Desktop Linux Is Dead 1348
digitaldc writes with this quote from PCWorld:
"It kills me to say this: The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead. Despite phenomenal security and stability — and amazing strides in usability, performance, and compatibility — Linux simply isn't catching on with desktop users. And if there ever was a chance for desktop Linux to succeed, that ship has long since sunk. ... Ultimately, Linux is doomed on the desktop because of a critical lack of content. And that lack of content owes its existence to two key factors: the fragmentation of the Linux platform, and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large."
Games (Score:3, Interesting)
I need nothing, absolutly nothing exception playable games.
WINE doesn't cut it, and I don't think that it ever will, I try it out regulary and it just sucks for the games I play.
Since 2004 I have been dual-booting between Ubuntu, where I do all serious and not so serious stuff, and Windows where I keep my FPS addiction alive (currently MW2)
Haven't we heard this before? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Games (Score:2, Interesting)
starcraft 2 works flawlessly with wine out of the box. Been playing it solely on ubuntu over 100 games played and including online games without drops or lag. Seems almost as if they tested it on wine before shipping the game.... just amazing that it works so well.
Re:wrong OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to see how a desktop UNIX-based os should do it right, look at OS X. Say what you will about Apple - I don't care, only own a mac and an iPod (I have a Droid X for my phone) - but they did the desktop RIGHT. It's easy to use, fairly intuitive (passes the grandma test, for the most part), and is oh so easy to support.
I remember when I got my first macbook a few years back and I had a sprint wireless broadband card for it. I was thinking "you know, I should be able to make my mac a wifi base station and share my wireless". Preferences, sharing,
Evil Twin day? (Score:5, Interesting)
What is going on today on /.?
Linux Destop is Dead, Top 10 Reasons to Work for Micsoroft, Pirated Software Making Anti Teorist Drones Fail, MS Donating Software to Charity, Why We Should Use Dell and Forget Custom Desktops, Earth Shortage...
Did ... did it finally grow up? Sell out? Get brainwashed? Recieved ms-paid escort service? All of it in one hectic night?
Linux has the same drag as Mac in business (Score:1, Interesting)
There aren't any business databases available for either OS. And I mean databases like dBaseIII or Paradox for DOS, and NOT the useless piece of shit Windows versions. No database, no deal. Many are using Access but if you've ever used anything well designed you don't like it.
The PHP/Javascript/MyPostrgressSQL combo is an abortion. We need something that those who know the business rules can use to implement said rules, and do it easily.
If it ever happens, the publisher will make billions overnight. I'm still selling PDoxDOS apps. Hey stupid, they work.
Oh Dr. Pauker, where art thou?
Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
It is kind of sad how obvious the whole "flamewars for ad views" thing has become on this site.
It's not about the OS, really. (Score:1, Interesting)
Most people want to buy feelings, not actually do something useful with the machine. Example: buying a Mac because it is pretty, at least partially for the feeling of owning something aesthetically pleasing. Games fall into this category too. People will line up to hand over money to buy something that barely works because a) friends are doing it and so they want to play it too, and b) playing the game will give a feeling of accomplishment very slightly different from the feeling of accomplishment gotten by playing the last game.
Most ways in which Linux is technically superior does not fit into this mental model of what a computer is for, and we are surprised that it doesn't have marketshare among these folks why exactly?
Re:On the contrary (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:huh... why now? (Score:5, Interesting)
... i dont get it.. why now? why at all?
Because Mr. Strohmeyer needed an article, and PCWorld needs their advertising revenue.
Re:So.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, the stories often suck, but once you filter out the trolls and complete morons, there's actually a great community of bright and interesting people who post comments here. You know, the people who've been around since the earlier era of the internet, the people who know an awful lot about science, technology and computing. That's what keeps me coming back - it's certainly not the brilliant editorial insights of the staff (guffaw).
Backroom deals killed Linux on the Desktop. (Score:3, Interesting)
Every time Linux has been on its way to success on the desktop Microsoft has stepped in and made its life short. Why did Dell despite pretty decent figures refuse to sell their Linux desktops in the open? Why was it only avaliable in a very limited amount of countries? Why did a computer with Linux cost more than one without an OS or FreeDos, or Windows?
Linux was well enroute to gooble the whole netbook market up when suddenly Asus ditched it overnight after hard pressure from Microsoft. Resellers refused to take it in despite good sales figures.
This has nothing to do with Linux in itself. It could be the best OS in the world but it still dont have a chance until the monopoly is broken. The OEMs are held by the balls by Microsoft and nothing will change until that grip is lessened.
Re:What's still keeping me away (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty right on most points. To me linux distros are like wrapping paper. underneath it's still a chaotic mess as soon as you try to install anything not included with the distro you run into install hell. Software is the most annoying thing to me when I deal with linux. So you find this app you want to install.. install it and it requires lib.version.x or whatever. So you go download the said lib and it's version x+5 and it doesn't work and all that bullshit. Why can't they just come as independent packages? Too much reliance on this or that lib.
Re:wrong OS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow... indeed the summary and the title of the article is quite trollish. I guess the reason is that that is what sells nowadays.
Nevertheless the author makes several insightful criticisms to the Linux community. (yeah I RTFA so sue me!)
In general the criticisms are the same old we have been hearing since the beginning of the "Linux on the desktop" days. The thing is... people don't *understand* how the Linux community work. They cannot see how Linux has been steadily gaining a share of the desktop in all these years.
Moreover, the term "linux on the desktop" has always been very ambiguous. In general, I believe what people mean is "the day some Linux variant gets 10% share of home PCs".
The *only* way this will happen is when a company gets Linux and tries to achieve such an objective.
The closest we were to that was when Lindows appeared; and it is very well known the backlash from the "open source community".
Re:wrong OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
I came at it the other way around, since I inherited an older-model Mac laptop from my wife when she upgraded. I've been using Linux since the early SLS (later Slackware) distributions on my desktop and server systems. I like the way Apple has gone to some lengths to make issues like dealing with wireless networks pretty much bombproof, but I still prefer the configurability of my desktop Linux systems. The Mac UI isn't bad, but it makes me a bit cranky that there's no way to configure it to suit the user's way of working. Seems it's good to think outside the box, but only if you think the way Apple damn well tells you to.
Also, even after several years, it still bothers me that closing a window on a Mac doesn't terminate the application. I can understand the philosophical rationale (for what it's worth) behind this, but it seems unnecessary and wasteful.
Re:wrong OS? (Score:2, Interesting)
MacOS is only easy to use if you don't stray from the party line. Otherwise
it can quickly become more difficult to deal with than either Windows or
Linux. It's much like the iPhone except you are more free to employ free
software (ironically enough) in order to smooth over these rough edges.
What Linux is lacking is major studio games. That is really the only area
where "content" is an issue since such games are ultimately as much about
non-programmer content as "code".
For most people, the web is where it's at and Linux is entirely suitable
to take up the slack for mobile devices when the self-inflicted limitations
of those cause you problems.
Re:What's still keeping me away (Score:4, Interesting)
KDE vs. Gnome: Tell me about it!
I wanted a drop dead simple distro for my wife and my mother to do their email and web browsing with no more virus headaches. I read up and found that Linux Mint was the friendliest experience out of the box.
I went to Linux Mint's website to get it and was offered this choice:
Linux Mint Gnome 32 bit edition
Linux Mint Gnome 64 bit edition
Linux Mint KDE 32 bit edition
Linux Mint KDE 64 bit edition
Linux Mint Xfce 32 bit edition
Linux Mint Xfce 64 bit edition
Linux Mint LDXE edition
Linux Mint Fluxbox edition
Linux Mint Debian edition
WTF. Now maybe I'm out of the loop and haven't been going to my local Linux club meetings, and I certainly don't know the secret handshake, but seeing this choice with absolutely no explanation of what the hell the difference is does not inspire me about a distro famous for being "simple for newcomers".
Perhaps there is ONE MAIN DEFAULT edition with some alternate editions available, but that isn't how it appears on their webpage.
I think I'll get them Macs.
Re:three million (Score:3, Interesting)
Just one query about that percentage, where exactly do dual boots end up. Do dual boots just disappear to favour the company paying for the most adds, surely the choice to dual boot should outweigh 'we are a monopoly and we are going to force manufacturers to supply you a cheap version of the OS'. You got the software as an OEM and you use it to play games but does that really count as a desktop or just a game console and the OS you boot to do work, really counts as your desktop of choice.
Why exactly does a dual boot windows and Linux machine only get counted as a windows box. Why does a dual boot Linux and Apple machine only get counted as a Apple machine. I would bet a windows and apple dual boot gets counted twice to fluff up the numbers. Why does a box without an OS get counted as nothing. Why doesn't Android count as it is a fork of Linux and elements of the code base will merge.
Desktop Linux is dead, WTF, yet another journalist that fails grasp open source or real choice, there is only one company who can give real statistics of Linux and that is Google, those privacy invasive buggers can quite readily even count the dual booters out there.
Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business (Score:3, Interesting)
What they're missing is the built-in idiot-easy form designing.
I'm speaking as a major PostgreSQL believer. One of my best friends was a beltway bandit in the 70's-90's. He calls GUI application development "the programmer's guaranteed employment act." He's definitely a fossil, and he made all his money on dBase and FoxPro. Neither of these tools are particularly amazing, but they do make it easy to write fairly simple databases with fairly simple visual forms (think ncurses).
There is a strong tendency in our profession to break systems down into a set of components and then elaborate those components. I am a web developer with a strong RDBMS background. I find that I can offload a great deal of the work to the database and it's not much effort for me. I find that, on the web, I only need a designer's input for a fraction of the time I would if I were doing a GUI application. This is because we've elaborated these components. FoxPro gives you a pretty stripped down, procedural way of dealing with the database. I haven't seen what its GUI frameworks are like but I'm willing to bet they're also fairly also stripped down and procedural. I have web developer friends who are not conversant in SQL. They are very excited about the "NoSQL" "databases." I think this largely has to do with the fact that when you misuse RDBMSes, they aren't that fast, and the kind of people NoSQL appeals to are already doing that work in their application. For them, it's not taking on a burden they don't already have. To my friend the FoxPro user, NoSQL just looks like even more work he didn't used to have to do.
The people who were brought up in simpler times find simpler tools better because they have to learn less and they can just sort of dive in and start getting shit done. But for me, I already have learned these tools and can use them deftly. To me, using FoxPro is a bunch of tedious manual labor because I can make a complicated SQL statement. Also, to make a nice application now is a lot more work than it was twenty or thirty years ago. It has to look nice and have a good metaphor as well as do its job quickly and well. My friend can certainly bang out a FoxPro application quickly, even quicker than me most of the time, but it won't be the app you want to use, because it also looks like it came out of that era.
As far as I can tell, there will always be a market for every kind of software developer. We've reached a critical mass where pretty much every technology now has an installed base of users for whom that technology is essential. My friend could certainly find work in FoxPro, though most of it seems to be on the east coast. But demand is low enough that he would have to relocate, which isn't the case for me as a web developer. It's the same thing with MUMPS. If you know it, you can get a job working for some hospital or medical company, but you are unlikely to find a company in your zip code that needs it.
To return to your point, MySQL and PostgreSQL aren't missing anything from a database perspective. From a FoxPro perspective they're simply missing simplicity. But simplicity isn't something you can just drop in.
Re:I agree with one thing: fragmentation (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish I had mod points here, and that you hadn't been tagged as a troll. Although your KDE-specific evangelism IS a bit of a problem, your core point is actually very valid and correct. It's the APIs and programming interfaces that make Linux on the desktop almost unusable for the average user. If there weren't 20 different ways of doing everything then we'd have some more traction and a more usable desktop.
I'll relate one of my most recent experiences... just this weekend in fact. I upgraded my Kubuntu 10.04 to Kubuntu 10.10 on Friday. I then spent an hour on Saturday trying to fathom how in hell to control my sound inputs so that I could make Skype use the microphone on my headset instead of the built in one on my laptop. An hour. And you know what the fix was? To install a different mixer for PulseAudio instead of the deafult KDE one so I could select my microphone inputs. Even then it was opaque as hell and took some experimentation using Audacity in monitor mode (which I had installed already but isn't installed by default) to determine which one worked and setting the appropriate input level. I mean WTF? A normal user would have given up at the point of clicking on the KDE Mixer and not finding any functions there to switch inputs. A middling-experience user would maybe have poked around in System Settings (of which there are NONE!) before giving up and installing Windows.
This is a huge problem. I have been working as a systems analyst for years, run Linux since 1993 as a side project, spent several years from 1999 to 2004 running it as my primary OS before switching to Mac. I have only recently returned to trying to use it as my primary OS, and while I'm incredibly impressed with Kubuntu 10.10, the lack of some critical applications and the incredible inconsistency between APIs and interfaces is making me think maybe a new Mac laptop is in my future. I really want to give Linux the shot because I recently got an awesome laptop to run it on and I am definitely on-board with the whole FOSS thing. Even I had trouble and had to resort to some rather opaque Google searches. This is not the way to win users at home OR in the Enterprise. Trust me; enterprise desktop tech support don't have time for this crap either and would rather just install Windows 7 on the hardware.
Funny Stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
Six months ago my brother, who is a very stalwart end-user-only, tried Ubuntu for the first time. He now recommends it for everything except for gaming.
But he is pretty smart -- probably not a fair test.
Two weeks ago my neighbor across the street came to me and said she had a problem with her computer. She explained the issue in very primitive terms which boiled down to a broad-spectrum viral infection of Windows. She said a friend of her son had recommended that she "Do something called 'wipe my hard drive' then install Ooo Boo Too on Windows." The conversation continued in this vein for a while. In short, she is neither the sharpest tack in the drawer nor a skilled computer user. She asked for my help with the install. I said, well, maybe I should stay here in case you need help, but you should try to do it all yourself. If you can figure it all out, then you should be OK with using it, but it is pretty different from Windows.
I helped out with a couple confidence things -- "Should I really wipe the whole hard drive?" "Yes.", "Do I really need a password?" "[brief pro/con explanation]" "OK, I'll use a password." -- but she did the rest on her own. Once it was up I showed her where the icons were and how to search for more software, where to put in her password for the local wi-fi she uses, how the system updater works -- but nothing else. I left feeling a little nauseous about the number of "How do I..." questions I would get over the ensuing days.
Two days later I stopped over to ask how it was going. "It's great -- works a lot better than Windows did." (which I ascribed to cruft and viruses having made her Windows install slow) I asked if she had any questions. "Nope, everything is working just fine."
MS Paid Trolling (Score:2, Interesting)
I've worked with Microsoft employees before. They have *admitted* to me that Microsoft pays people to troll boards, people inside tech magazines/sites/etc to write troll stories, etc. All to keep the *idea* of their barely functional, buggy, bloated desktop on top by making it "the" desktop in a majority of computer users' minds. This is the ONLY reason Microsoft is on top and alternatives such as OSX and GNU/Linux cannot get a foothold, not by any other reason.
It should be illegal for a company to do such negative viral marketing, and is yet another example of how our social and economic system is fundamentally flawed and tilted to people who can lie and cheat and steal their way to the top and keep themselves there by throwing money at everything that threatens them.
I keep a Windows partition on my computer to play games, but have considered taking it off many times before because I want to play games. No game is worth supporting a lying, cheating, scamming company that uses underhanded methods like this to keep themselves on top.
My Windows dies today, if only to prove this trollish Microsoft-funded "article" false. Desktop GNU/Linux is alive and well on mine and many, many other desktops, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. And as we continue to push against Microsoft's lies and make people see what Microsoft really is, we WILL dominate the desktop.
Count on it.
Re:One other thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes it can. Novell, IBM, Red Hat et al have sunk millions of dollars into advertising. Unfortunately they're advertising to people who buy servers and such like, not deploying desktops. I expect these companies realise it's kind of futile and high risk to chase the consumer market when Microsoft have it sewn up.
Ubuntu 10.10 has great copy on its website extolling the benefits and showing that you can do pretty much anything on Ubuntu that you can on a Mac or Windows based PC. But...you only see that if you're already on the Ubuntu landing page. Linux also doesnt come pre-installed on the vast majority of new PC's either.
Therein lies the problem. People who have Windows or OS X are not going to be convinced to undergo the trauma of switching operating systems for one which can "do pretty much anything ... that you can do on a Mac or Windows PC". So I switch dist and I'm almost but not quite where I was when I started, what was the point of that?
I believe it would be more productive to deemphasize the OS and promote things like Firefox, OpenOffice etc. that run on top of it. If an OS runs all the apps a user is used then they're far less likely to care what is running underneath the next time they switch.
bah (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:wrong OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's funny, but I actually like the differentiation between closing a window and an application. But I do a lot via the keyboard, not the mouse, so when I want to close a window I use Command-W and know that the application will still be in memory to use Command-O or Command-N rather than having to relaunch the app. If I want to quit then I use Command-Q. I was actually a bit annoyed when they changed "single window/document/view" type applications to exit when their window was closed (though I get the rational.)
I also launch everything from Spotlight rather than spelunking around the Finder. One of the funniest things to me is how people (not saying you) assume that Mac OS X is not for power users and is mouse centric. But if you enable "All Controls" in System Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts, have Spotlight enabled and know the difference between Command-Tab and Command-`, you can do most driving from the keyboard. Add the Automater's Save As Service, the consistent Service interface, applescript and the ability to assign global, application and context sensitive keyboard shortcuts and for me Mac OS X is a power user's dream. All right out of the box. For instance, using the Application's Shortcuts I've bound Command-. to bring up the System Preferences and by creating a "Finder Application.app" in the automator I can use Spotlight to jump right to the finder rather than tabbing through 20 apps or mousing around in expose. Plus Shift-Command-G in virtually any file dialog and Finder and you can type in a path rather than click up and down folder hierarchies.
While I'm in fanboy mode, I'll mention what I love most is the consistency. All (non-MS) application's text edit areas support the basic emacs-like ^a, ^d ^e, and ^k functionality. I'm an old emacs/bash guy, so I'm happy, even if it makes no sense to young-uns. Also, once you know about property lists, you can figure out where prefs are for 99% of applications. And if you can find to the right docs, you can tweak away. It almost sucks that there is no uninstaller, but it rarely matters and if you care - once again the consistency tells you exactly where to look for any left over files. I think that the "application bundle" is a great way to deal with managing all the files related to a program.
Apologies for the fanboyism. I also came from years of Linux experience, which I loved. But for some reason Mac OS X just "clicked" for me.
If you don't have it, I highly recommend TinkerTool [bresink.com] which is free "as in beer" to explore some level of system/UI tweaking. Also, Lingon [sourceforge.net]
is a pretty decent open source tool for navigating all the system and user startup services provided by launchd. It's no longer under development, but it's an Apache licensed program and pretty useful so maybe someone will pick it up. I install Lingon via MacPorts [macports.org] (though the git based HomeBrew" is intriguing...) [github.com]
OK, I'll go away now...
Re:wrong OS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Things like the menu bar being pegged to the top of the primary screen. That made sense when we only had one screen, and resolutions were so low that windows always needed to stack if you had more than one open at a time. Today we have multiple screens, so the 'flick the mouse to the corner' argument no longer applies, and having to figure out what application the menu bar applies to is just annoying and breaks the flow of work.
The list goes on and on, but Apple doesn't seem to want to admit that many parts of their UI are badly designed in the first place, or have become out of date for use on modern hardware, so they just keep repeating the mantra that Apple has an intuitive UI. I can definitely say that the emperor has no clothes.
Re:Not dead on my desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
Random (and especially cheap) hardware may still have problems, but seriously: buy good hardware and you get all that with linux -- at least that's my experience. My last three X-series Thinkpads have all done the above without any tweaking...
Re:wrong OS? NO! Wrong QUESTION! (Score:4, Interesting)
The Desktop OS is dead.
Apple will wind down OS X over the decade - the PC era is over.
For users, this was heralded by the advent of the iPad, which will usher in 10,000 copies. For data centers, this came with large-scale, production virtualization.
Your beloved PC? Now a "content creator's" workstation. Everything from word processing to simple photo-editing goes on line - or into an "app".
Desktop Linux is just kicking (Score:2, Interesting)
Its all my pleasure to see those folks using Linux on daily bases, installing Linux updates and learning commands. I feel proud coz they watched me using Linux over the years and when they were struggling with there OS infected with viri, malwares etc and my system never piss on me. And finally here we go now they are using the rock solid OS.
For me Linux is just penetrating in our companies desktop
Long live Linux.
Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business (Score:4, Interesting)
In all fairness, try finding -anything- specific at ibm.com.
Ain't that the truth. Though, again in all fairness, it's hardly anything unique to IBM. Commercial web sites are often annoyingly short of detailed information about their products. They go for the flash, but you and I are too dumb to be given details.
Recently, I've been looking around at high-quality DSLR cameras. I've gotten tired of my old one whose manual focus is so complex that by the time I've got it to work, the cute critter I'm trying to photograph has moved on or flown off. If I use the automatic focus, most of the time it's the twigs in front of the critter or the grass in the background that's in focus, not the critter. So I want to know how the manual focus works. This in formation is incredibly difficult to find in the companies' sales info, even the so-called specs. They merely say that they have a manual focus setting, and then go into a flowery description of the marvels of their multi-point automagic focus system.
With one camera, I finally hunted down the details, and it turned out that the camera didn't have the claimed manual focus at all. It had a list of 7 "preset" focal lengths that you could choose from. I wasted a lot of hours hunting down the info that made me cross that one off my list. A lot of cameras' lenses have what looks like focus rings, but if I can find one in a store to test, I find that it's a dummy that doesn't turn; it's just a sort of grip and shock absorber, not a focus mechanism.
The same sort of approach is used with all sorts of products. You and I don't need the details; we just need to buy their product. Even if it turns out not to be what we were looking for, and won't work for our intended applications.
Re:Accept reality (Score:3, Interesting)
Professionals want PC's that work just as much as the rest of the world. Without some semblance of market share, you can't get hardware manufacturers to look at you (BSD,*NIX), so you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. In order to get good hardware support, you need market penetration. In order to get market penetration, you need to make the OS attractive outside of your core community. In order to make is appealing to outside audiences, you loose the professional focus of the OS.
Getting Linux in a position to satisfy all three criteria in a relatively seamless way will be a tight walk that may just take another 10 years to get right, but as long as you keep at it, things should always get better.
If Linux is dead on the desktop (Score:1, Interesting)
If Linux is dead on the desktop then this post is written from the graveyard :-)
Wakeup digitaldc. Linux is getting reborn pretty much every 8 month or more.
Re:wrong OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behaviour when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
In other UIs it's irrelevant, because they're window-centric rather than app-centric. You're *always* just closing the window - whether that quits the application as well doesn't matter, because the UI is focused around windows (or "documents", if you prefer) as standalone elements, rather than elements in a child-parent relationship like MacOS does (except when it doesn't).
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debateable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
Everyone I know with a laptop connects it to a larger screen quite regularly to use a dual-screen setup, at which point the problems with the single menu bar become *very* apparent, as dissimilar screens in a multi-monitor setup exacerbates them badly.
Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
Every since OSX 10.0 in 2000, Apple's primary objective with its UI design has been looking cool in demos. Utility has followed a far second.
Re:wrong OS? (Score:5, Interesting)
You are just used to the idiosyncrasies of different desktop environments to the point that you don't think about them any more.
This is what Apple fans like to tell themselves. Sorry, but it isn't true, and sticking your head in the sand doesn't make it so. My computer usage far predates both Windows and Mac.
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behavior when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
What are you talking about? One of us is confused about the definition of "Modal". What I can tell you is that the X button on both Linux and Windows is very consistent. It closes the window, and any of the windows children. The only applications I have run across on Windows that do not follow the consistent behavior are bittorrent clients and IM clients. (Inconsistent, but I understand why.) With MacOS, it is all over the board.
The green zoom button always causes grief to new users because they think it's ought to be a minimize/maximize button, which it isn't. This expectation is entirely a consequence of coming from UIs that treat minimize/maximize as a primary UI operation.
You sound ridiculous saying this. The reason that the green + button causes grief is because for as long as any of us have been alive, we have agreed that a + symbol means 'add'. I means you are making something more or bigger. Green means go. So, a green + means go bigger. In fact, if the green + button was minimize/maximize, it would still be wrong. A green plus should never shrink a window.
So, no, it isn't because I am used to other OSes. It is because I am used to being a human who is part of society beyond Mac computers.
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debatable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
The placement of the menu was debatable back when single monitors where the only setup. Today, it isn't debatable any more. It is now simply a poor design. So, Apple uses a system that is bad for use at a desk and is neutral for a portable instead of using a UI that would work well for both. Notice I did not say "desktop" because when used at a desk, a laptop will often have two monitors hooked to it. It is funny that you use this argument, yet you claim that the OS is designed to be productive. An OS who chooses to make multiple monitors a second class citizen in it's UI design cannot be claimed as one that is designed to be productive.
I agree that it is inaccurate to describe Apple's UI as intuitive---parts of it are astonishingly sophisticated. Intuitive suggests that it should be easy for new users, but that is the way of Clippy and Start buttons. Apple doesn't design to be intuitive--that's a leftover meme from 1985. Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
You are the only one claiming this. The mantra of Apple has been that "It just works" (and when it doesn't, it is the users fault) and is "Intuitive". There is nothing inherently more productive about Apples UI. In fact, it is things like the lack of a maximize button, the fact that to increase window size, you can only do it from the lower right corner, and putting the menu for a program on a different screen that the application, that makes the MacOS UI LESS productive.
While Clippy was a failed attempt at a better help system, the Start button is useful, productive AND intuitive. MacOS also has a start button of it's own. It is just split between the 'Appli
Re:wrong OS? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the menu, when you step away from your computer, and have two copies of RDP open. When you come back, how do you know which one the menu applies to? Don't say, you would just remember. Because that could be the next morning. Asking people to remember what the last window they clicked on the night before when there are perfectly good ways for the UI to tell them is bad UI design. (And no, the amount of space taken by a menu does not matter anymore. That is just a poor excuse for bad UI design.)