they couldn't get the software to do their jobs. I still think that if linux wants to make headway on the desktop someone needs to come up with a distro to go after the gaming market. That's the only demograph that hardware manufacturers really pay attention to and what is cutting edge now will be standard in 12 months. Unfortunately you can't even get recent games that run on linux yet, so it's no wonder the hardware guys are a bit behind.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Fork, or perhaps not-fork? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps it is time for a "DeskLinux" project along similar lines, specifically to cater to the needs of desktop users. This would allow the core Linux kernel to keep its ostensible neutrality toward what systems it runs on, while still letting those who favor desktops to resolve what many people see as some very real issues. It even opens the way for a "BigLinux" later on, to bring enhancements specific to big iron that do not need to be in the core.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
These days people are arguing over what distro is better because it uses kde or gnome or uses an easy frontend for this or that. I think it's dumb.
maybe i'm just some old classic copylefter, but people seem to forget about the gnu pa
So What? (Score:3, Interesting)
By the same token, they don't "own Linux". When there are people who care enough to improve Desktop Linux, they'll do it (as many are). That's how Linux works: it's Open Source not just to read, but to write with your patches. When those people make money off Desktop Linux, and form a "foundation", maybe they'll have the sense of proportion to call it the "Linux Desktop Foundation". There's already plenty of orgs with those interests. So what if "the" Linux Foundation isn't one of them? And who's got the right to tell them they should be?
I figure it's because it's getting enough work.. (Score:2)
On the other hand, servers are getting fancier every day. Infiniband, 10Gbit/100Gbit ethernet, clustering are all real important to get a hold on or Linux is going to be left behind in favour of something else. If you want to run a datace
This story is factually incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
The focus was split pretty evenly between the desktop and the server - although journalists were only invited to the first day and that session was, admittedly, weighted towards the server. However, the two all-day desktop meetings and many of the other sessions (Printing in Linux, virtualization, energy efficiency) involved significant Desktop content. I'm not sure that his claim can be substantiated.
From the conference agenda [linux-foundation.org]:
Wednesday, 9-5: Desktop Linux Architects Meeting
- State of the Linux Desktop - Linux Distros
- OEM vendor round table: what they need to have a successful Linux desktop
- Building a Desktop Environment Ecosystem - Gnome / KDE
- Linux Desktop Implementation Case Studies
Thursday, 9-4:30: Desktop Linux Architects MeetingFlamebait is Missing The Point (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Backend/Big Iron is where the most dollar opportunity are with Linux.
3. The desktop problems are much more difficult to solve and the payoff in dollars is worth maybe a nice dinner.
There are *still* new and interesting things happening on the server side in storage, virtual machines, memory, you name it. Desktops? Not so much. What's the last legitimately different desktop environment you, or anyone else has tried?
Still to big a hassle (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is, back when I used linux full time (99-2003) I didn't own a house. I didn't have kids. I enjoyed building my own computers and futzing around with configuration and getting packages to build for hours or days at a time. Now I've got kids, a house to maintain, and little or no free time.
If I have to spend a half hour on administration a month on my computer then I simply won't even turn it on, it's not worth the hassle. There's way more important things I can be doing. I can either spend the next two hours trying to figure out why an upgrade to a kde or gnome core library broke Totem or I can play with my kids. Easy decision to make.
I switched to OS X for all my multimedia production needs in 2002, and shut down my linux box permanently in 2003 as the birth of my first child approached. It does everything I wanted linux to do and I don't have to *do* anything to keep it running. My priorities are obviously going to be different from that of a lot of linux fans, but those fans need to realize that most non-fans will have no interest in linux on the desktop until it becomes less of a pain to use than Windows is.
Linux is where the money is (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody surprised?
Did anybody actually tried to sell a new desktop system? Does anybody even make money on desktop software??
Because that's where you can sell pure technology. That's where most people are engineers - the people who are not biased by subjective perception: they buy what does work best for them.
That doesn't work for desktop software. Take a look at top two desktop OSs - Windows and MacOS - and try to recall how long it took for them to be where they are now. Inertness of desktop market is ridiculous: some people are still dreaming of Amiga OS...
And just WHO is this "Linux Foundation"? (Score:3, Informative)
I notice some Linux supporting companies there, but a lot of companies whose support is, at best, half-hearted.
(I'd have copied out the list, but it's all pictures of the names. Look if you care. IBM and Red Hat are there, but so is Adobe. And a bunch of companies I've never heard of, as well as many whose position on Linux I don't know.)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted, it's a different business model and a different product offering from Linux but if anything Apple should show that the mythical Windows stranglehold on the desktop is just that, mythical. Apple has gotten to the places that I heard that Linux was going to be in 5 years ago. They've actually done it, it's not a lot of talk and
Re:No windows compition[sic] (Score:3, Insightful)
And why exactly shouldn't Apple count? Don't get me wrong, I'm not fanboi and I've never been tempted to "swing on that side" except for my iPod, but Apple should be counted.
I don't know what the previous poster was intending. OS X and Linux are both being used on the desktop. In the US they count together as something nearing 10%. They count even more if you're counting all the new devices, like smart phones, that are starting to take over some of the tasks traditionally reserved for the desktop (Web browsing).
On the other hand, if you're looking at things in terms of markets, neither OS X nor Linux counts as part of the "desktop OS" market the EU is referring to in their a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:no surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats why I feel that the future of Linux in user's hands is in the form of "appliance" type machines. Things like the EeePC, cellphones, Tivos-type things... we already have, and it works quite well. Now push it a notch further... a desktop machine with everything a user need, but locked down. Can't install or remove anything, except for the SD card or USB stick to store your data. Different models with different software for different people (and maybe like the EeePC, let people hack it up, but not by default).
Linux is -really- good at that kindda stuff. Linux desktops work great when they're preconfigured and you don't change em too much (which is when, for a regular user, all hell breaks loose).
I remember at my fiancee's college, most of the computer clusters were like that. Locked down desktop linux installs. It worked amazingly well. Since you couldn't screw it up, everything just worked, Mac-style. Very clean, all your files were saved on a network drive (as opposed to USB as I said above, but still), and you could install a limited amount of non-disruptive things.. if you messed up, you could just re-init it like you would a router.
There's nothing special about that...nothing that can't be done with Ubuntu and a few minutes/hours of tweaking. But if you sell that directly to users, you'll have a winner.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Either you have no idea what you're talking about, or you're not communicating very well...
Interaction between what?
There are many standards. POSIX provides standards for shells -- a shell must support a certain set of features to be POSIX-compliant, and a POSIX-compliant shell script can run with #!/bin/sh on any remotely POSIX-compliant system.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is where X comes in.
I fully admit to being in the minority who enjoys it. But I do think it's useful to know, because then you get to do shell scripts. GUIs are not really scriptable.
There are many things that contributed to the Internet being a big deal. Linux is only part of it. (And if it wasn't