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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Why do I call this a troll article? Quite simple, cause that author did not mind to verify if his claims still are valid, if at is worked on solving them. For the hardware detection problem for instance I just want to ask what he guesses, why the entire Linux kernel has become hot-pluggable, why sysfs has been introduced, why devfs is obsolete now. Did he ever hear about freedesktop.org's desktop bus (http://freedesktop.org/Software/dbus) and their hardware abstraction layer (http://freedesktop.org/Software/hal, http://freedesktop.org/~david/guadec2004-hal-and-gnome.pdf) - First programs for it exist, the virtual file system of GNOME 2.8 will be able to use it. Only purpose of this stuff: Make hardware gadgets easy to use.
Same ignorance applies for eye-candy like transparency in X11: Transparency was one reason for the XFree86 fork (know Keith to fight for it for years now). The next release of the xorg-server definitly will contain true transparency plus window-update notification (aka. DAMAGE extension) - which allows efficient support for on demand remote user support via VNC (as known from windows). Did he mention the VNC problem? Don't know, as I give up reading the entire article, after being upset by the initial thesis.