The Open Source Journal

Linux has come a long way in the last 10 years, especially when it comes to the desktop. Distributions like Mandriva, Ubuntu, and Fedora are leading examples of success in the Linux desktop world. But despite the excellent work these distributions and the thousands of open source developers have done, mainstream Linux adoption on the Desktop is marginal at best.

It's not that Linux isn't ready or the technology isn't there yet. It's all about implementation.

I'll cut to the chase: a major part of the problem is the KDE/Gnome (QT/GTK) battle that's still going strong, regardless of the efforts of FreeDesktop.org to create inter operable standards.

One of the strengths of Windows is the familiarity of the interface. But Linux has that covered. Where the Linux desktop fails is consistency. The interface is inconsistent. The dialogs are inconsistent. Often times, fonts and other UI elements are inconsistent. The best distributions are the ones that hide these.

Sadly, KDE has suffered greatly due to the adoption of Gnome and subsequent use of GTK (like Adobe's Reader). While I personally prefer Qt to GTK, it seems many developers do not. Firefox is a great example of this: many KDE based distributions, despite the elephant in the room (Konqueror!) include the GTK based Firefox. Tear. I wont even mention how ghastly some Motif applications are.

One of the other issues, as I've mentioned, is fonts. Distributions which REALLY do this configuration for you, such as Ubuntu, look great...most of the time. Still, weird things seem to happen with fonts for me: anti-aliasing sometimes has strange and unexpected quirks do to fontconfig rules, sub-pixel hinting makes some fonts look really messy, fonts in some programs look radically different than others (once again, Firefox's fonts are often completely fscked). Manually configuring fonts is a nightmare and often has unexpected consequences - such as changing the DPI. My ideal solution would be to have fonts work in Linux exactly like they do in Windows.

Finally for this rant, there's lack of serious commercial support. It looks like many companies are finally coming around however, such as Adobe. Hardware supports is getting better as well; regardless of whether or not you agree with the binary blobs in the Linux kernel, companies like nVidia have done a pretty damn good job at making their software work on modern computers.

In my dream world more software developers would use Qt. The reason they don't is obvious, but still - I've found applications in KDE to feel far more integrated with each other and the interface more intuitive to use. Yeah, it's a personal opinion (to a degree, anyways).

I'm sure things will improve, but it's frustrating to watch Linux developers and users stumbling over each other trying to make Linux an attractive and usable alternative to Windows.