[GLLUG] Why I left Ubuntu ~ Everyday Linux User

[Jonathan Billings]

On Sweetmorn, the 55th of Confusion, 3179 , Matt Parrott said:
> The bad news is that the open source community has proven itself utterly
> incapable of creatively and effectively adapting its core principles to the
> desktop, and has failed spectacularly. 

Those are pretty bold premises, I assume you have evidence?  As far as
I can tell, Linux suffers from an abundance of creativity when it
comes to adapting to the desktop, which is the whole reason why the
Mir situation is so frustrating -- how can desktop environment
developers expect to build a platform when the underpinnings are going
in two (or more, if you count X) simultaneous directions?

> The good news is that the browser
> will completely swallow the desktop, which will place Linux in a tactically
> enviable position once again. Linux is going to win despite decades of
> heroic attempts to lose spectacularly at the GUI game.

That is a particularly limited view of what Linux users use the
Desktop to do.  Perhaps your use cases are fine, but I doubt your
claim covers all use.

Perhaps you can get away with using a browser and an SSH client to do
your job, but there are so many different uses of a Desktop system
that currently do not work in a Browser, nor does it make sense to
turn them into a web page.  For example, much of the Scientific and
Engineering software I support use extremely complicated interfaces
and their own windowing toolkits, on both Windows and Linux.  I see
little incentive for these companies to turn them into browser-based
applications.

Anyway, as you end up buiding more and more complicated browser-based
desktop environments, you're going to end up back at square one, where
you've got a bunch of implementations that don't 100% work together,
and you end up having to pick and choose which you can use.  Have you
ever tried to make a complicated web site work in both IE and Firefox?
On top of that, IE works best with Microsoft's clouds, and Chrome
works best with Google's cloud, and each company has an agenda to get
you to use their browser.  This leads to worse cross-browser support,
and not better.

On top of that, most of these browser-based desktops are NOT EVEN OPEN
SOURCE.  Sure, parts of the Chromebook's OS are based on source that's
open, but to get it to work, you have to rely on Google's
infrastructure, which is closed.  Google Chrome itself has parts that
aren't open.  

By pushing into closed clouds like Google, you're actually moving away
from the Open Source community.  I like Google, and I don't think that
they're out to get us, but they have their own financial interests at
heart, which doesn't necessarily overlap with the best interests of
Linux users. 

Lastly, I have a bone to pick with Google.  They dropped Chrome
support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all the distros based off of
RHEL (CentOS, Scientific Linux, PU_IAS, etc.).  So, it's pretty clear
they have no interest in supporting Enterprise customers.  This leads
me to believe that Google really only is interested in supporting
their browsers on 1.) Their own OS 2.) Windows (They support Chrome on
XP and MacOSX 10.6) and 3.) Non-enterprise linux users willing to
always run cutting-edge OSs.  

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>