Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Leaves Desktop Linux Behind 212
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."
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.
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
Re:Stay away annoying journalists. (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: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.
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.
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:No windows compition (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stay away annoying journalists. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fork, or perhaps not-fork? (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 part of linux distributions. these days it's "with distro is better". People assume I have linux on my laptop, but i have to take time and show them that i'm running fluxbox on openbsd, not linux.
well what does this have to do with the parent? i guess i'm saying that somehow directly linking the desktop to linux might help out and show people that even if they are using their special distribution for themselves, that no matter what it all comes down to the fact that they are running linux.
on a side note, i don't think linux will "make it" until hardware providers really start helping out with giving source code for driver development. also, no matter how easy of a distribution you have, some people have to pull up the terminal at one point to fix a problem. this scares people away. many many many windows users have never run cmd.exe and will call up some tech support guy if they do have to run some command line apps. when it comes to linux, i am a slackware user, so that sorta shows im a friend of building from source, and doing command line work. I just hope we can fix this link that seems to be breaking apart with linux users, and the state of mind of seeing linux as a desktop os.
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 web surfer".
Flamebait 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?
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 antitrust actions against MS. The main customers for desktop OS's are large organizations (business and government) and even larger PC OEMs. Apple refuses to sell their OS into this market because it monopolized and there is no business case. Linux is licensed such that it is not salable. Most Linux development shops do so because they are users and use it to sell other products, in many cases support and services using Linux or (like Apple) hardware that ships with Linux pre-installed.
So considering the latter perspective, no Linux and OS X do not count in terms of whether the desktop OS market is monopolized, but they certainly do count if you're just trying to figure out install base for other reasons.
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.
It is true that MS is slowly losing install share to Apple and for that matter to Linux on the desktop, although that is really just getting started in the mainstream. This should not, however, dissuade one from understanding that it is a poor investment to try to compete in the desktop OS market. The ROI is terrible because unlike healthy markets your investment is partly wasted chasing MS's intentional un-interoperability. Further, since MS has multiple monopolies you have to commit to investing in all the markets they influence or finding partners to do so. This includes server OS's, hardware, end user applications, some services, media downloads, gaming systems, etc.
If anything the target users that Linux was suppose to rope in went Apple. I think that it's important for the Linux community to understand why and how.
I have personally seen a big move to OS X on the desktop from former Linux on the desktop users. In the security industry it has been a revolution. I can think of several reasons why this seems to be including:
Re:Uh Oh (Score:2, Insightful)
You know, compared to all the time spent running apt-get to check for software updates, running netstat to check for ports that shouldn't be open to the world but for some reason are, deleting and reinstalling 50 libraries to fix a dependency hell broken by the aforementioned apt-get update, 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.
Both systems have their upsides. Both have their downsides. Let's at least try for a little intellectual honesty when comparing them, instead of using hyperbole and strawmen to say why OS 1 sucks but OS 2 should run the world.
Re:Uh Oh (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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
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.
Re:Big Business is ten years behind (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: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.
Re:no surprise (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.
I don't really get how Linux is responsible for either of these things. All I see is cheap, commodity webservers, which made it easier for a startup to get somewhere. Remember, even Google was a startup not very long ago.
WTF?
What do you mean by a "complicated task"? And what do you mean by "single-mission services"?
X was released in 1984. Nineteen eighty-fucking-four. If you are less than 25 years old, Linux's GUI system is more mature than you.
Why is this a good thing?
Performance? Depending on the drivers, Linux has frequently beat Windows at raw 3D performance for awhile now.
Other than that, what is the point? Why would I want all that GUI crap in my kernel? Seems like even Microsoft has started to figure out that this is a Bad Idea, and newer versions of Windows are splitting more and more drivers away from the kernel -- the next version of Windows Server should be able to boot without a GUI.
What does that even mean?
Linux has threads. Linux also has lightweight fork()s. Linux can spawn new, whole processes faster than Windows or OS X -- or any other OS I know of.
I'm sorry, "tight integration with the kernel" is the opposite of modular. Tight integration is the opposite of modularity, full stop.
Many people do, now. Windows is now a viable server platform. There are still many good reasons for preferring Linux, or any Unix, but to say you wouldn't "dare" suggests that you see some security risk that just isn't relevant anymore -- Windows can be locked down as tightly as any Linux, and the more dangerous vulnerabilities are usually in the application, now.
Let me ask you this: When was the last time Microsoft.com was 0wned?
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...
Re:Uh Oh (Score:2, Insightful)
Vista is eating XP share, but it is not *growing* the Windows market. The desktop market as a whole has been growing at something like 8% per year since 2005. So, at best the Windows brand as a whole can only grow about 8%/yr. However, the growth of OSX is almost entirely at the expense of Windows (and, interestingly greatest in the laptop segment). The result is that Windows isn't really growing at all, it's practically stagnant.
The growth of Linux on the desktop is somewhat at the expense of Windows, but not so much as Apple. Most Linux converts are tech-savvy or early-adopter types that don't really figure into MS's bottom line. Most Linux adopters will likely have a copy Windows around 'just in case', so their impact on the market is practically nil. Where we might start to see Linux eat into MS share is on the entry-level products like the gPC and the EeePC. However, it is still too early to tell if these 'almost-appliance' products will have sustained demand in the market.
Re:Uh Oh (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Uh Oh (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:no surprise (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 Linux, it would have been BSD...)
But I would say that it would have been about as big, anyway. There was an insane amount of money coming from venture cap firms, etc -- everyone had a dotcom, and they all had Underpants Gnomes business models. Cheap Linux may have accelerated it, but requiring expensive Windows (or Solaris) really just means more money.
Yes. So can most OSes now -- we're past the memory leak, bluescreen every five hours BS.
Which has nothing to do with running more than one task, and doing it well. I think you've got multitasking and user-friendliness confused, and I have no idea how you got them confused.
Trivial example: Xen virtualization. Amazon EC2 does this now, as does Slicehost. It means that a single physical Linux machine may be running some 30 virtual machines, each of which, if its admin is particularly unimaginative, is only doing one thing.
And for that matter, Amazon EC2 is establishing itself as a general-purpose, do-anything, CPU-on-demand solution.
That should be a point for Linux, not against it. True, some apps are going to require manual installs that are far worse than anything Windows has...
And others are going to be packages, which can be installed in a few clicks from the package manager, or a very simple command on the command-line. No "next" buttons in sight. It may be more complex, the first time -- but so was a next-next-next wizard, until users figured out they could ignore everything and just keep hitting next until it was done. And once the user knows it, they can confidently install or uninstall anything in the repository.
Again: Neither do all Linux servers.
Windows wasn't even coded from the ground up; large chunks of it were stolen from Apple, originally.
And it's also not entirely accurate -- it took long enough for businesspeople to quite grasp the concept of multitasking on Windows.
Funny you should say that. I find that Kubuntu/KDE integrates a ton of projects, made by completely different people, fairly seamlessly, into one product.
It's also not why people use Windows. Ironically, desktop users continue to use Windows largely because of third-party software, which is not necessarily integrated very well. Linux may not be as "tightly integrated", whatever the hell that means (I think you mean consistent, navigateable GUIs), but the things it does integrate, it integrates pretty much as if they were third-parties.
Trivial example: Anyone can create a Debian