10. Eye-candy: competing with Vista?

This is something I never thought I would experience from something like Linux: deliberately going with the shallowness, the eye-candy, the superficial.

As a "semi-veteran" in computing, I was expecting from Linux to try to prevail through quality and performance, if not from simplicity too (K.I.S.S. is one of the principles of UNIX). This used to happen 10 years ago, why isn't it possible anymore?

Maybe the first sign was when FreeBSD tried to mimic Linux and to be "more user-friendly". It was rather wrong, and I can only hope they realized the mistake. The gradual recovery of the once legendary FreeBSD stability can be seen with 6.1 and 6.2. Hopefully the trend will not be reversed again.

The point of no return was generated by Ubuntu. More and more IT-illiterate users, some of them not being able to find their way in Windows if an icon is moved from its initial place, were now "into the Linux thing" Ubuntu was already a polished, user-oriented Debian, now demands were to make it even more user-friendly.

What's almost tragic for the accuracy-minded people is that in various Ubuntu forum threads I could read in the past 2 years plenty of plainly wrong explanations and speculations regarding the cause of some annoyments, and about "how Linux works". The democratization of the access to UNIX-like systems engendered a lot of garbage from people not knowing anything, yet believing they have found the Holy Grail. You shouldn't take a Ubuntu forum for Wikipedia.

When polls on popular Linux sites ask: "What is the most newbie-friendly distro", you know you are in the 21st century when people need nice GUIs, no matter what bugs are hidden therein.

Improving the user experience is not a bad choice per se, exaggeratedly focusing on eye-candy is however wrong. No common sense can explain how so many people believe they actually need those dozens of Superkaramba widgets that make their desktop look like an Airbus cockpit. No common sense can explain why so many people claim they need unstable 3D desktops like Beryl/Compiz, for they believe that having the applications windows on the faces of a spinning cube, or having "wobbly" windows does actually help them.

I have seen some rational voices too, who confirmed that most of the 3D innovations are actually distracting them, thus decreasing the productivity. But, you know, you can't fight with the masses of teenagers that can't make the difference between the games they play and a productivity desktop.

Some of those youngsters happen to be Linux developers. Can you trust such childish developers for creating quality software?!

Sometimes you can.

Don't misunderstand me. I have had rather pleasant experiences with both Compiz and Beryl: they worked. AIGLX doesn't always work better than XGL, but at least it doesn't break 3D rendering for games and for anything that needs to do 3D rendering: OpenGL screen savers, animation and CAD/CAE programs, that sort of thing. Functionality has been sacrificed for cosmetics, and totally unnecessary cosmetics at that. I am happy I don't have to use them, but I am unhappy to see that RHEL5 comes with Compiz and AIGLX.

A third 3D desktop approach is the French Metisse, which seems to be less interested in wobbly windows and spinning cubes. It includes some productivity-oriented features, but unlike XGL and AIGLX, Metisse failed to work with my Radeon.

The cherry on the top of the cake is the bizarre idea that Linux has to compete with Vista. As if Vista wasn't an aberrant OS anyway, the American way of thinking saw everything through a comparison. Linux is not supposed to gain momentum "because it is good", but because "Vista has the GUI feature X, and Linux does it better".

And what is Vista, if not eye-candy, GUI, and useless resource consumption? If this is where Linux is heading...

While many minimalist window managers still exist, the very small group of users who believe in the power of the simplicity is a decreasing quantity...