Unpopular opinion: Ditch everything GNOME, glib, vala, GTK and focus on making KDE, Qt, QML first class software. QML is powerful and is quite fast and can at least be made fast. KDE needs UI and design polish but the foundations are IMHO more sane than GNOME ever was. Move the good stuff from GNOME over to KDE. E.g. kio-slaves and gvfs should be one stable solid pluggable piece of software. And document that well - Good tools are already there - Qt is documented, QtCreator is usable, KDevelop is fine software - merge the efforts to make that platform fast and sane and secure. Also please stop that CADT stuff[1]. Won't happen, but one can dream.<p>1: <a href="http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html" rel="nofollow">http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html</a><p>Edit: jwz doesn't like hacker news. removed referer.
I really don't understand the drive to make GNU/Linux a "consumer operating system." The consumers don't care and are happy with absolutely awful software. Shiny GUI toolkits that are a huge pain to develop for, and non-free software gos against what the people who use GNU/Linux <i>now</i> want. <i>That's</i> why ubuntu's unity stuff failed, because they chased after users who don't care and alienated the only ones that might use their product.
I was rolling my eyes reading this and then hit this, which is the real value of the article IMO:<p>> few Linux platforms (if any?) had taken a series whack at building a consumer grade app and developer experience. We tried, it was not successful, and instead of digging up the past I would rather ensure we can inform the future.<p>"What not to do, and how not to do it" are at least one valid take away from that whole era.
Sorry, but I believe this effort is doomed to fail if you don’t provide compatibility with the open web. It is the only online app distribution environment that has really thrived, other than Apple’s and Google’s.<p>Of course you could do this easily with electron apps. Too much bloat? Fine- go with a ReactNative/NativeScript approach with a JS VM controlling native UI. Hate JS? Fine- compile to it from your language of choice. Refuse to use a runtime? Fine- compile to webassembly. There is no excuse for not having compatibility with the open web.<p>As a developer, I have no interest in building for Linux- I need to go where the users are. But if I can develop a nice web app that can be deployed natively to Linux and mobile platforms- sign me up!
The real elephant in the room is not a single platform, we already have that (Linux+Gnu+X11).<p>What is missing is STABILITY. The kind of stability we see over at Windows where win32 binaries from the 9x era can run on Windows 10.<p>The kind of stability one have achieved with the bedrock of Linux (and that Torvalds gets ragged on for defending), but that the DE devs piss on every time they make a new weekend project.<p>App stores are a distraction, single platform (more like distro monoculture, it seems to me) is a distraction, And Gnome+Wayland is the last people you want to entrust with anything related to stability (you can get Qt working on things that get GTK screaming about missing dependencies).
Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning <a href="https://electron.atom.io" rel="nofollow">https://electron.atom.io</a> to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue.<p>edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't have the same applications as windows and OSX is the window manager. A lot of amazing apps have been created using electron which has allowed people to even remotely think about moving over.
I would like to see the main distros collaborate on/ invest resources in an IDE for GNOME or w/e desktop environment they choose to standardize on. Seems like there is one already but I don't know how actively it is being developed (<a href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder</a>).
I still think the whole Linux Desktop problem can be summarized in one sentence:<p>There is a lack of a simple desktop app development environment.<p>Yes there is GTK and yes there QT. But regardless of how much people may hate Xcode, it allowed people to create solid desktop applications in a fraction of the time that was needed to do the same in either GTK or QT. It's better documented, it's smoother, it's easier to structure your application in terms of the framework rather than programming language.<p>The whole thing is a little like the Rails vs. Flask or Go argument. Yes Flask is really cool, and in Go you can build really cool stuff and it's modular, you select a muxer and stitch it together, it does more requests per second, but if you just want to bash out a quick web application you're better off picking the first option.<p>The app store is hard argument is so far down the line... If you look at all the things Apple did before they pushed their app store it almost doesn't matter.
It is foolish to pursue consumer space in this age. The muggles want mobile.<p>This is a wonderful opportunity for us original computer nerds... with the mainstream leaving for their terrible mobile devices computers can finally go back to being tools for power users. The appliance-like expectations of the mainstream was the worst thing that ever happened to traditional computing.