Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 25th Oct 2010 19:00 UTC, submitted by sjvn
Well, this is sure to raise a few eyebrows here and there. Today, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Mark Shuttleworth held his keynote speech, and in it, he announced that Ubuntu will switch to the Unity user interface come release, for both the netbook as well as the desktop, leaving the GNOME user interface behind (but keeping the GNOME platform).
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Member since:
2005-11-02
People say fragmentation is holding Linux back, but then do not back up the assertion by describing *how*. As far as desktop environments and toolkits go I don't see many third party developers who are avoiding Linux due to toolkit confusion or intimidation. You can say, in general, that more than one is fragmentation and fragmentation is bad, and we can allow that for the sake of argument--it may even be true! But to say that "Desktop Linux" is being hurt by fragmentation specifically requires that you provide at least some anecdotal evidence.
I'll start: "My friend Timmy was going to port his friendly checkbook manager to Linux but couldn't decide on GTK or QT, so he didn't." Does this makes sense? "My friend Timmy wanted to support Linux for his application but since no one would tell him the correct order for OK and Cancel buttons he didn't." Do you see where I'm going here?
People who want to support Linux don't get stopped by multiple toolkits or DEs. Some really do get stopped by multiple installation mechanisms and a more get intimated by the plethora of distributions, but even those will mostly say "Red Hat only" and just do it.
Spread your FUDbutter somwhere else. Don't repeat things you hear said just because it seems to make sense when people say it. If you have some actual facts, figures, or any kind of evidence, that suggests that Desktop Linux is being hurt by the KDE/GNOME/XFce/etc split, bring them up now.
Please, please don't start in with "Development effort" or "wasted time" because these things don't make any sense when talking about volunteer-driven projects with effectively unlimited pools of manpower. It's not like in a company where I have ten developers and have assigned six to GNOME and four to KDE and could make GNOME better by reassigning those four. Nobody can be reassigned.