Star Opinion: How Desktop Linux Should Behave
Linked by Sean Oliviero on Wed 28th Jul 2004 05:54 UTC
Linux The promise of Desktop Linux (DL) has been long coming. It's made significant progress since the mid-90s when GNOME and KDE came out, giving Linux users a somewhat modern desktop to work upon. However, it's been 7 years and DL hasn't progressed much at all since then. Today, DL is still nothing more than a UNIX-clone with a task bar, a start menu, and a desktop with some icons on it. But why has DL evolved at such a glacial pace?
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Cheer up!
by Jay on Wed 28th Jul 2004 06:16 UTC

I believe that a lot that you speak of HAL and hotplug is trying to be solved. Or, at least, building the foundation of hardware identification, notifications, etc. so that programs can be built to solve the problem. DBUS will also fit into this category for communications between the system, applications, and themselves.

Right now, some of the things you speak of are addressed by the individual distribution--like network settings and such. This is because how they configure these varies from distro to distro. If you want a cross-distribution tool, look into the Gnome System Tools. It is written in a way that a backend can be written to each distribution to be supported. Kind of similar to Webmin.

Automounting of media? Covered by supermount. Pooled storage? LVM (Linux Volume Management). X11? Xorg is actively working on new features such as composites. See this OSnews article: http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=7634.

I believe you have some valid points, especially when it comes to the interaction of users with hardware and drivers as well as 3rd party installation of programs (which really doesn't happen all that often yet due to the lack of commercial applications at the user level). You've mixed up some major issues regarding hardware and such with some trite issues that are dealt with at the distribution level, or just aren't that important to begin with.

Cheer up, things aren't as bleak as you are making them seem.