Why Linux Has Failed on the Desktop

SlinkySausage writes "Linux is burdened with 'enterprise crap' that makes it run poorly on desktop PCs, says kernel developer Con Kolivas. Kolivas recently walked away from years of work on the kernel in despair. APCmag.com has a lengthy interview with Kolivas, who explains what he sees is wrong with Linux from a performance perspective and how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers."

Don't think so

how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers.

I found that rather funny. Blaming Microsoft for your own lack of creativity and ingenuity.

Besides, Steve Jobs would very much disagree.

Re:Don't think so

Creativity is very rarly an out of the blue thing, It is about looking at many alternatives trying to take what you like about them and make it your own, with perhaps somthing extra to get them to work correcly together.

Having many Different OS's and Computers around we would be much better off seeing what works what doesn't why it does and how to improve on it. Back in the 80s If I were asked how would a Desktop System look in 2007 I would have given a much different answer (In my mind a 2007 desktop would look more like Plan 9 and less like windows) But during the 80s the Only GUI i had experinece with was Gem Desktop and I didn't particully care for it. I expected graphics in 2007 to be a bit better then they are now, But the OS in my mind would have frames not windows.

Re:Don't think so

In the 80's I would have told you that the ultimate desktop OS would be System 6 with Unix underneath.

Funny, that's exactly the same answer I'd give in 2007.

(The eye candy -- make it stop!)

Re:Independent creativity launches many things...

Seems someone didn't RTFA. CK is saying that while he was pushing the kernel to be speedy on the desktop, all the other developers were pushing it to be speedy on the server, sacrificing the desktop performance (and this is because all the others were big-corporation workers).

And yes i know it isn't "either the desktop or the server" but i can see his POV beeing somewhat right.

Re:Don't think so

No they aren't. They're expanding their company into other industries, not moving away from Macs.

There's a difference.

Re:Don't think so

You say toe-may-toe, I say toe-mah-toe....

I say Solanum lycopersicum. Which fully demonstrates my superiority, I think.

Re:Don't think so

The whole thing is dead wrong. All that enterprise crap is what keeps the platform solid and almost crash free.

Sure, some extra code may slow things down, but since Linux, Windows and even MacOS now, is all based on server kernels (linux's own, VMS/WNT for anything newer than Windows 2000, *BSD) they don't crash too much. YOU may have problems with XP or 2000, but you shouldn't be. I've had an XP install going for more than four years, Windows 2000 running for months. (If you can't do this, you should not be using it, nuff said)

Code doesn't care how many employees you have. Maybe this guy belongs at Ubuntu, where things are moving towards the 'desktop'. Just ask my new Ubuntu installation on my laptop - it's running like a desktop just fine. I just finished 5 hours of World of Warcraft on it!

Re:Don't think so

His point is that the kernels are optimized for servers. That is, focus on throughput, performance, but not latency or responsiveness. A desktop has the latter two as priorities, while sacrificing the former two. As an example, it doesn't matter if that mpeg4 video I/O eats a little more CPU, as long as other tasks don't interrupt its playback.

Re:Don't think so

This is why Linux distributors supply custom built kernels in different flavors. In desktop distributions like Kubuntu or Mandriva, the standard kernel is in fact configured to be responsive for desktop use.

Re:Solution

The average user has no idea how to do that, nor should they have to.

That's part of the reason why Linux will never really hit it big on the desktop.

Re:Solution

Unix and Unix-like systems have been around for a very long time (a lot longer than windows) and have yet to hit big on the desktop.

Really? Like OSX?

Granted, it doesn't have as much market on the desktop, but it's still the second. And it only is the second exactly because of the reasons de GP pointed out.

Re:Solution

The average user has no idea how to do that, nor should they have to.

I think you entirely missed the point:

if that's your issue, then create a daemon that renices the priorities of pre-set programs to some given level - better yet tweak the module that starts programs to nice them as they start.

A tweak to the start module in the kernal should be able to set the nice level of any program when it starts - giving latency sensative software more priority & dropping those insensative. Skype cares about latency - terminal doesn't care all that much. The whole point of the comment was that a process already exists to deal with the majority of the latency issues described and either a daemon or a tweak to the start module should be able to use that process & adjust usage based on the program without user intervention.

The administrator creates a file /etc/nicety that ranks programs as needed: [programs] /usr/local/bin/Skype 15 /usr/local/bin/gterm -4 /usr/local/bin/totem 15 ... [user] bob 45 alice 18 ...

With the user section, you could even prevent a slob from killing the system in a multi user environment by limiting his total niceness. Anything over nice(max) results in everything being trimmed back proportionally. If you boot into single user mode, that section is ignored.

ulimit does provide some of these constraints, but it works on the whole userspace for its memory & process quotas & per process for the nice limit.

Re:Solution

We're talking about linux on the DESKTOP. Your average home user does NOT have an admin that works on their desktop.

And how exactly does the average home Windows user set the parameters on the software they install - oh yes, it's all done automagically. Why, I do believe that installation software for linux currently adds things to the SE linux contexts when it installs. But I suppose that would be impossible to do to a simple file when your creating a module to do it.

Here how about rather than toss an idea off my head, I spell it out in a step by step process:

1. A developer [not the desktop user] creates a daemon that runs with the ability to renice a program above 0.
   or
   A developer [not the desktop user] modifies the module in the kernal that starts processes to set the nice level of the process according to a set record already defined in a file [in /etc/nicety for our example].
2. A developer [not the desktop user] creates a config tool that allows the definition files [in /etc/nicety for our example] to be edited in a graphical manner.
3. This daemon or modified module and config tool are included in a distro.
4. The packager of a program includes a file for a directory [/etc/nicety for our example]. This file contains a list of the executable files in the package and the nice level they should be run at.
5. Someone with administrative rights [not an administrator because your average home user doesn't have an admin] to the computer installs the software with the appropriate package management system.
6. Users start the program & miraculously their programs are niced to the appropriate level.
7. Someone with administrative rights [not an administrator because your average home user doesn't have an admin] - uses the config tool [if needed], permitting them to increase or decrease the nicety to aleviate problems caused by the default settings.

There did that include enough detail that your straw men are dispelled? The core protocols exist to minimize the problem - nice. A patch to set the nice level on starting shouldn't be all that hard to do, a daemon to reset them after starting even easier. Your argument that a home user needs an 'admin' who understands daemons & patches etc to do this is only valid if you also feel the average Windows box needs an 'admin' to install AIM.

As several people pointed out, Con's dissatisfaction with the kernel dev team is that they wouldn't change the way nice works to better impliment it's stated purpose - splitting CPU time based on the interactiveness of a program. However, even in it's current state, a system to automate nicing the processes would resolve most of the issues people are seeing with desktop responsiveness. In combination with any of the new schedulers, it should make just about anyone happy.

Re:Solution

Boy you are really missing the point. bladesjester is correct. Your "simplified" answer gave me a headache and I have been into computers since the early 80's. The "computer geek" that understands that makes up probably less than 5% of computer users. Which is as hi as Linux desktop market penetration will ever get if they continue to keep things so complex/complicated.

Re:Solution

That's part of the reason why your attempt at trolling will never really hit it big on Slashdot.

He's not trolling! He's not saying that your approach fails to fix the problem. He's not even saying that he doesn't like to type.

He's saying that someone afraid of their computer can't do it. And until Linux can be used by people afraid of their computer, it won't appeal to the majority of the desktop PC market.

flamebait

Actually, knucklehead, I was the exec editor of an open source enterprise magazine.
Right, and flamebait is insulting people just because you're an asshole. And I don't mean "you" in the general sort of sense.

No Unix or Unix-like distro has been and they've been around a heck of a lot longer than windows.
I know several people on Ubuntu who struggle with Windows. Plus, saying Unix has been around a long time and it's going nowhere is like saying, in 1994, that the internet has been around a long time, and it's going nowhere. The initiative towards a widespread Linux desktop has been around a few years, max. OSS movements take a while to rev up, and this one's doing quite nicely.

Be quiet, be schooled, thank the nice man as he leaves.

Why this solution won't work:

>if that's your issue, then create a daemon that renices the priorities of pre-set programs to
>some given level - better yet tweak the module that starts programs to nice them as they start. Works
>better than blocking the background tasks by bumping everything that's happening under a users uid, while
>still providing the lower latency issue.

Here is what they average computer user will think of your solution:

1) What's a daemon?
2) What does "renices" mean?
3) What are priorities?
4) What is a pre-set program?
5) What is a module?
6) What does it mean to block a task?
7) What is a background task?
8) What is a UID?
9) What is latency?

Re:Why this solution won't work:

Which is totally not the point. The average user doesn't have to do this. A developer does, just once, then he distributes it to all the average users.

Re:Why this solution won't work:

If they don't know what's latency, then why do they bother about the problem at all?

A couple of years ago Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG managed to say "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" and this was rightfully frowned upon as an valid argument. I fail to see how your is different, am I missing something?

Re:Don't think so

Why he's getting the response he is, is because of the claim that Linux is a failure, which only feeds the Windows fanboys. Linux is in no way a failure on the desktop. It just isn't as widely accepted as a viable desktop due to so many people not knowing anything about it as a desktop OS, or that it even exists. Focusing on that--getting the word out--is what will ensure Linux on the desktop.

The good thing is that Linux, GNU, and Open Source development are moving along at a faster pace than Windows is and sooner or later it will begin to surpass other OSes and GUIs in features, stability, flexibility, future potential, etc (if it already hasn't). There are weak spots as all products have them. I think Open Source will respond better to enhancing those features faster than a monolithic monopoly ever could. Not to mention there are huge numbers of potential developers that will be creating prior art and even IP that companies such as Microsoft can only steal if they want to move ahead. That's a tremendous boom.

What also troubles me is that Linux, GNU, and Open Source tend to react to technologies instead of really developing new technological ideas. We see that feature such and such has been created and that is often reproduced, though maybe in a superior way. What I'd like to see are more unique ideas coming from the Linux community itself thus ensuring that some key new technological concepts come from Open Source. It is sort of like when John Warnock created Adobe and created PostScript for the Apple Mac and the Laser printer. It was a technology like that which propelled Apple to the front of certain markets and it is that which made John Warnock the rich man he is today. I just can see some killer app being developed for Linux which draws people into the industry created and supported by so many of us. Also, convincing companies such as Adobe to adapt their applications to Linux will also help change the landscape. The issue is why would a company develop for such a small market? Well, as we have seen in the past couple years with Ubuntu having approximately 20 million users world wide and then with all the other distributions combined we come near 100 million users world wide. That's a huge market vs. what Adobe had when it was working on the Postscript and the laser printer with Apple. Certainly a much greater potential market for even some of the smaller technologies. Personally, I don't care if software costs money. And I know software can be developed for the Open Source operating systems without forcing them to use Open Source code. So, the potential is there for a huge market to make some people very rich selling software to Linux users.

I don't recall the guys name nor his exact quote nor the precise context of the quote, but I do recall what he was getting at when he said something like "in our fight for racial equality we should have put more emphasis on buying land/property and being less strict about fighting for equality, as equality is bound to happen in a free society." What he meant was if they had bought land they'd have it as a valuable resource--something to ensure the future. They should have focused on that as much as they did on just getting equal rights as equal rights were bound to happen. Maybe it would have taken longer but it was bound to happen. This is what I perceived he meant. What I'm getting at with this story is that Linux should be focusing on building up (as in every participant, every volunteer, every developer) the IP and prior art to keep companies such as Microsoft from getting patents on them. We'll get parity sooner or later on the desktop. Let's own the land upon which the IP is based so that the monolithic monopoly doesn't lock Open Source out of some key advances. I'd rather see Open Source lock out the commercial entities than have the freedoms that I desire held hostage to the extortion attempts we've seen Microsoft use in the past.

Re:Don't think so

Linux CANNOT have a killer app, because it contradicts what Linux stands for: Freedom, Openness, Choice, to name a few. If the Linux community creates something, it's damn well going to be F/OSS, and therefore, portable to just about any other platform. The fact that something is proprietary is the essence of what makes it "killer," and that just might be why Linux hasn't been able to dominate.

Re:Don't think so

The good thing is that Linux, GNU, and Open Source development are moving along at a faster pace than Windows is and sooner or later it will begin to surpass other OSes and GUIs in features, stability, flexibility, future potential, etc (if it already hasn't). There are weak spots as all products have them. I think Open Source will respond better to enhancing those features faster than a monolithic monopoly ever could. Not to mention there are huge numbers of potential developers that will be creating prior art and even IP that companies such as Microsoft can only steal if they want to move ahead. That's a tremendous boom.

Wow, those are some big shoes to fill, and filling them rests on some pretty big ifs.

Read The Mythical Man-Month. One of the most cogent things Brooks has to say is about project coherency, best exemplified in the desktop world by Apple. What Macs give you above all, their primary value proposition, is coherency of design.

Coherency tends to be one of the weakest suits for many or most Open Source projects, especially those without a central entity to define the direction. The exceptions tend to be server or kernel-side: Apache, Linux Kernel, databases, etc, and I'd claim this is because there's a well-defined set of CS problems being solved there. KDE, which I use daily, has absolutely no coherency of design. That's why it does well as a testbed for new features, approaches, etc, but very poorly at consistency of experience.

Brooks' argument, which is pretty credible, is that coherency comes from having one or a few project architects and consistently returning to their vision. They absolutely need to spend a lot of their time listening to users and developers and reacting to their feedback, but ultimately someone's vision is what makes a codebase hang together. Con is saying that the architects of Linux are basically not that interested in the desktop experience on vanilla hardware, because they're most interested in more traditional CS questions that tend to play themselves out much more in the enterprise space than the desktop space. As a non-CS guy in the software development world, this really strikes a chord with me. The Linux desktop is built on very similar components to the Mac desktop, yet is worlds away in usability. And that's basically because a) nobody is defining, shepherding and advocating usability requirements at the OS level, and b) the desktop projects don't have a architect/requirements definer at all.

The rest of the article, and particularly the extravagant claims about success and failure are pretty much what you'd expect from a smart, non-CS, hardworking, disgruntled community member who has not been taken as seriously as he ought. The same dynamic pretty clearly played itself out in the climate change debate over the "hockey stick", where Mann et. al. were too dismissive of smart, hardworking, somewhat contrarian, non-climate science authors of counterclaims, McKitrick and McIntyre (M&M). Mann's work has withstood M&M's criticism well, and frankly M&M dropped the ball on some key items (like not properly modeling how various quantities vary with latitude - a big blooper in climate science) but the whole debate would have had less drama (and therefore been less ripe for political cherry-picking) had M&M not been seen to be marginalized by the climate science community. To me the lesson is not the technical merits of Con's solutions, but the lack of serious attention to his points about where the focus is in kernel development. That's the interesting part of this story, and one that Linus should really take to heart.

Re:Don't think so

The Linux desktop is built on very similar components to the Mac desktop, yet is worlds away in usability. And that's basically because a) nobody is defining, shepherding and advocating usability requirements at the OS level, and b) the desktop projects don't have a architect/requirements definer at all.

And whose fault is this? How many usability studies has GNOME conducted? NOVELL, IIRC, has done a only a handful, many years later. And KDE has set up an usability group one one or two years ago (and I've yet to read any paper on it). Not only that, GNOME has adopted the practice of not even paying attention to bug reports (look up Eugenia Loli-Queru's arguement with the GNOME project on this).

Almost all the free software GUIs are not innovating *at all* on usability. They are all about little cosmetic changes. Mac OS X and Vista have left them behind the curve (and don't mention Beryl...what's the point of a spinning cube ?! How does that increase usability? Or wobbly windows?!!) Sometimes they inovate a little, but in the opposite direction, like Ion.

And frankly when someone tries something new, nobody pays attention. Like OpenCroquet. Like some experimental Java desktops. You can't really expect anything other from developers hellbent on C programming...What can you expect from GMOME? All I expect from a C project of that size is that it's going to be further and further behind the curve...We can't even expecct anything from the likes of Novell: their Mono is not really being developed as a multiplatform tool, is it? (So, no FOSS desktop like GNOME or KDE).

The real shame is having companies that are basically full with non-creative individuals injecting money on FOSS.

By the way, "Linux" is not the only Unix-like OS that uses GNOME and KDE.

Re:Don't think so

Okay, I'll be as clear as I can be here: Linux will never take over the desktop. Ever. Ever. Why? Because it's a pain in the arse.

Never, in all my years of working on the Mac and Windows, have I been required to type something like "sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf" and then try to tell my computer to display something over 640x480 resolution--and even then not having it work, even after following 3 different, progressively complex, methods of getting an nVidia driver to work.

Every year or so, I try to set up a Linux machine with whatever the new darling distro is. Only once have I gotten one to work acceptably, but there were still issues I wasn't happy with. And that took about a week of reading poorly-written manpages. Just the other day I gave Ubuntu 7.0.4 a shot. I gave up after 2 hours of fiddling to get working video.

That is after having to futz with my CMOS to boot it--a step most people wouldn't know to do.

Linux people are, and I'm going to be brutally honest here, morons. Not computer morons, obviously, because they have the skills and general knowledge required to get Linux to at least boot and display video properly, but morons because they lack even a basic understanding of what other people want from computers. Linux people are, and this will be news to precisely no one, geeks. As such, their opinions on computers are absolutely irrelevant to anyone other than fellow geeks.

People do not want to fuss. They want to buy a computer, turn it on, and start putting in software they bought at Wal-Mart without ever even thinking about what is going on below the UI. Hell, as far as most of them know, there ISN'T anything below the GUI. That's what it has taken to get the computer into every home in every developed country in the world: compatibility and ease-of-use.

Linux offers neither of these things.

Ultimately, the FOSS model is fundamentally flawed. People write things they find fun or that they really need--motivations we in the education business refer to as intrinsic, which is the best kind of motivation there is. The problem is that no one finds things like video drivers fun. There's no huge drive to make sure all the features of the video card are supported, because you won't need them anyway. So, without some kind of extrinsic motivation, like profit, certain jobs just never get done--or at best, get done half-assedly.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the people doing the developing are uber-geeks (we know this for certain because they are evidently coding for fun), and therefore don't sweat having to tweak a text file here and there. They pat themselves on the back for getting it to run at all (as they should--it's quite the accomplishment, and something to be marveled at!) and get so excited that they mistake this small success to be proof that everybody can and should be running Linux just like them. But they shouldn't, because (polishing off my old Slashdot chestnut)...

Linux is a toy.

It is a hobby OS. People have gotten this claptrap toy to do some pretty great things, and it's a no-brainer for any kind of application where the computer isn't expected to do anything very exciting (games, iTunes, iMovie/Windows Movie Maker, hook up any random scanner you buy--Only geeks are "excited" by hosting webpages and/or directing network traffic) or where you need a really small footprint (embedded). But that does not a desktop OS make. Not for the unquantifiably vast majority of computer users, anyway.

Look, everyone hates Microsoft. Apple has their own hassles to deal with. But both are so astonishingly better at serving the customer's needs and desires than the Linux distros will ever be that the fact that some people even need that pointed out to them simply demonstrates, clearly and unequivocally, that those people are, as I have already stated above, morons.

I'm sorry, but it's true.

Re:Don't think so

As a user of all 3 (and a few more), I must disagree. EVERY operating system has it's little pauses like you describe, but Linux in particular drags the whole time, just in small incremements.

Mr. Kolivas in the article hit the nail on the head. Take linux windows. Drag one around. It chops around into various little segments and such as it moves. Drag an icon. Select stuff. Reposition a toolbar (or buttons on it). There are these fraction of a second delays. It's almost like walking on stilts. You're on the floor, and you feel when your feet hit the floor, but there is feeling of some layer in between where you're not REALLY touching the the floor. Same applies to Linux and it's GUI (or at least it's most common collection of tools that we call it's GUI).

Now personally, I'm not so sure the problem is in the kernel; I've always been more apt to blame Xfree86 (and now X.org) instead, but the fact remains that it just doesn't feel right.

Mac OS X on the other hand, has a MUCH better flow to it. BeOS's approach to such things was practically perfect (my 450mhz K6-II with 128mb of RAM running BeOS feels faster than an Athlon XP 2100 with 1GB of RAM running Gentoo Linux). Even Windows, despite it's many other problems, feels more responsive on the desktop than Linux.

What the problem is for sure, I don't know, but I'd certainly like to see it fixed. Windows is well, Windows (boring and evil). Macs work too well for their own good for a tinkerer (they work, work well, and not as many people feel like fiddling with them, so the development community is much smaller). BeOS is dead. Other operating systems like SkyOS an Syllable are just too obscure. Linux is where it's at for programming enthusiasts. It would sure be nice to be able to use it for more than that though :).

Re:Don't think so

Two words: Direct Rendering

The issues your describing have almost nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with your graphics card driver (or lack thereof). If you've ever run Windows XP on a system without your graphics card driver you will experience the same thing. In fact, in my experience it's quite a bit worse.

There certainly are some things that could be optimized in Linux, but I those are relatively insignificant.

choppiness

I would blame linux, not X :)

While the difference isn't nearly what it used to be, FreeBSD has always had far less of that on the same hardware and the same version of X.

Back on a 486 (and even my K6, iirc) linux could freeze for seconds under loads under 4, while at least the mouse kept working at 20 and up.

The last time I compared on the same hardware (a couple of years ago), Linux was merely "annoying" under load, rather than the older "unusable"

hawk

Re:Don't think so

His point is that the kernels are optimized for servers. That is, focus on throughput, performance, but not latency or responsiveness.

Actually, the poor interactive performance of the Linux scheduler was due to a combination of a server-oriented performance hack (O(1) scheduler) and an ineffective attempt to propagate the notion of "interactivity" between processes. So in this case, both a server hack and a desktop hack contributed to the problem.

Thankfully fixed now, due to Con figuring out how to satisfy both efficiency and latency objectives with a single scheduler, and Ingo rudely but efficiently pushing his own interpretation of Con's work into mainline. Moral of the story: sometimes the process is bumpy and feelings get hurt, but the code doesn't care, it just keeps getting better.

Re:Don't think so

All that enterprise crap is what keeps the platform solid and almost crash free.

I want to agree with you, I really do. But my SuSE 10.1 desktop regularly has fits where it becomes completely unuseable - if I can manage to get a shell, I find that the load has spiked to 5-10 (on a single core system) when the system was doing *nothing*. Just this morning, I woke up, poured a bowl of cereal, walked over to it to read some Slashdot over my Cheerios, and found the system thrashing and refusing to come out of screensaver because the load was so high. This happened while I was sleeping. I had to ssh in from my Powerbook to kill off any processes that appeared to be using CPU before the system would respond to the mouse.

Meanwhile at work, we just tossed an Ubuntu server that should have been reasonably swift, but was regularly DOS'ing itself by spiking to loads of 40 or more several times a day under normal use. A load of 40-60, on a single-core machine! We "fixed" it by spending thousands of dollars replacing it with a pair of multicore beast with scads of memory and fast disks, which seems to overpower the problem.

Then there's that server belonging to a client, a RHES 4 system. When I ssh in through a tunnel to update it, it insists on running the update program as an X client for crissakes. Then it tells me to register the system at a URL, but the URL cannot be selected or copied to the clipboard. This is "enterprise" quality software?

Back at work, the dev server is still a RedHat 7.3 clunker. It has a half dozen developers fine-tuning their infinite loops, fork bombs, broken joins, buffer overruns, and spaghetti code, all day long. It simply never crashes or hangs, never gets slow, and never complains about the abuse it receives. It's a rock-solid dream. Except that it's a damn nuisance to update, since it's so old. And it's only hobbyist-quality software, after all, built before RedHat went all enterprise-centric

Posted, with regrets, from my Powerbook. I'm starting to think that software built for the home user is a safer bet than the "enterprise" shite I'm dealing with every day.

Re:Don't think so

Tell me, do you compile your shit natively or do you install binaries (such as using the RHEL bootable CD, which in general installs binaries)? Because I've never had any problems if I've taken a day to uninstall everything, download the newest SOURCE and recompile natively on my box with my library versions and my compiler, optimized for my memory controller and my CPU. After recompiling my Kernel image with same and rebooting. If you expect Open Source, in most cases amateur, developers to make their software automatically detect and work with older library versions, compile portable enough binaries to run on your hacked together system, you are sorely mistaken. Do it right, trust me. Binaries ARE NOT PORTABLE. They sort of work, sometimes. C source is PORTABLE. USE THE SOURCE.

I think you've just perfectly summarized why Linux is not popular as a desktop platform.

Re:Don't think so

But that's not the title of the article. It's just the title of a horribly written slashdot post. The article itself is pretty reasonably, and makes some excellent points.

But, I suppose, "why linux has failed on the desktop" sounds catchier than "a well known kernel hacker muses on the relationship between software and hardware in PC innovation and discusses the problems he sees in the way the mainline kernel developers address desktop user needs."

Re:Don't think so

No way can you consider 100 million of anything a failure.

How about: 100 million dead?

Re:Don't think so

Depends which side you're on...

Re:Don't think so

With Linux, there's no cohesive community backing it and forcing it into hardware manufacturers. But, it's free. So it gets put into things by default (like Tivos, wireless routers, etc), and ends up working great. Desktop-wise, people are willing to pay to not have to be responsible. Just like people get totally ripped off at a dry cleaning shop because they don't want to wash and iron their shirts.

Things I would like to see in Linux:

Standardized single-sign on/authentication solution. Yes, I know there's kerberos, but someone needs to build an easy to use API over kerberos which allows you to make a simple call like "bool isTrusted()" to handle security throughout the app. ONE SIGN ON. ONE KEY staying with the user session, whether they open a shell, click on an app in KDE or Gnome, SSH or NFS to another machine or disk. One sign on. Please. This is one thing that Windows does so simply and elegantly. And yes, I know they crippled Kerberos and stuff. But it works. It really does. One of the most impressive things about Windows to me with no real Linux analogue. To get the same thing in Linux, you have to know what you're doing. In windows, you check the "Trusted for Delegation" box and make sure the computer has an account in LDAP.

That's about it. I have about 4 linux boxes, 1 macosx, and several win2k3 servers. I enjoy working with Linux the most because I have a lot of control. But when it comes to getting something "good enough" set up from scratch to live, windows beats Linux hands down. Thus, CIO's and CEO's buy it. If it were possible to have a nice standardized teaching method to teach nice standardized Linux installs and get enough people through there to make a difference, it would be possible to stage a serious invasion of MS shops. The reason is that they have "good enough" all ready, but they are starting to get new ideas that the microsoft stuff is not capable of doing quickly, and MS themselves have become too big and bloated as a company to get anything done in a timely fashion. Whereas a small consortium is much more nimble. The problem is there's NO LEADERSHIP. It's a bunch of nerds leading each other around, arguing about the correct text editor to use and/or what window manager is best. When there emerges a clear leader, not a technology leader but someone with the vision of truthful computing who can get us all thinking the right way, then we can make a push. This leader will not be in it for the money. Although he/she may already have a lot of it. This person will DEFINITELY not be from the academic, CS or otherwise, sector. Perhaps a politician, but more likely a businessman. Above all, a great leader with the vision to provide something better than good enough, and the army to build it.