Miguel de Icaza Leaves Linux For Apple OS X

[arokh]

It's becoming clear to me I'm discussing with a child. Come back once you've grown up, moved out from your nerdcave and had some real world experience with computers will you?

The Linux desktop have always been and still is a trainwreck. Even the devs are realizing it and they are either abandoning ship or trying to fix things by creating more fragmentation as usual. Too bad UnitedLinux failed, they were on the right path until SCO went insane.

[johnc]

The Linux desktop have always been and still is a trainwreck. Even the devs are realizing it and they are either abandoning ship or trying to fix things by creating more fragmentation as usual. Too bad UnitedLinux failed, they were on the right path until SCO went insane.

I tend to agree with your comments but I think instead of unity what we really need is one group to take in their own efforts and make their own Operating Environment and forget about the "community". Kind of like what Google does with Android. What we have on the desktop is a bunch of completely disparate parts developed by a variety of people for a variety of needs with a variety of visions and tastes and then a distro just throws them all together, hoping that it meets the needs of the users. And so we have a bunch of different distros but in essence they are all the same hodge-podge of mediocre choices with a little polish thrown in to differentiate.

Instead what you need is a company large enough to design an OE from end-to-end and re-use existing pieces where possible (Linux kernel, some common GNU tools, etc.). And, like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, this company has to depend on consumer sales to drive profits. In other words, make a turd and you get $0. (This is the opposite of the GNOME mentality... where they can force their "vision" on the product, no matter how batshit insane it is, because they don't have to answer to customers at all.)

Now unfortunately there aren't too many companies that have the resources to do this. It's kind of like trying to make a car company to go up against Ford and GM -- the latter have years and years of accumulated experience. But what we do know is that the current distros are kind of wallowing around in the same nerdiocrity year after year after year without really making any inroads in terms of marketshare, and what's baffling is that people in these efforts still can't figure out why.


So I completely reject the idea of a "Linux desktop", just as a "Linux mobile" would likewise be a failure. We need a desktop OE that has Linux at its core and that's about it. Whether it be Ubuntu or ChromeOS or Android or whatever, this focus on commonality and having a "community project" is just a waste of time because it doesn't reflect reality. Creating a good desktop OS requires a ton of focus and concerted effort and, yes, hierarchy.

JMO of course.

[dee.]

What? It's irrelevant if he used mouse & keyboard on a touch interface? It's like trying to skateboard in high heels.

Yes it's irrelevant, because touch is only useful for tablets/smartphones or other things with <=12" screens. And touch input is no good for any prolonged, serious work where you have to interact with a GUI. Touch on larger screened devices (not to mention multi-monitor setups) is ergonomically inferior, ergo: any OS that relies on touch to be usable is a failure.

Windows 8 is designed for both touch screens and classic setup. They unified their platform, devs will be able to develop once and run "everywhere". Don't blame your ignorance on MS.

Hahaha, are you reciting some kind of MS propaganda PR text? Get the fuck out of here...

This unified platform nonsense is... well, nonsense. It's not working for MS, their phone OS is tanking even though they butchered Nokia for it (4% market share and dropping) and no one wants to use windows ache - its sales figures are abysmal.

For that matter - the "develop once, run everywhere" is bullshit. Windows ache, windows phony and windows Reeking Turd (RT for short) are not mutually compatible. Even in cases where they are, the developers will still have to adapt the interface for different types of devices and different input methods.

The reality of the situation is, that the same interface for desktops, laptops, tablets and phones is a moronic idea, they are different platforms and different things work for them. Trying to use the same interface for such drastically different platforms is idiocy, and MS is paying the price for their failure.

I'm not a Windows user myself, just had a quick look at Windows 8 but it does look promising.

So you're just engaging in anal ventriloquism, then. Or in layman's terms, talking out of your arse.

I don't know where you get from that it's a disaster/failure, do a google search for windows 8 reviews, most of them are overly positive.

Where I get it? Have you been living in a subterranean barrel for the last year? How about:
- windows ache sales figures are horrible. This has been all over the news. The sales are only a fraction of what windows 7 sales were when it had been released for the same amount of time. http://www.techieapps.com/windows-8-...ing-pc-makers/
- the sales figures were so horrible microsoft decided to try pulling a fast one: they claimed "oh hey, we didn't REALLY release it when we said we did (and started selling it with a huge, multi-billion dollar marketing campaign), the REAL release is now". They also tried shifting blame to the OEM's... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01..._8_blame_game/
- most sources that aren't paid MS shills are calling windows ache a piece of shit. Notably, the usability guru Jakob Nielsen has bashed it to all hell, and he's not a windows hater, he usually likes ms products. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/wind...ing-usability/

That enough or do you need more?

You got it backwards, Unity is a disaster agreed upon by everyone. Canonical wants to do the same thing as MS though, unify their desktop/tablet/phone experience etc. Problem is that the rest of the Linux distributions aren't going to follow, so more fragmentation is incoming.

Unity is liked by many and hated by many. It's not the best interface, has many flaws, but at least it's usable. Heck, I used it for almost a year with no problems, it's actually quite nice for trivial day-to-day use when you get used to it, it's only in power use that it's limitations start to show. Of course there are better desktops out there, and that's the great thing about Linux - something doesn't work for you, there are alternatives. How many different desktop environments can you install on windows 8? Oh right, none.

Canonical is doing shitty things, yes - of that we can agree and that's not the issue at hand here. I hope they'll come to their senses at some point and drop all those marketing-speaking suit-zombies that keep steering them shitwards.

[nightmarex]

Excuse me, are you fucking retarded? How are Unity, KDE, Gnome3, XFCE, IceWM, Awesome, LXDE duplicating anything? They are completely different projects with complete different goals and views. And user-friendly are usable out of the box, developer friendly are expecting developer to customize them to their needs by reading documentation. Just shutup!


Another proof that you are fucking retarded.
There is difference between truck and train, no? Fucking yes. Different transport ways call for different paradigms.
On modern hardware, the network transparent Xorg is inefficient, because no one has supermachine with 1000 thin graphical terminals at home anymore. These "features" are not used, but are required for graphical throughput, resulting in excessive complexity, loss of performance and degraded coding/debugging transparency.
Xorg is in no freaking way is going to be abadoned or broken.
The road map is either to finish Wayland and then implement Wayland over network or rewrite Xorg from scratch specifically to match needs of datacenters with multiple thin clients to "as needed" degree.


Ubuntu decided to write own display server. The only two reasons why Ubuntu got under crossfire is NOT because they duplicate anything. It is THEIR money and THEIR decision.
They got criticized only because they have listed many Wayland shortcommings that are false statements because they actually do not know Wayland. That was cleared by them.
Which resulted in another criticism vector, they rewrite simply because they want full control over it even though they have not been hindered to change and upstream anything they change, which is always seen as stupid thing to do.
Are we clear now?


If you did start in 1997, then you would not bullshit me with such claims! In 2003 Linux was enough powerfull with Nvidia graphics card and HP all-in-ones to do absolutely everything.
That was the year of Linux desktop for me, because I booted into it and never booted back into windows since then. Never.


I know a frigging 80 year old salesman, COMPLETE NOOB when it comes to computers, who works in technical area who uses Linux for EVERYTHING. Is he nerd?


Oh shut up - what is "MVP"?



Fine, lets unroll the quote for the blind:

I havent and going from Ubuntu to Fedora to whatever will work FINE.
I also were not talking about "something completely different". So suggestion - how about you shut up?


Are you fucking retarded?! Binary packages work FINE across different versions of same or whatever distribution, because each distribution has own binary repository that no one ever cares about because its automatic.
No, I haven't heard of Linux dependency hell, but I know about DLL hell and newer version WinSUCKS (WinSxS) which grows beyond 100GiB very rapidly due to each application being installed with own dynamic libraries in seperate containers.
Also, you once more point out you should shut the fuck up because amount of updates one gets depends solely on software choice and distribution policy - whether its rapidly updating or not; whether its bleeding edge or stable.
If you join microshaft developer channel, you winblows beta is updated no less frequent as for example, debian sid. But one difference again - one can PIN the packages and prevent any updates without breaking anything.


How fucking much have both MacOS and windows reinvented the wheel? What about microsoft bob?


Oh fuck no, not because it works great - but because they have no choice but get used to it. And you are NOT forced, if you want stable software, use STABLE DISTRIBUTION. They have XFCE 4.6 right now in Debian Stable, very old, but completely stable.


Nope - a turd is matter that constantly spreads decaying odor regardless of environiment for no apparent reason except its own nature, it matches you perfectly.
I am a turd cleaner and you are wiped once again.

I agree with most of what you said and I was just going to bash his dependency hell statement earlier. Dependency hell isn't what we have today, yes there are loads of dependencies but same for Windows apps.... now what dependency hell refers to (to those of us who suffered I still have nightmares about it) is wayyy back in the 90's you would want to set up an Apache server or something, so you make the server... well errors spit out depends on yadda yadda, download the tarball for that make and guess what... more dependencies, it took many hours of compiling just to get one God damn thing working it was insane. I remember RPM's being really rare but interesting and I couldn't wait for them to take over the Linux world, no more compiling for hours!!! Well little did I know .deb would take over and I would be back to compiling... not so painful these days I guess.

[dsmithhfx]

Linux is fragmented....He is right.

Linux is a bunch of different distro's all running the linux kernel and a smorgasbord of pretty much the same de's, and gnu software. Each has been more or less tweaked in small, cosmetic ways. The main differentiator among all these distros is package management. Does that mean the platform is hopelessly "fragmented"? Far from it. The flexibility of this platform, unlike the commercial offerings (meaning Apple and Windows) is... flexibility to take the source code, and do whatever you want with it. Even without needing to monkey around with code, you can customize a given distro in ways unimaginable to mac and windows users. These are strengths and advantages, not a drawback.

One may fairly say that Linux has been unable to compete in the marketplace of commercial desktop operating systems because, well, it isn't one. It isn't in your face flogging its brand on mainstream media 24/7, with shelf space and retail outlets in every mall, and a price point to match. Advertising, distribution, point-of-sale packaging, profits, and bevies of ip lawyers aren't exactly cheap baggage, and it's all factored into the retail prices. Linux is just out there, freely available (literally) to anyone who can discover it, and I'm very glad to use it.

Miguel de Icaza has a rockstar complex that's proven a very bad fit in the open source community. It's always, all about him. Here's hoping he finds whatever he's looking for in Apple's closed garden, and will henceforth leave the linux community alone. We don't need no steenking rockstars, eh?

[nightmarex]

Linux is a bunch of different distro's all running the linux kernel and a smorgasbord of pretty much the same de's, and gnu software. Each has been more or less tweaked in small, cosmetic ways. The main differentiator among all these distros is package management. Does that mean the platform is hopelessly "fragmented"? Far from it. The flexibility of this platform, unlike the commercial offerings (meaning Apple and Windows) is... flexibility to take the source code, and do whatever you want with it. Even without needing to monkey around with code, you can customize a given distro in ways unimaginable to mac and windows users. These are strengths and advantages, not a drawback.

One may fairly say that Linux has been unable to compete in the marketplace of commercial desktop operating systems because, well, it isn't one. It isn't in your face flogging its brand on mainstream media 24/7, with shelf space and retail outlets in every mall, and a price point to match. Advertising, distribution, point-of-sale packaging, profits, and bevies of ip lawyers aren't exactly cheap baggage, and it's all factored into the retail prices. Linux is just out there, freely available (literally) to anyone who can discover it, and I'm very glad to use it.

Miguel de Icaza has a rockstar complex that's proven a very bad fit in the open source community. It's always, all about him. Here's hoping he finds whatever he's looking for in Apple's closed garden, and will henceforth leave the linux community alone. We don't need no steenking rockstars, eh?

I really disliked the idea of mono, the way I disliked the idea of Wine. It made an excuse to not use Linux native tools or compilers. I thank him for his work and curse him as well. Wine and mono are both double edged swords and I understand the need if not loathe the result. Yeah I know, I use Wine when I must for games I "must" play... Wow I suck.

[Del_]

I am not so sure the linux desktop is particularly fragmented either. It certainly provides a lot of choice, and Ubuntu does seem to fragment whatever it can these days. Still, xorg and pulseaudio is used by everybody today. GTK and Qt are basically the only GUI frameworks in use (though firefox and libreoffice use their own for historic reasons). Everybody seems to converge to systemd and wayland (with Ubuntu as a possible exception, although I don't think Mark is mad enough to try to do it all alone). The GNU stack with GCC is still king. Graphics drivers are finally giving us hope for a competitive open stack within two years. Both KDE, Gnome and Unity have embraced modern design principles and mature nicely. Seems all three of them are soon up to speed with both Windows and OSX. Some serious shortcomings on the application stack is being addressed these days. Yep, there are still issues, rough edges to iron out. Let us all try to help out with the last hundred paper cuts. I see 2013 as a very promising year for the linux desktop, I expect a healthy growth, no revolution, but healthy growth. 2014 and 2015 look very interesting given that the current progress continues though.

[Tweenk]

does someone know what that means for Mono? As a cross-platform developer I hope that it doesn't influence Mono.

All hate against Microsoft aside: There is just no good/useable cross-platform language aside from C#/VB.NET.

Python

If you want better performance you can always write a module in with Cython, Boost.Python, etc.

Windows programs written in C# almost always rely on WPF / Windows Forms, so it's not really cross platform in the sense that Java is. You can't compile those programs with Mono.

[Pallidus]

arokh: "oh linux is a trainwreck" "oh linux is a piece of shit"


what the fuck are you doing here then you piece of shit?

partner up with that dirty mexican whore icaza and go fucking suck off jobs corpse.



you people disgust me.


linux is by far the most advanced and adaptable operating system I have used. It pains me to have to use windows just because of the lack of programs in linux

I am fully aware that if developers bothered optimizing their programs for linux, the same they do for windows, linux would be light years ahead of win.


The lack of software is the deal breaker and what is keeping linux down you dumb fucks. That and subpar support from vendors like intel etc


You could have the most amazing desktop environment ever that would suck your dick and pat your back at the same time and it wouldn't mean shit since there's no decent video/sound editing software, image manipulation etc etc etc...

and I suppose the frantic pace of development that makes linux so good is also a killer when it comes to third party programs.

[brosis]

I have done keeping ~ between Fedora and openSUSE and I can say that Fedora->openSUSE and openSUSE->Fedora works just fine, as well as maintaining ~ while going up in versions. Infact either of those -> Slackware works fine too although the transition back isn't so clean as you have to Chown everything when you want to use it with another Distro.

But of course!
When transitioning, I also tend to delete irrelevant config I never use.
For example, I am moving the Xu 12.04 32bit to U 13.04 64bit system, so I keep only mozilla and clawsmail directories, since there is no other config worthy to keep. This is the salesman machine I am talking about and he is extremely happy with upgrade. It takes me 10 minutes and the system pulls down what it should automatically.

I agree with most of what you said and I was just going to bash his dependency hell statement earlier. Dependency hell isn't what we have today, yes there are loads of dependencies but same for Windows apps.... now what dependency hell refers to (to those of us who suffered I still have nightmares about it) is wayyy back in the 90's you would want to set up an Apache server or something, so you make the server... well errors spit out depends on yadda yadda, download the tarball for that make and guess what... more dependencies, it took many hours of compiling just to get one God damn thing working it was insane. I remember RPM's being really rare but interesting and I couldn't wait for them to take over the Linux world, no more compiling for hours!!! Well little did I know .deb would take over and I would be back to compiling... not so painful these days I guess.

Sure, I heard there was dependency resolver problems in the past with RPM, which were fixed. Right now, there is so many package management tools, each having own approach from none to full automatic GUI click-and-forget, that there is a lot to choose from! I mean, if one wants to fully control all dependencies - LFS or Slackware (without any tools), if not - huge pick of riped projects.

It's becoming clear to me I'm discussing with a child. Come back once you've grown up, moved out from your nerdcave and had some real world experience with computers will you?

The Linux desktop have always been and still is a trainwreck. Even the devs are realizing it and they are either abandoning ship or trying to fix things by creating more fragmentation as usual. Too bad UnitedLinux failed, they were on the right path until SCO went insane.

Oh duck! The grow-up aka no-life aka your-mom argument! The sign of the 10 year old. Don`t tell me I`ve been arguing with a child! In that case, please excuse me for my excessive wordlist! I am sure you can install VirtualBox in your windows - there is a plenty of instructional videos at youtube, and then please start expirementing with Linux on practice! You will sure learn a lot! If not, please refrain from answering in this thread again, till you do, because no one sure wants to harm you, I will also refrain from answering you, since I have hurt your sensitive soul too much already GL!

PS. Regarding UnitedLinux, since you mentioned it - it was pure attempt to standartise the userspace, so that proprietary applications can be deployed. That was its single and only goal. UnitedLinux had nothing to do with "unification" or "free software", because they already communicate very well without it.