What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop

What went wrong with Linux on the Desktop

In my opinion, the problem with Linux on the Desktop is rooted in the developer culture that was created around it.

Linus, despite being a low-level kernel guy, set the tone for our community years ago when he dismissed binary compatibility for device drivers. The kernel people might have some valid reasons for it, and might have forced the industry to play by their rules, but the Desktop people did not have the power that the kernel people did. But we did keep the attitude.

The attitude of our community was one of engineering excellence: we do not want deprecated code in our source trees, we do not want to keep broken designs around, we want pure and beautiful designs and we want to eliminate all traces of bad or poorly implemented ideas from our source code trees.

And we did.

We deprecated APIs, because there was a better way. We removed functionality because "that approach is broken", for degrees of broken from "it is a security hole" all the way to "it does not conform to the new style we are using".

We replaced core subsystems in the operating system, with poor transitions paths. We introduced compatibility layers that were not really compatible, nor were they maintained. When faced with "this does not work", the community response was usually "you are doing it wrong".

As long as you had an operating system that was 100% free, and you could patch and upgrade every component of your operating system to keep up with the system updates, you were fine and it was merely an inconvenience that lasted a few months while the kinks were sorted out.

The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Either they did not agree, the schedule of the transitions were out of sync or there were competing implementations for the same functionality.

The efforts to standardize on a kernel and a set of core libraries were undermined by the Distro of the Day that held the position of power. If you are the top dog, you did not want to make any concessions that would help other distributions catch up with you. Being incompatible became a way of gaining market share. A strategy that continues to be employed by the 800 pound gorillas in the Linux world.

To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions.

This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the "top" distro or if you were feeling generous "the top three" distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later.

Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers.

But at this point, those of us in the Linux world still believed that we could build everything as open source software. The software industry as a whole had a few home runs, and we were convinced we could implement those ourselves: spreadsheets, word processors, design programs. And we did a fine job at that.

Linux pioneered solid package management and the most advance software updating systems. We did a good job, considering our goals and our culture.

But we missed the big picture. We alienated every third party developer in the process. The ecosystem that has sprung to life with Apple's OSX AppStore is just impossible to achieve with Linux today...