Not even one line of code
December 21, 2006Eugenia blogged about the stagnation in the Linux desktop world. One comment was rather interesting:
Hate to break it to you, but the KDE devs are planning big things for KDE4.
KDE developers are indeed planning big things for KDE4– but that’s what they’re stuck at. Show me where the results are. KDE4 was supposed to be fleshed out by now, with a release somewhere early 2007. However, if you now take a look at the latest KDE4 dev build– it’s just KDE3, but uglier. We’ve been hearing Plasma this and Appeal that for a very long time now; however, nothing Solid (ha ha ha) has emerged.
All the wonderful ideas behind KDE4 (and the accompanying slick websites) are just that– ideas and websites. There are no development builds that truly show these ideas in a usable state. KDE4 is supposed to be released in the first half of 2007, but if all they have to show now is KDE3+, KDE4 is more likely to see release somewhere in 2008– Q3/Q4 rather than Q1/Q2.
GNOME3 is in an even worse state, as Eugenia pointed out. There is literally nothing, not even one line of code. In fact, there are not even ideas, not even a vision; there are only some random thoughts and ideas by random people in random places.
In the meantime, Vista is close to shipping, a significant step forward both under the hood as well as graphically from Windows XP; it is truly something different from XP (no matter what the anti-MS fanboys want you to believe). Apple, on the other side of the spectrum, has continuously been improving its operating system, making it faster, adding new and sometimes even innovative features. Leopard is planned for the first half of 2007, and is supposed to have some major new features (even though we know nothing of these features, I think we can give Apple the benefit of the doubt on this one seeing their track record of delivering).
And all that KDE and GNOME have to offer are some vague ideas, some vague visions (and in the case of GNOME, not even that). The future seems grim.
Well said Thom. The bubble has burst.
Comment by Eugenia — December 21, 2006 @ 12:12 am
“In the meantime, Vista is close to shipping, a significant step forward both under the hood as well as graphically from Windows XP; it is truly something different from XP”
Yes, an order-of-magnitude improvement in code complexity, required installation space, and mandated upgrades. No, I know the end user won’t care.
Except that this time, not even Microsoft can be bothered about promoting Vista. Remember the Great Hullaballoo about Win95? It was going to revolutionize computing, making it “faster, easier, and more fun.” Never mind that it didn’t, or that all the ideas had been invented by Apple a decade before (if not by Xerox even before that) — People believed it.
This time, all Microsoft can be bothered to sell is “software”. “Software that runs on Windows”. Well, guess what? IBM sells “software”. Games publishers do. Oracle does. OpenOffice.org is “software”.
It took Microsoft *five years* to bring out its all-new, all-singing, all-dancing, all-tea-making, all-we’ve-heard-it-before OS, and in the meantime they increased the visibility of Linux by signing a deal with Novell to keep people who believe there could be “legal issues” with running Linux happy, and you’re singing their praises whilst damning KDE for being *eighteen months* late?
No Vir^H^H^HEugenia, the contention in your article that 2001-2004 were the boom years for the Linux desktop was incorrect. The bubble has not burst.
Comment by Jeff Rollin — December 21, 2006 @ 1:45 am
Oh come on. Vista offers no significant upgrade for end-users, with plenty of downsides (DRM, hardware upgrades, more hard drive space for installation, WGA). Hardly any drivers work with it, no-one is planning software updates for it, it doesn’t work with EFI, and MS aren’t pushing it.
So you decide to focus on ONE aspect of Linux, and proclaim that because of it, “Linux is dead”. Hate to break it to you, but despite Eugenia’s contention that Linux’s big break was 2001-2004, I don’t even remember any “Ubuntu hype” until the very end of that period if not afterwards.
Vista took *five years* to come out, was behind schedule, and users aren’t gagging for it. It’s not that big a deal. I will agree with you that Apple is bigger on the bling department than either Linux or Microsoft, but not even Vista will rob them of that crown.
Comment by Jeff Rollin — December 21, 2006 @ 1:54 am
In fact one part of your message sticks out as very disingenuous indeed. You say we’ve been hearing about KDE4 for “a very long time now,”, but Wikipedia links to an article dated “16 February 2006,” which states:
“When will KDE 4.0 final be out”?
“This isn’t decided yet.”
I don’t know about you, but when I was in school 5 years was longer than 11 months.
Comment by Jeff Rollin — December 21, 2006 @ 1:58 am
Thom,
Bravo. I’m happy to see some people stand up and actually speak their minds about the linux desktop, or the “free” desktop whatever.
What you have said is true, there is nothing. All the innovation, all the talent…and nothing. No results.
I used to love KDE, I used to use it all the time, now it feels old, outdated and I really can’t stand the devs on the Gnome project. They tend to attack people when they show any resistance to doing things the GNOME way.
But bravo.
Comment by Anonymous Person — December 21, 2006 @ 2:03 am
Hmm, how odd. A comment on how “brave” people are to speak their minds - from an “Anonymous Person”!
Comment by Jeff Rollin — December 21, 2006 @ 2:07 am
If KDE4 takes longer than Vista, you’ll be right :)
I am much more pessimistic about GNOME however. There seems to be a drastic shortage of people developing GTK+ applications (compared to their Qt/KDE counterparts). And GNOME/GTK+ developers themselves. That in particular seems kind of funny considering the amount of support GNOME has . I guess that never translated into material benefits?
Comment by Josef — December 21, 2006 @ 2:10 am
Josef - that’s true, and very telling.
On the one hand it’s odd that distros like Mandrake/Mandriva, which started out as a project to use KDE instead of GNOME on Redhat, write such tools as DrakConf in GTK. OTOH I think the fact that GNOME was written purely as a response to write a GPL’ed DE for Linux is coming back to bite them. Now that Qt is dual-licenced as GPL, I don’t see the need for it. I actually think GNOME looked better in version 1 than it does in version 2 - and it was more configurable to boot. I also hear a lot people install Ubuntu and put the KDE desktop on it.
GNOME just isn’t interesting anymore.
Comment by Jeff Rollin — December 21, 2006 @ 2:21 am
GNOME just isn’t interesting anymore.
A desktop environment is supposed to be usable, not interesting. I think you have your priorities backwards.
Comment by Jay — December 21, 2006 @ 3:21 am
The real problem started when Red Hat moved away from the Desktop and Novell/Ximian never took over the full responsibilities Red Hat had. The fact that Owen Taylor left GTK development (not just maintainership) to work on something as useless as Mugshot, it’s a tell-tell situation of how things turned up the way they did.
Comment by Eugenia — December 21, 2006 @ 3:53 am
A few thoughts:
The staff blog is consistently more interesting than the material on your front page.
Eventually, the Linux distributions will have their bluff called. If they want the glory (and in some cases the success of their commercial schemes), then they must start putting back in the leadership and organisation skills and the money that some big Linux projects have apparently run out of. At the moment, and ironically, Google’s Summer of Code seems to have stepped up to this plate, with the distros becoming more parasitical of Linux than they used to be.
All desktop environments suck in one way or another. They are paradise for control freaks. Which offers the least amount of suckage? At the moment I’d say XFCE and Fluxbox.
Comment by moleskine — December 21, 2006 @ 7:17 am
DOH!
Thom and Eugenia. Trolling again over the Linux Desktop. Especially the version numbering. DOH!
KDE4 has no roadmap and cannot possible be delayed since there is no time for release.
Functionality expected to be in a KDE4-release is already in KDE3.
Gnome3 does not exist, and probably will not for many years. None the less it has already more functionality than Vista, though Vista is close to Gnome. Microsoft is actually playing catch-up ;)
Every single Gnome release in the 2.x series has come up with something new compared with the former release, and since 2.8 the speed has been high.
Nothing indicates that the Linux Desktop is stagnating. Except the version numbering. But that means nothing.
And no Vista isn’t that different from XP. Take a look at the “new features”-part on Wikipedia. It’s not so much new as it is updated. New features can be counted on ONE hand. No matter what unknowing pseudo-editors like Thom want you to believe.
Comment by Kristian Poul Herkild — December 21, 2006 @ 9:14 am
You and Eugenia get it, and the rabid, anti-MS fanboys are in complete denial. What else is new?
There’s just no money to be made in the desktop space because the OEMs never got on board, and the OEMs never got on board because there was never the desktop linux that could be held up as a standard. The biggest failure of the desktop linux experiment was fragmentation. All the mistakes are historical and almost impossible to rectify. KDE or Gnome? Gnome was developed as a response to KDE’s toolkit licensing problems which exist to this day (no, the dual-license QT scheme is not optimal), and Gnome has always lagged technologically. The big vendors don’t even care about KDE anymore, and as Eugenia pointed out, RedHat gave up on desktop linux years ago. No leadership and now all you have is stagnation.
The only solution I see is for someone with the big bucks to come along and just ignore Gnome and KDE. The only important desktop components of any linux distro are Mozilla and OpenOffice. Maybe Google, IBM, and Sun could come up with something, but I doubt they care either.
It was fun while it lasted (and who knows, maybe E17 will bring some excitement to the table), but at this point in time, you can say it’s dead Jim. And that’s unfortunate, because a decade ago I had pretty high hopes. Maybe Apple will start giving OSX to OEMs and Windows will finally get some competition.
Comment by Dave — December 21, 2006 @ 10:47 am
“And all that KDE and GNOME have to offer are some vague ideas, some vague visions (and in the case of GNOME, not even that). The future seems grim.”
You’re not a Gnome-fan by chance, are you ? :)) You say a+b offer c+d, but b only offers c :) Sounds nice. Thing is, KDE guys at least have started something, although their speed seems somewhat slow. Still, progress hasn’t been stopped, and current versions are also constantly improved, that doesn’t sound that bad. Remember, FOSS development isn’t about strictly meeting company-driven pr-fueled release times. And the situation isn’t like we wouldn’t have a usable gnome or kde at our hands. Features will come, releases will happen. I’d say, vote with your code (hey, I like this line :)
Comment by l3v1 — December 21, 2006 @ 12:35 pm
“he only important desktop components of any linux distro are Mozilla and OpenOffice.”
Well, for an average user, maybe so, even if it’s not true. I wouldn’t want to see kparts, dcop, kioslaves, etc. go just because some people would lovingly bow to a new linux-based monopoly. Applications are a different matter, firefox, openoffice, amarok, kdevelop, kile and the rest - they will survive, since they have enough fans to continue.
Comment by l3v1 — December 21, 2006 @ 12:39 pm
I wouldn’t want to see kparts, dcop, kioslaves, etc. go just because some people would lovingly bow to a new linux-based monopoly.
Will you people think for a change? kparts, dcop, kioslaves, etc.. can’t go because it’s open source. And the same goes for some imagined monopoly.
Those sorts of comments just go to show how utterly stupid the average linux fanboy is.
Comment by Dave — December 21, 2006 @ 12:52 pm
Jay,
I don’t think I have my priorities backwards at all. The point was that I don’t think GNOME offers anything over KDE anymore. Yes, DE’s are supposed to be useful, but if they have accomplished that I see no reason why they can’t be interesting too.
Dave - The “average linux fanboy” is probably not “stupid” enough not to realise that if a project runs out of coders, it’s as dead as a business that runs out of money. It can be resurrected, of course, but sometimes that just doesn’t happen.
Comment by Jeff Rollin — December 21, 2006 @ 1:30 pm
Dave - The “average linux fanboy” is probably not “stupid” enough not to realise that if a project runs out of coders, it’s as dead as a business that runs out of money. It can be resurrected, of course, but sometimes that just doesn’t happen.
That’s quite a contradiction to all the kumbaya-singing about “the code will always be free”. l3v1 doesn’t have any right to have coders working on whatever pet project he deems useful. He has the right to take the code and do whatever he wants with it. But that just goes to show the greedy, selfish nature of the average linux fanboy with their “gimme, gimme, gimme” attitude.
Comment by Dave — December 21, 2006 @ 1:39 pm
Dave,
Nice troll. My advice: Don’t give up the day job. Oh, and see a therapist; it sounds like you have unresolved anger issues.
Comment by Jeff Rollin — December 22, 2006 @ 1:16 am
Jeff, can’t you brain-dead drones ever come up with something besides “troll”? Seriously, you people are so caught up in your little “movement” that you can’t see the forest through the trees. You Linux zealots are disturbed.
Comment by Dave — December 22, 2006 @ 6:32 am
I don’t understand how somebody can spread such a FUD about things he really don’t know anything about?!?
It’s time for you to grow up, little boy ;-)
Comment by some guy — December 23, 2006 @ 9:54 am
Hey Thom, I’ve got to say, great job with the article. I’m glad you got the KDE people fired up. The biggest problem with them, they may have lots of stuff going in development, but the end users don’t see anything. They don’t release news, they don’t even give us some kind of deadlines as to when they expect to ship the next version, you have to dig around forever just to get something. At least now maybe people can learn what’s really going on.
Comment by John S. — December 23, 2006 @ 7:20 pm
.
Putain, J’ai regarde tes photos dans ton Blog et maintenant j’en suis certain:
Tu as une gueule de Connard incroyable Thom Holverda!
I agree with some guy: It’s time for you to grow up, little boy ;-)
Comment by some guy — December 23, 2006 @ 9:54 am
“some guy” a raison, Thom, tu dois grandir !
lecorbusier
lecorbusier@lecorbusier.net
Comment by lecorbusier — December 24, 2006 @ 11:29 am
That’s funny.
Figure that Gnome and KDE run immediatly out of programmers.
So what’s the problem?
They yet work great, better than any hardware-consuming Vista.
What do u need more?
There’s a lot of things that can be done, but none of them are vital.
Comment by DanteAlighieri — January 5, 2007 @ 10:10 am