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• The Killer App is Ubiquity
  2003-11-15 10:41:19  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Actually my friend I am an RHCE who installs Mandrake for people's desktops. LTSP for groups.
  
  I am probably moving away from using Linux as my own primary desktop and toward OSX.
  
  I have waited a long time for Linux to get its shit together. An IRRATIONALLY long time and you could say I'm sick of it. Every advance on the application usefulness side just heightens the frustration that these wonderful things just DO NOT WORK TOGETHER. Too many cooks cooking up too many toolkits and incompatible components. No UI standards for look and feel.
  
  Linux will not make any real progress --I mean towards mass acceptance among people with a CHOICE in the matter- until the people who make Linux distributions come together and first admit that the desktop is infinitely more complicated than the server and second commit themselves to creating a unified platform that independent software vendors can write desktop software for without worrying that
  
  a) the user won't have the needed requirements installed.
  b) Software that complements the function of their product won't easily integrate with it.
  c) Their software will be broken by the next release of the target distribution 6 months from now because of incompatible library versions, glibc changes, X changes, etc.
  d) the package manager won't know what to do with their package or how to fulfill/resolve dependencies when installation is attempted.
  
  There must be a SINGLE DESKTOP SPEC for Linux. If the user's distribution certifies against that spec, and it has a label attesting to this fact then the ISVs software will install without more than a click from the user (and a password) and the software will just run with reasonable defaults. It will know how to call the browser if needed or the email program, it will know how to call the filemanager open/save file dialog instead of using its own non-standard dialog. it will not break upon the next teeny to majpor number revision of the certified distribution's libraries. I have seen stuff compiled for windows95 and not touched since, install and run on XP. Obviously not everything can be like that but we also don't need the situation where an updated version of an installed packaged on Linux breaks something else, because the library they both depend on had to be changed with the update.
  The reason this happens is that developers are all on different library versions.
  For purposes of the desktop at least these need to be MUCH more tightly synchronized. No one should label as "Stable" a piece of software for the linux desktop that means a user of a recent major distribution has to upgrade a library, thus breaking something else. People who do this should be treated as though they had leprosy herpes and infectious tuberculosis.
  The only way for a reliable desktop for developers and users can come into being on Linux is through the elaboration of a prescriptive spec to govern these things and the need for distros to obtain and abide by a certification process that assures customers as well as developers that this distro will not give them problems. Nobody who doesn't want to participate will have to. There will always be a place for mini distros, non-standard wm style desktops and server oriented distributions. But the demands of desktop software require that a MUCH greater effort to standardize, synchronize and integrate be made.
  Else quit yer bitchin'.