Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 12th Feb 2008 21:32 UTC, submitted by Flatland_Spider
The Linux Foundation has posted the second half of its long and thorough interview with Linux founder Linus Torvalds, part of the Foundation's 'open voices' podcast. While the first part of the interview focused on the Linux development community, this time Torvalds sounds off on everything from patents and innovation to the future of Linux. According to Torvalds the reason Linux hasn't taken off is that most people are happy with the way things are. "If you act differently from Windows, even if you act in some ways better, it doesn't matter; better is worse if it's different." Torvalds also attributes much of the frustration with Windows Vista to this same idea. In other words, it's not that Vista is worse than XP, but it's different and that causes distress among users.
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Member since:
2005-07-28
Do you have any ideas?
I'm not challenging you. I agree with you that such changes could make the inconveniences compelling and worth it. But just as people keep wanting to ditch the desktop metaphor for GUIs, I haven't seen any practical alternatives. I know that when this *does* happen and someone develops a compelling, productive alternative to the desktop metaphor, we're all going to smack our heads and say, "that is so blindingly obvious, why the hell didn't I think of that?"
And we will be very old and sitting at a bar and boring some young person with the story of, "If only I could have been the guy who thought of that," the same way people say that about the Pet Rock guy.
One thing that is true of Linux is that it has multiple WE/WMs, but most of the screenshots that seem to get linked to are shots of people making their desktops look like...well, let's face it, most of the time, like OS X. One of the cooler things you can do is demonstrate how Linux (or the BSDs) can look like pretty much anything you want them to. Show a prospective user all of the different Windows managers and tell them that they can choose which they like, and if they want to start out with KDE or Gnome because it looks familiar, they can always switch later, or run more than one.
I feel the same sense about desktop GUIs as I do about rock and roll; that the well is dry and it's all about recycling now. I hope to be proven wrong within my lifetime, but as much as I'd like to see the next big thing, I haven't got a clue of what it is.
Mainly because I adapt to machines; I don't expect them to adapt to me. This is atypical and suboptimal, even, if you want to sell computers to the masses, but it's a habit I've adopted, which means I can use and be productive in anything, but also feel no sense of necessity of change, which is, as they say, the mother of invention. So other than irksome "quirks" that unnerve me from time to time, I'm rarely thinking too hard about how computers can evolve to be more useful by people.
Which is why I'm not Steve Jobs and have a mind numbing career and lead a penny-ante life, but hey.
But go ahead and revese my OK/Cancel dialogs. I won't notice. I am sturdy in this way. It has yet to buy me a cup of tea, however.