Shuttleworth: Desktop Linux can be better than the Mac
Mark Shuttleworth addresses a range of interesting things in a recent interview, but there are two, in particular, that strike me. First, Mark acknowledges the obvious: The Mac is a superior usability experience. Second, however, while placating his upstream developer communities, he also notes that improving on their work is going to be critical to beating the Mac:
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has historically been very, very deferential to what we call our upstream communities - GNOME, KDE, and so on - in the definition of the desktop experience. Our view, very strongly, is that they hold the real expertise in defining that. And that, as a distribution, our primary job is to be a very efficient conductor of their good work into the hands of users....
Because we've increasingly been engaged in the definition of the desktop experience for some of these consumer electronics products, however, we're now in a position to actually start engaging with those upstreams and investing in that desktop experience....
And so we started to build out a team that will focus on the specific user experiences..., and our goal, very simply, is to make sure the Free software ecosystem can deliver a Mac OS-like experience, or an experience that will compete with the Mac OS. We see Apple as the gold standard of the user experience. We believe that, while it can be a challenge, the innovation inherent in the Free software process can deliver an experience that is comparable and in many ways superior.
Mark is a wonderful diplomat, but I'm glad to see that he also recognizes the deficiencies of his upstream communities, even if he would never articulate it like that. Put baldly: The upstream developer communities that he references are developer communities, often without the expertise or interest in developing an average user-focused experience.
To beat the Mac for usability, the emphasis can't be on developers. It has to be on users. Too often open-source developers forget the user. I'm glad that Mark has not.
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desktop Linux,
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*nix is great for developers and geeks. That's where it has its following. For people who don't care about the tech geek side of it, OS X does the job. Different products for different people. There really is no need to compare them.
The GNOME community (at the heart of the Ubuntu user experience) has been focussed on the user experience and our vision of universal access for many years. That vision has been guided by a motto - "we are not our users" - and the guiding principle that we want to make our technology available to everyone - through beautiful, usable, integrated, accessible, localised applications.
Your prejudice that "upstream communities are developer communities", and thus cannot be user-oriented, is really quite insulting to a community which has embraced companies engaging the community, and community members with a wide range of skills, including many usability experts.
Dave Neary.
On the otherhand, for the very large set of functionalities, the winner is XP.
That said, I am certain that Linux (and the Mac) are eroding the market that Microsoft owned. One reason is that Vista arrived too early on the scene, when the anticipated hardware hardware upgrades lag Vistas resource demands. People want to keep pcs for the same duration as they want to keep their cars.
Now, where Linux is taking off is in governments, non-USA countries, and in technical areas where Microsoft costs are dibilitating (small PDA's, cell phones and the like).
Open source will also force Microsoft to react with downward setting of prices, or else further provide the implementation advantage to Linux.
Leslie Satenstein
Obviously, it is just one aspect of an overall user experience, and as aspect that Apple could presumably adopt if they envied it, but still ...
[1] http://compiz.org/Home/Screenshots