Comment: Desktop Fragmentation

[bigflopper2]

Competition may be good for business, but competition among Linux desktops is currently so fierce that it may end up being to everyone's detriment in the medium-term.

Fragmentation means that resolution of such problems will take a little longer. If I still believed in the long-standing Linux on the desktop pipe dream, I would posit that it has once again receded even further into the distance.

http://www.h-online.com/open/feature...n-1662354.html

What do you think about it?

[Dan]

I think any attempts to artificially reduce competition among various different desktops are both folly and foolish. Let the process play out. In the end, the quality of the products will be well worth the contest.

[DBelton]

I agree.

Let the process play itself out. It looks to me that the author of that article is afraid that if it's allowed to play itself out, that will mean less users for Gnome. (Which in my experience with Gnome 3, is probably going to be the case)

I do believe that we are going to see a 3rd big desktop enter the race in the near future. (and no, I'm not counting Unity here) It will be KDE, Gnome, and a third. Xfce is looking like a possible contender, and if they do things right, they could displace Gnome fairly easily.

[BBQdave]

Originally Posted by DBelton

I do believe that we are going to see a 3rd big desktop enter the race in the near future. (and no, I'm not counting Unity here) It will be KDE, Gnome, and a third. Xfce is looking like a possible contender, and if they do things right, they could displace Gnome fairly easily.

Agreed.

With an eye to Mint Maya Xfce and Debian 7 defaulting to Xfce, I think there is your 3rd player.
I do think the fragmentation of Gnome 3 (Unity, Cinnamon) and continuing Gnome 2 (MATE) is opening the door for Xfce.

I am curious, down the road as Xfce gains speed, if the devs involved with Cinnamon and MATE will switch over to Xfce development?

[Gareth Jones]

Personally I don't think the term "desktop environment" is really relevant any more, and the apparent fragmentation is largely a result of trying to apply the term to the current situation.

At one time, Linux needed the drive of organized well-defined and well-led (or at least centralized) projects (KDE and GNOME) to build complete CDE-comparable desktop environments up from scratch. Now that several exist, the Linux desktop has been usable and even complete for several years, and there is some level of standardization in underlying infrastructure, it seems natural that the big projects should fragment. They're not playing catch-up any more (in terms of features and pleasantness to use), so they can experiment with leading the way instead.

In terms of back-end environments and core applications, there still are only two main options: KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK+. Some sub-projects have out-grown their need for being part of one particular desktop environment project. The projects seen as "competition" to the traditional desktops are largely just offering replacements for individual components, e.g. the desktop shell and window manager, or the core applications, and share the rest of the software stack. (Only MATE looks to have really bitten off more than it can possibly chew in the long-term.) In some ways, it's like the dozens of plain window managers we had before the desktop environments took off. Or the choice of terminal shells, or media players, or text editors, or...

Most people will still use the same everyday applications, whether that's Vim or Emacs, or LibreOffice and Firefox. As long as they're comfortable with the rest of the desktop, they won't even need to know about the details, perceived politics or history. The choice is good for more advanced users who care about such things, or people with particular requirements of their desktop.

I suspect that the abundance of distributions (indeed the very concept of a Linux distro) is more intimidating to potential new Linux users than the spread of desktop "environments".

[BBQdave]

Originally Posted by Gareth Jones

Personally I don't think the term "desktop environment" is really relevant any more, and the apparent fragmentation is largely a result of trying to apply the term to the current situation.

In terms of back-end environments and core applications, there still are only two main options: KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK+.

I suspect that the abundance of distributions (indeed the very concept of a Linux distro) is more intimidating to potential new Linux users than the spread of desktop "environments".

Well said, and through my limited understanding of devs, I suspect there is far more collaboration than competition. In the Linux world, nice to have a choice of flavors