Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Ubuntu Linux

Why Linux On Desktop 'Failed': A Discussion With Mark Shuttleworth (www.tfir.io) 584

sfcrazy writes: Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical, summed it in a few words: "I think the bigger challenge has been that we haven't invented anything in the Linux that was like deeply, powerfully ahead of its time." He also said that "if in the free software community we only allow ourselves to talk about things that look like something that already exists, then we're sort of defining ourselves as a series of forks and fragmentations." He added that it seems the desktop Linux people want to be angry at something. We wanted to do amazing things with Unity but the community won't let us do it, so here we are. He also commended Google folks for what they have built for Chrome OS.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Why Linux On Desktop 'Failed': A Discussion With Mark Shuttleworth

Comments Filter:
  • by bigjarom ( 950328 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:31AM (#58596234) Journal
    2019 will be the year of Linux
    • Re:Prediction... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Megol ( 3135005 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:49AM (#58596372)

      Perhaps indirectly through Windows 10. ;)

      • Perhaps indirectly through Windows 10. ;)

        Linux on the **Windows Desktop**. The best of both "worlds".

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Linux subsystem for Windows or whatever it's called that lets you run Ubuntu or Debian on Windows is actually really good. I've been using it a fair bit lately instead of stuff like Cygwin. Much easier, everything just works, no need for a VM or dual boot. File sharing between the two systems is reasonable.

          • by drnb ( 2434720 )
            Yeah, I've booted into Linux a lot less once Mac OS X went BSD. Now with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) the PC side "just works" too for the *nix tools and utilities of interest. WSL v2 is supposed to be even better, a real Linux kernel rather than a partial implementation of the kernel API by Microsoft.

            CygWin usually motivated me to perform the task on a Mac.
          • by DrYak ( 748999 )

            Linux subsystem for Windows or whatever it's called {...}

            WSL - Windows Subsystem for Linux

            in Microsoft's terminology: "subsystem" = a set of API that the WinNT kernel can "speak". Win32 is the most well known, and in the past we also used to have OS/2 and POSIX.
            That's a peculiarity of the WinNT kernel: it's polyglott.
            With regards to Unix-ish compatibility, that's important because it can then implement and expose in API capabilities that do not exist under Win32.
            For WSL1, that means introducing new threading capabilities (pico processes) which are important to im

  • tl;dr (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:33AM (#58596244)

    "I am blaming the community for my lack of vision.."

    -- Mark Shuttleworth

    • Linux is my desktop, no failures detected.

      My wife doesn't know what part of the computer "Linux" is, and she doesn't like trying to remember and pronounce "Libre Office" so she calls it "Excel," but it works just fine for her; browser, office apps, Skype, etc.

      One of the reasons it works well is that I avoid the crap that Shuttlehead guy pushes on the world. Get the fuck away from my desktop, man; it's not broken, stop trying to fix it!

      XFCE forever!!!

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:35AM (#58596252)

    I think the bigger challenge has been that we haven't invented anything in the Linux that was like deeply, powerfully ahead of its time.

    YES, BUT:

    You also didn't invent something that sucks. Apple can't honestly say that about Mac OS. Microsoft can't honestly say that about Windows. Even Google can't honestly say that, about Android. But my Linux desktop keeps not fucking me over, never doing anything hostile against me, never doing anything intended to work against my interests.

    And while I happen to use XFCE which wasn't made by Canonical specifically, I do get it from them. Ubuntu brought PCs-that-don't-suck to the masses, or at least whatever "masses" happen to give a fuck about things-not-intended-to-suck. Nobody else did.

    • by damnbunni ( 1215350 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:44AM (#58596334) Journal

      I hate to break it to you, but Linux sucks.

      It sucks in ways that are DIFFERENT from the ways that macOS and Windows and AmigaOS and BSD and AIX and VMS and openSTEP and Plan 9 and Haiku and Solaris and eComStation and RiscOS and Android and iOS and Symbian and Blackberry 10 and Sailfish suck, but it still sucks.

      They all suck. They suck different ways and in different amounts, but suckiness is inherent in all of them.

  • Was the not-invented-here and lego-duplo-windowmanager he forced on regular Ubuntu meant for anything else than utter failure? Off course his Linux version failed on the desktop!
    • If he got behind KDE Plasma he would really make a difference. Yet another crappy marginally functional re-imagining of something we don't need re-imagined just isn't the right idea.

  • Ubuntu mostly packages others' softwares and smooths out wrinkles in some of them which is a great thing, but why does Mark think Ubuntu can innovate?

    Unity was crap, most didn't like it. get over it. you're welcome to try to innovate something other than a UI

  • Transcript or GTFO (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why should we watch this video? Why isn't there a transcript. Most of us can read faster than these assholes can talk.

  • Not set for success (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kenh ( 9056 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:45AM (#58596342) Homepage Journal

    Building on Mark Shuttleworth's comments, there isn't 'one' Linux, there are dozens and dozens that are "mostly" the same, but not enough that a publisher can not put out a Linux book that appeals to even a majority of users (too many distros), apps come from distro-specific app stores, etc.

    Fractured (forked) efforts fail to succeed.

    Windows succeeds because developers create a need for customers to buy Windows. OS X succeeds for similar reasons, but who develops for Linux? Who drives customers to adopt Linux?

    The pre-mature peak of Netbooks with Linux also burned a bunch of early-adopters that gave Linux on a $200 netbook a try, only to find a lack of compelling software and underpowered hardware.

    Fast-forward to today, and "decent" win 10 laptops can be found for less than $200 in every big box retailer.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:45AM (#58596348)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • XFCE is a great DE (for old hardware too: this is very useful on third-world countries)
    • Re:GNOME 3 and Unity (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @02:46PM (#58598224) Homepage Journal

      better hardware compatibility than Windows

      That's not true and was one of the major reasons why Linux never took off.

      Sure, maybe it supported older hardware very well, but if you went to the local electrical shop and bought whatever printer took your fancy it was a toss up if it would work or not. Even if it did work the advanced drivers that enabled photo quality output and the bundled photo editing software definitely wouldn't work.

      Same with scanners, webcams, and even stuff like digital cameras because although they had a standard MTP interface it wasn't tested on Linux, only Windows, and was probably buggy as hell.

      Even now people complain about laptops not being properly supported, which is why companies can make money selling laptops with full compatibility at a higher price than an equivalent Dell or Lenovo.

    • by 4pins ( 858270 )
      I just want to say that this matches my experience. This is when I went from Ubuntu being my primary OS and installing it on machines for whoever would let me to a Mac.
  • Failed? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HalAtWork ( 926717 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:47AM (#58596356)

    It's compatible, easy to use, GUI for everything, reliable, and doesn't change for the sake of change, which means when grandma learns how to do something it doesn't change with the next update, and it means I can always find what I'm looking for in a pinch and don't have to reorganize my process.

    That's everything I want in a desktop. Maybe it fails in the eyes of others but that's fine. If it becomes popular as a consumer desktop then it will bring all the other crappy things about consumerism with it and I'm fine if that never happens too.

    • Re:Failed? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:56AM (#58596430)
      Linux on desktop isn't easy to use, my mother picked up Win desktop in a couple of weeks to where she could function with it. Her iPad was only couple hours to learn despite being new UI. I gave up trying to move her to Ubuntu.
      • Install KDE, done. Ramp up time for Windows or Max users is basically zero.

      • My experience is a bit different. I switched my grandfather over to Mint a couple of years back (he'd stuck with Windows XP and Office 2003 way past their security support date), spent a little time setting MATE and LibreOffice up to look as much like Windows 98 and Excel 2003 as I could, and it's mostly worked pretty well for him.

        LibreOffice has been a pain point for him; there's a lot of stuff he knew how to do in Excel that he hasn't been able to figure out in LO. But I honestly think that switching hi

    • ... when grandma learns how to do something it doesn't change with the next update ...

      Grandma is better served with Chrome or an iPad. The "grandma network" out there seems to be increasingly interested in iPad. One of the grandma's in our family asked about iPad at a holiday dinner, a friend of hers switched from PC and thought it great. Someone set her up with an older model as a test run, it was successful, she then got a new iPad as a present. Email, web browsing, shopping apps, skype, kindle, ... the three in my extended family that made the move are happy. As their friends that made t

      • Yeah we shouldn't be giving Grandmas PC's anymore. And that goes for the entire low information demographics. PC's can do ANYTHING an individual may want to do in terms of computing. And until recently they were required for almost EVERYTHING. However, while the former is still true, the latter is not. For most low information users today EVERYTHING in terms of computing is content consumption. So watching videos, browsing social media and the web at large, online shopping. Those kinds of things. A tablet o

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Unity failed because it was difficult to use, not because it was ahead of it's time. There I said it.
    That said, I think he has a point. There has been no "killer app" or "killer experience" on the desktop to make people move to Linux (Chrome OS aside). On the server side, Linux is more efficient, cheaper, and easier to manage than windows or mac boxen. On the desktop though, people care about the UI experience and what desktop apps work and don't. Hell I even run MacOS at work just because I don't hav

  • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:53AM (#58596396)

    (I am calling it GNU/Linux as to differentiate other OS's which run off the Linux Kernel such as Android, but the versions from Slackware to Ubuntu that are really meant to be a Unix like OS)
    At the OS's main heart GNU/Linux is a server OS. It is designed to be configured then just left on and running the same program over and over again. Windows and MacOS were designed to be a Desktop OS, where it will have random hardware attached and removed, run a wide set of programs to fit the users whim at the time.

    Desktop Linux never really gained traction, because it was a server OS in heart, thus had a gap in how the UI designed for Grandma where just click the pretty icon then go to the program and Developer, where you have a command line terminal where you vi your config file to get whatever you want done.
    There is a Gap in Desktop Linux for the "Professional" Users, Where they have a good idea what is happening in the system, but will menu options to find their way, where changing a setting is something that will happen every once in a while, but they won't be there all the time.
    For the longest time, in XWindows I wasn't able to right click on the desktop to change screen resolution. I had to blast out of X and back in. While Windows had this feature for about a decade. This is because XWindows is a Client Server Application and Linux Distribution makers were limited to the XWindows developers for features.

  • by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:55AM (#58596414)
    Its what happens when a community has (for decades) a by geeks for geeks attitude. Add to that support often consisting of annoyed RTFM responses. Unix workstation environments, embedded, server ... Linux is awesome and shines. But as a general user desktop it just does not offer sufficient advantage to cover the switching costs of moving from Windows or Mac. Most FOSS apps run under Windows or Mac, the *nix consoles and tools are now available for Mac and Windows. Linux is just less advantageous each year. 1990s, a godsend, today, meh.
    • By geeks for geeks.. and it's a good thing. I don't want a touchscreen-like UI. It's a desktop/OS for power users (mostly IT guys like me). Linux doesn't have to be "easy" for everyone.

      I love Linux desktop because its highly configurable, light on resources, can run on old computers (reusing obsolete Windows machines), ... If people like spending thousands each 1-3 years to buy a new machines because Windows become slower/unusable after each update, so be it.

      I run Linux Mint on my laptop bought in october 2

      • by drnb ( 2434720 )

        ... If people like spending thousands each 1-3 years to buy a new machines because Windows become slower/unusable after each update ...

        Nope, that's FUD. PC sales are down because the working life of an existing PC is beyond 3 years. The hardware has greatly surpassed the performance needs of the average user. I have a nine year old PC that works great, an Athlon X2 3Ghz with 8GB of RAM. Yeah, I tend to put a lot of RAM into systems, it greatly extends their useful life. Its even playable for some modern games since I tend to upgrade the video card every 2 to 3 years. This machine boots Windows 7, 8 and 10 and runs fine. It started with Wi

  • I rather think it fails because it doesn't offer the basic MS user anything that isn't already available in MS, and I don't mean fluffy concepts like freedom. And it doesn't run all of the MS-only software that companies rely upon. The basic MS user isn't too thrilled with MS's updating regime (with its periodic bollixes), and its periodic UI "upgrades". However, moving to Linux requires them to learn an entire new updating regime and the UI is different. Learning that stuff is going to do what exactly for

  • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:57AM (#58596434)

    Because Linux does dumb shit now like randomly changing your ethernet device designations after a reboot. Yeah I know about udev rules but that isn't the point. How people have come to accept that in a production environment I will never know. No other operating system does such asinine behavior. Or snap applications that fail because your home directory is /home/corp.name/user instead of /home/user.

    • What are you talking about? This was solved many years ago!

      Maybe the naming scheme is not beautiful, but they do not change on reboot anymore. No udev rules needed.

      https://www.freedesktop.org/wi... [freedesktop.org]

    • by gosand ( 234100 )

      Because Linux does dumb shit now like randomly changing your ethernet device designations after a reboot. Yeah I know about udev rules but that isn't the point. How people have come to accept that in a production environment I will never know. No other operating system does such asinine behavior. Or snap applications that fail because your home directory is /home/corp.name/user instead of /home/user.

      My system doesn't do this at all. I am not sure what your distro is, but I'm running Devuan.
      And snap applications are the operating system? Maybe... don't use them then?

      Shame on whoever modded this up. Not that they aren't issues, and they do only occur on Linux systems, but hardly a representative list of issues with "Linux".

  • I wouldn't call 2% of desktops a failure (that excludes chrome), that's huge, about 100 million

    • Lol Windows XP has more users than Linux .

    • by drnb ( 2434720 )

      I wouldn't call 2% of desktops a failure ...

      I bet you did when Mac was at 2% :-)

      ... (that excludes chrome)

      As it should. Android and Chrome are not Linux Desktops. They are merely hosted on a Linux kernel. A Linux kernel that could be replaced by another POSIX kernel and nearly no users would know or care and most developers would not know or care either.

      • lolz, I use a mac at work because the choices were Dell with windows or macbook

        Linux is just a kernel though, nothing more. so I'd argue Android and Chrome desktops are a kind of Linux desktop, just some of us would prefer the GNU kind.

        You could replace the Linux kernel with BSD in a GNU/Linux distro... would most users care? Like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD or similar

        • by drnb ( 2434720 )

          lolz, I use a mac at work because the choices were Dell with windows or macbook

          Linux is just a kernel though, nothing more. so I'd argue Android and Chrome desktops are a kind of Linux desktop, just some of us would prefer the GNU kind.

          You could replace the Linux kernel with BSD in a GNU/Linux distro... would most users care? Like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD or similar

          "Linux" can mean two things. One a kernel. Two a complete end user desktop environment. We are discussing the latter case.

          Yes if you replaced the Linux kernel with the BSD kernel in a Linux Desktop distro most users would care. Those embracing Linux as their day-to-day desktop are largely politically motivated, BSD hated by these GPL devotees. Other people who just want a FOSS app or *nix console tools are going Windows or Mac. The handful of Linux desktop users who are not political, who are traditional

  • What stopped them? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @11:02AM (#58596466) Homepage Journal

    We wanted to do amazing things with Unity but the community won't let us do it, so here we are.

    Maybe they should have done amazing things instead of doing stupid things. They handed a rigid and uncustomizable interface designed for phones to nerds for use on desktops, then acted confused when we didn't like it. What epic myopia.

    The most interesting interface I've seen since Windows 95 was on Moblin, and Intel spent almost as much time making Moblin not run on AMD as they did on the Clutter-based interface. (Great name for a UI toolkit, there, champs.) But at least that was both attractive and apprehensible. (Irony of ironies, my browser dictionary doesn't include the word "apprehensible". Boy, does that speak volumes about the Mozilla foundation.)

    I was really, really happy with Emerald, Compiz, GNOME 2, and avant-window-navigator. It was pretty, it had all the functionality I wanted from both Windows and OSX UI, and it was fast. Now neither Emerald nor AWN works correctly, and GNOME 2 only exists in a fork. Why is it that everyone wants to break the interfaces that work on Linux? Just so they can own something?

    • by sl3xd ( 111641 )

      Maybe they should have done amazing things instead of doing stupid things.

      Not only were the things they did in Unity stupid, but they were re-hashing ideas that were rejected decades ago as bad ideas...

      Re-doing the same thing that many other groups already tried, and learned from experience was a bad idea is "amazing," but not in a good way.

  • by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @11:06AM (#58596482)
    Microsoft can get away with telemetry and constant reboots in Windows 10 because they know desktop Linux has floundered. Adobe and Oracle get away with it too. Linux didn’t win in the Windows Vista era (their best chance) and they won’t win now.
  • by Moof123 ( 1292134 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @11:10AM (#58596508)

    I've dipped my toe into Linux land at home a few times. I CentOS at work for our engineering tools, so I am not a complete neophyte.

    In no particular order, here are my snags:

    1) Impenetrable number of variants that create confusion. Asking the basic question of "What version?" results in description like Linux kernel 4.09 Fornicating Fish 19.01 long term support with Debian and SystemD... Like, WTF? There need not be a single "Linux", but holy god there is no rational way to expect the average or even above average Windows/Apple refugee to maintain any of their excitement after spending a day just figuring out which "distro" to try. Some distros are specific to things like CAE, when what I actually want is the toolset on my OS, and not a whole linux distro with them, WTF?

    2) Command line. OK, I know I will get skewered here, but for those coming from GUI land, the command line is more impenetrable than it needs to be. Getting help on commands works, but the usage entries need more examples and less syntax that is only helpful for those "in the know". Much of the UI has been GUI'ed, which is great and all, but it creates a creepy valley. There are far too many obscure command line things I have to deal with during setup, or once every couple months that CANNOT be done in the GUI, and are not used often enough to be worth trying to remember. Given that often the GUI is just a wrapper over top of command line tools, it would be really nice if ALL the GUI control panels would include a help box that listed exactly what the equivalent command line would be so I have a trail of bread crumbs when I need to go off the reservation.

    3) Too much religion. The linux community is a large turn-off of high and mighty folks that miss the point that these days computers are just tools, not a crusade. Bashing Windows users and mocking god-damned stupid crap like editor choices gets old real quick when all we want to do is get our jobs done. While I am glad you can do cool shit with vi or vim in your workflow, editing plain text files is something I spend only a couple percent of my work-week on, so stop mocking me for firing up uex.

    4) Drivers. The last dedicated CentOS box that got dropped on my desk at work took the IT guy and our CAD guy quite a while to first admit the AMD graphics driver was borked, and a while longer to jump through a byzantine set of steps to get it working. By that time my current crisis had passed and I was too busy to bother transitioning back from my virtual machine yet again. I want the tool on my desk to work so I can too. Spending hours fiddling with obscure files and recompiling crap is not my idea of fun, no matter how much y'all think it should be.

    • 2) Command line. OK, I know I will get skewered here, but for those coming from GUI land, the command line is more impenetrable than it needs to be.

      I think your other points are right on, but this one is just flat wrong. Not because your complaints aren't valid, but because they apply equally well to Windows. I've had to use several Windows CLI one-liners to make my Windows 7 system work correctly, and I don't remember any of them so if I were to have to set this system up all over again, I would be hard-pressed to get the same result. And that's not even mentioning the several registry tweaks I've made.

      • It is a fair point. I have not had to touch the registry in a number of years, while my experience on linux has involved semi-regular delves into the obscure and arcane. YMMV I guess.

    • I've dipped my toe into Linux land at home a few times. I CentOS at work for our engineering tools, so I am not a complete neophyte.

      In no particular order, here are my snags:

      1) Impenetrable number of variants that create confusion. Asking the basic question of "What version?" results in description like Linux kernel 4.09 Fornicating Fish 19.01 long term support with Debian and SystemD... Like, WTF? There need not be a single "Linux", but holy god there is no rational way to expect the average or even above average Windows/Apple refugee to maintain any of their excitement after spending a day just figuring out which "distro" to try. Some distros are specific to things like CAE, when what I actually want is the toolset on my OS, and not a whole linux distro with them, WTF?

      I hear you. I get it. I have been using Linux exclusively since 1998. I've been on everything from RedHat to Mandrake to *buntu to Mint and now Devuan.
      It's hard. I always forget which Debian release correlates to Devuan ASCII. I couldn't keep track of the Mint names, or the Ubuntu names either - just tell me the version number! But I don't think this is unique to Linux. Versioning is hard to keep straight. I think it's less of an issue with MacOS or Windows because their releases occur much less oft

  • There lack of hardware support is the main problem. M$ and Intel F'd us all and continue bending us over the rail today. All of the applications that only run on Windows are really only missing on Linux because they have no choice. With no HW support, things simply don't work, or someone makes a FOSS driver with terrible performance and nobody wants to use the platform because of it.

  • Windows is targeted for the home user/consumer and provides the opportunity for the user to be a power user.
    MacOS is targeted for the home consumer who doesn't want to think about MacOS at all.

    Linux continues to require power user mentality as a minimum. Any expectation of compiling, command lines, or understanding 3-letter abbreviations for directories instead of using full names make it difficult for a Windows-minded individual to even consider the transition.

    But of course, as others mention, if it can't

  • by 0111 1110 ( 518466 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @11:14AM (#58596538)

    I don't understand how they don't understand. I am thinking maybe they are just too intelligent to understand those of us who are less intelligent. They cannot imagine having any difficulty with manually compiling 10 different software modules and then linking them up with python and lua scripts and downloading 23 different dependencies before they can run a program. They don't seem to understand that most people don't want to spend 3 hours installing their program even if they are smart enough to do it.

    For the past few days I have been unable to work on my project because I needed a way to block outgoing connections from a particular program. On Windows this would have been trivial to do by just using a personal firewall to block the program from accessing the internet.

    Many Linuxians have a philosophical problem with the very idea of a personal firewall (which illustrates another problem with Linux), but there are actually 3 different linux personal firewalls: Douane [douaneapp.com](outgoing connections only), Leopard Flower [github.com], and Open Snitch [github.com].

    I am an amateur programmer with a degree in Electrical Engineering and I cannot install any of those in Xubuntu Disco Dingo. I carefully followed the complicated and lengthy installation instructions in all 3 cases and installed half a gigabyte of dependencies and in all 3 cases there were all kinds of errors and the installations failed. I searched for help online but there was nothing. The only way I will ever install any of those programs in Ubuntu is if I can find an expert Linuxian who is smarter than I am to hold my hand and walk me through each step. Needless to say these 3 programs are not the only ones that are almost impossible for a normal person to ever install. They are just glaring examples of what should be and could be easy to install programs, but instead are so difficult to install that it might be easier and faster to just write a new program of your own instead.

    So problem number one is that at least 10-20% of Linux software is uninstallable by anyone without an IQ of 150, a computer science degree, and many years of using and studying the Linux system. This is mostly I think because the authors of those applications simply do not care if anyone at all ever uses it. Why they even bother to upload them remains a compelling mystery to me. I would love to interview some of those guys and maybe find out some of their reasons, but they almost never leave any contact information.

    The second huge problem is documentation. Linux applications often have absolutely terrible, woefully inadequate documentation. I consider myself lucky when the author bothers to write more than a short paragraph on what the program is for and how to use it.

    I think a third major problem is that so many Linuxians view GUIs with distrust or even hatred and consider them unnecessary coddling of the masses. They want to do everything from the command line and this prejudice can frequently be reflected in the software which often regards a GUI as something very optional and separate. An example of this is what would otherwise be an excellent piece of FTP software called LFTP [lftp.yar.ru]. It is the only Linux ftp program with multi-segmented downloading. It has no GUI because Linux. And yet it is actually quite difficult to use an ftp program without a GUI to help you select files with long filenames. It requires an excessive amount of typing.

    One or two programmers have tried to write a GUI for it [github.com] but I cannot get the GUI to install on my system. Yes the installation problem again. I encountered this problem [github.com] where the software requires libreadline6, but I have libreadline7. The author 'solves' the problem by telling you to use his Docker image. I did not even know what that was, but I installe

    • So problem number one is that at least 10-20% of Linux software is uninstallable by anyone without an IQ of 150, a computer science degree, and many years of using and studying the Linux system.

      It makes no difference how smart you are. With Linux developers adopting every trendy build environment on the planet as fast as Javascript nuts are developing them, it will always take weeks of frustration to get anything to install. The first order of business to install anything is reverse-engineering how the developer thinks. That doesn't take smarts -- just oodles of time I don't have.

  • by way2slo ( 151122 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @11:20AM (#58596580) Journal

    Problems:
    1) Linux does not run the applications that people want to use (Games, Professional Software Tools, etc.) When I design an information system, first I pick the software that best suits the customer's needs/requirements, THEN I pick the best OS to run that software.

    2) Linux is too complicated for non-computer people. They have other things they need/want to do than to learn how and spend time managing an OS. Customers want devices and software that just work, be it a phone, tablet, laptop, or server. Automatic. Or at most, push a button to do a series of complex tasks behind the scenes.

    3) Linux as a community is to balkanized. Too many forks. If I am a retailer trying to sell Linux laptops to customers, which Linux do I choose? How many do I have to offer/support? How much will that cost my business?

    4) No advertising. I would say the majority of potential customers do not know Linux exists, let alone is an option for them. How could they possibly choose it? (most small businesses fail because they do not advertise enough and to the right audience.) Or if I am selling laptops and offer multiple Linux distros for installation, Why would a customer pick something they have never heard of before?

    • Related to item 4:

      5) The Microsoft Tax. Most PC's ship with some version of Microsoft Windows already installed. It is effectively the default operating system. Most consumers are not going to care about this "Linux" thing.
  • When one thinks of a literal "desktop", one thinks of a desk, with a surface, on which someone accomplishes tasks -- paper-pushing, writing, storage, crafts, et cetera.

    No one buys a desk, puts it into their office, and then proceeds to modify the desk. Arguably, almost no one purchases a desk to then change the desk. They purchase a desk to then use the desk as-is.

    The huge advantages of Linux all come down to an otherwise unattainable level of control. Linux is more than just "configurable". If mac's ar

  • It's very easy.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by idji ( 984038 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @11:33AM (#58596664)
    If it doesn't have Microsoft Excel then business people will never touch it. The end.
  • would be make the launching config easy to graphically edit while still being full featured. Not just a basic one-off setup in a simplistic launcher config editor. Want something powerful to match the underlying flexibility of the OS. This isn't a phone or TV!

    The something special is "Flexibility that works."

    It wants to be a highly flexible drag and drop for configuring desktop launching. Able to automatically list every existing program on the HDD that has desktop integration - even when not "installed

  • by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @11:37AM (#58596692)
    ... all slightly incompatible

    There is no one "LInux", so much of the Linux world's energy has been wasted fighting among itself. Producing variants that are neither better nor worse - just different. And different enough to make learning how to use them a PITA and spreading the development effort into duplicating unnecessary features. The result is that none of them has the polish needed to run effortlessly and in a way that the average non-technical user feels comfortable with.

    As an example SAMBA was originally released in 1992 and it is still - 27 years later - an absolute nightmare for a user to set up. Not because it can't just be right-click on a directory and then share it, but because the user has to be in the right group, there are many and varied ways it can produce unhelpful and cryptic error messages, it isn't always included by default (so a user needs to know how to install it).

    This isn't meant to beat-up the Samba people. It is meant as an illustration of ALL the picky little problems, variants, poor configurations and crappy documentation that means it is far easier to simply reach for the Windows installation.

    Why does Linux have these issues? Because instead of having one unified team all pulling together to create a single, standard, working, polished and debugged product there are dozens of teams all pulling in slightly different directions, creating similar but different bugs and trying to show each other how clever they are by doing much the same thing in many different ways.

  • Firstly, because of a developer disease called "I'm smarter and I know what's better for you". The best example is Unity, an UI that is easy to use and intuitive only for its developers. Then they switched to an even worse abomination called Gnome 3.

    Secondly, they didn't entirely focused on the desktop, they thought that they could also make Linux on phones/tablets. Yes, Ubuntu Touch, Unity 8 and Mir, they wasted their limited resources on this "convergence" shit. And, of course, they failed. Even Microsoft couldn't succeed in mobile market with investments of billions of dollars, let alone Canonical. And *suddenly*, Canonical realized that their dream was falling apart and they were running out of money. They dropped Ubuntu Touch, Mir, Unity 8 and even Unity 7, they decided to switch to Gnome 3 and fire many developers since no much money was left.

    And this is the most successful Linux desktop company.
  • Windows is Free (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mesterha ( 110796 )
    Because Windows is bundled with most PCs, the common user sees no reason to install Linux. Even if it was much easier, most users would not change. This is why monopoly laws try to fight bundling. Microsoft is clever enough to get other companies to do the bundling for them. That along with the network effect keeps Linux off the desktop for the vast majority of users.
  • by recrudescence ( 1383489 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @12:49PM (#58597258)
    Ubuntu != Linux. I've been happy on linux mint for the last, I don't know, decades? I shudder when I have to use ubuntu. More so than windows, mind you. Worse part is, I don't even know why. There is no single big reason for it, it's all the papercuts that do it for me. Incidentally, my fiancée requested to switch to linux mint from windows too after seeing me use it, and she's totally happy with it and not going back either. So, yeah, Linux desktop is doing just fine. I feel Mark Shuttleworth sounds more bitter than enlightened here if you ask me.
  • We used to have Linux at work. We really only need a web browser, which means we aren't in the same situation other companies are with software compatibility or equivalent software.

    Then Unity came. We were find with Gnome 2.
    I moved us to Windows after that. We were starting to grow (now 30 employees) and I didn't have time to be a test dummy for Unity. Also we can't have personal connections to Amazon here, so the fact that Ubuntu was by default sending your local pc searches through Amazon was... not cool.


    So while the summary says Mark blames this on not inventing anything ahead of the times, my experience has been the opposite. Things were relatively stable for us, until they weren't. If they kept going with Gnome 2, we might still be using Ubuntu. Not everyone needs groundbreaking features, especially as software moves to the web. Less is more, sometimes.
  • by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:05PM (#58600326) Homepage

    Linux has some great ideas. In some areas, Linux is better than Windows or Mac OS. That's not the problem. The problem is, to get people to "buy" (or use) your product, you have to SELL it.

    Microsoft, Apple, and Google spend huge amounts of money and effort to sell their products. Even Red Hat has found success by SELLING its "free" OS.

    Unless you have an enterprise pushing a Linux desktop, it will never garner any significant consumer market share.

He who has but four and spends five has no need for a wallet.

Working...