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Saturday, August 10, 2002
Deconstructing desktops 
| | Dave is right to call John Markoff on his statement that "Linux has failed as a desktop alternative to either Microsoft's Windows or Apple's Macintosh operating system." To be fair, John is closer to accurate than most remarks like this, which go "Linux has failed as a desktop." But both statements are somewhere between misleading and outright wrong. |
| | Let's get something straight. |
| | Linux isn't a desktop. It's something that goes under a desktop. It also goes under a lot of other stuff. It's very flexible that way. The two primary desktops for Linux are KDE and GNOME. They are popular with Linux users. They are also provide useful GUI consoles on severs not primarily intended for desktop use. Having KDE or GNOME on a Linux server is like having a fancy dashboard, comfy seats and air conditioning in the cab of an 18-wheeler. |
| | Tractor trailers are not as popular as cars. But nobody is calling them a failure in the marketplace. That's kind of like Linux' situation in respect to desktops. |
| | BSD isn't a desktop, either. Like Linux, it goes under desktops, plus lots of other stuff. Unlike Linux, however, BSD does have a very popular desktop. It's called OS X. That desktop, plus a lot of other stuff, sits on top of the version of BSD called Darwin. For more, see this graphic here. As a variety of BSD, Darwin can also be a platform for stuff other than Apple's. It even runs on Intel boxes. |
| | Both Linux and BSD are varieties of UNIX. It's coming to the point where technical computing folks are as familiar with UNIX OSes as carpenters are with wood. Given the presence of UNIX under the OS X desktop, it won't be long before lots of users learn to run a few simple terminal commands that are about a hard as learning to read the oil level on a dipstick. |
| | It's a red herring, this stuff about whose desktop is biggest. It's about dicks, frankly. Look at Microsoft! Whoa! Nobody else's dick is that big! Not even close! That's your default mainstream desktop story. |
| | Market share is a head trip, Dave used to say. It's been true so long that it's one of the Great Verities. |
| | The real issue is the commoditization of base operating systems. Linux and BSD have commodified them, turning them into pure, transparent infrastructure: elemental as the Periodic Table. That's the real world domination story. |
| | But the ramifications of that fact are less obvious, a lot more subtle and less subject to dick-length measurement than who's got the biggest desktop. |
| | So here's the easy way to approach the issue: It doesn't matter. |
| | I think Doc throws in the towel too soon. Linux on the desktop didn't make it because it was conceived as a frontal assault, offering nothing that Windows didn't already do (much) better. |
| | Not sure I'm throwing in a towell here (my main point really had less to do with desktops than the whole market share thing, and what the press considers success and failure). But I am sure that neither KDE nor GNOME were conceived primrily as a "frontal assault," except by the few (mostly in the press and the VC and VC-funded dot-com communities) who had grandiose fantasies about them. |
| | What I thought when I first saw KDE wasn't "Whoa! What an assault on Microsoft!" I thought, "Whoa! Isn't it cool that somebody bothered to put a desktop on this thing." Linux needed a desktop. KDE gave it one. So did GNOME. I think it's pretty darn cool that it has two to choose from. And also that it doesn't fucking matter that they've "failed" in the mass marketplace. |
| | I also think one, the other, or both may ultimately succeed in the mass marketplace. In fact, I think there's a very good chance of that, for the next reasons Dave gives: |
| | There will be opportunities to fork from Windows, as Microsoft gets more in bed with other BigCo's in other industries. Want a refuge from Hillary and Valenti? Or maybe you just want a break from legacy-ware? Can't use Windows. Maybe you don't trust Apple, yet. |
| | Mother Jones used to have a great slogan: "You trust your mother. But you cut the cards." |
| | Apple is doing a lot of very nice stuff these days, and a lot of it is not compliant with Hollywood's wishes. But not all of it. |
| | An example. The ancestor of iTunes is SoundJam (Apple picked up the whole development team, the SoundJam site says). With SoundJam (which I no longer have), I could record an MP3 stream off the air, just like I can record any broadcast station with a cassette deck or a VCR. Not so with iTunes. Why? I think it's because Apple wants to play safe with the RIAA. Understandable, but not user-friendly. I'd also like to be able to take screenshots of DVD frames. That's disabled too. (I've heard various good reasons why that's so, but I still don't like it. Or the fact that workarounds exist on Linux and Windows, but not on OS X — at least not that I know of.) |
| | Anyway, I think in the long run the best refuge from Hillary Rosen and Jack Valenti isn't with Steve Jobs and his beautiful machines (much as we may love them). It's the guys in the hills making free tanks out of spare parts. |
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