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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I don't get it when people say that having two competitive desktops is detrimental to linux. Since when is choice a bad thing? KDE and GNOME are both fully functional, they compete with one another vigorously, they offer the user choice and variety.
Unfortunately having two desktops limits the choise. Once you have chosen your desktop environment applictiations from other environments will look foreign and give your desktop and inconsitent look & feel. E.g. if you have a KDE app in Gnome you will have to manage font and color settings both in the KDE way and in the Gnome way.
I'd much rather see a healthy assortment of technologies and desktops that can interoperate using open standards, but allow for variety and competition. You just try to get every KDE user to use GNOME instead and see how they feel about it! Try and take Fluxbox away from the nerd accross the street and tell him that he must use GNOME with Metacity only. I don't think the response will be very friendly ;-)
The secret of a succesful desktop environment is having good defaults. Even if there was one standard Linux desktop environment there is no reason to disallow individual users from making their own choises. If the geek doesn't like Gnome he will have no problem installing his favorite Fluxbox.