I've been running linux for 10 years as my main system. That amounts to a geological era or two in the software world. I have seen some pretty radical things happen to my desktop, namely KDE4, Gnome3 and Unity.
Each of these change shed a clamor of outraged complaints in their wake. For each of them, the song is the same: buggy, ugly and with the wrong approach to computing... Now, hear me out, none are a revolution. None is truly game changing. Each is merely a slightly different way of doing the same old things. And, really, each is an improvement over what was there before. The kids that develop those, aren't fools.
The example of KDE4 is enlightening as it is the oldest. Back in 2008, I tried it right away and I found it beautiful and, I admit, messy. But such a model of simplicity over the cacophony that was KDE3. Nowadays, it's a pretty recognized and established environment. The two others are too recent to be examined through the lens of history.
How not to see those waves of discontent as a knee jerk from grumpy fossils that turn sour when their habits are changed? What extremities will they go to if some really disruptive and game-changing technology ever springs out?
And more interestingly, are those the spearhead activists that lead the free software revolution? If so, I'm on my way to the Apple Store.
2 comments
disruptive, not innovating
If none of the common shells is truly game changing, why is their acceptance so important for the evolution of free software?
From what I've seen, a significant portion of Gnome's user base was so much disrupted in their workflow that it might indeed make sense to switch to a "more Gnome 2.x" desktop environment. Actually, the same holds true for unity. I appreciate some of their concepts, yet especially the global menu bar is discredited by quite a few GUI designers and just a MacOS ripoff.
So overall, great simplifications of modern desktop are paired with the adoption of dogmatic concepts from Apple that people feel are innovation because the least computer savvy users fall for it. Of course power users hate having so little choice in how to work their desktop.
Regarding KDE4, I agree that it is a vast improvement over KDE3, yet until recently it was indeed so buggy that some people even switched to Gnome. My big problem as a user of a number of KDE4 applications is that their awesome functionality too often comes with completely broken backend technologies.
What I'd like to see is window managers with the power of awesome with a clean default desktop like modern Gnome/KDE/Unity offer. This would actually open the Linux desktop for innovation.
NTS
I've been wanting to reply, but I'm short on arguments.
I used the word disruptive as in Disruptive technology.
I'm on a 2 weeks long test of gnome 3 now and it's disruptive enough to my work flow. But I can already foresee a future where, my habits having adapted, I will be more productive on gnome 3 than I used to be in gnome 2. And with much more style :)
Appart from that little misunderstanding on the use of "disruptive", I'm with you on the rest.