Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Leaves Desktop Linux Behind

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."

Lack of Desktop Focus?!

[BacOs]

I was at the Collaboration Summit and am surprised by the comment of "Lack of attention to desktop Linux." According to the agenda [linux-foundation.org], there was a Desktop Panel on day 1, and all day Desktop Workgroup meetings on days 2 and 3. That doesn't seem like a lack of attention to desktop Linux to me. I attended the Desktop Panel and part of the Desktop Workgroup meeting and they seemed like attention to desktop Linux rather than a lack thereof.

This story is factually incorrect

[br1an.warner]

While I respect Joe, he unfortunately missed the fact that on the other two days that he _wasn't_ at the conference, there were all-day desktop Linux meetings.

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 Meeting

• Virtualization on the Desktop
• State of X
• OpenPrinting Joint Session
• Creating Portable Linux Applications, Joint Session with the LSB Workgroup
• Desktop kernel requirements
• Desktop project Lightening Talks

Re:Not Likely

[Builder]

They lack a wide selection of applications? Care to justify that?

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.

Re:Uh Oh

[xrobertcmx]

Now, not to argue too much. The key differences between my XP desktop vs. my SuSE 10.3, kubuntu, and EEEXubuntu machines is that XP needs to be updated about 2 or 3 times a month and rebooted about once week if I leave it on 24/7. SuSE and the 'buntu family receive updates on a daily or every other day basis. However my uptimes is roughly 72 days for SuSE and 8 days for Kubuntu. EEEXubuntu is shut down three or four times a day as unlike my MacBook Pro and very much like my old dell laptop suspend and sleep don't seem to work. In conclusion both systems have their annoyances. I've yet to encounter a major issue related to dependencies which either Yast or apt-get hasn't sorted out for me, and neither has destroyed my systems. On the other Hand a well set up XP desktop, which does take three times as long to get running, is stable, and if properly secured doesn't get hammered with spyware or virii. System maintenance can also be scheduled for 3am, when even I'm alseep most of the time, or 2pm when I'm at work.

Re:Uh Oh

[mikael]

After upgrading to Fedora Core 8, apt-get and yum install hasn't been too bad recently, although I did encounter some bad mojo with my Nvidia drivers which turned out to be that the GL library file is now in /usr/lib/nvidia and not /usr/lib, and is not longer called libGL.so, but libGL.so.1 - I ended up just deleting everything nvidia and starting again, then got error permission with /dev/nvidiactl [nvnews.net].

Codecs work perfectly, but the installed fonts and desktop schemes seem to change according to the preferences of the current maintainer. A workaround to this is to make a manifest of all the rpm's installed prior to upgrading to a new release, then making a manifest of the new rpm's, then doing a diff and installing the missing rpm's.

Those are minor compared to having the installed anti-virus tools on Windows slow everything down because they are are doing their full volume scans in the evening or at night. Even worse is seeing how much disk space they use up with their virus definition files - this seems to run into hundreds of megabytes now.

And with any pre-installed ISP software, you can never be quite sure what information they are sending out (CPU ID's, local username, local current user directory). Remember the reaction when Real networks was sending back the filenames of the files that users were viewing.

At least with Linux, when you set up your own connection scripts, you know exactly what information is going where.

Re:Uh Oh

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

And just WHO is this "Linux Foundation"?

[HiThere]

http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Members [linux-foundation.org]

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.)