Linux on the Desktop is not a Failure
July 24, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin
Sometimes it’s much more interesting to just read the comments on Slashdot rather than the articles. Today is an article titled “Why Linux Has Failed on the Desktop” (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/24/1432245&from=rss). The comments are quite interesting.
Personally, I don’t feel that Linux has failed on the desktop. I think it’s just fine. There were all kinds of comments about the actual article about how the kernel is really built for servers which value high throughput over low latency, about how the desktop UI just isn’t responsive, how it can be a pain to configure devices, etc. These are all great points. But, I don’t believe that any of these things point to the failure of Linux as a viable desktop OS.
Part of the problem stems from the open source approach of Linux. The kernel itself is open source and most applications people use are open source. Because of this, there tends to be a do-it-yourself viewpoint of using Linux as a desktop OS. If you use Linux, you pretty much need to know it inside and out. Can there really be an easy to use version of Linux that performs and has the ease of use that other operating systems have? I’m not certain.
One of the unusual things about running Linux is that a distribution is just a bunch of different applications cobbled together in a semi-coherent manner using whatever packaging and distribution system the distribution creators decided to use. When you use something like MacOS or Windows, the vendor locks you into one specific desktop UI and their suite of programs.
I’ve used large Linux distributions in the past and got really turned off by them. Sure, they seem simpler and easier to use because they have all kinds of nice GUI programs with them, but they all turned out to be awful for me. Eventually they got all kinds of application crud on them that performed poorly and caused crashing issues. That’s why I turned to a distribution like Gentoo. Gentoo gives me the flexibility to install whatever I want, compile my kernel however I want, use whatever desktop UI I want. All of this adds up to machines that run fantastic.
I purposely compile my kernel to be low latency (it’s a configuration choice). I use a very minimal desktop UI (Fluxbox, I think it’s something like 4 MB in memory). The other Windows-esque UIs (KDE, Gnome) tend to be memory hogs and really heavyweight (much like another suite of operating systems from a company whose name starts with ‘M’ and ends with ‘T’). I have a 2 Ghz AMD box with 256 MB of RAM that Gentoo runs great on. Sure, loading apps is a bit slow, but once programs are up I have absolutely no problems speed-wise. Firefox runs fast, Eclipse runs fast, even running Win2K in Vmware runs faster than Win2K on a similar machine in my house where it’s the installed OS.
So, my feeling is that Linux is definitely NOT a failure on the desktop. Will Linux ever gain the kind of popularity that Windows or Mac have? Probably not. Maybe that’s OK, though. I’m fine with being one of a small minority of users that actually use Linux as their primary OS. I’m fine with dealing with the issues that come with being a Linux user. It’s not for everyone, that’s for sure, but I’m hoping to convince others that it’s OK to make the switch.
Filed in: Team Member Blog Comments (0)
Comments
There are no comments for this entry.
Commenting is not available in this section entry.