A piece ‘a Me

via eWeek

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.

This is a regurgitation of something I wrote on the 68kMLA forum in response to comparisons of GNU/Linux, Windows and OS X.

Okay, in order to make a fair comparison to OS X you have to compare it to installing OSX86 on an.other PC hardware combination. Try that and see how well it runs and how nicely it behaves. It’s hell on two legs, that’s what. OS X is, in my opinion the best consumer OS available. While not perfect it is about as good as it gets. It is *not* however available outside the Mac hardware platform without significant screwing around, and following undocumented techniques that frankly make Linux installs look like a walk in the park with mother. There are, now, install DVDs where a lot of the screwing is done for you but you still have to jump through hoop X and y to get tit working, and there’s no guarantee at the end that it will anyway.

Therefore, and what this all boils down to is, when faced with *generic non-Apple hardware*, which is the easiest and least obstructive OS with the best support and most straightforward install? The answer in some people’s mind is Linux (insert favourite distro here). In my mind it’s Windows, and I don’t care what ANYONE says, I still think that. It doesn’t stop me using Linux, but that’s because I know it inside out and understand what goes wrong with it and where. To a novice or a Windows-only user it’s all alien flim-flam, and when it goes wrong they are up the creek and desperately lacking propulsion devices.

Linux is free, as in beer/speech, but with any free OS the penalty is the need for support. You either need an IT tech, or a pet nerd (one and the same in some cases). I’m sure plenty of people will quote chapter and verse about how they’ve never had a problem with x distro etc. In my experience I’ve never had a serious problem with *some* distros on *some* hardware. I’ve had gripes though, and they are the sort of things Joe Soap User can’t fix themselves.

Another issue is hardware compatibility. You throw your favourite distro at a machine not knowing if it’s going to work okay or not, simply. Most of the time it does. Sometimes, especially on older hardware (which is a more common target for experimentation with Linux), it doesn’t and you have to use something different. Because of differences between distros it then puts you slightly on the back foot as you can potentially be stuck in a system you don’t know, making life hard when stuff goes wrong (which it does).

All this is to say nothing of the fact that GNOME based distros either have a hellish and jumbled mess of config utilities which may or may not work correctly and lack the options required for some setup. I generally compare them directly with OS X or Windows, both of which lacks some in places themselves, so lacking on something that’s lacking is generally really not good.

KDE goes some way to helping I have found as it seems more homologous with config and util apps having much more consistency, however it’s still not quite all there.

Then there’s XFCE which is different again.

Then every distro uses a different setup for configs and utils to manage them. Although common threads exist, they are only that. Rough similarity is not either consistency or standardization. Most of the similarities are factors more of the basic nature of a configuration being the same and/or the text config file being the same. The upshot is it’s difficult to guide a novice user through a standard procedure to reconfigure/setup/install anything. Using ‘Linux’ isn’t enough anymore. Divergence means you now have to ask ‘what Linux?’ and ‘what version?’ to get anywhere. The latter and often even former are something, again, Joe Soap User doesn’t know and can’t find out all that easily (and to compound the issue, finding out is different between distros! ARGHHHHHH!!!).

Linux will never succeed as a desktop OS unless it is standardized, and then rigorously crafted into a product on a par with OS X and Windows quality and consistency wise. That won’t happen because it’s ‘Free’, which means you can do what you like. That’s ultimately going to leads to it’s remaining a mediocrity, in my opinion.