Prominent Linux desktop developer: No one wants a new desktop
Havoc Pennington has long been one of the pioneers of the Linux desktop movement, and a primary GNOME developer. Once at Red Hat, now at Litl (cool name, by the way), Havoc should be the poster boy for Linux desktop advocacy.
Nope.
In a recent blog post, Havoc rubbished the idea of anyone needing a new (traditional) desktop:
GNOME 2.0 and KDE 4 are bad models for change. They rewrote and broke the code, but from a user-goals perspective, they are the same thing as before. We shouldn't feel bad; Windows Vista made the same mistake. Nobody cares about Vista, because XP allows users to accomplish all the same goals. Even if Vista didn't have a bunch of regressions, nobody would really care about it.
The fact is that people already have a desktop. They don't want a new desktop from GNOME, from Apple, or from Microsoft. Making another desktop does not add anything to the world. On average, people who have GNOME want to keep it, and the same for the other desktops.
I agree. I've long argued that what is needed is not Yet Another Desktop, but rather a novel conception of what "desktop" means. Microsoft won the desktop war. Time to move on to the next battle. It's not about Vista or GNOME. It's about what "office productivity" means and where I do it.
Hint: Not in Office.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I do tend to agree with the premise of this though. It's the underlying technologies that make something more useful, not just prettying up the gloss on the desktop. Leopard was so well received by Mac users because of the new ways of interacting with your desktop that were actually useful, but there's only so many more ways of doing what is essentially the same type of interfacing we have always been doing.
just bought a playstation 3 for gaming and that thing is damn near the computer I want. small desktop that boots fast and can get me on the web. hell if they would let me run firefox on it I would hardly need a computer.
Build in a day planner that synchs with outlook, google calendar, palm, and anything else so I can enter crap wherever I want and not have to check 4 other calendars.
Build in a way for me to easily automate repetitive steps.
Let me run applications from abbreviations I create. Give me a key sequence like Cntrl-/ or something that'll pop up a text box into which I can type PS and run photoshop or DW for dreamweaver or SQL for SQL Server.
Let me tag my files so I can quickly look for "Sales Funnel, Appts Kept, Chicago DMA".
Give me a tabbed desktop so I can create numerous views with frequently used files and tasks relelvant to that particular topic. A Wife Tab. A kid tab. A stock tab. A porn tab.
Allow me to automatically save previous versions of documents. With terrabyte hard drives on the way it's ridiculous to think that I can't find space to save 145 versions of a file and not have it show up 145 times in my document folder.
Allow me to safely and easily connect with other computers. If my mom wants to show me a folder of 5 gigs of pictures, let me connect to her computer and view her files as easily as I can IM.
That's what I want.
However, he is right in all other counts. VISTA and teh MAC have few improvements because there really is not much more to do desktop-wise. A new desktop isn't needed. An adaptive interface that learns what you want and has more input options (touch, getsure, ink) is a start. Application interop at a very high level (not just data) would be good too.
What KDE or Gnome needs is a frontman, a steve jobs. Someone who will get people to think and question MS and the status quo. They need their "1984". When they do that, they also need a desktop that will deliver. This may not be too hard, after all, MS did half of the work for them by delivering Vista.
- by meh130 June 15, 2008 6:15 PM PDT
- I have to agree. Let's see, what have been the major innovations in the desktop recently? The "Dock" from Apple. However, I seem to remember that when it was called CDE's Front Panel. OS/2 had something similar. Then there are "Widgets". But I recall these internet gadgets when they were called "push" technology back in the days of Netscape 4.
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(11 Comments)Other than those two recent developments, the big thing I have seen is Eee PCs interface, which reminds me a lot of the HyperCard based UI my college had on its Macs back in the late 1980s.
Here is a crazy idea: Figure out how people work, and build a UI which matches that. For me, I live or die by Window's search feature. Come to think of it, when I worked mostly in a Solaris environment, I lived or died by the UNIX find command.
Here is another crazy idea: A multi-dimensional file system. That is, not just hierarchical. I have wanted this for years. I used to think the way to do it was with a database. But now, thanks to using Gmail, I think tags are the answer. Build tags into the extended attributes of a file system. Make NAS shares more like document management systems. Better yet, dump NAS and document management, and make them cloud apps, verbs instead of nouns.
I'm sure there are other ideas. But I want a simpler desktop OS, not a more complicated one. I lobotomize XP to look and feel like Win2K. I have no desire for Vista. I want innovation. I want unlimited undo between saves, rollbacks, revisioning, etc. I want a seamless flow between the cloud and offline client, with intelligent syncing.
It is hard to imagine what could happen if the development effort on stupid stuff like 3D UI's, wiggling windows, widgets, etc., was instead focused on productivity enhancements.