Are Open-Source Desktops Losing Competitiveness? 663
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the not-enough-squabbling-over-rounded-edges dept.
from the not-enough-squabbling-over-rounded-edges dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Penz has been a user of KDE since version 1.2, and he led the development of the Dolphin file manager for the past six years. Now, he's quitting KDE development and handing off Dolphin. His reasons for quitting KDE development are described in a blog post. Penz speaks of KDE losing competitiveness to Apple and Microsoft due to increased complexity and other reasons. 'Working on the non-user-interface parts of applications can be challenging, and this is not something that most freetime-contributors are striving for. But if there are not enough contributors for the complex stuff behind the scenes and if no company is willing to invest fulltime-developers to work on this... well then we are losing ground.' Are open-source desktops losing?"
Re:NO !! NEVER WERE !! (Score:0, Funny)
Re:Are open-source desktops losing? (Score:4, Funny)
It's going to be the year of Linux on the desktop... any year now!
Not a chance (Score:5, Funny)
Re:NO !! NEVER WERE !! (Score:5, Funny)
"Don't feed the ________".
Obvious ______ is obvious".
Re:NO !! NEVER WERE !! (Score:1, Funny)
screw off, Steve.
Re:I was a skeptic on Ubuntu's Unity... (Score:5, Funny)
No more hunting through menus looking for files or software functions. One hot key, followed by a few letters in the name, and up it pops.
There's this crazy thing on my Debian box that works the same way, but its even faster and marginally cooler. The UI is a little different though, you type a couple letters THEN hit the "hot key" which happens to be the tab key and then the enter key if the tab guessed right (kind of like Siri, sometimes it gets it wrong). So its like oct-TAB-ENTER and in instants you're running octave. I believe they call this desktop environment "bash" although theres 80 million clones like csh tcsh dash and even this weird operating system called "emacs" or maybe it was "vi" I don't remember.
Speaking of octave, it has a fascinating user interface too, where you use that row of digits on that old fashioned keyboard thingy to enter numbers, instead of clicking colorized, styled, fonted, widgeted "buttons" on the screen.
Its an interesting change of pace, but I do warn that this "CLI" user interface thing is way too new and experimental for all but the newest, most 'leet, early adopter hipsters, like if you only own a iphone 3gs instead of a 4, don't bother with this trendy new fangled CLI fad.
Re:No problem here (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Partially a lack of interest by users (Score:2, Funny)
That's not a console or shell, that's what Microsoft programmers think, console and shell should be like. In other words, complete idiosyncratic shit.