[Discuss] The next Linux desktop

[Richard Pieri]

I think that Laura's experience is indicative of the state of the Linux 
desktop especially on portable kit.  In short: it sucks.  Here are some 
points.

GNOME 2 is broken.  There are lots of little things that don't work or 
don't work correctly/consistently and the GNOME devs have refused to fix 
them even when patches are provided.

GNOME 3 is worse.  For all practical purposes it is unusable.  It's 
elegant, true enough, but elegance without functionality is a waste.

Mint following the GNOME path is a lose.  Doing GNOME 'right' is 
impossible because GNOME itself is so bad.  A broken foundation can only 
yield a broken environment.

KDE is a nightmare.  While it has the consistency that GNOME lacks, as 
soon as one uses a non-KDE application that consistency shatters, and 
everything that you may have done to tweak the environment doesn't work 
for those non-KDE apps.  Like Emacs, Thunderbird and Chrome.

I simply hate Unity.  I give Canonical props for the effort, but 
"effort" is not the same as "good".  I find that Unity spends more time 
getting in my way than letting me work.  That's a bad start for a UI.

XFCE and LXDE exist for the technically proficient.  They're certainly 
usable but they lack what average users expect from a desktop.


The Macintosh desktop works so well because of the Macintosh Human 
Interface Guidelines and the uniform enforcement of those guidelines. 
The HIG ensures UI consistency across all applications.  It makes sure 
that things like copying from from one application and pasting into 
another "just works".

Microsoft finally figured it out and instituted the Windows User 
Experience Interaction Guidelines, their equivalent to Apple's HIG, for 
Windows Vista and Windows 7.  Windows 7 still has some rough edges but 
overall the experience is remarkably usable.  In some ways it is better 
than Macintosh, and I expect that to improve as Apple focuses on the 
iOSification of OS X.

Linux... doesn't get it.  It takes no effort to pick any three different 
applications and point out how they look and act differently and refuse 
to interoperate even when they use the same toolkits.  The ultimate 
problem is a lack of specialized UI people at the cores of the desktop 
projects.  The major Linux desktop projects are stuck with Windows 95's 
mentality: copying the frontrunners with no understanding of why the 
frontrunners made the decisions that they did.

I've wanted an elegant, functional Linux desktop for 16 years.  I've 
grown tired of waiting for it.

-- 
Rich P.