WIRED:SOME PEOPLE have privacy screens on their laptops to prevent prying eyes. I just have my desktop. The moment people see it, they spin off into confusion.
Half of the screen is some impenetrable, always scrolling, set of digits and letters that looks, in the word of one co-worker, “crashing cashpoint machine”. The rest is the usual set of icons, but madly distributed in all the wrong places. Why is the time in the top middle of my screen? Where are my folders? Why does everything fling around like a tornado whenever I hit the Windows button? And where the hell is the Start button?
I don’t use Macs and I don’t use Windows, which makes me a freak in all kinds of ways. But I’m actually a particularly freakish kind of freak in that my desktop is what’s called Gnome 3. It’s Linux, of course, the free operating system custom-made for dorks like me, but Gnome 3is, one might say, the freest of free desktops.
The majority of Linux desktop users get their operating system in a variant called Ubuntu from Canonical Group Ltd, founded by African billionaire and astronaut Mark Shuttleworth. I hold in disdain such commercial frivolity and get my Linux straight from the overly generous maw of hardcore free software activists – Debian, a version of Linux lovingly handcrafted by volunteers.
For many years, using Debian or Ubuntu didn’t really make much difference, at least when bystanders peered at my screen. No matter how much the code differed on the inside, both distributions used the Gnome desktop to present their programs to the world.
What that meant was that Debian and Ubuntu (and several other Linux distributions) looked pretty much the same. If I’d wanted them to look different I could do with a flick of one of the million or so options Linux provides its power-crazy users. I could switch to KDE, an alternative desktop founded by proud Germans, which has been developed in parallel to Gnome and has its own adherents.
Such fracturing of the market base between KDE and Gnome is often given as the reason Linux has never gained more than a tiny sub-percentage of the desktop market. If Linux enthusiasts can’t decide what is the best way forward, it is suggested, how is anyone else supposed to follow their lead?
The traditional Linux reply is to say “there is no leader – just pick the programs you like and carve your own trail”.
That rather assumes, however, that you know which trail isn’t going to lead into oblivion. KDE and Gnome have both survived for many years but it has never been clear whether they would really prosper – and there are plenty of even wilder desktops that have even smaller audiences.
Both rely in large part on the enthusiasm of the core developers and to a smaller degree on corporate support. Gnome has always had the backing of Redhat, the billion-dollar US open-source company. The core technologies behind KDE have had the wavering support of companies such as Nokia.
Both have a stable, if not burgeoning, coder fan base but there have been tough times. In particular, KDE and Gnome both went through a profound collective rethink recently of their priorities and set about creating a new forward- looking appearance for their users. Which, unfortunately, many of their users hated.
KDE rewrote much of its software internals, which led to a version that its customers felt was excessively buggy. Gnome tried to build its third iteration, Gnome 3, on the assumption that the future of user interfaces would benefit from breaking the desktop metaphor (that the screen is repository for files and programs, expressed as icons). The lead developers also lopped away at those millions of configurations in the belief that simplicity should trump infinite flexibility.
Cue the howls of outrage – and yet another split. Shuttleworth disagreed with the Gnome designers and instead switched Ubuntu to its own interface, called Unity, which attempted to take the lessons of touchscreens and merge them with the desktop so that Ubuntu installations could run on both touchpads and PCs. If that all sounds like chaos, it’s chaos with some rules.
No matter which desktop you end up using, almost all Linux applications will run just fine on it (even if they might look a bit out of place sometimes). The engineers working on each design also share code and co-operate on broader issues, such as fonts, 3D graphics and printing.
What is strange, though, is that this ferment in the world of minority operating systems is happening at the same time as a discontinuity in mainstream computing too. Microsoft is veering along the same lines as Shuttleworth’s Unity experiment, by attempting to merge its tablet and desktop offerings with Windows 8.
Meanwhile, Apple is attempting to merge its experience with the iPhone and iPad into its desktop offering. Google’s intent is unclear – it has a desktop in the form of its Chrome OS laptops but it seems like its larger touchpads, such as the Nexus 7, are aiming to bring its Android mobile phone sensibility to a bigger workspace.
People complain that the desktop is dying in the face of tablets but there hasn’t been this level of innovation in the desktop space for years. And it’s good to see even the smaller players taking advantage of that to come up with their own ideas. Let the best developers win – or let them steal from each other and let us all be winners from the experience.
