No Linux desktop can make such claims. A developer who wants to target Linux will have to first fathom what kinds of distros are used by his users. After that, he needs to figure out how his toolkit or library (GTK+, Qt, etc.) fares under each desktop environment in each given distro!
Trust me, when that kind of formidable testing is involved, even the bravest of developers give up, be it application development or system software development like that of device drivers and firmware. Linux doesn't make it easy for developers to target their platform. The fragmentation of distros and desktop environments over the years is directly responsible for this mess. Maybe, the most ideologically oriented developer who believes in the open source or libre software principles will stick around and deal with it, but most people won't, and that's one thing that needs to change.
This incompatibility factor is perhaps the single largest reason for failure of desktop linux. Everyone wants to fork and create their own different distro, desktop, library, toolkit, platform or whatever. If there is one thing that linux and open source needs to learn from Microsoft world then its this - Diversity is good but not always, and standardizing upon a thing is good some times and leads to an efficient way of computing.
I don't know when the year of linux desktops is going to come, but in order for that to happen, desktop linux needs to accept this "incompatibility caused by fragmentation" factor and do something about it.
1 comment:
This article was written by someone who misses the entire point.
"No Linux desktop can make such claims."
First of all, what is a desktop? Gnome doesn't make this claim? I have no idea why KDE, Gnome, XFCE and others would claim some app will run after x years. I mean, they do, but I have no idea why they would claim it. Also, some game isn't really rocket science.
Developers that can't figure out how to write something for the xorg desktop, shouldn't be developers in the first place, because they would be unable to make windows applications as well.
"device drivers and firmware." Drivers, I haven't heard that term in years, because we don't use it. Firmware is also laughable.
"The fragmentation of distros and desktop environments over the years is directly responsible for this mess." No, it's why Linux is so good.
"that's one thing that needs to change." I think we need to kick people in the balls that keep saying we need to change it. We don't. One of the reasons why it's so powerful is because we can change it. That's opensource. Without the change, it won't be the same. We need the changes. We need systemd, we need runit, we need openrc, we need sysvinit.
"This incompatibility factor" no properly written GNU/Linux program is incompatible. If it's incompatible, it's by definition, badly written and the developer should be blamed.
Diversity isn't always good, but we are talking about computers. In computers, diversity is good.
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