Former Compiz Developer: Free Software Desktop Might Enter A Dark Age

[DanL]

As DanL said in so many words: Michael L is basically a professional shit-stirrer at this point.

Don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say or imply anything about Michael. I don't agree with the author of the blog post (Sam S), but it doesn't mean I disagree with Michael for making a quick article about it or pointing it out. Canonical abandoning Mir/Unity8 is newsworthy, and a little sidebar opinion piece from someone who worked on Compiz/Unity7 is not "shit-stirring" journalism in my book.

[Vistaus]

I think it is because Linux has two major GUI toolkits: QT and GTK. This causes many duplicate Linux applications. For example, Totem and VLC, Okular and Evince, etc. It would be great if the whole community can focus on building one great application with one toolkit, and then developers might have more interests in migrating their applications to Linux.

Personally, I like QT and I want only one GUI toolkit in my Linux laptop, but because Chromium uses GTK2, I have to choose LXDE.

(sorry about my english as 2nd language)

And on Windows, where you can choose to develop traditional apps or UWP apps, that's not a problem? I don't see devs moving away from Windows because they can choose between Microsoft's two major toolkits there, so I fail to see why it'd be a problem for them on Linux.

[Guest]

Thanks God KDE exists. An only fully featured desktop environment on Linux. Far better than Windows and OS X. Too bad Canonical is going back to Gnome, because many of Ubuntu users prefer KDE/Qt applications. Clementine, VLC, Okular, Kolourpaint, Gwenview are best examples. There are no good video and music players in Gnome. Rhythmbox, banshee, totem are utter crap. There's Exile, but it stagnates.

KDE/Qt would allow them to challenge mobile market as well (without wasting years for unity 8). Are they stupid or something?

[Vistaus]

It depends on your definition of dark age.To be honest I don't like compositors first thing I usually disable. Now on to systemd. It's looking more and more like I will be moving to a non systemd distro and rolling my own kernels again like back in my slackware days. Ubuntu studio has just been too convenient and I find its IRQ handling annoying with jacked and pulse sync. So IRQ handling and Systemd combined leaves uneeded resource hogging on a low latency kernel. Been think of adopting non systemd ark as distro or reading back up on slackware. Having a Kaby Lake Chip I am starting to wonder how well the back porting is coming along for its speedstepping in kernel 4.4 it hits 4.2Ghz turbo but overrides bios core voltages watching i7z and fails to step to 800mhz. This is not a major concern but I do wonder about the back porting support for 4.4 it has gotten better with each update. I won't touch 4.8 in 16.04's repos due to too much funkiness going on and Linus ripping that one kernel contributor for including a very old issue from way back when causing kernel panics lol never had one with 4.8 but it would idle to 800mhz. 4.8 is hmmmmm WACKED too many odd things going on. So that is what is on my mind.

I do like systemd for the most part. What I don't like is that I can never get it to reduce the log sizes, even if you configure it like that (and I'm not the only one, there are tons of bug reports/forum threads around about that) and that every once in a blue moon it decides to make a huge coredump if an application misbehaves even slightly. But other than that, I do like systemd. It makes a lot of things easy to use in a console with systemctl and writing services for it is also very easy It's getting there, it just needs a bit more polishing.

[dungeon]

Thanks God KDE exists.

I think God should be renamed to Kod if we speak about KDE

[Vistaus]

Thanks God KDE exists. An only fully featured desktop environment on Linux. Far better than Windows and OS X. Too bad Canonical is going back to Gnome, because many of Ubuntu users prefer KDE/Qt applications. Clementine, VLC, Okular, Kolourpaint, Gwenview are best examples. There are no good video and music players in Gnome. Rhythmbox, banshee, totem are utter crap. There's Exile, but it stagnates.

KDE/Qt would allow them to challenge mobile market as well (without wasting years for unity 8). Are they stupid or something?

How do you know that most Ubuntu users prefer KDE/Qt applications? Also, GNOME has good a good video player: gnome-mpv (https://github.com/gnome-mpv/gnome-mpv). IMHO it's stellar. I don't really use music players on my laptop anymore (hurray for streaming music!) but gnome-mpv handles that nicely as well IMHO.

[leipero]

Vistaus
Systemd is great, I also don't see a problem with it.

[dungeon]

Vistaus
Systemd is great, I also don't see a problem with it.

It tends to be bloat, people with dominant "Keep it Simple, Non-Bloat" metaphore or traditionalists have all rights to hate it. Other apps to support It also introduce dependcy on it, so by the time it also tend to turn off other options, etc...

Some people just hate any sort of bloatware, that is it. Imagine your OS and your apps do exactly what you want, exactly no more and exactly no less. That is hard to imagine to some, as for that you will need to write your OS and all your apps, SystemD goes into entire opposite direction - it strive to be only one and promise that by the time it will eat everything including you

To me it is forced shit, same like Gnome was forced by Novell on OpenSUSE by default regardless of their K tradition at the moment where KDE users represented 70% of userbase, but Gnome about 20% Companies like to invest in future and pushing thing around where they see some interests as always

Same like here M.R: Shuttleworth won't invest anymore in Unity, regardless of some people like it as it is, etc... push here, push there and see what would happen

[gojul]

Vistaus
Systemd is great, I also don't see a problem with it.

The problem is the same as X in its early days : it is an operating system within the operating system. Everything now depends on it : GDM, udev and so on, many major software bricks we cannot avoid.

[berolinux]

It's time for people to look past evil big corporations and look at community projects.

Pretty much all relevant Open Source projects were created by the community, not on the order of any particular company - partially because We The Community care about doing the right thing, not so much about doing the most profitable thing.

Don't look at the Microsofts of the world to solve the Linux desktop problem - look at the OpenMandrivas, the Mageias, the KDE neons and friends.