Linked by Sean Oliviero on Wed 28th Jul 2004 05:54 UTC
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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X11 is not the problem. I agree with Dev about exciting things like the Cairo project at freedesktop.org which will make X even better than it is now.
I agree that better hardware integration is needed. Project Utopia with HAL, D-BUS, and udev will achieve this, and will even include a GNOME front end for making hardware more user friendly on the Linux desktop.
Compared to where it was a few years ago, the Linux desktop is amazing and the pace of improvement is accelerating! Who here remembers trying to surf the web on a Linux box with Netscape 4.x and wishing just once that the fonts didn't look like total garbage. There was a time when everyone was seriously worried that Linux would not have a competitive web browser at all! I remember reading an article on it. Now there are several excellent web browsers.
Go back and play with KDE 1.x or GNOME 1.x for a while ;-) (KDE 1.x was really the beginning of it all, I was amazed by it at the time). Or better yet fvwm95 which looked and behaved horribly, even for its time.
The Linux desktop got there for me this year. It meets my needs perfectly, though I will grant you I am not a typical user. Still, it didn't meet my needs before. The pace of improvement is starting to really show. Wait another 12 months and if you have an open mind, you will be astounded.