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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Linux has almost everything it needs now to make a good DE. Unfortunately OSX has a few additional tricks which put it anywhere from 1 to 4 years ahead of Linux in its GUI, but most of that useful functionality can be copied or is currently available in metacity. Other windowmanagers might catch up to OSX sometime in the next few years, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Anyway, the problems Linux faces are mostly just taste, style and having a person/group focused on providing a simple default configuration. This will be addressed eventually, but until then we have to deal with the ugly defaults chosen by Redhat, Slackware, etc. I haven't seen the latest Linspire, SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake configs but I would assume they aren't much better. Mandrake is probably the most user friendly, from my perspective, but its been a while since I looked at it.
I would tell you what is needed, but I think it would be easier for me to show you. So I'll continue my work and one day will be ready to contribute my idea of the perfect linux DE if someone else doesn't beat me to it first.