Offered without comment
July 9th, 2009
Daring Fireball: “Ubuntu is almost certainly the pinnacle of these distributions, but they’re all conceptually the same thing, and the only significant difference is the choice between Gnome and KDE, and even there you’re just choosing between two different environments that are conceptually modeled after Microsoft Windows. The entire X Windows/Gnome/KDE ‘desktop Linux’ racket has never caught any traction with real people. Almost no one wanted it, wants it, or will want it.”
July 9th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
I agree…. its totally not going to catch on with “real people” because linux isn’t usable for “real people” I am a pretty knowledgeable geek.. and I find lots of stuff that is pretty simple 5 minutes jobs on windows or mac.. to be 6 hour scream fests on about any Linux flavor out there… “real people” are not going to spend 3 hours finding out where all there dependencies are for their RPM.. or spending a week trying to get X or their kernel to load again after doing so simple as changing their screen resolution.. or installing a simple program like a movie player, image viewer, or chat program… It has not improved. At all. Even the autoupdates cause total epic system foobars.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:58 am
‘Real people’ don’t often play with RPMs, Larffy, because they dont even install software. Unsure where you get the 6 hour scream fests from though, are you sure its not related to you previous knowledge on other systems – and trying absolutely the wrong method?
The core audience of a computer does little more than just bloody use it – badly at that – and for that I think they’re safe on all three OSes.
From watching my sister stumble through using OS X (she wasnt great with Windows either), and my friend on an Acer One running the stock kiosk Linux (he only vaguely understands what Linux is), I dont think we can really compare usability, it’s all up to the user.
July 10th, 2009 at 3:10 am
Man, I know why I don’t want to use any software created by people who actually do believe that. Windows itself isn’t even original, it has been modeled after other windowed OSes (and ironically, has been borrowing ideas even from the X-based desktop environments). It’s a rare thing in software that is really something new and different, 99% of everything created is a copy of what was already around with certain small tweaks. If anyone thinks he’s starting the revolution, it’s usually a doomed project. People don’t want revolutions, but soft evolutions, or else Windows as a clearly weaker UI than both OS X and KDE would have died a long time ago.
July 10th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
The article itself seems well-written though. He actually claims that Ubuntu is in some ways better than Windows.
“and I’d say Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop is in most ways better from a design and usability standpoint than Windows Vista”