Shuttleworth making a good point?
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, calls on Linux developers to make the presentation layer of desktop Linux applications even more attractive to users than Apple’s Mac OS.
Yup. In short, this is what they need to do. Screw GNOME, KDE and the rest, we need something that looks stunning (even on relatively modest hardware), works stunning and is stunningly easy to develop beautiful and functional apps on. Like… well… OS X.
BUT… and this is a big but (no, not a big butt, that’d be crass and schoolboy-ish), it’s not going to happen on ‘Linux’ like Shuttleworth says. Why? Because the open source community that controls ‘Linux’ and all things attached to it has aptly demonstrated over the past few years that, try as they might, they are still incapable of producing something as tidy, elegant and good looking as Apple’s Aqua/Quartz model. Yeah we can have flashy rotating 3D crap everywhere, and window transforms that actually bring on nausea. Yes we can had a good development model. But like everything the product is ugly, over-complicated and ultimately unsatisfactory, no matter who does it.
The answer? One Linux distributor/author has to do an Apple, take a good basis from open source and build a world-beating layer above it that makes it the desktop everyone wants. Too many cooks. Shut out the extra cooks and make your own broth and it’ll turn out just like you want it.
Yeah tons of folk will deride me and call me a fan boy. I don’t care. It’s not Apple I like, I used them as an example because Shuttleworth did, and because they are a good example. The key is in the method. Because it works. Harness, control and regulate, while using open source as inspiration, testing stuff and developing new ideas, filtering and channelling that into the non-OSS final product. Works for Apple, Sun, Red Hat et al.
Linux won’t succeed without regulation. Linux isn’t a socialist community, its Anarchy. Anarchy isn’t a system, it’s an anti-system.
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Completely agree.
There is so much awesome to be had in Open Source, but there’s also a lot of noise, everyone is talking at once. You need to have a model that allows this awesome to trickle through while everything else can just run off. There are many companies doing this and doing well off it. I think Apple could loosen up a bit. There is a lot about OS X that they could open up some more, and they haven’t quite gotten rid of all those nasty “big cooperation” traits, the faff about the iPhone SDK and whether or not there would even be one at one point is a good example of that.
I also have a fear that there is too much emphasis on how things look. Check vista out. Linux can look pretty as it stands now, it just takes the time to put it together. In my experience of using kubuntu, there are times when it just-falls-apart. I don’t know why, I didn’t touch it. (Thankyou automatic updates) There needs to be more work on other aspects of the system as well. Device drivers (graphics especially, even with an nvidia card it is still liable to surprise-fail on my machine), “dynamic” networking (as in, liable to change at any point with no notice and be ok with that) and multimedia functions are all things that also need taking care of. Not to mention the things that stuff relies on.
“Linux” as an operating system, by it’s open source nature will have difficulty keeping it together as well as a smaller team of dedicated developers can. The project is huge == Many many many people talking.
“If it were me… “, put linux in, get linux-based out.
February 12th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
“The answer? One Linux distributor/author has to …”
It happens. E.g. Mepis, Puppy. Not for the faint-hearted though.