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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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.
Finally someone figured it out. This is what sucks in windows, you can't tweak it enough without getting a buggy environment (Litestep etc etc). Linux problem is that nothing is consistent ever however tweakable for the experienced. So they really not even competing with eachother... I'd say Linux main competitor is the BSDs and other Unices but not Windows. Even if some distros try to be consistent it is impossible as GNU/Linux in it's nature is inconsistent.
I don't even want Linux to "succeed on the desktop". As far as I'm concerned, BSDs or Solaris or Haiku or SkyOS are better choices as their future seem to have far wider options than the current GNU development model.